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Man, I'm still struggling with optimal fleet composition for TEC myself.
You can delve into like full-on spreadsheet mania with it, but I genuinely think the number of possible combinations ultimately makes it impossible to really calculate once the game hits a certain size.
One reason I like TEC is that by midgame if your economy is running well, you can spit out whatever ships are needed to deal with the current threat very quickly, so you're replacing lost ships and optimizing your composition on the fly. "Oh shit that's a lot of strikecraft, better send some Flak Frigates in."
You want your fleet's pierce to be able to overwhelm their fleet's durability. Here's the basic rundown. You can sort of kind of ignore the "supply" number if you can tell at a glance that the ships they've sent in don't have the requisite pierce to focus down your ships' health given your ships' durability. That is, even if you were to start losing, you can likely retreat and not take too many losses since their effective DPS is low.
If they've got a lot of durable ships in their fleet, you gotta bring as much pierce as possible.
If there's any stats in the game worth memorizing, its the durability rating of each ship. I mentally have them sorted into buckets of "High, Medium, Low" durability so I don't have to do actual math in my head.
So I'll share my basic approach.
I like to have a wall of higher durability ships as the 'core' of my fleet. I tend to rely on Carriers in the early game, which is to say I have them sit back and send strikecraft in to do the dirty work, so I just want to have a physical shield to keep the enemies at bay.
Then I have to make some decisions, based on what it appears the enemies are fielding. If I'm dealing with strikecraft, the aforementioned flak frigates. If they've got high DPS capital ships, I will probably produce a TON of Corvettes since those help keep the Caps occupied and not killing my more valuable ships (note: doesn't work as well on human players). If they're fielding tough ships with a lot of support: Missiles. Lots of missiles.
Then pick your own caps based on whether you're being more aggressive or defensive. Or, if you like, if you're focusing on killing as much as you can as fast as you can, or if you need survivability (i.e. you're sending a fleet deep into enemy territory and it needs a lot of repair capabilities).
Then add in ship items for your capital ships based on what the enemy is likely to throw at them.
The one big 'insight' I've had that I THINK was fully intended by the Devs was that they have made the default supply cap pretty strict to prevent overuse of "Ball of doom" fleets that can just overwhelm anything, and require harder decisions about where to send your forces, knowing that you also can't hold a lot in reserve.
But in exchange, they've added numerous ways to augment fleet power that doesn't hit the supply cap. Like using influence points to call in NPC factions on your side, or the TEC Enclave's ridiculous(ly fun) garrison system.
So its actually kinda smart to divide up your forces between more than one fleet, and keep them mobile, so you don't have all your valuable supply caught in the wrong spot at the wrong time. And if you notice your opponent has a singular large fleet, you can both prepare to face it by setting up heavy defenses in bottleneck areas, or you can try to harass behind their lines and force them to keep said large fleet on the defensive. Calling in pirate raids on their planets basically demands they send a large force to counter it. Pirate raids are pretty damned expensive in influence, however, so timing is important.
So I think the Devs want players to try different tactics than "make the biggest fleet and dive at the enemy's homeworld."
I've been experimenting with setting up two fleets early on. "Hammer" fleet and "Anvil" fleet.
Anvil is made up of the high durability ships, and is intended to be the first one that encounters the enemy, and is able to stand there and slug it out for long enough for Hammer Fleet to arrive, which is the high DPS, high pierce fleet that can start whittling them down faster, HOPEFULLY while they're distracted with Anvil fleet.
If we get overwhelmed, I can order Hammer to retreat while Anvil covers for it. If we start winning, I can push Anvil forward to take more territory/cut off retreat while Hammer finishes the job.
It's been interesting to keep things managed this way. It feels like this more flexible approach is rewarded so I do think I've uncovered aspects of the game's design that the Devs intentionally added but didn't call attention to directly.
But its still great fun to build up a fleet as large as you can make it, built around what you expect the enemy to field, then smashing large fleets into each other and seeing what happens.
DEFINITELY learn how to get your ships to focus fire on high-value targets, though. They tend to do sub-optimal targeting on their own.
Thanks, this is good stuff. As it happens I also play TEC (Enclave, so far), so this is perfect for me. Right now my basic approach is to spread my fleet comp around - I have some corvettes, some light frigates, a few flak frigates, some LRM frigates, and so on, plus one of each cap. That has been working pretty well against the AI, though sometimes I do need to make use of the garrisons (offensive garrison is a hell of a thing) to win large engagements. I definitely do focus down priority targets - titans and capital ships mainly, but also starbases when I'm tackling a fortified enemy system. It helps a lot because I had noticed that ship targeting is pretty lackluster if you just let them do whatever they want.
With TEC, I think you can afford to overproduce anything you might need. If you think you need missiles, build MORE missile frigates than you think you need. If you need strikecraft, build MORE carriers than you think you need, and use the extra strikecraft items on your Capital ships to make even more.
Literally, just think of your fleets as 'units' and the ships as the HP, and your factories as 'healers.' Replace losses as quickly as you can. Don't bemoan losses as inherently bad if you're trading damage at approximately an equal rate.
And of course use Garrisons to bolster your "HP."
If you've got the resources pouring in, you should NEVER have idle factories, especially as enclave. Oh, and build more factories than you think you need, too.
Once you're finally running up against the supply limit, then it pays to get more strategic. There are ships that are more 'efficient' uses of supply than others.
If you've got the exotics, don't be afraid to scuttle your frigates to free up supply, even making a fleet ENTIRELY out of capital ships if you want.
There's a strategy of "Rollin' Kols" which is to send in nothing but Kol battleships with Experimental Beam upgrades and just obliterate any given target in the gravity well.
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