Ship design: Quantity vs quality

[TheFlemishDuck]

Just to have a discussion on ship design and to ask people how they organise/build their fleets the more so keeping costs and pontential numbers in mind. What do people thing, is it better to build a larger force that is cheaper in resources, or is it better to build a smaller amount of high quality ships?

Personally my forces are devided between 2 main components which i call the Homeguard and the Starfleet. The starfleet typicly is a smaller force of higher quality ships that are meant for offensive opperations whereas the homeguard is a bulk force of cheap (obsolete) ships meant for defense.

To explain my Homeguard a little bit better, since i think it's a very valuable strategy, they are composed of ships that at start have a minimum amount of components that use rare materials and are equiped with loads of ion guns which uses no gravitonium, reidium or plutonium but has it's main cost in steel. Homeguard corvette's typicly only have one engine, minimal amounts of fuel storage (enough to hop around my home systems) and minimal amount of added components or power generators. Because compared to better ships they can be slow and lacking of range they are supported by a bulk force of homeguard fighters which are build on the same phillosophy. Because these ships take so few resources in terms of gravitonium, reidium and plutonium i can build them in rally vast quantity's from the start, by the time ill build better ships ill typicly have about 50 to a100 of these corvette's complemented with a few thousands of HG fighters and ill still be building up my reserve's in rare materials while it's quite hard to come to lack metals in the game. In my first games i wouldn't have been able to even build 10 ships over that period simply because i took few notice of resources and then would have been blocked soon enough in further construction due to having wasted to much of my limited early supplies of gravitonium , reidium or plutonium.

This homeguard remains a functional force for me well beyond the time you'd consider them obsolete by the sheer mass in which i can build them. Say that i have 4 defensive chokepoints for them to defend while starfleet is away then i might have about 25 of these HG corvette's + 500 HG fighters. Whereas the corvette's are slow the fighters are fast enough to deal with ships that would use range or speed to outmaneuver the ion corvette's. While ion guns are far from the most effecient against fighters in such bulk they don't have to many issue's in dispatching with a more advanced fighters providing they don't come in equal bulk numbers but given the cost of advanced fighters that is not so likely.
In principle i wouldn't mind if such a defensive force would suffer a large amount of casualty's when attacked by a more modern fleet given that they are so cheap and easy to replace, the simple matter is that such a bulk of ships is eitherway kinda hard for the AI to deal with, the AI doesn't mass it's ships that well neither and such a bulk force will often even act as a detterrent to attack for te Ai seemingly.

So i just wanted to convey soe of my thoughts on early ship design and especially how people looked at the metric of quantity vs quality as the game progresses.

[von Runstedt]

Not to knock your method, its certainly a good one, I think you are missing a better method here. Why not instead of dozens of corvettes, why not have a few defensive satellites? They are harder to destroy, have more spots for weapons and hangars. pretty much so long as they have adequate fighter support they are practically invincible against an AI opponent. I usually have 8 satellites per choke-point but that's just personal preference, you can probably get away with far fewer than that even. I've had battles where the satellites with some fighter support have wiped out 40 + enemy ships and many hundreds of fighters for the lose of maybe 1 or 2 satellites and the fighters that were supporting them. I'm not entirely clear on your use of the term star fleet in an organizational sense (i.e. is it a centrally located fleet that then goes out wherever needed?), but I then have my mobile fleet of offensive ships which are divided according to sector with hundreds of ships per sector. Each sector corresponds to a different entry point into my empire and given the distance there usually is between these sectors, each one is designed to have all the offensive power it needs to carry out its operations without support from the fleets in the other sectors. I usually couple this approach with my attrition strategy that I've mentioned in previous posts so that my large fleets of ships find enemy forces that are greatly weakened by resource shortages in my opponents empire caused by over-mining and discontinued expansion. This essentially means my great fleets meet little if any opposition and, for all intents and purposes, steamroll over my enemies with few if, even, any casualties.

[TheFlemishDuck]

Not to knock your method, its certainly a good one, I think you are missing a better method here. Why not instead of dozens of corvettes, why not have a few defensive satellites? They are harder to destroy, have more spots for weapons and hangars. pretty much so long as they have adequate fighter support they are practically invincible against an AI opponent.

Why hangars on a defensive sattelite? Its not like you need them to have fighters at that system, just a stack of fighters "flying around" will do too. If youre going to use defensive sattelite's then pack them with weapons and shields i'd say. Ok perhaps you could use hangers for rearming fighters with missile's but early on fighters with missile's cost too much plutonium to have in big numbers.

A sattelite has a few advantage's like stronger shields or weapons with slightly more range, but takes longer to build (higher hammer cost) and costs more resources. The disadvantage afcourse is complete lack of mobillety though granted they can be moved with freighters and the inabbilety to move in formation with other sattelite's which means they might be picked off peacemeal.
When it comes to cheap designs with load of ion guns and lazers the extra that they deliver in dakka and armor compared to a corvette is about the same or even less. I can put 21 guns on a sattelite, 14 on a corvette. (human) Sattlite takes 23 months to build, corvete 14. (just 2 comparative designs build on the same world) They are somewhat cheaper on gravitonium but far more expensive on plutonium. This might be different from race to race though, the base hulls of each race is different and might offer diffferent advantage's or dissadvantages.

I've had battles where the satellites with some fighter support have wiped out 40 + enemy ships and many hundreds of fighters for the lose of maybe 1 or 2 satellites and the fighters that were supporting them. I'm not entirely clear on your use of the term star fleet in an organizational sense (i.e. is it a centrally located fleet that then goes out wherever needed?), but I then have my mobile fleet of offensive ships which are divided according to sector with hundreds of ships per sector.

The homeguard is simply a bulk force of cheap ships that i can always build with leftover materials whereas the starfleet is made of optimally designed warships with different roles which might be harder to build in large numbers due to their costs. The homeguard is simply a defensive force of planes and ships that clutters chokepoints and fills holes if in the back when i go on the offense whereas the starfleet do all the attacking work and is a smaller but effecient force. If need be the Starfleet can aid the defense, in peace they stand more as a reserve while the homeguard stays on the borders.

but I then have my mobile fleet of offensive ships which are divided according to sector with hundreds of ships per sector. Each sector corresponds to a different entry point into my empire and given the distance there usually is between these sectors, each one is designed to have all the offensive power it needs to carry out its operations without support from the fleets in the other sectors. I usually couple this approach with my attrition strategy that I've mentioned in previous posts so that my large fleets of ships find enemy forces that are greatly weakened by resource shortages in my opponents empire caused by over-mining and discontinued expansion. This essentially means my great fleets meet little if any opposition and, for all intents and purposes, steamroll over my enemies with few if, even, any casualties.

Afcourse actual numbers of ships kinda depend on time played and how many stars on the map. The Ai has too many issue's now to be really a dangerous force but i think that patches can work it out.

[mikeck]

I rarely use stations. I build one chances are several hundred years later my empire boundaries will have changed and now I have an interior planet with a battle station around it and have to build new ones every time I extend my empire . I prefer to have a few ships there at important planets or intersections of star lanes. that way I can move them around as needed

[von Runstedt]

First of all, battle stations don't need to be able to move during battles. If you are on the defensive (which you pretty much have to be if you have defense satellites) then there is a pre-battle set up portion that allows you to move the satellites wherever you want them so that you can cluster them all together which is what I do. Sure they may take longer to build but like I said they are more durable and you get more bang with only a slightly larger outlay of bucks. In any case how is the 9 months difference in build time that much of problem? Are you in so much of a hurry in a game that has a timescale of thousands of years that waiting less than a year more for a better product is that much of an issue? Sure you can build a lot of corvettes that collectively may have an equivalent armament compared to a satellite but each one can be destroyed fairly easily and doesn't have anywhere near the same firepower potential that a satellite does. Like I've said I've seen a handful of satellites wipe out much larger enemy forces. And yes its a pain in the *** that they cant move on their own but its simple enough to build a cargo fleet that has the ability to transport them to the next choke-point. Hell, usually by the time I'm pushing the boundaries of my empire I don't even need the satellites to defend my choke-points as by that time I've built up such a powerful military machine that I can just park my large conquest fleets on each chokepoint and expand or defend my borders as I see fit. Even more to the point, by that stage I probably don't even need any fleet defenses on my borders at all since my AI opponents are all so afraid of me and stumbling over themselves to try to come to terms with me that the only wars I'd have to worry about would be the ones I launched myself.

That is in part the reason why I prefer satellites. Usually in my playthroughs, for most of the early and part way into the mid game portions of the game I dispense with a fleet entirely. I usually just peg out a large zone of control and then park satellites at the chokepoints and just sit back and focus on internal development while the AI either spends its time fighting amongst itself or, in the event that they declare war on me, sends its fleets into the meat grinder.

[freifrei]

In my previous game I've had one small satellite + 20-40 very cheap but fast fighters in every system behind the frontlines.
I made satellite relatively cheap by, but it still had heavy baryon gun to kill a few corvettes.

It was useless. Turned out that what I really need is a satellite with jump inhibitor and a few cheap guns to stop cloaked corvettes and like 5 heavy interceptors with 4x heavy ions each to kill passerby spies that often have anti-missile traps but no other weapons.

[RandomAttack]

As a new player I find this discussion fascinating, esp. the ship design aspects. Regarding fuel for Corvettes, how much do you consider sufficient for "HG" ones, and then those you hope to move around more? I'm having a hard time judging what is "sufficient". Guess it has to be tailored every game depending on the relative distances between stars? Also, what about power balances? Does a surplus serve any purpose? Should you try and get it as close to "zero" as practicable to reduce weight/cost?

The timing aspect eludes me a bit. How early do you generally need a horde of defenses?? Build them TOO early and you miss out on some good tech. Build them too late and get trounced in an unexpected war. I realize there is no single right answer, but it seems your "Homeworld" usually is pretty isolated from any potential enemy after you colonize a bit. Do you guys heavily protect it even though any bad guys would have to slog thru a bunch of other systems to get to it?

Anyway, I really enjoy reading these threads with all the ingenious strategies that people come up with!

[Flef]

Just to have a discussion on ship design and to ask people how they organise/build their fleets the more so keeping costs and pontential numbers in mind. What do people thing, is it better to build a larger force that is cheaper in resources, or is it better to build a smaller amount of high quality ships?

Quality is definitely cheaper. The ships themselves can be expensive but they are more reliable and survives a lot better in battle. Then they acquire experience meaning they are deadlier and more resistant. And in peace periods you can upgrade them easily with a better weapon of differents reactor, shield etc... for not so much.

In the other hand crappy ships will die easily meaning you'll lost your investments without compensation.

After it all depends also by what you call quality. In fact quality and quantity are not really apllicable to the game.
My ships are not getting the best armor but the best speed (which can imply a crappy and light armor), the best possible fire range, a boson gun and a shield. But I do not give them much more than 8000hu in fuel and only the destroyers/cruiser/battleship get ttop notch radars. In consequence my ships are hard to hit, move fast between systems and I need only small fleets of 10 ships roughly to fight anything.
But they need tankers to go deep into enemy territory or to cross big gaps.

[TheFlemishDuck]

Regarding fuel for Corvettes, how much do you consider sufficient for "HG" ones, and then those you hope to move around more? I'm having a hard time judging what is "sufficient". Guess it has to be tailored every game depending on the relative distances between stars?

Depending indeed on relative distances between stars, 3 to 4 is usually enough.

Also, what about power balances? Does a surplus serve any purpose? Should you try and get it as close to "zero" as practicable to reduce weight/cost?

One thing you deffinatly shouldn't do is go from the principle that all room must be filled with somethting that could appear remotly usefull. I love that the developer in this game has taken rather care for the room/weight balance in ships and parts. From a tactical perspective speed can be a weapon on itself, the more when it can be combined with outranging weaponry, or when it can be of use for mobilization and deployement on the battlespace. A slow ship filled to the brim with expensive stuff might find itself slow to join battle in formation, perhaps isolated even and vulnerable to being defeated in detail. There is a need for heavier or more armored ships to have enough mobillety to be functional and there is a incentive to also build special light ships that can harrass slower ships with long range weaponry and disengage to thrust to safety when needed. If you fill ships to the brimn depending on the species you could end up with mighty slow ships indeed.

Besides that, there is also the matter simply of dakka per cost. The amount of dammage you can get out of youre units of resources. It can easily be the case for ex. with fighters that building them with minimal amount of needed components can reduce the cost of such fighters by multiple's the more so in rare resources at times. The difference in cost between an more armored and yet faster ion fighter might be double of a slower weaker one. The option of the cheaper fighter here give's twice as much firepower for the same cost as you can affor twice as much but have less resistance. Wether that is good depends on circumstances regarding tech and numbers pitted against. If for ex. you outnumber youre opponent a lot then the cheap fighters are likely going to be better as the enemy simply might not have the time to shoot back much, atleast the double firepower can make the process of killing that ship twice as fast. And even when it comes to fighters with shields, them being good fighters doesn't nessecarily mean that so much more of them will survive the battle. It is rather depending too of the technoligy youre up against too. With a HG force you expect to have those superior numbers though, usually the will be a bulk force camping a limited amount of chokepoints.

The timing aspect eludes me a bit. How early do you generally need a horde of defenses?? Build them TOO early and you miss out on some good tech. Build them too late and get trounced in an unexpected war. I realize there is no single right answer, but it seems your "Homeworld" usually is pretty isolated from any potential enemy after you colonize a bit. Do you guys heavily protect it even though any bad guys would have to slog thru a bunch of other systems to get to it?

I first set up good manufacturing worlds before i start to build bulk forces, before that i sneak in the odd corvette in my build queu, start of game is mostly colonizers, a transport ship to move people to my manufacturing worlds to speed up their industrial expansion. 1st tech i rush from the start is the one that allows to settle dessert planets because i want to have a lot more plutonium, organics and then steel fast. Generally my strategy is optimized to get to a bulk fleet of ships asap with the consideration that a 1 or 2 manufacturing worlds + the required early resources is the thing you will need for that.

Starting weaponry and other ship module's have their cost more in things like steel and organics, the early weapons unlocked by tech have mostly a big increase in plutonium cost. Mid game weaponry and module's witll start to cost a lot in reidium and gravitonium too. It's easier to build up the manufacturing potential early on than the mining output, so the first ships i build in bulk usually need to be build with very limited resources and prefferably more with the resources that i have than the ones i lack. Weapons like better lasers and torpedo's can be researched much faster than one would be able to build up plutonium mining so to be able to build a lot of ships containing such weaponry, same goes for rushing projectile weapons.
Also all ships require some plutonium and gravitonium and at start it's extremely limited for a long time so you really need to take a lot of care of not using too much in youre designs for a long time.

With other words, you can build up loads of production capacity up much easier/faster early on than you can expand youre resources so at that point it makes sense to account of how many ships and total firepower you can build out of youre limited reserve's and income.To give you an idea, i can set up a production planet with like 30 factory's and 6 space shipyards churning out corvette's in less than a year at about 15-20 years in game i gather. But even with boni to tech research it will take me about 15 years to research the tech to settle dessert planets and it then will take me another 10-40 years to start up resource mining and build it up further. Having large numbers of plutonium and gravitonium will easily take me a century i gather. I can do some mining on terran worlds early on but it's hardly significant. So it comes to the point that for quite a while i could easily exchaust my supply of key resources by not minimalizing the amount of key resources my early ships use, early on my reserve's will be very low on gravitonium especially (because of colonizers grav cost) and ill have enough steel and organics so i construct ships that take minimal gravitonium and use weaponry that mostly cost in steel and organics like basic ion weapons.

After it all depends also by what you call quality. In fact quality and quantity are not really apllicable to the game.

It's mostly a matter of production capacity vs resource availabillety and otoh DPS per cost. Quantity ships depend in their "quality" on the current tech level too, in game there are 5 different resource and all ship components and weaposn have varried costs which for ex. might be mostly plutonium or gravitonium. The point the is that you could design yourself some quality ships that you wouldn't be able to build in large numbers at times because you lack the key resource for it, while otoh you might have plenty of reserve's in other resources that won't be used much by such quality ships but which could be used to build a large number of ships that use such resources. The easiest to get resources early on are usualy those that are used in the less advanced weaponr, it's easy to rush better weapons early on and be unable to afford ships using them.

Gravitonium is the key limit early on, you have very few income and reserve and a lot gets eaten by Colonizers. The difference in gravitonium cost between a cheap and better quality early ship might be 2 vs 20, If then you only have say 40 gravitonium to build warships with in the next 20 years then youre better of building 20 cheap ships than 2 ships that have tech that is just a bit more advanced. My 20 Ion corvette's might be slow but they will bring a lot more guns with them than those 2. And i'm rather serious with this example, things like that could happen and if you don't consider specific resource costs of youre designs you might find yourself with just those 2 ships for quite a while. Same goes with Plutonium if you don't watch out.

[RandomAttack]

All good points-- thanks for the insights!

[Flef]

After it all depends also by what you call quality. In fact quality and quantity are not really apllicable to the game.

It's mostly a matter of production capacity vs resource availabillety and otoh DPS per cost. Quantity ships depend in their "quality" on the current tech level too, in game there are 5 different resource and all ship components and weaposn have varried costs which for ex. might be mostly plutonium or gravitonium. The point the is that you could design yourself some quality ships that you wouldn't be able to build in large numbers at times because you lack the key resource for it, while otoh you might have plenty of reserve's in other resources that won't be used much by such quality ships but which could be used to build a large number of ships that use such resources. The easiest to get resources early on are usualy those that are used in the less advanced weaponr, it's easy to rush better weapons early on and be unable to afford ships using them.

Gravitonium is the key limit early on, you have very few income and reserve and a lot gets eaten by Colonizers. The difference in gravitonium cost between a cheap and better quality early ship might be 2 vs 20, If then you only have say 40 gravitonium to build warships with in the next 20 years then youre better of building 20 cheap ships than 2 ships that have tech that is just a bit more advanced. My 20 Ion corvette's might be slow but they will bring a lot more guns with them than those 2. And i'm rather serious with this example, things like that could happen and if you don't consider specific resource costs of youre designs you might find yourself with just those 2 ships for quite a while. Same goes with Plutonium if you don't watch out.

Agreed. The ressources are the key factor in the design.
That's where the trade comes in but that's another discussion

On a side note, combats are a relationship between weapons and platform. the fact of being enough ahead in tech allows to spare ressources too simply by using the range and the speed of the platform.
On another hand , the use of a shield when the other ship have none allows to close in weapon range and negates eventually a superior DPS for a time.

[Protagoras01]

Agreed. The ressources are the key factor in the design.

Poppycock!

Its the amount of Chrome on the sides, and the sleek fins on the back. You want to impress your opponent with the sheer audacity of your design.. it matters not if your outnumbered 10-1!

[buglepong]

Why not both? Its a 4x game, you win by outgunning the opponents in every way you can