small vs large fighters

To fix (or adress) the speed issue you could just have different default speeds for the different hull sizes.

So tiny would be speed4 before any engines
small speed3
med speed2
large speed1
huge speed0 (yerp)

Perhaps you wouldn't want that large of a discrepency though.

Medium are my favourite, they're cheap, fast, powerful. I have most of my navy medium and small fighters, as attack fleets. I have escort fleets with hyperwarp and a powerful weapon to keep my transports secure (small), patrol fleets around my core worlds to stop any sneak attacks, usually fast small (occasionally medium) fighters, engines and weak attack and def, buffed up by my starbase network. Then we have the spearhead fleets of my large fighters, the ones that do the damage. My strongest fleet will have my flagship, a huge battlecruiser armed to the teeth and basically invulnerable.

Small are very useful when miniturisation is high, they can be fast little attack ships.

By the time I'm seriously invading anyone my transports have speeds around 20, so they can stay well back until I've cleared the enemy off of his planets, and then just 'lightning' in. They are only threatened when I forget to move them and some enemy fleet has crept up to them.

I never bother with escorts. I never bother with multiple ship designs (other than occasionally having two different defenses) and I have never gotten to the point where large or bigger ships became an issue.

Its alittle bit too true in this game that speed kills, and the AI hasn't quite caught onto it yet

I never really build tiny ships, but I regularly build small ships with 3 engines on them. Research some miniturization and you can fit nearly as much on a small ship as you do a large ship. (Which is weird, my current game has small ships with 35 attack, 5 defense, and 16 speed; my large ship has 35 attack, 18 defense, and 24 speed. My medium ship is somewhere inbetween - although it also has 16 speed so that I can easily make fleets of small and medium ships.) While I see your point, engines aren't that big, or even very expensive to research. Research up a few points in the tech tree and you will be able to build some pretty good small ships.

Well one of the big selling points for the small fighter groups is that they are fairly cheap and quick to produce. They won't ever have the range of options that a bigger ship can boast of though. So its quantity and cheapness vs quality and toughness. I've had success in making swarms of small fighters stuffed to the gills with weapons and spending a bit extra to upgrade them to the latest and greatest weaponary when it rolls off the line. I still prefer the range of options that a bigger hull can give you, but the small fighter has a definite role.

I have a mixture, I prefer to use large and medium hulls in my battlefleets, while having a couple small and tiny hull fleets around (which my less industrious colonies produce). But I find that the large hulls are far more survivable in a protracted battle.

I've found that mixed fleets can be helpfull. However you have to worry about slowing down your faster ship in the fleet because, as you said, the smaller ones just can't be built to go as fast. The reasons I like mixed fleets are; One, I use up ships in battle rather than destroy them for monney. Two, I regularly have planets that aren't developed yet and would take forever to create a capital ship. Three, in a mixed fleet, depending on the damage to destroyability ratio from the AI's perspective the smaller ships are targetted first and this allows my capital ships to gain more experience/hit points for future battles. Four, assuming you're not lossing all your pea shotters every battle they tend to level up faster than capital ships. What this means is that you could potentialy have a pea shooter that is regularly targeted first but has so many hit points it doesn't matter.                                                        I also like having a few faster ships in a fleet for the occations that I run a cross a troop ship just out of range of my fleet.                                               It's all about creating ships with the proper ratios so that the AI targets the ones you want it to.                                                                                     I also like loosing more smaller ships, which are easier to replace, than capital ships that can only be produced on a few planets without seeing build times of years.                                                                                          (sorry for the stupid paragraphing, I can't figure out how to start a new line with this stardock web browser)

You cant beat tiny hulls for home defense. Backed up by one or more star base's a fleet of tiny's will devoure anything in it's path.

One thing you have to remeber about fleet size is however many ships you have, thats how many shots you get. If you've managed to cram enough power in, and you attack, you can wipe out smaller fleets of larger ships.. Your offensive rateing vs thier defensive rateing, and pray for good dice rolls

A tiny fleet of expirianced ships is a beast. I've had tiny fleets with over 55 hitpoints each ship because I use them so much and buy them upgrades. Yeah you can spend alot per turn in maintence fee's, but what a power house.

My 20 tinys against thier 7 dreadnaugts, I win, every time. I may lose a tiny here and there, but hey, cant make omlettes without breaking a few eggs.

Another factor is cost. A huge ship decked out can be ungodly expensive, over 30 bc per turn. I can make 3 tiny for less, and have more shots when I do meet the AI in combat. When you attack, any ship you kill before they get to fire is that much more off thier fleets attack rateing. Thats how tinys beat the big boys.

The true about this game is they provide you several ways to dominate in military power. Smaller ship has its own way of becoming powerful compare to bigger ship, It all depend on what you research on and how to cope with the situation to use the most out of your capabilities at the moment! (Small ship with high LOG and MIN researches may become a domionational powerful against pretty much anything!)

Small ships can be good because of the military assist starbase modules. But I go with bigger ships for speed.

Defense becomes more powerful the more you are outnumbered since it activates on every attack made against you, I'm all about the massive nearly indestructable ships, nothing like watching a single dreadnought blast thorugh 12 puny fighters without taking any damage.

last game i did have quite advanced minituarization
tiny ships had 30 space for 2 logistics
huge had 152 space for 8 logistics
8 / 2 = 4
4 * 30 = 120
120 < 152
so even if fitting in engies would be no problem, the tiny ships would still have a lot less firepower because i have less storage space to put in guns !

that completly negated the argument that tiny ships get more shots and wipe out the enemy earlier:
you can pack more weapons in fleets with huge ships, therefor the huge ships get more shots

by the way, defense is so small and strong now, i often build ships that have more defense then offense and its totally worth it
all offense to hope to get the lucky first shot is simply not worth it ... a good defense and you get a nearly invulneral fleet

how does combat work by the way? those small fighter do shoot seperatly in combat, dont they?
that would be another issue to make them quite useless vs huge ones
imagine my huge battleship with its 60 missile defense
in combat with another huge battleship with its 80 missileattack, i will get damaged - a lot
in combat with 4 tiny fighters with 20 missile attack each, it is very unlikly that i receive any heavy damage, if i get damaged at all
(that 10 point defense only needs 7 slots, i usually put at least 3-4 of them in my huge ships when i got through with defense research, throw in some defense bonus or a starbase ... those 60 defense may even be too low)

only advantage i see for lots of tiny ships are military starbases
their bonuses work a lot better with lots of small ships
but i rarely use them anyway ... in defense they are great, but for offense i need mobility
and imho they are just not worth it - constructors are VERY expensive, building 2-3 huge battleships instead of dozends of constructors seems a lot better to me

last game i did have quite advanced minituarization tiny ships had 30 space for 2 logistics huge had 152 space for 8 logistics 8 / 2 = 4 4 * 30 = 120 120 < 152

Except that components also take up more space on larger hulls...

To fix (or adress) the speed issue you could just have different default speeds for the different hull sizes. So tiny would be speed4 before any engines small speed3 med speed2 large speed1 huge speed0 (yerp) Perhaps you wouldn't want that large of a discrepency though.

This makes no sense. In space everything weighs the same, nothing. So general physics wouldn't apply like that. An engine would move a huge ship just as quickly as it would move a small ship.

This makes no sense. In space everything weighs the same, nothing. So general physics wouldn't apply like that. An engine would move a huge ship just as quickly as it would move a small ship.

It doesn't have to make sense if its a desired game play mechanism.

Besides it does make some sense in that in order to manuver a bigger ship would take more power. Everything isn't just straight lines, even if its represented that way

that completly negated the argument that tiny ships get more shots and wipe out the enemy earlier

...?

Small ships are typically a good deal cheaper. And if you have a group of small ships attacking a large ship, you can have multiple shots fired before the big ship has the chance to retaliate (and you're only losing one little ship at a time when the big one retaliates). So a fleet of advanced small ships can potentially destroy one big one without taking a single loss - or at the loss of only one or two vessels.

Naturally, this is assuming all tech is equal, etc.

This makes no sense. In space everything weighs the same, nothing. So general physics wouldn't apply like that. An engine would move a huge ship just as quickly as it would move a small ship.

That's quite wrong. Newton's laws still apply in space and objects in space still have mass. More massive objects take more force to move and will accelerate more slowly with like forces applied when compared to less massive objects.

This makes no sense. In space everything weighs the same, nothing. So general physics wouldn't apply like that. An engine would move a huge ship just as quickly as it would move a small ship.

Weight is a function of gravity and mass, so in a zero-gravity environment, things are "weightless". But they still have the same *mass* they always had. The amount of effort(force) to move a mass is inversely proportional to the size of the mass. Newton's 2nd law: F = m * a. So flipping that, a (acceleration) = F (force) / m (mass). So for a fixed amount of rocket engine thrust (force), a mass twice as large will accelerate half as fast. Or you could say that a mass half the size would accelerate twice as fast.

Of course, the engine sizes on large/small ships is different, so presumably the bigger engines would have more thrust than tthe smaller ones, so it's sort of a moot point, but I wanted to correct the physics.

This makes no sense. In space everything weighs the same, nothing. So general physics wouldn't apply like that. An engine would move a huge ship just as quickly as it would move a small ship.

I'm not sure what you're saying. If you're saying that the exact same engine would move a small ship at the same speed as a huge ship, there's a strong chance you're wrong. While everything weighs the same, the mass is uneffected, so a huge ship moving at the same speed would have much more kinetic energy, and it would take a larger engine or more time to induce that much kinetic energy.

In GC2 it's stated that interstellar drives are composed of two components, the sublight drive, and the space-folding mechanism. The space-folding mechanism doesn't move the ship, it only compresses space so that where you're going is effectively closer, and without details on the sublight drives used, we don't know if those drives follow newtonian physics or not. The one sublight drive technology mentioned is the Ion drive, which if it's the same ion drive that is being discussed in the real world now, would follow newtonian physics.

However, that said, unless one of the two drive components gets less efficient as it gets larger, then your statement that the smaller ships shouldn't be faster than the larger ships is correct. However, this assumes that the small ship and the large ship have the same % of mass and or volume dedicated to the drive. In GC2, the engines don't scale linearly with the mass/volume of the ship, so this doesn't directly apply.

I find myself often building swarms as oppsed to single hulking cap ships but that is because my first real game that involved significant military production was against the dread lords >_<. Problem with a single big ship vs the dread lords is that unless you have truly amazing defensive capabilities and/or enormous hulls a single ship is going to get eaten by the dread lords 40 or so attack. So I figured I would just build a swarm fleet since the dread lords are still limited by thier ROF (untill they get logistics of course).

However, as I play more sandbox games for longer (ie long enough to get to the war portion of the game) I realize that larger cap ships are a good idea. Jury is still out on a final fleet compositon.

i just tried the thing i wrote above
enemy fleet, they got a huge ship with about 20 beam defense
my huge ship has about 40 beam attack and no problems kicking ass
a fleet of 14 tiny ships can hardly damage the enemys ship because every single shot gets reduced to 0 from its armor
i did use 9 damage beams
even with a support starbase that would be about 12 damage beams - vs a 20 shield
1 * 40 dam vs 20 shield seems to be a lot better then 14 * 10 dam vs a 20 shield
so tiny ships are totally useless ...

maybe a mixed fleet of medium ships, each packed full with weapons of only one type (so you get 80 missile on one medium, 80 beam on the next and so on) could be usefull ... on the other hand you could also do that with huge ones and then get 200 bean on one and 200 missile on the next which simply cant be countered by any amount of shielding )

tiny are very much underpowered ...

I don't claim to be an expert on such things, but from what I do understand I don't see how mass would have an effect on speed in space when things are weightless and there is no resistance to movement. There is no gravity, no type of air resistance, and I think that any space dust around would have no real affect on acceleration or speed. I can see how it would be impossible for a person to push a ship or whatever, but a powerful engine shouldn't have any problem moving a giant ship at the same rate of speed as it would a small ship.

There is a difference between acceleration and velocity (speed in a
direction).  Ignoring relativistic velocities, you are correct in that
there is no practical difference in the velocity that can be achieved by either
a small ship or a large ship.  The difference is in how quickly they can
get to that velocity.  A large ship will need a commensurately more
powerful engine to apply the greater thrust needed to accelerate its greater
mass to reach the same velocity as the smaller ship in the same amount of
time.  Acceleration is measured in feet/second-squared, while velocity
is measured in Feet/second (or substitute meters for our metric friends ). 
Therefore: Velocity = acceleration x time
assuming a constant acceleration rate. Enough Physics?

tiny are very much underpowered ...

It seems you're expecting your existing tiny ships to always be viable regardless of what the enemy does to counter them. Putting 20 beam defense is just about the optimal defense against your 9/12-beam tinies.

Once the enemy defenses are start to equal or exceed your ship's offensive power, you need to switch weapon types. With tiny ships it should be a lot easier to refit/rebuild your fleet with missiles or mass drivers to counter the enemy's shields than it is for your enemy to refit/rebuild his huge ships with alternate defenses. And you could use the research points you don't spend on hull techs and defenses to ensure you have high tech levels in multiple attack types.

Also, having multiple smaller ships sometimes has an advantage:
Imagine your 14 ship fleet 9-or-12-attack tinies are attacked not by a 20-defense huge, but, say, 3 huges with 70 attack and low or no defense. You'd be killing one of his huges for every 2-3 tinies you lose. How's that for a tradeoff?

There is a difference between acceleration and velocity (speed in a direction). Ignoring relativistic velocities, you are correct in that there is no practical difference in the velocity that can be achieved by either a small ship or a large ship. The difference is in how quickly they can get to that velocity. A large ship will need a commensurately more powerful engine to apply the greater thrust needed to accelerate its greater mass to reach the same velocity as the smaller ship in the same amount of time. Acceleration is measured in feet/second-squared, while velocity is measured in Feet/second (or substitute meters for our metric friends ). Therefore: Velocity = acceleration x time assuming a constant acceleration rate. Enough Physics?

I see the point you are making. It does make sense.