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Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Academy » Cruisers vs Battleships (Re: Maybe i am a little thick but...)
Re: Cruisers vs Battleships (Re: Maybe i am a little thick but...) Wed, 17 March 2004 16:28 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Orca

 
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Messages: 148
Registered: June 2003
Location: Orbiting tower at the L5 ...
 Other than the large weapon slots (important with missiles), the high base armor, large number of armor slots, large number of shield slots, much higher base init and - oh yeah, let's not forget how much fuel those battleships carry, there is one undeniable multiplier. That of elec slots. Destroyers have 1 elec, 1 mech, and 1 shared. Cruisers have up to 4 such slots - but only 1 more shield than destroyers when used in that configuration. Battleships have *6* elec slots plus a mech (which is usually best used on a computer if a missile ship, an overthruster if a beamer).

Basically it comes down to this: EVEN IF weapons tech is severely limited, the BB's intrinsic abilities cause it to still be your best firepower for whatever currency you choose to use (be it ironium, boranium, germanium, resources, whatever).

1) High init - you'll shoot first, unless they waste slots on computers.

2) More elec slots. You can be assured of shooting first should you choose to. Should you choose not to, you have more flexibility concerning your missile defenses or beamer offensive effectiveness. You can multiply your beams by a hefty 1.77 times for pennies with capacitors.

3) High base armor and large armor slots - you can withstand more missile fire without suffering losses through shields - and when you do take losses, less of your launchers will be knocked out. For an extreme example of this, send a group of Arm cruisers up against Arm BB's. With massed numbers you can win, but you'll still lose half your fleet...if you're lucky. If you're not, that entire fleet will be scrap.

Let me give a concrete example then, directly from a game - Trench Warfare. Interesting weapons tech limitations (13 max), BET required, slow tech checked.

The Carthaginians had created a veritable Barbarian Horde from Hell:
539 shielded bazooka destroyers
243 shielded sapper frigates
(plus various supporting ships pushing the total ship count to nearly 1000)

I countered with 50 VF-1A's:
Battleship, 16 colloidals, 4 sappers, 6 caps, 5 slabs of armor, full shields, warp 8 engine and a thruster. Dangerously heavy, and slow. But, could take a large beating and keep on coming...

I should note that neither of us had RS. I think. I didn't feel like calculating out everything...and I know I didn't have RS.

In 10 rounds of battle I suffered the loss of 2 of my battleships and 9% damage to the remainder of my stack. He lost everything he brought to the battle - and somewhere around that time lost his empire to massed packet attacks by another race.

Note - these were the BEST conditions under which to field a horde of lower tech ships of the type you're suggesting. Weapons tech was artifically limited to equal the other defensive techs (limited to tech 13). Yet when the lighter ships were employed, it was *strictly* as a counterdesign to the heavier ships (range 1 BCs to counter my heavy range 3 beamers, which I countered with range 0 cruisers, ad nauseum).

Unless used to fulfill a specific role - sweeping, light skirmishing, specific counterdesign, gatability due to extreme range gating [say, one of X's stretched-beyond-huge games], the higher tech hull *will* win. Go fight a straight up slugfest versus a WM with DNs when you have BBs to see this. If you want to see just how bad it is, look at what it would take to knock down a well balanced fleet of dreadnaughts with frigates, destroyers, cruisers...even with battleships you'll still take horrendous losses unless you have a large economic advantage such that you can survive his best punch and then knock his fleet out in one blow. Then see what a fleet of nubians can do to trash that fleet of DNs when given equal resource inputs. For some *real* entertainment, see what they'll do to those wimpy destroyers...

And another thing: yes you can split CAs and DDs more fine-grained than you can battleships, but really, except for skirmishing duty, you don't really want to! Even with skirmishing duty it usually isn't too painful to split a half dozen battleships of ...

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