Looking for Advice on Fleets / Starports

[therrio2002]

I've already got some, 70 hours put into Distant Worlds: Universe; however, I am still unsure on some things. Typically what kind of ships do you compile your fleets out of, how vast do you make your fleets, do you micromanage your fleets (if so, what do you instruct them to do?), or do you allow AI to control your fleets? What is a good ratio of defense fleets to colonies / territory controlled (what do you compile them of)? Are support fleets viable, if so what are they compiled of typically? Lastly, how often should starports be built? I rarley build starports beyond key hubworlds. What is a good design for a starport?

[icedude94]

This is what works for me. To understand it you have to know that I manually design all my ships and I use them differently from how the AI does.

Escorts - Either I don't use them or I keep multiple variations of designs for "utility roles." Typically in every game I'll have an escort design geared for capturing ships so high speed, tractor beams, warp disruptor, missiles(good for shields but light on armor) and boarding pods. If I encounter silvermist I make a custom design to deal with that, etc.

Frigates - Local defense forces. Designed to be strong general combat ships, put into fleets of 5-12 around every system with a colony. They are homebased at the colony, automated, and set to defend their homebase and system only. This keeps all my colonies and the in-system mining operations save from pirates and empire raids.

Destroyers - Similar to the escorts, I keep multiple designs for different roles. Some are set up as long range snipers as part of a larger fleet, some are designed to be raiders in a fleet of their own. I may have a large group of them supported by capitals and carriers as a mobile defense fleet.

Cruisers - Workhorse combat ship. The most abundant ship in all offensive fleets.

Carriers - Fleet carriers and command ships.

Capital Ships - I keep at least 2 design branches of capitals. One is designed to be like a battleship, the other designed to be like a battlecruiser/command ship hybrid. Sometimes I design a battlecruiser raider variant that has a little bit of everything on a large ship that are put in smaller fleets for raiding operations.

Troop transports - Ground invasion only. No boarding pods like the AI designs do. Always in their own fleets to keep them out of combat until the area around the planet is clear. Some troop transport fleets are loaded with special forces who go in first, others are loaded with a mix of infantry and armor.

Types of fleets:

1. System defense fleets or SDF - frigates only, 5-12 in every system with a colony. This is also the most numerous fleet type in all my games. Starting their fleet name with SDF keeps them down in the fleet listings.

2. Exterminator/Utility fleets - Escorts used for killing space monsters and the like.

3. Cluster defense fleet - Every group of 4 sectors under my control with have a large fleet of destroyers with a few capitals and carriers based at the area spaceport. This fleet is for fleet on fleet combat and will greet attacking enemy fleets at their target destination.

4. Raider fleets - self explanatory.

5. Battlegroups - Large fleets, up to 30 ships maximum of capitals, carriers and cruisers. The cruisers act as screens for the carriers and capitals so it's typically 15 carriers and capitals and 15 cruisers.

6. Task Forces - Custom fleet built for a single purpose, retired once their job is done.

7. Troop transport fleets - Carrying either all special forces or a mix of infantry and armor.

8 . Resupply fleets - Just to make it easier to select my resupply ships. Sometimes they include a construction ship but I generally don't engage in offensive operations until I have repair bots on all my ships.

In terms of fleet management, I control all my fleets except for the system defense fleets. Those are automated for colony defense.

I build a spaceport for every group of 4 sectors. I also custom design my spaceports. Small spaceports are for remote border outposts so freighters and mining ships have a place to drop off goods and for them to be picked up before being transported to the empire's core.

Medium spaceports are regional trade hubs with no research labs and a handful of construction yards. Cluster defense fleets are based at these and this base will repair any damaged system defense fleet ships.

Large spaceports are confined to the core worlds. The bulk of the shipbuilding and all fleet construction goes on here. These also have lots of research labs to make sure I'm not wasting any of my empire's research potential.

Then I have variants of custom starbases. One I always use has energy to fuel converters, gas harvesters, lots of docking bays, long range scanners but NO commerce center. These are military refueling bases and staging areas for offensive fleets. Not having a commercial center keeps civilians away.

Now the final key to an effective empire defense is my Tripwire Network. It's deep space scanners put on every mining station and frontier base and a ring of monitering stations around my empire's borders. This guarantees an alert and early warning of any attacking enemy fleets and gives plenty of time to position a defense fleet at the destination to meet them.

[Mytheos]

*I run everything on manual*

I generally tend to separate fleets by system, the size based on need.

But I have been going with the smallest size of 3 frigates, 3 destroyers, and when able 2 carriers.

I tend to go with Frigates having Grav weapons and phasers, and destroyers using torpedoes, one gets close, one stays at range...and the carriers going full ship bays.

I dont use escorts, yet, maybe one day, but I dont find any need to have anything protected as it goes around, I'd just make it fast enough to get away instead....cheaper that way.


After all systems with resources get their small fleet of 6-8ships, I generally use a decent sized Defense fleets to cover sector size areas and larger....they function to back up the system fleets if they get more than they can handle.

( Also once they start needing backup from the defense fleet I start increasing that system's fleet size and defenses...its MUCH cheaper to start with probably enough and add ships to popular targets as needed.)

The defense fleet also covers my home systems when my assault fleets are away at war.

Then I of course build assault fleets to my bidding as needed.


Generally though all my assault/defense fleets run a 3 frigates and destroyers to 2 carriers ratio.

So my basic fleet size is 8 and then just increases by that amount and ratio as needed....8,16,24,32.


Spaceports are a little tricky...I try to stick to around 1-2 per sector...more than that and you start having issues with storage...freighters run resources back to whatever space port is closer, so you tend to have resource piles split up all over.

However if you can manage to lessen the # of stockpiles the state seems to be better able to manage logistics...essentially when things need supplies it's 1 stop shopping vs having to run to 2 or even 3 different stores.


Starport design - 1 plant of each, no storage, 5 constructors for small, 10 for medium, 15 for large...Grav weapons/torpedoes + Fighters...no labs.

The system fleets are set to attack system targets while the Defense Fleets I tend to send around manually as needed...they function to protect against larger attacks and can transfer ships to system fleets that need their #s replenished.

[Ri0Rdian]

Once the game gets big enough (tens of fleets or more) I always use fleet posture (too much micro otherwise). Mainly defense but attack is also possible, although I like to command at least one fleet personally all the time. Something like "Royal Fleet" or "Guard Fleet".

[Destructomonkey]

Does fleet posture allow fleets to park themselves at a station the AI is launching an attack vector towards, before they actually get there?

[Ri0Rdian]

Nope. It's a vector, not a destination anyway. Although almost always it indeed IS the target :P

[Destructomonkey]

I've been wondering about the use of stealth, in that case

If the computer can see you coming, but fleets only respond once an enemy ship is in the immediate vicinity of a space station, what use is hiding yourself from long range scanners?

Plus you're kinda forced into micro in order to remove the response time of coming to a station under attack by moving to intercept before the enemy even warps in

[Mytheos]

Originally posted by Destructomonkey:

Does fleet posture allow fleets to park themselves at a station the AI is launching an attack vector towards, before they actually get there?

Well you can stick a fleet to a single planet/spaceport.

If you have them set to Defense - Homebase - Nearby Targets. ( And have their home base set )

They will normally stay rather close to what you want them to protect.


Otherwise they tend to go crazy...and manage to just jump around the system never managing to do anything other than kill a ship or two, or accidentally protect something.

[Ri0Rdian]

You have to disable their jump drives...then you can eat them for breakfast :)

[icedude94]

You have to consider the charge up and hyperspace speed at different stages in a game. From early to mid-game, defense fleets can only efficiently defend stuff that is in the same system as the fleet.

During the late game, when you have better hypdrives, you can expand their range to include nearby systems since the targets they're defending will likely have better shields and armor by then. Gravity well generators help a ton in buying you some time.

But to defend against an attack fleet, you need the long range scanners to get that early warning so you can move a larger fleet to the destination to meet them.

Similar to what riordian said, when fighting an enemy fleet, equip your ships with hyperspace inhibitors so the enemy fleet can't escape.

[therrio2002]

All your advice has been helpful in securing my beloved Gizurian empire, the most helpful tip for me was the information about sectors. I had forgotten that this games map is set up in a grid system and has made being supreme leader much easier for both governing and defending assets.

One last question is how do you go about forcibly removing the enemy from their systems? Do you bomb then into oblivion? Or do you have an effective methood of producing ground armies and getting them to occupy enemy planets? Most importantly do you let the AI build your ground armies on your colonies or do you perfer building your own ground armies?

[icedude94]

That's more than one question. ;)

By forcibly removing an enemy from their systems, I'm assuming you mean wiping them out completely. I never exterminate or bombard because population takes a really long time to grow. By killing committing genocide you are destroying the tax revenue and making the planet worthless.

Now extermination or enslavement policies tend to cause rebellions and it's wasteful to maintain large garrisons on every colony you have conquered. I recommend creating a penal colony to resettle the aliens to and exterminate them there so you only need a garrison in that one location. Note that when you start exterminating, transport ships from other empires that will accept them will start swarming that colony to evacuate them. Think of it as people fleeing as refugees and seeking asylum in other empires.

Now your next question, yes I have a pretty good method for producing ground armies and such.

First, I do not let the AI do any recruiting. The AI recruits way too many troops allover the place and doesnt do it as efficiently as a human player can with a little micro. Plus the AI tends to bankrupt you with troop maintenance.

Now a colony needs two things to start to make it decent at troop recruitment. It needs a population of at least 2 billion and a good approval rating to recruit at full speed.

After that you need facilities to produce the troops you want. These facilities have upkeep costs so it's better to keep all your troop recruitment centered around a couple of core worlds.

I tend to recruit elite troops, get them experienced in a few battles, and then I start cloning them.

Now you have to understand what each troop type does.

Infantry is equally good at offense and defense. They'll likely make up the bulk of your garrisons and at least a third of your offensive forces.

Armor is very strong at attacking but much weaker at defense. Having more armor than the enemy will give you a 25% bonus to your ground force strength in both attack and defense so sometimes it's worth to have a few on defense just to stop the enemy from getting that 25% bonus. It also takes up twice the space of infantry.

Robotic troops, just don't use them. It takes like 6 or 7 of them to match one experienced infantry unit. They might be good for a faction with really weak ground troops but those factions tend to have much higher population growth rates and could just outproduce empires with infantry anyways. Maybe you can use them as cannon fodder in the first wave of a major invasion. They don't seem to get any bonuses from the infantry techs and they were added to the game before those techs were put in. Now they're just obsolete and in need of rebalancing.

Planetary defense units inflict heavy damage on drop pods so the enemy units will land severely weakened. They are however extremely expensive and ineffective unless you have a group of them AND have a few levels of research put into them. Only use them to defend really important and lucrative colonies. Their cost vs. damage ratio becomes more favorable the bigger the enemy invasion force is. These units are however weak to special forces units.

Now special forces units are pretty unique. If sent in as the first wave, they can knock out the planetary defense units very quickly as well as any planetary facilities that might aid the enemy empire in defense like fortified bunkers, emp cannons and planetary shields. They also defend against other special forces attacks. Like tanks, you get a 25% strength bonus if you have more than the enemy.

So when it comes to putting them into fleets, I keep my troop transports separate from my main combat fleets. I make use of the troop composition settings that you can configure for each fleet. Invasion fleets will have maybe half and half of infantry and armor. Special forces troops are in their own fleet so I can send them in first.

After invading a colony, I use the troop management window at the top to quickly shift click a bunch to leave behind as a garrison, then order the transport fleet to pick up the rest from the newly conquered colony and I move on, rebuilding defensive facilities as I see fit. That's the fastest way to do land grabs of multiple colonies. Just be careful not to leave your troop transports unguarded. The AI will counterattack and try to retake its colonies. You don't want your troop transports sitting at the colonies when the AI fleets show up.

You'll get gradually less and less troops to invade with, but your losses should be minimal as long as you have medical centers on your troop transports to bring their strength back up to full.

With this method you can still plan ahead to make sure you have enough troops for all your war targets. If the target empire is far from my core worlds, I'll spend time moving troops to a forward colony to use as a staging area for troop transports to grab more grunts.

As for how many troops I garrison at my colonies, I always do 6 infantry units. Six can fit onto a single troop transport that can drop off the grunts as soon as the colony ship lands. Six will protect you against all but the really large pirate raids. Build the fortified bunkers and the pirates won't even bother anymore. Even the empires will have to amass a sizeable invasion force. You can add more and different types of ground units as the population grows. Use your judgement based on how much tax revenue that colony makes.

I wouldn't build the bunkers though until the population exceeds 2 billion. Once it reaches that, pirates can't build anymore facilities. There's kind of, in my opinion, a bug that occurs with pirate facilities and fortified bunkers. When your troops attack a pirate base on YOUR colony, the pirates get the defensive bonus from the bunkers to boost their strength.

[SgtScum]

With the most recent ai mod I tend to let the ai do the ship design and fight the wars with me designing key ships to form specialized fleets to run manually and help the ai on to victory. Works good as I'm free of most of the micro of fighting wars but can jump on oppourtunitys with the personal fleets and turn the tide. This is especially true when combating pirates as they tend to not provoke the ai into a quick enough defense so I do the pirate hunting and eventual extermination myself. My manual fleets also get all the good characters because the ai has a tendency to put them in ships that die easily and you lose them in a simple skirmish.

[T-Bone Biggins]

Originally posted by Ri0Rdian:

Once the game gets big enough (tens of fleets or more) I always use fleet posture (too much micro otherwise). Mainly defense but attack is also possible, although I like to command at least one fleet personally all the time. Something like "Royal Fleet" or "Guard Fleet".

Q: "Why is it called the Royal Fleet?"
A: "Because I tell them what to do and because I say so."

[Ri0Rdian]

Originally posted by T-Bone Biggins:

Originally posted by Ri0Rdian:

....

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You got it 100%!

[Zastaver]

hay would like to add a quick qeustion here, will the AI with auto retrofit keep two differant lines of ships (escort A/escort B) seperate or will it upgrade all of escort B to escort A if it thinks escort A is better?