I’ve finally dipped my toe into the online challenges and have been tearing through them like a hot knife through butter using my ECM Spam Frigate fleet.
It’s a Puma hull with an ECM Missile for disabling the enemy, an ion cannon for bringing down shields, a Frigate Beam Laser for cutting ships up once the shields are down, and a pulse laser for dealing with fighters and missiles. I deploy as many as I can in a square formation at one side of the play field.
I don’t care how much anti-ECM your ship has, a cloud of ECM missiles from this fleet approaching on your flank will leave your precious cruiser of death permanently offline until they peck its shields off. You can fire back with heavy firepower and barely affect the damage output of the fleet (one measly ship out of fifty down) while the huge thicket of beam weapons that lance out once the enemy shields are down will bring down a cruiser in seconds.
The only challenge I haven’t been able to beat is the four tanks of the apocalypse.
My balance suggestion: only have a single ECM missile knock down a single weapon system. I know, I know, battle of Hoth, but that was supposed to be an overpowered planet-based weapon.
Is there a way to create our own challenges? So that I could make this frigate your talking about and try and create a counter force for it to exploit weakness’s? I don’t see anyway to create a challenge?
Just beat your fleet 62-8. I don’t think a single EMP missile even hit them. Which is kinda funny, because only one of my weapons in anti-missile defense on each cruisers. :]
I used my standard anti-frigate cruisers btw (with a fighter swarm…was still mostly cruisers. Fighters got owned).
I beat your fleet as well, sent you a challenge, I had a balanced force of frigates, cruisers and a large fighter swarm. The key was keeping my ships away long enough the fighters to tear into your ships. I put my ships on the opposite side of the map and yoru ships had to fly while under fighter attack, by the time you got to me your fleet was spread out and my ships were able to focus fire one one or two ships at a time.
Stomped it with fighters + basic frigate spam. Actually, the fighters would have been enough by themselves, but they did provide a nice distraction that broke up your formation integrity and prevented the ECM spam from amounting to anything (only a few missiles coming out at any one time on a couple of my frigates - not enough to dent their firepower). Incidentally, the frigates I used were 3 ion + 1 smallbeam in terms of weapons.
If you think it’s really then submit it to the tournament! It’s even on the right map. If it shows up on top and all it’s battles were one sided then it could be broken, if it doesn’t then it probably isn’t broken.
No, I stand corrected, this fleet gets decimated by fighters. Then again some of these fighters are just ridiculous. Am I correct in assuming that two contrails from a fighter mean two engines? Because zero hits against enemy fighters in two minutes of just fighters vs frigates is ridiculous.
Though I will state for the record that the fleets that have beaten my fleet (that I’ve been able to see) have been frigate spam themselves, just longer ranged.
I beat this fleet with a mixed group of cruisers and some fighter escorts. The main killers were cruisers with lots of pulse lasers, they tear through frigates; they were backed up by some cruisers with ECM beams, which removed most of the ECM missile threat.
Your frigate fleet was decimated before my main force could reach them. My swarm of fighters popped them like corn ;D
You could mount a tractor beam to prevent that.
The fighters was a direct counter to that fleet, but for the challenge I tried beating your frigate fleet without any fighters and that’s when it became annoyingly hard.
It took multiple heavy armored cruisers before I could with-hold the pressure of all those ion cannons and lasers.