Breaking this out so as to stop interrupting your Succession game thread. :D
RefSteel said:
Quote:For me, it's a slightly subtler distinction: My rule isn't to artificially handicap my ship designs, but to assume (or say pretend) that the AI is smarter than it is when I'm making my ship designs: If I want a huge gunship, I'll design it the way I like, with banks and banks of beams. If I know the AI is suicidally obsessed with stopping bombers, I could also throw a few random bombs onto my gunship, hoping to bait the AI into uselessly shooting at the dreadnought's ARS instead of at the swarms of fighters that are my real ship-to-ship offense and actually vulnerable to attrition. I don't do that because I'm assuming/pretending the AI will attack my vulnerable ships even if I know it won't. And if I want a huge gunship that will also be able to sit on a planet while transports fly in from far away, blowing up missile bases as they get rebuilt, I'll put some bombs on it (or rather, if someone else in an SG has already built one like that, I'll use it) even if I'm worried the AI might be able to slag it or force it to retreat: I'll just reserve it for fights that I expect it to survive, or retreat it when necessary, and plan around the possibility that they will go after it, and make sure I have enough force of other kinds to win in case they do.
Also, when on defense, I wouldn't necessarily go after the bombers first. In RotP, as I understand it at least, it's possible to defend a planet from dedicated bombers in incredibly cheesy but effective ways as long as you can take out their space superiority ships and survive whatever space-to-space weapons their bombers carry. You don't even need Repulsors or Dissipators - just enough different designs in the same battle - though I don't know if even the Xilmi AI uses tactics as ridiculous as this.
Even without that though, if I'm not going to be able to stop their bombers from doing ~the worst they can do (destroying all the bases? wiping out the whole colony from the combat screen, especially with spores?) then I probably wouldn't target them until I've beaten their space superiority fleet. Then if the bombers don't retreat for whatever reason, my spacefleet can burn them down, and if they do, they're still taken out of action while they're forced to retreat to a friendly colony - where I may be able to chase them again if I can hit it with a winning fleet. Of course, that's just theorycrafting. If I think I can save a colony (or substantial parts of its value) by hitting the bombers first (and still win the space battle so it isn't wasted effort) that I couldn't without, I probably would - but I'd hope it's a much more complicated decision than just "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa kill the bombers kill them!!!!!" if I'm (or if any player or AI is) playing the battle well!
Just to be clear on what I'm seeing in RotP, since I think maybe there are some misunderstandings here. Firstly, I'm talking about what's most effective, not about intentionally being less effective in order to give the AI a better chance or whatever.
What I've found is that using a medium or large ship design with maximum defensive attributes, assuming you have reasonable technology, will generally yield ships that take zero or almost zero damage from enemy attacks, both missiles and beams. For this I'll use a couple of examples below that I just sort of randomly picked from some old saved games at a mid point in tech level:
First the bomber:
Then a gunship:
These are from a game vs Xilmi where I needed as much help as I could get. Yes, you can see there is a lot of available space, that's just because I happened to load a save where these were becoming obsolete and were about to be replaced, but they filled their space when initially designed.
You can see that the Bomber is a Large design with Internal Stabilizers. It has a beam defense of 7 and an missile defense of 10. I don't recall all the details of this game as this was from a while back, but generally such designs, when at appropriate tech levels, will be able to go into a fight without losing any, or very few, ships while drawing all of the fire. Since the ship only needs to carry bombs, the fact loading up with maximum defenses leaves little room for weapons isn't a huge drawback because bombs don't require much room. Honestly, since I'm only using Internal Stabilizers here I could have just used Medium bombers most likely. Typically I'll switch to Large when I add on Battle Scanners, Cloaking Devices and/or Teleporters, or also when ECM gets high and takes up more room. Sometimes I'll also add on Auto Repair when using Large too if I see that my bombers are taking healable damage. But whatever, Large works just fine.
For the Huge gunship you can see that the beam and missile defense are only 3 each. Even with Auto Repair this ship will take damage and can be one-shot, so Auto Repair alone isn't necessarily enough. Absolutely there are many cases where a single Huge Auto Repair can't out-heal the damage and survive. So even with a stack of several of them you will be losing at least one each turn if you take heavy fire. The options here are to try to make this ship more defensive by increasing movement and adding an Internal Stabilizer, but that #1 takes up more room and #2 eliminates the use of other specials, or just not using a Huge design at all.
In this case I'm not using Repulsor Beams I because I didn't have them. Normally I would prefer Repulsor Beams. I don't have Battle Scanners on this ship because I needed the other specials. I was also running a Large fighter design as well, with basically a 3 ship fleet, in which case the Large fighter had the Battle Scanner. The Large fighter used Internal Stabilizer, Battle Scanner and Warp Dissipator with no shields at all.
So the Bomber has maximum shields, ECM and maneuverability. When on offense pretty much everything will target the bombers all the time. This means the Huge and Large have little need for defense as they generally aren't targeted in the first place, but the Huge has shields and armor just in case and to help it on defense. Typically, when you have Repulsors on defense you can just sit your Huge in front of the planet and prevent the planet from being bombed as long as your stack survives.
On offense everything will target the bomber but be very ineffective, either doing no damage at all or very little. The bomber can run up and bomb out the bases while drawing fire and once its done bombing out the bases it can stick around to continue drawing fire while the fighters engage in ship to ship combat. Sometimes I'll add a few beams to the bomber as well if they are more than capable for bombing. Of course it all works even better once you have either Cloaking Devices or Teleporters.
By not putting any bombs on the gunship that prevents the gunship from being targeted. If I filled out the Huge gunship with bombs then this would cause the gunship to get targeted, perhaps over the bomber. Once it is seen as a threat to the planet then it will get prioritized. Without bombs it will be mostly left alone. I want it to be left alone, even with Auto Repair, because with defense levels of only 3 it can still get one-shot. The Huge with ECM and Internal Stabilizers would have a lot less room for weapons. So by having the bombers draw all the fire I could put more weapons and specials on the Huge so they would be more effective.
The Large fighter was basically never targeted on offense so it ran no shields at all, but relied on beam and missile defense if needed. With Warp Dissipater and Internal Stabilizer it was able to run up and start applying speed reduction ASAP. The Large fighter didn't use heavy weapons, it relied on a mix of regular fusion beams and mass drivers.
Other than intentionally handicapping myself, there would be no reason to put bombs on my other ships, which would both #1 cause them to be targeted when on offense, requiring them to increase their defenses and reduce their offensive power and #2 take away space for ship-to-ship weapons, decreasing their power on defense. In this case I didn't have Repulsor Beams so I was relying on maneuverability. Arguably there are cases where, especially with Repulsor Beams, you may need more defensive Huge designs that can soak up more damage on defense. I don't recall the particulars of this situation.
But across many games, what I've found to be the case is that Medium and Large ships with maximum Shields, ECM and maneuverability can pretty well avoid taking damage. When you put bombs on a ship that ship will be prioritized by the enemy for destruction when on offense. Bombs take up little room. Maximizing defense takes up a lot of space on a ship design. Making bombers with maximum defense works well because bombs take little room so you can still fit enough on to be effective while also having maximum defense. And those bombers will be almost exclusively targeted when on offense, meaning that you can let them draw all the fire and design your other ships for maximum ship-to-ship firepower, as along as you don't also put bombs on them, which would then cause them to be targeted as well.
Maybe this is "cheesy" when playing against simple AIs or on relatively easy difficulty levels, but when maximizing the difficulty by using Xilmi/Hybrid AI or playing on Hardest you need every advantage you can get, and this is a legitimate tactic. The AI is targeting the bombers for a reason, because they are capable of destroying the planet. If the AI were to ignore the bombers and focus on the gunships, I would then in-fact bomb out the planet if against opposing forces my gunships weren't capable of defeating. And against Xilmi this is exactly what the AI does. They press you with fleets that include both heavy bombers and capable gunships. If you don't stop the bombers they will bomb out the planet, often with Death Spores. So unless you have an overwhelming fleet on defense you have to make choices between going after the bombers to save the planet while you take damage from the gunships or going after the gunships and losing the planet. The Xilmi AI will do this to you over and over again and retreat ships and re-invade the next turn if you have any chance of defending, etc. ,etc.
In classic MoO I often ended up using Huge generalist designs, that are like what you describe. In MoO I will typically end up with fleets of mostly one single Huge design that has max shields, max armor, no ECM, moderate speed, Auto Repair, Repulsor Beams about 80%-90% of the offensive space filled with beams and the rest filled with bombs. These designs could "do it all", especially at the point when Auto Repair was new and capable of out healing most of the damage, which often came largely from planetary missile bases.
This typically worked because the AI would continue to build ships that couldn't get past Repulsor Beams, so their huge stacks of Small and Medium ships filled with Megabolt Cannons were useless. So as long as you could out-heal the planetary defenses you were good. Every now and then the AI would stumble onto a ranged ship design that was a threat, but they typically wouldn't put Repulsor Beams on it, so if they did, you could counter with your own stack of Small or Medium 1 space weapons and just run up on them and one-shot them. But generally you can have one design to rule them all, the Huge dreadnaught, capable of holding off attackers, beaming down ships and bombing out planets.
But such tactics don't typically work in RotP. Granted, when playing on lesser difficulty levels many things can be made to work, but on higher difficulty levels Repulsor Beams won't be effective at much of anything other than keeping bombers off your planet. The enemy will use lots of either missile boats or 2 space beams. They will develop stacks capable one one-shotting Huge Auto Repair designs. Repulsor Beams are still good for protecting planets, but I've had to rely a lot more on #1 maneuverability to outrun missiles #2 Warp Dissipator to increase the maneuverability advantage and #3 the use of maximum defensive ships that can draw fire paired with ships capable of dealing heavy enough damage to overcome Auto Repair and/or kill large stacks quickly. Auto Repair is still very good, but the AI is better at fielding stacks that can one-shot ships than it was in MoO, thus overcoming Auto Repair. So damage mitigation does more to increase survivability than Auto Repair does, but maximum damage mitigation doesn't leave a lot of room for offensive weapons.
Just to add, if you don't have good enough ECM, then yeah you may need to rely on Auto Repair if you can't make a design capable of avoiding missile damage. That's true. Generally I've found that I typically have good enough ECM to be effective.
And as far as "cheesy" goes, I'm really not sure what the difference is between using a dedicated bomber that can draw fire and evade damage vs a dreadnought that you put bombs on with Auto Repair intended to be a damage sponge that can draw fire and out-heal it. Both end up doing the exact same thing. So I'm not sure how one is "acceptable" and the other is "cheesy". In both cases you design a ship that can draw fire without being destroyed. All I'm saying is that in my experience with RotP dedicated bombers designed to evade damage work better than dreadnoughts that try to out heal it. And at some point, you need to be able to develop a ship design with maximum ship-to-ship fire power. That works better when the ship isn't also the focus of damage taking. You can't have max defense and max offense, that's just not possible. Giving the bomber max defense allows the non-bombers to have max offense. When you put bombs on you then need to raise the defenses, which by definition will lower the offense. Again, this all may be mute on lower difficulty.
I've been most successful with the huge, do-everything dreadnought designs in the past, with the occasional missile boat or heavy beam gunship as supporting vessels, but I'm intrigued and will have a go with the dedicated bomber designs. My primary concern with them has been attrition, especially with RotPs change to missile bases where even destroying the bases will not stop missiles from reaching their targets.
As for the AI exploitation angle, I'm personally of the opinion that anything that works on the up-to-date Xilmi-type AIs in fusion mod is fair game, and if it seems like it shouldn't be working, ping Xilmi in the discord and he'll either explain it or fix it.
Dp101 Wrote:Also, while I don't seek to repoen the whole ship design discussion, it's interesting seeing the variety of ship sizes everyone here has used. When I play solo, I basically have 4 varieties of combat ships: small fighters (usually with NPGs), small bombers, medium missile boats if I need a stopgap defence and techs have been unkind, and huge general-purpose autorepair designs. This entirely leaves out larges, and as a result I don't think I've ever built one and put guns on it, yet others have designed several this run and the above report segment mentions a cruiser (which from context is a large) would be a good thing to scale the Thunderbird down into, and I just.. don't quite get it? Like, this isn't me saying it's bad or anything, I've just literally never had the thought "I really wish I had a large" before, and am not sure what would cause said thought to occur. Off the top of my head, the biggest benefit seems to be greatly reduced attrition compared to smaller designs while not having as much latency involved in building them compared to huges, and they do seem to be large enough such that you can justify putting a lot of defensive tools on them like shields and armour without it being a waste (and again, without having to take the time to build a huge) but I dunno what the actual reasons/ideas involved are, beyond the variety being neat.
Sorry, just pulling this out here to respond so as not to derail the game thread too much.
Yeah, that is interesting, because I hardly ever use Small or Medium, I rely mostly on Large and Huge. The way I look at it like this: In the very early game I rely mostly on Small and Medium, both because you can rely on evasion instead of shields and because they take less time to build and because you don't really have much in the way of tech that requires much space to use. So there is really little reason to use Large of Huge at this point.
By mid game, however, I've typically switched to mostly Medium and Large, and maybe also Huge.
Depending on when I get Auto-Repair and some other factors I'll go to Huge. There are cases where I get Auto-Repair pretty early, before I can make Huge designs very quickly, so I'll go with Large Auto-Repair designs. I find that with Large I can either put on Shields or go without them. But I do like using them for bombers and putting everything on them: max shields, max ECM, and max maneuverability, which yields ships that are virtually untouchable.
Huge of course benefits a lot from Auto-Repair and also Repulsor Beams and of course from shields. But you can put shields on Large designs just fine too. To me it generally comes down to shields vs evasion. So whether you go with Small and Medium or Large and Huge has to do with whether you plan to rely on blocking and healing damage or evading damage. It also has to do with whether the enemy is using Repulsor Beams and ECM, because you may need to use 2 space weapons.
What I've found in RotP is that the AI builds much better fleet than they do in MoO1. So I find that I more often have to go to Large and Huge designs, but also that I have to make more decisions based on circumstances and can't just use standard formulas, which is nice. The one thing I've never used in RotP that I did sometimes use in MoO1 is Pulsars. In MoO1, especially the Klackons and Alkari would send in waves of thousands of Small and Medium ships that could almost only be dealt with using Pulsars. I haven't seen that in this game.
In RotP what I see is lots of designs that use 2 space weapons or lots of missiles. This means you have to be able to deal with getting hit, you can't just avoid damage by using Repulsor Beams like you can in MoO1. Also the AI tends to use a lot of ECM so missiles tend to be less effective. I've gone against Alkari with like almost 20 ECM before. I use missile boats way less in RotP than I did in MoO.
But generally it all comes down to what level of targeting the opponent has and what types of weapons they are using. If their targeting is poor, then yes, Small and Medium designs to maximize evasion are good. If their targeting is good, then evasion won't work as well, so you may as well go for bigger designs and rely on shields. This is especially true if they are using relatively weak weapons like Ion Cannons or something. However, if they have good targeting and strong weapons, then you do sometimes have to go back to Small/Medium designs and rely on overwhelming them with numbers. Of course if they have Repulsor Beams this can be a challenge.
Also, it depends on if I'm going for Warp Dissipators or not. If I decide to use Warp Dissipators then of course I'll go with Large and Huge designs and put Warp Dissipators on all ship designs except bombers. I'll go with Warp Dissipators generally if their ships aren't too fast, i.e. its not going to take too many applications to slow them down, I'm getting threatened with bombers that I need to be able to stop before they can kill planets, I have a range advantage I can exploit by stopping their ships and then sniping them from out of their range.
But yeah, Small and Medium for shieldless designs. Large for either shieldless or a combination of shields and evasion. Huge for shields and Auto-Repair. If your Huge designs are getting one-shot, then go back down to smaller sizes. I kind of like Large actually for the ability to load them up with all defensive measure (shields + ECM + Stabilizers) and still have room for weapons. When making Huge designs I don't even try for evasion. I never put ECM on them and only use even numbered speeds, but always use max shields and armor. With Large you can also generally fit good heavy weapons on them, so you can use them to get around Repulsor Beams, whereas very often you can't with Small and Medium designs.
Typically I get to a place where my Large and Huge designs can survive the fights I'm engaged in without any losses. At that point, if your Large and Huge designs are surviving but you are losing Small and Medium fighters, then of course you just stick with Large and Huge.
Interesting, nice to read. It generally is the case that past the early game I don't use small/medium designs much, at least in terms of fighters, the AI's documented lust for scatter packs (outside of Xilmi it seems?) seems to rule those out. But bombers I tend to like just for putting stabilisers on them, and I'll sometimes make a medium bomber if that's what it takes to fit a teleporter once I get those. Do large auto-repairs regen enough health for it to be worth it? I'm kinda surprised by the idea. I'd also somehow missed until now the defence increase from smaller hulls, that would make a lot of sense...
Also it really is a shame that in rotp the AI seems to *never* make the hordes of smalls, because those would add some much-needed variety to combat, instead stuff like pulsars go entirely unneeded. Would also make graviton beams and the like a lot more appealing.
Why do warp dissipators "of course" lead to large/huge designs only? Is it just that you generally only want them on ships with heavy weapons, and you need to get to at least large for those to be good? I get it in terms of needing space for specials, but at the same time it's not like your entire fleet needs to have the dissipators, you could always go to a doctrine of a few larger ships with them supporting a bunch of smaller ones. Regardless, I definitely need to try them more. I must confess at this point that my default for all MoO/RotP strategy is "do what Sullla would do, adjust for better AI + my increased preference for turtling and thus lategame scenarios as needed" since I've read so many of his reports, and so as a result I tend to not fiddle with as many weird specials. The one time I *did* try it, doing the classic torpedo + cloaking device strat, I found their damage output anemic and they'd often just get slapped on the uncloaked turn (if using plasma torps where they have to get in close, and if those weren't available they tended to just not deal enough damage at all) and it kinda scared me away from further weirdness lol.
Poking around in a save, I did find one interesting use for mediums, which is being the smallest ships that can reliably mount heavy weapons. If you're in a situation where the AI has (and is using) repulsors and you lack the tech yourself so there's no drive to be making larger ships so that you can fit the repulsors + the heavies at the same time, it might be an interesting avenue to explore. Of course, comparing 1 heavy phasor to 4 phasors still feels bad regardless ;-;
I have not tried torpedos in RotP, but my experiences with them in MOO were similar to Dp101. They just seemed rather under-powered for their tech level, cost, space, etc. If you did not have anything else, they could be made to work. But almost always you had some other, better option available.
I am certainly a fan of huge auto repair designs. But small ships can be made to work too. You just have to accept a certain amount of atttrition is going to happen, and keep building more to replace losses. Ideally the smalls are cheap enough that you can churn them out by the hundreds (or thousands!), so losing a hundred or a hundred and fifty here and there just does not really matter. Cost of doing business.
As for Large with Auto-Repair: I tend to really push Construction early. I sometimes give it disproportionate spending up through Tier 3, then level off. Well, I usually start with like 80% spending in Construction for Tier 1, then reduce to spend on Planetology and Propulsion, then give preference again like 40% or 50% spending on Construction if I have the option of Tech 8, then if I get Auto-Repair I'll continue to give it more spending. If not then I'll even it out. Also against Xilmi type AIs or on non-Xilmi Hardest I tend to play Kackon, Silicoid or Pslion a lot. So anyway, that means I often get Auto-Repair relatively quickly. So sometimes I'll have Auto-Repair while still having Tier 1 & 2 Weapons, Propulsion, Shields, etc. If you get Auto-Repair early, when opponents are still fielding Tier 1 & 2 weapons, using it on Larges can work. And even beyond for highly defensive ships, which is usually just bombers by that point. But if you have a Large with Internal Stabilizer, shields and ECM they can often survive a lot of attacks, and if the damage they are taking is moderate but survivable, then Auto-Repair makes sense. Sometimes you get it to where they take almost no damage, and then you don't need it, or sometimes they are taking too much damage and again its not useful.
Once enemies get to about Tier 3 or 4 tech, they tend to develop either heavy beam ships or strong missile boats. They can definitely make missile boats that are quite deadly and when they do that I tend to move away from Huge designs because they are just much more difficult to make resilient to missiles. With Large you can more easily get high missile evasion and still also pack on some specials, including Repulsor Beams. So like they if they go heavy on missile ships I may go for Large, high shields + Internal Stabilizer + ECM and Repulsor Beam as a planetary defender if that's needed. If you really want to get cheesy for planetary defenses you can go for Large with Repulsor Beam and Cloaking Device along with other defenses and like 1 or 2 heavy beam weapons, and have stacks of them of course, but they will be pretty much unhittable, and you can just sit them on your planet to defend without shooting, using your missile bases for offense. I mean, yeah, that's cheesy, but I've done it in dire circumstances.
As a general rule, if your defenses are +5 over the attackers attack level then you are unhittable (takes a 90 or 95 to hit in most situations). I consider it worthwhile to go for defensive evasion if you can get +3 over their attack level. But if you can't get +3 then I tend to go the other way and just forget about defensive evasion and rely on shields.
What I like about Large is you can sort of do both and I think its the only ship size that can really do both very well. You can use both shields and defensive evasion at the same time. So your Larges can be really, really defensive. Like Small and Medium are shieldless, so if you can keep them at at least +4, then they are good. If you can keep Large at a +3 AND have max shields on them with max armor, they can be really good. Huges I tend to just not even worry about defensive scores. I just put them at the highest even movement and let that be it and use max shields and Auto-Repair.
But again, when on offense I tend to go for highly defensive bombers that will draw all the fire and not worry too much about the defensive properties of my other ships. I do use max shields, armor and Auto-Repair on Huges, because why not and I may need them on defense.
But generally the AI, or any opponent really, is going to prioritize the ships that pose the most threat. When attacking a planet that is going to be ships with bombs. Ideally you want to design a ship that can both draw fire and also hold up well to the fire, like a "tank" class in a RPG. Putting bombs on your ships will cause them to draw fire, so whatever ship you want to draw fire, put bombs on it. If you make a highly defensive beam ship it will likely not draw fire unless its the only ship of the battlefield. So all of those defenses aren't very helpful. The problem with Huges that draw fire is that at a certain point there will be missile boats that can one-shot your Huge designs. And if you make them defensive enough to stand up to the missile attacks, then they are going to be very weak.
I just find that on offense I like it better just having the bomber draw the fire, leaving bombs off of everything else and maximizing fire power on everything else. I'll have Huges designed that can do moderate dual duty as defenders at all times, but if I REALLY need strong defenses then I'll make a specialty ship, either Large or Huge that's designed to be an unkillable sole defender. Maybe I'll pull in other ships to help defend sometimes, but if those ships get targeted and aren't going to be able to stand up to attacks I'll either want to be able to retreat them or just maneuver them around to do stuff like dodge missiles. But for serious defense I like to have a single design with Repulsor Beams that can pretty much avoid taking damage. These ships tend not to have much offensive power though, so I don't use ships like that offensively. I mean I may send them along with a fleet so they can help guard the planet after invasion, but they tend not to contribute much in the offensive battles. I guess you can put bombs on such a ship, if you only use bombs to fill in unusable space. But for defense you don't want to displace beam weapons to put bombs on.
Anyway, for my fleets I tend to have bombers that are capable of hitting the planet in as few turns as possible, typically 2 until you get Teleporters, and then 2 other designs that come along to handle ship to ship combat. And of course I may bring along older versions of those designs, so may have more than just 3 ships in an offensive, but I tend to go really with just 3 designs, allowing for 2 versions of those designs to be in play at a time. By mid to late game that usually ends up being a Large Bomber, Huge Beamer/light Defender and Large mobile Beamer (the Huge will have highest even combat speed, the Large will have max speed and also Stabilizer). If I really need strong defense then I'll have to make a specialty Defender, either Huge or Large depending on the situation. If they are using really strong missile boats I'll tend to go Large with max defenses.
Once High Energy Focus come along though, then yeah, it tend to go to all Huges plus Large Bombers.
Really cool ideas here, and I'd still like to add some of my own when I have more time, but in the meantime, I'd like to at least quickly respond to this:
(May 24th, 2024, 08:22)rgp151 Wrote: And as far as "cheesy" goes, I'm really not sure what the difference is between using a dedicated bomber that can draw fire and evade damage vs a dreadnought that you put bombs on with Auto Repair intended to be a damage sponge that can draw fire and out-heal it.
I may not have conveyed this clearly enough, but that's exactly what I was saying (well, one of the things) in the post you quoted to start this thread: Neither of those ship designs is intrinsically cheesy; it's a subtler matter of context and intentions. There's nothing cheesy about building a nigh-unkillable defensive supership, and nothing cheesy about building high-damage-output fleets. The smell of cheese comes in when I'm building the larger fleet: If, having built my unkillable dreadnought, bombs included so it can do everything, and/or my bomber wings, I then escort either or both with a bunch of Large or Huge ships with lots of guns and max targeting but no shields or armor and only enough maneuver to get closing speed because I know as long as my bombers and/or supership are there, no one will shoot at my glass cannons, I'm exploiting a hole in the AI rather than building the best possible fleet. Likewise, if I want to make a supership that can do everything and I hesitate and say, "Oh, no, I'd better leave the bombs off: I really don't want to lose this ship, and if I put bombs on, they'll kill it, but they'll ignore it if I leave them off," even though the bombless ship design is valid and non-cheesy in itself (I ~never put bombs on gunships myself) the decision-making process that led to it in the example I described has a whiff of cheese.
That said, I agree with you that against an AI like Xilmi's that's designed to win at all costs instead of playing a role in the game, exploiting and exposing its weaknesses is almost the point, and not really cheese.
(May 29th, 2024, 06:16)Dp101 Wrote: Also, while I don't seek to repoen the whole ship design discussion, it's interesting seeing the variety of ship sizes everyone here has used. When I play solo, I basically have 4 varieties of combat ships: small fighters (usually with NPGs), small bombers, medium missile boats if I need a stopgap defence and techs have been unkind, and huge general-purpose autorepair designs. This entirely leaves out larges, and as a result I don't think I've ever built one and put guns on it, yet others have designed several this run and the above report segment mentions a cruiser (which from context is a large) would be a good thing to scale the Thunderbird down into, and I just.. don't quite get it?
Yeah, I tend to call small ships "fighters," mediums "destroyers," larges "cruisers," and huges either "dreadnoughts" or "battleships" - and then forget that not everyone uses the same nomenclature! Sorry about that. In the particular instance you're talking about, my point was really that the same armament they put on their huge ship - if they took off all the junk - would still have fit if they scaled it down to a large. Which means they either should have, or put more (real) armament (in place of scatter-v-5s and so forth) on the huge they had! But you were looking for a use case for large ships altogether, right? So, here are some:
1: It's true if you could wish one ship into existence, you'd presumably always rather it be a huge, but since you have to build the ships, if you want a specific type of ship in a specific spot at a specific time, you frequently have to settle for a large ... or two larges ... or five, which frequently can all be finished faster than a single huge ship, helping your attack or defense plans at times and places to which you couldn't have gotten a huge ship at all. In fact, even once you would have finished a huge ship...
2: A huge ship can only be in one place at a time, whereas a fleet of larges of comparable cost can divide and/or recombine into smaller battle wings, separate ships, or a single fleet as required by your operational needs. Of course, this is also the reason that small ships are my favorite when they can accomplish what I need them to do, but when a special system is needed (e.g. repulsor or dissipator obviously, but also e.g. when heavy weapons or up-to-date missile boats are needed, or when fighting Alkari or other high-defense targets and therefore needing maximized hit rate, i.e. battle scanner + max battle computer) the best firepower available per unit cost (at least when you want to finish one quickly, and sometimes even better than for a huge, at least in Orion when you need high closing speed) is often a large ship's.
3: High maneuverability is a better defense against many potential enemy ship designs than (and often even better in combination with) shields, hitpoints, and autorepair. Large ships have +1 defense above huge ships be default, which can be an important breakpoint in some cases. Moreover, as noted above, MoO larges generally spend a smaller fraction of their design space on improved maneuverability (though I'm not sure if that's true in RotP) which makes a fast large gunship more potent "pound for pound" than a huge could be. (And closing speed is critically important for both defense and offense in many situations.
Or in short: I usually want to get as many guns into space as possible of the kind I need. When I'm looking for scads of NPGs, this usually means (small) fighter fleets. When I'm looking for high-accuracy heavy fusion beams, this usually means (large) cruiser gunships, because smalls won't fit any, mediums will need a compromise design that's space inefficient in one way or another since each piece of the design needs too big a fraction of the space, and huges won't get enough guns into space in the desired timeframe unless supplemented with other designs, if only because a bunch of planets will end up with the choice of producing either half a dreadnought or about three full cruisers!
That said, given that by this game's end we were running around with 111 cruisers in our fleet, we should presumably at some point have stopped building so many of those and switched over to a new huge design to supplement our existing ships. Those Beamers did good work for us - and having the ability to split them up into arbitrary attack groups helped a lot in my quest to take ... what was that, 28 stars in ten turns? Something patently ridiculous like that anyway.
Or in shorter words:
Quote:greatly reduced attrition compared to smaller designs while not having as much latency involved in building them compared to huges, and they do seem to be large enough such that you can justify putting a lot of defensive tools on them like shields and armour without it being a waste (and again, without having to take the time to build a huge)
Apart from some of the details I tried to go into above, you got it!
And on general ship designs:
Quote:Something exactly like the chameleon but with new engines? I guess not much has changed in terms of the context besides that, though we did get particle beams which present another option.
No, I don't think I'd have used the Chameleons if we'd had any other scanner ships that could keep up with our fleet at that point in the game. I'd have gone with (possibly-cloaked) fighters (smalls) with whatever our best weapon/computer combination might be, an updated cruiser, or a full-on dreadnought - or some combination of the three! The Chameleons were designed to be capable of hitting anything, but really they weren't very good, for exactly the reason I mentioned in spoilers above about big weapons with high accuracy on smaller ships. By being able to do everything if built in sufficient numbers, they really weren't especially good at doing anything in particular. I'd have designed a (better) cruiser instead if not for the latency issue again: I wanted a scan of several enemy ships sooner than I could get a new cruiser (or an old, slow Monitor) to any of them - and then, depending on what I saw, wanted my new design to be an option to take on whatever I found, just in case.
Just to add this for discussion or reference, here are some lengthy thoughts on missile boats:
In Orion, well-designed missile boats are extremely effective weapons, depending on your particular situation. (Nearly everthing in Orion is situational this way, which is part of what makes it such a great and replayable game!) In both Orion and RotP, the great advantage of missile boats is that they can get the first strike in, by firing from beyond other weapons' range. Then in RotP, this advantage is accentuated because there is no such thing as reaction fire: The only way to hit an enemy ship as it closes for combat on its own turn, before it can attack, is by firing missiles (or torps) at it. The obvious disadvantage of missiles is that they lack staying power: You get lots of damage in across two or five attacks, but then if there are targets left over, there's nothing your missile boat can do about them. If you've designed your fleet well though, this isn't a problem, because you'll have other ships designed for a long fight to clean up whatever survives the missile barrage. A less-obvious disadvantage is that once the enemy ships close with whatever they're trying to destroy (unless they're targeting the missile boat itself when it's giving ground or a beamer that can "hide behind" it - just one part of the reason that targeting a missile boat is usually a mistake if there's anything else to attack) the first-strike turns around on the missile ship completely: No matter how close you fly to the enemy, your missile boat does no damage to them when you fire, but only after the missile catches up to them, during or after they move and/or after their attack. Orion's AI can even dodge missiles completely (as can we) if you're not careful about where and when you fire them. And in RotP specifically, at least in the very-limited sample I've seen, missile boats are weaker than they should be because the AI is obsessed with ECM and seems to install their best version on all of their ships. I'll note in passing that both the predictability and the choice itself of max-ECM-on-all-ships is really bad AI ship design, but especially egregious on missile boats specifically. A well-designed, well-played missile boat in conditions where they're useful should (to a first approximation) never have a to-hit roll made against it - by missiles or anything else. The whole point of a missile boat is to get your first strike in before the enemy can fight back, and then escape retaliation if anything survives either by retreating or by "hiding behind" clean-up ships. (You'll very rarely want your missile boat and clean-up ship to be one and the same because then it will do neither job well, but I can see a rare case of something like a fast advanced missile cruiser with a couple of small beams built in to finish off the shattered remains of nearly-annihilated stacks without wasting a whole missile volley.)
So what does a good missile boat look like?
- Essentially no defenses: No shield, just titanium armor, no repulsor nor autrepair nor anti-missile rockets nor ECM, and usually not even an extra maneuvering class that takes it to an odd number, though in RotP that's usually so cheap that it might not matter really. A missile boat's defense is never being in the enemy's range. (For times when this seems impossible, see Missile Boat vs Missile Boat, below.)
- High tactical speed if firing short-range missiles or facing enemy missile boats or fast-moving - but not too fast-moving - enemy ships. (Beyond a certain point, especially with the likes of High Energy Focus, missile boats do become more or less completely obsolete.) Almost the entire point of using missiles is (basically) to get damage in before the rest of the fight can begin, so if your missile boat is lagging behind the rest of the ships in the fight and the missiles themselves can't make up the difference, it's not going to be able to do its job very well.
- Sufficient targeting: Choosing the right targeting computer is always a tough balance on most ships, and since there's no advantage at all to exceedint 100% hit chances on a missile boat (unlike a normal ship) it's less obvious to just max out the battle computer even when there's space (especially as this can be expensive) - but initiative can be important on a missile ship (one reason to go for max maneuver even when it's odd-numbered) to make sure your "first strike" actually gets in first. When ships are slow in comparison with your best missiles, this is less important, and you can sometimes do without much extra targeting power, but there are times when your missile boats need the best computer you can mount and even a battle scanner - one of the reasons you may want to use a (large) missile cruiser. (Militating against this is the first point on the list: All the extra hitpoints are wasted - one reason you basically never want a missile-based (huge) battleship - so at least in Orion, initiative is often sacrificed just to get more missiles into space on more, smaller ships ... except...
- Almost always, as many 2-rack missiles as you can mount: Missile space costs can be awkward - especially for five-racks (one of the reasons they're rarely used except by clueless AIs) but they do have utility, plus the advantage that you can sometimes add a 2-rack as an "extra" to make up the space. So if there's not quite enough space for that one more launcher on a medium, that's often the reason to design a large instead. (Small missile boats, when you can get away with them, are wonderful if the missiles are good, but it takes a lot of miniaturization, especially against RotP enemies who compulsively ECM their ships to death, making beamers much more effective even in a first-strike role unless you have very good targeting.) The reason to use 2-racks, of course, is twofold: First, you're getting more of your damage up front, when it counts the most: The whole purpose of missile boats! Second, 2-racked missiles have additional closing speed and therefore additional range! This again means you can get your first strike in faster, gives you more margin of safety to fire off both shots before the enemy can target you in turn, and makes them harder to dodge (at least in Orion, where the AI knows how to do so). The main reasons to use 5-racks are when you have no other choice (i.e. no good beams and you need all the firepower you can get to take down a full enemy fleet) or when you have decent combat speed and your enemy does not: In the latter case, with good enough missiles, you can sometimes kite an enemy ship across the entire screen and get off all five volleys before they can close to beam range.
- Allowable specials: These may include Inertial Stabilizer (or, theoretically, Nullifier, but...) and/or Battle Scanner, I guess Subspace Teleporter if your opponent lacks it and [various other conditions necessary to make this better than using beams] and/or Reserve Fuel Tanks if you want to engage at long strategic range. I think that's it.
- Nearly always, nothing else: The rare case mentioned above for a missile boat with a beam or two gets the emphasis on "rare."
Finally, a note on Torpedos: They do not count as missiles, and torp ships are not missile boats! Torps are weird, space-hungry hybrid weapons that do get the very first strike but take up more room (and cost more) than enough 2-rack regular missiles to do the same first-volley damage. Then, the torps get no second-round strike, but can stick around for the entire battle, firing ... occasionally. Missile defenses are effective against them, and they do only half damage against planets, just like beams. I used them to good effect in Imperium 14, at a stage of the game where I could have used basically anything to good effect, but that was a long time ago, and I don't think I've ever used them since.
Used correctly, missile boats are excellent for asymmetric warfare: If you can't take out an enemy fleet, you may still be able to inflict unanswered attritional losses with missile boats - and if you have enough force to overwhelm an enemy fleet, your missile boats can erase it (and/or defensive bases if not too heavily shielded) without taking any attrition in return, even when the numbers on each side get big enough that the losing side could otherwise one-shot a huge battleship, or when your production distribution is such that you can get a cloud of missile boats to the front faster than you can build even a single huge ship.
Designed and used incorrectly ... you can lose four races' entire starfleets, each nominally stronger than the one your smarter opponent is throwing at each of you in turn, along with something like thirty planets with their population, bases, and factories, all in the course of about thirty turns, to judge by the AIs in our first succession game!
