I'd like to know what people think are great ship-designs/fleet-designs with the many changes that Disharmony brought to how combat works.



I feel a lot of the things we learned about ship&fleet-designs in Vanilla no longer is true. Let me give some examples:



Avoid mixing weapons on one ship => with the change of Defenses reducing damage instead of blocking it, this no longer holds true. Mixing weapon-types doesn't have that disadvantage anymore.



Glass-cannons are very powerfull => I don't think that's the case anymore. Having even a few defenses will make ships survive in "Spread-Fire" easily and having to use Guillotine or even Nosebreaker is not what you will want to do with glass-cannons as those will still die to spread-fire.



I'm especially interested in how you distribute your defenses weapons and armor now and how successfull this has been against other distributions of similar strength.



My aim is to use the best design-principles as templates for the AIs in a mod.

One Fleet design that did quite good is:



1 Dreadnoughts with massive defense and armor but no weapons taking all fire if enemy chooses nosebreaker

2 Dreadnoughts with good defenses capable of absorbing enemy Guillotine but also containing lots of beam weapons to wipe out enemy glass cannons in long range using spread fire.

1 Supporter Corvette with engines, support energy module, high evasion skill and enough armor/defense to have a good chance to survice enemy spreadfire

Rest of the Fleet Glass Cannons carrying missles only containing a minimum of defenses and armor.



According to my experience it is of vast importance (but very diffucult) to survive long range phase while dealing massive damage during that phase yourselve. The design i described above is working very well and due to the new defense mechanisms in Disharmony even the glass cannons are likely to survive the innefficient but fast medium/melee range weapons during long range phase. After long range usually there is not much of the enemy fleet left and their fire is easily absorbed by the Dreadnoughts.



Though this is efficient it is also very boring. Still the combats are decided soleley in Long Range phase which is something i really hoped to get rid of in Disharmony.

I like dreadnought fleets, but a bit if a mix is good. I usually have all ships capable of holding their own, all defence heavy. I basically aim to absorb a lot of damage while only dealing out a little as survival is more important I think.

Combat_Sheep888 wrote:
I like dreadnought fleets, but a bit if a mix is good. I usually have all ships capable of holding their own, all defence heavy. I basically aim to absorb a lot of damage while only dealing out a little as survival is more important I think.

Me too, I usually mix my fleets.

Super defense heavy dreadnoughts, not unarmed, but pretty minimal. Depends for cruisers and battleships, but more or less on the defensive side. But where it gets interesting is my destroyers. The first type is defensive like the rest, but to make up for the trade in firepower, the other type is filled with nothing but beams to wreck house. Surprisingly enough they rarely die because the AI is like "Oooooh big scary dreadnought, fire everything at it!" while ignoring the real damage dealers. As for total fleet composition I'd say a stone wall dreadnought, 75% mighty glaciers and the rest is a few glass cannons mixed in.

Early/mid game: missile destroyer spam

Late game: balanced fleet - dread, two BS, support cruiser, destroyers

I don't think I have a set template yet, purely because every faction now has different hull bonuses. Up to this point my fleet composition was highly situational.

That said, I have recently noticed that I kinda tend to make fleets that have 2-3 bulky ships (not necessarily big) to tank the damage in case the enemy goes for nosebreaker or guillotine; then I add as many bomber-carriers as I can (dreadnaughts with 4 bombers and some defenses in case the enemy goes for spread fire). I like this setup because even if my carrier gets destroyed, its bombers will still continue to attack until the battle is over. It's a good composition when fighting against an otherwise superior fleet that somewhat neglected their fighter/point defense modules.

But that's only a recent trend in my games. I'm still getting used to the Disharmony and I keep testing other fleet compositions

I'm experimenting with a carrier type ship in there. As Automatons, I use the cruiser 'Sickle class?' As it has a repair module bonus which I think comes in handy if you needed to repair fighters and bombers. I always pop on a few weapons but its mostly carrier, with defensive measures and minimal weapons. Watching a bomber finish off an enemy ship while following the bomber on camera is awesome. But otherwise I mostly aim for big ships.



Mixed fleets have been encouraged in Disharmony due to new targeting mechanics I think. Also helps I love the look of the Automaton destroyer.

Putting in a few small ships loaded with only armor/defense (which small ship depends on faction).



For some reason, AI use nosebreaker a lot more often than the other targetting priorities (or maybe i'm only noticing those battles because I used to take more loses in nosebreaker fights). Small ship tanks can be brought out a lot earlier and generally give more hp/cp than bigger ships. Plus they're sooooo cheaper to replace.

Generally i'll use the faction hull bonuses as a guide. I'll often put fighters/bombers on the cp 1 ships (with basic defenses) as the hull slots are cheaper, the first 2cp ship is often a seige craft with troops, with the other 2 ships being offense, a lesser and a greater offense, spreading out the types of damage. (combined arms)



All ships have repair (except seigecraft unless they have troops), but only take armour when i have spare points left over.

Only the scout has engines, as the weight is too prohibitive in the other ships.

have never seen the need to use pop or structure bombs.

occasionally use point defense on dreadnought.



If faction is offensive, will use double the offense vs defense. and vice versa if the faction is defensive.



I tend to use veteran formation, and mostly guillotine. Spread if i have overwhelming odds, nose if underwhelming.