Light Fighter VS Capital ships...

Im pretty sure they keep firing on the one ship till its destroyed and then move onto another one in the list all in the same turn. If one cap ship could take out a fighter in one "salvo" then 4 would take out 4, etc.
So basically it would be 4 versus 20, then 4 versus 16, 4-12,etc....

Now if you could have your cap ships split thier fire between ships THAT would be useful as they would not waste a lot of firepower. So you could then have one cap ship take out 2 or more fighters each.

I think there should be a push for "support" parts to add to a ship. Parts that would only fit on large and up sized ships. Something like "adds shields to all ships" and fits only on a cap ship. Would better support the mixing of fleet sizes

cool idea

The trick, as in any scenario, is to develop the weapons that the other races don't, and the defenses to whatever the other races weapons are. That being said, I had a fleet of 5 capital ships equipped with disintegrators tear through a fleet of about 20 small ships. My fleet had something like 490 beam weapon "points", and about the same in missile defense. The other fleet was using missiles as weapons, and also used missile defense. Therefore, they could not effectively defeat my beam weapon ships, especially considering I also had more total hit points. The battle was fierce, but was over fairly quickly.

Try putting less weapons and more defense on the big ships. I bet that will make a difference.

^good idea. My big ships tend to have more defenses than weapons anyway, because they are built for defense over offense.

I want to have my CIA overthrow unfriendly third world governments. Why can't I do that?

I think there should be a push for "support" parts to add to a ship. Parts that would only fit on large and up sized ships. Something like "adds shields to all ships" and fits only on a cap ship. Would better support the mixing of fleet sizes

I dont even want to think about trying to fight DL with these.

actually a group of small ships should be able to take out a group of caps becouse the small ships have more fire power that being said no small ships for that matter no large ship could have sank the yamoto during world war 2

that being said a b17 droping bombs on it blew it up when one of the bombs found the magaizine

for those of you who don't know that is where they keep the gunpowder

capital ships are way more powerful then a fleet of small ones
defense is the key here

small ships can have an attack of maybe 30 each tops (with high tech weapons!)
huge ships can have 80 defense without much effort (defense tech is MUCH cheaper then the offense tech)
so the small ships will never even leave a scratch on the huge one and they will be blows to peaces without the loss of a single capital ship

small fighters are just useless in lategame

(and its a LOT easier to pack engines on large ships while having defense, try some engines on a small one and you dont have space left for attack/defense)

Megavolt, that's very true. The issue here is that the AI doesn't seem to do this in the same way that humans do.

Small fighter are not useless, though - if you have very experienced units, they can really rack up the hitpoints, which they retain even when upgraded, and they are great for picking off transports, constructors and weaker/damaged fleets, and padding out fleets with a couple of spare logistics points.

I usually have medium ships as the backbone of my fleet in the later game; 2 mediums + 1 large seem to be the optimum fleet size, with the large having lots of defence as you say.