corvette only fleets?

[Ruben_101]

are there any disadvantages? thinking about swarms of corvettes doing their job

[tempest.of.emptiness]

It is possible, and I have done it, but each time I do it I regret the decision. Eventually the alloy cost of the droves of corvettes that must be replaced after each battle becomes a drag on your economy.

[Leoscar]

The disadvantage is that you'll have to constantly replace the ones you will inevitably loose.

[Ruben_101]

ok i'm still thinking. But doesn't that mean that with a fortress, created only for the front with 3 to 4 shipyards, that is still possible?

[MrHero23]

Yes, it is still possible, but not nearly as effective as a more diverse fleet. In older versions of the game corvette masses could win you the game, but not so much now. It can still be done but you will need a very large alloy complex to make it work. This doubles if you use mods like gigastructures.
I think its still best to specialize ships in your fleet and send out groups of those.

[Dakota]

Well it's not an issue of "are there any disadvantages" it's more that they have only one single advantage which is their speed and they're the worst ship class possible for literally everything else.

They do bad damage for their cost, have bad durability for their cost, have pathetic range so they get shot to pieces before they even get to do damage sometimes, their low health means they'll often just die outright rather than being able to warp out which compounds the issue of them being inefficient fleet power for their cost already, upkeep to fleet power ratios also bad, they have no strike craft for quickly dealing with enemy corvettes before they get into range or for bullying stations out of range nor do they get XL weapons to get big shots on battleships and stations before closing range, admiral is more likely to die due to the ship he's on being a corvette which is low health and likely to die rather than escape, worse values for healing due to lower total health pools of the fleet so they run out of steam in hit and runs far far faster which is compounded further by taking much more damage and hard losses.

That's just off the top of my head. Basically corvettes are absolute dumpster fire garbage and deserve their spot as the first ship available that you swap away from as soon as you have more tech unlocked.

[Cryten]

To summarise, even with 95% evade, tracking will remove 15-30 of it depending on if you have tracking modules or a tracking titan. Sensors make the initial 15. And tracking is not diminished by evasion being over cap. IE it always reduced 95% to 80%-65%. Combine that with when a corvette gets hit it gets vaporised in a single cannon round / Arc round and corvette return fire is both short ranged and weak. Meaning that the vast majority of enemy vessel will retreat instead of explode.

The end result is that your corvette fleet will likely win on equal points (of the enemy has no medium / small weaponry of fighters) 1 or 2 battles but take extreme casualties. They will cost you tons of alloys to resupply. They are mainly only useful late if your in a multiplayer game vs someone who has no anti corvette forces and you take them by surprise in a blitzkrieg assault on their homeworld and core worlds. Or against the L gate (not) crisis event since they have only super large weapons and fighters.

But in single player who cares. You can win with any fleet formation unless your in a tight spot. Its just you will end up with more losses with corvettes. I tend to only use corvettes as a fast moving mop up fleet when the map get too big to bottle up enemy fleets.

[Stevcorp]

Corvettes are worth their weight in gold. Every shot the enemy wastes on those losers is one less hit on your useful ships.

[Dakota]

Originally posted by Stevcorp:

Corvettes are worth their weight in gold. Every shot the enemy wastes on those losers is one less hit on your useful ships.

But he's suggesting not having any of the useful ships backing them up.

[Cryten]

In a comparison of equal fleet sizes its hard to compare a mixed fleet vs pure fleets. However there is quite a few anecdotal experiences from people stating that mixed fleets loose to pure battleships with tracking or range titans. Of course there are also anecdotal descriptions of people countering the current meta of pure battleships. But that itself tends to be countered by the newly buffed fighter escort cruisers.

How much of a fleet capacity advantage would you have to give to someone to get a extra corvette fleet evasion tanking to overcome it. I dont know. I do think that the fighter repeatables made corvettes even worse though.

[Dakota]

Originally posted by Cryten:

In a comparison of equal fleet sizes its hard to compare a mixed fleet vs pure fleets. However there is quite a few anecdotal experiences from people stating that mixed fleets loose to pure battleships with tracking or range titans. Of course there are also anecdotal descriptions of people countering the current meta of pure battleships. But that itself tends to be countered by the newly buffed fighter escort cruisers.

How much of a fleet capacity advantage would you have to give to someone to get a extra corvette fleet evasion tanking to overcome it. I dont know. I do think that the fighter repeatables made corvettes even worse though.

Thinking about it, battleship + corvette just seems flat worse than pure battleship with same costs since the corvettes mean less XL weapons shooting across at the beginning, so even if the enemy has some XL shots missing corvettes the other side just doesn't have those XL shots to begin with but also has less overall health even with evasion factored in (which is 0 because fighters exist) and less overall damage especially with the corvettes getting melted by said fighter swarm before reaching the battleships then having a fighter numbers advantage so their strikecraft are tied up on yours while you outnumber.

I don't see it beating the XL + dual hangar meta, infact it's kinda a bad matchup since XL + dual hangar is built specifically to deal with short range lower tier evasion vehicles and low evasion high health ships.

[Tiasmoon]

Originally posted by Dakota:

Well it's not an issue of "are there any disadvantages" it's more that they have only one single advantage which is their speed and they're the worst ship class possible for literally everything else.

They do bad damage for their cost

Upkeep scales with ship class, I dont know where you get these impressions from but in an unmodded game Corvettes are for the most part comparable in cost/ship size to higher tier ships.

Corvettes are some of the most efficient damage per cost ships. Their only real disadvantages are that they have a hard time killing ships instead of letting them run away, and if you outclass the enemy hard you'll still need to replace some after fightings due to their lower health.
This comes with the upside that its much faster to replace Corvettes then other shipclasses.
Their other downside is that they are less flexible since they can't use shipkiller weapon or fighter themselves.

They are easily the best ship type to use against something like the Grey Tempest or anything else with ship killing weapons. Also worth noting that giving the enemy more targets and having more ships firing yourself tends to work better. Advantage in numbers is still a thing.

Originally posted by Dakota:

That's just off the top of my head. Basically corvettes are absolute dumpster fire garbage and deserve their spot as the first ship available that you swap away from as soon as you have more tech unlocked.

Corvettes only really fall off when you get access to full lightning battleships. That is ofcourse, based on the assumption you know how to build them well enough.

I assume you never use Crystal Plating? Without that tech they are certainly a lot worse.

Destroyers are just straight up worse in terms of slots and damage per shipsize. I dont know why you'd say that someone should upgrade to them right away?

Late game is a different topic, but before that Corvettes are actually quite great.

[Cryten]

I dont think you should compare upkeep per ship to combat ability per fleet capacity. Upkeep per ship would indicate that a gutted anti pirate corvette would be best ship when it infact has no weaponry what so ever.

Also you seem to think corvettes are better then destroyers. Which is weird because a destroyer with 2 mediums and 2 lights easily outclasses a corvette for upfront damage, dps, armour, shield and hull health. Thats on a per fleet capacity basis. ie 2 corvettes for 1 destroyer.

The only thing corvettes do better damage wise than destroyers is mount small weaponry. But since medium does more then twice the damage of small weaponry an effective balanced destroyer has the equivalent fighting power of 8 light weapons. Compared to 6 light weapons from 2 corvettes. And if you go to scaling vs higher tier the same thing happens from destroyers large slot vs corvettes medium.

[CrUsHeR]

Problem is that Corvettes have such low defensive stats, and their evasion is unreliable.

Example taking on some of those Void Clouds with a similar or larger Corvette fleet might give you 50% losses, because every hit of them insta-kills a Corvette.


And as others mentioned, you basically want to fast tech to get exlusive Battleship fleets with Arc Emitters, plus a Titan flagship once you can afford them. Other ship types just don't compare in performance, point for point in your naval cap or fleet power.

You could still keep a corvette fleet as a quick reaction force, since they are at least 50% faster than a battleship. So they can intercept stragglers and deal with other issues while your main battleship fleets are doing the real work (battles and bombardment).

They are also nice to send down some remote undefended hyperlanes during a war, you can even split them in several fleets to make it even faster.

[MP]

Corvettes are the express route to losing a war due to high war exhaustion.

[talemore]

Corvette is the 2nd wave you throw in when the opponent think they already won.

They're basically large fighters and the key is to make as many you can produce and toss them in when the opponent is attacking the battleships.

They're logistic nightmare as they're in need to regroup from many solar systems and made on places where building battleships take too long time

When using modified transports (-food penalties) with fighters the concept of Corvette work as transport has a purpose by being excluded fighters from the main fleet

Corvette compared is something that is not working as a concept because the game tag it as a destroyer when it is a support fire, support ship who may as well replace their guns for a fighter bay or transport module