So far I've been playing this game for a few days, and a thing I've noticed that a lot of ship designs are often big, singular, motherships that try to do it all. But after some experimenting I pretty quickly figured out that fleet tactics work super well in this game for a couple of reasons:
1) Most ships are directionally biased, so having a flanking ship can turn things in your favor quite easily.
2) Having multiple ships allow each individual ship to preform better as the enemy ship's fire is divided amongst multiple targets, allowing better tanking. Also the enemy ship has more targets to fire at. (Which is actually a good thing) as unless the ship has been heavily optimized, that is more strain on their power/ammo supplies, further compromising their performance.
3) Decentralizing ship functions allow for redundancy and for you get away with specialized designs that are useful in a group, but function poorly on their own.
Ships that work better in a group scene are listed in support vessels. Ships are listed from cheapest to most expensive of their respective categories.
Frigate Series:
Light frigates that can function as standalone starting ships with a very clear progression path, or as flanking vessels for larger navies.
Frigate v1
Frigate v2
Frigate v3
Ion Warships
I've designed these warships to make full utilization of a continuously firing Ion beam to wear down your foes with sheer attrition.
Ion Frigate IV - A heavy frigate with a continual Ion beam and electro bolts to bring down the enemies shields as it's main cannon is it's primary source of damage. While the shield does cover the beam, the penetration of cannons make it vulnerable to cannon heavy ships.
Arrow III - An ion cruiser that resolves the weakness to cannons issue of it's previous kin with larger shield spacing. A noteworthy feature is that due to it's robust power supply, the forward shields are (at least compared to vanilla ships) unusually resilient and capable of tanking more damage than two sheild gens normally should. This makes it an ideal brawler to draw attention away from your flanking ships.
Arrow IV - A larger and more heavily armed version of the Arrow III. Since it's core design philosophy is derived from it's previous iteration, this ship also inherits their predecessors ability to shield tank like a Caldari with even more gusto due to it's larger power supply. I might be blowing smoke up my own butt, but I have no other way of describing the feeling that this has an unusually long time to kill for a ship this big.
Broadsider - Name being pretty self explanatory for the design I was going with, this ship sports a hefty three full fire Ion beams and four electro bolts on each side. The nice thing of a broadside design over my typical "Spearpoint" is that if their weapons are compromised, you can just rotate the ship.
Spearhead - This ship is my first employment of missile weapons, and like the Ion beams the ships internals were designed so that the missiles are fed as well as possible by the crew allowing a near-continual stream of missiles. This alone can overwhelm modest point defenses, and the heavy forward facing Ion array/supporting fleet often can strip the enemies hull of these fragile pieces of equipment.
Support Vessels
These are ships that do poorly in 1v1 (vs ships of similar cost) but fulfill necessary roles or become more useful with a supporting fleet to back them up. These ships are not meant for dedicated combat, and should only participate in battles with an already preoccupied enemy.
Logistics Frigate - A light frigate fitted with a sensor array for scouting and a shield generator to protect the expensive piece of kit. It only sports a modest armament for self defense and chip-in damage. It also acts as supportive point defense.
Point Defender - A modified Ion frigate rigged with a large array of PD modules and a light armament. Due to the "Herd immunity" of it being in a fleet, it's role is mostly redundant. but if you need a hard counter to missile spam, this is your silver bullet.
FTL Escort - Simply put, fielding a fleet of ships is going to use up a lot of FTL fuel. This ship increases your carrying capacity for it with it's array of five drives. Though it should be noted this ship takes as long as the Spearhead to charge up and since FTL fuel is spent on a per drive basis, you are otherwise spending fuel that could be used to mobilize another ship(s). This ship is here to increase your fuel cap and nothing more. You should only have one these at most and opt into another design when you got the cash. It has a light armament and acts as moderate point defense with a light tanking capability thanks to it's thick shielded nose.
Now, go gank the crap 'outta those NPC ships!
