Aeson
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Joined: 8/30/2013
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quote:
I've been trying to figure out if there's any viable place for a large number of smaller ship sizes as the game progresses.
Use 1: raiding infrastructure. Computer-designed mining stations will probably never be sufficiently powerful to stand up against a small group of "small" warships, unless you're playing a mod that altered the design templates, so it might be better to invest in, say, 50 size-300 ships for mine-busting than in 10 size-1500 ships for the same purpose. The 10 size-1500 ships will, however, be far more useful in a major fleet action than the 50 size-300 ships will be. Plus, mine-busting, especially later in the game when empires have had time to build up large resource stockpiles, is a relatively long war strategy and has relatively little immediate impact on your enemy's war-making capabilities (though it depends on your enemy's resource situation, and capturing or destroying fuel mines is never a bad idea and tends to have an impact relatively quickly as fuel is a resource in very high demand). Also remember check on how powerful the mines your enemy uses are before deciding that it's a good idea to field a handful of size-300 ships as a raiding group, and keep an eye on the ships because light raiders can't really afford to be caught by similarly-advanced larger warships.
Use 2: boarding actions. There's a bug, or at least there used to be (I haven't checked to see if it's still there, though I don't recall it being mentioned as fixed in any of the recent patches), with boarding pods that makes it so that ships carrying more than one can be permanently reduced to having only one available boarding pod if the target vessel becomes an invalid target (is destroyed, jumps away, or is captured) before all the pods launched against it attach to the vessel. Since the bug doesn't affect ships with only one boarding pod and since it's not really worthwhile making a big ship with only one boarding pod if the intent is to use it to capture targets, small ships have a use for capturing targets. This can overlap with their use as infrastructure raiders; destroying enemy fuel mines is good, but taking them over, at least in a limited area, may be better for your purposes. Even if the bug has been fixed, it's still useful to use less powerful warships as boarding vessels, as less powerful ships are less likely to destroy or seriously damage the target while attempting to capture it (this, incidentally, is also a reason to favor weapons which perform poorly against armor but well against shields or which have short range, and also to keep the fleets of boarding ships relatively small; you simply do not want to be firing a lot of guns at a capture target if you want the target to be captured in reasonably good condition).
Use 3: anti-pirate forces. Unless you run into Legendary Pirates or a pirate faction that has amassed a big fleet, you don't really need to be using your big frontline warships to deal with them or their stations. Not really something worth a dedicated design, though, unless you have other demands on your big frontline warships, especially since pirates mostly disappear by the time you really start seeing a significant size gap between 'large' and 'small' warships. This overlaps with boarding vessels, especially in the early stages of the game, as early on captured pirate vessels are useful for boosting either your military strength (the ships are likely to be relatively advanced and powerful in comparison to your own) or your research (scrapping them for technology can provide earlier access to some technologies that you might want but feel you don't need enough for the tech to be a priority right now).
Use 4: system defense. A handful of small ships can provide an adequate defense against pirate raiding (beware of major pirate factions with big fleets; such pirate factions will sometimes send something like 20 or 30 ships on a single raid) while your colony builds a space station of some type. The ships can also provide some protection to mining stations or other colonies in the system, whereas a station of any type will only ever protect the colony over which it is built and maybe something on a nearby moon or two, and unlike stations you can relocate defensive vessels if they are no longer needed in the region or if they are needed more elsewhere. Such ships can also be somewhat useful later in the game to delay attacking fleets long enough for a force more able to deal with the attackers can respond, but if you do choose to try something like that be careful not to leave the defensive forces too weak and the individual ships too small relative to frontline units or you could bleed yourself dry as you continually lose vessels to attacks.
Small ships lose their value quickly in major fleet actions unless they're only 'small' in that you could have made them a bit bigger as concentrating shields and armor into larger blocks becomes increasingly important as the offensive capabilities of warships increase. In a direct confrontation between ships, 200 firepower and 2000 shields concentrated on one big ship is much better than 100 firepower and 1000 shields on each of two smaller ships even if it's notionally the same value. Smaller ships have their uses, but those uses tend to require more of a player's attention than battle fleets of big ships require; raiders need to be kept moving and away from anything reasonable powerful, you need to keep an eye on your defensive forces if you're going to try to send something to help them against a big attack (and ships held back to serve as response forces or defensive fleets are ships which are not being employed to take the war to the enemy), and getting the most out of boarding tends to require you to pay attention to what the boarding ships are doing.
As with anything, though, a lot of this is dependent upon just how small a 'small' ship is by comparison to a big ship. If 'big' ships have 500 firepower and 2000 shields while 'small' ships have 250 firepower and 1000 shields (indicating that the 'small' ships are ~50% as large as the 'big' ships), then nominally equal fleets of 'big' and 'small' ships (i.e. same total firepower and shields) are likely to be very unlike one another in effectiveness; the fleets of big ships are likely to completely overpower the fleets of small ships. If 'big' ships have 125 firepower and 400 shields while 'small' ships have 100 firepower and 400 shields (indicating the 'small' ships are ~80% as large as the 'big' ships), the story is rather different; engagements between nominally equal fleets of big and small ships will probably still favor the big ships, but it's a much more even matchup and which is superior becomes less obvious (individually, yes, the smaller ships remain clearly inferior; however, in a 5 vs 4 scenario you might have 3 big ships engaging 3 small ships and 2 small ships engaging 1 big ship, and in such a scenario it's not clear that the unit quality advantage held by the big ships is sufficiently great to allow the fleet of big ships to win, at least not without testing to see what happens). You may also have strategic reasons to use larger numbers of smaller battleships than smaller numbers of larger battleships. For example, you may have a long border or be fighting wars on opposite sides of your empire; if a ship that is 80% of the size of the biggest ship you could build can win your battles without requiring you to deploy larger fleets, it might be worth looking into building your fleets out of the smaller ships than out of the bigger ships because a ship 20% smaller is also about 20% cheaper to build and maintain (assuming the same component types are used in the same ratios on both designs) and so you can have 25% more of them. Of course, if this is the case, you may be able to get the same effect by reducing the number of big ships in each fleet and forming the ships thus obtained into the additional fleets you needed or wanted to have, as if the small ships are 20% smaller than the big ships then 4 of the big ships should be nominally equivalent to 5 of the small ships, and in practice a fleet of 4 of the big ships is probably a bit stronger than a fleet of 5 of the little ships.
< Message edited by Aeson -- 7/7/2015 5:49:42 AM >
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