How Should I Battle?

Good question, I have been wondering myself how efficient I have been being with my battles. My strategy lately has been to use a capital ship massed with lots of light frigates, ill keep the group in tight formation and focus fire on each ship at a time to kill them, if the enemy has a mass of smaller frigates / cruisers ill bring these down to below ten, then usually focus fire on the larger ship and get that out of the way, while doing this if I have any carriers, ill micro the carrier planes into their own control group and use this group to destroy other fighter / bomber formation and to pick off straglers / enemys trying to sneak around the main battle. I just started playing so I dont know how efficient this is and same as you, would be curious to hear from some veteran players and what strategys are working for them.

With a grand total of three games to my name, I have been very successful with massed fires against individual cap ships. Usually after two of them explode the AI will break and run. However if the battles are taking place early before I have transitioned to cruisers, I have had opportunity to have to run myself as the AI stripped away my frigate cover before I could get favorable odds. I am an advocate of focused cap killing, at least against the AI.

ive actually only had one mp game and it was basically a training... are there any vets at there willing to share their secrets on battles?

i usually focus on cruisers(if they have any) and then 2nd the capital ships with my main fleet, and a smaller fleet of light frigates to kill their light frigates. lots of focusd fire. and if i see that they are targeting one of my ships (especially a cap) i command it to run right through and past the enemy fleet so that they have to turn allll the way around to keep killing that one. I also like to split up my fleet into 2 and keep them in really loose formation so that it is harder for the enemy to employ the same tactic. I usually use fighter(as aposed to bombers) squads aswell, so that they cant make use of their bombers, and fighters still to a suprising amount of damage to normal ships aswell.


Although i havn't played many games i have been able to kill much larger fleets if they aren't using good tactics.

there is a myrid of other tactics i could explain but ill let you figure them out yourself

in the erly game i use a kol battel ship and a horde of cobalt light frigs till i get cruiers and use hit and run in a game thats isint going well.

I usually have my main force go after their capital ships (one at a time) and if they have, say, a million Cobalts, I'll just let my LRMs automaticaly target them (instead of going after the capital ships).

It may not be in your best interests to focus fire, as shield mitigation reduces the effective dps done the more you do.

That doesn't really matter when you have 50+ ships vs. one capital ship.

I have found that bombers really usefull. Have a bunch of defense frigates on hand, to take out their fighters and take out their flak frigates, and then your bombers can wreak havoc on the enemies ships. I tend to go for a technological advantage versus a numerical one because people get careless when they have more ships than another pwerson and think their numerical superiority will win, they gorget about the technology levels.

I usually have my Frigates focus fire on enemy frigates and cruisers, while my caps take care of other caps. To each their strength I guess.

focus fire stack on their frigates while you in turn retreat invidual ships taking fire moving their fleet out of position and streching it

I agree with "cousindaVe." This works well against Humans as well as AI.

If someone is microing your ships, try to pick up on it as soon as you can and retreat any ship they micro (at least, before it dies). Their ships will move all over the place and waste time chasing your retreating ship.

Other than that, i think Microing is a bad idea in small battles due to mitigation. Let's say you each have 1 or 2 cap ships and 20 frigates, 5 cruisers. The amount of mitigation will make an impact. 60% of the shots will not hit. That's huge. Focus fire only on the most dangerous units (battleship caps, specialty cruisers, etc) but let your units target multiple enemies.

If you both have huge armies, the most efficient microing is removing capships, but the downside to that is that people generally retreat even if they think they can win without capships

focus on ships that do the most damage to you.

Why shoot cruisers and frigs if its lrm and other long range ships killing you?

I like the tech advantage rather than numbers too, its just less forces to command. another good strategy is to mass hordes of carriers and kite them around. kiting is trying to stay out of enemy range while still attacking them (with bombers) for those who dont know what "kite" means...

My standard tactics rely heavily on my empire tree with stacking. I'll grab all my caps and maybe a 10 stack of lrms and focus fire on a cap ship. The argument that damage reduction has diminshing returns doesn't convince me. Enough missiles hittin g will shred a ship even with 60% DR.

I then take my 10 stacks of ships and assign them to attack a stack of enemy ships. They'll auto focus fire and I don't have to worry to much. Also if you take a small group of siege frigates and get past any turrets and begin to ard the planet, the enemy fleet will reassign targets and waste time moving to the siege frigates. If they choose not to go for them and remain focussed on the fleet they may just end up losing the planet.

The stacks help alot with large battles. I've also noticed just a couple of ships will push the DR on a target up to the 40-50% range, and one ship is in the 20-30 range. I find my self in a dispersed focus fire school, with multiple ships getting focused fireed they go down fast AND majorily reduce the enemy fleets DPS.

Depends on the situation. In my first couple of online games I would always just attack the Cap ships. I quickly found out this doesn't work all the time. The enemy would attack my frigates and destroy them before I could destroy their Cap ship. It just ends up repairing and being good as new. For the early game fights, kill the frigates using single target fire. Use all your ships to attack each ship at a time. At this point you don't have enough fire power to kill the Cap ship fast enough. They also just end up retreating if you do come close to killing it. I also think this is a better way to go with the bigger battles, although loosing a Cap ship is a suffering blow. They can just continuing building frigates.

Consider the damage ratios. A normal frigate does around 10-13 damage each. A cap ship does around 40-50 damage. So 4*13=52. Since your average fleet early game has around 10-15 ships in it thats a lot more damage. Also consider the health of each frigate compared to the cap ship.Frigate-500 shield, 600 hull about. Cap- 1500 shield, 3000 hull about. You can kill the 4 frigates a lot faster then the cap ship. This isn't considering the abilites though. I would still go after the frigates. 10 frigates scare me more then 1 capital ship.

Also use support ships. I find these greatly under used in the games I have played. Having even 4 ships to support can give you a great boost in the battle. You should also control the abilities, don't use the auto. Auto usually just fires off whenever there is a fight, not very effective. But I only do small maps(1 star) so I use a lot of micro. Micro ftw

The some of the best strategys is to flank with small but powerful attack fleets and push back the enemy fleet with your main. Also use the capital ship specialtys they can help greatly in bad situations. Capital ships can attack more than 1 target at a time send it to the front and lead a column of heavy frigates streaght int the enemy fleet to split it in pieces. 
good luck Econimist