Frigates

[Terra_Inc]

Lately I was thinking about stock A2's frigates. No, I'm not talking about the correct naval term "frigate", I'm talking about the ships A2 calls frigates - fleet protection/support vessels. (In fact I'm not talking at all, but who cares.)
A2's frigates seem to be pretty disliked and useless. Most people seem to remember frigates as "the small ships that always get destroyed 5 seconds after the battle started". IF you decide to use a frigate it's probably because of the special weapon.

What do you think about frigates? Do you use them at all, and if you do, how? And what should be changed to make stock A2's frigates more useful?

I'm sure that many members of the community have thought about that before (especially if they are/were working on a TC) so I'd like to know what you think.

[Freyr]

Well. A difficult one to answer.

This is more or less a list of the stock ship classes.

Scouts
Destroyers
Cruisers
Artillery ships
Frigates
Science Ships
Battleships

And, other than battleships they are all pretty much useless, apart from a few ships with strong special weapons.

Traditionally, you make the smaller ships with less firepower and shielding faster and give them better sensors to offset the fact they can't stand up to larger ships. However, the current game implementation of warp speed messes this up badly. Simply put, at warp speed a battleship is as fast as a scout and you can do things like microwarping to get in range of things trying to outrun you at impulse.

Therefore, to make anything smaller than a battleship relevant the first thing to do is address the warp drive. The first thing to do to fix that is to increase the gravity wells by a factor of 4, at a minimum. On some maps, this will make a distinction of where you can use the warp drive, rather than where you can't. I'd also consider giving at least one class of ship a silent special weapon based on the gravity mine, delivered by a wave, with an effect about a second longer than the refire rate of the special. If you don't set a slowdown speed for the gravity mine and give it an area of effect of about 2 screens then I should think you can consider the warp problem fixed.

That lets you turn to your order of battle. Personally, i'd just scrap the scout and transfer the cloak detection to the destroyer as the scout is completely pointless for anything other than scouting, and then have a very clear difference between destroyer1 & destroyer2. As in, destroyer2 should be slightly less powerful than a cruiser1.

The stock Armada uses approximate factor of 4 balancing, so 4 destroyers will take a cruiser, and likewise with cruisers and battleships.

I'd simply leave that as is for shipclass1 and double the weapons/shields of shipclass2, while giving the shipclass2 a hefty cost increase and more tech requirements. (ie, destroyer2 needs the tech centre, cruiser2 needs the second tech lab and i'd leave battleship2 needing the upgrade centre

And that's another thing. Why does a destroyer cost 85-140D and a battleships 290-400D ? If a battleships is 8-16 times more powerful, it should cost about that much to discourage spamming battleships and encourage building the other ships.

I would either remove artillery ships (seriously, have you tried blowing up a starbase or heavy fortifications with artillery ships? Forget it. Just charge in and do the job as seen on the show) or increase the range, decrease the cost (in metal) and give them shields as strong as a battleships. Then, they might be useful.

Likewise with the science ships. Any decent specials can goto the cruisers to further encourage building the smaller ships.

That, finally brings us to the frigate in our order of battle. Most people haven't noticed that the frigate is almost a battlecruiser by it's stats. (naval history for the otherwise uninterested; the battlecruiser was originally built to have the speed and armour of a cruiser, but the firepower of a battleship. The idea was to obselete the armoured cruiser, which they did)

It you apply the same design spec to A2, you'd end up with something like the Defiant class as seen on screen.

Anyway, taking that sort of approach would play better and leave you with a force structure looking something like this:-

Destroyer
Cruiser
Battlecruiser
Battleship

I hope that helped.

[CanadianBorg]

Originally Posted by Freyr

Likewise with the science ships. Any decent specials can goto the cruisers to further encourage building the smaller ships.

I would honestly beg to differ on that one. Canonically speaking, Starfleet usually mounts the prototype weapons on Nebula-class vessels (or their period equivalent), and most of the civilizations do the same. To counter this, I'd recommend increasing the resource cost of the sci-ships until it's about on a par with a battleship, with a couple of differences (less metal, more dilithium, crew, and officers) because they are very useful when push comes to shove. They may be weak and easy to kill, but can easily turn the tide if protected. The Gemini Effect, holo-emitters, ultritium bursts, all this good stuff, is something I find really handy to have around.

Just my thoughts.

[archerscott]

I tend to chop and change my fleet around. Sometimes I give the poor frigates an upgrade, other times I cut them out completely.

That way each class of ship gets a turn.

[starfox1701]

Here in lies some of the problem while Trek history does record scout class vessels (the SS Begal TOS, the BoP STIII) A2 exculsily uses over grown shuttlecraft in that roll. These ships would be best used as base deffence fighters. Both Frigates and Science ships end up being to weak from a physical point of view. Espiecally the Nebula class. wheather you want an all eggs in one basket ship like in stock or not there is no reson these to classes should die so fast as to make the usless in heavy combat. Bassed on the average mass and size these ships should at least have heavy cruiser strengthe and shields the equal of a construction ship which can take a surprising pounding for being a noncombatant. Nebulas in particular should be the equal of a Galaxy class in shields and firepower with 2/3 crew and hull.

[the Starfleet Kid]

The problem here lies not in frigates but in A2's design itself.

The whole point of A2 is the same as every other RTS out there: base assault. They realized early on that the game would eventually culminate in the equivalent of "zerg rushing". So eventually you have to put together crushing numbers of dreadnoughts (or Defiants) and go out there and win it with sheer numbers.

But that's not what Trek is all about. So trying to shoehorn concepts of Trek --or actual naval parallels-- into a simple RTS in which the whole point is overwhelming force concentrated against a couple fixed installations.... you're going to get some headaches.

The game's design is far too simple to simulate any meaningful combat. Battleships can hit scout ships just as easily as starbases. The targeting likelihood is determined by the AI, and usually they choose the stupidest of targets --fire everything on that destroyer! ignore those ten battleships and the starbase!-- so if anything you're going to have to give them a role.

In my A2 play version (which is different from my custom build) I made the frigates and science ships all twice as tough, spread the special weapons out between the various ships (including the destroyers!) and it makes things a lot more interesting. This is especially true with the Romulans-- giving the shield-energy converter to the Griffin meant that they had the ability to support Warbirds and Venators in a fight for far longer. The Shadow really hogs some awesome special weapons, and utilized across the fleet means that they ALL get used (unlike in the stock game where aside from the holo-emitter I don't think I've ever seen the Shadow use any other special weapons against me).

Special weapons on a science ship are not experimental nor are they intended as surprise or single-shot weapons. They are an essential component of the ship's overall armament. More than any other concept, even the frigate, the science ship is the one most in need of an overhaul. Best move I ever made in game was to give them the ability to tachyon-detect INSTEAD of the scouts. With more hitpoints and another special weapon on board (in the case of the Nebula, I left it the Gemini emitter-- giving the Sabre the shield-depleting torpedo was another good move since it meant those ships actually did something other than roll over and die) the science ships actually live up to their role. And since many of them look like sensor-and-specials vessels to begin with, it's not that far out of line. In fact, it makes those fleet battles extra interesting (especially after it's been a couple weeks and you forget that Qeh'ral class starships can bring about an ion storm....)

But none of that matters during the "final countdown" when you're up against the base. Aside from a select few classes of vessel, you're simply going to want maximum firepower against each target in its turn. And there isn't a frigate in the stock game that you'll want for that job.

[starfox1701]

You know there was a TC I worked on a year or so back that brought the idea of jammers and I also had overhauled the weapons to make fighting on the move work better as it offered some defence aganst the instant hit and worked for everyone. Starbases got jammers too and became far more defencible. I never quite got the AI to play along with the move and shoot game but it made the enhanced physics worth while.

[Majest]

I personally use frigates as the naval tradition of small vessels, below a destroyer.

In a Trek based modification my fleet usually consists of:

Frigate
Destroyer
Light Cruiser
Heavy Cruiser
Fighter Carrier (Only occasionally)
Assault Cruiser (Troop ship)
Battlecruiser
Dreadnought
Battleship

The last two are swapped around in a TNG era modification as that list is more TMP era.

But I don't use frigates the way they are in stock, I feel they are really useless as stated by some above. If they were beefed up, called a cruiser then they would be an asset.

[Freyr]

Originally Posted by thekid

The whole point of A2 is the same as every other RTS out there: base assault. They realized early on that the game would eventually culminate in the equivalent of "zerg rushing". So eventually you have to put together crushing numbers of dreadnoughts (or Defiants) and go out there and win it with sheer numbers.

That's not completely the case, though it happens as soon as someone masses turrets.

If your just attacking a starbase then most of the races need 6 battleships to kill a starbase. I have seen it done with 3 battleships and 4 destroyers. Balanced fleets can still win out.

The reason for this is simply that while the destroyers die in a volley rather than two volleys (most advanced ships are either dead or crippled after two starbase volleys) if they are targeted first then they absorb the firepower that would have killed the battleships, if the battleships are targeted by the time they have killed them the shields are down and the weapons are being blown to bits by the destroyers.

In my mind, the main reason for the predominance of battleships is the fact that they are cheaper to build than anything else on a cost/firepower basis.

225D for a intrepid. You should need ~4 to kill a battleship. 225 X 4 = 900. 1 galaxy is 350D.

Why would you build destroyers and cruisers instead of just massing battleships? It's the only sensible thing to do considering the costs and officer amounts.

If you try and fight against someone bringing battleships to the field and your only bringing cruisers then your just going to be decimated by the opposition, as they can afford to deploy more than double the firepower than you can do. (not to mention the officer limits are about the same for a destroyer and a battleship...)

If you doubled the cost and quadrupled the officer requirements then you might persuade people to build anything other than battleships as there would be a cost disincentive to just massing battleships. Otherwise, people are going to keep doing it.

Originally Posted by CanadianBorg

I would honestly beg to differ on that one.

The issue in my mind just comes down to game balance. When you have all of the useful special weapons on the science ship, and the only other ship worth having is the battleship then inevitably anybody sensible will build nothing other than the battleship and maybe a science ship per fleet to make the battleships a bit more effective, as has been conclusively demonstrated by the happy folk that still play A2 online.

Moving the specials to the cruisers and destroyers gives reasons to build both.

[Terra_Inc]

I totally understand if people want to use the naval vessel definition. But I've been playing A2 for years, so when I hear the word frigate I always think "support vessel".

Destroyer
Cruiser
Battlecruiser
Battleship

Frigate
Destroyer
Light Cruiser
Heavy Cruiser
Fighter Carrier (Only occasionally)
Assault Cruiser (Troop ship)
Battlecruiser
Dreadnought
Battleship

I use a similar structure, but I prefer to add a scout vessel: Easy to kill, almost no weapons, but very fast and good sensors - something like the Oberth.
Carriers are interesting, but not that great in A2. The main problem is that in real life the carriers and the fighters/bombers are totally different objects: The carrier is a ship, but the fighters are planes. In A2 both are spaceships and - as a result - not very different.
I think it's a matter of taste to split the cruisers, although it does make sense.