Fleet Design Strategies?

Unfortunately, the attack priority is given to those with the highest weapon to defense ratio [Off / (Def+HP)], so with your carrier group, they will always blow your fighters to smitherines first (because they have no defense and low HP). Then, if your carrier had no weapons, it's just a sitting duck waiting for death (even if it has insane defense lucky hits will still kill it).

Fleets of tiny hulls are best used around a military base.
Fleets of small hulls are best used around a military base.
Medium hulls are best used alone as defenders if you have a military base.

Fleets of large hulls are good battleship on their own.
Huge hulls are just bigger large hulls... nice, but not comepletely necessary.


As for a fleet's offense and defense, assuming you are not using military bases (and have the tech required), make multiple types of ships which focus on different weapons (IE: a fleet of 3 large ships should have one focusing on missile, one on beams, and one on guns). All three ships should focus into 1 defense type (the primary weapon that your enemy is using), and exactly 1 point of defense in the other two fields (so if your enemy is using lasers, make your ships have 5 shields, 1 PD, and 1 armor).

With the above fleet design, your enemy will never have a chance. They will literally never be able to adapt their defense to your weapon strategy, and even if they adapt their own weapons to your defense, and somehow managed to catch you off guard, they are still at a significant disadvantage.

But if you REALLY want an ultimate strategy, wait until you fight a few battle with this strategy. When you get one of your ships more damaged than the others, upgrade it to a design with a TON of defense, just make sure that its [off / (def + current HP)] is more than the next guy (which should be easy because in a few battles those ships will have leveled up some), and he will tank the enemy for the entire game. If you do this right, the game is just plain easy.

I rarely use defenses and instead put a few extra engines on my ships so if I'm out powered I can pull back and regroup.

I tend to build fleets of a a handful of powerful cruisers(for invasions), a large number of well-rounded fighters(for interception), and a number of small scouts with good sensor capability(for recon and patrols). I've also had some good luck (and great fun) with very fast, long-ranged but lightly armed raiders, which I use to hunt down freighters and isolated starbases in the enemies rear areas.

I rarely use defenses and instead put a few extra engines on my ships so if I'm out powered I can pull back and regroup.

what happens when you get into a fleet battle? each side is allowed to shoot, and engine speed does you absolutely no good. without defenses I don't see how you could possible succeed.

Going for a more traditional approach, when you discover that you can make fleets with 400 beam attack and 200 missle attack, as well as nearly a hundred of each defense type and 14 movement points (that's massive hulls with psionic beam weapons, and psionic missiles, hyperwarp 3s, powerful barriers and other defenses in a fleet with a logistics ability of 42), it becomes almost unimportant how you design the fleet. Fighting against the most well defended planetary fleets (with omega defense), I lost one ship...once. the sheer power is so incredible, that the design and balance of the fleet is just unneccesary. noone can affectively hurt it, and you can destry anything.

you can defeat a fleet like that by never allowing it to be built.  i find that getting involved in some fights around lasersV/impluseIII goes a long way towards nerfing your enemies so you dont need massives fleets. also the fighters i build then usually have huge experience late game and are matches late game with an upgrade of at least a destroyer if in groups of 3-4. in larger groups they are just evil.

and speed is never worthless, its like a stategic force multiplyer

The way defence works is the value of the armor if its the same or the square of the value for other types.
So a ship with 1 armor in each spot has 3 armor against all ( 1 + 1^.5 + 1^.5 = 3 , square of 1 is 1) so just putting that on a ship is a huge advantage. Not only that but 1 armor are cheap (usualy around 20-50 cost) and relativly small, the size of one rocket based weapon.
The above comment about where to use what is right on.
Miltary base + alot of little fuckers = massive streangth.
I had something like 20 tinys in a fleet and a small planet could make one every turn, there attack was over 100 and this was very early on in the game.

1. The speed of the fleet is the speed of the slowest ship; design your ships to go in fleets with a common speed as much as practical given changing technology.
2. Defenses on ships that do not get fired upon are not used; ships with high offense, low defense, and low hitpoints will get shot before ships with low offense, high defense, and high hitpoints. Defense is in no way shared among a fleet. Design your ships to go in fleets with similar offense/defense ratios.
3. One defense makes such a difference that in my opinion there's no reason to ever make a non-cargo hull ship without at least one point.
4. Because of the constraint imposed on fleet size by logistics, weapons are more relatively more effective on small ships and defense is relatively more effective on larger ships.
5. (2) and (4) taken together indicate that the most effective fleets are likely those built from ships with identical hull types, although I haven't thought this all the way out.

I tend to like using medium hulls when I decide to go for my first offensive push. Initial survivability is much better then small and tiny hulls. And they are the first hull I can slap 2 engines on and still have room for weapons and defenses.


The AI likes to use small hulls for quite a long time. And defense is applied against every attack, so a swarm of 5 ships with 4 attack each would only get the benefit of 1 attack if I can get 3 Defense. 20 attack from a fleet sounds good, but a practical attack of 5 total from the fleet is not that great.

If your going for a minimal level of total defense, aim for 4. 4 Def in any category is as good as 2 def of for the other 2 categories. Beyond 4 points, the off type benefit falls off too fast to be very useful.

Onother meta game aspect to defense is that if you start putting out ships that can completely shut down the attack of the enemies ships, they will change to a new weapon track. This will allow you to pull pretty damn far ahead in your prefered weapon category.

END COMMUNICATION

I just played a game recently (beta 3), trying out the strategy I outlined in my opening post. It worked alright (ie, no better than just making a bunch of independent ships), but I suffered from too much attrition damage, and when my fighters all died my carrier had nothing to fight back with and would slowly get wittled to death.

However, when I decided to switch it around, and load up my (1) huge ship with huge amounts of weaponry and have the rest of the fleet be mainly defensive fighters, it worked wonders.

I basically built 1 battle cruiser (large or huge ship, 1-2 engines, 1 support, 1-2 defensive items, the rest weaponry), and then every other ship in the fleet was a fighter (tiny ship, 1-2 engines, 1 support, 1 weapon, the rest a balance of defensive items).

The enemy would only target the battle cruiser (it had like 80 missile attack), which was protected by all the fighters (which each had about 8 defense). Each battle the battlecruiser only really took 3-10 hp worth of damage, and the little fighters all steadily got stronger.

This organization also let me maximize usage of my Starbases, since with 28 logistics, I had 1 battle cruiser and about 11 fighters.

I just played a game recently (beta 3), trying out the strategy I outlined in my opening post. It worked alright (ie, no better than just making a bunch of independent ships), but I suffered from too much attrition damage, and when my fighters all died my carrier had nothing to fight back with and would slowly get wittled to death.

However, when I decided to switch it around, and load up my (1) huge ship with huge amounts of weaponry and have the rest of the fleet be mainly defensive fighters, it worked wonders.

I basically built 1 battle cruiser (large or huge ship, 1-2 engines, 1 support, 1-2 defensive items, the rest weaponry), and then every other ship in the fleet was a fighter (tiny ship, 1-2 engines, 1 support, 1 weapon, the rest a balance of defensive items).

The enemy would only target the battle cruiser (it had like 80 missile attack), which was protected by all the fighters (which each had about 8 defense). Each battle the battlecruiser only really took 3-10 hp worth of damage, and the little fighters all steadily got stronger.

This organization also let me maximize usage of my Starbases, since with 28 logistics, I had 1 battle cruiser and about 11 fighters.