AI War:Missile Frigates

Are Cruisers Overpowered?

A: A lot of new players tend to favor cruisers, and I can see why -- they have long range, they hit hard, and a huge group of them can seem pretty invincible for a while. On the lower difficulties, just building a lot of cruisers can be a reasonably effective tactic (although, there are some ships, such as the AI Home Command Stations, which are missile-proof and thus perfectly immune to cruisers, so you'll want to have some high-level bombers before the end of the game).

Once you start playing on the higher difficulties, however, building homogeneous fleets of cruisers is a good way to lose fast. The three core ships of bomber, fighter, and cruiser, are each strong against roughly 1/3 of the other ships in the game. So if you play with cruisers only, you'll be doing non-ideal amounts of damage to 2/3 of the ships in the game. If you're playing on a suitably low difficulty you can get away with this, but once the AI is harder you'll simply take too many losses for this to be viable (and cruisers are expensive to be constantly rebuilding).

Cruisers are still a powerful ship, but they aren't the end-all solution. The other issue you'll face is that with maps of 80 planets or more, you can't just put cruisers on every planet because of the per-type ship caps. So you'll really want to figure out how to use the many other ships in your arsenal, because you'll need them all...

AI_War:Fleet_Command