Sweet. That info will save me save me a lot of laborious testing today. Thanks Yurch.
Exactly. If only fighters are left, your fleet can surrender at a level much higher than 10%. It surrenders when your remaining HP% drops to half of the remaining HP% of the enemy. If even one cruiser is present, they hold on much longer. This gives the fighters enough time to destroy the enemy cruisers.
SAC 15 is built around the fighters. It’s designed so that first the enemy fighters will be destroyed. Then my fighter swarm will be released to destroy the enemy cruisers and frigates. This was difficult to arrange because in some challenges the enemy fighters attack, in others they are held back in escort. In some there are nearly as many fighters as SAC 15 has. If I just set the fighters to attack, then in some challenges they would attack the enemy fighters amidst enemy tractor beams and there wouldn’t be enough left to destroy the enemy cruisers. If I just left them back in escort, then by the time they were released to attack the enemy cruisers there wasn’t enough time and my forces would surrender before they had a chance to destroy the enemy big ships.
I didn’t have enough budget left for a regular cruiser and I couldn’t afford to pull one off my battle line. Since so much of my budget went into the fighters, my cruiser battle line was already weak in comparison to the enemy. So I made a decoy cruiser. I took the cheapest cruiser hull I had, stuck on plenty of engines a crew module and a generator. Then I gave it orders to engage the enemy at a range of 2000 and keep moving. If I didn’t use the keep moving order, then it would take too long to start moving when enemy ships approached. On the other hand, with keep moving orders it sometimes blunders into enemy firing range. That is why SAC 15 sometimes loses to certain fleets and sometimes wins. It depends on whether the decoy cruiser blunders into range. When it survived, it allowed my fighters enough time to destroy the enemy cruisers and frigates. In my next candidate fleet, I stuck a carrier bay in the decoy to allow it to do double duty, but I didn’t have the budget in SAC 15.
Keeping most of my cruisers slow also makes the timing easier allowing my cruisers to attack but leaving enough time to destroy the enemy fighters.
The way to counter SAC 15, by the way, is to distribute more tractor beams amongst your cruisers. SAC B (by mrblitz) with its many tractors and very fast cruisers to disrupt the timing defeats SAC 15. SAC 2 which has a tractor on every cruiser is also hard for SAC 15.
I guess the tendency to surrender even with overpowering numbers of fighters is perversely realistic. At least if they surrender, the fighter pilots might live, and if they don’t they’re going to die slow deaths in space.
That depends. Fighter-sized vessels in some fiction are still perfectly capable of FTL travel.
It’s very easy to visualize if you give those type of long (1500+) range orders to a mass of fighters.
Posted SAC 16, beat SAC 15, 13, & 12 can’t test 14 since I don’t have order.
Hardest by far was SAC 15, had to abandon my “Macross-L” missile cruisers due to heavy scrambling and use other long range cruisers. That decoy was annoying as hell though. Finally found out how to beat it by putting three medium range frigates with no “attack fighters” order and %100 attack cruisers at the bottom of the map, they hunted the decoy down, and as an added bonus, proceeded to flank the missile ships and helped destroy them bombarding them within their minimum range, their odd & long path also allowed them to avoid the fighters which were engaging my cruisers and by the time they got there, the lethal beam cruisers capable of killing them were dead.
The trio of extremely important frigates was unfortunately dead weight for SAC 12 &13 and got destroyed easily
EDIT: Crap, uploaded wrong fleet. The challenge with the longer explaination is the correct one. Why can’t I erase the wrong one =/ ?
Posted SAC 19, beats SAC 18, 17, 16, nearly beaten (8%vs10%, only fighters remained?) SAC 15 with random “slow”(0.28) cruiser tribe fleet.
The ‘official’ numbered fleets thus far with a generalist archetype description - there are too many outside derivatives to keep track of all of them. Lemme know if you feel I have an inappropriate or insufficient description for yours:
1 - yurch - Alliance - Armored frigate screen with mixed range support
2 - Follick - Federation - Mixed armament heavy cruisers (tractor/scrambled) with light rocket fighter support
3 - Schn - Order - Short/medium range energy weapon heavy cruisers with laser fighter support
4 - yurch - Rebel - Mixed missile/energy cruisers (scrambled) with light laser fighter and light frigate support
5 - Follick - Federation - Missile/beam heavy attack line (scrambled) with a significant CL cruiser in the rear
6 - Hexes - Rebels - Quick CL/beam armed cruisers (scrambled)
7 - mrblitz - Order - Stacked rocket/radcannon slow cruisers (scrambled) with rocket/painter support
8 - JoeCairo - Tribe - Heavy unshielded CL/Beam repairtank cruisers (tractor/scrambled), with missile cruisers and AA frigates in rear
9 - TheBlackFleet - Tribe - Medium unshielded CL/beam cruisers (scrambled)
10.1 - Hexes - Tribe - Heavy unshielded CL repartank cruisers
10.2 - yurch - Tribe - Pulse fighter rush, backed with light howitzer cruisers (scrambled) and emp frigates
11 - Schn - Order - Laser fighter rush, backed with slow CL/Radcannon cruisers
12 - Follick - Federation - Laser fighter rush, backed with extremely slow unshielded armored repairtank missile/beam cruisers (tractor/scrambled)
13 - Yurch - Alliance - three armored/repair delay cruisers (scrambled), death-triggering plasma/beam retreat frigates
14 - Aratak - Order - Two size-tiers of very heavily shielded CL/Radcannon cruisers with armored AA/EMP frigates
15 - Follick - Federation - Slow armor repairtank (scrambled/tractor) followed by beam cruisers (scrambled/tractor) and missile cruisers (scrambled). Large quantity of tethered laser fighters on tank. Single distraction cruiser.
16 - Oksbad - Federation - Assorted medium-armored plasma/beam cruisers, single AA/missile (tractor) cruiser in rear. Supported by armored frigates of various armaments.
17 - Aratak - Order - Firefly rocket cruisers supported with rocket/painter fighters on long tethers, AA/EMP frigates in rear. Single CL/radcannon cruiser shieldtank.
18 - yurch - Rebel - Light ion and beam frigates, with armored AA trap frigates.
19 - BlueBreaker - Tribe - Medium CL/Howitzer/pulseBeam repairtank cruisers, some with tractors. EMP frigate supporting.
Perhaps we can offer sets of 20, and anyone who can beat them all will be a god.
It would certainly be very hard. I could only get SAC 20 to defeat 16 of the previous numbered SAC challenges. I think the last one to defeat all the previous SAC challenges was SAC 15, and that took an awful lot of careful tweaking. These SAC challenges are really tough.
Given how hard it is to make “plasma” (in other words, range/PD/tank breaking) setups work for a given 3+ challenges, I suspect some of these slower fleet types will continue unopposed for a while.
If I had to wager, my guess is that a tribe version of what Follick is messing around with would probably be the closest fleet to clean house of all 21+ SAC’s.
I wonder if Cliffski would invite some of the better challenge makers to make challenges for the starter scenarios at a level above expert?
Trying to beat the 19-20-21 string is pretty brutal for stock races.
I can do it with rebel fighters, but I’m holding out for something more substantial.
Only got the game last weekend so I hope I didn’t break any rules by using a deployment that starts near a corner. If it’s allowed then SAC 25 is up. Loses to one of the 10s, and to 15. SAC 7 crashes the game so not sure about that one.
I’ve posted SAC 27. It’s a slow fleet that combines elements of SAC 15 and SAC 22 with some additional tweaks. It defeats all numbered SAC challenges 1-26.
Like SAC 15, it’s timing dependent and not perfectly consistent. In each of the closer challenges I ran it three times and it won at least 2 out of three.
Follick is a patient, patient man. Do you think that setup will work with other races or is it too dependent on the Fed beam?
For completeness’ sake, I put up the type of setup I usually use to break slow/missile fleets, although it will usually lose against anything fast, shortranged, or tribe enough to get past the paltry DPS.
It’s interesting how poorly frig fleets are doing despite the fact that rocket fighters are barely being used.
well i guess that for the armor ship you need tons of slots.
And so far, retaliation orders screw it alot.
SAC-29 is up. It’s mostly plasma based with Beam lasers for cleanup. It’s always vulnerable to certain setups, but it did pretty good overall, defeating all but SAC-9, 10, 14, and 18. Though some battles were tight.
- Chris
Are those cruisers actually moving at 15 speed? Every time I run it my cruisers move across 2/3 of the map (starting at the very edge) while the other fleet only moves 1/3 or so… and my cruisers are only speed 17.
they are certainly below 0.15
Lame. So is that the official SAC 27 then? I think I saw another person’s… Thought perhaps I should focus on seeing if I can beat SAC 29. No luck so far, but I’m determined to work frigates into my lineups.
EDIT: I’m proud to say I just beat SAC 29 twice in a row with a bunch of frigates, 1 cruiser, and some light fighter cover. I had 9200/9200 and the SAC 29 opposition had 22000/22000. First time I won with 60-something% remaining and the second time with 50%. I’ll see how it fairs versus the preceding SACs, but I just wanted to brag about a little bit of frigate-win, since most threads I’ve read hate on them.
EDIT2: Maybe we don’t have to wait. The frigates did well against all but follick’s tank-ness. The frigates still tear through the main stuff, but those lead ships he puts out have too much armor and his fighters end up downing the frigs. I’m going to have to find a way to tweak this with some more armor penetration if I want to post up SAC 30…
EDIT3: SAC 30 posted. Had to tweak it a bit, but I was able to turn my frigate fleet into the legit newest SAC. Beats merdoc’s 23, 25, 27, 28, 29. Don’t have exp packs yet and can’t find 26. Lost to 22 after the tweaks. I could probably do better if I just changed some ship positions around. I may try a few other SACs with my fleet, but I’m happy to have done so well with frigates 