To me, the tribe seem to be quite horrible, except for their repair systems everything new that is the tribe seems to get pwned by everything else.
Especially the new cool kinetic weapons.
Heres what happens when i try to use them:
I make Cruisers with all howitzers and frigates with all kinetic guns.
Usually i put 2 engines on cruisers, and 1-2 on the frigates.
They have to rush into the pathetically close 400 range, and by the time they get there i have already lost a cruiser or two, even with good defenses.
Then it just all goes downhill as they slowly take my guys from a range, and pummel them into deep space.
Then on top of that, from what i have been reading cruiser lasers are TWICE as good, and have about twice the range too, at least i think… im more of a beam person.
And correct me if im wrong, but tribe have -50% shields correct?
So in my opinion, the tribe, combined with the weakness of armor even with advanced repair systems, suck. Anyone care to agree? dissagree? Be diplomatic and not take a side?
Tests have shown that kinetic weapons are just plain bad, stat-wise. Cruiser Lasers and Ion Cannons stomp kinetics. That said, they can fill some very limited roles as low-energy weapons with decent firepower. I’m not sure that they’re worth the tradeoff, but they might see occasional use. I actually use frigate kinetics as low-power-requirement armor-piercing weapons (cheap substitutes for beam weapons, basically), but they’re specialty weapons rather than bread and butter firepower.
But the Tribe isn’t just about kinetics. The Tribe is about raw hit points. Rapair modules are part of their strength, but even more important is the fact that once shields and armor are penetrated, they’ll outlast any comparable opponent. Ironically, the Tribe are all about offense - make sure that you penetrate armor and shields, then pour on the raw firepower and watch the enemy die first. You don’t have to devote anything to armor or shields in order to have a huge hit point advantage, leaving you more space to mount guns and engines. Though I tend to mount Reflective shields on my Tribe cruisers anyway, just to provide basic defense against fighters (particularly rocket fighters, which can’t get under the bubble) and beam weapons. Also shifting to a single shield on my frigates, just to avoid being completely wrecked by high-DPS laser fighters.
Tribal frigate swarms are particularly devastating due to this. Add a backline of anti-fighter frigates, and Tribal frigate swarms will usually survive rocket fighter swarms simply due to having far more hit points than other factions’ frigates. The fighters will die to the anti-fighter frigates before they take out a decisive amount of attack frigates. This strategy can be even more brutal against capital-based fleets by stringing a bunch of cheap Tribe cruisers as a front line to soak damage, because Tribe cruisers have obscene amounts of hit points for very low costs. In all cases the focus is on mitigating the only threats that can out-DPS you (enemy fighters), then brawling the enemy into oblivion on the strength of superior endurance.
The Tribe also works well with EMP weapons. Repair modules are best at mitigating slow streams of damage; repair systems can be overwhelmed quickly with concentrated fire. Thus, anything that can reduce the amount of damage you’re taking will increase the effectiveness of your endurance advantage. My current favorite strategy involves fast Tribal frigates with EMP Missile Launchers and repair systems - unless the enemy is mounting point defense, my the frigates are incredibly hard to kill due to the rampant disruption. The odd hit or two generally gets repaired, leaving little or no lasting damage. Cruiser based fleets in particular get absolutely wrecked, since EMP strikes are at their best against fewer large targets.
I built a fleet of tribe cruisers with only kinetic weapons and can pwn most challenges with it.
These ships have 0 armor. 0 shields. 4 engines. 2 Tribe repair systems. As many howies as can be stuffed onboard. The idea is to get there FAST, not sorta quickly. The idea is to use the slots that were being taken up by armor and make good use of them with ECM, EMP and extra engines. The idea is to drop from 2 - 3 power IIIs to just 2 power Is (taking advantage of the 0 shields and low power requirements of howitzers). The idea is to save so much money that you can deploy extra cruisers, or tougher fighters, or more frigates.
Tribe has an entirely different play style. Building a green Federation ship is just going to get it stomped.
So thats why my ships were getting stomped…
I am more in favor of cruiser fleets with frigates as support or anti fighter, so i guess that just doesnt work with tribe.
Also i always put a ton of armor and shields on my ships, aparently you dont need to do that for the tribe.
The Tribe will get shredded by fighter heavy Challenge fleets, though. That’s the real downside of their armor penalty – you’ll have to equip twice as much armor in order to get the same basic resistance against fighters, and even then it will take only half as much to tip you over the edge where the armor starts taking real damage and melts away.
That’s why I haven’t been making Tribe fleets – I dunno what to do about fighters. Even reasonably balanced Challenge fleets that feature plenty of cruisers and frigates but also have a solid compliment of fighters will trounce me because the fighters just mow down Tribe ships.
This one guy, on a smaller map, built two “tank” cruisers out front, who seemed nearly invincible to anything i threw at them. probably alot of repair mechanisms. But then he had 3 squads of fighters, and 3 missle cruisers out back. Also a few weak frigates to go along with it.
So whatever i did, my guys would attack the two tanks, get wrecked by the missles, and then be defeated.
Maybe try a tank strategy, it works quite well combined with some anti-fighter frigates/fighters.
There are other ways to defeat mobs of fighters than cruiser armor. I’ve been using a dedicated carrier, several squads of fast rocket fighters, and a line an AA frigates behind my main fleet; it seems to do OK. I suspect that most people tell their laser fighters to prioritize other fighters over frigates and cruisers. Rocket fighters, in addition to walloping frigates, make a good distraction for the enemy fighters. The carrier keeps the distraction going for as long as possible. The basic idea is that the enemy laser fighters will keep going after my rocket fighters until the main battle is over and I’ve won; if they’re shooting at fighters then they aren’t tearing up my other ships. Also if you can get them to attack your fighters while in range of your AA frigates then that will wear down their numbers enough so that your main fleet can tank them. Of course if someone makes a mob of laser fighters that go for your cruisers first this might not work but at least your rocket fighters get free reign for a bit.
I’ve thought about having some laser fighters to defend the fleet then some rocket fighters for distraction and removing frigates before they can close. The problem with this is that any type of fighter relies on strength of numbers to be effective. Multiple squads stack in a way that frigates and cruisers (without using exploits) can’t. That is why large amounts of fighters can be so devastating; they concentrate all their firepower in one place and you can’t stuff enough firepower into the area around them to kill them off quickly. You might eventually kill them but it doesn’t really matter if the cloud of fighters eats a third of your fleet in the process. Anyways, when you split your fighter types then you each group will be less effective since they don’t have as much concentrated firepower.
Despite this the Tribe is still my favorite race by far at the moment. I seem to have much more success with them than with the other races.
Their main advantage is their zombie like qualities of not dieing in a timely manner.
A secondary corollary is their consolidated module uses to fit their tank. Only need 2 -3 repair modules to replace 5-6 shield/armor modules, and they still tend to get better results. This saves on cost considerably, I tend to save 600 credits per cruiser when using the same weapons mix from my normal alliance cruisers to a tribe cruiser.
In turn, the extra available module space tends to go into engines, which leads to the fast Cruiser laser platform, which does bad things to most of my fleet set ups.
Tribe has also unhinged several maps. In the reduced and No shield maps, Tribe fleets are taking over. In the Fighter and Frigate map, It’s Tribe or nothing. No other race can compete there anymore.
My experience with the fighters is that certain Tribe configurations do well in one challenge, but not the next. So I’ve not found a Tribe fighter design which is ideal in every situation.
Whatever the friendly fighter contingent on hand, equipping the main cruisers with a tractor beam allows them to go to town on enemy fighter hordes; firing multiple cruiser laser or some rough equivalent at fighters caught in the tractor beam (pretty much any cruiser weapon with halfway decent tracking).
The aircraft carrier in the background is good idea.
Anyway, if you look at the typical ‘hitpoints’ for a tribal fleet, it’s often way higher than their non-Tribe opponent going in.
The only way to defeat the tribal cruisers is with withering firepower. When fighting against the Tribe; if their cruisers are hanging around at all while under fire, it’s a lost cause. The tribal cruisers have got to be exploded, quickly.
I’ve had a heck of a time engaging tribal cruisers with rebels.
The worst have to be the Imperial ships. Those things really blow up easily.
I’m beginning to agree that the Tribe is overpowered (perhaps Cliff primarily tested them using their terrible kinetic weapons). Tribe frigate spam is particularly brutal; I’m interested to see how people cope with my Improved Tribal Wall challenge. Despite the possible balance issues, it’s really refreshing to have a faction that plays significantly differently from the original four. Expansions like this, particularly if they bring actual useful modules along with distinctly different factions, could keep this game going for quite a while.
The Tribe’s hitpoint bonus has a hidden synergy with their wtfawesome repair modules: a module is FAR less likely to be knocked out before it can be repaired.
Just look for the weapons that have the highest DPS – damage divided by firing rate (not counting the kinetic weapons, which are misleading). Those are the anti-tribe weapons. You won’t need to worry nearly as much about getting good penetration scores since tribe armor and shields are easily dropped, so it’s really just a battle of delivering the highest amount of raw DPS that you can.
I still find fighter swarms set to cooperate work great. I’m actually not sure it’s worth it to put repair modules on a tribal frigate anymore because one pass of a rocket fighter squad will usually outright destroy some modules, and there’s no repairing a totally destroyed module.
That’s only if you don’t notice that Tribe fighters get double hitpoints too! I can deploy the “double rocket fighter” design with tribe and the slowness is less of an issue since they can just plow back to the repair bay. Tribe laser fighters can stay in the fight longer with cautious orders of 25-50% instead of 1%.
Only Rebel fighter fleets have done well against my Tribe fighters but hey, I have to respect the Rebel fighter. For fighting Rebel fighters the trick is tractor beams and escort orders. That way the Rebel fighters can fight on my terms and be tractor’d to death or escort their own cruisers which buys my cruisers time to close without being swarmed by fighters.
The same way I deal with most tribe fleets. Alliance Pythons loaded up with Shields armor, Cruisers lasers, and Beam Lasers. That batch of frigates lacked an anti-armor weapon so far as I noticed.
I disagree with them playing significantly different. So far they seem to be playing a lot like rebel’s using speed to their advantage. Though they do seem to have a weird trend of bringing proton beams with them.
I’m agreeing with them being overpowered. Case in point was the Tribe version of my cruiser rush fleet being able to thrash the Rebel version, despite investing much more in anti-fighter and anti-frigate weapons. Probably needs to be something like +75% hull instead of +100%.
As for the Improved Tribal Wall challenge… It gets thrashed soundly by a Rock Paper Scissors counter: it simply can’t cope with rocket fighters, just like most frigate swarms. Maybe you should redeploy that challenge on a map with less pilots (that’s what I should’ve done with my cruiser rush fleet, instead of weakening it by dumping 1/5 of my weapons to get tractor beams
May I guess that you ran the challenge at 4x speed? I tend to play my challenges at 1x speed, and that frigate fleet held up to the worst rocket spam that I found. I forgot that game speed dramatically hoses antifighter weapons though.
Also, I do actually have armor breaking weapons - but they’re cheapass meta-targeted armor breakers, with just enough to punch through armor designed to defend against ion strikes (frigate kinetics have 18 armor penetration as opposed to the ion’s 12).
I usually run at 2x speed… So I ran it again at 1x for you… 92% victory for the cruisers+rocket fighters. Then I tried removing the cruisers, so it was just rocket fighters… It was an even battle until both were at 60%, then your frigates turned the tables. But keeping pace down to 60%, with only a third of the available points spent, shows the rocket fighters are a pretty convincing counter. With the remaining 2/3 spent on some cruisers, it’s a very one sided battle. I was using Tribe too. I haven’t tried to see how the extra speed, but lower hp, of Rebel rocket fighters would perform. Probably worse.
EDIT: Tried with Rebels. They did slightly worse.
EDIT2: Tried adding one unarmed frigate to my deployment. 82% victory for the rocket fighters, with 1/3 of the points spend. The frigate died though, although he took the Wall on a rather long ride around the map before he finally caught a rocket too many. I’ve sent you the deployment as a challenge, Corbeau, as I figure you might be amused to see the distraction tactic I see you use with fighters sometimes, but this time with a frigate.
