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Swarms of small fighters versus captial ships

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Swarms of small fighters versus captial ships

Which is better?

from GalCiv2 Forums
Once I start hitting medium or larger hulls do small/tiny become obsolete or are they still a viable choice? What is your general experience? I don't have enough experience with the game to tell but I imagine small/tiny hulls pretty much become redundant.
21,178 views 38 replies
Reply #26 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It really does depend on the purpose you are building the given ships for.

If you are going to want to attack, you need fast ships, especially on larger galaxies. You cannot really fit much in the way of engines on your smaller ships. You can slam the next system over with fighters, but by the time your figher fleet makes it to the far side of a larger galaxy, its obsolete. For me, Medium hulls get 2 of my best engines, and everything above that gets 4 engines.

Larger ships simply beat the hell out of smaller ships, all else being equal. One poster mentioned that a large ship will often overkill on one fighter, and then get slammed by the return volly. First, even with larger ships, you will usually have more then one, so your usually overkilling at least 3 ships at a time. And assuming you have a decent amount of defense, even off type defense, your probably not going to lose all that much on the return volly. Defences count against every attack, and you really cannot pack all that much weaponry on a fighter hull.

Where larger ships really lose out is on cost. You simply must use defence to get your moneys worth. Ordinarily, its not a big deal, but it makes your ships expensive, and requires you to pursue a given line of defence tech. If your attacked by an enemy who either has strong defences to your chosen weapon type, or weapons that your defences are not geared for, even experienced huge hulls will die. And when you have lost a fleet or two of large ships, you have lost a huge investment. Small ships are disposable, and if you suddenly find your ships obsolete, its not as painful to use your fighters as cannon fodder while you rebuild your fleet. Also, If you like leveraging the bonus effects of starbases, fighters are great, since your getting your starbase bonus multiplied against the total number of ships in your fleet. If you end up going for small hulls, you can probably do well enough without putting much effort into defence, and let your starbases do the heavy lifting for that.

I only use small hulls for planet defense, and use my large ships to pulverize my opponents, primary because I want to have fast (movement 15 or better) ships by late game, since I tend to play on the 2 largest galaxy sizes. Fast ships with the eyes of the galaxy usually results in the AI being tactically ineffective. I can move my fleets in, do some damage, and when needed, fall back to one of my planets to remove damaged ships from my fleet, letting them repair for later. Though in all fairness, I can probably finish the game out with just medium hulls, since its at that point in the game when I am fighting the only AI that can stand against me. By the time I get my large or huge hulls going, its prolonged mopup.

END COMMUNICATION
Reply #27 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
some replies reveal that their authors obviously have no idea what they are talking about (probably sub-normal players), but many others are really insightful!
my few games so far ended at early mid-game (medium, max. large hulls), but i've learnt a lot about the basics of GC2 warfare reading through these postings, thanks.
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Reply #28 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
In my present game on huge with 9 opponents and abubdant stars and planets I am going to make capital ships in year 2029, where all techs are researched. we are down to 4 players and all hate me. I plan to keep most of remaining small vessels in fleets with 2 huge ships. I like the look in battles and by now most of them have increased their hitpoins from 16 to 50-60 during the wars until now. Then the combination will be deadly in my experience to the AI. This game is masochistic, but it worked on suicidal too.
Only downside on this map - looking trough my 129 planets to find the ones with enough troopers
Reply #29 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
In my experience, the whole thing boils down to supply lines and attrition.

I can build fleets of fighters that will take out my enemies' capital fleets, and I definitely agree with much of the sentiment here that the loss ratio ends up looking very nice. If I attack a ship that does say 40 points of damage with a bunch of ships that can only take, say, 16, they've wasted 24 points of damage on pure overkill.

The problem is, let's say we agree that these battles end up swapping one snub fighter for each of their capital ships I take out (or even for every two of their capital ships, or however many). These are still gauranteed losses, losses which have to be replaced. As someone cited earlier, snub fighters don't have much room, so they don't get much in the way of engines. If I'm fighting close to home (or Heaven forbid, even at home ) then this works out fine (and I'll admit, I hadn't thought of the individual nature of bonuses gained from military starbases). If I'm fighting halfway across the galaxy, the war's nearly over by the time my re-enforcements arrive for fleets that after one or two battles just aren't at fighting strength anymore.

With capital ships, you may take losses, but they're much more infrequent, and not gauranteed. The need for re-enforcements isn't as strong, my capital fleets can still fight even without replacements, and those replacements arrive much faster thanks to good engines.

At the end of the day, this has been the deciding factor for me, far beyond how these fleets actually fare in combat. (I did try once establishing a line of military bases with speed boosters stretching from Earth to the battlefield, but maintaining control of that supply line was such an enormous task that it just wasn't worth the investment.)
Reply #30 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I skimmed through all of the responses but one point was not discussed enough. Yes, small ships can be produced fast but are limited in speed because of there hule size. Capital ships can defend or attack a much larger area. My small fighter that can travel four spaces are too slow to go on the attack. I have a capital ship that moves 15 spaces speeds the attacks up and obviously the distance traveled.

The sheer number of attacks the large ships can make in a one turn makes them worth three fleets of smaller vessels.
Reply #31 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Exactly. Fighters take ages to get them anywhere.
My two Shadow Crabs with Doom Rays (which really look exactly like the rays the crabs fired in B5) had like 90 points in beam damage and made 15 spaces per turn. They cought up with any fleet my adversaries ahd and desintegrated them in notime.
Btw, thanks Vorlone for bringing all those B5 ships to the library.

So to summarize my POV:
Fighters are good for battles near home.
Caps for far away seek n destroy missions.
Reply #32 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I am playing "battle of the gods" at this very moment. My single dreadnoughts are no match for enemy fighter squadrons: Using diffirent fighters with 80 attackpoints each ! My dreadnoughts can not stand any chance.
Fighter squadrons are the ultimate weapons!
PS: I know, it sounds strange!
Reply #33 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
it's basically a gamble between offfensive and defensive techs, not just armors and weapons.
Consider anything that allow to punch more to be offensive tech, this include logistic because weaps add up in fleet, drives, because it allow first strike and obviously weapons techs.
Defense is matter of hulls, that give more hit points per ships, and obviuously defense modules.

at differents stages of the game, differents situations occurs :

- during early phases if you go to fleet of fisghter path you will want to maximize punch/speed so you can attack first and add up wepons to one turn kill your opponent.
Your opponent can counter it by geting big hulls and defenses modules so you will not be able to kill him quiclky, and the longer the fight, the higher the chance the big ship will survive and if not he will destroy ennemy ships in the fleet. Destriyed ships have to be buildt again to reinforce while if you win with a big ship he just have to run back to recover hitpoints, increasing his advantage.

- but the more you advance in game, the more powerfull are the weapons, so powerfull that the big defended med/large ships cannot stand more than 1-2 maybe 3 round of combat. If you lose a capship you lose all your indvestment but the fleetmonger only lose few small fighter more easyier to replace than the big one. so the more strong are getting the weapons, the more affectives are the small fighters ships.

Take the dreadlords as an example, if you manage to milk some weapons from them by planet invasion, you will be able to build fleets with hundreds of firepower, enough to kill any ship, even those with defense they build sometime, in just one round of comabt if you are the attacker.
Reply #34 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
i spam my special mini fightas (spelt correctly) in the beginning of the game, where there has not yet been the time to research medium- large- huge- hulls, and weapons and defenses are relavitvly primitive. in those case my numbers count... especially with military upgrades.

I can churn out these quickly, which is what i like best

they;re a gamble, but i like having a lot of units to play with, (who doesnt? - except those who have major micromanagement headaches) so they can kill off anything i like, with their numbers it isnt a problem.

Still, late in game, nothing beats watchin ur specially made ship smash everything in its path
Reply #35 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
My games never last long enough to get to things like Doom Ray. I was under the impression it was easier to win a technological victory then to get that.

I prefer big ships.

As I understand it, the combat goes in rounds. Attacker shoots at defender, defender's remaining ships shoot at attacker, attacker's remaining ships shoot at defender, etc.

With large ships with good defence it's very likely you can weather a round without taking any losses so that you can bring the same firepower to bear on the next round. With small ships having much weaker defences (if any), it's almost certain you're going to take losses. This means that you'll have less firepower on the next round thus able to do less damage. If the other side did the same thing, or if they're a lot weaker you can still win. But if he has a bunch of well defended big ships and both fleets total to about the same stats, you could be in for some serious trouble.

That effect can snowball. Suppose side A is small ships thus taking more losses then side B and suppose their total stats are about the same. That means that on the second round A will have less firepower then B since it's far more likely that proportionally more of the low hitpoint ships will die. This means A will do less damage to B then B does to A on the second round. On each succeeding round it'll become more and more lopsided with A doing less and damage then B as A keeps loosing those tiny fighters. B's firepower doesn't go down at all until his first capital ship looses all it's hitpoints -- and it's got a lot more hitpoints then A's fighters so it'll take alot longer.

If a ship's firepower was proportional to the damage it's taken this effect wouldn't happen -- then it would be all about maximizing firepower per hitpoint. But it isn't -- a ship with one hitpoint left can deal out as much damage as an undamaged ship. Therefore, the side with the most durable ships (most hitpoints) has an edge.

So, if a guy with fighters comes up against a guy with capital ships, unless the fighters can kill at least one capital ship every round or so he's going to be in trouble if they started out roughly equal.

This is actually a well known effect in many games and even some real life scenarios.

Quantity is good but there's a lot to be said for quality.
Reply #36 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
In one game I played, I had fleets containing 5 huge ships with 500 missle attack each (no defense). Now, these ships killed everything they met in one shot, so against other cap ships they rocked. However, when the enemy would send in a fleet of 12 or so fighters, I would kill 5, and then 7 of them would return fire, and then I would kill 5 more, and then the last 2 would hit me, and then I would win. Now, after running into several fleets of those fighters, I actually lost 1 cap ship.

If I had made like 12 medium ships with 100 attack each, I probably could have won every battle unscathed. However, I would have lost one really nice bonus of cap ships which is that all the engine are on one ship, so that my fleet of mediums would have had like 6 movement where as my fleet of caps had 12.
Reply #37 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
In my last game my tech was so far advanced that tiny ships were the ultimate weapon. each one had 2 doom rays 2 hyperwarp III and 1 zero point armour. I also had logistics of 54 and 2 fully upgraded military starbases. Because of my speed I always got first strike and even if they fitted half their ship out with shields they couldn't stop my weapons. Eventually i finished the other weapon and shield tech branches and built 3 versions with different combinations of weapons and defence.

These ships destroyed everything in the 3/4 of the gigantic galaxy I didn't own. In fact no ship even got to fire on them at all. This was with all 9 computer opponents set to intelligent although I think 4 had been eliminated before i began my final attack.
Reply #38 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
When you guys mention "capital ships", are you simply refering to huge hulled ships, or are there certain components that make a capital ship? I haven't seen anything bigger than huge.

It'd be really nice if a large and huge ship could have a landing bay to park fighters in, so that the small ships could travel better in a fleet of large ships. Something like the Battlestar Galactica, or an Imperial Star Destroyer.