Beef #1: Ramming

[Saxon]

Ramming is powerful, but there are some costs. One is that ships are not cheap and a ramming race will be perpetually bleeding off their strength, whereas conventional ships that win can fight another day and probably get experience from it.

Another is that you don’t have any ships left after the fight to project your power. Ok, you kicked my homeworld fleet’s butt, but you don’t have any ships left to glass my planets. This raises another point, but one I am not so sure about. Can you ram a satellite or a planet. I suspect you can not. Even if reasonable number of your rammers survive, you can not get past my static defenses.

Mixing in a few rammers for special occasions is a pretty neat idea, but you need to keep a lot of regular ships around. Otherwise, all your victories will be Pyrithic ones.

Before I purged SEIV off the computer I use, I had a design for a Kamikazi which was almost entirely organic armor. If you go organic, it would be very effective as a rammer.

Lonnie Courtney Clay

[Suicide Junkie]

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This raises another point, but one I am not so sure about. Can you ram a satellite or a planet. I suspect you can not. Even if reasonable number of your rammers survive, you can not get past my static defenses.

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You CAN ram sats, fighters, planets, & bases. The problem is that your ship gets vaped without doing a whole lotta damage when you lose a ram.

You can even ram warppoints, in case you don't want to avoid being captured.

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It'd be much more difficult to intercept 12 individual targets (or however many marines make up a boarding party) than it would be to down a single assualt craft, which helps explain why there's no chance modelled for interdicting the boarding party before it reaches its target.

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How about 200 Marines, with 100 tons of boarding/combat/control equipment EACH.

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 12 September 2001).]

[dmm]

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Originally posted by Saxon:
Ramming is powerful, but there are some costs. One is that ships are not cheap and a ramming race will be perpetually bleeding off their strength, whereas conventional ships that win can fight another day and probably get experience from it.

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The term "kamikaze" is probably not appropriate. A ship with all armor, even if not organic, is able to destroy other ships (even much larger ones) without completely destroying itself. So you definitely need some repair ships in your fleet, but your fleet will not disappear after each battle. The victories are real, not Pyrrhic. (At least they used to be. Like I said, I haven't tried this strategy lately. Armor's been revamped, ramming's been revamped, and AIs have been improved.) Experience is irrelevant to a rammer. (Actually it is best to keep using fresh crews! )

[Neo]

Couldn't a ramming fleet just be easily neutralized with engine damaging weapons though? Wouldn't matter how may shields or armor the ramming ships have, if they're dead in the water, they can't get close enough to anyone to ram.

[Taqwus]

Yup. Ionic weapons would really ruin a rammer's day. So would anybody else having a speed advantage (or even parity, barring huge numbers) and a maximum-weapons-range / don't-get-hurt tactic.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[dmm]

Taqwus and Neo:
True and true, rammers would need greater numbers. But remember that they are cheaper than regular ships, and can take out ships much larger than themselves, so you would normally be launching a swarm of small ships at a few large ships. Also, ramming specialists would only need to research armor and propulsion, so that, all other things being equal, they'd be the fastest ships.

And of course, as has been pointed out before, every strategy has an effective counter-strategy. Rammers would dread a crystalline race with multi-targeting.