Losing battles with overwhelming odds

Too many capital ships? I mean that would be my guess!

What faction was the attacking player?

Advent in particular has incredibly effective Support ships. Guardians and Progenitor Motherships can keep not only a fleet from annihilation, but with smart use of the abilities can even prevent a fleet from taking losses at all. This is especially true in a prolonged battle where they have time to recharge Anti-Matter and maintain their shields.

It really depends on the units and faction you were up against (and what you had) to figure out what exactly happened.

I was playing the Advent and the enemy was the Visari.

Wouldn't MORE capital ships be a good thing?

Vasari ships outclass Advent ships, generally.

Also, as Advent, your better served by having more ships instead of lots of Cap ships. A dozen frigates is very "meh" A dozen of each is very awesome. As Advent, a Cap ship takes just as much supply as a dozen Illuminators (IIRC).

More ships, less Cap ships (Either that, or take more of the 'carrier' type cap ships).

Can you upload the replay someplace so I can take a look and try to figure you what happened?

How does this hold for the TEC? I know they like heavily armoured warships and of course the good old humanies like their big guns Asking as a new multiplayer player. Also, carriers or battleships? If you had to chose?

That sounds really strange. Are you microing your Cap ship abilities and support craft?

I usualy have at least one mothership to guard a battleship (sounds strange). Take that battleship to the front of the fight and set aggression (antagonise?) special ability. Then use the mothership to heal its shields. Also Guardians are very useful in this area for keeping the damage down on your main guns.

A replay would be great to watch if possible.

TEC have the LRM frigate and a group of these can inflict a lot of pain on capital ships but they have to be protected by other units because they are virtually defenseless.

I finished my first game 2 days ago (small map ~12 planets with a 1v1v1, each race) and took me almost 7 hours of game play to finish it. I had the computer on easy just to learn the ropes, I felt that carriers are a good early cap ship to take first. Anyways, my second game I am playing is an extremely large map (~115 planets over 5 solar systems) and I am going into my 10th hour into the game and I have almost dominated my starting solar system. I have the computer on medium this time and its still 1v1v1, all races. I myself played the Vasari in the first game and playing TEC this game, and in both games, I am still sticking to the original game plan, going carriers first. And yes, having large numbers of frigates do help in large scale fights instead of having more cap ships because that gives the enemy more targets they have to take out which, unless they focus fire with a lot of firepower, generally takes them forever. Also, like WindsweptStone said, support ships help out a lot. Hope this helped...

The majority of a fleet's dps comes from it's supporting frigates and cruisers, not from capital ships. Frigates are cheap, fast and do a lot of damage, especially LRMs. Capital ships are meant to support fleets, do reliable dps to high value targets, and to be large targets to soak up enemy dps while your fleet picks them apart.4

Yeah, capital ships, for their popcap cost, have much less firepower than the equivalent popcap of frigates. Capital ships are for their abilities, not their firepower, and those abilities generally need a supporting fleet to be of much use anyway. Capital ships are meant to anchor and support a fleet, not to BE a fleet.

Also, remember that Vasari ships cost, in general, almost twice what Advent ships do, and are almost twice as good. All things being equal, you should have twice as many as him. It sounds very much like he had the numbers over you by a large margin.

Not necessarily.

It sounds like the enemy had a lot more frigates than you, so even though you had more caps, he had a much higher damage output.

Cap ships have a fairly low ratio of 'firepower to cost', both in terms of the resources required to build them and the amount of fleet capacity they use. In general, 50 fleet capacity of frigates will have a much higher combined DPS than a single cap.

Essentially, it's about balanced fleet composition - no Cap ships and you lack the powerful abilities and durability that they provide, too many Cap ships and you lack the firepower that the smaller ships provide.

Of course, working out the right mix of cap ships and frigates is the tricky part, especially as it changes with the situation and the opponent.

You are using way too many capital ships. I have never heard of using that many cap ships before. Try building more frigates and cruisers.

Yeah, I almost never have more than 2 or 3 caps. Frequently, I only have 1. Advent caps may call for a few more, seeing how their abilities are synergistic, but I would never have more than 4 or 5 at max fleet cap even as them, and it sounds like you were no where near that. (I play Vasari, and our capital ships are really...meh.)

Capital ships can take a beating, but do far less damage than an equivalent cost/supply of frigates. Remember, capitals are for SUPPORT, and are largely useless for actual fighting outside of capturing neutral worlds.

I can't tell what the problem is from the text. You can win a game against 3 hard ais by building nothing other than capital ships, so I don't think it was your quantity of capitals that was the problem.

Well I finally won on my 3rd game. Definitely more cruisers (and tech) made the difference. I think my problem before was I didn't research the powerful weapon techs to the level I did this time. I was blowing through the enemy fleets this round. I had three fleet task forces by the end of the game with about 6 capitals, but the cruisers and frigates were definitely the workhorses.

*sigh* I'm just so used to the WWII stratagem where the capital ships are the powerhouses in fleet battles. Bit different in this game, eh?

Also found pirate attacks aren't all bad as capitals gain experience quickly in their attacks.

Thanks for the feedback!

Who was the enemy? A human player or an AI? I simply can't see an AI doing that kind of damage to you with the fleet you describe, particularly as Advent. What kind of caps did you have? 5 Advent caps is likely a force the AI should find to be nigh-insurmountable, and it would typically run in terror rather than fight you.

Try adding more carriers with a large amount of bombers.