Are fleet/ship training facilities all that useful?

[Pax]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
The value of the neural net is questionable, but training is definitely required.

Questionable? Damn, man. Build up some ships (with neural nets) to park and train, during peacetime. When war happens (as it inevitablywill), don't send them ALL off in a group to the front.

Build new ships. Assigne 2 or 3 of the hgihly-trained ships as "Task Force Command Ships" into the same fleet (ideally, you trained the peacetime fleet in Groups of 2 or three, each in their own fleet).

Now, while you might expand your fleet to five or ten times normal size, your ships ALL still benefit from being highly-trained (thanks to the "leader" ships), AND, you have a stable fo trained FLEETS to put them into.

Assuming you wanted to go order-of-magnitude higher in fleet strength ... and wanted, oh, 200 ships ... then for peacetime, train 20 ships, in ten fleets of 2 ships each. When you build / unmothball the other 180 ships, they ALL benefit as if they'd been sitting there trainign up to 20%.

Once one set of "leaders" is trained, ofc, if yo're still at peace ... mothball 'em and start a new set of trainees.

If you're ever fortunate enough to get to 40% ship with someone, and they have a neural net ... you get to 40% ship with EVERY ship in teh same fleet.

IMO the benefit of the neural net is GREAT, if you can only expect to train SOME of your ships.

If you can expect to fully train them ALL, of course (psychic race relyign SOLELY on their system-wide training facilities), then it's a waste of space, ofc.

By doing both ship and fleet training to the max, your ships get +40% to both attack and defense. That is equivalent to two extra tech levels in Sensors and ECM, and can easily make the difference between crushing blows and invulnerability.

If you normally get some ships with +50% legendary status, then the neural net may be worthwhile, especially on the dreadnoughts and baseships.
Place one of the legendaries in each fleet, and all the new recruits get +30% to attack and defense, beyond the training.

Or +50%, -without- training at all. If you go to a peacetime footing after a war, it might pay to break up those veteran fleets (w/o deletign the fleet ITSELF ofc) and spread them around as a core group of veterans LEADING NEW RECRUITS. 8)

Even in the midst of a war, if you have a ship hit 40% or 50% ship experience, consider pullign it BACK fromt eh fighting, to merge into a large fleet of raw recruits. If you can, then they can skip ALL their training, and (so long as the actual legendary ship survives) gain teh FULL benefit of that legendary ship's experience. 8)

With those kinds of stats, enemy fleets will be nothing more than trivial annoyances.

Re: computer tech.
Master computers are OK in most cases, but nearly required against psychic races. Against Allegiance subverters, the only things you can do are:
- use master computers and hope they miss with the computer virus weapons
- use swarms of small ships, so they can't capture them all at once.

- try and stay completely out of the range of their subverters in the first place.

Against other races, the MCs will save small amounts of space, freeing up room for an extra shield generator or small weapon.
You main benefit from the computer tech area will be in resource bonuses.

Or freeing up space for another PDC or two -- maybe three, on the REALLY big ships, and on full Starbases ofc.