Ship Design Advice for Crystal

[douglas]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
You mustn't forget weapons, though; Stealth/Scattering armor is OK, but if the enemy has the sensors to look through your Stealth Armor it's generally useless, as the 15% defense bonus won't stack with Scattering Armor and ECM.

Incorrect. One each of stealth armor, scattering armor, and ECM all stack for a total defense bonus of 90%. This stacking is completely independent of anything else, you still get stealth armor's defense bonus even if your opponent has the sensors to see through the cloak. Unfortunately, the Religious Talisman makes all defense bonuses irrelevent, so replacing the stealth and scattering armor with other stuff makes sense against a religious enemy.

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
What you could also do is use two or more types of ships, a Cover Defender and an Offensive Warship. Cover ships would have a lot of armor and shields but little weapons; they'd be hard to destroy but wouldn't pack much firepower. The Offensive Warships would have less armor/shields but would pack a lot more firepower. If you keep your ships in, say, Decoy Arrowhead formation (with an Offensive lead ship) with Cover ships as the front arrow and Warships as the rear, the enemy will be faced with a choice; pound away at the heavily shielded Defenders who are hard to kill but can keep pouring fire into the enemy for a long time and ignore the heavily-armed Warships, but if (s)he chooses to attack the heavily-armed formation of Warships they'll be left with tough ships difficult to kill that can keep firing for pretty long.

It's a nice idea, but it's not doable in SEIV because you can't specify which ships go where in the formation other than the lead ship.