How cute! He is worried that this might be a bad idea.

Seriously though. It is a good idea. A great many GalCiv 2 vets would swear by this. In GalCiv 2, you roll your attack and roll your defense. For instance, if you had an attack of 100, you could get a number ranging from 100 to 0; the result would be the damage you would do to the enemy ship (after defenses reduce damage). Likewise, for every attack against you, you would roll your defense, and then you would subtract the result from the attack. It is possible to reduce the damage to as low as 0. The reason why attack and defense type matters is because an on-type pairing will result in defenses working at full power, while an off-type pairing would result in the defense working at the square root value. So if you had shields and got attacked by lasers, your shields would work at full power, but if you got attacked by missiles or railguns it would be less effective. So 100 points of shields would be 100 defense against lasers, but only 10 defense against missiles or railguns. You should see that a heavy investment in defenses can be reduced by a factor as high as 10 (or even more) if you merely switch to a weapon type that the defenses don't work well against.

I'm unsure as to how much the combat engine has changed going into GalCiv 3. For instance, weapon ranges are now a factor. However, if weapon/defense pairings still work the same, then you will likely find yourself in an arms race with your opponent to exploit the weaknesses in your enemies defenses while trying to make sure that you weapons can still kill your opponent. There were other things you could do to win battles, such as using large fleets or using bigger hulls, so this isn't your only option. Considering the changes taking place include adding carriers, jamming technology, weapons that can damage on-type defenses, etc, there will likely be a number of experiments to figure out what works well against what.

I like to build defenses based on my opponent's ships and refit when I change opponents. That said, I kind of feel like all ships need shields, otherwise they seriously risk being destroyed before they can fire their first salvo. I have fought a bunch of battles with carriers carrying beam fighters and usually my opponent doesn't even get to fire.

I usually have a theme when I play a Race and stick to it and make specialty ships as the tech presents itself if needed. Like when I play the Federation (Star Trek custom race) I stick to Beam and Shields but will make a specialty ship to counter certain foes (think The Defiant being built to conter Borg)  

I agree the biggest problem with a "generalist" approach is that it consumes a lot more research, which the other guys (or AI) are using to increase their tier.  The fact that a pally against a pally is a draw isn't a problem, though, because the idea is not to get owned, not to dominate.   And you make a great point about the load out.   With all that defense and different weapons, a paladin build is going to suffer somewhere.    

It has been opined elsewhere that a prime concern for ship building ought to be speed.  A slow moving tank will have a role only in static defense for shipyards, etc., and can easily be bypassed by a nimbler opponent.  I have seen it written that one's task in galciv is not to destroy the other guy's fleet anyway.   It is to take away their colonies and keep moving.    Back to weapons, evaluating ship vs ship only on the basis of offense vs defence isn't enough.   Support ships with special things like jammers, fleet speed, tactical (thrusters) speed, etc. are critical components.

@ thenewteddy

So what you're saying is that instead of picking some combination of weapons and defense and use that for a standard for your whole fleet, you want 9 ships in a fleet, 1 for each combination type you listed? I don't think that would work well.

In GalCiv 2, it was possible for the opposing force to determine what would be easy kills. Range, accuracy, or formation wasn't a factor, as any ship could target any opposing ship without difficulty. Each side wanted to reduce the other side's firepower as quickly as possible, so they would likely target the easily killed ships. While ships in GalCiv 3 can't easily target the ships they want because of new things like weapon ranges, I would think that they would still try to prioritize targets.

In your example, they would favor targeting the 6 ships with the off-type defense, and favor even more the 4 that had off-type attacks that could bypass your defenses. On the other hand, 6 of your ships should be able to bypass the defenses of the enemy ships, but only 3 of your ships would have proper defenses, with 2 having the right right weapons to deal damage. I think you would lose a lot of ships quickly, thereby giving a numbers advantage to your enemy. I think you would lose 2/3rds of you ships quickly in the fight because 9 of their ships could hit something at full power, while you could only do the same with 6 ships. It should be noted that another rule from GalCiv 2 is, being attacked will reduce your defenses for a short bit (which resets every turn), so it is possible that enough enemy ships might survive to be able to kill your remaining ships off.

I think you would be making the battle too easy for your opponent. Even if you won, only the ships with proper defenses (or poor attack) would have survived, which would require you to replace your forces. I think you would be better off having 9 fleets, 1 for each type of ship you want to mix up in your fleets. That way, you could choose to attack with the best combination of attack and defenses and every ship in the fleet would have that advantage. It would give you easy kills, and give your enemies hard kills. It would keep your loses low and theirs high.

Engines are important; how much depends on the size of your galaxy. On the smaller end a couple or three levels will do, but on immense -- you may want to spend some time researching up. Otherwise a few extra movement points may do.

You really need to research out to some of the bigger guns in whatever specialization you go with. I found myself facing off two neighbors both using Beam weapons and (obviously) shield defenses -- same as I did. So after I got a reasonable beam weapon I started to research missile tech. The missile weren't as powerful as the beamers, so I put two of them as secondaries on a medium hull: Two Beams (24), Two Missiles (12) and beam defense (27). Against the AI this will work, because (as of now) it still uses matching A/D tech. If that changes -- and I hope it does -- and against human opponents, this and stacking defenses may become necessary.

If the way I read the weapons stuff so far is right the beams will fire first and will take down the AI shields, then the missiles fire against the defenseless hull. Hopefully shields and escorts limit the time my shields have to hold against their ~ 30 points of attack.

Since the immense galaxy I was in just locked up (eternal wait) I may have to wait until I get 200 turns into my next game to see if the strategy works.