weak ships in larg numbers vs powerful starships in low numbers?

[navy3000]

what is more powerful? so i know what ships to make when fleet controls arrive

 

[DeltaEpsilon7787]

Tactically speaking weak ships are more powerful. Why? Because turrets are stupid and tend to focus on one enemy at a time. Weak ships are usually far more smaller and therefore have far bigger amount of acceleration and can easily dodge turrets of any kinds.
So pretty much weak ships have higher manueveribilty and can outrun any "powerful" ship. Smart missiles take too much time to lock-on manually. Weak ships can afford having antimissile turrets on them and be nigh-invincible against missiles. So pretty much it's almost impossible to tackle down a huge interceptor assault on a huge ship.

 

[Edymnion]

A swarm of smaller ships of the same mass as a single larger ship will win just about every time.

Main reason we don't see them more in game now is because it requires a LOT of human pilots to run them, or a LOT of disposable ships that have to be constantly resupplied to the carrier because there is no effective way of retrieving drones after launch.

Fleet controls should help that situation out though.

 

[serge1944]

Just mass spawn ships.I already did 500 fighters againts 500 fighters.

 

[jontyfreack]

im going to leave this here.
small ships win.
(the battle lasted 20 minutes, the tyranids lost 20 out of 50. so if the battle was ongoing then the small ship fleets would eventually dry up so eventually a bigger hip would win)

 

[Jaaskinal]

Yes, and there's an interesting reason why that I don't think anyone else has pointed out. Almost all systems have a downward curve to their effectiveness. The more blocks you use, the less effective each block gets. Power (generation and capacity, but capacity actually does just get stronker with more blocks) is sort of an exception to this, but it's also somewhat the easiest way to show this, as once you pass the soft cap power efficiency tanks. The same number of blocks spread out across multiple ships will yeild greater total system strength than on one ship.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

If it's player controlled, as long as the smaller ships can break shield regen it will be normally them winning. If it's AI controlled it depends on weaponry etc, since the AI has a habit of wandering off. Drone swarms normally get by this due to being more focused in design, but bigger ships will fly to the range of whatever their longest range weapon is, which is usually missile/beam.

 

[Keptick]

Here's a long answer to your question: The ultimate drone R&D thread