Unbalance in game (for MP)

Could you please explain why small hulls work better than larger hulls in your games? I have played BM and MP, and don't understand what you mean.

Personaly I dont find this as each ship type has its usefullness mostly depending on what its up against. So far I find the universialy most useful multi role ships are the light carrier with a suitable stand off weapon and a multi armed light cruiser I however especialy in the IRM never underestimate the ability of Batle ships and Dreadnoughts to deal with swarms of smaller ships and withstand the damage that they hand out.

You need to realize that in all aspects of this game frigates rule. It makes me mad i know but heres why:
1)cheapness. The frigate is VERY cost effective. On an emergency build they can offten be built on 1 turn: and without at 2 turns. While the dreadnaught has more guns, They usually take at least 6 months with upgraded ship yards.
2)frigates are the fastest. They can easily outdistance any other ship: besides fighters and drones of course:D
3)You can easily get 3 CSM onto a frigate. You dont really need armor or sheilds, because a frigate is dead if it is caught. Its called parthian shot....
4)ecm plus natural abillity makes frigates very hard to hit.

It saddens me to say it but the author is very right in this fact. It wouldnt be so bad if everyone wasnt trying to make the "Perfect ship" because it usually ends up as a small size. It also wouldnt be so bad if the game had the capability to only allow certain components on certain shipsizes...
I love building dreadnaughts but i find it very difficult to design ships that can actaually beat a small hunting pack of frigates...

The problem with frigates is, at its root, a problem of the balance between missiles and direct fire. Thanks to parthian shot tactics, the speed bonus a frigate gets is essential and cannot be traded for the extra space and bigger weapon mounts you get with larger ships - weapon mounts that are useless when their direct fire weapons can only target other ships, ships you cannot catch as they run away and shoot missiles at you.. this is not to say that CSM frigates are unbeatable, fighters are the scissors to their paper, but well armored point-defense frigates are the rock that destroys fighters, so where do the larger ships fit in? If a change were made to somehow break the parthian shot tactic and put missiles on par with direct fire, suddenly the frigate speed bonus wouldn't seem so important, and the heavier weapons of larger ships would become more attractive.

Mounts are the equiliser linked to the fact that frigiates are not that much faster than bigger ships unless they have markedly better engines. You can also do a considerable damage to a frigiate with a larger ships alpha strike as unless you have adjusted the stratergy the frigiates always turn under the guns of the beiger ship after flying towards it.

The larger ship can also quite easly mount more than enough PD to cope with the incoming misile fire which a frigiate cant unless its suported by specialist point defence ships

Lotta talk about parthian shots for a thread about multiplayer. Besides, real men play with strategic combat.

Suction feet are not to be trifled with!

Actually, evan though it started as multiplayer, I'd like to see how ships sizes can get rebalanced out, in all forms of the game...

I happen to prefer cruisers or larger especially in IRM my one cruiser can take a pack of frigates most days. And for warp point defense larger ships definitely seem to work better. Of corse this could be because I normally have a large research lead.

No its the case if you are reasonably equal in tech as well with the IRM in my experience the only time I have had problems with big ships and warp point defence was with Base ships and individual frigate hulled scouts which could out manuver them. In fleet actions where the AI was trying to destroy the Base ship the base ship won. There is also nothing to stop larger ships using the running tactic and it’s nastier if they do because of their ability to carry more weapons and more supplies and ordinance. Any IRM archer type ship can be used in this way.

If you are playing an MP game and having to use Strategic combat you are less likly to be able to do the running fight tactic reliably as it can require a lot of player intervention to do

I have to throw in my opinion that I've not yet found anything majorly wrong with the the BM ship sizes. I suppose I have no problems with wanting to tweak things a little, but generally it works well as it stands. Bigger = better survivability in combat, smaller = cannon fodder vs. much larger ships at the same tech levels, but able to pick/choose where and when to fight. Fighters also seem to be well balanced: swarms can work, but they can be beaten by a well equipped force.

With DUC you don't have to research Physics, which makes it better in the early game.