Stars! - Matt's Warship Factory

Here's a selection of warships that I've designed and used in real Stars! games, either in testbeds against the AIs or against human opponents.

First up, a bit of design philosophy:
 

Firepower

Your warships will ideally want as much firepower as you can get. Providing they satisfy the other concerns listed here, you should usually go for the most powerful weapon (for beam weapons the power is obvious, for missiles multiply the damage caused by the accuracy) you can get. Fast weapons research is the key to getting more firepower

Cost

The cost of warships can be measured in several ways. Firstly the resource cost which is pretty self-explanatory. The second thing is the mineral cost, most warships tend to use ironium for hulls and missiles, which usually makes it the limiting factor. Boranium is used a lot by beam weaponds and bombs and Germanium is used a lot in electronics. You should try to balance your usage of all three minerals to maximize effectiveness. Note that it may often make sense to make a lot of ships that aren't the most powerful individually, because their cost is lower and the total amount of firepower you can wield for a given amount of resources is greater.

Protection

A ship's base arrmour is it's first form of protection, this can be added to by additional armour and shields. After that you can add jammers and beam deflectors to defend against missiles and beams respectively. Try to balance the protection you give your ships to minimize costs and defend against your most likely opponents. Avoiding being hit is also a form of protection which we'll look at in the next few factors.

Initiative

Different weapons and hulls have different initiatives, the highest of  which gets to fire first. To increase a ship's initiative, you can add extra computers. Getting the first shot can often be crucial, as if you can cause a lot of damage with it, you can often avoid taking much yourself. However, many players will deliberately opt to lose the initiative war if they can protect their ships well enough in other ways and use the slots freed for other purposes.

Range

The range of weapons is very important. For example range zero weapons cause a lot of damage but need to be delivered by a warship in the same battle square as it's target which makes them nearly useless. On the other hand long ranged weapons, espeically missiles but also range 3 beams can be very useful as they can step away from opponents with shorter ranged weapons. To make the shorter ranged beam weapons effective they need to be mounted on very fast ships which brings us to...

Battle Speed

A high battle speed gives several advantages. The first of which is the ability to close down fleeing opponents quickly. A secondary one is that it allows fast ships with greater range to step back from their opponents getting several free shots in before they can fire back. This happens regardless of the relative initiatives of the ships.

Weight

Reducing weight has two advantages. Firstly, it increases the distance a ship can travel between stars on a given amount of fuel. Secondly, lighter ships move after heavier ones on the battle board, so if they have longer ranged weapons they can step back. This makes range 0 weapons rather limited, as opponents can usually design a lighter ship with a longer range to use this tactic against them. It also can be used against other short ranged (e.g. range 1 or 2 beams) to a limited extent as well.

Warp Speed

A high warp speed allows your ships to cross space quickly. In the early game you should aim for warp 8 or 9 and in the late game all your warships (except perhaps bombers and chaff) should be warp 10 capable.

Fuel

The final, but by no means least, factor. Your warships will be limited by the amount of fuel they can carry. This can be offset by using super fuel transports in the late game, but your early ships should aim for decent energy efficiency (scoops and the fuel mizer can be very handy) and possibly carry fuel tanks as well.

Obsolesence

There's no such thing as an "ultimate" ship in Stars! For any design you come up with there's always something better around the corner that it's bound to bump into sooner or later as technology advances, and even at the end Nubians are so flexibles as hulls that any design can be countered by another. So, it makes sense to build your warships immediately just before you need to use them, so your resources can go into improving planets and research more effectively.

Now onto some warships...

Scout based warships

The BE2C

This is an early scout/warship. It's pretty useless for serious combat as the low armour will mean that it can be taken out with a single hit, and the low initiative means that even with swarming it'll be hard for it to take out any sort of seriously defended ship or base. Consequently I don't usually build them, especially when playing against human opponents. Still, it can worry the occasional scout and freighter and is quite useful against some of the AIs, particularly the Macinti who will often leave their starter colonies undefended.

Design options:

Destroyer based warships

The Sopwith Pup

This is typically the first warship I'd build in a game.It's main purpose isn't for combat though, as it makes an excellent tanker for boosting the speed of colony fleets. The two X-Ray lasers are added to make it a capable escort that can chase off most other early warships providing they don't have too much of an advantage in numbers. Large numbers of these ships can be built in the early game for that dual purpose, and despite the light armament, they can be effiective when swarming against freighters or starbases. They're generally too slow to make an effective interceptor though.

Design Options:

The Sopwith Camel

This ship goes for a missile approach rather than using beam weapons. There are numerous disadvantages to this at this stage of the game:

1. Missiles cost more in ironium than equivalent beam weapons.
2. Missiles are less poweful.
3. Missiles are heavier, so ships will be slower and use more fuel.
On the other hand, the missiles do have the advantage of range. So, if a missile ship can move faster than a beamer, they'll manage to avoid being hit. Missiles can also directly attack the armour of a ship, even if it's shielded whereas beams have to take the shields down first.

Design options:

Sopwith Snipe

This is a return to beam ship design. The Phaser Bazooka offers much more firepower than the Beta Torpedo, so is generally a better weapon. However, the range is only two, so you need to make it as fast as possible so as to close the gap quickly. To this end, I've dispensed with the armour and fitted a better engine in the Alpha Drive 8. The addition of an energy capacitor also boosts the firepower by 10%.

Design Options:

Frigate Based Warships

Chaff

This is a sacrificial ship designed to soak up missile hits freeing your more expensive warships from attack. Chaff works because of two features of the game. The first being that a missile can only kill one ship, so to kill a thousand ships, you'd need to fire a thousand missiles. Considering that a battleship can carry at most 20 missiles, it'd take one a fifty turns to wipe out a fleet of a thousand ships. The second thing is that the targetting system used in batttles will often go for small lightly armed ships first, leaving large heavilty armed ships until last. So, this would mean that while the aforementioned Battleship was wasting its time wiping out the cheap and inneffectual Chaff, an enemy Battleship would be able to close and destroy it without so much as picking up a scratch.

To use chaff effectively, you'll need extremely large numbers as battleships rarely fight alone. A useful rule of thumb is that one for each missile in the enemy fleet will give your own fleet one extra round of protection. Chaff is useless against beam weapons as they can stream from target to target. Generally the best method of countering chaff is to include beamer equippeed warships in your battle fleet. Given sufficient firepower they can dispose of all the Chaff in a single turn, freeing the missile ships to target the more important enemy ships.

Since Chaff only has a QJ5 engine, you'll need to move it around by gating or use a tanker or other large ship with a decent engine. Fleets of Battleships or Nubians usually have a lot of spare fuel, so they can drag their chaff along with them without much penalty. Watch out for overloaded engines at warp 10 and try to avoid rushing chaff through minefields as chaff is extremely vulnerable in them and you can quite easily lose an entire fleet that way.

Design options:

The SE5a

This is an example of a "horde" ship. The idea is to produce vast numbers of these ships early in the game and swamp the opposition with them before they can field superior ships in enough numbers. Sending large numbers of these ships at enemy starbases and fleets before they have time to prepare themselves can cause utter havoc. They do have a short window of opportunity to do their damage though, as they effectively become obsolete once the enemy can build more cost effective ships with superior tech. e.g. Jihad Cruisers.

Design options:

Cruiser based warships

The Hurricane

This is a basic Guided Missile Cruiser design. The idea of this ship is to use the firepower of the Jihad Missile which is much greater than any other weapon available at the time. However, since the Jihad is a rather innacurate weapon, it requires the Cruiser hull's extra electronic slots as it's not usually worth placing on a Destroyer or Frigate where the number of slots for Battle Computers is very limited.

Design options:

The Spitfire

This is a typical Beamer warship complimentary to the Hurricane. The ideal for which is high battlespeed so as to close down the slower but longer ranged missile ships easily. This design is particularly optimised for the task of sweeping minefields as well with the four Gatling Guns.

Design options:

Battleship based warships

The Hunter

This is a typical first battleship. The idea is to give a high intitiative and accuracy with the four Battle Super Computers and do vast amounts of damage with the 16 Jihad missiles.

Design options:

The Swift

The Phantom

This is a higher tech version of the Hunter. As you can see the components are nearly equivalent, but each has been replaced by a higher tech version.

Design Options:

The Lightning

This is basically a high tech version of the Swift.

Design Options:

Nubian based warships

The Tornado

The Nubian is the ultimate warship in Stars. No other ship is as capable with the possible exception of  the Warmonger Dreadnaught which certainly isn't as flexible. Since there are a myriad of possible Nubian designs, all of which can be counterdesigned, I'll concentrate on just one here and you can use it as a starting point for your own designs.

The Tornado is a Beamer Nubian designed to fight against other Beamer Nubians. The battle speed of 2.5 given by the IS-10 engines and the 3 manoevering jets will allow it to close the gap quickly and while the Synchro Sappers can take down shields quickly, they'll be assisted by the Anti Matter Pulverisers which will then hopefully start eating into enemy armour. The three banks of capacitors can more than double the firepower of the ship. The Jammers will help protect this ship against missile armed opponents, and the two banks of beam deflectors will reduce enemy beam power to about a half which hopefully won't be enough to overwhelm the two banks of shields. In the event of this happening, the high base armour of the Nubian hull will come into play. Ideally though, this ship will be deployed in huge stacks so that with the overlapping shields, the hull will never pick up a scratch. The design is also easily gateable, so can get to the front line quickly in numbers. It also uses roughly equivalent amounts of all minerals, so with careful management you shouldn't have any horrendous shortages.

This ship can easily be counterdesigned by a determined opponent, as the jammers will be useless if they only field beamers, and the deflectors useless against missile ships. Although the latter can also be held at bay by chaff.

Design options:

Bomber Designs

The Mosquito

This design has numerous advantage: The downsides are: Design options:

The Wellinton

This is a bit better protected than the Mosquito, although not by enough to withstand a mine hit, alas. It can also travel at warp 10, but that makes it less cost effective in engine terms than the mini bomber design. It's also large enough to have problems fitting through stargates. The different types of bomb make it more effective than just having cherry bombs, although you have the added worry of obsolesence due to better bombs being avaiable at high levels of biotech and electronics which aren't normally fields you'd exhaust quickly. In summary, this design falls between the stools of the Mini Bomber and B52 and is rarely as effective as either.

Design options:

The Lancaster

The B52 is the true heavyweight bomber of Stars! so don't even think about letting it near a stargate with a full bomb load on board. Still it's the only one of the standard bombers that can survive a mine hit intact, indeed with good shields and withotu ramscoop engines it can take a few of them.

Design options: