Smaller Ship Use

[VoxKoshka]

New here, first post, yaddayadda

I've been trying to figure out if there's any viable place for a large number of smaller ship sizes as the game progresses. I was trying to snoop around on the forums, but the most recent posts that I came across were from 2013. From what I can tell the game has changed quite a bit since then, so I was curious if it's changed in relation to small ship usage... or what the consensus on the subject was.

Thank you kindly for your time
Vox

[Aeson]

I've been trying to figure out if there's any viable place for a large number of smaller ship sizes as the game progresses.

Use 1: raiding infrastructure. Computer-designed mining stations will probably never be sufficiently powerful to stand up against a small group of "small" warships, unless you're playing a mod that altered the design templates, so it might be better to invest in, say, 50 size-300 ships for mine-busting than in 10 size-1500 ships for the same purpose. The 10 size-1500 ships will, however, be far more useful in a major fleet action than the 50 size-300 ships will be. Plus, mine-busting, especially later in the game when empires have had time to build up large resource stockpiles, is a relatively long war strategy and has relatively little immediate impact on your enemy's war-making capabilities (though it depends on your enemy's resource situation, and capturing or destroying fuel mines is never a bad idea and tends to have an impact relatively quickly as fuel is a resource in very high demand). Also remember check on how powerful the mines your enemy uses are before deciding that it's a good idea to field a handful of size-300 ships as a raiding group, and keep an eye on the ships because light raiders can't really afford to be caught by similarly-advanced larger warships.

Use 2: boarding actions. There's a bug, or at least there used to be (I haven't checked to see if it's still there, though I don't recall it being mentioned as fixed in any of the recent patches), with boarding pods that makes it so that ships carrying more than one can be permanently reduced to having only one available boarding pod if the target vessel becomes an invalid target (is destroyed, jumps away, or is captured) before all the pods launched against it attach to the vessel. Since the bug doesn't affect ships with only one boarding pod and since it's not really worthwhile making a big ship with only one boarding pod if the intent is to use it to capture targets, small ships have a use for capturing targets. This can overlap with their use as infrastructure raiders; destroying enemy fuel mines is good, but taking them over, at least in a limited area, may be better for your purposes. Even if the bug has been fixed, it's still useful to use less powerful warships as boarding vessels, as less powerful ships are less likely to destroy or seriously damage the target while attempting to capture it (this, incidentally, is also a reason to favor weapons which perform poorly against armor but well against shields or which have short range, and also to keep the fleets of boarding ships relatively small; you simply do not want to be firing a lot of guns at a capture target if you want the target to be captured in reasonably good condition).

Use 3: anti-pirate forces. Unless you run into Legendary Pirates or a pirate faction that has amassed a big fleet, you don't really need to be using your big frontline warships to deal with them or their stations. Not really something worth a dedicated design, though, unless you have other demands on your big frontline warships, especially since pirates mostly disappear by the time you really start seeing a significant size gap between 'large' and 'small' warships. This overlaps with boarding vessels, especially in the early stages of the game, as early on captured pirate vessels are useful for boosting either your military strength (the ships are likely to be relatively advanced and powerful in comparison to your own) or your research (scrapping them for technology can provide earlier access to some technologies that you might want but feel you don't need enough for the tech to be a priority right now).

Use 4: system defense. A handful of small ships can provide an adequate defense against pirate raiding (beware of major pirate factions with big fleets; such pirate factions will sometimes send something like 20 or 30 ships on a single raid) while your colony builds a space station of some type. The ships can also provide some protection to mining stations or other colonies in the system, whereas a station of any type will only ever protect the colony over which it is built and maybe something on a nearby moon or two, and unlike stations you can relocate defensive vessels if they are no longer needed in the region or if they are needed more elsewhere. Such ships can also be somewhat useful later in the game to delay attacking fleets long enough for a force more able to deal with the attackers can respond, but if you do choose to try something like that be careful not to leave the defensive forces too weak and the individual ships too small relative to frontline units or you could bleed yourself dry as you continually lose vessels to attacks.

Small ships lose their value quickly in major fleet actions unless they're only 'small' in that you could have made them a bit bigger as concentrating shields and armor into larger blocks becomes increasingly important as the offensive capabilities of warships increase. In a direct confrontation between ships, 200 firepower and 2000 shields concentrated on one big ship is much better than 100 firepower and 1000 shields on each of two smaller ships even if it's notionally the same value. Smaller ships have their uses, but those uses tend to require more of a player's attention than battle fleets of big ships require; raiders need to be kept moving and away from anything reasonable powerful, you need to keep an eye on your defensive forces if you're going to try to send something to help them against a big attack (and ships held back to serve as response forces or defensive fleets are ships which are not being employed to take the war to the enemy), and getting the most out of boarding tends to require you to pay attention to what the boarding ships are doing.

As with anything, though, a lot of this is dependent upon just how small a 'small' ship is by comparison to a big ship. If 'big' ships have 500 firepower and 2000 shields while 'small' ships have 250 firepower and 1000 shields (indicating that the 'small' ships are ~50% as large as the 'big' ships), then nominally equal fleets of 'big' and 'small' ships (i.e. same total firepower and shields) are likely to be very unlike one another in effectiveness; the fleets of big ships are likely to completely overpower the fleets of small ships. If 'big' ships have 125 firepower and 400 shields while 'small' ships have 100 firepower and 400 shields (indicating the 'small' ships are ~80% as large as the 'big' ships), the story is rather different; engagements between nominally equal fleets of big and small ships will probably still favor the big ships, but it's a much more even matchup and which is superior becomes less obvious (individually, yes, the smaller ships remain clearly inferior; however, in a 5 vs 4 scenario you might have 3 big ships engaging 3 small ships and 2 small ships engaging 1 big ship, and in such a scenario it's not clear that the unit quality advantage held by the big ships is sufficiently great to allow the fleet of big ships to win, at least not without testing to see what happens). You may also have strategic reasons to use larger numbers of smaller battleships than smaller numbers of larger battleships. For example, you may have a long border or be fighting wars on opposite sides of your empire; if a ship that is 80% of the size of the biggest ship you could build can win your battles without requiring you to deploy larger fleets, it might be worth looking into building your fleets out of the smaller ships than out of the bigger ships because a ship 20% smaller is also about 20% cheaper to build and maintain (assuming the same component types are used in the same ratios on both designs) and so you can have 25% more of them. Of course, if this is the case, you may be able to get the same effect by reducing the number of big ships in each fleet and forming the ships thus obtained into the additional fleets you needed or wanted to have, as if the small ships are 20% smaller than the big ships then 4 of the big ships should be nominally equivalent to 5 of the small ships, and in practice a fleet of 4 of the big ships is probably a bit stronger than a fleet of 5 of the little ships.

[HerpInYourDerp]

AFAIK although I may be wrong, the only weapons that do not stack are ion weapons (and the super laser in practice). Every other weapon, shields and armours do, so their effectiveness scales linearly with quantity. As both component sizes & stats are absolute, each component becomes more efficient per space used as the ship's/base's size increases and many components like hyperdrive, sensors, command centre, etc. you only need one of in the design.

Combine all of that and the end result is for any given set amount of resources, the less numerous group of larger warships will always, always be better than the more numerous group of smaller warships in pretty much every combat metric. The only caveats being if you want to spam ion weaps or if you need to fight (stall) on multiple distant fronts asap but your resource mining rate is negligible.

[DeadlyShoe]

there is a bare minimum of ships you want conducting a task. for example, if you are attacking an enemy fleet and you have a size 2000 goliath of pure murder, you're are kind of out of luck if they just decide to scatter or go the other way. you might have a lot of sheer combat power but position matters too. you can only come from one angle or chase one enemy ship. This really isn't a concern in practice though owing to the construction caps on ship size.

Death Rays deserve a special mention. the difference between a ship that gets obliterated by a death ray and one that merely gets 90% destroyed is negligible; you might be paying twice as much for a ship with twice the firepower and the same effective HP against death rays. OTOH I believe the default AI designs only mount death rays on space stations, though i am not sure.

one reason for small ships is simply automation. you can't bring the "% of ships in fleets" slider above 20%, so if you have 20% of your fleet as escorts and everything else in fleets the escort can be suboptimal size for combat just to save you money on escorts.

theoretically, having more ships also lets you cover more ground against raiders and such. in practice however an empire of any real size has too many stations and freighters for escorts to cover, and ever since Shadows pirate attackers are too numerous and too strong.

[VoxKoshka]

I cannot express how much I appreciate the responses. I've noticed on this forum that there's a tendency for paragraphs, and I love it.

Aeson touched on all the points and usecases that I needed to get my head in the right place for ship design. I think the only thing that was left out of this discussion (that I can tell) is feint attacks with false fleets. But that's more of a 'positioning' strategy. So maybe it was covered.


I've been reading about how things stack and how costs work. I wish maintenance costs went up a bit more with bigger ships, but otherwise I'm okay with how things are playing out in my games so I can't complain.


I have another question about a different subject I haven't been able to dig up. Should I ask here or another thread? I think this topic bares more discussion, and don't want to kill the thread.


Oh and I am very new to the game. I only played it two weeks ago, but I've been hooked ever since. This is absolutely the only 4x game that's drawn me in so hard. As much as I'd love better graphics, this is still satisfieing as hell without them.

[Aeson]

Combine all of that and the end result is for any given set amount of resources, the less numerous group of larger warships will always, always be better than the more numerous group of smaller warships in pretty much every combat metric. The only caveats being if you want to spam ion weaps or if you need to fight (stall) on multiple distant fronts asap but your resource mining rate is negligible.

You might be rather surprised to learn this, but it is possible for small ships to defeat big ships at approximate resource cost parity (estimated by matching total size of the fleets involved).

For example:
Small Design:
1 command center
1 combat targeting system
1 countermeasures system
1 basic proximity array
1 damage control unit
2 point defense cannons
12 maxos blasters (fully upgraded)
12 standard armor
8 deucalios shields
8 turbo thrusters
1 thrust vector (first upgrade)
2 quantum reactors
5 standard fuel cells
4 life support
4 habitation modules

Large Design:
1 command center
1 combat targeting system
1 countermeasures system
1 basic proximity array
1 damage control unit
2 point defense cannons
15 maxos blasters (fully upgraded)
15 standard armor
10 deucalios shields
10 turbo thrusters
1 thrust vector (first upgrade)
2 quantum reactors
5 standard fuel cells
5 life support
5 habitation modules

Unless otherwise specified, components are unupgraded aside from the life support and habitation modules, which are at 85 support capacity. Both designs are set to never flee and are to engage with all weapons against any opponent type. The small ships are about 85% as big as the large ships, so 20 of them should be about equal in cost to 17 of the big ships.

I ran one test where the ships started in two separate lines and the small ships won the engagement with 14 ships remaining out of 20 against 17 of the big ships, and 5 or 6 of the surviving small ships were damaged; neither fleet was managed beyond an order to move towards the other fleet. I ran another test where the ships were intermingled well within firing range of one another and the big ships won with 6 ships remaining (one of which was fairly seriously damaged; the other five took no damage aside from shield points) out of 18 in the initial force against 20 of the small ships. In neither case is the smaller fleet of larger ships particularly clearly superior to the larger, similarly expensive fleet of smaller ships. I attribute the low losses experienced by the larger fleet of small ships in the first test to that fleet bunching up during its approach against the smaller fleet of large ships, though the victory itself is not strictly attributable to the same cause. I also only ran one test for either case; be careful about basing too many decisions on such a small sample.

Aeson touched on all the points and usecases that I needed to get my head in the right place for ship design. I think the only thing that was left out of this discussion (that I can tell) is feint attacks with false fleets. But that's more of a 'positioning' strategy. So maybe it was covered.

I'm not sure that the computer will respond to 'positioning' strategies. Putting a fleet somewhere that merely allows it to threaten a target does not, as far as I know, provoke a response from the computer; the fleet needs to either be attacking something or be detected moving to attack something (i.e. the same scenarios which produce an attack warning notification for the player), or the computer needs to choose the fleet as something to be attacked. As a result, feints basically fall under raiding, as far as I'm concerned.

I have another question about a different subject I haven't been able to dig up. Should I ask here or another thread? I think this topic bares more discussion, and don't want to kill the thread.

Entirely up to you.

Death Rays deserve a special mention. the difference between a ship that gets obliterated by a death ray and one that merely gets 90% destroyed is negligible; you might be paying twice as much for a ship with twice the firepower and the same effective HP against death rays. OTOH I believe the default AI designs only mount death rays on space stations, though i am not sure.

I don't know that I'd be particularly concerned about Death Rays. The DPS of standard blasters from the first upgrade of the Impact Assault Blaster onwards means that the same size invested in standard blasters can catch up to or surpass the total damage of a Death Ray blast in the firing interval between Death Ray blasts, and Death Rays are likely to waste a lot of the potential of their initial shot by firing at long range rather than waiting until the ships get closer. It also doesn't help that by mid game even somewhat small ships can have shield points at least comparable to the maximum shot damage of a Death Ray. If enough are present, Death Rays can be a problem, but they're not really common enough or likely to be present in enough numbers for this to come up all that often.

Oh, and the capital ship design templates usually call for 1 super beam weapon; most of the time, the only super beam weapon you'll have access to is the Death Ray, so computer-designed capital ships belonging to a faction with Death Rays will most likely carry a Death Ray.

[VoxKoshka]

I'm not sure that the computer will respond to 'positioning' strategies. Putting a fleet somewhere that merely allows it to threaten a target does not, as far as I know, provoke a response from the computer; the fleet needs to either be attacking something or be detected moving to attack something (i.e. the same scenarios which produce an attack warning notification for the player), or the computer needs to choose the fleet as something to be attacked. As a result, feints basically fall under raiding, as far as I'm concerned.

I traded clarity for brevity there. By a 'feint' fleet I meant 'feint attack with less expensive fleets.' Using those fleets to attack and force a reaction, to open up a good right hook alphastrike. This game puts some weight on moving from one start to another, or even within system. So having lots of smaller ships to harass on one side of an opponents empire, while your positioning your large fleet on the other.

Sorry about the confusion.
Also I apologize for the run on sentences. I have an editor. She hates how predictably bad I can be with that.

[Blabsawaw22]

in terms of smaller ships, I've literally built 100's of escorts with only 100-200 shields and just a figher bay.. it works when you have like 30 attacking anything.. it's hilarious to see 120 little fighters trying to fly to kill 1 ship..