Are escorts good for anything?

Are escorts good for anything? (Full Version)

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WCG -> Are escorts good for anything? (5/30/2013 6:26:27 PM)
Newbie here. I took advantage of the sale to buy Shadows and all the earlier required games (still really expensive for newcomers to the series!). Anyway, I'm playing an empire in the Age of Shadows, and I'm starting to wonder why anyone would build an escort ship. Is there ANY other ship they can defeat? Normally, escorts should defend merchant vessels against pirates, I'd think, but pirates are far and away more powerful than I am. I need a whole fleet to take out one pirate destroyer (while suffering big losses in the battle), and when I encountered a pirate cruiser, he wiped out every ship I had. That's with a fleet of mostly destroyers myself (although mine don't have anywhere near the shielding pirate destroyers have) and after going gangbusters on research for awhile. Anyway - sorry, I tend to drift off the subject :) - I can't imagine why I'd build any escorts. Are they good for anything at all? Admittedly, I've let the AI handle ship design. I don't know if that's a good idea or not, but it's pretty well mandatory for a newbie, I think, since I don't have a clue what works best. Bill

Bingeling -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/30/2013 6:52:45 PM)
If you are in age of Shadows, pirate ships are crazy strong at the start. Or rather, your ships are crazy crap. They wreck both destroyers and escorts alike... When it comes to escorts, though, I agree with you. They are useless. I find frigates mostly useless too, and destroyers pretty much as well if I can build anything larger. The cruiser seems useful, at least until I can build capitals, but it is not available at the start. Letting the AI handle ship design is not a bad idea, they are pretty decent. Could you do better? If you know the game, sure. If you like doing manual research, though, peek into empire policy options and see what weapons are the tech focus. That is those that your AI prefers, and it is a good idea to go along with that. Be aware that for some races in Shadows, the weapon choices on AI frigates and destroyers may be odd. Like one of them having only blasters, and the other only torpedoes. I have as a general rule to only build destroyers and larger, but for some races the destroyers could potentially suck and make the frigates a better choice.

Bentley264 -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/30/2013 7:49:32 PM)
I research fighter bays (and the fighters that go with them) fairly early, and put them on about everything. It works well for me, but then again I play at fairly low difficulty. As your construction improves, you can make your escorts and frigates larger as well. I put at least 1 troop compartment on anything large enough that I want to put in a fleet (Destroyer, Cruiser, Carrier, Capital, Troop transport.) for quick sorting from the F11 menu. (filter for troop carriers, and sort by fleet - none = eligible for new fleet)

Bingeling -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/30/2013 9:21:21 PM)
Adding troop compartments adds maintenance, and troop compartments are evil apart form on troop transports... If you need to find you fresh orders, just sort military ships on firepower. Those not yet builds have 0, the rest have some.

Mansen -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/30/2013 9:33:55 PM)
I tend to forgo Escorts entirely in favor of early fighter bays. They're much easier to keep "alive" than Escorts. Couple of mini carriers and your trade routes seem much safer.

Bingeling -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/30/2013 9:51:52 PM)
I love fighters, but tend to move with the AI. Not using too good tech too early is a nice balancing factor [8D] On truly manual design, my destroyers would pack a fighter bay for sure. At least until carriers can be built, which is not so urgent if you got the bays elsewhere.

Larsenex -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/30/2013 11:47:31 PM)
Can you 'upgrade' and a simple escort to be a box that holds a fighter bay? that would be pretty funny actually.

ASHBERY76 -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/30/2013 11:51:21 PM)
The A.I policy ratios build far too many small ships.Good job you can mod it but I wonder why vanilla has not been changed.

Bingeling -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/31/2013 12:15:42 AM)
You can make any ship class anything you want, apart from carriers and resupply ships having special requirements, and extra size bonuses. With shadows I guess the old warning of "pirates may use the escort design" is gone, since they got their own ship sets. So one can pretend escort is escort carrier, and make them cruiser sized carriers. Or anything else... It could actually be interesting to test a race in a lot of automated games. Some with default settings, and some where automation settings are tuned to different build policies. How much of a difference could it make? The problem is that running the games takes time, and it would probably require a whole lot of them to get statistics on performance. One can have a "day 1" save for all of them to remove the random of galaxy, though.

ASHBERY76 -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/31/2013 12:25:19 AM)
The A.I designed smaller ships are still small.

unclean -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/31/2013 3:49:24 AM)
I'm finding them pretty useful playing as Pirates, since they can raid and control planets for a minimal cost after your fleet takes out the main defense.

Brainsucker -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/31/2013 6:26:13 AM)
Honestly, there is no different between Escort, Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, and Capital Ship in DW, and I love that. It is you who decide the difference. So you can make an escort with huge tonnage and par to par to your Cruiser, or leave them all and just use a single slot (ex : Cruiser) for your ships. It is true to modern naval combat ships too. Just look at US Navy. How could Arleigh Burke Destroyer rival a Cruiser Class - Tincoderoga Class? And look at Sumwalt that even outclass the Cruiser Class Completely in term of tonnage. US Navy is also skip Frigate Class entirely. They are not developing the successor of aging Oliver Hazard Perry Class Frigate. While China, in the other hand split their ship into several smaller ship. Filling the role of Corvette (type 56), Frigate (Type 54A) and Destroyer (type 52C). So free yourselves from previous 4x Games minded. Distant World offer us more freedom, and that is why DW is way better than the other 4x games. For me, Escort, Destroyer, Frigate, Cruiser are just slot to fill for my designed ship. What make them different is their role. What is their role? Well, I don't put any strict rule over this. Role can be change according to the situation. For example, I set my destroyer to be a close range starship with heavy protection. AKA my tank; Frigate as light, fast, with long range armament like missile, like archer in my game. I set Cruiser as multi role ship that pack different armament, and my capital ship as my AOE specialist weapon in my fleet. Later on, after my empire progress more and new technologies discovered, I change my ship role again - all depend to my strategy and tactic. For example, I change my Capital Ship role to become AWAC like ship role, while my previously multirole Cruiser into AOE packed ship, etc. As long as it is efficient, I will stick to the role, but if I find that the role is not work or wrong or under powered, I'll change it to different design. For the tonnage, I don't strict it to specific size. My first generation Cruiser can be smaller than my third or four generation of Frigate or Escort. In my latest game play (that still around in the middle of the tech tree, as I put research to 700% cost), My frigate size is 300, my Destroyer size is 360 - 400, my Cruiser size is 400 - 450, my capital ship class size is 500. That's mean my latest frigate is bigger than my first generation of Destroyer (that 230). Well, it is the beauty of Distant world.

Kruos -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/31/2013 10:29:07 AM)
I think that the underground question about ship size is :"few big ships or many small ones?". The easy answer is :"it depends". And it is why DW is great, because "it depends". :) Personaly I tend to prefer small ships for defensive duty, and big ships for offensive & invasion. Small ships means fast ships, and when it comes to mine or colony raids (empire point of vue), 3-4 fast escorts are more useful than 1 fat cruiser for disturbing the pirate ships. Generally I mix my defensive fleet with escort class ships, for 'disturbing' duties, and with frigate class ships, for 'ship destruction' duties. The idea is to redirect the pirate fire from the mine to the escort, giving some time for the frigate to arrive and destroy the pirate ship. With 4x4 or 8x8 fleet size (depending on system vulnerability), it works quite well. I have not very much tested the boarding option yet. I am sure their are some interesting options with that, even with small ships. ;)

WCG -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/31/2013 4:43:41 PM)
Thanks for the replies! There's a lot to think about here - maybe too much, for a complete newbie. [:)] (I'm on my first game - well, my second, technically, since I started over when the game was revised.) And I started with playing an empire in the pre-warp age, despite the recommendation to choose a "classic" start for your first game. (The pre-warp start just appealed to me more.) So pirates have far-and-away better ships than I do. Four or five escorts - or anything else I can build - wouldn't even come close to taking out one of their ships. And they've also got far more ships than I do, although they never seem to attack with more than one at a time (yet). So far, as a complete newbie, I've let the AI handle ship design, because I really didn't have a clue. But I'm thinking I won't survive that way. On the other hand, will I survive by designing ships myself, when I don't really have a clue what I'm doing? [:)] Note that one thing I'm not worried about is the game being too easy for me! So I like the idea of putting a fighter bay on escorts. I'm also wondering about the AI design of destroyers, where they put two missiles and a bunch of... phasers? Would it be more efficient - for a fleet ship - to put all missiles (or torpedoes? I'm not sure of the difference) on destroyers, and let the frigates use the beam weapons? Also, there are many weapons the AI isn't using at all (on ships, at least). Rail guns bypass shields, right? Well, my biggest problem with pirate vessels right now is that they've got shielding up the wazoo. My whole fleet struggles to do them any damage at all, because I can't get through that shielding before it regenerates. Ion weapons, too, sound good (although, apparently, there are counters for that). But I don't know if you can have multiple designs for different types of frigates, for example. Or is it just one kind of frigate design at a time? Obviously, there's a lot I don't know. And while I'm sure I'll learn by doing, winning is more fun than losing (except in Dwarf Fortress, of course [:)] ). Bill

Plant -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/31/2013 5:52:51 PM)
There really isn't an question between a many small ones and a fewer large ones. It's decisively in favour of as large as possible as long as you can afford to have one ship per system you care about, which is usually always. Smaller ships aren't any faster than larger ships, in fact larger ships are faster per cost, because of efficiencies gain since you only need one hyperdrive and command centre,. The AI scripts in regard to ship building and design makes no sense within the context of the game. Escorts are essentially worthless designs, good only for fighting escorts, except that you can always make a larger escort, just as fast, and more cost efficient in combat. Escorts are supposed to be used for raiding and escorting, but they are too weak alone to attack a mine, and are nonsensically designed for escorting. If you play as a Pirate in Shadows, Escort are useful because they are strong at the start of the game as a side effect of being hyperspace capable and technologically advanced over the civilisations, and that they are about as big as an equivalent destroyer in Legends, and can raid. But you can just design a better ship in every respect, simply by making it size 300 instead of around 220. There's lots of wierdness in the AI ship designs. They all have too much weapons in relation to shields, making them cost inefficient. They have multiple weapon types, making them inferior to single weapon ships. Military power seemed to be calculated from firepower, which is the damage a weapon does per shot, which doesn't take into account of defence. AI also doesn't seem to make ships to 1500 size, except for a certain game campaign ender race. Despite using ion weapons, I have no real idea how they work, and yes, you can have multiple frigate design, but updating each design is tricky.

Bingeling -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (5/31/2013 6:58:35 PM)
Well, all AI ships don't have multiple weapons. Unless you count point defense. Quite a few race have frigates and destroyers with only one weapon type now, at least. The AI designs are fine to use, but I would avoid escorts. You can do better. But if you lose in the game, you surely lost it to someone running AI designs... I think Plant may be on to something with shields. I prefer larger ships, and they got more shields than smaller ships. A big bonus of cruisers compared to the smaller ones is also range. They have more stamina for "travel - fight - travel - fight". This applies to AI designs of course, if you design your own you can do whatever you want. If you do AI designs, I would put carriers reasonably high on the research list (if you do that part manually). That is 3 techs straight down the star fighter path. If you got them, doing the first tech to get some fighters that hurts a bit is not silly either.

Carewolf -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/5/2013 6:04:23 PM)
The thing about the smaller ships is that: If they get hit they are dead. So do not bother much with armor and shields (they only need to survive point-blank weapons). Just throw engines and weapon into them and set them to attack at point blank range. This means they fly in and give massive amounts of damage to capital ships with large single weapons (or the evil black hole creature), most will die but being the cheapest design that doesn't matter as much as losing a larger ship.

Plant -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/6/2013 2:55:11 PM)
Um...no. Nothing you said makes sense or is true. No arour or shields means that they are just liekly to be taken out from one salvo, Adding just one shield (space 10), or enough to take 2 hits, improves survivability massively, and is the start point for why larger ships are more cost efficient. Throwing engines is not free, and you can just as easily throw engines on a larger ship. Massive amounts of damage! Not if that ship gets wiped out from the opening long range shots since you have no shield. Not even the World Destroyers are armed with one large single weapon. Losing one small ship doesn't matter as losing on big ship. Except that will never happen. Small ships still cost resources. You will always end up losing more resources, because small ships are cost inefficient, and in your case even more cost inefficient than usual.

Spacecadet -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/7/2013 2:04:52 AM)
I tend to view the Classes more as a Mission type platform more than anything else. That said, I design my Escorts to be quick, so they're on the small side. I set them up with Missiles or Long Range weapons only, and adjust vs Stronger & Weaker to be Standoff. Last change is to set Flee when Shields are 50%, because one Shield at 20% most likely won't give you time to flee. Escorts set up this way can really delay an attacker: - Generally they can stay out of range while shooting into the following/chasing attacker. - Since it is being chased, the Escort weapons essentially have a better range (the attacker is running into them). - Because the Escort is normally dealing damage rather than receiving it, there is a chance that the attacker will have to flee due to low Shields. - While all of the above is going on, you are buying time for other assets to come into play to deal with the threat.

elanaagain -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/7/2013 1:12:32 PM)
Small ships (esc, fg) only good for feeding Kaltors.

WCG -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/7/2013 2:38:38 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Spacecadet - Because the Escort is normally dealing damage rather than receiving it, there is a chance that the attacker will have to flee due to low Shields. That sounds very logical, but my experience (in just my first game, note) makes me question whether that would work for me. I'm playing an empire in the Age of Shadows, and the pirates have ships with massive shielding. Even one pirate ship is usually a challenge for a fleet (and even after playing for awhile, I've still got two pirate factions with three times the number of ships I've got and three times the firepower). In small numbers, my ships never even get close to eliminating the shields on one pirate ship. (And pirates normally go after my mines and other facilities, so I don't think a lone escort would even catch their attention.) Because of this problem, I keep my ships in large fleets, and I've designed escorts to be large ships with rail guns, which bypass shields, and with lots of shields and armor themselves. (I don't know why, but I was surprised to find these pirate ships largely armed with rail guns, too, which means that my whole fleet usually needs repairs after an engagement.) I'm also using carriers, which seem to be pretty nice. But the AI design for destroyers and cruisers seems to make them rather useless, except to sop up damage. (However, it's such a pain to keep manual designs up to date, that I've stayed with the auto-designing for everything but escorts.) This has been working with the closest pirate factions, so far. But I'm just hoping the two big factions don't start attacking me. And I had one pirate faction with a capital ship which I thought was going to wipe me out all by itself. It took out a small spaceport, then moved on to a resort base. I thought it was going to destroy everything I owned in my home system, but I apparently drove it off (somehow - maybe my rail guns?). And it never returned. That's another weird thing, because usually pirate vessels just keep coming back and coming back. Well, so far, so good. [:)] Bill

invaderzim -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/7/2013 7:29:21 PM)
It seems that small ships aren't good for much if you look at the numbers. They typically cost around 2000 or 1/3 the cost of the cruiser but die much more easily. With 3 escorts you have to pay for extra extra engines, hyperdrive, command center etc. but you wind up with a more fragile force than 1 cruiser. I've been thinking about using escorts for specialized support roles though. Later on you could have one cheap escort that has fleet ECM, fleet targeting, long range scanning, proximity scanning, etc and maybe one long range weapon. Give it average shielding and tell it to evade both weaker and stronger enemies (I think this allows them to still attack at maximum range). By assigning one per fleet, you can free up some room on your big ships for some more guns and shields at the cost of some micro. Another idea would be to have medium sized fast escorts with hyperdeny and scanners that you can use to chase down fleeing enemies and prevent them from escaping. I like the idea of long range escorts that harass the enemy too at the cost of minimal micromanagement. It should work against other empires but I don't know if it does much against pirates since they like to just charge at the planet you are defending and raid unless the AI get tangled up in attacking you.

Plant -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/8/2013 4:48:54 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Spacecadet I tend to view the Classes more as a Mission type platform more than anything else. That said, I design my Escorts to be quick, so they're on the small side. I set them up with Missiles or Long Range weapons only, and adjust vs Stronger & Weaker to be Standoff. Last change is to set Flee when Shields are 50%, because one Shield at 20% most likely won't give you time to flee. Escorts set up this way can really delay an attacker: - Generally they can stay out of range while shooting into the following/chasing attacker. - Since it is being chased, the Escort weapons essentially have a better range (the attacker is running into them). - Because the Escort is normally dealing damage rather than receiving it, there is a chance that the attacker will have to flee due to low Shields. - While all of the above is going on, you are buying time for other assets to come into play to deal with the threat. Designing for being quick would make your ships larger, not smaller. Everything you have written about your escorts would be better done by making them larger. The larger a ship is, the faster it is, because speed is dependent on the amount of thrust per size. The space efficiency gained from needing only one of command center, hyperdrive, proximity array, scanner, damage control, countermeasures, targetter, means that you got more relative space devoted to everything else, including engines. This doesn't even include the fact that larger ships are just simply less likely to be destroyed by to smaller amounts of damage. If you take to designing ships, you should realise that as long as its purpose is combat, larger is better in every respect that can be though of. I can think of uses for ships that don't have to be as large as possible to be as well designed as possible, but those aren't combat ships.

turtlefang -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/8/2013 11:57:47 PM)
Spacecadet and I have a similar philosphy - design mission specific ships. Early in the game, pirates have a major technology advantage over the player, and his ships will simply cut through yours with minimium losses. The best bet is pay off the pirates until you can get to larger ship sizes (300+) and at least rail guns, a good beam weapon and a good long range torpedo/missile combination and at least the second level of shields and a few pts of armor. At that point, unless the pirates have found a capital ship or strong cruiser, you should be in decent shape. I usually keep ships in groups of six to ten anyway. Sometimes, you just run into a giant and lose the whole fleet regardless. And grav weapon or rail gun pirates early are simply difficult to manage. Escorts. I view escorts as having one of two missions 1) setting three ships or so around a spaceport on permanet defense duty. These ships start at 230 pts and mine usually increase in size to about 300 in size. I heavy up on shields, weapons and don't usually worry about a lot of speed for these types of ships. 2) I usually use Frigates for this, design these as single ships to partol bases or trade lanes. These ships have to be big enough to fight off most single ships or two small ships. These average about 400 in size, use the calisto drive (if that is the fastest one, don't have the game in front of me), realtively fast, and carry a mix of beam and close end weapons plus anything I stick on it to enhance targeting or stop targeting. These need to cost efficient enough to allow to enough of them to be build to cover the a wide area. And these aren't that useful when the big ships start fleet fighting. Destroyers. I usually use these as my armored and gunned up scouts used with fleets. I put a long range sensor on these, then as many shields and weapons as possible. I assign one or two per fleet for eyes and ears. Crusiers. These are close to the largest size I can build. The ships are very fast, heavily armed, have very long range, and as many shields as I can put given the other requirements. I use these in mid to late game as deep penetration and spaceport killers deep in enemy territory. Capital Ships. As big as I can make them, not as fast or having the same range as a cruiser but more shields, more weapons, and designed as the mailed fist of a main battle fleet. Virtually always supported by carriers. I just haven't found the smaller ships to have the range or the firepower needed for deep raids - although I haven't played the new expansion enough to know if capturing frieghters is worth the effort or not. This works for me. Other people use other approaches but it gives me my guidelines for building my ships and how I design them. As a note, the designs end up very different, with different missions. Early in the game (until you have size 400 or so) all the ships look the same or close to it. I try to keep the numbers in each class to what I think I will need long term - although capital ships and cruisers will be just about as many as I can manage.

Trifler -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/9/2013 8:46:42 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Spacecadet I tend to view the Classes more as a Mission type platform more than anything else. That said, I design my Escorts to be quick, so they're on the small side. I set them up with Missiles or Long Range weapons only, and adjust vs Stronger & Weaker to be Standoff. Last change is to set Flee when Shields are 50%, because one Shield at 20% most likely won't give you time to flee. Escorts set up this way can really delay an attacker: - Generally they can stay out of range while shooting into the following/chasing attacker. - Since it is being chased, the Escort weapons essentially have a better range (the attacker is running into them). - Because the Escort is normally dealing damage rather than receiving it, there is a chance that the attacker will have to flee due to low Shields. - While all of the above is going on, you are buying time for other assets to come into play to deal with the threat. This tends to be my design philosophy when it comes to Escorts as well. I will also add that they can make good support ships. The key is not to worry about their travel range. In Pre-warp I find I need a Warp Bubble drive before they're useful. Without at least that, there can be no reinforcements.

Sithuk -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/9/2013 2:00:48 PM)
Ship Classes: Escort, Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Capital. Ship Size: Only limited by tech level and other race related bonuses. Any Ship Class can have any Ship Design assigned to it up to the maximum build size at that point. For the purposes of how the AI operates, 1. What are the differences in how the AI uses the current Ship Classes? 2. What, if any, reasons are there to apply an arbitrary ship size limit to the Ship Designs used for the current Ship Classes? We can all play on manual using designs for roles as we like, but resolving the issues with the AI control will benefit the AI races and lead to a more challenging play environment.

invaderzim -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/9/2013 2:53:32 PM)
quote: 1. What are the differences in how the AI uses the current Ship Classes? 2. What, if any, reasons are there to apply an arbitrary ship size limit to the Ship Designs used for the current Ship Classes? 1. As far as I can tell, there aren't really any. I like to let the AI run my empire for a while when I get tired of managing things. So I think I might build one general purpose combat ship and just tell the AI to build lots of these. 2. I don't think there are any. As long as your thruster tech can keep up to prevent your ships from becoming impossibly slow. With low thrust to size ratio, you'll reach a certain point where more engines will slow the ship down. You can probably still win most of your battles with big slow ships that are armed to the teeth, but it takes forever for them to dock when refueling or repairing. This is pretty annoying problem though as it can take months for a really slow ship to crawl up to a spaceport after arriving. I try to maintain at least a cruising speed of 15 to 20 for this reason.

Bingeling -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/10/2013 8:57:05 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Sithuk 1. What are the differences in how the AI uses the current Ship Classes? Build ratios, fleet composition, and it probably tries to put higher ship classes at higher value objectives if they are not in a fleet.

paShadoWn -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/10/2013 12:10:17 PM)
The main difference between escorts and the rest is that AI doesnt put them into fleets as often and they tend to loiter around bases. Which makes their role quite obvious: to delay enemies until nearby task force arrives. Thus lots of engines and long ranged weapons, standoff/evade and fighter bay. Or tons of shields and ion cannons.

Fenrisfil -> RE: Are escorts good for anything? (6/10/2013 12:10:25 PM)
I think escorts can be useful, but they are certainly not something I would want to rely on. For pirates escorts are almost like civilian ships, they form an important part of your economy, but you can mostly just ignore them and let them go on their way under automation. Pirate escorts can happily carry out raids on weaker planets and maintain influence. They can also capture civilian ships and in larger groups can capture bases. For a normal empire they are of limited use. They can deal with pirate escorts well enough and if you have a tech advantage they can be a bit more of a threat. They can also be used to take out undefended mining stations and the like, something they are especially good at if equipped with long range weapons (though sometimes this can take a long time). Basically they are best at generally annoying your enemy and prodding them lightly into submission. If I'm attacking an enemy colony or taking on a fleet I wouldn't even consider bringing these guys. Usually I try and keep my escorts as cheap as possible, fitting them into 1 life support/hab modules worth of space and so far it hasn't made them any less useful (or more useless perhaps).

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