I don’t think there’s much wrong with frigates other than having poor missile weapons.
I do think there’s something wrong with rocket fighters:
[]Too fast to be hit with fighter pulse/lasers or frigate pulse, often “outruns” AA missiles and tractors
[]Often cheaper than normal fighters
[]Overloads local scramblers, frigate PD is outright useless of course
[]Can double as a defensive AA role with painter escorts
Cheap, low-budget hordes of what effectively are unarmored anti-frigate bombers should be getting torn apart by superiority fighters. Instead they’re enjoying near immunity to things that would be outright killing normal fighters, to the point where they actually make better defensive AA.
Because of their speed, rocket fighters have no natural predators. They’re throwing everything off - if these things had an anticruser application people would be screaming bloody murder.
Hmmmmm… Well there are a few places I would say frigates ARE broken. In a recient DuelDown I had 19 frigates with four Frigate Beam Lasers on each ship. They maneuvered themselves into position to all fire their weapons at the same time at a single alliance cruiser. The could not penitrate it’s shield. The scale of the firepower is off. 76 Beam Lasers fireing at one ship should ROAST it.
The weapons shouldn’t be that weak with only two capital ship classes in the game. If there were more classes, frigates, destroyers, cruisers and destroyers had weapons half-way between the two, it might be better. I still think they would be underpowered.
Another area that frigates are broken is weapon and module technology. They should have everything cruisers have. There is nothing in the GSB universe story line that says these technologies are “cruiser” specific or size specific. To simplify the game all modules should be scaled to all hull types (fighters are not a hull type for purposes of this discussion, although it is possible to scale many of the technologies to fighters and I’d love to have that discussion).
That’s a poor example. 76 cruiser beam lasers would bounce off a reflective shield as well. That’s just the nature of the weapon.
If you meant to say armor, I can sympathize somewhat (frigates can’t do 50+), but that would not the first time the screwy armor system resulted in something unfair.
The scaling argument goes both ways. If I could mount frigate AA missiles, EMP missiles and ion cannons on my cruisers without a change in logistical costs… I’d probably never use frigates again.
Lol I thought Frigate Spam is already being used against any fleet that isn’t loaded with Rocket Fighters.
I personally prefer dual rockets over single rockets. Dogfights doesn’t matter 99% of the time anyway. The escort command keep them alive long enough as is.
The only reason why frigates are underpowered is because of rockets. If they are immune to rockets then it wouldn’t matter what high tracking anti frigate weapons cruisers has, since they will be stunlocked. Why bother trying to dodge a super high tracking anti frigate weapon, when you can maximize stun with cheap 0.3 frigates while having perfect immunity from fighters?
How right you are. I went and built that exact senario. I was operating under the delusion that if a shield stopped or reflected an attack it affected the shield negatively, the shield would use/lose power. Clearly this is not the case in the game.