Request for comments (various ships)

[Jorgen_CAB]

I find the biggest constraint of large ships is the logistics in the form of jump drives and maintenance facilities.

Larger ships always build faster than smaller ships given the same BP per tonnage. I also find that large ships are easier to retrofit since they have less specialised components and this usually mean they retrofit in many more incremental stages nd often you don't have to retool the shipyards either. Since large ships often have much fewer ship variants than smaller ones they tend to have dedicated shipyards more often than the small ships. Small shipyards with many slipways can also be quite expensive to retool given that small ships often need yards to retool even when replacing the mire rudimentary components, being more specialised and also.

Large ships also is more durable and combat damage also equals crew experience, I think this is an overlooked sometimes important factor.

Large ships can also repair faster and have more redundant systems if damaged in combat.

In general I would use larger ships if I have the infrastructure in place to support them so that is how I usually develop. Ships get bigger and bigger as my technology progress and my overall fleet get more and more diverse.

[baconholic]

I find the biggest constraint of large ships is the logistics in the form of jump drives and maintenance facilities.

I've found a fairly convenient way to manage maintenance facilities. I build 300,000 ton maintenance ships without any engine. They only have maintenance modules, a tractor beam, and the rest is filled with cargo space. Each ship can perform maintenance facility for 10,000 tons. As my fleet grew, I'll just build more maintenance ships and add them to the fleet or merge two fleets together. With decent shipbuilding, they are fairly fast and cheap to build. They can also be tug around easily with built in mineral storage to setup forward bases.

Jump drives are definitely the main limiting factor in building large military ships. Big drives are just really expensive to research. My ships are mostly limited by jump drives.

As for fleet diversity, I've found that my fleet composition actually goes from diverse in early game down to big ship that does everything in late game. I like to cram everything into a single beam/kinetic ship that can destroy an entire civilization  .

[83athom]

My way of getting around the jump drive thing is to build gates everywhere (or play with JGs on all JPs). This does require you to manage more gate builders than normal as you need to continuously move your gate network forward while not letting them stumble into an enemy system.

[baconholic]

I like to capture a few spoiler jumpgate builders and refit them with size 1 sensors. With a decent captain, they can complete a JG in less than 10 days. After they are fully TF trained, they can easily escape hostile systems. Set them on auto build jump gate default order and forget them all game.