The theorycraft behind building a fleet in GC that can triumph over anything is challenging on it’s own.
There are three goals to build your fleet for: Raiding, attacking and defense. Raiding is purely suicidal, attacking it designed to destroy 90% of the enemy fleet, and defense is to destroy 90% of fleets attacking you.
The strongest fleet, both for attacking and defense, is purely a fighter swarm. I run on the order of 30+ squads of fighters, each a 1.54 speed rebel dual laser fighter. Even with armored anti-fighter cruisers, they can’t hit enough fighters fast enough to prevent lucky shots from eating through their armor, even with 3 repair modules!
Please, give my build a try. What’s more, it lets you capture planets relatively early on. With this build, complimented by 10 Fenrir fast missile cruisers to take out the early bases with slightly larger fleets, you can get up to 5 bases by week 40-50
Haven’t tried making a tribe fighter swarm yet, but Tribe Fighters die to my fighter swarm just as easily as anything else. Actually, i’ve found the tribe dies quicker due to lower armor and shields
They do. It’s pretty simple why. You have 16 ships firing at a target at once. Odds are in the time it takes to make a pass they’ll kill 1-6 of the hybrids.
And more often then not in the campaign, you just ignore the FT and kill the CR and some FR, capture the FT and the rest of the FR!
When i say swarm i don’t mean the RACE the swarm, just a large number of Rebel fighters. (My fighter build is 99 credits, dual laser speed of 1.54 i believe)
Agreed. I’ve been running with this tactic too, but substituting CL and beam cruisers for your missiles boats. (And I’ve been using pulse fighters rather than double laser - will have to give that a shot).
I wonder, as more and more fleets get logged in to the campaign database, if we’ll start seeing stronger air defence filtering through. I know I’ve been deploying far more flak cruisers and carriers than I would against an average player challenge.
In my first look at the campaign, I’ve been using fleets with 1 or 2 aa 4-bay carriers and the rest dual weapon Tribe fighters, mostly pulse-rocket with some rocket-painters thrown in. The only places I’ve bothered with anything else are the worlds where fighters are banned by spatial anomoly.
Point for point, fighters have the most combat effectiveness. The limit on fighters in the regular game is the pilot limit. A laser fighter squadron will outfight most cruisers and costs less than most cruisers but uses 16 pilots while the cruiser only uses 1 pilot.
In the campaign however, the limited resource is not pilots but crew. So a cruiser will not only cost more than a squadron of fighters but will also use 10 or 20 times as many crew. There are also fewer shipyards that can build cruisers.
Most fleet isn’t meant to deal with 100% fighters, but other cruisers. Even if in theory cruiser can handle fighters fine point by point the campaign just doesn’t have those fleets.
This strategy will stop working once a few anti fighter fleet is thrown in.
I’ve run into an Alliance all-cruiser fleet that not only beat off my fighter swarms, but my should-have-won cruiser fleet as well - they must be loaded to the gills with armour and repair modules, as even my plasma wasn’t working.
If it’s the one i think you’re talking about, I just FT swarmed it. I had equal HP to his HP (keep in mind, this was FT. Equal credits would give a fraction of the HP, so i VASTLY out numbered him)
I’m glad that worked for you. I find I am usually fighting fleets with many times the size of my own. I can usually win up to 2x (that’s a vast generalization), but when I get hit by 3x and 4x fleets, I’m screwed, regardless of my fighters.
guys let me just stop all you fighter swarm lovers here for a moment and present you with a unique perspective
fighters - dots shooting dots
capital ships - several thousand metric tons of pure awesomeness,powered by blood of virgins and blessed by devil,and most importantly,having high caliber DAKKA
fighters may be effective,but theres no damn way it will keep you entertained for long
I don’t love fighter swarms. I love carriers and attack carriers and heavy cruisers with some fighters for support. But that fleet doesn’t work very well in GC. That’s why people say there’s a balance problem. And I do love winning.
This is why, in Beta, we’re advising Cliff to tweak the campaign so that it encourages the use of cruisers. If we don’t the campaign will devolve to fighter wars. An who wants Pepepepepepepepepepepepepepepepepepepepew all night long. I’d rather see the Pew Kappow Dakka Dakka of cruisers any day.
(Again: Cruiser =/= Capital ship…)
And I honestly HATE fighters. But until my Cruisers are equally effective to my fighter swarm tactic, then i’ll run pure FT
And honestly even once they DO make CR more effective, I’ll still run a fighter swarm fleet in case i find a base with a fleet i want to capture a ship class of.
I actually capture a lot more ships with cruiser fleets - fighters tend to kill everything. I have lots of captured ships in my cruiser campaigns. Not many in my fighter campaigns.
Does any one else think that when it comes to Fighters vs Frigates, that Frigate do not have a credit for credit value to Hard counter a fighter swarm?
I’ve seen specifically AA cruisers do it barely (but I’m not sure if it was credit for credit match)
I just wonder if boosting the tracking speed on most Anti fighter weapons for Frigates would be a good solution to the fighter spam problem.
Plus giving some much needed value to frigates which have limited applications as is.
