Tactics Question for You guys

[TurinTurambar]

Well golly-gee-whiz y'all... what am I doing then?

I can honestly say I've used retrofitted LC's and Cruisers all the way to the end of most games. Since I rely on numbers, formations, high-tech and strategies, the bigger ships tend to have no real advantage over mine.
Personally, I find that the BC's and DN's take just too darn long to build, even with an enhanced constuction trait and SY III.
Strategies are very important in simul-games. I always save a few Simul AI games on my machine where they're building DN's with advanced weaponry. I play with different strategies in those games to develop stuff for PBW. I have a "Preemptive Bombardment" strategy to prepare the way for troop transports. I have a customized "Max Weapons Range" strategy for glassing the planets not worth the trouble. I have a "Carrier Group" strategy for defending warp points and ridding planets of pesky satellites. The list goes on.

If you combine tested, successful, broader strategies like these with carefully constructed individual strategies for ship-types (which they will follow after breaking formation), and high-tech weapons; large ships are not necessary, IMHO.

Turin

[Fyron]

Large ships have a huge advantage over small ships in that they can do quite a bit more damage from mounts... Using smaller warships (such as cruisers) when you have Battleships available is not a good idea. Sure, you might build individual ships more quickly, but they will be signifcantly weaker, so there is no real gain there... Mounts are very overly powerful. The only mount that is questionable is when you compare baseships with battleships. Baseships can do a bit more damage from the mounts (much less of an advantage comparing Massive and Heavy mounts than there is when comparing Heavy and Large mounts), but they have a significant speed disadvantage, which may or may not negate the damage advantage, depending on the situation. Baseships also have a huge defense penalty, which is always a bad thing...

Many mods make efforts to nullify the huge advantages that larger ships get from mounts specifically so that smaller attack ships can actually be of use when you have larger ships around...

[brianeyci]

Imperator Fyron said:
Large ships have a huge advantage over small ships...

Agreed from first-hand experience. I just got into a battle with two battleships against 10 smaller vessels, mostly light cruisers and so on. The battleships won, no losses and 25% damage to one.

Of course the smaller vessels were using some seekers and had inferior weapons and components, so that is something. But consider that a heavy mounted DUC V does 120 damage, and just a few shots from these babies is enough to disable any light cruiser.

Brian