Bigger is always better?

[Cannes]

I know we have only been given a brief walkthrough of the game so far, but it seems to me that there should be more options to fit ships for various roles? From what I've seen so far, you'll ever only want to fit more and bigger guns to your ships.
What happened to such properties as speed, agility, ECM, stealth, range, RoF and so forth? Should be possible to make a contigent of small agile ECM frigates to mess up the targeting of those huge Battleships, and some stealthy torpedo bombers that could flank the enemy force and apply a very bad case of having a bad day to them.
As it looks now, spacecombat seems reduced to bring a bigger blob of bigger ships than your enemy and try to make sense of the confusion of ships circling eachother in a great big lightshow...

A few other things that could greatly improve this game is more involved/detailed ground combat and espionage.

Despite this I am VERY much looking forward to this game. It looks altogether awesome!

 

[Robhol]

No. Big guns are bad for fighting small ships because they can evade them and because a lot of damage potential is lost to overkill. A large swarm of corvettes will be effective against a fleet of battleships that are only fitted with large guns.

 

[Brian Bóroimhe]

Should be possible to make a contigent of small agile ECM frigates to mess up the targeting of those huge Battleships,

That's exactly how it already works. They have said that large weapons will have a harder time hitting smaller ships. So if you have 1 battleship with only large weapons in it versus 10 corvette's with big weapons on them (torpedo boat style) then your battleship is in trouble. However 10 corvette's with light weapons versus a battleship bristling with tons of light weapons are doomed. This is where flattery customisation and diversity comes into the game.

Edit: Have a read through all the Dev diaries and check the dev comments only to scoop extra info. That's the best way to find out about this sort of stuff.

 

[beckermt]

There are also non-offensive/defensive components. Wiz mentioned that the FTL-jammer which is on defensive stations can be mounted on larger ships. So, this ECM and ECCM stuff is certainly in to a degree.

I expect an expansion of components to be a big feature of an upcoming DLC too.

 

[KingRolan]

Only for a megalomaniac.