One Way I have found to make my fighters more effective is to put them At the Rear of my line of battle and Tag them to a Ship at the head of the line. For example I will take a frigate with decent armor and some anti-fighter/missle arms and place it near the head of my battle formation. To this ship I tag my Fighters flying in Formation at the VERY rear of my battle line. Once combat is joined and my Cruiser’s are Giving/Taking hot laser fire the Shields and Armor of the enemy is going to be beaten down and when the Frigate is finally worn down and destroyed that releases my fighters to take off and exploit the holes blown into the enemy by the big gun platforms. Has anyone else used fighters like this?
Yes… But it’s a very dangerous strategy. Worst case scenario - and it’s pretty much guaranteed to occur on the second attempt someone makes if you use this approach in a challenge - is the enemy has laser fighters set to go straight after your fighters. They’ll whiz past your formation and tear your fighters up while they’re waiting in formation. Slaughter results…
A less vulnerable approach, would be to just have them escort the frigate on a tight leash, say 200 range. That way if the enemy cruisers are close enough to shoot at your fighters, they’ll also be close enough to kill the trigger and let your fighters loose.
Formation is never a good idea for fighters. Speed is their lifeblood. But i have seen some good uses of this strategy. Its an interesting one, to be sure.
sounds good in theory, but i doubt it will work once your opponent realized what you are doing.
there are several situations i can imagine:
your “target ship” gets destroyed in the very beginning -> nothing different to a battle without it
i ignore your fighters since they are behind your precious battleships and pound your cruisers/frigates to death while they are watching. depends on luck if your “target ship” gets destroyed the moment you need it
i ignore your battleships and attack your fighters with my own. unless you don’t spent money on extra aa or order your battleships to attack my fighters (which you really shouldn’t do), it’s pretty much a basic dogfight (or target practice, if you want to say so), only behind your fleet instead the center of the map.
no one said your fighters will have an easy time with the enemy just because your cruisers fire at him
the enemy orders his fighters to escort the cruisers
and as crakker mentioned, the formation order is no good for fighters. makes them sitting ducks actually.
Oh, it’s definately workable… Just needs to use the escort order as I mentioned, so the fighters aren’t standing still.
You can also place your bombers in formation behind, so long as you have fighters set up in escort at the front of your fleet - no orders your enemy can set will get his fighters attacking them without having to go through the fighters first, so no problem there.
It’s trivial to guarantee that the ‘trigger’ ship gets killed - just make it the same ship type as the bulk of your fleet, and place it a couple of grid points in front of the rest of the fleet (and same speed.) Cruiser hull + engine + token weapon is very very cheap, so that’s not a factor. Very very fragile too. It’ll come into the enemy’s range first, guaranteed by your placement and attention to ship speed, and will be so low HP it’ll die in a flash.
The problem with the suggestion was the use of Formation orders for the fighters… When you really must use Escort, so they are still at top speed while ‘waiting’.
I can certainly vouch for it being an unpleasant surprise against some of the single-player missions where cruisers have a full escort squadron. Everything appears to be going fine, enemy attrition is much worse than mine, and then suddenly I have a hole that used to have three or four of my skirmisher frigates in it. Why? Because one of the enemy cruisers went pop, which releases its escorts to swarm. Looks like kicking a wasp nest, with about the same result. Ow.
like the suggestion of a tick box under cautious that says … stay grouped. that way you could setup squadrons of 6 or so to stay grouped and repair together, or keep it unchecked for an indervidual mass brawl like there is now.