Frigates are melting!

Vanilla, meaning without mods? Or the original game without expansions (the community sometimes uses vanilla for both, even though thats confusing for everyone).

Either way, there are a number of ways that can happen. If you're severely outgunned and without proper support ships frigates won't last long. There are also a number of strong abilities on capitalships and titans that can do strong area of effect damage. If you were next to a TEC starbase they also can blow themselves up for a ton of damage. We really need to know what you were fighting to give any sort of sound advice.

Hard to tell without more details.

Ideally it would be useful to know what ships your opponent and you were using, but from your post I suspect you don't know the opponent's composition.

A few general questions that may help narrow it down a bit:

What faction were you playing?

What faction was the opponent playing?

How long had the game been going?

What was in your fleet?

Are you leaving abilities on your ships on autocast or are you casting them manually?

Of course it would be easiest to diagnose the issue if we knew what ships the AI fleet had, but the above questions should be easier to answer and might help us figure out what's going wrong.

Thanks for your help, guys! Forgive me for the scant details. I had no business posting on the forum at 4am

I was playing the game without the expansions (or mods for that matter.) Both the AI and myself were TEC. His fleet consisted of a couple dozen light frigates and as many missile frigates. He had roughly ten Percheron carriers, and as many command cruisers. I believe there were two dreadnought capitals, and about eight robotic repair cruisers. He also had a smaller compliment of flak cruisers. There were no stationary defenses nearby.

I know it's not as simple as being outgunned. I think his fleet was slightly larger, but what was remarkable is that every one of my frigates' icons in the command tree on the left lit up simultaneously, indicating they were receiving damage. And I watched as, simultaneously, their hp melted to almost nothing within a matter of 3 seconds.

This game could really use a quick fleet battle mode to more easily experiment with the various ships and their capabilities.

As in the Marza Dreadnought? You probably suffered the Missile Barrage ability. Its nasty to frigates but if you a capital ship  with an interrupt ability (Akkan with Ion Bolt works great) you can stop that attack cold.

snoopy if you want to try out fleets and stuff try playing online with someone who doesn't mind doing the same.

That sounds like what's happening, Ryat. I'll bear that in mind in the future. I assume the Missile Barrage ability is something that the Marza Dreadnought gets at higher levels, because I don't remember seeing that option when I built my own.

Level 6 Ultimate. And now level 8 with Rebellion. Nasty!

Yeah, if you see a Marza Dreadnought that's even close to level six, you might want to invest in a capitalship with an "Interrupt" ability, or any ability that can disable abilities. The Dunov battlecruiser with Magnetize and EMP is a good choice, though you're probably just as good with your starting Akkan with level 1 ion bolt. When you see the Marza start to fire a bunch of brighter missiles than usual, hit it with one of these abilities immediately. It will stop the attack and most of the damage will be mitigated.