So lately I’ve been playing around with trying to make a good frigate spam fleet. Of course, the ships wouldn’t have to be able to survive in small numbers, the idea is to have 15.000+ HP in this ship type. (this works out to ~65-75 of them.) I found a Swarm design that meets my critera below (speed of 1.01) with good armor, speed, and packs a punch esp. in large numbers. So far the only thing i’ve come across that hurt was a FT spam fleet with fighters copying my design. It was roughly equal in credit cost, i took it out with ~60% losses. On average, you can expect 1-7% losses against most fleets. Took out a 60k HP Tribe fleet, 2% losses with 25k in HP of my frigates. I think i found a new FT spam fleet. Upcoming playtests will try this on harder difficulties, as if i can get it going on Admiral it’ll be truly impressive
My next goal is a pure cruiser spam fleet. I’ll mix it with some FT spam, to allow me to go to areas i couldn’t otherwise
Please post your results with similar specs, if people can’t figure out what i used or something that gets similar results i’ll post my design
Step 1: design a special type of frigate (fast, armored enough that rocket fighters don’t just burn through the armor, small crew, AND able to punch through shields!)
Step 2: build squads of fighters, just enough to hold off an enemy attack, but NO MORE (keep maintenance costs down.)
Step 3: Wait until you have ~1000 crew, spend it ALL on your frigates. you will earn more credits then you spend making the frigates, so spend them on FT for system defense (Crew is your early game limiting factor, late game limiting factor is Shipyard Construction Space.)
Pros:
As good or maybe even better then my FT spam fleet.
Individual ships are relatively survivable, pack a punch, and are basically replaceable.
On the basic map, there is no world that won’t allow Frigates to go to it. That makes this the only spec i’ve found that allows you to only run one combat fleet.
Cons
Against a Dual Laser or Laser/Rocket fighter fleet, DOES take significant losses.
Buildup is SLOW. Since crew is the limiting factor, building up large FT fleets for defense is viable, but perhaps not advised in all circumstances.
I think you can reach around 1.20 speed for at least some of the frigates, which gives them better survival ability… Especially by having specialized frigate types. One for bringing down shields and the other for cutting through armor. My nomad frigates have a torpedo variant, beam variant and ion/phaser variant just because strafing runs look fun. However, yeah, it shows the true superiority of the fighter spam. Where as fighter spam wins everything - including most of other fighter spams - with minimal losses, frigate spam gets spanked. Further, certain cruiser configurations with fast-tracking, low-range weapons will cause carnage upon the frigates. Thus, the faster they are, the better. I don’t think it is worth it to put buck in shields, they can’t stop rockets anyway. My brawler frigates with short-range weapons have lil’ shielding, but they’d likely do better with just armor.
My fleet has handled a as large or larger FT fleet and won. with 1.01 speed, they are fast enough.
And a CL fleet actually doesn’t do as well here as you’d think. I went up against a few of them, and they died rather quickly
I find Tribe frigate spam to be better than Swarm Frigate spam in many aspects. They also have the best anti fighter lure in the game to bypass the mass fighters.
Yes, most cruiser fleets, but for example, I remember fighting against pretty much immobile Alliance cruiser fleet. They were stacked with armor and weapons with high-tracking. My frigate spam managed to win them, but only through numbers - I had more HP than that fleet and still lost 70%. All my 1.01 torpedo frigates died, only ~1.20 brawlers lived to the end. Still many of them died to tractor beams and target finders.
So yeah, I like fast frigates, I think they are fun, but they are really not nearly as good as fighter spam.
The fleet’s i’ve gone up against always died pretty quickly. Won around turn 302, as i started taking a few turns to build up after every conquest. Final fleet was composed of just frigates, although i had nearly 400 of them by the time it ended!
I’m going to be trying this on harder modes, and working out kinks. As it isn’t perfect, but i suspect with some work and revision it’ll end up quite good.
Sadly i agree that fighters ARE the best fleet in GC. it’s really just a matter of gun density. what’s has more guns: 10 frigates, or 8 squads of fighters. those 10 frigates would have at MOST 60 guns. The fighter squads would have 256 guns. A reasonable fast frigate fleet will have at most 3 guns per frigate, v the 32 guns of a single “unit” (squad) of the fighter swarm.
If you’re fighting frigates with cruisers, armor is key. Beams aren’t particularly popular with frigate spams, so you can get away with 30-40 average armor on your frontline cruisers + some short range weapons to deal damage and keep aggro - they’ll last a long time, and your longer-range cruisers can hang back and provide support. Haven’t really tried this all out though - I usually at least have rocket fighters helping at max escort range. Of course, this only works when attacking - the armor cruisers might survive a MWM round or two, but plasma will tear them apart.
I make these fleets to prove a point, that a single, large, spec’d fleet can eventually win just about everything. Showed it with Laser FT (going to try it with rocket fighters sometime, maybe mix in some torpedo fighters xD)
Currently i’m working on a cruiser fleet. I’ve decided it’ll be rush most likely, as rush fleets tend to do better v fighter swarms
As of now I see no point in proving any points in gsb balance
The sheer imbalance and randomness factor practically renders the competitive play inert
Instead I play a heavily modded version of gsb where frigs may actually survive to the end of the battle and howitzers are actually worthwhile mid range combat weapons
I create my own balance and so far it’s been working pretty dam well… Really fun too
Competitive play die because of Tribe. Those who participated in the SAC/NEC has come to a consent that it is pretty much Tribe MWM vs Tribe Plasma, until it gets so focus on long range (over 6 MWM per ship) that a rush actually gets through. Then it’s back to long range spam again.
This is also why none of the competitive fleet uses Fast Missile. Defending rush is so easy that the main focus has always been trying to beat the other person’s long range.
And then the campaign came out, where the game is no longer focused on trying to defeat a fleet with an equal cost.
Yeah because I was tired of arguing. I mean it wasn’t like Cliff was going to change Tribe, especially when so many people are telling their personal story about how they beat Tribe fleets in the past. And by then the competitive play was already dead.
So I instead wrote a huge guide, put up some same fleets, which has the side effect of showing how OP Tribe is.
That would just make the pilot & crew facilities even more irrelevant. Right now, the only limiting factor is money, and fighters are the best use of your money, so as long as money is the only limiting factor, the best fleet is fighters.
One of the interesting features of the campaign is that it draws the fleets it sends against you from fleets designed and used by other campaign players, screening out the excessively monomaniacal ones (i.e. the all-fighter deployments). In a way, it can be said to be learning. Not in the same league as Skynet, but still something to be aware of.
Some very heavily fighter-weighted fleets do make the cut, however, which has led, in turn, to an increasing number of anti-fighter fleets in the mix. Thus, over, time, all-fighter deployments will be more risky, because there are ways to destroy or force the surrender of these fleets, and as fleets designed to use these tactics are created, luck of the draw will cause the AI to pick them at more and more frequent intervals.
In addition, the campaign proceeds in certain clearly definable phases, with different challenges in each. In the earliest phase, the limiting factor is pilots. If you are trying to use an all-fighter fleet, your buildup and breakout will be slower because of low pilot production, and your home planet will remain subject to attack for a longer period of time (because Dayamun, right next door, doesn’t allow fighters). Also, if an anti-fighter fleet shows up early on, you are likely to suffer crippling losses with no time or depth of position to recover.
Ikhomine’s buildup idea outlined in the first post in this thread is probably the most efficient way to get out of phase 1, secure the local systems quickly, and then prepare for phase 2, which is the capture of shipyard and cash-producing systems just outside the “local cluster”. I will be interested to hear if he succeeds in creating a cruiser variant of that strategy.
Fighters chief limitation is Pilots, early game. Frigates, it’s crew. Cruisers, it’s Credits.
I’m currently working on 3 or 4 ideas for my cruiser spam fleet. The idea is only one type of ship, build big numbers and murder. I’m not going to be using tribe, as always xD
