Warship Size Attractors

[Prince of Space (OP)]

I've been giving thought to my warship sizes lately. Specifically, I've been trying to determine how the game mechanics might favor certain sizes for certain tactics.

Ships that rely on being undetected would benefit from being as small as possible given the minimum equipment needed to perform their missions. Many little ships are also a great way to keep your lieutenants busy.

Ships that are likely to take a beating even under the best circumstances would benefit from being bigger, to spread out damage across more columns of armor (and to pack in redundant systems). Combining the firepower of several midsized vessels into one large ship also makes better use of exceptional officers.

That's as far as I get. The bull-in-a-china-shop vs. mouse-with-sneakers-on dichotomy seems to hold up, as shown by the widespread acceptance of missile fighters (which can keep their distance from active search sensors) and the backbending needed to justify beam fighters (who can't avoid being picked up by anti-missile sensors if they want to close to engagement range).

Has anyone else noticed advantages I've overlooked? Is there a strong case to be made for midsized ships?

[Nathan_]

If you can afford all big ships then great, but mid range ships let you more cheaply project force over a large area in both ship construction and maintenance consumption.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Yes... I have found out the same thing as you (more or less).

The big ships are very hard to destroy and they can usually project their power over a great area. They often have bigger missiles and/or hangars with fighter crafts. They are very expensive to maintain and move around since building large maintenance facilities in many places will become expensive over time.

I find that a good balance between all types of ships seem to be the best and most efficient way to build your fleet. I'm not saying that its the only way but it will make you more flexible. Just started a new campaign in 6.2 and I plan to play this for a long time as long as their is no major bugs and already know at low tech levels I have ships ranging from 250-28000 tones with plans for a few bigger ships down the road.

The big girls are hard to hide and they are for projecting your real power or to bring in the smaller ships and use them as a moveable base of operations. In my last campaign I made good use of small cruiser fleets (ranging from 20-40k). Docked in their hangar they had stealthy scout ships and some strike wings and a brutal defense against any type of attack against the cruisers themselves, including some strike craft squadrons. In this instance I had no real mid range more specialized ships, but relied on fighter sized craft for scouting and harassment while the cruiser provided both the artillery and the shield.

My battle carrier groups on the other hand where protected with both smaller and middle sized ships as well as spearheaded by small light cruiser recon squadrons. To bad I never had the opportunity to use either of my battle carrier task forces in battle to see their might. Hopefully I will get the opportunity in the coming weeks. My cruisers on the other hand were engaged in many small and larger skirmishes. My cruiser division was also an integrated part of my survey efforts. One heavy cruiser would be outfitted with survey crafts in its hangar and so they provided the muscle in case some nifty NPR decided to show up and ruin my day. Despite all my efforts I did get a few losses but I never left one single life pod from any survey crafts and only a very few humans actually died in total to these "Accidents".

Any way... I don't see myself using a pure strategy in either direction. Although, I see little reason for grouping many smaller vessels in large strike groups and sending them to battle this is what big cruisers and carries are for. Smaller vessels are for scouting and engaging other small medium sized ships when they appear in smaller quantities, or to lure enemies into traps. Smaller ships are of course good at providing escort services for bigger ships.

I have played one game where I played several sides and here it was even more evident how frail small ships are in comparison with the big ones in pure firefights. But they also show their brilliant strategic use in the recon and diversion tactic to decide the engagement on the battlefield.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Might also add some more while I'm thinking about this issue.

What are the benefits of three 10000 ton destroyers over one 30000 ton cruiser?
If they are all more or less equipped equally the bigger ship would usually be more powerful in combat since it can concentrate firepower against each weaker ship in turn. But what you gain in pure firepower you loose in flexibility. It is also economically more expensive to maintain big ships in the field since you can't just plop down a 30000 ton maintenance facility wherever you like and at as many places as you can use 10000 ton facilities. Not to mention additional fuel costs to slingshot those big ships around, you also don't always need a 75000 ton monster to defend or move against a target. If two 18000 light cruisers is all you need then using a 75000 ton carrier with all its escort is just a waste of resources.

In my opinion, the bigger a ship get the less important it is that it is really fast because defenses such as armour and in particular shields is more efficient. Smaller ships must rely more on being able to escape what it can't kill and engage targets of opportunity. This probably goes all the way down to FAC and fighters. Although, you can't build a ship to withstand all types of attacks. They mostly have some form of weakness. A large ship might be too slow and eventually overwhelmed by faster enemy ships. A smaller squadron of destroyers may survive an engagement but half of them was destroyed, if they had been a single large vessels it would most probably have been damaged at most.

When I build and deploy my ship assets I tend to think what I need them fore and what my overall plan for them are. In essence, I like to employ the rule of Sun Tzu of hitting hard and decisively and knowing where and when to do so. I build most (not all) of my ship designs to be able to do dual roles. Most of the time they are equipped for defensive action while probing an enemy. Once I know the disposition of the enemies forces then my ships may be equipped for offensive action. Thus, the same ships can be used in both roles. You can do this even with smaller ships if you want to. As an example, my missile frigates have launchers for both anti-ship and anti-missile purposes. In most circumstances their magazines are loaded with defensive missiles while they can quite easily switch through loading at a collier from defensive to offensive at a moments notice. My main concern is for my ships to survive the probing of enemy defenses, I never go in blind and I like to apply just as much force that I need to obtain my goals.

In order to get the most out of the game in respect to ship and fleet composition I think you need to play against yourself and you will understand how frail you are when you just move all your ships in one large fleet. This is where ships of different sizes and roles enters into the picture.

[Prince of Space (OP)]

I don't contest that big ships require big slipways and ample maintenance facilities, both of which require an upfront mineral expenditure and ongoing costs in labor and wealth, but I was thinking about the best ship to accomplish a given mission, not the best ship for sweet talking the chair of the budget oversight committee.

That aside, there might be something to using midsized ships to apply just the right amount of force, rather than using overkill. It seems harder to pin down a size, though. A 2,500-ton corvette can slip unnoticed through the range of a res-100 active sensor if I'm careful. If I need a ship that can take it on the chin and keep fighting my battleships can be as large as my shipyard and maintenance facilities allow. But there's no clear best size (or range of sizes) for destroyers or cruisers or whatever I call my middling ships, unless I've missed something.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I would say that the rule of thumb is to use whatever forces you need to accomplish the task based on the resources you have. If you can afford to station Battleships in each and every system then there obviously is no need for any middle range combat ships.

I would say that the difference in ship types will be the design of your ships and what resources you are in short supply of. I tend to favor to give larges ships slower speed and more defense and weapons. So if my operation need speed then the big ships is not very efficient. I also might not want to risk a Battleship on a mission until I know what forces I face. Then it could be more efficient to send in your slightly stealthier and faster cruisers than battleship to probe the enemy defenses.

Just because one ship is more powerful does not mean it can be destroyed as easily under the right circumstances or you simply burn huge amount of resources for a very little benefit.

When you play the game you need to look at each ship and design you have and ask yourself what purpose they serve. Ships would go out of style all the time for many different reasons, I see no point in deploying ships of all sizes all the time and certainly not together in the same battle groups.

[niflheimr]

Actually I find a mixed-sized force to be most efficient. Take for example my smallest taskforce : 1 strike carrier 12kt , 1x command/missile cruiser 12kt , 3 escort dessies 6kt , 3 escort/attack frigates 4kt ( 1 dual laser turret , 5 size 1 launchers , 20 size 3 boxes ) and 4 escort 'vettes - 2kt , 6x size 1 launchers.

The corvettes are using full signature engines and a small size active sensor - until I get in engagement range they are bait , with more than enough pd in the group to keep them resonably safe. And if one gets killed I can replace it in just a few months - keeping my heavier ships protected and undamaged so they can perform as they should once the first missile barrage is exhausted.

The frigates on the other hand use 12% sig engines and a cloaking device - which allows me to get those boxes in range for a devastating alpha .

For big operations I combine two of these squadrons with a main group - 1 command battlecruiser , 3 pure offensive missile battlecruiser and a mix of heavy carriers , tenders and specialized ships.

One thing I noticed is that for my kind of fleets 35% size launchers are a lot more effective since I can put a salvo big enough to overwhelm any defence , and if needed I can use time-on-target assault .

[Jorgen_CAB]

Yes, I would agree with that. A mixed sized fleet can usually work very well since each ship in the battle group serve a particular role. My sizes do, however, vary much more than yours from about 3000 tons up to about 75000 for the biggest capital ships.

One interesting tactic I use is to put better ECM on my escort rather then my big ships. I want the enemy to focus their fire on the capital ships not the escorts which are frail and much easier to destroy. I can also make better use of CIWS point defenses against missile attacks.

Just for the sake of my economy I would use a mixed fleet of ships for flexibility and the use of multiple strategies and being able to cover a much greater area.

Remember, big ships have a much higher thermal imprint and will show up much sooner on enemy passive sensors unless you drive them very slow, they are simply much harder to surprise your enemy with. A small group of missile frigates can sneak up on a target much more easy then a squadron of cruisers. On the other hand, a group of Frigates are much more vulnerable than a squadron of cruisers once detected even if they represent roughly the same amount of total tonnage.

[jseah]

Sometime after my first actual game, I came to the conclusion that large ships were only useful as damage magnets and that there was little point putting out too many of them. 

Since my overall strategy aims to use overwhelming force (when I spot a threat, I muster every single spare ship for it, Lancaster's Square Law being what it is), I lean towards logistical simplicity and specialization.  Every ship does exactly one thing and that's it. 
A single 6kton ship is the workhorse of the fleet.  It has antimissile and antiship launchers and a small magazine.  And that's it. 

The fleet also contains sensor ships, jump ships and so on to do all the other stuff.  All in all, I aim to make the ships as small as possible (the size 50 sensor ships are also 6kton, the remaining mass going to armour) for their role. 

I do aim to build a giant monster flagship that will have laser dual-role PD turrets, AMM and ASM launchers, its own sensors, jumpdrive etc. but that is really more a vanity project built because I can. 


I do this because ships get obsoleted very very fast by new technology (mostly new engine tech level), usually at least once every 4-5 years.  Replacing sections of the fleet is less disruptive than calling in refits on giant ships that take up lots of yard space.  Plus, small size yards can be cheaply run with multiple slipways and literally stamp out an entire fleet in under a year or two. 

[Gidoran]

I actually noticed recently that it doesn't seem like smaller ships are built that much faster than larger ships are with both shipyards being just-about exactly the right size. But while you can churn out a large number of slipways for a smaller ship design, the smaller it gets the less likely it is that you can build multiple designs in the same space. With the 8k ton Frigates I was fielding in my 6.1 campaign, I was able to take the FFG design and turn it into both a jump frigate and an escort carrier (by stripping weaponry out, only partially in the JF's case, and replacing it with role-critical equipment) that had them all built in the same shipyard if the FFG was the tooled for design.

You could probably just retool as necessary (although that seems wasteful) or just built a bunch of shipyards, but that seems like it increases logistical requirements (read: more clicky and scrolly, to use technical terms) while giving only a slight advantage in minerals and wealth.

But more on the original topic, I think that the size level where I'm usually most comfortable is around 14000-ish tons. Back before 6.0 one of my favorite design clusters was a bunch of 14400 'Destroyers', and in my last campaign it was 14000-ton cruisers that worked best. It gives enough tonnage that each ship can really have decent protection, speed, and armament, and it allows you to out-perform most NPR combatants you've faced. And it does this in a package that's not too hard to build new shipyards for, nor are they overly expensive to produce and maintain when compared against the cost of having to produce an entirely new, but smaller ship every time it takes losses. Although I've never really encountered a satisfactorily challenging NPR, so losses might be less of a worry for others than it is for me. It always seems like their point defense ships are off eating chips and ice cream, millions of kilometers away from the action while their combatants are charging down my throat, into my missile murder radius.

Edit: Forgot part of my point due to lack of sleep. Put it in properly.

[SteelChicken]

I find around 12KT-14KT to be a good blend of the various factors for most ships, except my carriers and small escorts.    My carriers I tend to make as large as I can, and escorts as small as I can.   My carriers are also usually my sensor platforms as well.   Since they are the biggest ship, they tend to be targeted first anyways and are hardly stealthy, so why not put giant radars on them?

Carriers (20-30KT, sensor platform [with huge sensors for res100, res20, and res1] lots of fuel and ordnance, and ~10 fighters per10KT)
Missile Cruisers (~12-14K), only short range sensors for backup, dual role, long range missile strike and AMM platform
Destroyers (~12-14K), short range sensors, dual role, some beam for point defense, some beams for close range(jump point defense) ship to ship combat, sometimes I put on some ASM box launchers for alpha strikes
Escorts (~6k) short range sensors, point defense only

Late game, ill add hunter killers, small ships with high stealth for raiding, scouting and jump point interdiction.  ~5K
Also late game, I may add (for fun/RP only, not really practical) a battle cruiser design which is 20KT-30KT and combines many roles.  What might be called a "space control ship" from the old Starfleet Battles board game.

[Rabid_Cog]

What I'm going to try in my game (I had some success in a test game) is a Swarm-like approach. I will rely extensively on cheap, mass-produced ships of the smallest effective size I can make (3-6kt). While these ships would of course be divided into specialized roles, I will attempt to make the non-mission critical components as homogeneous as possible. This will have several advantages as I can use my planetary industry to produce components for these things and shipyards will retool faster to handle upgrades.

Something I think people miss is that you can split up your fleet as the missiles approach. While this makes you more vulnerable to getting hit, it does mean that once the target is destroyed, the remaining missiles will most likely have difficulty re-targeting your other ships. Nothing like having a guy waste 50% of his missile ordinance to kill one 5kt ship.

[jseah]

For reference, my 'standard' setup about 10 years into a game (1 billion starting pop) consists of a 6 slip shipyard at 6kton for the missile ships and a bunch of 1 slip yards for the specialists.  Most of the time, I maintain a pretty large fleet (easy enough when it's just 6ktons per ship, you chuck them out bit by bit and before you know it...) so I tend to have around the same tonnage as the opposition. 

Since I go with the Missile Massacre school of thought, the 6kton ships pack 33% size reduction launchers for offense, usually size 4; with a two-stage missile (size 1 bus, size 3 warhead) built for speed to penetrate PD.  I don't always use a full salvo, especially if I am just testing their missile defences or it turns out I brought too many ships (usually the case).