big ships, medium ships, small ships ≤ big ships, big ships, big ships
Thus (assuming big ships are more advantageous) show up to the battlefield with all big ships.
You make medium and small ships because they’re more cost-efficient: they can turn the same number of dollars into more mobile gun/missile barrels (usually at the cost of armour—the little ships are like DPS “glass cannons.”) But whereas a DPS player in an MMO game gets protected by a “tank” player while they do as much concentrated damage as possible, conventional historical military doctrine actually had the small ships act as a “screen” for the big ships—effectively having the DPS “tanking” for the “tank”!
Luckily, we’ve worked out how crazy this was in the last 80 years, and modern doctrine for combined use of air and sea materiel actually concentrates fire and has the most durable units protecting the strike units (basically by having the sea units protect the air units from below, recapitulating the millennia-old role of mobile artillery in protection of—and area denial for—infantry.)
Source: I read a couple of Horatio Hornblower novels a decade ago.
This reminds me of historical approaches to war-fighting, where both you and your opponent nation-state would build e.g. five classes of ships, biggest to smallest; and then bring them all with you to a battle; and then your big ships would fight their big ships, while your medium ships fought their medium ships, and the smalls fought the smalls.
It always seemed to me that, in such situations, choosing to send those medium and small ships off to fight one-another was, in some way, "playing to lose"—or at least not "playing to win."
It goes against the more recent war-fighting learning: force concentration. If you've got medium and small units, well, you can have them also shoot at whatever the big units are shooting at, and maybe it'll get dead sooner such that they can all move onto shooting at something else!
I hope the analogy to business strategies is obvious :)