Kurt Wrote:
How many people use armor on their ships, rather than, or in addition, to, shields? If so, at what tech level do you use armor, and how much do you use
I do tend to armor up bigger ships once I hit the 4th level of armor. Just a couple of points initially. At the same time the ships would have better shield efficiency's available but they don't tend to get any stronger total shield strength. The tradeoff is hard to quantify, but in the last couple of battles I was running it made a huge difference. I had two seperate, large fleets engage from maximum ranges on in. The one with the heavier shields and 1 point of armor was losing ships from the start. The one that had 3 points of armor and about 2/3 the shields didn't lose anyone untill the range closed by about 60,000 km. It ended up making a huge difference. The fleets were almost identical in tech and cost, yet almost half of the armor heavy fleet survived, and only a couple of the other fleets ships managed to escape. The general tech level was at around the 5th level of reasearch across the board. Both fleets were balanced with missle and beam weapons, no fighters however.
As far as armored systems go, about the only one I use consistantly is the fuel bunker, that extra couple of points can make a big difference against the marginal shots that are just barely getting through the armor at longer range, or against smaller missle warheads. I ocasionaly use armored power plants, mostly on heavy assult ships. I almost never find the aromored engines to be worth it unless it is also a dedicated defense ship/almost a base design.
Kurt Wrote:
What about gunboats? What role do you tend to use them in? Missile boats and fast attack craft (with various types of weapons) are the obvious roles, but are there others? In the Quad-System campaign I was using gunboats armed with a fast-firing 15 cm plasma carronade as my primary planetary defense unit. I can't say how well they worked because the first battle where they were being used was also the battle where Aurora crapped out. Oh well.
I use my gunboats mostly for system defense. There is one time that I used them in an offensive role, but that was because the defender didn't have them, and had never developed a radar system to pick them up. Outside of their missile defense radar coverage they were blind. This left a range bracket of about 50K km where the gunboats could engage, but not be fired upon.
The weapons I like the most for gunboats are the meson cannon. While they don't do the damage that the laser can do, they are always a threat, even to a heavy battle line unit with heavy armor. After meson's the missle is my next favorite, I tend to make a size 9 launcher with the max size reduction which gives it 3 hs. A typical gunboat has 2, sometimes 3 of them onboard. Their rate of fire is laughable, but if you have 6-8 gunboats then a salvo of 12-16 of those missles can do a lot of damage from a good range out.
Brian