What’s the AVERAGE speed for all the three main ship classes?
Playing challenges, i’ve discovered that a lot of my designs are incredibly slow and the short ranged ones usually recieve a lot of damage before getting a shot in.
hi,
if by average you mean decent, i’d say:
fighters: not many options here, however the 14% bonus on some fighters has an impact.
frigates: everything above 0.40 is ok and average for frigates, but you should aim for 0.50 - 0.60 if you want speed to actually matter. you’ll notice a great difference then.
cruisers: around 0.30 and above is quite fast for a cruiser. 0.40 is somewhat possible with ships that have a speed bonus, however i managed to get it only with missile weapons attached, since either power consumption is too high for enough (beam) lasers or your ship will be under-armed.
note that faster ships can dodge quite an amount of shots, especially missiles, so speed can be a protection of it’s own.
greetings
driver
Yeah, “decent” speeds are what I’m after, not fast, not slow.
Thanks for the answer, though I’d like to hear from more people too.
Faster speeds can backfire if a unit isn’t smart enough to use it properly. Too many engines can also mean you’re missing out on other defenses or weapons.
I usually go 0.2-0.35 for my cruisers and escort frigates. Shorter ranged units need more speed.
Like Yurch mentioned, speed vs defense/weapons is the trade off.
Fighters: a lot of people like the fastest possible since speed = life for fighters. Since the Rebels racial bonus is speed, their fighters are popular for doing over 3.7 speed. A common Rebel combo is one fighter with 1 rocket doing over 4.0 speed, along with another fighter design with 1 painter that’s 3.8-3.9ish speed as I recall.
Frigates: depends on the role you want it to fill. If you’re going with an Anti-Air build to kill fighters that hangs with your cruisers, you may want something slower like the cruisers doing .10-.25 speed. At the other end of the spectrum, you may build a short range, multiple ion cannon fast frigate that does .50+ as Driver noted.
Cruisers: like frigates, it depends on the role. A high speed, cruiser laser design will want to be .35+ so it can dodge low tracking weapons more often and survive to get in close range with high dps cruiser lasers (see the Rebels again for that speed bonus). A medium range cruiser will probably be in the .15-.25 range. A back of the line, long range fire support design could be a lot slower (.05-.12) since it doesn’t have to go far to get in missile/plasma range.