When to use Fleet combat or Single ship combat?

Hi!

Straight from wiki - Ship combat:

In DA I've used fleets od ships quite rarely. Mostly it was in situation where I needed to quickly kill some ships in opponent's fleet, because my defenses were not high enough to withstand two or more attacks of his whole fleet without losing my ship.

BR,  Iztok

Even in DA and TA, isn't there still some advantage to using fleets if you have notably higher logistics (or just a full fleet compared to a partial one)?

I don't watch my numbers very closely, but I have a sloppy impression that sending 10 hulls against 4 hulls that have a much stronger attack still means the fleet is a good thing. Maybe I'm confusing combat efficiency with saving myself some extra clicking? Or maybe my impression is because I still find Tough difficulty to be plenty tough?

The wiki is referring to countering enemy fleets with a single ship.  When should I use a fleet myself?  I would think that if the enemy has low firepower, don't use fleets as you will get more destroyed ships (small/medium).  Large or Huge hulls should not have this problem.

Hi!

But you need to know when you should use what. Basically there are only few different combat situations that can happen in the course of the game:

• you can match firepower of opponent's fleet with defenses on your single ship. In this situation you use single most-defense ships.
  If opponent is using defenses, you use fleets big enough to remove defenses and deal some hull damage each combat round to one of his ships (e.g. he's using ships with Y attack and 20 defenses. You have ships that have 10 attack and X defenses. You put three such ships in a fleet. First two remove his defenses, the third does hull damage).
• Firepower of opponent's fleet is larger than defenses on your single ship. In this situation you use fleets of most-defense ships and maybe add in one all-attack one, to decrease opponent's firepower ASAP.
  If opponent is also using defenses, you use fleets big enough to remove defenses and deal some hull damage each combat round to one of his ships. If you can't make large enough fleets to deal hull damage, use single all-attack ships.
• Firepower of opponent's fleet is several times larger than defenses on your single ship. This is mostly very late game situation, when ultimate weapons are common. Here you use single all-attack suicidal ships to destroy his fleets. For clearing orbits of planets where there's no OFM you still can use most-defense ones, assuming they have enough defenses. 

But just fighting for the sake of fighting is not smart. You need to asses outcome of each battle before you start it, and the purpose you want to achieve with it. So you don't need to destroy each and every ship of your opponent, but just those you MUST. That big nasty fleet of his that's coming slowly to your planets doesn't mean a serious threat of you can fly around it and conquer opponent's planets and destroy opponent's starbases that are extending its range. And when you conquer the last of his planets, are his big nasty fleets suddenly no more just your concern, if any concern at all.

BR,  Iztok

I thought the 3 ships will use their combined attack value (assuming single weapon type) rolled against the combined defense value of the enemy fleet.  Ships do not fire individually (same weapon type) when in a fleet right?

Wrong.

Ships fire individually.

Furthermore, in DA and TA, weapons fire individually.

Sole Soul is correct about weapons firing individually. Each weapon gets an individual attack roll, at the highest priority target (attack/(defense + HP/10). This means a fleet will focus on the biggest threat until it dies, then move to the next biggest threat. That is why fleets are suicidal unless you have enough defense to tank the entire opposing fleet's attack with one ship. And if you DO have enough defense to tank their fleet, why do you need additional ships? One should do fine.

Overall, a high (not all) attack huge hull will beat almost any opposing fleet, unless you are on the wrong end of a severe tech imbalance. If you are, swarms of all attack tiny hulls are the way to go.

So as a rule of thumb, all I need to do is make sure that my combined attack power is higher than the enemy's defense, and that my highest attack units have either high defense or high HPs.  As long as these conditions are met, it doesn't really matter whether I use fleets or not.

Pretty much. Although you don't have to outgun their entire fleet defense, just outgun the strongest single-ship defense by a good margin, and always take the luck bonus when setting up your race.

Don't build a huge ship that's ALL attack, throw on some defense. Especially if you have some military bonus from mines or racial bonuses, giving up 10% of your possible attack to add double that in defenses is a great survival enhancer.

If you really want to, you can design a fleet around the new fleet modules as well. One huge (or your biggest hull, whatever) with an offense boost module, plenty of defense, and several of your best weapons. Couple that with some tiny all attack ships, and the big one takes all the fire while the tinys hand out the damage. This works because having a fleet module paints a big bullseye on your flagship. I just find it complicated and unnecessary.

Hey just to add my two cents... about ships firing individually (they do but they must get a fleet bonus)

 Often I find that the total amount of fleet offense does make a difference and causes each ship in that fleet to do more damage (even more damage than they are capable of). Many times I have noticed that large fleets of small hulled ships going against a couple of my destroyers sometimes do a higher damage roll than the single ship can.

E.G. (and I cant remember exact values, but these are prob somewhat close)

I had 2 destroyers against 9 drengin heavy fighters and 1 frigate.

My 2 destroyers had something like 25 def in all categories each, so total def was 50 50 50.Each drengin heavy fighter had about 25 missle attack. Frigate had around 50 (cant remember).

Now if each ship was rolled based only on it's own attack vs defense factor, the heavy fighters should have hardly hit, or hit at all (except for the frigate). but being the fleet attack was way up there (close to 275) vs. my total def of 50-50-50, each and every ship apparently got some huge bonuses, and i remember one of those heavy fighters did over 25 damage. But the heavy fighters during that battle were hitting my destroyers for dam almost every attack (usually 3-8 hp's). But once they lost 4-5 of their heavy fighters and fleet attack dropped down a bunch, then the heavy fighters could no longer land any damage (or very little, maybe 1 hp).

I remember reading something like this somewhere, just thought i'd mention it.

@galacticdoom

No fleet bonus.  What you're seeing is defenses depleting during a round, and replenishing in between rounds.

@galacticdoom

I thought the defenses on your ship would be 35/35/35 with 25 defenses of the proper category and twice the square root of 25.

As Sole Soul mentioned as well, defenses are depleted during a round. This was done so large numbers of small ships could take down larger ones. As such, large fleets can wear superior ships down.

As to fleet combat versus single ships:

Before version 2.0 I favoured the single all-attack massive hull approach (though some might call it exploit). You just take the largest hull in the game, install as many weapons on it as you possibly can and set it loose on the galaxy. The idea would be that the attack of the ship would wipe out your opponent at least as fast as he would take your ship out. Then, being the largest ship, you would survive the battle. As ironic as it may sound: all-attack vessels can be invulnerable.

With version 2.0 weapon techs are very, very expensive so I've switched to another 'tactic' involving fleets consisting of two parts:

1) The Ice Breaker: A large ship containing a single weapon, a fleet module and lots of defenses and improved hull points. This ship is intended to draw all the fire of the enemy fleet.

2) All-attack ships: as many high-attack ship as you can fit in your fleet. These ships won't be fired upon as long as the Ice Breaker is present so they won't need defenses. It is their job to grind down the enemy while it is occupied with your Ice Breaker.

I've found this approach to work wonders with the new version, giving defenses a place in my planning for the first time in a long while. Obviously, you need to be able to match the enemy's weapons with your defenses but seeing how expensive weaponry is to research, you can adapt in a relatively small amount of time.

Should the game progress long enough that you begin to reach the high-end weapons, it may be better to switch to the single all-attack ships of doom but until then, I've found these fleets to work well.

I hope this helps.

I thought a ship with high attack & low HPs would become the priority target?  The icebreaker would always be the last one to be hit instead of drawing fire to protect the rest of the fleet.

That's usually the case, but fleet modules change the targeting order.  IIRC, all ships with fleet modules and at least one weapon will be targeted before any other ships.  The weapon is important, because the "no-offense" ship targeting (or would that be non-targeting?) rule takes precedence over the "fleet module" targeting rule.

That's not entirely true. The fleet module modifier will adjust the targetting order, but it is still entirely possible for an all attack ship to be targetted first. Without that modifier, the targetting priority is [attack/(defense + HP/10)]. Make sure your tank of a fleet module ship isn't outscored more than 4-to-1 or so, and you should be fine.

Well, you guys have gone and gotten me all cranky again about the click overhead required for maintaining more than a few ship designs. Some ages back, I started trying to do some 'mixed fleet' compositions (mainly b/c of posts like Iztok's above). But I gave up because I didn't want to keep adding scroll bar clicks to setting Starport construction or upgrading ships. Might ought to reconsider that here in the Latter Days of GC2.

Ahh, ok i see... I was unaware of that. Figured it was something of the sort.