Frigates,cruisers and destroyers: Are they usefull?

[stinkoman]

Ive owned MoO2 for about 3 weeks and after reading this board and following the democracy game have gotten a fairly good feel for the game. However, i keep wondering if there are any uses for ships smaller than Battleships after the early portions of the game.

It seems like most people just use them as early gunboats and then build only battleships and better for the rest of the game.

Are there any good designs for smaller ships? Please list any good designs you might have for frigates thru cruisers and what the ship can be used for.

Thankyou.

[RNiner]

I use Destroyers (and later Cruisers) as Anti-Missile Rocket carriers for when I attack planets and enemies with lots of missile ships. 15-20 rockets is enough to stop each planetary barrage.

[vmxa1]

Once you do not use missiles ships, I see no reason to make smaller than battleship size. In fact even larger than battleship, is not required.

If I am attacking planets, I can take it down with little or no lose or I will not attack it. IOW I am not concerned about the planets defeses.

[Whoha]

When you have the industry to build the bigger ships theres no point to build the smaller ones, but yea early game all the types are useful.

Of course later on i'll still have and build cruiser designs, cruisers are pretty good.

[Brutalisk]

stinkoman: for multiplayer games, even smaller ships have their uses

It depends what your "Strategy" is and what the setup of you and your opponent's is...

[stinkoman]

Thanks for the responses all. I spent a few hours today looking through the forum and found a few uses for cruisers which makes them useful well into the game

Early missle boats cruisers

would build two of them in the early game and go monster hunting with them to claim the good planets. Only monster that can swat them down is the dragon. Havnt tested it to much though.

Capture ships

someone recommended that cruisers loaded with shuttles made great capture ships. havnt really tried capturing ships yet but it sounds like a sound design.

flagships

load a cruiser with defensive modules, pd and a gravwell(not sure what its called in game, dissipitators?) and then put leaders on them.

Destroyers also seem to make good missle boats and as RNiner pointed out, the smaller ships also make good anti-missle defenders as the ai on hard/impossible seems to love using missles and fighters. Some posters also said they make early decent beam ships with mass drivers.

Since my beam battleships usual get creamed at these difficulties i think i might start throwing some anti missile ships into the mix.

After reading through the forum it seems like most people use battleships as there front line beamers and the smaller boats as missle boats/capture ships/picket defenders. I also think that i probably need to utilize leaders better so the flagship design sounds like a good idea too.

So it seems that once you reach mid game and have decent industry that frigates and destroyers become obsolete. Is that right? does anyone have good early designs for frigates/destroyers for the early game? Thanks for all your replies.

[Dunnagan]

Originally posted by stinkoman
So it seems that once you reach mid game and have decent industry that frigates and destroyers become obsolete. Is that right? does anyone have good early designs for frigates/destroyers for the early game? Thanks for all your replies.

If you are going up against a fleet technologically above yours, ..I'd fit all those early small ships with a one-shot stack of interceptors or a two shot stack of your best missiles. Fire and retreat the small ships before turn 2, though

[Whoha]

Friates:
Battlepods
As many mirv nukes as you can cram into them.

They build fast, and hit hard. 12 of these guys can take most monsters no problem.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Whoha
Friates:
Battlepods
As many mirv nukes as you can cram into them.

They build fast, and hit hard. 12 of these guys can take most monsters no problem.

That has always worked for me as well.

[stinkoman]

Thanks, ill give the mirv frigates a try in my next game.

[bakalov]

Another use of frigates - sometimes the AI will send only transports to attack you, or the transports may fall behind the main forces. You can rush-buy almost empty frigate on such planet, and it will kill all of the transports

[redazncommieDXP]

destroyers can be rigged to be very fast moving bomb craft, carrying as many of the biggest bombs you got as you can, and you can get a pack of them. they also draw a lot of missile fire when attacking planets because they can cut up planetary defenses like paper. (usual name: "bomb craft" followed by model number)

cruisers with beams and scanners make good support/ams/fighter killers. whenever there's like 20 fighters giving your bomb craft hell, just perform a backscratching. decent firepower, too. (usual name: spider or cobra, followed by model number)

battleships are the backbone of your fleet, though. these are the ships you use against other ships. starbases are easily captured, and planets are best bombed into submission. i either load these up with guns or with missiles. guns are called king vipers or scorpions, missiles are serpents.

cruisers can also be loaded up with missiles.

cruisers can carry tractor beams and warp dissipators- there you have an interdictor that you can use to capture enemy fleets.

[Old n Slow]

Frigates are of course, the better (cheaper) searchers.

Second use for my frigate is the "hang around boat." Early in the game I'll have a couple of missle cruisers fire all of their missles and the frigate heads sideway & to the rear of the battle. Second turn the cruisers fire their last salvo & run away (meanwhile they've soaked up two rounds of beams.) The frigate zooms to the far corner, away from the action. Start of round three, only the frigate and the launched missles (and targets remain.) If the targets fall -- great; if not retreat & return.

This way even crummy stuff might prevail.

Destroyers are top of the line for a non-Star Base Planet -- so I'll often have to build one when I'm surprise and something is attacking (and the fleet is out of position.)

Once the money and production power justify the larger ships, it doesn't make sense to continue to produce the smaller boats; once the command points become a constraint, it makes sense to retire the little guys in favor of the largers ones.

[stinkoman]

Thanks for the excellent posts all.

Last night i played and won an 8 players/huge/hard game with a creative/+2 research/rhw race testing some of the ideas.

Around turn 80 started on missile cruisers instead of my usual missile battleship and sent them to an amoeba expecting an easy win. First salvo went off and did over half damage yet next turn it captured one cruiser and then the next turn both ships turned on my last cruiser and destroyed it before the last salvo could even hit the amoeba. crap, didnt even know monsters could capture ships. I think if i had used one of old n slow's hanger outer frigs i could have at least survived long enough for the last salvo to hit or maybe even save both cruisers.

I also noticed that the ai seemed to prefer going after my smaller ships first, so i decided to make smaller ships with pd to act as fighter/missile screens as redazncommie suggested. Made a destroyer but made the mistake of trying to fit one autofire md on the ship at the expense of pd. I learned that a destroyer could make a decent early beam ship or a good anti missile ship early, yet it didnt have enough space to make either.

On the other hand, i learned that one of the benefits of smaller ships is that they allow for specialization of ships early on before you have lots of command. Normally i would build battleships and fit them with pd which took space from offensive beams. Yet with a fairly cheaper destroyer cruiser screen, i could make my boat pure offense. Especially useful when you get plasma cannons which can make the difference between having just 2 or having 4 or even 5 cannons installed.

At that point my game had advanced enough where i could support all battleships, so i just switched to the traditional all battelship fleet with the occasional missile cruiser thrown in, though battles didnt last long enough for them to be effective.

Feeling bold, i decided to try impossible thinking that since the last game wasnt too difficult, i could handle impossible. Ouch. I was blown out of the sky around turn 270 by an enormous elerian fleet of around 30 battleships while i had around 12. The AI loved to put missiles and torpedoes on its ships, which simply overwhelmed my beam ships, even at the plasma cannon/lightning generator stage. Not only where my ships getting blown out of the water by missile barages, enemy planets were much better defended than on hard, and i found that beams which had worked well before, often didnt cut it againts the radiation shields and figher/missile/batteries that the ai now had.

Next game i think im going to seriously build anti missile cruisers, and include more missiles in my later stage fleets. Going to also try out the anti-missile rocket ships to see how that stacks up. Also going to try putting fighters on smaller ships and later building carrier battleships to defend against the large number of fighters that AI sent against my ships. And to counter the better defenses of planets, going to try redazncommies excellent destroyer/bomber ship.

Thanks again for posting your designs and thoughts. If you see any problem with my observations or just want to post additional insigts please do.

[Old n Slow]

12BB?

After I have 2-4 BB, I'll have the tech for titans.

Also 12 vs 30 aren't such bad odds, unless your quality is... (not so hot.) Elerian boats shouldn't be that high powered.

You may want to go refit your ships after they can miniturize things & when better armor becomes available.

As nice as phasors and plasma weapons go, I usually pack in mass drivers (and later gauss cannons) while nabbing the better shields with my creative research. When the titans come on line, I'll try to pack in one or two of the computer upgrades, making the beams more effective.

In fact I often get phasors VERY late into the game -- if I'm getting my weaponry from the force field line, then the incentive to research the physics line is reduced -- I'll hold off that stuff until late (get battle scanner medium timeframe or so -- in time for the early BB beamers.)

[vmxa1]

You may have titan tech, but non creatives won't. Even if I have titan, I have no reason to build them.

Phasors are only 2000RP and Gauss is 2750. I pretty much never use Gauss, since phasors are fine, until disrupters.

[Old n Slow]

My primary purpose in achieving Gause is the miniturization of mass drivers; level III shields come free when the MD's get auto fire.

A couple of FF techs & the Hvy Auto Fire MD's drop from 20 space (the major constraint) each down to 8 -- allowing a lot more firepower. So I just continue "investing" in this line.

When I get to Hvy Auto Fire Gauss -- it really is time ask for lights out -- three of my boats will take out a row of the ai ships coming to visit.

I think that a similar story exists for the physics line, but with the creative side benes, one gets guns AND shields vs guns (and comm?).

[stinkoman]

Well, after about a week i went back and tried the impossible game from a save and won. I made the mistake of attacking smaller races while letting the elerians grow unchecked over a third of the galaxy. This time i launched a surprise attack against their sod and won with only 2 losses. After that, i was able to crush the rest of the galaxy and win my first impossible with vanilla humans.

As for smaller ships, my next three games i used a creative research race and lost. I kept trying to race up the tree to get robo miners and pollution processors, yet by the time i finally got them so i could build battleships, the sakras or silicoids would come destroy me with 4 battleships while i had only minimal beam weapons and no battleships. Seems like the lower cost of smaller ships combined with better technology is the better way to go then to try to compete with the builder races early on by racing for a battleship.

I tested the gauss cannon path on an average game last night and was surprised at how effective they were. Usually i just went the plasma cannon path like everyone else, but the extra shields and ground troop/spy bonuses one gets with shields for creative races definetly makes it a powerfull approach.

A bit off topic, how good are the beam weapons on the physics tree? I read on the forum that lasers/fusions make good early beam weapons and of course plasmas are popular, but what about the neutrons and gravitons? are they worth using or should they just be skipped? And vxma, why dont you usually build titans? Are they just too expensive or do you find battleships to be effective enough to win most impossible games? Just want to know your opinions on why.

Thanks for the responses all.

[vmxa1]

Battleships are plenty. Are you losing ships in combat? Probably not, so why spend more time building larger ones?

Even if you lost a ship from time to time, they are easy to replace.

BTW I don't use plasma cannons either. The very early beams, could be anything, depends on the game, from laser to fusion to mass drivers. After that I use only phasors and then disrupters.

Not because one is better than another (I think they are), but I can find no reason to do otherwise. Not to mention after I get disrupters, I will soon want to race for Star gates. So convient that disrupters are on that path.

Creative races are known to need some time to get enough tech to take care of themself. If they are next to some of the bad boys, it can get hairy.

You should have gotten missile bases up and fighter garrisons and that should hold off 4 BB's early in the game.