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[Megas]

Another big advantage for Falcon over destroyers aside from range:  PPT.  I generally bring Falcons instead of destroyers because I need something that can fight for a while without needed to retreat due to not enough PPT.

[Goumindong]

A wolf costs 5 points to deploy. It has 150(250) dissipation, 2250 capacity, and a medium energy slot. A conquest costs 40 points to deploy. So you get 8 wolf for every one conquest*.

The conquest has 1200(1700) dissipation and 20,000 cap. So 8 wolf beat its dissipation by 300, which means they have a higher maximum dps. They have slightly less capacity but are also a lot harder to hit

Is 8 wolf worth a conquest? Maybe, maybe not.

What if we start looking at better frigates? 5 tempest? 10 LP Brawlers? Different capitals? Well the conquest has the highest dissipation and lowest deployment point cost of any capital. So everything else is specific to fleet composition. But if frigates has the same range as capitals you would never use capitals.


*strangely this is also perfect alignment with fuel use!

[Asherogar]

Yeah,I agree with you about braindead capital spam and that game actively encourages it,thats awful and I really hope next update resolve it. But your reasons...

Other peoples already told you about range/hull size,so I just advise you to take a look at the carriers. Drower/Sparks spam specifically. That what you get when armaments used on larger hulls dont have bonuses. Players just find ship with best slots/DP ratio and start spamming it. Why not?

So why capital better then a bunch of frigates with the same DP? I think main reason is that AI's combat awarness greatly decreases with increase of battle scale. AI at the large slow ship with great range has far less reason and opportunities to rush at the bunch of enemies.

[Plantissue]

Nominally larger range for nominally slower ships is understandable, but the relationship is very warped towards larger range, at least for fleet on fleet action. Non- Safety Override frigates will have to take about 10 seconds of being within capital ship weapon range before getting into range themselves. Sometimes they will even get destroyed on the way out. AI frigates which can't dodge shots, or otherwise have some sort of special ability to otherwise mitigate damage, or suicide into capitals, be obsolete when facing capital ships. The range increase is excessive.

It's not really a problem in that most of the slower ships have lower burn speed, so they are more CP efficient to compensate as long as you don't see a problem that eventually all player fleets will most likely be either "fast enough" or "powerful enough" with nothing in between.

It doesn't help that fleet cap is based on fleet size, not deployment size, so you will naturally gravitate towards capital ships. For instance I rather like to collect the Shepherd in my fleet, but with a 30 ship limit it means that there is only a limited amount of slots to take per battle cap, and I suspect the problem would be even worse for those with large battle size.

[Nysalor]

I rather think that frigates being nonviable as a line-of-battle combatant in the face of capital ship firepower and range is a feature, not a bug. Frigates have been incapable of facing proper warships as far back as the Age of Sail. Destroyers have

[sotanaht]

A wolf costs 5 points to deploy. It has 150(250) dissipation, 2250 capacity, and a medium energy slot. A conquest costs 40 points to deploy. So you get 8 wolf for every one conquest*.

The conquest has 1200(1700) dissipation and 20,000 cap. So 8 wolf beat its dissipation by 300, which means they have a higher maximum dps. They have slightly less capacity but are also a lot harder to hit

Is 8 wolf worth a conquest? Maybe, maybe not.

What if we start looking at better frigates? 5 tempest? 10 LP Brawlers? Different capitals? Well the conquest has the highest dissipation and lowest deployment point cost of any capital. So everything else is specific to fleet composition. But if frigates has the same range as capitals you would never use capitals.


*strangely this is also perfect alignment with fuel use!

The part you forget in dps race terms is that one side dies.  If 8 Wolfs fought a Conquest in exactly even terms, the Wolfs would lose every single time, because once the Conquest has destroyed 1 wolf they lose 1/8th of their DPS, meanwhile the Wolfs can't reduce the Conquest's DPS until they completely destroy all 8/8ths of it.  In practice what tends to happen is that frigates die before they even get close to the Capital.

Another issue is Armor.  Obviously your numbers weren't taking into account armor/hull values, but the simple fact is that medium and small guns rarely do much damage to cruiser or capital-grade armor in the first place.  Not simply a battle of "who has more armor", but rather small guns are all but negligable and mediums take a very very long time to do any damage.  In practice you also have to deal with armor zones.  A swarm of frigates will be fighting the capital ship from all sides, meaning they will be evenly damaging the armor on all sides.  A capital will usually end up focusing a single point on the enemy's armor, leading to faster kills even with the same weapons/flux/armor/hull stats.

Ultimately, I think that even without the range extensions, Capital ships win out in nearly every metric.  This comes out in practice as well, as I often don't equip DTC/ITU at all on my capitals, and I still consider them more valuable than a swarm of frigates.  So in other words the range difference isn't actually necessary to balance frigates vs capitals, as the capitals already have plenty of advantages.  I think that if DTC/ITU didn't exist at all, things might actually be more balanced between capitals and frigates.  People would still use capitals, but they would use more small ships as well which are mostly rendered obsolete outside of niche uses as is.  Combat would often require "hammer and anvil" type strategies, where a faster ship flanks and cuts off the retreat of enemy small ships dancing in and out of range.

[Tackywheat1]

*has fleet of mudskipper mk IIs armed with gauss cannons*

[sotanaht]

*has fleet of mudskipper mk IIs armed with gauss cannons*

Fighters.  Not even mass fighters, like 2 wings of fighters will kill that entire fleet.

[TaLaR]

8 Wolves with player-equivalent quality of piloting would wipe the floor with a player-equivalent Conquest. They'd just need to use skimmer properly and back off when focused (there are 7 others to press attack while you recover). I don't think even if Conquest had combat skills while Wolves didn't that would change the outcome, except maybe corner camping case.

But AI Wolves aren't nearly that good at self-preservation. And while 8 vs 1 is doable scenario for Wolves, 40 vs 5 is not. You can only pack ships so densely (while efficient skimmer usage necessitates somewhat loose formation), not to mention it's above fleet size limit of 30. 40 Wolves is a horribly inefficient deployment due to 10 officer limit as well.

[Amoebka]

As someone who prefers to spam cruisers over capitals, I feel like this discussion is focusing way too hard on weapon ranges. The main reason I feel forced to not field smaller ships isn't the range disadvantage, it's the ridiculous carrier spam.

Carriers are just blatantly better than anything else right now. Even in AI fleets, that can't spam the optimal drover/spark/lux combo. AI doesn't understand how to deal with fighter clouds, at all. It will fire its main weapons and torpedos at them, mising every single shot, it will turn to face a wing of fighters, exposing their unshielded behinds to 3 dagger wings, etc. Even something as trivial as mining drones greatly increases fleet power, simply because they will mess up with decision making of enemy ships so much, and later game opponents field much scarier things.

Destroyers and frigates simply stand no chance whatsoever in carrier-heavy lategame fights (which is all of them) - they get oneshot by a single bomber fly-by or harassed out of this world by fighters.

[Asherogar]

As someone who prefers to spam cruisers over capitals, I feel like this discussion is focusing way too hard on weapon ranges. The main reason I feel forced to not field smaller ships isn't the range disadvantage, it's the ridiculous carrier spam.

Carriers are just blatantly better than anything else right now. Even in AI fleets, that can't spam the optimal drover/spark/lux combo. AI doesn't understand how to deal with fighter clouds, at all. It will fire its main weapons and torpedos at them, mising every single shot, it will turn to face a wing of fighters, exposing their unshielded behinds to 3 dagger wings, etc. Even something as trivial as mining drones greatly increases fleet power, simply because they will mess up with decision making of enemy ships so much, and later game opponents field much scarier things.

Destroyers and frigates simply stand no chance whatsoever in carrier-heavy lategame fights (which is all of them) - they get oneshot by a single bomber fly-by or harassed out of this world by fighters.

There was a post about fighters, missiles and PD,but in short:PD right now - useless garbage. Only decent one is flak cannon and thats a medium ballistic slot and again its only decent. Fighters need to be put in pseudo 3D,like give them huge evasive chance against primary weapons,but also make them a lot more fragile. And yeah,give PD a buff so they can effectively fight off fighters.

[TaLaR]

Carriers are just blatantly better than anything else right now. Even in AI fleets, that can't spam the optimal drover/spark/lux combo. AI doesn't understand how to deal with fighter clouds, at all. It will fire its main weapons and torpedos at them, mising every single shot, it will turn to face a wing of fighters, exposing their unshielded behinds to 3 dagger wings, etc. Even something as trivial as mining drones greatly increases fleet power, simply because they will mess up with decision making of enemy ships so much, and later game opponents field much scarier things.

Destroyers and frigates simply stand no chance whatsoever in carrier-heavy lategame fights (which is all of them) - they get oneshot by a single bomber fly-by or harassed out of this world by fighters.

Not really on per ship basis (all examples skill-less, without SO):
- Any capital under player control can shutdown and kill an Astral easily. 4x TL Paragon can kill almost all of it's fighters in single failed attack run, then proceed to kill the helpless carrier.
- Any combat cruiser can kill Heron or Mora. Most of them can kill some Astral builds too, if they try hard enough.
- Most DEs can kill a Drover easily enough (but not Medusa and Shrike, these are extremely vulnerable to fighters).

Advantage of carriers comes from easy stacking and AI being incompetent at countering fighters: you just need to either shoot them down on approach or in some cases just accept damage and rush the carrier.
AI simply doesn't use main guns efficiently enough to clear fighter swarms, surely at least Devastator is designed explicitly to do exactly that (just checked once more, Devastator is funnily enough, horrible at the job, just gets blocked by flares).

[Grievous69]

As someone who prefers to spam cruisers over capitals, I feel like this discussion is focusing way too hard on weapon ranges. The main reason I feel forced to not field smaller ships isn't the range disadvantage, it's the ridiculous carrier spam.

Carriers are just blatantly better than anything else right now. Even in AI fleets, that can't spam the optimal drover/spark/lux combo. AI doesn't understand how to deal with fighter clouds, at all. It will fire its main weapons and torpedos at them, mising every single shot, it will turn to face a wing of fighters, exposing their unshielded behinds to 3 dagger wings, etc. Even something as trivial as mining drones greatly increases fleet power, simply because they will mess up with decision making of enemy ships so much, and later game opponents field much scarier things.

Destroyers and frigates simply stand no chance whatsoever in carrier-heavy lategame fights (which is all of them) - they get oneshot by a single bomber fly-by or harassed out of this world by fighters.

There was a post about fighters, missiles and PD,but in short:PD right now - useless garbage. Only decent one is flak cannon and thats a medium ballistic slot and again its only decent. Fighters need to be put in pseudo 3D,like give them huge evasive chance against primary weapons,but also make them a lot more fragile. And yeah,give PD a buff so they can effectively fight off fighters.

And yet some people still don't understand clearly. PD is NOT meant to destroy fighters quickly. Sure Burst PD can kill them without much trouble but it would be stupid just to equip a couple of PD Lasers and then be immune to fighters. I don't get why people have these crazy suggestions in which the whole mechanics of the game have to be changed, introduce RNG in combat to make it frustrating and more needlessly complex, for basically no gain. Put actual weapons that are good vs fighters then see how quickly they die.

[Amoebka]

under player control

Sorry, but I feel like this invalidates a big part of your argument. 1 vs 1 fights in sim with player control and actual in-game battles have nothing in common. Any player can beat an Onslaught with a single Tempest in sims, but you can only control 1 Tempest in a fight - and your AI companions aren't nearly as capable.

You can't really just compare raw stats when you are talking game balance. The absolute majority of ships in any given fight are AI-controlled, so the ease of use for AI is a huge stat in itself. Carriers are super easy for AI, big ships are somewhat easy, and small ships are impossible. There's your reason for why capitals are better.

[Asherogar]

And yet some people still don't understand clearly. PD is NOT meant to destroy fighters quickly. Sure Burst PD can kill them without much trouble but it would be stupid just to equip a couple of PD Lasers and then be immune to fighters. I don't get why people have these crazy suggestions in which the whole mechanics of the game have to be changed, introduce RNG in combat to make it frustrating and more needlessly complex, for basically no gain. Put actual weapons that are good vs fighters then see how quickly they die.

Okay,Ill admite I was not very clear with my suggestions,but you are really exaggerate. I never suggested buffing PD to that extend. And can you please tell me about this secret weapons that good vs fighters? I find a really hard time find such weapons aside from Locusts and my own fighters. Usually its more effective to just use your primary weapons to deal with incoming fighters or
spam Locusts if they already swarming you. Far more effective than rely on PD/Anti-air to have a chance to deal with lone half-dead interseptor.