The problem is the “few and far between” are precisely the tough battles. Put in another way, if you are winning with over 50%, your repair will work fine, but you didn’t need the repair to win. If you are facing evenly match battles where winning is based on a small margin, then the repair comes back to haunt you as they get overloaded by focus fire.
You forgo a gun by raising the cost of the one ship. If you leave the module empty you can build more ships.
I’ve found the Tribe repair dynamic changes significantly if you use more repairers. I typically put two on carriers (as they tend to have fighters drawn to them), one on bombardment ships (plasma and MWM) (I design fleets so these ships avoid taking too much damage; one is usually enough to keep a bombardment design in the fight unless things are going badly), and a minimum of four on front line cruisers. This ups the ships regenerative capacity considerably, and adds to the longevity of the repair modules themselves as they can be mutually repaired.
Of course, if a ship is under very heavy attack then almost all types of defences become irrelevant, except the kind of armour tank that is impossible for Tribe anyway (if you can get more than 39 armour rating on a Tribe design with a gun, I’d like to know how).
I was a big fan of repair until I start slaughtering my repair fleets with my non repair fleets. Non repair Tribe fleet will significantly out gun the same Tribe fleets with heavy repair, and when the DPS is combined with the co-op tag repairs get overloaded in no time.
I have never seen, or have gotten repair to work in the front line.
Shield is different because they provide resistance and a solid block of shield strength, and armor tank is clearly in a different class. Repair however, give nothing at start and only start working after it gets damaged. They won’t have the chance to provide anything in the fights where win/lose is determined by under 30%.
In a simplified way, Tribe repair is something that works great when you are already winning, and stops working when you start losing.
Repair has saved my ass more times then i can count.
I normally run 1 or 2 pieces of armor, 2 shields and a repair on my front-line am/af cruisers. They don’t hold agro so they don’t get shot TOO much, but they get killed fairly fast. I can more then double their lifespan by dropping a weapon or armor and adding a single repair module
Care to post some examples? I want to see a Tribe fleet that improved after adding repair. All the fleet I had made in the past has only improved by removing them.
I should also include that this guide is NOT intended for the campaign. Repair fits well with the “preserve and outnumber” philosophy and therefore should work great in the campaign.
I’m interested how your test went. But if you try it while also making sure it also beats the 1000x serenity challenge from NEC, I think the outcome will be even more favorable towards repairs.
With that, yes. It’s definitely better there.
Repair section regarding Tribe Repair changed.
Theoretically, there’s some added advantage to be found in there somewhere - weapons reload slower (and thus lose DPS) when even slightly damaged. Might be better to look at it from that perspective.
I don’t doubt the benefit of Tribe Repair so long as half of it’s supplies get used up. It’s getting any of the supplies used at all against the wave of MWMs, plasmas, or CLs that’s the problem. When ships goes from full HP to 0 in under a second, repair just isn’t doing much. It’s probably because I tend to play on large maps like SAC 5.
The rush section had been updated with a new frigate based fleet.
What about combining long and short range, like having eg. the majority of your fleet be a rush fleet, while keeping a few long range MWM cruisers and perhaps a fighter carrier hanging back?
I bought the game a while ago on Steam, but for various reasons never got around to spend more than a few hours with it until now that I’ve bought the campaign and getting ready to start playing the game properly.
I’ve made use of the excellent info in this thread - and the campaign tutorial someone else wrote - to start out the campaign with long range Nomad fleets, each consisting of a heavily armored tank, a carrier (with tractor beam and pulse lasers) and a slew of Nomad missile armed cruisers, around half of them also carrying lasers for anti-rush purposes.
On top of that I have a few squadrons of laser and dual rockets fighters.
My handful of battles so far - on the easy difficulty - have been rather one sided, with my fleets heavily outmatching the much smaller enemy fleets, and on two occasions my slow cruisers barely managed to get into firing range before my fighters have made mincemeat of the enemy frigates and one or two cruisers.
I’m sure the difficulty will ramp up soon enough, but rather than just aiming for making by-the-numbers extremely powerful long range or rush fleets, I wouldn’t mind trying out some slightly more creative combinations - perhaps trowing in some of those pretty looking beam weapons as well, this game is a visual treat after all - assuming they are viable of course, and not a sure fire way to gimp yourself?
Well you can mix and match, but functionally it will still fall into one of the 3.
So take the rush + long range example, if you have mostly rush and some missiles in the back, it will function as a rush with disadvantage against anti rush and advantage against pure long range.
Missiles should not be used at small quantity as their ability to bypassing scramblers is highly dependent on the density. I suggest going with plasma instead.
As for beams, they are not only visually stunning, you absolutely need the red ones (cruiser beam laser) nowadays. The pulse laser is also good as an utility gun against fighters and frigates.
This is great stuff STW!
I especially like that you gave explicit ship designs. Finally decided to share some of your secrets!
Okay, now about the long range section. I’m curious why you rated plasma spam lower than missile spam. In my experience, plasma spam always has the capability of beating missile spam by simply taking more engines. I think this is true, even after the scrambler nerf.
Actually I gave both of them 4 rating. You might be right that Tribe MWM should have less. I think you and ZGeneral spend a lot more time using Tribe long range then I did. Then again maybe I should move Alliance armored plasma above nomad missile since it can beat everything that doesn’t come into beam laser range.
Nice guide as I start getting into the “guts” of the game mechanics.
I’m wondering though, is there any kind of excel style “spec sheet” that someone has created so I can compare 2 module types at the same time without the need to keep switching back and forth between them in the menu? Too many numbers to keep track of that way for this feeble mind 
Thanks!
Now we’re cookin’ with fire
Cheers bud
Lure section updated.
I was intrigued by the FML MWM controversy so I decided to try out one of your listed challenges - the only one with MWM. And I was shocked. This is the reason people don’t like Tribe, and this challenge has many of the things people list as what makes challenges bad. Tribe, corner banging, misleading fighter deployment, forced deployment zone, are all issues with this challenge. The decoys and fighters are also detractors.
Then I realized that you had listed this as anti-rush not long range MWM. OK, but it’s not pure anti-rush either.
I know there is an attractiveness to the challenges as a “puzzle”, how do I configure my fleet to beat this paticular setup. I get less enjoyment from those types of challenges. I would post a non-Tribe MWM example to let people work on that, because as I see it now you don’t have a MWM challenge posted.
Edit:
I just played this as well and it is a better example of the power of a lure to spring a trap than it is an example of a rush. I’d be more than happy to talk off-line (skype?) and create some challenges that show case your good work without detractors.
I have no intention of showcasing an handicap fleet.
What you are asking me to do here is
No Fighters using Escorts
No Lures
Allow Corner Deploy for Challenger
Place a MWM spam in front where it’s easy to kill
Not use Tribe
If you want a challenge like that, you don’t need me to build it. They can be found all over the challenge board.
Personally I don’t see the fun of “I know I can beat it with a mediocre Nomad Missile Spam, or a Plasma Spam, what’s else”?
I don’t have skype. I do have MSN and AIM. PM me your username if you still want to talk about this.