Capships, increasingly slower fighters? Or strategic weapons?

[dizbmikuni]

Battleships ARE your artillery platforms. They stand off about 30 miles away and pummel things into the ground.

Cruisers - Primary role is anti-destroyer
Destroyer - Primary role is anti-fighter
Gunboats - Harasses anything that is not friendly.

get the picture.

If you make the cruisers long range artillery pieces, then you introduce a single cruiser being able to take out a battleship by itself. (cruisers are faster, thus can stay at long range and manuver. i.e. the battleship will never be able to hit it)

Battleships should have a EXTREAMLY long range, and very high damage. You hit a fighter or bomber with the main guns from a battleship, the F/B should be vaporized. The idea of using bombers was to present another capital ship to keep its attention while the bombers do their runs. Because the other capital ship DOES more damage then the bombers do.
Cruisers - Long range
Destroyers - Medium range - High Projectile speed.
GB - Short range

That actually seems to make more sense to me. I also liked the idea of decreasing gunboat range to 1000 or increasing cap range to 2.5 or 3.5k or more. I am also attracted by the notion of huge capship broadsides while fighters/bombers/gunboats skirmish in the middle. Never understood why gunboats should be more effective than capital ships at ranges over 1k...

I'm definitely not a fan of making gunboats into purely anti fighter-bomber weapons. For the factions that don't regularly employ 2-3 capships (excluding GBs) on a regular basis...everyone would just end up flying gunboats....or if the other side wanted to use any fighters at all, they'd just get wiped. I mean fighters at the very least have to double team gunboats already. I think that lots of fighters should be used in these "huge fleet battles", mostly to keep other fighters/bombers occupied. I dont think that gunboats should just be able to rape them all.