2. No freaking way. Have you got any idea how much fun that would kill? It would be like total mayhem and you would have the choice of clicking insanely everywhere to manage your fleet or just go with only heavy cruisers or frigates because they can survive at least a while in the middle of a enemy fleet.

The problem here is that it not sensible. Look Titans have been billed as the new endagme sine they where announced. This whole titan rushing clearly isn't intended. Corvettes are meant to slot into your early game fleet. No these fleets don't exist right now, i know. But in the context of those old LRM + Flak spam fleets they could be a lot more effective, (i'm going through the corvette data files right now btw to try to figure out their strengths and weaknesses).

The whole problem right now is everyones rushiig titans, and titan have all 4 things that are hard counters to corvettes in abundance:

1. Anti-Fighter guns.

2. AoE abilities.

3. Multipule firing Arcs.

4. Mulipule firing banks per firing arc.

Titan's vs Corvettes is bassiclly the hardest counter in the game right now and thats skewing every possibble perception of corvettes badly.

I'll come back with more data once i've finished digging.

ok, here's something out of left field and it's a little involved so bear with me (or not).

light frigates die horribly mid-late game so include with their special ability (sabotage reactor, steal anti-matter, and interference) an ECM package that significantly reduces their chance of being hit by any weapon.  This would increase their survivability and allow them to retake their hunter-killer role against support cruisers.

Give corvettes a stackable "tagging" ability that negates some of the ECM affect so light frigates can be more effectively targeted.  This ability would not require extra research and could exist alongside other abilities corvettes might have.  This could add a kind of submarine/anti-submarine mechanic that does not exist in Sins.

From a lore perspective, only the TEC factions would use actual ECM and sensors while Advent would use their psychic powers and the vasari would use phase space and nanobots but the effects would be the same.

How did you know i do not drink decaf coffee ever? perks of starbucks employment

People writing in all caps usually give me the impression that they have had way to much strong coffee.

Haha i know just was a little sleep deprived.

I don't think you are seeing how the titan would be countered by my previously stated design. 

The corvettes would be the ONLY ship aside from another titan or carrier that could engage a titan 1v1 and last a while.  Corvettes would get free replenishment and they would "ASSIST" in countering an opposing titan. There should be no 1 strategy to take out a titan, it should be a coordination of many fleet assets.  What I am proposing would make corvettes less of an attrition hog while at the same time requiring less micromanagement to make them a more effective military tool.  In this way they would be able to keep up pressure on a titan for longer, and cheaper.  Adding some more passive debuffs would really help in reducing a titan's effectiveness so that it would be easier to take them while they are at their weakest. 

If you play it right you could have corvettes attack a titan the second it is built keeping pressure on it while receiving fewer permanent losses so that corvette debuffs would have more application time on the titan. 

Currently corvettes are balanced for endgame players with large economies that just spam corvettes to get one small edge on an enemy titan (occupy its guns with corvettes, debuff it, then snipe with rest of fleet).

as it stands the early game has not loyalist titan counter except for a titan rush + fleet spam. a Lvl 1 ankylon titan can take on 56+ LRM and level to lvl 4 while still surviving with no support at an enemy homeworld.

statisticly corvetts don't seem to be any sort of counter to any other ship, they are cheap and weak.  perhaps the destruction of corvetts dosn't net any experence to a titon, or they have some sort of counter coded into them but it dosn't seem so to me.  if there is an advantage to corvetts it likely has something to do with the fact that they act like fighters.  the only advantage i see in that is in a fight between light frigets/seige/scout ships and corvets.  corvets would constanly leave the narrow fireing cone of the erly game units lowering their dps. straifing however would have no effect on flack (360 fireing capability) or LRM (missiles follow ships).  so it seems that as of right now they are as others have said, an erly game unit.  their movement is their only current strength. 

they don't, as far as i can see, counter titons.  the one thing that sets a corvety apart from any other unit is its attack pattern,  a titon compleately nutralises that bonus by haveing multiple huge aoe attacks.  feeding a titon a constant streem of corvets and there by bosting its level seemes stupid. 

imo titons are a way of encouraging players to build more cap ships, and to be agressive.  a large group of cap ships can defeat an unleveled titon without much trouble and once the titon rush problem is dealt with, it will be possible to level up a group of cap ships before the titon drops, that way you can use cap ship debuffs (like ion bolt) to cripple an undefended titon. if you focus frigets, titon is the counter.  if you focus cap ship, frigets are the answer.  i you focus titon, cap ships are counter. 

on the other hand erly agression can cripple an economy, force an opponent to built frigets and you stop them from building titons erly game. so attack with corvetts erly and alot there is your counter.  if there is a way to counter the actual titons with corvets it would be destroy buildings, use them to attack infustructure, lots of corvetts, one expensive titon.  corvets (any friget actualy) can attack many planets and wreak havock.  while titons can only be in one place at a time.

maybe the devs should make corvetts better at destroying buildings, turn them into early game resurch hunters.

just to take this discussion away from something nobody seems to agree on anyway what kind of terrible game design strategy is being pursued where tiny cheap ships are even a proposed if not possibly currently effective counter against massive behemothic uber-capital ships just because they're one of two new units being introduced

is this the same intuitive logic that gave us "flak ships that look like they'd snap in half if you looked at them funny and shoot at strike craft are HP tanks that counter long range missile frigates"

its like building a wwii rts game where combat engineers engage king tigers in direct combat and win. maybe whoever is in charge here should take a cue from the people that have already implemented corvettes in a "realistic" or at least vaguely intuitive manner three expansions ago and make them fast raider vessels that can disrupt supply lines or something

Wow, you're as self-absorbed as SemazRalan when it comes to claiming credit for features.  Best of luck getting people to play Dawn of Victory when it is for an outdated game version and has useless AI!

For poops and giggles try flying a squadron of 50 or so corvettes into a minefield. The result is made of l0l

I do use corvettes in a role i believe intended for the light frigates. Spam them early game as little pieces of meat to feed planetary milita as your capship harvests them for xp. Lights are too slow and cost too much supply to really serve the cannon fodder role well.

I feel that the point of corvettes is to give another option for a starting fleet composition rather than the rush to LRFs right away. This is kinda the way scouts were before they got nerfed, and this makes me think they would like to further nerf the scouts and let corvettes take over the combat roll scouts used to have.

It seems to me that the other possibility might be for defensive purposes. All that disabling ability's and such that they get only works if you have enough corvettes to keep em up and stack em'; also, disabling doesn't matter much if you cant take advantage of the disablement. So, all you can accomplish is to delay the inevitable. But that might be all you need to do.

Yes there has been a lot of balance work done on rate of assault for the endgame so that it becomes a slugging fest to see who's strategy pans out.  The corvettes do in some way buy you time, yet they do not buy you enough time considering their costs in production time, micromanagement, lack of military effectiveness at delaying an opponent and in game resources.

Your titan can still bomb a few planets out with no support having a hundred or so of these on it at all times.  Now when used with starbases you have an actual barrier, yet it is hard to starbase all your worlds under pressure, especially if you are spamming corvettes.

Corvettes are a cheap way to deal with things if you have an economy...They aren't early game ships at all.

Their prime early game usefulness is to achieve a cheap, quick defense for neutral asteroids.  That is about all I have found use for them.  Considering they take a tech level to research, i'd rather use my factory/research time building lrm/lf/scout as early game starter ships, as neutrals don't always need ships defending them and you are building ships that actually matter.

i think that they should be at least twice as strong as they are now and there should bemore than one type of corvett for each race

They need to fix its flight pattern, and it's ramming the target.

well it has the same flight pattern as strike craft, yet you don't see all the collisions because most of the time you are zoomed out.

good luck doing whatever it is you do (bad posts, buying video games and several expansions and playing them by yourself)

Ok i've done some playin and a lot of digging.

Vassari corvettes are a littile odd so i'm going to deal with them seperatly.

Both Tec and Advent corvettes share the same basic design elements in terms of damage output.

Namely they both have 2 guns with the composite damage type and one with the anti-light damage type. That means that 2 guns are bassiclly heavy cruiser weapons of a lower DPS, whilst the other is a fighter gun. This means they're not only very effective against allmost everything else out there that isn't a fighter. But also they're absolutly brutal against bombers. Whilst 'd need more data than my mining allows, (it dosen't give me exact weapon damage and cooldown values), to be certian, i strongly suspect that cost for cost they're a harder bomber counter than flak frigates. They're damage type supports this and the DPS to cost values displayed in game strongly suggest it, but it's hard to be 100% certain. That said they're also very effective at killing the things carrying the bombers, so with that in they're probably the most cost efficent carrier counter out there now.

They're damage types also makes them the hardest LRM counter out there without exception. They're just so cheap that carriers with fighters cannot compete directly, (though they make excellent support).

Their real weakness is their armur type. The TEC have the very light type, while the Advent have the light type. What this means is that TEC suffer more than three quaters again as much damage from flak frigates as the Advent ships. Overall this means that Flak frigates are frightninglly effective killers of TEC corvettes, but are much weaker against Advent ones.

There is one adittinol fact of intrest, the TEC corvettes appear to have their missiles aft mounted, meaning that even when moving away they continue to pour damage into their target.

Overall however, i agree they're just TOO lacking in durability, even for their cheap price. The problem is a lot of AoE damage dealing abilities or a lot of ships with multipule firing arcs, really tend to ruin their day. Overall they have noticablly less efective health than a squadron of fighter or bombers. This is mainly because in practise their sheild migation never raises very high until they're allmost dead, so despite having the potentiol to outlast a fighter or bomber squdron, they're unlikliy to do so in practise. IMO a doubled base costs and supply usagem, but a half again the hull and shields, plus several points of armour would go a long way towards helping them as that drasticlly increases the time they spend at max sheild migation, and greatly reduced the DPS loss rate of a corvette group.

But by far their biggest issue is the early apperrance of titans. Corvettes just suck horriblly vs them.