I personaly love the tricked up Fighter trick, because even with a miniture logistics leval, if you have say 4 tiny ships onto one medium, or 6 tricked up tiny's onto 2 mediums then the triked up tinys are going to win, because simply put they can target more things. Thats why fighters are so good, you can only destroy them one at a time aswell, which makes it even better!

And yes, I agree. there fighter hordes can be anouying, even when your ships smash them without a casualty

Fate,

Also, I have never, not once, fought an ememy fighter hoard without casualty, even with precurser rangers ect, yes I have tried matching some small tricked out ships with some big ones, still get whupped by the fighter hoards, Help please!

Here's a good example of what I just fought. He had ONE ship (pirate hvy fighter), 10 hp, 1 attack (laser), NO sheilds. I had 3 defenders, 11 hp per ship, 1 attack (missle), no sheilds. I should have won right. No dice. The fight was over in 4 rounds again, He killed my fist ship with one shot, dmg'd my second ship in the 2nd round, killed the damg'd ship in the third round and then killed my last ship in the fourth round. He had 2 hp left on his ship when the battle was over! It was like my missles couldn't hit. I know the AI is supposed to be hard but come on, I'm getting board with the fighting REAL quick. Oh and another thing, I've won practically all of the games with an infulence victory (before I could research all of the techs and/or build out all of my planets the way I like), even if the infulence victory was disabled (I usually play a med. size galaxy with alot of habitable planets). Oh, by the way thnx for the help.

Huh. Yeah that's sort of crazy. Don't know what's up with that last example you gave.

You know, reading these forums there's a lot of differant play strategies. Depending on how you build your ships, I can see where fighter hordes could be an advantage over larger ships.

Anyways, I'll tell you how I build mine and maybe it'll help you out. I prioritize defense over offense. On the higher difficulty levels- where the AI's research is comparable to mine- I usually wind up with a slightly lower offense but a much higher defense. This is because defensive techs are generally cheaper to research.

So in the mid-game, the AI fighters might have an attack between 10-20 and my medium ships have around the same value for both defense and attack (between 10-20). If I group my mediums in to fleets of three, I can do some serious damage to the fighter hordes (think four to six fighters killed for every medium lost). But if my mediums are alone, they'll get smoked. Even if they way overpower the enemy one-on-one.

Now I'll also have some large ships floating around. Usually around 20 defense and between 20-30 offense. I just played a game where a solitary large like this took out 12 fighters (in fleets of four, around 10 attack each) before dying itself.

However, I find that if I group a large ship with two mediums, I'm able to do massive damage to the enemy. I'll loose the medium ships at a trickle but nothing major. Meanwhile my more expensive ship is protected.

Am I making sense? I'm probably ranting a bit. Too many freakin' numbers.

Anyway. Good luck.

I usually work with medium sized hulls whenever possible. I find these give me enough space to put on the necessary systems, enough HP to warrant defences and a reasonable manufacturing cost.

I used to build larger ships but after a spree of losing tricked out huge hulls to medium vessels I decided the risk wasn't worth taking anymore. Also, by using only medium hulls or small hulls even, you present a nice mixture of target saturation and the option to spread your fire when possible.

If the AI attack power becomes too much to credibly match with defences, I'm more likely to build cheaper attack vessels rather then trying to match his advancement by building larger, more defensive ships.

I do have to add I often play on a slower tech advancement and I usually have some kind of lead on weaponry development.

You absolutely MUST have some kind of defense on your ships. This is unavoidable. Unarmored ships will almost always die in the opening round.

I have a big issue with the AI. Alien empires tend to be one note songs. They'll always use missiles, or always use mass drivers, or always use beams. Even if they get the snot stomped out of me when I have my ships sickeningly stacked against their preferred attack, they stick to it. Only in the late game, when the damage output of weapons far outstrips the defensive values (the best shield is 9 points of protection, the best beam weapon is 21 points, you do the math), does this make sense. The Drengin are notorious for this. They'll pathologically stick with missiles, and when they hit me and my Point Defense Combo'd or Aereon Missile Defended ships, they keep at it with the missiles, trying to race for the best missiles, rather than sideshifting to Railguns or Beams.

It doesn't analyze ships until they're attacked by them, where I'll watch their fleets moving around, and I'll click on them to see what they're packing while I'm still building up my war machine.

It depeneds what you want, If you want to go at them, till death and as many of the bastards with you sorta thing go with fighter hords. If you want to stand and fight, destroy as many as you can before they destroy you, go with capitails