Aren't destroyers smaller than cruisers?

During design phase, it might have been possible to have low end frigates level up through battle experience to corvettes or destroyers. One or the other. Hard now.

correctly AFAIK it is something like this:

corvetes, frigates, destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships

well since i play homeworld when im not playing sins you could say a corvette is a bit bigger then a fighter and of course more heavily armed (in homeworld they circle and fire around an enemy kind of like a helicopter)

ah sorry forgot to answer your question

yes a corvette would be something like an escort ship

I searched a bit on the subject (wikipedia) and I saw that cruisers and destroyers are approx. of the same size while corvettes are smaller ships.

What would be interesting IMO is to had a 3rd tier ship, ala battlecruiser. They are not as big as capital ships, but they're still a real threat against a few frigates.

completely agree, this is what has always been missing from sins. Destroyers and Battlecruisers need to compliment the larger heroe ships. We need to get to know the smaller capital ships also. But their really are none to speak of.

Problem is I think the smaller ships are supposed to actually do this now and be destroyers and battlecruisers. They just don't look big enough to be those ships though and don't act like capital ships. They all act and look like corvettes or support ships with a single main armament up until the heroe ships are built.

I have always wanted to have a proper fleet. But the Kodiak and others like it have not looked of felt in any way shape or form like anything other than heavier support vessels. Remember that in most fleets that have ever been the flagship may have been one of 50 or more capital ships all the same size. Think of Jutland. The largest capital ships are never too much larger than the others. An example of this is the flagships in old roman or rennaisance galley fighting.... the flagships were massive, but they were also complimented by many others approaching their size. The most they would have been would be twice the size of the larger standard line of battle ships.

It's actually-

corvettes->destroyers->frigates->cruisers->battlecruisers->battleships->dreadnoughts

Generally a modern day "destroyer" is more akin to a frigate.

For a video game, a great way to delineate destroyers from frigates would be to have them have equal firepower, but the destroyer is cheaper/less tanky/has less endurance (if there's a logistics system of some sort)/is smaller than a Frigate.

Battleships are the second biggest ships.  Frigates are actually the smallest and are the real world navy's escort ship. Destroyers are also small and are escort ships.  Cruisers are  between Destroyers and Battleships.  they don't have a corvette class.\

http://www.nvr.navy.mil/class.htm