GUTB

From SEWiki

GUTB was a mighty fine poster (troll?) on Shrapnel Intel Forums famous for his UBER ESCORT designs. These escorts were alleged to allow him to swamp anyone early in the game and destroy whatever he had built, "because of my massively overwhelming, shattering, crushing firepower coupled with your complete inability to hit my ships." He clearly misunderstood the entire basis of the combat bonus system.

Killer Strategy for Ship Design

The original posting about these was made in this thread:

All you guys are missing the boat on this one.

Killer strategy for ship design:

Escort. As much beam firepower as you can fit. For instance, early game get an escort with:

• x3 engines
• x3 cannons

If you give a significant bonus to research in your racial points, you will literally have upgradeded cannon tech in one turn. What I did was give a sigificant bonus to research and a huge bonus to lower maintenence. You have to be smart to work the game system, foklks. And I made my people hard workers.

Step two, build a space yard base or two (with my stats it took one turn for each one) and start pumping these escorts out ( I call them Assault) with emergency build. Once you have 12-15 of these, build 4-6 supply ships. Once you're done with that, you will have several upgraded levels of cannons. Retrofit.

There you go, a force that cream anything in battle at this stage of the game. You don't even have to run tactical combat, the firepower is so overwhelming none of yoru ships is in danger of really dying.

Once you get repair bays, send these ships along with the fleet to give them staying power. You will defeat any player, AI or human this way.

After twenty or so turns of a game, how are you supposed to defend againt an enemy that shows up to combat with 45 advanced guns? In ONE combat turn with several of such assault vessels hammering a frigate it will be killed or near-dead. Even a cruiser will be severaly damaged in ONE turn, in which it only manages to severally damage or kill one of your many ships. Of course, the next turn it has a only a few guns left so it's effectiveness is basically nill. In the twenty or so turns it took to build this fleet, you would NEVER EVER be able to build a fleet of larger ships that have the same level of firepower and overal effectiveness.

Too many people bother with nonsense that doesn't matter, like armor, sheilds, engines, etc. Guys get with the program. THIS is the ultimate forumla for ship design:

1. ESCORT full size
2. MINIMUM crew facilities
3. Three engines
4. Three rail guns
5. ECM (when you're advanced enough to fit it)
6. Point-defenses (when your're advanced enough to fit it)

You might ask why ECM and PD and not another gun. That's because they actually make a difference. Avoiding being hit makes yoru fleet overall more effective overall, AND you have to have space for PD, which is extremely important to have once the enemy starts going wild on missiles. A swarm of assault vessels with PDs will massacre to death ANY missiles or fighters.

Design

The ship design was as follows:

Crew/Bridge/Life	30t
x2 DUCs IV	60t
x1 ECM I	10t
x1 PD III	20t
x3 Ion Engines	30t
Net Weight	150t

Let's check out what the defensive stats:

Escort hull bonus	40%
Berzerker racial bonus	10%
Ship Defense race bonus	30%
ECM I bonus	20%
Net defense bonus	100%

The power of these ships was described as:

His absurd strategies were great for a laugh, if nothing else.

"GUTB was lucky that he was in the company of such benign veterans..." - TerranC

Riposte

Phoenix-D decided to humor GUTB with a lengthy posting about why his insistant strategy could not work. It has been reproduced here for your convenience:

"OVERWHELMING FORCE. Brutal, direct, unsurmountable FORCE."

I really do hate to break it to you, but it's not overwhelming. One planet. 15 weapons platforms armed with 2 CSM1, 3 DUC I. More often than not, those WPs smash the attacking fleet- 15 of your assult escorts armed with DUC IVs- flat. Oh, and they build FASTER than your ships, which means there will be more of them (except on small, outlying colony worlds).

I did a test scenerio. Settings: 2000 racial points, no advanced trait. Maxed maintance reduction, high research bonus, enchanced minerals and construction. Low tech start, one planet.

Built two bases, then started cranking out ships. Turn 1.1: DUC II attack ships finished, supply ships finished. Retrofit begings to DUCIII. 1.5: retrofit complete

Now, at this point finances are OK, so it looks like paying for the ships is not a problem. However, you have no idea where the nearest empire is. I assumed the nearest empire would be in the second habitable system I found. Time of arrival: 2.5.

OK. So let's assume there's another empire out there in a more defensive posture, and you find him. He uses the same racial stats as you. Assuming he built two construction bases, used those to expand, and turned his homeworld to building WPs, he has twenty-one WPs before you even launch your fleet. Then his homeworld slows down (emergancy build expires).

He continues to expand.

On the turn you launch your fleet, he has: 4 colonies, 3 with 4 WPs each 21 WPs on his homeworld And a scout ship already out.

By the time your slow attack fleet arrives, it's already dead.. it just doesn't know it yet.

Oh, and speed 6 CSMI armed ships will tear apart your assult ships quite easily, if he went for ships instead of weapon platforms.

EDIT: heh. I just did a test- took your assult ship design armed with DUCVs against a CSMI armed speed 6 ship. Both escorts. One side had 15 ships (DUC) the other 13 (CSM).

I've been running it through SE4's simulator, and the DUC ships have yet to win. Best they've managed to do is kill 3 of the other ships for a loss of 6 of their own. Often they are wiped out without killing a single CSM ship. That's with tech AND numbers on the side of the DUC ships!

EDIT2: Shield 1, Combat Sensor 1 ECM 1 DUC I speed three light cruisers fare much worse- about the same as the DUC escorts vs the CSM escorts. But replace those DUCs with CSM1, and again the balance shifts. Four light cruisers can kill 15 assult escorts. The light cruisers take a little more research, but much much less cash.

But hey, let's not talk theory too much . Up for a game?