Help! Swarm frigate spam

I am having difficulty with a challenge involving many swarm frigates. I cannot work out how to beat it. Can somebody give me some hints please?

The challenge number is 4624605

Thanks in advance!

I’m at work, so can’t bring up the specific challenge right now.

But the standard way of dealing with frigate spams is to spam as many double-rocket fighters as you can, set to engage frigates at 100%.

Heavy cruiser tanks can work too, and decoy tactics can split up frigate spams into more manageable chunks.

Another tactic that works for me is to build some fast, heavily-shielded beam cruisers and set them to engage frigates at long range (1600-2000). If you’re lucky, they’ll drag the frigates around the map, picking them off one-by-one whenever they get too close. This doesn’t work if you’re facing really fast frigs though.

Hope this helps!

Thanks. I tried these techniques but neither of them worked. (they were more effective than before though.

Any other ideas?

Thanks

I just played through the challenge. There are two things you have to counter: the frigates, and the fighter wave.

To kill the frigates, I deployed seven squads of dual-rocket fighters directly facing them and as far to the right of the deployment zone as they could go. Their orders were: ‘Attack Frigates 100% / Range 350’, ‘Co-operative’, and ‘Stick Together - 12’. I deleted the orders to attack fighters and cruisers, as I want them to concentrate on the frigates until they’ve all been destroyed.

The remainder of my fleet was composed of six fast cruisers with armour ratings of just over 9 (so that only critical hits from the fighters will do damage), a tractor and pulse laser each for AA duties, and a mix of beams and cruiser lasers (beams to help dispose of the frigates, CLs to knock down the shields on the carrier). They’re set to engage frigates as first priority, then cruisers. You can delete attack fighters, as they’ll still shoot down any that come into range. I’ll let you work out the other orders and ranges :wink:

One last cruiser was my dedicated AA design - two tractors, two pulse lasers, and two defence lasers along with lots of armour and a repair module.

Incidentally, I was using Rebels, but this tactic can be applied to most races. If you don’t have access to a dual-hardpoint fighter, single rockets should do the trick but it’ll be harder…a decoy tank would probably be of use if this is the case.

Let me know how you get on!

I strongly suggest including a bunch of painter fighters, in squadron size 3 or smaller. Have them set to 100% frigate priority, 1% fighter priority. They will significantly increase the efficiency of your rocket fighters vs frigates, and once the frigates are gone, your rocket fighters will slowly whittle down the enemy fighters.

Here is what I did that finally worked.

2 slow panther cruisers, 1 tiger (with a cv bay on board, this was kind of important)

8 dual rocket squadrons, 5 squadrons of 3 painter fighters each.

All fighters were on 5% cautious, so if they took ANY hull damage they would withdraw.

All fighters had 100% orders to engage the frigates, and I deleted the orders to engage either fighters or cruiser.

The precise cruiser armament isn’t that important. The challenging fighters seemed to have orders to kill my fighters before my cruisers, and with my fighter’s speed and the carrier backing them up, there was no way for my cruisers to be threatened. All the cruisers really needed was some ranged weapon to take out the enemy cruisers’ shields. Oddly, the scenario surrendered once my cruisers entered the range of the cruiser, because my fighters had killed all of his. Painters and tractors meant even his decoy fighter which seemed to have nothing but engines died.

The rocket fighters +painters absolutely slaughtered the frigates before they were even close to my cruisers. And my cruisers just slowly sailed through the fighters. My fighters were set to vulture, so any tractored fighter was dead meat.

The first couple of times, I somehow neglected to set my painter fighters to cautious, which meant they got slowly chewed up, to the point that my fighters were no longer generating kills. Fixing that ensured that slowly his fighters were killed, one by one, as a squadron of rocket fighters would unload on a painted fighter.

Lol since I made it, I didn’t want to specify how to beat it right away. I waited until someone else post a strategy first.

The 2 easiest way to beat that challenge are

  1. Every ship with armor > 49 + Nano-Repair, load it up with pulse. Add a few plasma/beam laser to kill that last cruiser.

or

  1. Mass Dual Rocket Fighters + Painter + Cruiser Anti Fighters with armor > 15 and nano-repair.

If you want even more challenge, you can participate in SAC1 by finding 1 fleet that not only beat 1-59, but 1-58 and 1-57 as well, and post it as 1-60.