Corvettes and their role

I think their only real role was a selling point.

Hopefully the ability on them will actually become useful...hell, they could be made to be a counter against Titans if things were done properly...

Not saying that's the best use for them, but it could be a use...

I'm fairly certain their intended role was disabling Titan passive regen.

Whether they work for that role or not, I don't know, I just reasonably presumed fielding them against Titans would just get them swatted by the dozen.

LRMs get insta-popped by Titans...corvettes are practically non-existent...

Make it so that Titans have a decreased chance to hit Corvettes and an even tougher time to hit Strike Craft. Buff corvette damage against capital ships and titans. Seems this would work, right?

Their cheap cost, fast build time,  anti-all weaponry but fragile health tells me they are intended for use as a quick spam defend your grav well kind of militia for when you need some numbers to counter an invading fleet quickly. I think flak frigates will still be a better choice vs. fighters and LRMs if you have the time to build their numbers up in advance.

Don't think the game works that way...gameplay file doesn't have a "chance to hit line" for corvettes, only fighters and bombers....

I think Ekko has a point.

But you're right, Seleuceia. I'm used to EVE Online where larger guns have difficulty hitting smaller targets (in addition to calculating trans-angular velocity among other factors.) 

Maybe if corvettes weren't such high priority by AI they would be a little more useful too.

I was thinking along the same lines. They could be a way to keep tabs on and harass low level titans until your fleet corners it.  They could be decent structure raiders too if again, they didn't blow up at the sight of an enemy ship.

I was expecting this to be the case.

I also hoped Corvettes would have more of a tackling role as seen in EVE as opposed to cheap fodder, I launched 50 or so Corvettes at a capital ship and did not see its phase jump rate slow by more than 20%.

Transporting the princess on diplomatic missions?

They may make good armed scouts.... are they any good at moving in grav wells?

I find them quite effective early game (on smaller maps) to send them out where you think your enemy homeworld is and cripple their early game constructors. Seems ridiculously effective!

Historically, very large ships have tended to be countered by small, maneuverable, specialists ships...it is fairly logical that corvettes should be the counter to Titans...

Give corvettes an ability that activates on weapons fired...give it a chance to hit of some percentage...and have that ability affect ability/weapon cooldown rates as well as linear speed...furthermore, make Titan weapons pitiful against very light armor (which is what corvettes have)...I think this would be a pretty decent recipe for a proper Titan counter...

I also don't really know what corvettes are good for.

In the Homeworld games, ships in the corvette-type class of class were generally anti-fighter ships; they had guns that could track fast enough to hit fighters, and the corvettes themselves _moved_ fast enough to not be hit by the big anti-capital ship beam weapons.

That said, ships in Sins of a Solar Empire don't really move during combat.  With the exception of strike craft, they more or less line up and just shoot at each other, pre-20th century stye.  I'm not arguing that ships should move and force players to micro-manage - I'm all for the grand-strategy scale of combat the game currently has.

I'm just trying to make the point that if ships moved during combat, controlled by the computer, that could be a distinguishing factor, and another strategic element to take into consideration when organizing your fleets.

Ok i'm not actually in the beta, (Got paid this weekend and need to move some money into my internet purcheses account first), but from thier damage type and armour type stats:

1. Depending on if they have the same accurracy as in dimplomacy they may or may not be Bomber Chewers par excellance.

2. They're defintlly LRM chewers stats wise, plus they have ok damage across a wide ranage of other targets.

3. They share the same armour type as fighters, though their durability looks like it could leave a lot to be desired in comparision. Still your looking at somthing that can give the enemy flak a lot more to worry about. That means not only are they going to do a fairly good job of keeping the flak off your LRM's, but they'll keep them off your fighters too as the side and rear banks select targets based on priority, which means that flak is gonna pick these over LRM's and may pick them over fighters.

4. Cap ships do 1 quater damage to them, meaning cap ships have a harder time killing them than they do light frigates. Thats going to make them very effective detterents to an early capital rush. Their nubers should also make ye old vassari starbase rush far less effective as it's going to have a hard time doing serious damage due to the raw amount of targets presented that it overkills, and which cost very littile.

My suggestion would be to buff their chance on hit abilities, so for example a higher chance to add a higher-stacking debuff (20/40/60/80% reduction in phase jump charge rate, 20/30/40/50% reduction in passive hull repair rate, though obviously these are arbitrary numbers and could quite possibly make them too good).

As it is currently, it seems to be a very low chance and only stacks up to 30%, to the point where throwing 80 corvettes against a single ship can see a mere 10% debuff (seen times when it doesn't even get applied once) for their combined attacks, and even when it's increased to 30%, it is so insignificant  (moreso for the phase jump increase then hull repair rate decrease) that it makes it hard to justify their cost, especially considering how quickly they get killed off by any significant opposition.

I feel this would also make them feel as a more unique addition, where you'd use them in hit and run attacks to isolate or slow titans, or cripple certain ships/structures before committing your main forces, rather then use them as glorified light frigates that don't stay still and are much more likely to explode when sneezed at.

Well after a 2v2 I just played I think I figured out their role as "brick your opponent's computers when you stalemate by building 600 of them and jumping them around."

I have never been more satisfied in Sins than getting to watch those little bastards burn by the hundreds.

Give them a survivability ability that you can research, maybe something like "Evasive Maneuvers" where they have a 10% chance to shrug off each attack volley. That'll make them more like a persistent swarm of killer bees, rather than a swarm of gnats.

I don't think Corvettes should be anti-Titan. Just let the anti-module ships fire at Titans, with a chance for the titan to evade their shots (i.e. the shots would be far less effective against a Titan than an immobile Starbase, but still better than shooting it with conventional weapons). OTOH, to make Corvettes more useful, I'd be in favor of increasing the maximum amount that they can slow down jumps. This would allow a well-prepared player to field Corvettes against an enemy Titan to prevent it from escaping through the phase lanes when it's low on hull. You'd still need to be able to destroy it, probably using a combination of capships, heavy cruisers, starbases and your own Titan; but at least this way you'd be able to ensure that the thing actually dies, instead of escaping with 10% hull.

This is important because otherwise Titans don't exhibit the risk and the commitment that Sins is well-known for: it takes so long to destroy one that any average human (or a smart AI) would be able to survive all but the most catastrophic defeats with their Titan intact (especially if the Titan is defending a system owned by its own empire; if attacking an enemy system, Phase Disruptors may be a slight problem if you can't destroy them on your way out).

By allowing Corvettes to effectively block the escape route for several seconds longer, it makes the escape that much more difficult, giving the other empire a large window to destroy the Titan.

Even as someone who plans to use the Titan as a key component of my assault fleets, I would like this mechanic very much. Before Titans, the "commitment" of capital ships to a battle was a fairly serious move: you needed to scout enemy grav wells until you were really sure that you could take on the defenders, and make sure you either cut off reinforcements or ensure that the nearest significant reinforcements are far away. If you failed to do these things, you could easily warp your cap ships into a grav well with multiple things preventing them from leaving, and their survivability is such that they couldn't escape in time before being destroyed. Not really the case with a Titan; even if they have multiple phase disruptors, you can usually kill them and still get out.

I'm still relatively a noob at this game but it seems to me that these corvettes are pretty efficient in terms of damage/hull/shield per supply used. For the supply of a heavy cruiser you could get 10 corvettes which have about 3x the hull and same amount of shield. On a per supply basis I have a hard time imagining a fleet of corvettes would loose to any fleet without a decent multitarget attack.

My major complaint is that they are wayyyy too taxing on the system right now. 300 of them turns my game into a slideshow when I zoom in. Their models need to be made smaller and much less detailed, like a slightly bigger version of a single fighter/bomber.