darkviking

Join Date 03/2006

Capital Ships vs. Fighter Swarms?

OK, I'm sure this has been discussed before -- but I wasn't around then, so I'm hoping someone will indulge me...

So far I've only been playing the GC2 campaign -- no DA, no sandbox games. I'm stubborn that way. It pretty quickly become obvious that the easiest way to beat the Dread Lords is with stacks of 4+ small ships. In every campaign game starting with "Apocalypse", I've consistently been able to take out even their Frigates and Battleships at a cost of only 1-2 small fighters per enemy ship destroyed, by having maybe 6-8 fighters in a fleet.

Now, building a fleet of 6-8 fighters is less expensive than building a capital ship. If the fighter swarm will always beat the capital ship, why bother building capital ships?

What am I missing? I mean, it's great fun to design giant dreadnoughts -- and I rather like the thought of watching a swarm of fighters helplessly smash themselves into my enormous battleship. But it seems much more likely that the opposite would happen.

Can someone explain the combat math that justifies building capital ships instead of fighter swarms?

Thanks!

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I havent played vanilla Galciv in quite a while, and Ive never played the campaign, but I dont recall being able to build 8 small ships in the same amount of time as a single medium, or even a large, unless the smalls are vastly underequipped compared to the cap ship.

If you upgrade to the current official game version (DA), and play some sandbox games, you'll find pretty much the opposite is true. Cap ships eat entire fleets of small ships for breakfast due to the new combat system, and outside of starbase strategies, there's very little good reason to build small ships over a mix of Med and large hulls. They don't cost *that* much less to build than a similarly equipped med hull, and they arent durable enough to survive even a low intensity encounter to gain XP and become even more powerful.

I havent played TA beta in a while, but it's possible that might change with the addition of all the new fleet enhancement techs.

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As I recall this was one of the problemms with the vanilla combat engine. Against a superior force swarms of small heavy weapons ships were in fact, more economical and more effective than one big gunboat. This is because each ship only gets one shot per ship, thus bunches of small ships > one big honkin ship.

If I recall correctly the math changes when you take defenses into account. If you have bunches of tiny/small attack craft each ship is likely to only be sporting one or two guns apeice. This means relatively low damage output on individual ships and thus with minimal defenses a big honkin ship with good defenses (of the proper type of course)can mop up a fleet of small attack craft.

This lack of defense is one of 2 glaring weaknesses with the dread lords, the other being thier complete lack of logistics. I would assume that these weaknesses were included on purpose by the dev team so the player could have a snowballs chance in hell of defeating the dreadlords in ship to ship combat.

With all of that being said, if/when you upgrade to DA/TA (which I would highly reccomend BTW) all of this discussion becomes largely moot since each GUN gets one shot and if the shot from the first gun vaporizes the target the next gun picks a new target. The ships also fire simultaneously so each ship is garunteed to get off one volley. Because of these changes in DA/TA the dread lords become MUCH more terrifying not because thier ships are stronger than vanilla but because you take hideous losses no matter how you try to attack them. Really until you get significantly down the tech tree you pretty much have to treat dread lords like a force of nature, that is to say you try to get the hell out of the way instead of trying to fight them

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Anyways hope I answered your question somewhere in there

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Hm. I do have DA installed, but I guess the new combat system doesn't apply to the original campaign? That's kind of disappointing -- I would have expected that, after upgrading to DA, everything would use the DA combat system??? Anyway, I'm done with the campaign now, and I'm not about to replay it just so the Dread Lords can kick my butt even harder than before -- plus, the campaign just wasn't that great (except for the Apocalypse and Deception missions!)

I definitely agree, if cap ships get a shot per gun instead of just one shot per ship, the balance would change drastically.

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I have the latest and greatest TA and its the same way to be honest. Its called the old suicide technique.

If the enemy has a superior fleet you make small ships with all weapons and suicide them (getting first attack) into the big fleet destroying 1 of their ships at a time, if you can't build up enough weapons on a single ship to defeat one of their defenses on 1 of their single ships you need to make mediums or research higher weapons.

Capital ships aren't really meant to take on a fleet of 8 small heavy fighters by themselves. The idea behind them is to have medium defenses and lots of your own small fighters with heavy weaponry escorting them. That way your capital ship gains experience and hit points through all the battles and when all your small ships gets destroyed after a big fleet battle it can run around destroying all the single defenders guarding their planets from invasion with ease while you build the reinforcing small ships. And that is the gimpness of the capital ships basically going untouched while taking out the defenders in orbit around planets.

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hi all

i just bought the vanilla game and have updated to latest vesion.

can anyone tell me if the vanilla game includes all the battle machanics of the expansions?

cheers

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It doesn't.

That's why it's the base game and the updated game mechanics are in the expansions.

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Hm. I do have DA installed, but I guess the new combat system doesn't apply to the original campaign?

No, it doesn't. That's mainly because they're really different games, as opposed to expansions. When you fire up GC2, you'll see a button on the splash screen labeled "switch chapters" or something like that. That changes between GC2:Dread Lords (DL) and GC2:Dark Avatar (DA). If you play DL, you don't see any of the DA changes. You're still playing DL. If you switch chapters and play DA, then you will see all the new features in that game.

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what about large ships vs small ships? I know it seems like an odd question, butafter several games on normal difficulty, the AI has defeated me several times with large amounts of miniaturization and medium hull ships. Is it just a problem with a lack of adaption to different weapon styles or are medium hull ships which can be built faster more effective than huge ships which take many turns to build?

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The breakpoint between large vs. small varies widely depending on a great number of factors. The MAIN important thing about large ships is not specifically their combat power, but their greater capacity for ENGINES! Like the game says, "Honor, courage, bravery, integrity, none of these things matter if you cannot get to the battle!".

Thus, size matters not. You should always build the best ship you can in the shortest time you can that can still get to the battle. Building tiny fighters with no movement on a massive industrial planet in the interior is a massive waste (you only get one a turn, and it will never reach the battle). Building gigantic dreadnoughts on a pathetic frontier colony will never happen. The size of the ship is completely secondary to your ability to get it produced and into the fight by any means necessary. As these factors vary hugely under the plethora of circumstances you may find yourself in, there is no one solution that always fits. Just remember:

"Honor, courage, bravery, integrity, none of these things matter if you cannot get to the battle!"

There are times when the best ship you can possibly build is a completely unarmed, engineless tiny hull. It won't do a damn thing and it costs next to nothing, but your enemy still must waste a move shooting it down before he can even consider invading. I have held off vastly superior forces with this tactic: The ship costs practically nothing to produce, consumes no maintenance at all, and even the crappiest planet can produce one every turn, so I can just pile them up en-masse, forcing the enemy to blast through stacks of these worthless hulls one move at a time, completely stalling a massive 5-ship fleet with 300 firepower.

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smaller ships can be usefully for offense...but they suck for DEF. Lack of hit points and small hull space for shields, armor etc. as for the speed issue... I chose the +2 speed ability so not having engines matters not. In fact that just means theres more room for weapons <@

) <---thats a clown with a hat btw.

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"There are times when the best ship you can possibly build is a completely unarmed, engineless tiny hull. It won't do a damn thing and it costs next to nothing, but your enemy still must waste a move shooting it down before he can even consider invading. I have held off vastly superior forces with this tactic: The ship costs practically nothing to produce, consumes no maintenance at all, and even the crappiest planet can produce one every turn, so I can just pile them up en-masse, forcing the enemy to blast through stacks of these worthless hulls one move at a time, completely stalling a massive 5-ship fleet with 300 firepower."

The Computer tried to pull this shit against me, it's really easy to counter all you have to do is split your massive fleet into separate ships, 1 ship destorys the cannon fodder, the others swoop in for the kill

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I tend to like bigpopa8's response. To me it feels a lot more "realistic" to combine large hull Battleships with light Destroyers as a screen, then to just mass the same type of ship.

But since I am new to the game I do not know if this is a viable strategy. That is why I want to ask experienced players if this is actually economically advantageous. Or if during the fleet battles, will the Battleship be targeted and the fighter escort be ignored in certain situations?

Note that I am only refering to building "general" combat fleets here, and not specialized ships like Norfleet's empty hull, scouts, fast transport ships etc...

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I tend to like bigpopa8's response. To me it feels a lot more "realistic" to combine large hull Battleships with light Destroyers as a screen, then to just mass the same type of ship. But since I am new to the game I do not know if this is a viable strategy. That is why I want to ask experienced players if this is actually economically advantageous. Or if during the fleet battles, will the Battleship be targeted and the fighter escort be ignored in certain situations?Note that I am only refering to building "general" combat fleets here, and not specialized ships like Norfleet's empty hull, scouts, fast transport ships etc...

I agree that any good combat system should reward a combined approach. I haven't actually played past plain vanilla DL, but unfortunately this version seems to uniformally favor using smaller ships. As to your question above, when I've had combined fleets, the computer tends to target my larger class ships first. There's no sense of any kind of "screen."

- woolfe

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I would like to report a great succes in combined fleets during my current game.

A little backgound: playing a small map in TA as Altarian with 7 AI's. Currently the two super powers are the Terrans and me. Humans were very exapnsive and aggressive from the start declaering war on just about everyone (including me). After a brief war with Terran I brokered a peace, then I attacked the Yor (who was in 3rd-4th place). I built and researched almost exculsively missels + point defence since Yor was using missles. After I succesfully defeated Yor I beghun upgrating my economy and production and made a BIG mistake by paying little attention to Terrans.

To make a long story short the terrans declared war on me again and I was compleatly unprepared since they had Beam attack and point defence while my antiquated fleets were designed to fight the Yor (missle attack+ponit defence) not to mention they surpassed me in logistics and hull size (I had medium they had large). Luckily I had just researched the Altarian defence module.

And so I decided a radical new aproach to fleet design. The first component is a (medium hull) "Carrier" class with a lot of Shield, very little Beam attack and most importantly the Defense Module. The second component is a Tiny hull fighter class that was filled with beam attack. Btw my beam and shield research was very little so the components were first generation.

Using this combination (1 carrier->5-logistics 4 fighters->2-logistics each 13/14logistics fleet ) I was amaizingly able to take on fleets that had double and in some cases 3 times more HP! The way it works is the AI focuses all it's fire on the "Carrier" which is packed with shield defense (and defense module) and ignores the fragile fighters. Often times a dammaged Carrier can be returned to the docks for repair and be replaced by a newly produced or repaired one. Furthermore the Carriers level up and gain even more HP making them more durrable.

In this way I was able to put up a good fight against Far advanced Terran fleets untill they surpassed mine by 4-5 times in HP. Once that happened I quickly traded a planet I had just took from them in exchange for peace. This is obviousely going to be temporary before I can catch up with them in weaponds tech and logistics so that I may have my Revenge !

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I'm new still and playing at beginner/normal level. What has been working for me is medium ships with equal amounts of offense and defense. Preferably an offense for a defense they don't have along with a defense for their offense.

The medium/equal weapons and defense seems to be working so far.. but I am certainly going to try some new things that were mentioned above.

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In DL Each ship can only target one other ship. Considering that even small ships can sport an impressive amount of weapons at higher tech levels, it becomes more advantageous to build several small attack vessels rather than an expensive huge hull.

The reason behind this is variance. The higher the numbers on the attack and defence values, the more likely a discrepancy between them will result in the destruction of your ship. In short, higher variance means more risk and reduces the value of defence. Bigger hulls lose value as a result and you may be better off using smaller hulls where the damage is limited by the size of the ship.

This means smaller hulls have an edge over bigger ones.

In the expansions, the combat system changed:

- Ships can target multiple targets.
- Defences are now matched against the attack of the entire opposing fleet.

This has resulted in a change of power among the hull sizes. When both sides wipe each other out, the ship with the largest number in the denominator fraction of the HP will survive with 1HP. So, as a result, the largest ship in the area is invulnerable as long as it can wipe out the enemy in at least the same round as it would be destroyed itself.

A second consideration is logistics. Whereas in DL fleets where an asset, now they can become a liability. You see, only the last ship is saved with 1HP in the case of mutual destruction. Some players are advocating the use of single huge hulls bristling with weapons so they'll wipe out every opposition in one turn and thus remain invulnerable.

Obviously, this is a personal opinion and other players have had success with other approaches I'm sure. The single ship of invulnerable and doomy death is just my approach to the current system.

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The combat AI in TA was tweaked with the introduction of all the fleet modules. This *radically* changes tactical combat, as Mihai noted. A ship with fleet modules is, from what I can tell, always the top priority in a fight. Makes sense, right? If you can destroy that ship, every other ship in the fleet is penalized.

If you can destroy that ship. If.

As a human fighting against that AI, you need to do three things to see absolutely ridiculous success in heavy fighting:

1. Research a fleet module. Doesn't matter what type, pick whatever's best for you. If you're feeling froggy, research a couple. A +speed, +attack pairing will let you shuttle around a more powerful force faster than the ships could manage themselves.

2. Research defensive techs. Keeping them even with your offensive techs is suddenly a good idea.

3. Have a ship type at least as large as the biggest AI type, and ideally two larger than their average. If they're throwing small hulls left and right, the core of your fleet ideally should be a large hull. Mediums will work fine, but they can't take quite as much pounding. Early on, a cargo hull with several +health modules could be a really, really sick concept. Lots of space, lots of health thanks to your modules, and it's going to gain levels (and thus even MORE health) with every single battle.

Create the "carrier" ship as stated, and make either Tiny or Small-hulled fighters. The carrier should have nothing but health/fleet modules and defenses. No weapons. Normally your fighters would get whacked left and right, but because there's a fleet module on the carrier, it's target #1 for anything else out there.

You save on hull costs because Tiny/Small are the cheapest things out there. They pop really fast, except now they're not getting popped. At all.

You save on engines because you can stick a +3 speed module in the carrier. Engines are EXPENSIVE and you're getting 100-150 credits per ship worth of free engine. Ever see a speed 10 Tiny ship before? How about 20 of them?! When you can run down your enemies you effectively *are* in two places at the same time.

You save on weapons if you stick a +attack module in there. Once you get past the first generation, weapons are pretty damn expensive too.

You save on maintaining your ships because as long as you have the big carriers pre-made, you can crank out or upgrade your Tiny hulls to current standards whenever the war starts.

Toss in a few transports behind to clean up, and you've got a war machine for a fraction of the cost of your enemies.

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What does the wiki say about combat in TA?

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MarvinKosh

Join Date 08/2005

+87

As far as meat shield carriers go, they need at least one weapon to be worth targeting first. An unarmed ship with fleet defence modules won't be targeted until all the armed ships have been destroyed.

You also don't need to limit this strategy to just small and tiny fighters because larger ships with weapons on board can be just as logistics-effective and cost-effective as a number of smaller ships. As a bonus, once the ships behind the carrier have gained some experience and therefore hitpoints, they are worth upgrading to more expensive models because they can take the punishment and will be able to survive without a defence-laden decoy.

As I've said previously, the downside is that your carrier can get pretty expensive to make and to maintain, and if your enemy brings sufficient end-game firepower to bear it can be blown apart leaving the defenceless ships behind it to be picked off.

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