Fleet design questions

[bankshot (OP)]

I'm designing my first fleet, and I'm not sure where to go with some of the choices.  I'm currently at Ion Engine tech level at 2046 (21 years in, 100% difficulty), and have decided on the following overall structure for the battle fleet:

15K-20K tonnage per ship

4 ASM ships
2 AMM ships
2 laser PD ships
1-2 tankers
1 collier/LR sensor ship

Initial questions:

1) Is this fleet large enough to handle likely challenges? 

Re: how much tonnage can I expect to face from NPR fleets?  Do I need to double/redouble this fleet to be effective?

2) Do I have the offense/defense balance right, and should I consider more generalized designs?  Since the laser PD ships can protect the entire fleet I decided on making specialized ships, on the theory that I'd be better off carrying extra launchers/ammo than the beam fire controls required for PD turrets.   

3) what sort of speed is required to be effective?

I'm OK with having one or more tankers attached, so I can consider engines with >1.0 output.  But SerBeardian's Fleet Doctrine document allocates 1/3 of the ship's mass to 1.75x engines to achieve 7K speed.  Most of the other Ion-Era designs I've seen are around half that speed.  25% mass at 1.0 yields 3K speed, 33% mass at 1.0 yields 4K, 25% at 1.5 yields 4,500, 25% at 1.75 yields 5.3K, and 33% at 1.5 yields 6K. 

4) Is a long range PD fire control worth it?  Assuming parity in tech per the missile calculator at http://romalarapps.elasticbeanstalk.com/aurora/AuroraMissileDesign.aspx I assume I should expect ASMs with speeds around 16-17K.  My next research priority is 4K fire control speed.  Once that completes I could design a 4x/4x fire control with a 96K/16K rating to match the 16K turrets I'm currently researching.  This would of course be rather expensive to research and build but should allow my laser turrets 2 shots at incoming missiles if I'm willing to toggle between area and final defense fire.  Or should I stick with 4x/1.5x (anti-ship) and 1x/4x fire controls? 

5) How much and what ratio of armor/shield should I use?  I've tentatively decided on 6 layers of armor and 20x Delta R300 shields (10%/5% mass). This leaves 150-200 HS (45-50% mass) for turrets and power plants assuming 30% engines/fuel.  But I don't know where the proper breakpoint is between glass cannon and turtle.
 
Missile questions for later:

6) Is 100M a good range for ASMs or should I go for 120 M or higher? 

7) Size 4, 5, or 6 ASMs?  For size 4 I can create a 9 damage ASM with 18K speed and 42% chance to hit 5K speed targets.  For size 5 a 9 damage missile gives 20K speed with 55% chance.  Or for size 6 it recommends 16 damage with 16K speed and 35% chance.  Would the best choice be volley size (4), accuracy (5), or damage (6)?

For size 1 AMMs I get 23K speed with 9M range and 23% to hit targets moving at 18K.  Is that sufficient or should I assume a higher target speed?

9) should I be reserving space for a terminal guidance sensor in either design?  I have read that would be required to allow retargeting a missile in flight but I'm not sure how often that would be an issue.

10) And finally - do towed ships use their engines?  re: could I outfit a tanker with extra commercial engines and a tractor beam then use it to tow strike fleet ships to their target system without de-fueling the ships in question?
   

[Michael Sandy]

AMMs don't really start becoming effective until the 8,000 RP tier of missile techs, coupled with at least the 250% engine boost tech, in my opinion.  And they don't become better than beam PD unless you are dealing with box launchers, where you need multiple shots at a wave to thin it down.

I am really disappointed by the difficulties associated with early capital ships.  It takes SO long to retool large shipyards.  By comparison, 1000 ton missile boats can be retooled as new fire control and engine techs are developed.  There are a couple of key technologies that make capital ships more effective:

1) Large beam weapons and associated fire controls that allows a large fast warship to kite smaller ones.
2) ECM and ECCM that give the larger ship that can afford them better an advantage.
3) Shields that allow a large warship to stay at extreme beam range and whittle the enemy down while its shields regenerate.

Against that, large ships will face enemy missile fire a lot sooner, will be detected a lot sooner, and will be more efficiently targeted by the enemy, compared to the wasted fire the enemy will shoot at destroyed ships.

Large ships can be more survivable, require less micro to command, and feel more cinematic.  And being FUN is very important in a solo game.

While it isn't practical to switch to a small ship fleet design, I STRONGLY recommend building a bunch of fighter factories for small fast fleet scouts.  Put a single hangar on your capital ships to house your scouts and you will have a LOT of flexibility.  While your fleet could beat the enemy, you could also get your head handed to you if your PD is slightly insufficient.  Or if you do not have enough missiles to kill the enemy.

Ideally, you want to know what kind of fleet your enemy has before your main fleet enters the system, or at least, enters even passive detection range.

In answer to your question, towed ships still use their engines and therefore fuel.  Parasite warships that are in a hangar do not.

I would suggest refocusing a little bit.  Define your AMM ships as anti-fighter/small craft.  Develop a 2 damage missile you can fire from a size 1 launcher.  It may not be particularly accurate, but it will be more effective in sandblasting fast small ships.  Your fire control range against small craft means your missiles have to be a bit short ranged anyways, so small missiles, which tend to be shorter range anyway, is a good fit.

Some tips for capital missile ship design:  Have a big anti-ship missile fire control, a big anti-fighter missile fire control, and have a whole bunch of .1 HS sized missile fire controls if it turns out the enemy has a lot of point defense, so you can match missile launchers to a point blank fire control for more effective short ranged missile fire.

Your PD ships may also be tasked with pursuing enemy missile ships that have exhausted their missiles, to save your offensive missile stocks.

But the biggest thing I can suggest for you is to develop a spectrum of fighter scouts.  Long ranged independent scouts, and short ranged really fast scouts, enough of them that you can expend them, and have complete scout options available at every colony you want to defend.

[Michael Sandy]

The higher the range you go with on your missiles, the more BP it will cost to inflict damage.  If you scout, you can get information on the enemy sensors and fire control, but be aware that your intelligence will estimate range of enemy sensors based on YOUR EM tech.  So if the enemy has better EM tech, their sensors will have greater range that your intelligence estimates.

If you have reduced sized launchers, say, .33 sized launchers with more HS in magazines than launchers, you can probably both penetrate defenses and carry enough missiles to kill enemy ships.

Another reason to develop a serious scouting force is that you can often use them to draw the enemy away from their bases, and away from reloads.  If you are counting on armor to get you through an enemy's missiles, you REALLY have to prevent them from reloading!

[JustAnotherDude]

Laser PD is pretty bad. At this tech level railguns work but Gauss turrets are the standard for beam PD. There are optimal sizes, too, though I don't remember what they are (I want to say the 17% ones).

[Iranon]

1) Sounds reasonable. Pure PD ships may be worth considering, probably based on railguns (Gauss requires significant research effort to become competitive). Lasers are fine dual-purpose weapons, but for pure point defence they don't really compete even when turreted.

2) General purpose ships or specialisation is a personal preference. Sometimes you have a choice between an integrated solution or tacking on something else - e.g. if an offensive laser ship needs some point defence capability, you can either turret the weapons or throw on a few railguns. Preferred approach may depend on details (slow ship = turrets, fast ship = railguns?).

The problem with a balanced approach is that overwhelming force in one aspect lets you skimp on other aspects without losing effectiveness. If you completely outrange enemy missile threats, you don't need defence. If your beam point defence makes you invulnerable to enemy missile attacks, you don't need missile range. However, a balanced approach is often more fun to play.

3) Depends. The defaults are subtly discouraged by Aurora.
1.0 power engines are ugly because of how costs scale (1.2 power is 1.2 times as expensive, 0.8 power is 0.64 times as expensive).
Having your speed match your base BFC tracking speed is also ugly. Faster gives you better tracking speed without turrets, slower doesn't lower it.
A fast beam ship that outruns and outranges the enemy can take down an unlimited number of beam ships - very fast works here.
If you can defend against any missile threat and blow up the enemy before they enter beam range, you don't need speed. The same applies when the enemy never even sees you (stealth, very long-ranged missiles, tiny missile fighters). Very slow works in these cases.
If you rely on railguns or other non-turreted beam weapons, going slightly above "standard" speed gives you correspondingly more effective firepower, meaning you get the additional speed almost for free. Moderate speed works here.

4) For point defence, usually not, especially not if you have few weapons per FC (small ships, or as a precaution against many small salvos). Take into account that the first shot will have very poor accuracy, if there's a chance you won't get the second shot off at a good, i.e. low, range it may be preferable to keep the weapon in final fire mode.
While many approaches work, I think it makes more sense to start with dedicated long-range beams and dedicated point defence. Integrated solutions are easy to mess up (paying through the nose for something that doesn't perform accordingly) and requires careful tech selection to work out well.

5) Very much a preference. I prefer large propulsion plants and copious defensive firepower as my main line of defence. After offensive mission tonnage, space for armour and shields is very tight as a result. I usually ignore shields for a long time, and armour beyond 2-3 layers are mostly fit to maintain speed in nebula systems when applicable.
Your numbers look turtle-y to me, but not to the point of being unreasonable. However, I'd argue that a propulsion budget below 40% of mass makes it easier to mess things up ("10% more capability for only 3x the logistics overhead!").

6) See the above. What range do you need? If the last 20m make the difference between shooting first and hitting before they do, it's great. Otherwise, not. In the end, there are only 3 relevant ranges: enough to outrange enemy beams, enough to outrange enemy AMMs, enough to outrange enemy ASMs.

7) My preferred size is actually 7. Enough to fit a working sensors without eating too much into raw capability, and box launchers have 1 HtK as opposed to 0.
To some extent, the answer depends on details. Many missiles from one fire control? You may want relatively small missiles to make enemy PD less effective. One missile per FC to confound enemy PD? May as well make it moderately big (this is my standard approach for fighters, often ending with size 7-12). Point blank weapon of last resort that will strike within one 5 second interval and therefore bypass most PD? May as well make it huge, size 30 is not unreasonable.

Against some of the Usual Suspects, that will barely suffice. At reasonable tech levels I'm never truly happy with AMMs as a purely defensive weapon, once you include the logistics overhead.  Beam PD, whether Gauss turrets, low-tech railguns or fast PD interceptors, offer more from my experience. However, AMMs may be an important offensive option especially in the face of a technlogically superior foe: You have the numbers to overwhelm point defence, and obviously a range advantage over the fanciest beams imaginable.

9) From a certain missile size (7-10 imo), it becomes a decent option if overkill is likely to be a problem. Keep in mind that enemy final fire PD will get a second shot against retargeting missiles.

10) Only one ship will use their engine, I believe the one with the more powerful one. Heavy use of tractor beams for military ships would offer many interesting options but is BLOODY annoying - the game will throw up whenever there's a single maintenance failure.

[Garfunkel]

SerBerdian is obsessed with speed and his designs are very fast for each engine generation/level. It is a completely valid choice and he has a good argument - but it isn't the only valid choice. Because the ultimate goal of every campaign is the capture/conquest of enemy NPR homeworld or spoiler-equivalent or defending your own colonies - meaning that while running engagements in deep space are possible and quite common, the truly decisive battles are fought at fixed locations: jump points and planets.

So there is no harm in dedicated less than 1/3 of ship tonnage to engines - I generally go with 1/4, though it does depend a lot on what sort of campaign I'm running.

As for fleet size, there is no perfect answer, because you can never be sure of the size of the enemy you encounter. With 100% difficulty, NPRs are generally roughly the same size as your faction, but exactly how many ships that translates into is a mystery - and spoilers are a wholly different ballgame as well. You should maintain a fleet that you can afford to build & maintain, and that can both defend your colonies as well as undertake expeditions to attack your enemies. Exactly how many ships and task forces that is, depends on your faction size and strength.

Early-to-mid game, specialist ships are better than generalist ships for efficiency. It is much, much better to have ten shipyards each building one specific design that is really good at its jobs than the alternative.

PD is generally best left for Final Fire (10,000 km) only. So you want fire controls with 50% accuracy at 20,000 km at the minimum, though with crew grade you can fiddle with it a little.

With armour and shields, it's better to think of the mission of the ship than rigid tonnage percentages. Missile and PD ships that should never come under fire can get away with minimal armour and shields, just enough to survive the occasional leaked missile. Beam sluggers need as much as possible - shields are better since they don't let shock damage through but armour is cheaper.

100M km range for ASM is good but of course longer is better IF your fire controls allow it - remember that enemies will use ECM and that'll reduce your engagement range significantly. Having missiles with 150M km range is pointless if your MFCs can't target the enemy until you're at 85M km distance.

For AMM you do not need 9M km range at your tech level - half that distance is probably fine. But it also depends on what you're fighting - if your enemy is 2-3 engine levels above you, their missiles will cross that distance very quickly - but your AMMs will not hit them anyway, so it's a moot point.

[Father Tim]

1)  Almost certainly not.
  -  No one can say.  It depends entirely on which NPRs you meet, when you meet them, and how big they are.
  -  No/irrelevent.  Your question is akin to asking 'Will the next playing card I draw from this pack be higher or lower than this one?'

2)  Almost certainly not;  In my opinion, yes.

3)  Ideally, more than your enemy.  But speed 1 can work if your enemy has to come into your range to attack what you want to protect.

4)  Only you can say what's "worth it" to you(r Empire).

5)  Generally more the closer you intend to get to your enemy.  Low-tech shields are hideously inefficient, and everyone has a different idea of when re-charging shields are worth more than must-be-repaired-at-base armour -- and therefore what ratio to use.

6)  What range are your enemies' missiles?  At what range can your sensors spot their units?  How much bigger (or less explosive, or whatever) would your missiles have to be to get that extra 20,000,000 km range?  What does that do to your expected damage-on-target?  (Accounting for how many fewer missiles your fleet can launch, what percentage will be shot down, what the damage profile of the ones that hit look like, etc.)  Will the extra range even help?

7)  Most people use those sizes, yes.

  Again, there is no way to know what your empire will face.  Even in the less than 50% of cases where your enemies also use Ion Tech engines, there's no predicting what speed their missiles will have.

9)  Are you going to precisely estimate how many of your missiles will be shot down, decoyed, or will miss in order to calculate how many hits your damage profile needs to on average destroy (or 2/3rds likely destroy, or 9/10ths) the enemy unit (assuming you even know any of that), or are you just going to empty your magazines in teh general direction of the enemy and see what happens two-three hours later?

Most of the people that use a small sensor on their missiles do so to make the micromanagement easier.  It's up to you how much of what type(s) of performance you're willing to give up to reduce wastage.

10)  No, but yes.  A towed ship that is out of fuel will still throw errors every increment if it has orders assigned, but throw even one litre in the tank and it's fine, as it doesn't actually use it's engines.

And you can tow one other unit at a time, even if your ship mounts multiple tractor beams.  You can exploit the game to chain-tow more, but that was not the intention.

[Steve Walmsley]

You should also consider fuel usage. While it is possible to build ships at Ion that are high speed they use a LOT of fuel. That only works if you produce enough fuel to support them. Fuel production and distribution is a major factor in campaigns and requires the infrastructure to support that. Investing in the infrastructure to support very high fuel consumption is money/resources that cannot be spent on your battle fleet, so you will end up with fewer high speed designs then moderate speed designs even if they seem to be similar in headline cost.

You need beam ships to be faster than opponents so you can run them down, but beyond a certain point that doesn't really help. Missile-ships are going to fire all their missiles before you get in range, regardless of speed advantage, because of the huge range disparity. You just need enough of a speed advantage to run them down afterwards.

[Michael Sandy]

Iranon, I would add a qualification to the types of range you mentioned.

If you have a slow ship, you also need enough range to kill the enemy before they close.  So missiles that are JUST out of beam range would not help as missiles that would be able to fire, say, 15 times before the enemy closed to beam range.  This can especially be a factor when the enemy has fast closing small beam ships, and you have to keep switching targets as you disable them.  You need to have a good amount of space, depending on your rate of fire, to do that.

My preferred fleet strategy, currently, is have enough point defense to ignore his missiles, use my missiles JUST to kill his beam ships, and kill everything that remains with railgun fighters.  I am developing some kiting beam warships, so that I don't have to try to kill enemy beam PD ships with missiles.

[Father Tim]

. . .  As for fleet size, there is no perfect answer, because you can never be sure of the size of the enemy you encounter. With 100% difficulty, NPRs are generally roughly the same size as your faction, but exactly how many ships that translates into is a mystery. . .

I believe that at the moment they are generated NPRs are from 50% to 200% (equal chances) of your empire's strength, with a tiny chance of 210-400% your strength.  Where they go from there depends on resources, government type, and whether they run into other NPRs.  It is entirely likely that an NPR created at game start will grow faster than your empire.

[Michael Sandy]

A lot of the tips people are giving are assuming player vs AI fights.  Which is almost certainly what you are going to focus on as a beginner. But some people play duels in Aurora4x, and players do things like hold back missiles for a point blank launch, or simply stop firing if the enemy has too effective point defense, unless they can do something to prompt the enemy to split up.

And some people use Aurora4x to write stories, where they play multiple different empires, and again, the tactics that work only versus the AI aren't going to be so hot there.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Another important part of fleet design is what house rules you are using. Almost all players use some sort of rules to regulate what they can and can't do with the game mechanics to fit their narrative stories. Aurora is after all a role-playing platform and there are many mechanical loopholes, especially against the AI.

Otherwise I do agree with most people here and there are many good suggestions.

The first thing that I think is important is to know why you have a fleet in the first place and what it is suppose to do. It is a very different issue to defend a fortified system from creating an offensive capable fleet able to operate in many different places at once.

For example I always use a fixed value for engine max boost and missile agility in my campaigns. Otherwise AMM can be either completely useless or completely overpowered for example. This make AMM and ASM useful at all levels of my games and not overpowered, especially when you consider the logistical side of things.

In general the way you build maintenance bases and can maintain ships based on max size rather than a certain amount of tonnage make cheap engines that takes up large amount of space in ships the smarter choice from a game play perspective. This will obviously change in Aurora C# where quality will clearly be better than quantity in that regard.

Aside from this you will need to build a fleet that can do what you expect it to do. Make sure you can support the fleet and that you don't over engineer it either. Specialised ships is good if you keep them relatively small and the bigger the ship the more you gain by having them able to do many things. This is from a maintainability and upgrade perspective long term.

The most important thing is to know the capabilities of any potential enemy, without that whatever you build are likely to be either overkill or not capable enough from a resource perspective. It sometimes is good to have a good potential to build large numbers of ships but have a moderate numbers of ships in active duty. Enough of a fleet to defend your territory, at least your core territory. This is the more resource sound strategy long term, perhaps not the coolest way to do things but certainly the smart thing long term.

And as I said.. build the ships you need now not the ones you might need down the road. Tailor your fleet from your immediate needs. If you have no need for an offensive fleet you don't need long range on your ships, you don't need advanced assault ships, carriers or the like. Your FAC and fighters can operate from PDC or stations most likely and your frigates and destroyers are mid range ships mostly geared toward patrol and defence. Consider a good logistical core of ships instead of over engineering your main combat ships for overly long trips, it will save you lots of resources.

I have really bad experienced from keeping ships in one unified size, speed or weapons systems... that will make you vulnerable in a multi-faction environment where it can easily be abused against you. There are no wrong in having some ships slower and some ships faster so they can perform different roles. Also... too much specialisation can also make you quite vulnerable in the same way that speed, weapons and size can, too much generalisation is not very efficient either. You want a healthy mix of them both.

Lastly... information is key. You need to know about the enemies capabilities to design the right tool for the right price, no more no less. This is the most important part of any general fleet doctrine and designs.

[bankshot (OP)]

Thanks for all your input.  I know there is one NPR out there as that was how I generated the game but I haven't encountered any live aliens yet - just one set of ruins with an orbiting wreck.  So I don't have any real clue about what I'm facing. 

I went with laser PD ships as I'd already researched lasers up to 15cm/NUV as part of the shipbuilding tutorial.  I did not consider railguns as they can't be turreted.  Railgun fighters for PD would probably have a higher base speed, but wouldn't they suffer almost the same accuracy penalties as their railguns would not be turreted?  Or does the fact that it delivers 4 shots at once make up for that?  Alternatively I could swap out the turrets in my ships for gauss cannons and add a couple of 15cm lasers for anti-ship use.   Having scout fighters makes sense as well.

For carriers: are fighter bays additive?  Re: I haven't researched hangar decks yet, could I combine two 250t boat bays to dock a 500t fighter?
 
For towing:  I was planning to use tanker/tugs to move the fleet from earth to whatever system was needed (either the new permanent base or the jump-off for exploring) to save fuel.  Otherwise I would quickly blow through my accumulated reserves.  Long term I don't have an issue as I have access to several gas giants with >10M high availability sorium deposits, but I'm still building out the fuel harvesting fleet.   

I'm researching the 4K/8K techs in preparation for building the first fleet, so a redesign at this point would be a lot easier than later. 

I still have at least a dozen cost 2 colonies to terraform and a lot of mines to set up, so I'm still decades away from needing to expand to find more resources.  I should hopefully have enough time to develop and deploy a fleet before one is needed - although all it would take is the NPR getting lucky on exploration to change all that in a hurry. 

The primary reason for the fleet is vox populi - the people demand it!  In particular the extrasolar colonies are getting a bit miffed that they don't have any protection.  Garrisons are keeping the unrest at bay for now but that's a temporary measure. My strategic plan was to station PD ships in every colony as patrol ships and crowd pleasers, but setting up a PDC based fighter wing may be a cheaper/easier option.   

The AMM range of 9M was just what the guide spit out - I was looking for anything above 1M and the calculator suggested designs with between 0.0056 and 0.156 MSP of fuel (3M to 10M) but the short range suggestions had less than 1% to-hit advantage over long range options.  The ASM range was what I'd read on other posts.  I have Grav tech 16 and EM 6, so a 5HS sensor can detect a 5K ton craft at 144M, giving me a 115M range after factoring in a 20% loss for ECM.

I didn't know that NPRs were randomly generated based on my strength - based on other posts I thought there was standard range or formula based on the difficulty setting and how many years I was into the game.  What I wanted to avoid was going into a new system with a grossly underpowered fleet.   As far as what I can afford:  I have roughly 900m population, mostly in Sol system (2 extra-solar colonies with >10M). I have about 900 construction factories in the Sol system, and another 100 extra-solar  at construction rate 16.  I've attached my database if you want detailed info on what my economy looks like.

[Garfunkel]

Note that the PPV value of any design, whether a ship or OWP or PDC, depends on its armaments. You can put a lot of cheap 10cm railguns on an OWP with no engines and just 2-3 BFCs and with enough engineering spaces to keep it going for 10+ years, then tow them into place to keep the civilians happy - there's a design in the last few pages of Aurora Chat thread for one example. They also work nicely as a last-ditch missile defence, and you can combine them with a surveillance PDC on the planet, assembled by construction brigades. That combination works well since PDCs require no maintenance and once the OWP gets too old, you can either scrap/salvage it or just delete it via SM mode and replace it.

If you combine that with a handful of corvettes/system patrol craft that have sufficient sensors to monitor their system and economical engines + long maintenance times, you can keep a good situational awareness of all your inhabited systems in a "believable" RP manner, plus getting yourself comfortable and familiar with the basic logistics of running military ships for a multi-system empire, before you get into a shooting war with an NPR/spoiler and/or have a dozen+ warship fleet guzzling fuel and MSPs.

[Michael Sandy]

Yes, carriers are additive.  I have built PDC carriers using boat bays, in games where I lacked a logistics scientist and so delayed researching much in that tree.  100 boat bays add up, and could hold a 25,000 ton destroyer.

Boat Bays are less efficient, in terms of cost and hull space, but for a PDC the hull space part isn't important.  Incidentally, for beam OWPs, you might consider using primitive power plants.  They are cheap HtK (except for the explosion risk), and because they are cheap components, cost less maintenance supply to fix if you have a failure.

I am a little torn between whether to go with PDC carriers or Orbital carriers.  The big difference is that PDC carriers can't repair stuff, and you can't shift them to the front as easily if you need a forward base.  Orbital carriers which have a sacrificial .1 HS sensor or something to sacrifice to the maintenance cycle gods can very cheaply have 20 year maintenance endurance, and can be towed to a colony to serve as a forward base for scout fighters and other important colony defense stuff.  PDC carriers are better on the maintenance front, and are cheaper overall in terms of minerals, but if you have a shipyard tooled to carriers already, you are better off using the shipyard and using your industry for something else.