Starting something here as an offshoot of a discussion in the WM forum.
(Summarizing a bit...)
Saw a posting about using the DD as chaff, and questioned the efficiency of such a move. The response was that the DD could be shielded and cheaply armored to the point of requiring multiple cap missile hits to kill. To me that's either not chaff, or chaff that's too expensive to be worth while.

And I was also asked what use beyond chaff I made of the Frigate hull. Thus, here we are. What use is made of the DD (destroyer) and FF (frigate) hull in terms of *new* designs once the BBs are king of the main battle fleet?

I get first shot of course.

Destroyer hull:
a. Sweeper - Armor and shield to take a minehit by itself. Some gatlings or other beam for clearing mines. A fairly expendable ship. I'll end up 'crashing' minefields as much as I slow sweep fields since I'll often risk Warp 7 or Warp 8 runs with these ships. A JOAT race would also get scanning from it.

I tend to deploy them in groups with a "backstop" force - usually a few mainfleet warships and SFX, and possibly some of my own minelayers. A haven for pursued ships to run to. And in a contested area my sweepers will tend to deploy using "yo-yo" tactics. Run in at high speed and then quickly run back out.

And to be honest I don't use DDs for much other than this.

Frigate hull:
a. Minelayer. Unless I'm a SD race. I'm not that much of a Galleon minelayer fan since those often can't gate. A JOAT will also get scanning from these.

b. Scout. Expendable scanner ship; especially for orbit checks when I have NAS. Galleons and Nubians will eventually replace these - especially with pen-scans available.

c. Chaff. Though I often continue to use scout chaff for entire games. The extra fuel of the FF hull is a help though. You just have to be careful here around Con 20 if you're using unjammed BBs - your FF chaff's attractiveness suddenly drops here due to miniturization.

d. Dampner ship (SD Only) Good hull for hauling one of these into a battle, or have it not show up. Depends on which is more beneficial for your fleet. Note that many hull types can fulfill this function.

===== have at it folks ====

Last section: DD as chaff - and armoring them up to require more hits to kill. Uses max tech here for comparisons since I have such a game at hand to pump designs into.

FF (the standard) Costs 5 res; 2 I 2 B 2 G - has 45 dp.
QJ5 engine, x-ray laser, nothing else.
1 missile, 1 kill. Beamers kill.

DD - (QJ5, x-ray laser)
Costs 11 res; 5 I 2 B 2 G - has 200 dp.
1 ARM still kills this, and over double Iron and Res cost... plus it's a heavier hull requiring more fuel to move. But it also carries more fuel.

So, we need to soup up the DD to make it take 2+ hits to kill.

That's a minimum of 525 dp (normal damage of an ARM - and part of it has to be a shield). And having a shield adjusts the attractiveness formula of chaff as well - making it a *lot* less attractive to missiles. So your mainline ships might start drawing fire all the sooner; unless you increase the bora and Resource costs of the chaff. Sort of a Catch-22 soon ensues.

Super Chaff DD 1 - QJ5, x-ray, 1 Organic, 1 Gorilla shield.
Cost: 22 res; 6 I, 2 B, 6 G 550 dp (375 armor + 175 shield)

IF you have RS LRT you need two organic and a Gorilla. Add 5 res and another 1 G to the cost.
Takes two missiles to kill - but costs are more than 3x greater than the FF chaff except Boranium.

Super Chaff DD 2 - QJ5, x-ray, 2 Organic, 1 Wolverine shield.
Cost: 22 res; 6 I, 2 B, 5 G 610 dp (550 armor + 60 shield)
Still costs 3x the FF cost in Iron and resources. Probably the two areas you want to spend the *least* in when building chaff.

Going to armors heavier than Organic will massively increase the Resource and Iron costs even further. Not to mention making it heavier and thus less fuel efficient and harder to overcloak.

Once you start upgrading the engine, weapons, etc. to make the ship more usefu

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DD's - I don't even bother with endgame. Not even as a sweeper ship. I much prefer to cloak up a Nubian (3x transgalactic super scoop, 12x super stealth cloak, 3x Big Mutha cannon and 1x tritanium). It's higly gateable, and while not as expendable as a DD sweeper, it's easy to keep hold of. The reason for the single bit of tritanium allows this ship to slap into Heavy minefields twice and survive - something those DD's can't do half as easy. These nubs can fly solo, those DD's get grouped up.

Frigate
A) Minelayer - Unless I'm SD yes, and unless I'm IT and I build a super minelaying nubian and cloak it. Again a cloaked minelayer can cause nightmares to your enemy.

B) I prefer the SFX as a scout. It costs a fair amount more, but it'll run at warp 9 until the cows come home. For orbit checks I'd still use a scout/chaff (scout, QJ5, laser, bat scanner).

C) Chaff, well due to the 16 design limit I tend to just stick to the scout design of which I had endless numbers of. If fuel is a problem, SFX's don't cost much.

D) Dampener - Never thought of using the frigate for this! I'd normally just stick one on a freighter or something else that's in my main fleet, but in low numbers.




Replacing chaff.....

I've thought about this one plenty of times now. Mostly for no chaff games. The best solution I've ever had was to fit a nubian to take the biggest pounding of it's life....

3x Engine
15x complete phase
9x superlatanium
3x synco sapper
6x jammer 30
+ overthrusters (2 in my design)

Against a design that has 6x Battle Nexi and Armaggedons this design can take 110 (ish) missiles before blowing up. Problem is that it costs a damned sight more than 110 chaff. It's also a nightmare to stay less attractive than.

It's the best I could come up with to replace chaff

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Hi!

Quote:

... This to safe a ship design slot, that's usually a bit harder for SD than for other races. Such a ship would be for instance a priv colonizer, or maybe on one of the few SMLs I would build ...

I've seen a SD Galleon for that purpose: penn scanners, TD, colonizer, speed trap minelayers and ... (forgot the last one slot) .
BR, Iztok

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The large freighter plus colonization module is my only freighter design mid to late game. Soon as I can delete the privateers, I do ... I'm terrible at keeping slots free.

But I have been known to build a cloaked galleon and stick a colonization module on it often enough - its a good ship when you need it.

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Dark_Traveller wrote on Tue, 21 October 2003 08:29

I agree with labyndor about a waste of a utility ship. If you would like a large colonizer you should give the Large Freighter design a try. Large amounts of fuel for extended range plus the ability to drop 120000 colony on a planet. I find this to be an great way to start Colony in the latter part of the game.

True, but you're missing the main point about using one hull that includes a colonizer pod to fulfill many other necessary functions besides colonization, to avoid using three other design slots to do the job that the one expensive "colonizer" galleon could do. After all, later in the game establishing a colony from scratch isn't as frequent as earlier in the game. This way, you always have a colonizer on hand if you need one without having a special design slot set aside for colonizing which is otherwise useless. A galleon is so versatile that you could have one design doing the work of 4 or 5 designs, possibly more.

For example, I'm currently playing an SD race. I have privateers I've used from the beginning for transport. I also have a basic colonizer, which I don't use very often, but you gotta have them, right? I also have scout vessels for planetary discovery/recon. I will also need a vessel equipped with an energy dampener. I also have a large freighter design that I use for meeting the Mystery Trader, because it takes about 250 of those privateers to carry 9800kt of minerals (okay, not really 250, but too many, anyways). That's 5 slots I'm using, and I could use a single galleon design to do all of those tasks, freeing up 4 slots.

True, I could use a large freighter equipped with a colony pod to do 3 of those tasks (MT, Transport, colonizer). But the galleon will do that and more, saving the maximum number of design slots. Design slot availability tends to be the biggest problem later in the game. I really, really like this multi-function galleon-colonizer idea.

I think this topic deserves it's own thread OUTSIDE of the WM section.

Editting: Doh! It's not IN the WM section!

[Updated on: Tue, 21 October 2003 22:11]

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Hi!

Quote:

Replacing chaff..... ... ... It's also a nightmare to stay less attractive than.

Your design is so heavily jammed and shielded and with so small amount of boranium, that it will be targeted the very last (and maybe even never ).
IMO chaff can not be replaced. Whatever you are going to use will cost more, and that beats the very idea of chaff. If chaff is forbidden, you have to use jammers, or the "first shoot" approach, and choose/design your race respectively (no HP with "first shoot", but -f or AR; IS for jammer 50...).
BR, Iztok

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Okay, okay. I probably should have a large freighter design as well for my main transportation fleet. I didn't consider all the extra engines, nor the number of freighters I'd have to build. So, the idea of a multifunction galleon serving as the main transport fleet may indeed be less than a perfect idea, as you guys have been saying.

Still, my eyes have been opened to the usefulness of the galleon hull as a multi-role vessel filling the roles of several specialized ships that you don't need too many of. The galleon hull is one I've always ignored, preferring specialized vessels instead that only do a single thing (for the lower cost) without considering how few I might need. Funny how I could miss such an obvious thing in 8-9 years of Stars exposure (but then again, who wouldn't expect exactly that, from me?) It's all part of the bumbling-idiot persona that I nurture so carefully here.

You know what? I'm just gonna blame my whole galleon-blindness thing on my recently abandoned preference for the HE race.

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zoid wrote on Thu, 23 October 2003 22:30

Okay, okay. I probably should have a large freighter design as well for my main transportation fleet. I didn't consider all the extra engines, nor the number of freighters I'd have to build. So, the idea of a multifunction galleon serving as the main transport fleet may indeed be less than a perfect idea, as you guys have been saying. Still, my eyes have been opened to the usefulness of the galleon hull as a multi-role vessel filling the roles of several specialized ships that you don't need too many of. The galleon hull is one I've always ignored, preferring specialized vessels instead that only do a single thing (for the lower cost) without considering how few I might need. Funny how I could miss such an obvious thing in 8-9 years of Stars exposure (but then again, who wouldn't expect exactly that, from me?) It's all part of the bumbling-idiot persona that I nurture so carefully here.

I also wonder if part of it has to do with general game experiences. A recent analysis indicated that most of my multiplayer experience is team games (especially Xdude monster slogs with AFON starts) and running observer races in games I host.

From the former I've generally been operating *large* fleets of max tech stage designs (or rapidly running towards that stage). Thus I am looking for efficiencies of scale and expecting to see tens of thousands of chaff, thousands of large freighters (I play IT a lot) , etc. etc. where minor cost savings are multipled to a much greater extent than a smaller game where a design run is only going to be a couple hundred hulls.

- Kurt

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freakyboy wrote on Fri, 24 October 2003 12:02

To As for the DD - I still don't use it.

I find the DDs to make excellent minesweepers.

I like have several DDs that can swarm at set of minefields and quickly unblock space. I use the general slot for a shield, plus enough armor to allow the DD to survive a mine hit, or detonation. When grouped, the shields can allow multiple hits.


Zathras

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Micha wrote on Fri, 24 October 2003 22:45

Uhm, missile ships use up a LOT of germ for their computers, beamer nubs also use a LOT of germ (compared to bor), in my last game in which I got to nubs my "final" weap26 nub cost was: 145/150/232 and 587 resources. Shields cost germ but especially the ship load of deflectors eats your germ supply, also jammers cost mainly germ ... Don't forget you use it to build factories too! Guess it's not "especially so with AR and -F designs" but "only" those, germ is always the mineral I've least of ... mch

Yep. Last games I was in: shortage of Bor(!) and germ (for the computers).
Why? I like my beamernubs.
And when I start building ARMNubs... Where is all the germ coming from?... Is this just me?
Ironiumcrunch? Never felt it!
I'm always sort on the other 2 (I quess I like Beamernubs with a small lot of ARMNubs...).


[edit, fixed quotes]

[Updated on: Fri, 24 October 2003 22:50] by Moderator

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