Ship to Ship combat in GalCiv2

Make 'em big or go for swarms of smaller ones.

from GalCiv2 Forums
Hi all. I've recently started seriously playing the game after getting GC2:DA addon, had a few wins on challenging level, so nothing spectacular. However I now have alot of questions regarding ship to ship combat:

I've been crunching numbers to see what size of ships are more economically efficient , and it looks to be pretty even ..... on paper. However given that a medium hull can have in late game 150 Attack and huge hull has only 84 Hp, if medium ship attacks huge ship the first salvo will destroy the huge ship. If this is correct then in general building lots of small ships is better then building one big and expensive ship? This seems to be especially true if you have bunch of non specialized worlds with crappy production (AIs strategy most of the time it seems)

About the defences. What is a good ratio to use when giving ship defenses, 2 Att/1 Deff or something else? Given the cost of defenses is it actually economically efficient to use defenses, especially when facing enemy that uses swarms of smaller ships loaded to the max with guns (50 Att and 8 hp small hull ships)?

Also how are the defenses calculated in combat? Is it total attack of a ship vs total defense of the other ship (or more importantly the entire attack of the fleet)? Or is it shot per shot basis?
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Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
well the first rule to remember with your large ships is that you should never attack a lone ship with a fleet, always use just one ship. One on one combat is the way to go if your ship is superior, you do not want to needlessly waste any ships by attacking lone ships with a fleet. I know it sounds stupid that using a fleet can be a dissadvantage, but that's just another querk of the combat system in this game.

If you have to attack an enemy fleet, well you just have to accept the losses, thats part of the fun of the game!

massive scale hulls are the most efficient to use.... if you remember that you do not have to use up all the space when you wan't cheaper ships. What i mean is that if your going to build medium hulled ships, you may as well use a massive hulled ship with the same equipment as the medium hulled ship and you will find it will not cost very much more, your effectively increasing the hitpoints of a medium hulled ship!

edit... i forgot about logistics! so yea, when you need to increase the overall firepower of a fleet, that changes things.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I prefer medium and massive hulls, using the small and tiny in support roles, I tend to overlook huge. The mainstays of my combat fleet are medium, with fast moving massive hulls taking care of harder targets.

What is a good ratio to use when giving ship defenses, 2 Att/1 Deff or something else?

What a hard question to answer.

The superwarrior ability lends itself to using little or no defense and setting all weapons, especially if you pick evil for your alignment and use the weapons techs bonuses. Picking good also gives you all those researchable defense bonuses. I compensate for a small defense    by selecting all the "beligerent" race bonuses at the beginning of the game, rather than any others. I don't use a speficic formula for computing defense during any part of the game. I just keep changing my ships to fit the defensive need.

Have you used Kryo's fleet sim?

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
What is a good ratio to use when giving ship defenses, 2 Att/1 Deff or something else?


Mostly defenses, or not a single defense, that's the way to buid ships in DA. With defenses your single ship has to have at least 75% of defenses as your opponent's fleet has attack (ofc. higher is better, and defenses have to match his weapons' type). If you can match that, your ships will take in combat only little damage, but will destroy lots of opponent's fleets. However timeframe of usefullnes for this design type is limited to early and mid game. With opponent's very high weapons and logistic tech your main fighter should be all-weapons-no-defenses design.

BR, Iztok
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Have you used Kryo's fleet sim?


The fleetsim is only made for DL, not DA. For DA's mechanics, see the sticky in the beta reports forum.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I generally tailor my defenses to my opponents. I might not be the best person for advice since I usually play pretty peaceful games and when I do war, I generally only war with 1 or 2 opponents at a time.

So I build my ships with about half of it's payload being used for the most damaging weapons I can, and I load up on defenses for that enemy's ships with the other half. The only exception is if the enemy's ship defenses are primarily against my weapons. Then I put a lot of defenses and use my second-most damaging weapon type.

If i'm warring 2 races that use different weapon types, then I make 2 different ship models if I can. if i dont have the resources for that i do all-weapons and no defenses.

If I dont have the proper tech for defenses I usually trade with minor races or friendly races to bump it up real fast...even if i get ripped off