Empire has no fighter defense

Pick the two empire battles. Drop Nine Fighters on the board. Mine have 1 laser ,1 armor, one engine, and 1powerplant. Order them to cooperate, and let em go. normal, hard expert the result is the same. THe fighter swarm and kill the empire ship in small groups. The empire cruisers mill about, helpless to take down the fighter swarm and die. Honor points and rafts full of Lobster await the player. I think those poor round ship need some anti-fighter defences.

Well, the Empire doesn’t consider a small one-man fighter to be any threat, or they’d have a tighter defense.

Sorry I couldn’t help my self.

Awesome :smiley:

They also have Exhaust ports on thier ships large enough to park a frigate in. Suggest narrowing the openings with walls of whomp Rats. :]

The problem isn’t winning through massed fighters, since fighters are strong against the empire to begin with. The problem is that the honor earned for massing fighters far exceeds what you would get for having similar massing of frigates or cruisers. Recommend that earn-able honor points have exponential decay when too many ships of one type (an arbitrary number without testing…lets say 4) are deployed. Thus, you could go up to about 5-6 fighters without a grave loss of honor, but 8 gets you in the double/triple digit range. This would mean that earning a serious profit would require a slightly more mixed fleet, and thus, a more complex strategy.

Hmm took in four fighter wings on an empire misssion and the result is the same. The empires proud cruisers die, but it takes a little longer. Give those poor sods a tractor beam or something.

Most of the scenarios can be beaten just with fighter-spam, since the strength of a fighter group goes up exponentially with more fighters. Empire is the most vulnerable to this, even with their tendency to put severral fighter groups escorting a single cruiser.

Adding more fighter defense ships wouldn’t necessarily help. They would have to be blobbed themselves to stand a chance against blobbed fighters.

I play with heavily modified fighters, who tend to max out at lower speeds and have lower armor penetration. And even they perform very very well when blobbed.

maybe if fighters took small amounts of damage from reactor explosions…

that’s how i beat ALL missions on hard. (Not normal, i used a different strategy) Fighter spam. It’s least effective with the Alliance, (Strong armor) but it still works.

If you’re trying to beat all the levels just to get them done, I think it’s faster to include at least one or two mop-up cruisers along with the fighters. :smiley:

well, i did that too (the pilot limit lowered the number of fighters)

The Empire is actually kinda screwed. Not enough hardpoints for all ships to carry anti-fighter spam; fighters that can’t fight. They’re the Star Wars Empire had Luke not taken them down after about 500 years of bureaucratic evolution. The paper pushers want more safe Union jobs on ship, not those dirty plasma torpedo loader jobs.

lol, looks like i don’t have to wash my hands every five minutes, for no longer am i a plasma torpedo loader

Anyone who doesn’t add enough armor is vulnerable to fighter spam and the AI empire doesn’t seem to focus on it.

All that armour is going to do is delay the inevitable and not by that much really a 4 squadron achilles attack group with a pulse laser( which seems to appear in challenges with suspicious regularity for a game that is said to be balanced) on co operate orders will tear even a cruiser with 6 heavy armour segments apart in very short order what the game is crying out for i feel is a low damage area effect weapon one that will do barely anything to a frigate or cruiser maybe one that only operates inside the ships own shields but will smack those ultra light interceptor designs that shouldn`t be going anywhere near a capital ship to small rapidly moving pieces.That way we may actually see people using torpedo or rocket squadrons to attack the big boys.

A cruiser that mounts a super-tractor beam, a defense laser and some nano-repair bots will quietly eat fighters one after the next. I threw out a cruiser that had 3 super-tractors and 3 defense lasers and one repair module. It waded out into the midst of 16 fighter squadrons and was the only cruiser there. Eventually, the cruiser died when it came in range of other cruisers. It did not ever take any serious damage from the fighters. The occasional “critical hit” simply caused a bot to wander out and do some welding.

It is far more concerning to me how poorly frigates fare against fighters. Fighters can eat frigates faster than the frigates can fire those anti-fighter missiles and the frigate tractor is something all fighter pilots laugh at over beer after the frigates are so much space-dust. Frigate armor? Who wants a frigate with 4 separate armor modules? Such a thing would be so slow it could be hit by heavy cruiser plasma (now THAT’s embarrassing for the frigate captain!) Even if frigates had nano-repair modules, frigates are low on slots as it is without requiring that all frigates must have armor and nano-repair or be mulch. I tried making frigates specifically to counter fighters. All that happened was the frigates took out 1 or 2 fighters before exploding.

Trouble is, it can’t do much other than sit in the middle of a swarm of fighters. If you’re lucky enough that all the enemy fighters goes for your honeypot then great, otherwise you find yourself having to mount such heavy defenses on almost all your ships… Which makes you a sitting duck for anything else your opponent chooses to throw at you. Supposing they do go for the honeypot… It’s still only delaying the problem - that tank will vanish quickly if a beam or plasma cruiser gets in range.

Don’t forget the game is in beta :wink: I expect the Achilles will get fixed soon, it’s one of the few things that is very clearly broken, being the only fighter that doesn’t need a power plant.

The frigate tractor is pretty effective, I find. You just need a lot of them. If you have 20 frigates, and they all have 1 tractor beam, and at least one weapon with reasonable tracking… Then they can even munch through swarms of Achilles. Of course, Giving up on upwards of 25% of your frigate firepower, to something that doesn’t really affect anything except fighters seems quite an expensive counter. If it means you much the enemy fighter wing, with yours mostly intact, that’s still pretty good value.

The antifighter missiles are quite slow to fire… But I’ve noticed they do do ok against the Achilles - they seem to get a decent hit ratio, and they always score an outright kill when they do. You need to make sure you don’t have ‘cooperative’ orders set to minimise the wasted missiles.

One tactic I’ve seen people use sometimes, is field a frigate honeypot, away from the main fleet, made of nothing but armour plate, in the hope the fighters are set to target frigates before cruisers (target priority orders seem to trump the ‘is the ship a threat’ part of the AI targetting, so it doesn’t even need a weapon.) Of course if you can see your opponent has deployed only one frigate, it becomes pretty obvious you shouldn’t let your fighters target frigates :slight_smile: Perhaps if you put something like this in front of your anti-fighter frigates, it might buy them a little more time.

I just tested. 18 squadrons of Achilles (I put a challenge up to make it easy to test antifighter vs fighter) against an equal point value of frigates…

Using the Rebel Loki hull (Rebel probably isn’t the best, since the speed boost is worthless in this match up, but Loki is a powerfull option since it’s a short frigate - which means nice tight sheilds.) First I tried this load out: 2x tractor beam, 2x antifighter missiles, sheild II, engine I, power III. The game declared a win at 50% of the fighters killed, 0% of the frigates. Then I tried 4 antifighter missiles, no tractor beams. Again, the game declared a win, at 50% of the fighters killed and none of the frigates down.

OK, maybe the Loki is just a rocking hull… This thread start out talking about federation sucking vs fighters, so I switched over to them.

Picked the smallest frigate they have - the Gladius, at 120m long, this is going to take a lot more punishment… Started out with the same loadout (4x missiles.) This didn’t go so well, got wiped out with 50% of the fighters surviving. Hmm, but I left the 4 extra module spaces empty. Let’s put on some armour… Four pieces of armour III, and upped the engine to a III as well so we’re not a snail. This is a lot more expensive, there is only 1 frigate deployed to each fighter squadron now. I thought they’d get thrashed again, but no. The fighters never even defeated the armouron one frigate. Game declared a 100% victory with half the fighters killed.

Conclusion: Antifighter missiles have a bad rep, they do ok. short frigates don’t need armour to beat fighters. long ones do. Anti-fighter frigates utterly dominate fighters, even the imbalanced Achillies, with an even spend. As well they should.

EDIT: And to back up what I was saying about frigate tractor beams. I built some Odin frigates with 2 ion cannons, 2 tractor beams, a tech II shield, and speed 0.41 (a tech II and a tech III engine.) Ion cannons are great - accurate, good shield penetration and high DPS. Only problem is range, hence the spend on engines so this ship can be multi-role. Against the Achilles, point for point they weren’t quite a match. But when I backed them up with 5 squadrons of Achillies (facing 18, with same overall point value), they thrashed the pure fighter force with 85% to 40% remaining when the game called the victory. Frigate tractor beams work fantastically well in a supporting role to your own fighters.

i think it is kind of silly to require a cruiser to be dedicated to AA. an aoe flack cannon would do the trick nicely. i can see a dedicated AA cruiser though, and i definitely think they need a boost in survivability across the board. currently all i can use them for is long range artillery. if they get anywhere close to the front lines they drop like flies.

i also think they should be faster. it would be more fun that way.

incidentally, with some of the forum talk of having larger hull types later on, how is that going to affect the overall speed of the game? are battleships going to be basically stationary or what? actualy, ill ask that ina another thread.

(insidentaly, no strike through text on this forum?)

Arkerry, the game is on beta stage and on the game’s homepage it says the game is PLAYABLE, it doesn’t say the game is fully balanced or even well balanced.