Benefits and detriments of small and large ton ships
Larger ships:
Do have deeper armour, if armoured proportionally.
Able to use the best commander’s bonuses.
Summary for the bonuses
Most valuable are Tactical bonus for combat ships and Production, Mining, Terraforming for stabilizers, salvagers, miners and terraformers respectively.
Crew Training is easily replaced with a bit longer time under Training command, and Logistics benefits too little to affect the operational picture.
Theoretically Reaction, Engineering, Carrier Operations, Diplomacy and Intelligence are useful, yet with the current mechanics their usefullness is very limited and you can just ignore these traits in most cases.
More efficient in using modules, which effects are size-irrelevant: EWs, fire controls, towing.
Smaller ships:
Stelthier.
Waste less in small-scope missions or, in other words, are easier to scale up for the particular task by adding particular number of ships.
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Aditional detriments.
Larger ships:
Larger shipyard retooling and shipbuilding times.
Increasing the scope of risks for every your individual planning and operating mistake.
Smaller ships:
Starting from some level, cannot use the most efficient (too large) engines.
Need a lot of micromanagement to provide the same early warning with their sensors.
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Shield generators have more shield points the larger they are. They are MUCH more effective (in shield points per ton of shield generator) when they’re bigger. If your ship is too small to mount a single full-sized shield (i.e. as big as you can make at your tech level), it will be at a disadvantage.
Ratio of tonnage dedicated to armor vs tonnage available for other things is better for larger ships, per an earlier post on the topic.
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A big advantage of small ships:
You will have more of them and they are cheaper to deploy. This allows you to use them much more liberally.
Ex: I’m using a lot of 5000-6000t FF and FFGs in my campaign. They are strong enough to drive off raiders flotillas so I’m using them to escort a lot of commercial fleets (fuel and mineral transports, colonization fleets, supply elements of larger fleets, etc), for scouting (they have a small hangar bay) or for colony protection, etc.
Also, it’s a lot less damaging to lose one or two so you’ll be able to be a lot less risk adverse with them.
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Indeed - there’s the added phenomenon where losing your flagship seems to correlate somehow with local power outages and/or losses of progress. Can’t put my finger on why. Perhaps Steve could look into this?
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May I ask you which is, for you, the limit for a ship is said small or large?
I consider small = fighters and FACs, large = everything else.
Large I think depends on how much msp they use every 5 years if my empire can handle it but it’s close that’s large
For instance my empire has 12 of all types of 50k cruisers and they use 50k msp each every 5 years
I should probably go by the 1 year msp time
It is not just that, but Shield Unification that is a huge advantage of large ships.
A fleet of 10 small ships with 10 separate shield generators will not only start to incur partial readiness reduction at thresholds. (“loose 10% firing power after each 10% damage due to a ship going down”) But also a large, x10 sized ship would unify all the shield regenerations to also be x10 the amount, which could make it immune or at least much more resistant to smaller threats where a small ship fleet still risks some impairment.
Also to the defensive advantage, remember that Aurora calculates armor weight based on actual geometry laws. A x2-dimensioned ship will have x4 the surface and x8 the mass. Therefore, if you want a x8-sized ship to have the same armor “HP” total as 8 x1-sized ships, you will now find you only have to cover half as much surface, and can therefore make the armor twice as deep. (at which point you spend the same %percentage on armor as the small ones. Or you just spend less and have more for other endeavors.)
Defensive power is a real strong point of big ships.
Logistical endurance too, even though the numbers might seem different. (but just try to combine the failure rates of x10 small ships with one x10-sized to see the effect)
Being able to field huge sensors used to be a plus too, but is now only a nice addition for empires that can afford the RP splurge, since the revamping of how sensors work makes it that fleets of smaller sensors are now more effective that a large central one. …It is better that way, but I still shed a tear for my lost system flash scanners.
Building big ships became more difficult in C#, since the resources seem more constrained. Still very possible, but not as natural as it used to come. You have to commit.
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