I was playing around with the Escort command, and decided to try having fighters escorting my tank cruisers at 600 range. It was kind of interesting, as enemy ships approached, the fighters would do a pass, and immediately head back to my tank.
It occurs to me that that might be a way to get torpedo fighters to work. They would be looping in and out, and hopefully encounter an enemy right before they would have to head back to the tank, fire, and be headed away. This would certainly prevent them from wandering aimlessly into the enemy formation.
It is too bad there isn’t some really heavy fighter armor. It might be interesting to have a decoy fighter variant, with the heaviest armor. A fighter with 3 pieces of level 3 fighter armor moves at over 3 speed, with over 9 armor. With 2 armor 3 and engine 1 and engine 2, the speed is over 3.5, over 6 armor, with twice the hit points.
But since most ships will preferentially target the slower fighters, the decoys would likely be ignored if there were any other targets nearby.+
Had a bit of an oops with that strategy. There was a lot of fighter damage among the escorting fighters, and they all retreated to the same frontline carrier tank… and 8 fighters went poof when it blew up.
But most of the time it was pretty successful. The big guns knocked down shields and the rocket fighters pounced on them, the 600 range tether allowed them a lot of flexibility. Sometimes they take a vacation about 300 range or so on the opposite side of the tank they are escorting from the enemy.
I’ve been having fun with a similar max escort range laser fighter for a while. Stick a carrier or two in the second line of my formations, fighters set to escort them at range 600. The way its generally worked is that the laser cruisers up front are thoroughly mixing it up with the enemy fleets by the time the carriers get close enough to ‘launch’ the fighters, and then they are free to finish off a target and then run back to the carriers for repairs while the carriers start closing on the next target (usually carriers are set to engage at 4-500 with beams, plus a tractor beam and a pulse gun to deal with any hostile fighters which follow mine back).
I’ll try switching it up torpedos and see what happens. Not sure if I want to stick bombers on my front line, though, since I usually have the laser cruisers set to engage at range 150 or so, and to keep moving. If the fighter escorts follow them in there, may end badly.
I’ve had good luck with fighters escorting cruisers. Put a tractor beam on each cruiser. When enemy fighters attack, the cruiser tractor beam will grab one enemy fighter at a time, and then the other fighters escorting the cruiser will vaporize the now stationary enemy fight. Each time a fighter is captured by a tractor beam it dies. Your fighters might also kill fighters on their own, but a fighter in a tractor beam is a guaranteed kill. You can chew through an impressively large number of fighters this way.
Fast rocket fighters are probably best so they last a long time before being shot down. You don’t even need a target painter due to the tractor beam.