Ok, not sure if you guys are aware of this, so I'll throw it out there. Just played a game on battle of the quadrants as dominion vs 3 unfair comps as feds, rommies and klinks (no borg). I was going through all the stats at the end of the game and noticed that the federation was the only race (besides me) that built 16 capital ships, while the other 2 only built at most 2 at a time. Any idea what causes this? Would it make that big a difference if the feds were an agressive comp or economist comp?
It's more circumstances than AI type, but that will aid in the circumstances they end up in. Fed capital ships are particularly durable at the upper levels, the AI is less inept at keeping them alive as a result. When fighting winning battles, it is exceedingly rare for them to lose those tough upper level capital ships. In a war they have the upper hand on, they end up being relatively flush with cash, and an AI that has the cash for it will prioritize building a capital ship. An AI without the cash will spend it as it comes in, trying to reach the fleet limit and never managing to build more than one or two at a time. So, the AI that are losing end up having very few capital ships, the AI that are winning end up with more, and Feds are particularly good about not dying in winnable situations. You'll only see large numbers of capital ships when a side has been winning battles, and you'll typically see more from the Feds than the other sides, Dominion will be last by comparison, their speed deficit gets them killed more often. If the AI had a better grasp on resource management it would do much better, but it basically spends every dime it makes, regardless of strategic priorities it should be paying attention too.
On a less important note, I lost 10 enslavers to the feds in a battle. 10!!! That doesn't seem quite right, although I think I know why it happened. I believe it was because I was having them all focus their attack on the galaxy classes (since they were pissing me off at the time), and after I went away for a sec to do some research, I was too late to realize they weren't dying. I noticed that after a galaxy's shields went down, its hull repair rate shot up to 80 a second. Is that the repair crew ability that's doing that? Still though, I feel that if if those enslavers were 10 sovvies or neg vars instead, it wouldn't have turned out that way at all. I could be wrong.
Ouch? The Galaxy class has it's own repair ability that can stack up to 30 points, and ten Excelsiors can stack up to 50 points on a single target. It took a lot of support to hit that, but yeah that's what you're seeing.
If you had a fleet of Enslavers and no supporting fleet, you're quite right about the other two classes surviving a fight they could lose. A Sovereign is much better at dueling tough targets, and much better at surviving heavy fire. The Enslaver excels at doing massive damage to a large number of targets while supporting a fleet of Jem'Hadar frigates. Ten of any capital ship isn't a particularly tactical choice. You just happen to be comparing purely self contained warships that excel in defense and individual firepower against one with a powerful support ability for an ultimate, a long cool down on a high target count attack ability, and another ability that only works on shields.
A duel between the two works out like this, your Enslaver does absurd damage, rapidly stripping off the enemy shields, dishes out a few thousand points in damage to the Sovereign from the torpedo spam while it does, then stalls out when the shields drop, doing little more than Ablative Armor will repair. The Sovereign does sustained high damage with a riddled with interrupts, potentially negating your torpedo spam in the process, while having high armor and repair rates.
