newby's guide to ship and fleet strategy

[GUTB]

All you guys are missing the boat on this one.

Killer strategy for ship design:

Escort. As much beam firepower as you can fit. For instance, early game get an escort with:

x3 engines
x3 cannons

If you give a significant bonus to research in your racial points, you will literally have upgradeded cannon tech in one turn. What I did was give a sigificant bonus to research and a huge bonus to lower maintenence. You have to be smart to work the game system, foklks. And I made my people hard workers.

Step two, build a space yard base or two (with my stats it took one turn for each one) and start pumping these escorts out ( I call them Assault) with emergency build. Once you have 12-15 of these, build 4-6 supply ships. Once you're done with that, you will have several upgraded levels of cannons. Retrofit.

There you go, a force that cream anything in battle at this stage of the game. You don't even have to run tactical combat, the firepower is so overwhelming none of yoru ships is in danger of really dying.

Once you get repair bays, send these ships along with the fleet to give them staying power. You will defeat any player, AI or human this way.

After twenty or so turns of a game, how are you supposed to defend againt an enemy that shows up to combat with 45 advanced guns? In ONE combat turn with several of such assault vessels hammering a frigate it will be killed or near-dead. Even a cruiser will be severaly damaged in ONE turn, in which it only manages to severally damage or kill one of your many ships. Of course, the next turn it has a only a few guns left so it's effectiveness is basically nill. In the twenty or so turns it took to build this fleet, you would NEVER EVER be able to build a fleet of larger ships that have the same level of firepower and overal effectiveness.

Too many people bother with nonsense that doesn't matter, like armor, sheilds, engines, etc. Guys get with the program. THIS is the ultimate forumla for ship design:

0. ESCORT full size
1. MINIMUM crew facilities
2. Three engines
3. Three rail guns
4. ECM (when you're advanced enough to fit it)
5. Point-defenses (when your're advanced enough to fit it)

You might ask why ECM and PD and not another gun. That's because they actually make a difference. Avoiding being hit makes yoru fleet overall more effective overall, AND you have to have space for PD, which is extremely important to have once the enemy starts going wild on missiles. A swarm of assault vessels with PDs will massacre to death ANY missiles or fighters.