What's Your Favorite Ship Type?

[Marty Ward]

LC's are my workhorses. I use them for all of my support ships except SY's. For my main fighting ship I try to stay within 2 sizes of my opponent. I very rarely build Baseships or DN's. They take to long to build. Occasionally I use carriers.

[Dragonlord]

In response to Hotfoot:
I like the biowar frigate idea. To be honest I have never used bioweapons, what exactly happens when one planet gets hit with a plague bomb? That single planet slowly dies off due to diminishing population?

I use LC's a lot in the beginning. I use Cruisers as repair ships since they'll hold two repair bays. At later stages the Battleship is my favorite: it has Heavy mounts, but can still move fast. I don't like the bigger designs like Dreadnoughts since they slow down my entire fleet.
My perfect fleet has about 50 ships, 15 of which are support ships. 2 Cruiser repair ships, 4 Cruiser fuel ships, 6-8 minesweepers, the rest mostly Battleships and LC's. This way I can attack a system, split off some forces to clean up (destroy) the planets there, and send the main force on with enough minesweepers to still sweep 100 mines.

[Hotfoot]

Phoenix-D:
Yeah, it's rather frightening, I think that the total defense bonus using a race with an average ship defense stat is something along the lines of 150%. Even fighters with combat sensors are going to have a heck of a time hitting it reliably, and capships had better have a few talismans on board to have a chance.

Dragonlord:
I stumbled on the concept when I went MEE in this one game that I played, and my main fleets were off on the other end of the galaxy, and I didn't have the time or the resources to build and maintain a whole new fleet. So, the initial design for my Terror-class escort was born. The first vessel destroyed a total of nearly twenty planets by itself, most being small "buffer" colonies. The higher level the plague bomb, the faster the population dies, and the population keeps dying until a ship with a medical bay is put in orbit around the planet (since that day almost all of my space station designs have a medical bay on board over my most important planets, just in case). Smaller colony worlds usually die in one turn with plague level 5, homeworlds and largers colonies can Last for several turns with most of the lower level plagues, while level 5 usually rips huge chunks out of the population right away.

I don't know about using this tactic against humans, since it takes longer to research medical bays than plague bombs by a rather significant amount. It could be seen as cheap in PBW or PBEM, but I love using it against computers.

Another amusing note, before the emergency propulsion bug was fixed, I started a high tech game for the hell of it, made a baseship with loads of emergency propulsion, repair bays, quantum reactor, and a plague bomb level 5.

A baseship with enough propulsion to traverse the galaxy in one turn, enough repair bays to fix every emergency propulsion unit every turn...and all it needs to do is hit a planet once to doom it for all time.

It was so beautiful. If only I had remembered to put shields on it.

-Hotfoot
"Ah well, it was fun seeing something so big move so damn fast."

[dumbluck]

"Captain, Our gunnery systems can't get a lock on that frigate dropping plague bombs on our homeworld! What do we do?"

"Well, isn't he a tricky bugger. Well, if we can't hit him with our guns, we'll hit him with our ship! We _ARE_ twice as big as he is, after all. RAMMING SPEED!"

I'm afraid your little ship is about to get squished, hotfoot.

[Phoenix-D]

There's still a slight problem with that..

..one ship, one bomb, one planet infected. Everything else is just pouring salt. And how many of these ships could he throw for each large one?

EDIT: Oh, and don't forget about the armor. It helps some.

Anyway, I just made one of these. Only 20k of space for weapons, but two of these ships (with meson bLasters) at range one have a grand total of 1% chance to hit each other

It'd be better if you had combat sensors, of course, but with combat sensors, it still only goes to 20%. And that's at point-blank range.

Phoenix-D

[This message has been edited by Phoenix-D (edited 29 July 2001).]