Put an engine 3 on a fighter and nothing else. Speed should be around 5.5+. (6.2 for Rebels).
Deploy 1-3 squadrons of them.
Watch as the AI fires weapons and sends fighters after them. Generally messing up their fleet. At 4x game speed it makes for a nice whirlwind of fighters.
Bombard the enemy with long range weapon ships.
At the post battle report, see that the decoy fighters have 0% hits on them.
This needs rebalancing so that the fighters can be destroyed. Possibly make it so that anti-fighter lasers eventually get an automatic hit. Or even add a new ‘Flak Cannon’ weapon with a small area of effect damage. The little smoke explosions in space would make for good visuals. Flak cannons were featured in the classic space combat game ‘Freespace 2’.
As a quicker fix, make it so that fighters without weapons are completely ignored by ships.
Even a ship with a power plant, a gun, and two engines, it is nearly impossible to shoot down. I’m designing a cruiser anti-air fortress to help with this problem. I’ll let you know how it goes lol
I’ve been playing with 12side to figure how to stop fighters like this. The only things I’ve seen ever take them down is tractor beams. I built an anti-fighter frigate with two tractor beams and two anti fighter beam weapons. One problem is both tractor beams will fire on the same fighter, totally worthless. Second, while the tractor beams are holding the fighter you still have to hope that something shots them before the let go. I had a few squadrons of fighters plus a few of these frigates, and it was still painfully slow to take out these fighters.
Seems like once fighters reach a certain speed nothing can hit them.
Also it is annoying to see all the fighters go into the corners. Not sure what causes this, as they aren’t set to “cautious”. Something is compelling both them and their target to slowly move in one direction forever.
Fun fact: I have a series of invincible fighters fight off some invincible frigates (they recharged their shields, hulls too fast for my fighters to do any permanent damage) and I ran it for over 12 hours and still stayed a stalemate.
Another suggestion I’ll make into it’s own thread later: permanent shield and hull destruction. So given enough damage, not even the shield generator can repair the shields to max, and not even the nanobots can repair the hull to max. This will help prevent stalemates and standoffs
When dealing with rapid fighters I just use my strong shield/armored ships to shrug off their fire and engage the enemy Crusiers/Frigates.
Although the problem of going in circles can occur, hopefully when Cliff adds a ‘Do Not Attack Fighters’ option this won’t be an issue anymore.
[modules]
0 = cruiser crew III,
1 = cruiser tractor,
2 = cruiser_defence laser,
3 = cruiser_defence laser,
4 = cruiser reinforced power II,
5 = cruiser reinforced power II,
6 = cruiser_armour III,
7 = cruiser_repair_armor1,
8 = cruiser_targetboosterII,
9 = cruiser_engine III,
10 = cruiser_engine III,
11 = cruiser_engine III,
12 = cruiser_engine III,
13 = cruiser_defence laser,
14 = cruiser_defence laser,[/code]
It was a slaughter, and I don’t mean the fighters. I had Legedi send me one set of fighters and one set of bombers. My tractor beams locked on just fine but my guns wouldn’t shoot them! and they certainly didn’t hit anything without the tractor beam. I managed to hit one fighter before my ship was almost instantly destroyed. Something has got to be done about fast-fighters!
Okay this time I took them out, at the risk of having a slow and vulnerable cruiser. In a real battle I think this cruiser would be slaughtered by any other shit really quickly.
At least it took out all the pesky fighters after an hour. I sure hope everyone sets their fighter to kill cruisers first! lol
Mass Rapid fighters really can be a problem. Hopefully bombers would be slow enough to shoot down, but it does seem any dedicated anti-fighter Hull isn’t as effective as it should be.
Maybe we need some other anti-fighter module, or once ships are in a tractor beam they are actually shot.
I wouldn’t overlook Interceptors as well, a few fighter squadrons on escort can at least draw fire from enemy fighters.