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[LinWasTaken]

Frigates: excel in speed (aka taking those annoying checkpoints or) weaving in and out of combat.
Destroyers : too slow to chase frigates, and too weak to fight cruisers (let alone capitals) unless they somehow surround them.
I have yet to find any practical or combat use for them, other then Phaeton for its good early to mid game fuel capacity.
Cruisers : good tanks or have good carrier potential and have in my opinion the best cargo ship in the game (Colossus is Bea).
Capitals : unless surrounded, beats every other hull size in combat. are used when you want to lay siege to stations.

Edit : typo

[Grievous69]

Destroyers make for great escorts for bigger, slower ships. For example long range Enforcer and Sunder builds are useful pretty much for the whole game. They just seem kinda in the unfortunate spot for skills where they don't get as much bonuses as other hull sizes. I'd honestly say frigates are the weakest, simply because there's so many of them which suck after early game. There's like a couple of them that work in any scenario, and even then they need skills.

[Amoebka]

Destroyers are decent, they just don't ulitize officers/s-mods as efficiently as larger ships. You can bypass the officer problem by using support doctrine or AI cores, but grinding s-mods for wide destroyer fleets is nightmarish.

[Salter]

I think most of the Midline destroyers are pretty decent. Sunders vulnerable but can mount large energy weapons allowing it to function at close or long range, loadout pending on what large energy weapon you mount in it. Hammerhead is pretty good if you outfit it with long range ballistics.

I dont normally mess with low-tech destroyers, but high-tech is okay too. The Shrike can dart into a situation and unload alot of firepower or be turned into a pretty decent laser ship. Medusa has issues though. It doesnt have enough OP to make use of its very excellent weapon mounts. Kind of gets torn apart when pressed by anything bigger than it, even when loaded out with hardened shields and heavy armor which tells me it needs to be buffed to really bring the best out of it. That or I dont really know how to build a Medusa.

The redacted destroyer is also pretty okay but needs more OP.

[Thaago]

I'd say Sunders, Hammerheads, Enforcers, Manticores, and Shrikes are all good ships that are useful all game and in many different fleet strategies, though some builds are more suited to early game and some builds more suited to late game. Medusas are slightly overpriced because of how frail their hulls are, but are good early game and make for nice player ships in that period.

Condors give maximum bays per DP but honestly just aren't that good because of their bad stats at everything, and Drovers are overpriced with their current system because it tanks their readiness (carrier skill helps, I should test out if an officered drover works, I haven't really tried them that much this patch), so I think for carriers cruisers are a better option.

Mules are honestly pretty good for the early game as they bring ok skirmish firepower on top of good logistic stats, but late game larger specialty cargo haulers are more efficient at the cost of not being able to retreat effectively.

[Draba]

Later on they also feel on the weaker side for me.

Straight shootouts, Sunder/Hammerhead/Manticore:

• Weapons are decent for the DP, but lower ITU bonus and more hulls means lots of wasted time+blocking
• Lower ITU bonus, lowish durability, middling speed: they are caught out of position and nuked pretty often. Non-beam Sunder is plain suicidal

Side cleanup/skirmishes (Medusa, Shrike):

• Not fast enough to reliably cap far points
• Take full bonus from wolfpack frigates, don't get anything against same size, only half bonus against cruiser/capital, frigates just seem better

As already mentioned, they are also bad for officer-efficiency and wolfpack/CM make frigates comparatively better. I do like Enforcer and standard Shrike, on the fence about gauss Manticore.
Overall I think destroyers could use a small boost: better wolfpack/ITU/CM scaling, 1-2 more officers by default or with the skill, any one of those could be a nice nudge.

[Megas]

I tried substituting Shrike for Tempest, but that did not work well.  Shrike is bigger and clumsier than Tempest.  Tempest can survive fights that would kill a Shrike.

[FenMuir]

Generally, your move up in ship class as the game goes on. This means that at a certain point of a casual playthrough, destroyers will the be best ships in the player's fleet. Those same ships will eventually be phased out for cruisers, and those cruisers, for capitals. Naturally, some ships are just really good a specific jobs, so they'll last longer, if not permanently, in a fleet.

My top vanilla destroyers are Unending Barrage Enforcers and Disco Medusas. The UB Enforcers have the steady firepower to clear hangar units when escorting or keep enemy flux maxed when brawling. The Disco Medusas have extreme range and can force frigates to keep their distance.

Destroyers definitely have their place, but they will be outshined be larger ships when the player can afford them.

[Draba]

Generally, your move up in ship class as the game goes on. This means that at a certain point of a casual playthrough, destroyers will the be best ships in the player's fleet. Those same ships will eventually be phased out for cruisers, and those cruisers, for capitals.

No, frigates and cruisers are good at every stage of the game.
Champion, Apogee, Eradicator, Heron, Gryphon, Doom are all great on their own and there is no capital substitute/upgrade.
Fury is excellent for punching down outside the main ball, Dominator is good but Onslaught is an upgrade for lots of things it does, Aurora/Eagle decent but might be slightly too expensive IMO.

[Daynen]

Destroyers are probably the closest thing to a "generalist" hull size in the game.  They don't excel at anything over any other class but also soften the weaknesses of each.  It doesn't help that the fleet cap is still a hard 30 (well, technically soft 30 now but no one's purposefully pushing that except temporarily to salvage a phenomenal ship) because when you have a limited number of ship slots in your fleet and the enemy continues to expand his infinitely, you NEED to squeeze as much firepower, durability and peak time as you can out of every ship...and destroyers just don't fit that bill very long.

[Salter]

Something something quantity over quality. A single frigates probably not going to defeat a paragon, but throw ten of those frigates plus some destroyers at said capital and they will pick it apart with a few casualties. Ideally, you are not taking ANY casualties, but frigates and destroyers do matter in fleet composition for late game. Especially for specialized ones like Omen, Monitor and so on.

In general you kind of want a bit of everything. Ideally, you have a fleet that has specialized ships that support and compliment the fleet as a whole. If you push yourself into just one ship type then the weaknesses of that decision become glaring and obvious after the fact when you leave the simulations.

[Thaago]

Destroyers are probably the closest thing to a "generalist" hull size in the game.  They don't excel at anything over any other class but also soften the weaknesses of each.  It doesn't help that the fleet cap is still a hard 30 (well, technically soft 30 now but no one's purposefully pushing that except temporarily to salvage a phenomenal ship) because when you have a limited number of ship slots in your fleet and the enemy continues to expand his infinitely, you NEED to squeeze as much firepower, durability and peak time as you can out of every ship...and destroyers just don't fit that bill very long.

I think its a little hard to call the entire class generalists just because several of the ships are, well, specialists that excel over other ships! But in terms of being a balance between speed, defenses, and firepower I agree, they fall into the middle for all categories before specialization. Hammerheads and Sunders are specialized for offense, and both bring more firepower per DP than most cruisers at the cost of destroyer level defenses (Artillery Sunders in particular go all the way to offense with 1400 range without an officer, light/medium cruiser firepower, but quite weak shields/armor/hull). Enforcers are specialized into defense and are nearly cruiser toughness but pay in speed, etc.

While I think its important to build fleets well, no AI fleet does actually get more than 30 ships, in the base game, and they are capped to 60% of the battle size so I don't think maximizing PPT is needed. Some frigates run out a bit too fast without hardened subsystems, but generally for me destroyers can do endgame fights without needing it (sometimes there are exceptional fights, but rarely). In terms of maximizing offense per DP destroyers are clear winners over most cruisers and frigates (there are a few high offense exceptions). For maximizing durability per DP Enforcers are better than anything other than monitors and they don't have any offense. And then there is also the fact that simply having more ships on the field helps immensely in how every other ship performs, as Salter mentions in their comment just above mine.

[FooF]

Fleet role is really important for Destroyers, imo. Early on, when they’re the primary damage dealers, you want to win flux wars and maximize damage but as bigger ships are introduced, that becomes less and less of a concern.

By the time I have capitals, Destroyers are 100% escorts. I do everything I can to specialize them for that task, whether it be maximizing range so they can assist larger ships or make them anti-frigate to protect blind spots. Alternatively, I make them hyper-specialized like a double Heavy and double Light Needler Hammerhead and pair it with a HIL or Plasma Cannon Champion.

Destroyers still have their place but they just can’t be line ships anymore. And more frequently, they won’t have officers so you just understand they won’t be the best ships out there.

[Salter]

Fleet role is really important for Destroyers, imo. Early on, when they’re the primary damage dealers, you want to win flux wars and maximize damage but as bigger ships are introduced, that becomes less and less of a concern.

By the time I have capitals, Destroyers are 100% escorts. I do everything I can to specialize them for that task, whether it be maximizing range so they can assist larger ships or make them anti-frigate to protect blind spots. Alternatively, I make them hyper-specialized like a double Heavy and double Light Needler Hammerhead and pair it with a HIL or Plasma Cannon Champion.

Destroyers still have their place but they just can’t be line ships anymore. And more frequently, they won’t have officers so you just understand they won’t be the best ships out there.

I think destroyers could work as line ships in a wolfpack fleet or as aggressive assault ships. For example SO Sunder w. Extended Magazine & with autopulse laser and double Ion Pulser can wreck some serious havoc if it can get past shields, especially if it has fast frigates like Hyperion or Tempest rolling up on its flanks.

[Blothorn]

FWIW, I mostly stop running frigates by the time my fleet passes ~50 DP--I haven't found a frigate that can survive both fighter swarms (rules out the Tempest and Wolf) and frigate wolfpacks. (The main vanilla exception is the Omen, which in my experience tends to get overrun if split off as a point-capper or distraction but is very good as a PD escort for larger ships that need help in that respect.) I think destroyers are mainly held back by the range of very good light cruisers--the Falcon and Apogee both come very close to a destroyer's logistical/deployment cost while offering considerably greater capability.