New to game and need help

Usually, you won't lose many ships unless either the enemy fleet is strong or you don't have enough (or in rare cases too many) support units. Did you try creating fleets and then assigning orders to the fleet leader?

What usually works for me is a TEC fleet like this:
- 1x Kol/Marza Capital Ship
- 1x Dunov/Akkan Capital Ship
- 25x Kodiak Heavy Cruiser
- 6x Garda Flak Frigate
- 2x Cielo Command Cruiser
- 10x Hoshiko Robotics Cruiser

Capital ships are *designed* to soak up lots of damage, and high level ones doubly so. You may find considerably better results if you take out the accompanying frigate fleet first, reducing the damage they deal to your own fleet.

kryo,
Are you suggesting that I send in my frigate fleet first as a sacrifice and then as the other team is fighting them attack with the rest of my fleet? If so what would the timing be on this, just before the last ship frigate was gone? Also I find I do not get help from other teams that I have a cease fire and peace treaty with. How can I encourage them to help out?

Get high leveled cap ships and support cruisers to back them. While your cap ships are soaking damage bring in your frigates and squadrons. Make sure you've researched  

You seem to be having some very deep and basic strategy issues. I don't know that A single thread can fix them. The best I can think of is to link the damage and armor type graph, which is a sticky in this forum:

Armor/damage type graph

As you can see, every basic ship type faces penalties against capital ships. In some cases, and the ship or its fleet has further mechanisms to reduce damage. The Vasari support ship is particularly dangerous, as it has what is essentially a direct heal. If there are a lot of Overseers around, targeting a high level cap first will be like shooting a black hole.

The best things to use against capital ships are Bombers, Heavy Cruisers, and Long Range frigates such as Assailants and Illuminators. If your fleet does not feature a large supply of these, you should be focusing your damage on different targets. Obviously, capital ships are capable of killing capital ships as well

I've read that the more units you use against a heavy armored unit the less damage you are capable of making. Something like how they're able to increase the regenerative ability as they take more simultaneous hits. I think they just divert more energy to shield regeneration or something up to a certain level, 60% or something. I could be wrong. Basically letting the AI do its job does better for you than selecting all units and clicking a single enemy unit. Thats what we usually do in other RTS games because more the better, but here apparently that can be a drawback. If you have enough units, obviously you can over come this but you need a lot. I could be very wrong as I just got this game but thats what I've heard.

Thanks for the chart and advice, being new to the game I was assuming that a TEC frigate (and other ships) had the same properties as an Advent or Vasair. Your discription so shooting into a black hole was exactly what it felt like when I had all my guys targeting that Capital ship and nothing seemed to happen, and if you think I have some deep strategy issues you'r probably right because I do not like to loose ships or men. It's something I may have to get use to in this game to win.

You're talking about mitigation, it's a percentage reduction to the damage a ship takes, for non-capitals it's capped at 60%, for capitals it's 65%, making focus fire less effective, effectivly making support classes more important. I just finished my first average AI game, and it massed Percheon (carrier frigates) and Hoshinko (support) with a Marza and Akkan, I had to pump out Kol's and repair facities to defend, while micromanaging to hell. In the end, I stormed through the opponent because nothing takes down 5 Kol's (alll at least lvl. 6), 25 Garda (Anti-fighter/bomber frigate), and 20 Kodiak (Heavy frigates). The trick is to decide whether you can just attack the Capital ship (when they fall the AI usually retreats) or if the support is too much and that needs to be your focus (typically the case in most larger fleets).

I would start making to seekers then a colonizer(frigate),then build a capital ship factory and build the first capital ship or the last one,then build 4 starting frigates and once when all done go to first planet(astroid) and colonize it after build cilization strutures there and build extratoirs at terran-home and astroid then build 2 or 3 research structures and research fire planet and ice planet colonization then build a few more ships and go colonize others.

Sometimes focus fire can suck, especially when enemy has high level cap ship and you dont have a dominating force. Shield mitigation will cause you to lose 60+% of your damage delt when you focus fire, vs 30% or so when you let the ships just auto attack everything. Trying to down a cap ship with 6000+ shield/hull (at that high of a level) can be nearly impossible if you dont have ALOT of firepower, or the time needed.

You are best off by focus fire on the defensive vessels, building a bigger overall fleet, and attacking on your terms. If you jump to an attack and you realize it could cost you half your fleet to kill 1 cap, retreat, repair and plan again. Cap ships should only be jumped if you can flat out smoke it, or you catch them in retreat and can use the disable ship ability to single the ship out (thus retreating fleet leaves it behind ) haha.

I think you need to just look at the damage charts here. If you are coming in with a bunch of light frigs and they come at you with a capital and a number of LRMs you are going to do nothing but die while you FF their Cap.

One thing I like to do is take Alt+ Click my ships (or stack them) and have them go after their hard counter before going after high level caps. So I send light frigs at carriers or support and LRM's to the light frigs and so forth. If your forces are somewhat equal in size you should be able to tear down their DPS to you and then take out their Cap. I will FF the cap with any ships that aren't a hard counter to the other ships (eg. not taking HC's with light frigs while there is a Capital I can kill).

Another thing is try using bombers to take down their cap while your carriers sit near the edge of the gravity well ready to jump out or while your carriers are skirting around the edge of the well. You may not kill it but it makes it softer for the rest of your fleet.

Good points to consider during my next attack. myemail21479, What is "use the disable ship ability" to single the ship out (thus retreating fleet leaves it behind)?

Some ships (such as the Akkan TEC Capital ship) have certain abilities that can disable part, or all of a ship, the Akkan class Capital ship has the Ion bolt, disabling the ship from moving, phase jumping, or using any of it's abilities, effectivly stopping it. A useful micromanage is to use the Ion bolt to stop an enemy Capital ship that's retreating, allowing your fleet more time to cath up, and take it out. Damn that was a long winded explanation.

Ion bolt has been the #1 killer of capital ships for me when I've got a fleet that won't steam roll a retreating cap. The beauty lies in how close it's CD is to the duration of the ability.

I still attack low level 1-3 caps pretty early in a fight vs. AI. Generally the AI has spent cash on the upgrades so you'll find them leveling before a single ship has gone down....this means a more powerful opponent. I don't know if downing cap in process of leveling means the creds spent on the upgrades are lost. If they are it is totally worth killing them. Consider that you just cost your opponent a cap
and the 3-4.5k he dumped into it. Gotta hurt!

A couple of flak is always good. If you micro-ff carriers because they're an easy kill their strikecraft hang around slowly diminishing health. This can be upwards of 90 seconds for various squadrons which means you killed the ship/hanger but haven't really lessened the damage to your own fleet! So generally a few flak and I ignore carriers.

How I generally FF is alt-tab HC's or LRM's and scroll in on the enemy fleet. If I find a support cruiser it gets nuked, since a fleet without support is half as strong as a same size fleet with support.