It is frigates and fighters only, but the challenge I was talking about was by ObadiahtheSlim, “Even Better Frigates and Fighters” and “Better Frigates and Fighters”
Best reliable way I found to take out the fighters was with a heavily armored FFE design with 2x tractors + pulse lasers backed up by two squadrons of cheap laser fighters. I’d like to know if you find a different way.
use AA cruisers with SCTB’S and quantam blasters?
Sometimes I’ve had success just putting a tractor beam on a cruiser design with 3 or 4 cruiser lasers. Such a cruiser can operate in the immediate vicinity of enemy non-fighters (it can combat cruisers and frigates directly), and has fairly good anti-fighter capability.
As for the Ion Cannon; it seems like it’s too expensive. It’s a great weapon though.
That’s what I do! xD
Indeed: Quantum blasters if you’re on a budget, and don’t expect the AA cruiser to have to combat other cruisers directly; upgraded to cruiser lasers if the ‘aa cruiser’ is expected to fight other cruisers as well as fighters.
Of course, with tribe there are the kinetic alternatives.
but auto cannons are rubbish.
It is possible to beat Dogthinker’s Tribe “Cruiser Spam!” fleet using nothing but antifighter missiles. That missile becomes a solid weapon when shields are down.
I try to avoid using cruiser tractor beams whenever possible. The expense and low killrate makes them a last resort.
Low kill rate?
Tractors are nice… I’d like to make a dirt cheap tractor cruiser sometime, killing 8 fighters at a time is pretty nice.
Tried the “Tractor Cruiser”…
Didn’t seem to work all that well. No data yet, just a gut feel kinda thing.
My standard AA defense cruiser uses 2 or 3 tractors, a cruiser beam laser, a PD laser and a Multiple Warhead Missile launcher. By and a large, one of those can handle 2 and a half fighter squadrons. Cruiser beam lasers make for a decent AA weapon when combined with tractors also.
I have another built on the Fenrir hull that is similar. My Fenrir-only fleets use that one along with a ton of Cruiser Lasers, which make for a great AA weapon in conjunction with tractors.
Honestly, if I see fighters in a challenge, the frigates stay home. They just don’t pay. An AA cruiser does a better job of handling the fighters and still has some utility as an anti-cruiser platform.
fighters eat frigates for breakfast…
Post the fighter list that beats this. You’re allowed 4800 credits and 36 pilots.
One of these:
16 of these.
You see fighters only eat some frigates for breakfast.
then I call in the cruiser/frigates busters…
Of course. The point I’m trying to make though, is that well armored frigates can ignore fighters, and specialized frigates can beat them with the assistence of fighters.
So what you can do, is put a setup like that in the back without an engine right next to your weapons platforms. If you position things well, the fighters rush in and die, and your weapons platforms live. So the existence of fighters doesn’t mean that using frigates is always inpractical.
So frigates in the back are still practical, since they can be defended against a starting fighter assult, and frigates in the front are still practical, because you can just armor them well, which would be a good idea even if fighters didn’t exist.
That’s too high of a ceiling and too easy of a target. 32 pulse, 4 torpedoes, with the torpedoes being completely optional because that frigate is virtually unarmed. I don’t think the race even matters.
Alternatively, pulse/torpedo combo fighters, or armored fighters, or just tribe fighters. Anything that can beat 16 of empire pulse fighters handily enough in spite of tractor interference wins that.
You always have to use a diverse set of weapons and defenses against fighters. It’s possible to armor fighters to the point of near immunity to pulse and frigate AA missiles; Tribe heaven fighters can reach upwards of 70 hitpoints; other fighters are near unhittable by anything below 2.9 tracking… the list goes on.
I’ve actually given up on “armored” (15+) frigates as anything but a small portion of a screened AA defense. Collections of frigates with multiple shields seem to do just fine against relatively small quantities of fighters through recharge and numerical target saturation, and as a result they’re often both cheaper and better defended against other types of threats.
The real problem is always when fighters hit large critical masses where they project themselves onto small portions of the opposing fleet at a time. You don’t see this often in “successful” challenges because it’s so easy to build around using distractions and swarm traps, but that threat is always there.
I cringe whenever I see those custom maps with 500+ pilot limits. There’s just no stopping that kind of nonsense with any fleet that still manages to remain interesting.
That changes if you arm the frigate by swapping out a tractor beam for a anti fighter missile.
However you still lose to 36 of:
[config]
name = shield
guiname = shield
hull = Rebel Achilles Fighter
[modules]
0 = fighter_laser,
1 = fighter_laser,
2 = fighter_engine,
3 = fighter power III,
Yes, you can build frigates that survive fighter swarms. The problem is that you can’t build USEFUL frigates that do so. The Imperial Weapons Platform is totally pointless if there are fighters on the map, because to make it survive the fighters you have to sacrifice its one distinguishing characteristic, the wealth of hardpoints.
this is why fighter swarms are silly