As soon as I saw them in the game I decided that they weren’t going to be used by me. I couldn’t see an advantage in them at all, considering that most missiles come with their own decoys anyways, and it would become useless if the enemy had a scanner.
But on a hunch I tried something out. I know that most ships will cease firing on an enemy if its weapons are disabled and is no longer a threat. So I tried loading a Cruiser with only decoys, and sure enough, I had the whole enemy fleet chasing it down.
Has anyone tried to make a decoy Cruiser using this? The decoy launchers are really cheap in just about every aspect compared to all other missiles, lightweight too.
Maybe if one had good shield support with powered armor to hold off fighters it could distract portions of the enemy fleet, wasting their time as you deal with a much more manageable portion of the enemy before moving on to the rest.
So I tested it out mildly…I did the second scenario with only two decoy ships, using Swarm, which had a speed of about .58 and barely cost over 2k each.
They each took about half the enemy fleet for a very reasonable amount of time, and even after shield and armor failed they had enough hull to last longer than 2 seconds after their defenses were breached.
I prefer using armor tanks for this purpose. Give one a cruiser laser or a cruiser defense laser, 1 engine, 1 repair module, and a tiny power plant. Play around with those builds, you’ll see they are quite effective
It depends on what you expect to face. I’m pretty much exclusively playing with fast CL & beam-based fleets these days. They tear most tanks apart (or just fire past them with retaliate), but fast retreating decoys can completely ruin my day.
But something like that won’t go anywhere. Sure it could last and draw fire, but as soon as it’s down all your other ships are in range.
I want something that will actually draw away half the enemy fleet across the map, so that even after my decoy is dead, they have to tread all the way back to the real fight.