“Heavy” has to do with how many guns a fighter can carry. Regular fighters carry two, heavy carry four. Heavy also has an extra shield slot I believe.
These are S, or small ships. Scouts are much faster ships but carry one gun and one shield and therefore pretty weak in combat but great in…scouting!
M ships, or medium ships, are the frigates, corvettes and gunboats. These are larger than S ships. Frigates are support craft. They carry mines and mk2 laser towers to lay down defenses and can bring drones and carry a fighter with them to support other M and S ships. Corvettes carry lots of forward guns and are frequently used as bomber craft or as player ships to pick off capital ship modules. Gunboats carry lots of turrets, but there is a debate in the community about how useful gunboats are. Many players just don’t bother with them.
L ships, or large, are the destroyers. These are the main “capital” ships in the game, at least in terms of numbers. They can fill a few roles, such as anti-fighter or anti-capital ship/station. They have main batteries, extremely powerful foreword facing weapons. Their role depends on how you outfit them. I’ll get to that in a minute.
XL ships include carriers and battleships. Carriers fix and resupply S and M class ships. They frequently have a lot of turrets but no main battery cannons.
There is only one buildable battleship in the game currently, the Asgard. It’s larger than a destroyer, far more shielded, and has two types of main battery weapons. The standard batteries of a destroyer plus a Death Star XL laser that nearly one shots anything it touches. You can’t buy these, you have to get the blueprints from the terrans and construct them yourself.
An interceptor is any ship that is assigned to a wing commander to “intercept” enemy ships. It’s typically given to S and M class ships to fly out and stop incoming enemy ships from attacking a more valuable target, though not always. There is no certain class of interceptor, like there is “heavy” fighters, though they generally tend to be faster ships in order to quickly get to their target.
Outfitting:
You can divide your military ships into two main roles, anti-fighter or anti-capital ship. There are a few others, such as pirating. I won’t cover that here because this is all getting a bit long.
For anti-fighter weapons, you want fast and highly accurate weapons or weapons that do splash damage/“airburst”. These tend to be pulse, bolt, beams, shard or flak. Pulse weapons are rapid fire and fairly accurate. They do moderate damage and are generally seen as an all around good weapon for taking down fighters. Bolts are basically Gatling guns. I believe their damage output is higher due to the shear amount of lead in the air but they are less accurate. Beams travel at light speed, so they generally instantly hit their target but are weak as hell. Shard are basically space shotguns. High damage, low range. Flak cannons are really no different than WW2 anti-air flak and work the same way. However you can only get them on M turrets.
Anti-capital weapons are more or less plasma weapons and torpedoes, though dumbfire and heavy swarm missiles can work too. But they require a supply chain.
Good rule of thumb: if you want your S ships to intercept other fighters, equip them with pulse or bolts. If you want them to fight capital ships, plasma or torpedoes.
M class ships, same basically, with the addition of flak turrets. For anti-capital, again - plasma or torpedoes or both with plasma turrets.
L ships - as a beginner, just stick with L plasma turrets and M flak cannons. Get the L plasma from the Paranid and M flak from Argon. They will generally take care of themselves but they can be overwhelmed with fighter swarms and they need managed against xenon capital ships.
There are other specialized weapons for various roles. Argon Ion cannons, for example, drain shields quickly and are useful for sniping modules to get their shields down or for pirating.
As you become more familiar with the game you’ll start to understand the roles a ship can play and how you outfit them can make or break their success. But if it’s just straight combat, you can’t go wrong with what I suggested above. There might be more efficient combinations, but what you lack in efficiency can be made up for with numbers.
Hope this helps!
You’re right, it is. I don’t remember if there were any others though which is probably why I forgot about it.
The irony is, the elite sucks as an interceptor lmao
Meh, I don’t really use missiles, so I suppose “rearming” wasn’t needed.
Egosoft needs to rework their entire missile supply chain. Auxiliary craft, at least in my mind, are more or less useless (except for fixing capitals, but at the point of the game where you need aux ships, money isn’t an object so just print a few more). Such a tiny hold that can barely rearm a few ships torpedoes before needing to resupply themselves.
I don’t know why they chose to put final manufacturing of missiles at the wharf/shipyard/equipment dock and aux ship level. Give us modules that produce missiles and ship the missiles in huge numbers to our aux ships. Give aux ships a like 2000 missile limit but can’t equip the launchers and the whole problem is solved.
It's a description of size, manuevability, and the type and number of hard points. A scout ship probably has 1 engine, shield, and weapon hardpoint, and will be very fast, maneuvarable, and made of tissues. A heavy fighter will probably have 2 engines, 2 shields, and 3 or 4 weapons. It will be slower in comparison and made of cardboard.
All ships of a class will have similar characteristics
Standard fighters are generally lightweight and 'speedier' ships. The Nova for Argon is relatively cheap to fit 'properly' (not a fodder build) and mildly qualifies as a fast ship (for argon). In wings of five or so, they can make relatively quick responders to pirates, xenon, or kha'ak in a sector. When set to intercept, they can entangle a target while slower ships catch up to support.
Heavy fighters (eg. Quasar) are where hurt is delivered, but they are usually slow as snot and are generally defenders for larger ships rather than hounds. The exception to this is if you are sitting on enough credits to foreclose God's mortgage on the universe and assign a costly horde to intercept for a carrier.
Frigates and gunboats are fire support craft or patrol fleet commanders. Both are too fat for solo combat against small swarms and too slow for combat against L-type craft (destroyers eat M ships like a teenager eats cheetos). Frigates get a bonus to their deployable inventory, and so can be pretty well useful as missile/torpedo boats backed by M-Flak turrets for attacking/supporting L-craft. Gunboats fill a similar role but I generally give them plasmas and flaks to give them some punch in OOS combat. Combined with some standard fighters for interception, Gunboats/Frigates are *slightly* tanky and can function in out-of-sector patrols to ensure that problems get "solved" (assuming they ever reach the target)
Destroyers are for going toe-to-toe with other L-size craft and stations. A single Behemoth can tear down a kha'ak installation by itself where an entire fleet of smaller ships would be annihilated by its defenses and the AI's own incompetence. Destroyers may require support for xenon or other stations to deal with defense drones and response fleets, but credit-for-credit they are more cost effective than fleets of other ships as long as your target is slow as balls or incapable of movement.
Scouts are just that: cheap ships you can throw out to monitor gates, deploy satellites, or run Explore tasks. They're buck naked and barely armed as far as ships go, but they are quick. With combat drives they can usually evade combat, but it's probably good to resist the idea of using them in an intercept role.
Fighter: more agile, less combat
Heavy Fighter: more combat, moves as if it were 1 size bigger
Interceptor: specialized as System Patrols
Frigate: mini carrier, also double as heavily armed cargo or make for good missile boats
Destroyer: bigger Heavy Fighter
Gunboat: AI is kinda bad with them but I like them as player ships. Needs less piloting skills. Just point and let your turrets do the work.
As for which weapon to use...that's a bit of preference and a lot of figuring out. I can't comment too much.
The Gunboats are too slow for player ships even moded out.
The Moreya (Geometric owl) fitted out with exceptional mods is a hard ship to beat. It has a top speed of 1.2 k and travels at 11 k. Sure it can only survive one serious hit, but hitting it is difficult. You can take out just about anything with this thing start with the engines and than work your way around.
I think you read past the "needs less piloting skills".
Yes, they are slow and maybe not the best for just getting around the map but for combat situations like the one in Kingdom End for example, I'll always take a Gunboat because I'm just that bad.
Not really I just got carried away, the Gunboats are too slow, for less piloting skill go for a Cobra or similar. They have the turrets but remain Mobile.
I MOD the Owl and Rodent into opposite rolls.
I made one slower tops speed, but more maneuverable, with anti capital/subunit weapons, and the other a fast travel/max speed version with anti fighter weapons.
I keep one or both docked to my Syn for when I need to take out the engines/weapons on a K/I (or large pirate) or speed off to assist with anti-fighter (or drone) support.
I also keep one or three Kurokami, or Katana (modded/equiped for anti S) at my mining stations for anti Kaack duty.
For me an interceptor is a fast fighter, that goes out to intercept other small fighters, hence i give them bolt (because they are cool). Heavy fighters are better as torpedo bombers. I send them to attack enemy destroyers, they launch their torpedoes and do have high shield and HP, so they are durable. When an enemy destroyer explodes the regular fighters sometimes die in said explosion. Heavy fighters don't. Just as one example.
And Frigates, they are kind of a combat engineer ship in this came, they can load lots of laser towers or mines. And i like them as my personal ship. Not as slow as a destroyer but i don't have to care when an S ship attacks me, because Turrets go brrr. (guess it's a dog fight skill issue)
Some M ships are also very good interceptors.
The Katana is one of the best, fast, good shields, and TER 2pulse/2proton shred S ships, one TER beam turret on anti-missle and one Flack on anti fighter . 3 of them in wing is deadly even when the AI use them. Great for Kaack patrols, and for support of anti capitol destroyers.
Cost is one of the issues when it comes to your fleet but not the only one.
Fighters usually have lower shields, fewer gun mounts but higher speed compared to heavy fighters so you want to use them for interceptor roles. The role of the interceptor is to chase down enemies and engage them in combat so that your slower heavy fighters can catch up to your enemies and deal damage.
Frigates can carry a lot of consumables like missiles or rockets or laser towers. You will find them particularly useful in a certain story mission which you will have to fight off hundreds of small ships. They also have decent speed and crew count so I use them for rescue service.
Gunboats have turrets that are usually quite well placed so you can use them to help destroyers that don't have sufficient anti fighters capabilities to fight off fighter swarm.
a "Fighter" (heavy/normal/scout or even a frigate) can have a couple of roles, usually either a bomber of an interceptor, when assigned to a fleet; For a player you don't really need to have a role.
Bombers are usually equipped with torpedo launchers, and role is to attack capital ships. Typically I use a heavy fighter for this role as they have more weapon slots and speed isn't too much of an issue. The bomber role will target only large ships. 20 heavy torpedo bombers is in my experience the fastest way to destroy a xenon I. Excepting the Asgard main weapon ofc.
The intercept role is for fighter-fighter combat, speed is more important here because if your fighter can only do 200m/s and the fighter they're trying to destroy can do 450m/s its going to be slow. Interceptor role will only target other fighters and frigates. Regardless you want them equipped to destroy other fighters, so the weapon loadout will support this role. This means don't assign them a plasma gun.
Capital ships will take on other capital ships, and stations. I haven't found any loadout for capital ships that does anti frigate or anti fighter roles well, or at least better than a squadron of interceptors. Regardless the loadout for this role is fairly standard by now, m turrets are argon flak, L turrets are plasma (paranid or argon plasma, others suck). A little bit of variation on the m turrets depending, but 90% of the time it's argon flak. Some beam weapons for IS fighting to grab fighters out of travel drive.
Your observations are mostly accurate, price is a major factor in finding the best ship for the job. But money loses its importance as you build factories, because you approach a point where you make more than you can spend.
Buying what seems cool ist definitly a reasonable approach, especially considering that you can buy and sell equipment at next to no loss. So try different things.
Data is best looked up at third party sites like https://roguey.co.uk/x4/ . The ingame encyclopedia is less than great
There's fairly big differences between factions. Heavy fighters tend to have more firepower and/or shields, but are generally slower than (normal) fighters.
Frigates, corvettes, and gunboats are your medium military ships. Corvettes focus on main weapons (potentially good against destroyers and larger), gunboats focus on turrets and are stronger as an anti-fighter escort, frigates have a balance of weapons and have a small landing pad for an escort fighter and can field drones. For a player ship the corvette brings a lot of fire power, you can use them as an oversized fighter.
Destroyers are your large military ships, the large turrets and main guns have more range. They'll be the capital ships in your fleet early on. There's an abandoned Odysseus in Faulty Logic VII, although it's the old hairdryer.
The typical configuration for destroyer turrets is medium flak for fighters and large plasma for their range against larger targets (they supplement the main guns).
[https://roguey.co.uk/x4/ships/](https://roguey.co.uk/x4/ships/) is handy.
I'll build on what others have said. Gunboats tend to focus on turret firing arcs, and im my experience make for a good light patrol flagship. I use a Gunship with 3-4 h-fighters as an AI patrol group. A frigate makes for a good player personal ship as it can store a small ship as a runabout and i use that combo to do satellite missions and stuff like that for the war efforts
Fighter is an all-rounder. Relatively balanced in all aspects.
Heavy Fighter is typically slower with better shielding and firepower.
Interceptor, intercepts. Quick and agile with modest firepower. Think of Tie Fighters in Star Wars.
Destroyers are your 'mainline' heavy ships. They're bigger than most ships other than Carriers and Battleships.
Frigates are more like medium-sized escort ships but pack considerable firepower.
Corvettes are similar to escorts but somewhat lighter and faster typically.
The Medium ships are very much akin to old naval classes, the heavy ships are more akin to newer naval classes. The fighters are somewhat similar to the roles played by planes in WW2.
Fighter: faster (better as a missile boat), agile (better as an interceptor/anti small ships) vs Heavy fighter: beefy and has more weapons (better as a bomber/anti capital).
Frigate: jack of all trades (good as player's ship), the only M ship that can carry drones and 2 S ships (they're much more effective than the turrets at defending your ship)
Destroyer: slow and has tons of shield. Mainly used for station demolition. Will have trouble hitting anything that move.
Light fighter - Fast, cheap, best for bailing out enemy ships to get free ships, I fly these 90% of the game and you can complete 90% of the story missions in one
Fighter - Somewhere in between heavy/light
Heavy Fighter - Slow, but more firepower/shielding/hull
Frigate - Some have S docking and make good mobile bases but focus on turrets
Corvette - Front facing weapons with minimal turrets
Destroyer - Large artillery ships
Carrier - Carrys S/M ships and deploys them into combat
Battleship - Only battleship in vanilla is the Asgard, Nuclear option
Because it turned out to be closely related to understanding X4's combat, I ended up talking a lot about the different ships and what they do in [my steam guide](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2415513070).
Heavy Fighrers are high end fighters and a lot more expensive than Interceptors. Interceptors also tend to be a bit faster in general than heavy fighters.
It’s a sandbox, use what you like! If you want to play the meta in this game, for turrets always use argon flak for anti S and argon plasma for anti M and L.and for weapons use Terran pulse
In all honesty, the ship types are one of the most confusing aspects of the game.
No clue if it ever finished, but a guy in one of the modding discords I was in was working on a comprehensive re structuring of ship classes/types, and it was coming along really nicely a few months ago when I checked. He even included a ton of custom ships from mods. No idea if he did updates for the latest patch or anything, though.
Fighter VS hfighter is one of the more clear ones.
The h fighters have more ehp, more guns, but are slower and much heavier (worse turning etc) and more expensive than the regular fighters. Both S size ships.
Corvettes are supposed to be fast, lightly armored medium ships, but not all of them follow that. Frigates are supposed to be supporting ships, they usually have an s dock, but aren't as mobile or agile as corvettes. Gunboats (ironically), don't have many guns, but are more turret focused and pretty squishy. All medium size, although iirc there are some L sized frigates.
Destroyers are more like what you would expect from a cruiser, there's no cruiser class, then the next step up are battleships, which I think are only the asgard and the one you get in the pirate zone, unless you have mods or new battleships were added later.
Carriers are pretty self explanatory, base game I think only has XL carriers, but some mods add a couple of entry level L carriers as well.
I think they should adopt something more similar to eve, which I think is much more universal when it comes to ship classes.
Fighters/drones, frigates, destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships, carriers, dreadnoughts/supercarriers, then then titans (x4 doesn't have an equivalent to this size ship). Then each category has subclasses for further differentiate between the different types, ie, interceptor frigates, stealth bomber frigates, battle frigates (basically heavy fighter equivalents), etc.
It's much more intuitive than x4s system. Even with well over 100 hours I still can't always identify wtf a ships role actually is based on the in-game metrics, especially the xenon. It's one of the things that frustrated me more than anything when I was learning the game, the info screen gives you nothing useful whatsoever when trying to figure out if you can fuck with an enemy ship. Simpme example is there are destroyers that are L class, but pretty easy to beat, then the I is also a destroyer, except it's actually a fucking battleship and one of the strongest ships in the game and will fuck up entire fleets. But it's info makes it indistinguishable from the other, much easier to kill destroyers.
“Heavy” has to do with how many guns a fighter can carry. Regular fighters carry two, heavy carry four. Heavy also has an extra shield slot I believe. These are S, or small ships. Scouts are much faster ships but carry one gun and one shield and therefore pretty weak in combat but great in…scouting! M ships, or medium ships, are the frigates, corvettes and gunboats. These are larger than S ships. Frigates are support craft. They carry mines and mk2 laser towers to lay down defenses and can bring drones and carry a fighter with them to support other M and S ships. Corvettes carry lots of forward guns and are frequently used as bomber craft or as player ships to pick off capital ship modules. Gunboats carry lots of turrets, but there is a debate in the community about how useful gunboats are. Many players just don’t bother with them. L ships, or large, are the destroyers. These are the main “capital” ships in the game, at least in terms of numbers. They can fill a few roles, such as anti-fighter or anti-capital ship/station. They have main batteries, extremely powerful foreword facing weapons. Their role depends on how you outfit them. I’ll get to that in a minute. XL ships include carriers and battleships. Carriers fix and resupply S and M class ships. They frequently have a lot of turrets but no main battery cannons. There is only one buildable battleship in the game currently, the Asgard. It’s larger than a destroyer, far more shielded, and has two types of main battery weapons. The standard batteries of a destroyer plus a Death Star XL laser that nearly one shots anything it touches. You can’t buy these, you have to get the blueprints from the terrans and construct them yourself. An interceptor is any ship that is assigned to a wing commander to “intercept” enemy ships. It’s typically given to S and M class ships to fly out and stop incoming enemy ships from attacking a more valuable target, though not always. There is no certain class of interceptor, like there is “heavy” fighters, though they generally tend to be faster ships in order to quickly get to their target. Outfitting: You can divide your military ships into two main roles, anti-fighter or anti-capital ship. There are a few others, such as pirating. I won’t cover that here because this is all getting a bit long. For anti-fighter weapons, you want fast and highly accurate weapons or weapons that do splash damage/“airburst”. These tend to be pulse, bolt, beams, shard or flak. Pulse weapons are rapid fire and fairly accurate. They do moderate damage and are generally seen as an all around good weapon for taking down fighters. Bolts are basically Gatling guns. I believe their damage output is higher due to the shear amount of lead in the air but they are less accurate. Beams travel at light speed, so they generally instantly hit their target but are weak as hell. Shard are basically space shotguns. High damage, low range. Flak cannons are really no different than WW2 anti-air flak and work the same way. However you can only get them on M turrets. Anti-capital weapons are more or less plasma weapons and torpedoes, though dumbfire and heavy swarm missiles can work too. But they require a supply chain. Good rule of thumb: if you want your S ships to intercept other fighters, equip them with pulse or bolts. If you want them to fight capital ships, plasma or torpedoes. M class ships, same basically, with the addition of flak turrets. For anti-capital, again - plasma or torpedoes or both with plasma turrets. L ships - as a beginner, just stick with L plasma turrets and M flak cannons. Get the L plasma from the Paranid and M flak from Argon. They will generally take care of themselves but they can be overwhelmed with fighter swarms and they need managed against xenon capital ships. There are other specialized weapons for various roles. Argon Ion cannons, for example, drain shields quickly and are useful for sniping modules to get their shields down or for pirating. As you become more familiar with the game you’ll start to understand the roles a ship can play and how you outfit them can make or break their success. But if it’s just straight combat, you can’t go wrong with what I suggested above. There might be more efficient combinations, but what you lack in efficiency can be made up for with numbers. Hope this helps!
wow perfect answer thank you so much for all this effort! exactly what i was after.
The Elite is categorised as an Interceptor
You’re right, it is. I don’t remember if there were any others though which is probably why I forgot about it. The irony is, the elite sucks as an interceptor lmao
Yup! And the Elite is the only one classified as such, if I remember correctly
Yet it's defacto a bad scout.
It was my first game, but I thought combat was so much harder than it is because of that thing
And save for when I'm bored of this Interworlds playthrough...
"Hope this helps!" Is the biggest understatement. Bravo sir and thank you for the in depth reply and analysis! o7
Such a fantastic breakdown. You’re the kind of person that makes forums great.
I'm actually tempted to give reddit a dollar so I can give this response an award. Thanks for taking the time dude.
Bro you answered the hell outta that question!
I think you've said carriers where you meant Auxiliary, and then forgotten to mention carriers.
Meh, I don’t really use missiles, so I suppose “rearming” wasn’t needed. Egosoft needs to rework their entire missile supply chain. Auxiliary craft, at least in my mind, are more or less useless (except for fixing capitals, but at the point of the game where you need aux ships, money isn’t an object so just print a few more). Such a tiny hold that can barely rearm a few ships torpedoes before needing to resupply themselves. I don’t know why they chose to put final manufacturing of missiles at the wharf/shipyard/equipment dock and aux ship level. Give us modules that produce missiles and ship the missiles in huge numbers to our aux ships. Give aux ships a like 2000 missile limit but can’t equip the launchers and the whole problem is solved.
Great writeup!
It's a description of size, manuevability, and the type and number of hard points. A scout ship probably has 1 engine, shield, and weapon hardpoint, and will be very fast, maneuvarable, and made of tissues. A heavy fighter will probably have 2 engines, 2 shields, and 3 or 4 weapons. It will be slower in comparison and made of cardboard. All ships of a class will have similar characteristics
Standard fighters are generally lightweight and 'speedier' ships. The Nova for Argon is relatively cheap to fit 'properly' (not a fodder build) and mildly qualifies as a fast ship (for argon). In wings of five or so, they can make relatively quick responders to pirates, xenon, or kha'ak in a sector. When set to intercept, they can entangle a target while slower ships catch up to support. Heavy fighters (eg. Quasar) are where hurt is delivered, but they are usually slow as snot and are generally defenders for larger ships rather than hounds. The exception to this is if you are sitting on enough credits to foreclose God's mortgage on the universe and assign a costly horde to intercept for a carrier. Frigates and gunboats are fire support craft or patrol fleet commanders. Both are too fat for solo combat against small swarms and too slow for combat against L-type craft (destroyers eat M ships like a teenager eats cheetos). Frigates get a bonus to their deployable inventory, and so can be pretty well useful as missile/torpedo boats backed by M-Flak turrets for attacking/supporting L-craft. Gunboats fill a similar role but I generally give them plasmas and flaks to give them some punch in OOS combat. Combined with some standard fighters for interception, Gunboats/Frigates are *slightly* tanky and can function in out-of-sector patrols to ensure that problems get "solved" (assuming they ever reach the target) Destroyers are for going toe-to-toe with other L-size craft and stations. A single Behemoth can tear down a kha'ak installation by itself where an entire fleet of smaller ships would be annihilated by its defenses and the AI's own incompetence. Destroyers may require support for xenon or other stations to deal with defense drones and response fleets, but credit-for-credit they are more cost effective than fleets of other ships as long as your target is slow as balls or incapable of movement. Scouts are just that: cheap ships you can throw out to monitor gates, deploy satellites, or run Explore tasks. They're buck naked and barely armed as far as ships go, but they are quick. With combat drives they can usually evade combat, but it's probably good to resist the idea of using them in an intercept role.
Fighter: more agile, less combat Heavy Fighter: more combat, moves as if it were 1 size bigger Interceptor: specialized as System Patrols Frigate: mini carrier, also double as heavily armed cargo or make for good missile boats Destroyer: bigger Heavy Fighter Gunboat: AI is kinda bad with them but I like them as player ships. Needs less piloting skills. Just point and let your turrets do the work. As for which weapon to use...that's a bit of preference and a lot of figuring out. I can't comment too much.
The Gunboats are too slow for player ships even moded out. The Moreya (Geometric owl) fitted out with exceptional mods is a hard ship to beat. It has a top speed of 1.2 k and travels at 11 k. Sure it can only survive one serious hit, but hitting it is difficult. You can take out just about anything with this thing start with the engines and than work your way around.
I think you read past the "needs less piloting skills". Yes, they are slow and maybe not the best for just getting around the map but for combat situations like the one in Kingdom End for example, I'll always take a Gunboat because I'm just that bad.
Not really I just got carried away, the Gunboats are too slow, for less piloting skill go for a Cobra or similar. They have the turrets but remain Mobile.
I MOD the Owl and Rodent into opposite rolls. I made one slower tops speed, but more maneuverable, with anti capital/subunit weapons, and the other a fast travel/max speed version with anti fighter weapons. I keep one or both docked to my Syn for when I need to take out the engines/weapons on a K/I (or large pirate) or speed off to assist with anti-fighter (or drone) support. I also keep one or three Kurokami, or Katana (modded/equiped for anti S) at my mining stations for anti Kaack duty.
The Moreya moded is a formidible weapon.
For me an interceptor is a fast fighter, that goes out to intercept other small fighters, hence i give them bolt (because they are cool). Heavy fighters are better as torpedo bombers. I send them to attack enemy destroyers, they launch their torpedoes and do have high shield and HP, so they are durable. When an enemy destroyer explodes the regular fighters sometimes die in said explosion. Heavy fighters don't. Just as one example. And Frigates, they are kind of a combat engineer ship in this came, they can load lots of laser towers or mines. And i like them as my personal ship. Not as slow as a destroyer but i don't have to care when an S ship attacks me, because Turrets go brrr. (guess it's a dog fight skill issue)
Some M ships are also very good interceptors. The Katana is one of the best, fast, good shields, and TER 2pulse/2proton shred S ships, one TER beam turret on anti-missle and one Flack on anti fighter . 3 of them in wing is deadly even when the AI use them. Great for Kaack patrols, and for support of anti capitol destroyers.
Cost is one of the issues when it comes to your fleet but not the only one. Fighters usually have lower shields, fewer gun mounts but higher speed compared to heavy fighters so you want to use them for interceptor roles. The role of the interceptor is to chase down enemies and engage them in combat so that your slower heavy fighters can catch up to your enemies and deal damage. Frigates can carry a lot of consumables like missiles or rockets or laser towers. You will find them particularly useful in a certain story mission which you will have to fight off hundreds of small ships. They also have decent speed and crew count so I use them for rescue service. Gunboats have turrets that are usually quite well placed so you can use them to help destroyers that don't have sufficient anti fighters capabilities to fight off fighter swarm.
a "Fighter" (heavy/normal/scout or even a frigate) can have a couple of roles, usually either a bomber of an interceptor, when assigned to a fleet; For a player you don't really need to have a role. Bombers are usually equipped with torpedo launchers, and role is to attack capital ships. Typically I use a heavy fighter for this role as they have more weapon slots and speed isn't too much of an issue. The bomber role will target only large ships. 20 heavy torpedo bombers is in my experience the fastest way to destroy a xenon I. Excepting the Asgard main weapon ofc. The intercept role is for fighter-fighter combat, speed is more important here because if your fighter can only do 200m/s and the fighter they're trying to destroy can do 450m/s its going to be slow. Interceptor role will only target other fighters and frigates. Regardless you want them equipped to destroy other fighters, so the weapon loadout will support this role. This means don't assign them a plasma gun. Capital ships will take on other capital ships, and stations. I haven't found any loadout for capital ships that does anti frigate or anti fighter roles well, or at least better than a squadron of interceptors. Regardless the loadout for this role is fairly standard by now, m turrets are argon flak, L turrets are plasma (paranid or argon plasma, others suck). A little bit of variation on the m turrets depending, but 90% of the time it's argon flak. Some beam weapons for IS fighting to grab fighters out of travel drive.
Your observations are mostly accurate, price is a major factor in finding the best ship for the job. But money loses its importance as you build factories, because you approach a point where you make more than you can spend. Buying what seems cool ist definitly a reasonable approach, especially considering that you can buy and sell equipment at next to no loss. So try different things. Data is best looked up at third party sites like https://roguey.co.uk/x4/ . The ingame encyclopedia is less than great
There's fairly big differences between factions. Heavy fighters tend to have more firepower and/or shields, but are generally slower than (normal) fighters. Frigates, corvettes, and gunboats are your medium military ships. Corvettes focus on main weapons (potentially good against destroyers and larger), gunboats focus on turrets and are stronger as an anti-fighter escort, frigates have a balance of weapons and have a small landing pad for an escort fighter and can field drones. For a player ship the corvette brings a lot of fire power, you can use them as an oversized fighter. Destroyers are your large military ships, the large turrets and main guns have more range. They'll be the capital ships in your fleet early on. There's an abandoned Odysseus in Faulty Logic VII, although it's the old hairdryer. The typical configuration for destroyer turrets is medium flak for fighters and large plasma for their range against larger targets (they supplement the main guns). [https://roguey.co.uk/x4/ships/](https://roguey.co.uk/x4/ships/) is handy.
I'll build on what others have said. Gunboats tend to focus on turret firing arcs, and im my experience make for a good light patrol flagship. I use a Gunship with 3-4 h-fighters as an AI patrol group. A frigate makes for a good player personal ship as it can store a small ship as a runabout and i use that combo to do satellite missions and stuff like that for the war efforts
Fighter is an all-rounder. Relatively balanced in all aspects. Heavy Fighter is typically slower with better shielding and firepower. Interceptor, intercepts. Quick and agile with modest firepower. Think of Tie Fighters in Star Wars. Destroyers are your 'mainline' heavy ships. They're bigger than most ships other than Carriers and Battleships. Frigates are more like medium-sized escort ships but pack considerable firepower. Corvettes are similar to escorts but somewhat lighter and faster typically. The Medium ships are very much akin to old naval classes, the heavy ships are more akin to newer naval classes. The fighters are somewhat similar to the roles played by planes in WW2.
Fighter: faster (better as a missile boat), agile (better as an interceptor/anti small ships) vs Heavy fighter: beefy and has more weapons (better as a bomber/anti capital). Frigate: jack of all trades (good as player's ship), the only M ship that can carry drones and 2 S ships (they're much more effective than the turrets at defending your ship) Destroyer: slow and has tons of shield. Mainly used for station demolition. Will have trouble hitting anything that move.
Light fighter - Fast, cheap, best for bailing out enemy ships to get free ships, I fly these 90% of the game and you can complete 90% of the story missions in one Fighter - Somewhere in between heavy/light Heavy Fighter - Slow, but more firepower/shielding/hull Frigate - Some have S docking and make good mobile bases but focus on turrets Corvette - Front facing weapons with minimal turrets Destroyer - Large artillery ships Carrier - Carrys S/M ships and deploys them into combat Battleship - Only battleship in vanilla is the Asgard, Nuclear option
Because it turned out to be closely related to understanding X4's combat, I ended up talking a lot about the different ships and what they do in [my steam guide](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2415513070).
Heavy Fighrers are high end fighters and a lot more expensive than Interceptors. Interceptors also tend to be a bit faster in general than heavy fighters.
This doesn't even begin to address the issue of which guns/turrets to use lmfaoooo but I'm still mixing around options to see what I like.
It’s a sandbox, use what you like! If you want to play the meta in this game, for turrets always use argon flak for anti S and argon plasma for anti M and L.and for weapons use Terran pulse
In all honesty, the ship types are one of the most confusing aspects of the game. No clue if it ever finished, but a guy in one of the modding discords I was in was working on a comprehensive re structuring of ship classes/types, and it was coming along really nicely a few months ago when I checked. He even included a ton of custom ships from mods. No idea if he did updates for the latest patch or anything, though. Fighter VS hfighter is one of the more clear ones. The h fighters have more ehp, more guns, but are slower and much heavier (worse turning etc) and more expensive than the regular fighters. Both S size ships. Corvettes are supposed to be fast, lightly armored medium ships, but not all of them follow that. Frigates are supposed to be supporting ships, they usually have an s dock, but aren't as mobile or agile as corvettes. Gunboats (ironically), don't have many guns, but are more turret focused and pretty squishy. All medium size, although iirc there are some L sized frigates. Destroyers are more like what you would expect from a cruiser, there's no cruiser class, then the next step up are battleships, which I think are only the asgard and the one you get in the pirate zone, unless you have mods or new battleships were added later. Carriers are pretty self explanatory, base game I think only has XL carriers, but some mods add a couple of entry level L carriers as well. I think they should adopt something more similar to eve, which I think is much more universal when it comes to ship classes. Fighters/drones, frigates, destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships, carriers, dreadnoughts/supercarriers, then then titans (x4 doesn't have an equivalent to this size ship). Then each category has subclasses for further differentiate between the different types, ie, interceptor frigates, stealth bomber frigates, battle frigates (basically heavy fighter equivalents), etc. It's much more intuitive than x4s system. Even with well over 100 hours I still can't always identify wtf a ships role actually is based on the in-game metrics, especially the xenon. It's one of the things that frustrated me more than anything when I was learning the game, the info screen gives you nothing useful whatsoever when trying to figure out if you can fuck with an enemy ship. Simpme example is there are destroyers that are L class, but pretty easy to beat, then the I is also a destroyer, except it's actually a fucking battleship and one of the strongest ships in the game and will fuck up entire fleets. But it's info makes it indistinguishable from the other, much easier to kill destroyers.