My disagreements with current strategies (no insults)

I formally disagree with these now-accepted strategies:
1.frigates are useless in normal battle roles
2.torpedo and/or pulse fighters are useless
3.armor or shield spamming (or spamming anything, really)
I will now show why:

  1. Place frigates behind your cruisers, “locked” in place by the cruiser hulls so it can’t fly ahead. No escort - observe why… when they reach main battle, they can then break off (due to the fact that current targets are at a more sideways-ish angle intead of straight forwards) and they enemy will target the cruisers instead of killing the frigates that would heve arrived first otherwise.
  2. Notice that the pulse lasers and torps have complimentary range. Use this. Same with rockets and lasers (hint hint). hybrid them, and what you have is bomber with a conveinent antifighter turret, and it’s faster than just torps. also they can target anything as they ranges cover eachother (pulse max is torps min, approx.)
  3. I can create pefectly good cruisers with just one shield or armor and 2 or 3 of the other, not 5 or 6 or whatever it is people do these days, you don’t need that much to be effective. instead, use the space for other stuff (like repair, target boost, emp turret, etc.) and watch as they allow you to do so much more to the enemy that you don’t need to spam defense anymore.
    I am open to counter arguments or suggestions, but no threats or flame please. I am also open to any “but what if… happened, then what would you do smart guy?” questions, so… the ball’s in your court.

See what happens when the enemy targets actively frigates instead of cruisers, or when there is a decent fighter force targeting frigates.

Pulse fighters are not useless. But they are useless at hitting fast rocket fighters.
Torpedo bombers, as they are, are useless whenever there is another target than your intended target. (ie. weaponless fighters escorting a cruiser, most torps if not all are going to target the fighters)

Certainly, but I doubt that anyone uses a full fleet of ships with 5+ hard defences. Generally that kind of ship is used in front to soak damage. Which more or less is defeated by retaliate order.

  1. yes, but if they have fighters I have already destroyed most of them, (part of my standard strategy is the use of fighters not as escorts, but as superiority (agressive), thus, destroying enemy fighters is always an opening game move, and they clear way for bombers) also, the way I described of locking the frig in place (very easy with order ships, btw) causes them to shoot cruisers first anyway, as they are first in range, and then, if they switch fire to frigs, they just wasted ammo, as the cruuiser shields will reacharge or hull/armor repair so it’s still win-win (ish)
    2.my point still stands that torp/pulse combo on a bomber is good combo, as it allows defensive fire (when in formation), speed, and complementary range. and to clarify, I almost always use bombers to eliminate enemy frigs, not cruisers, based on the fact that destroying or even damaging a frigate that cannot repair is far better than dammaging cruiser shields that will repair by the time they reach the main battle. this, combined with the fact that almost no-one escorts frigs, and my aggressive fighter strat., means that this is not a problem.
    3.I see. sometimes forum posts are too vauge for me to understand correctly.

A few tractor beams, and your fighters are raped.
A few fast rocket fighters, and you are not going to kill them before the bombers arrive.
Also don’t forget, with that kind of “relased fighters”, fooling them to follow targets that they cannot kill is very easy.

Frigates have a great DPS potential, but when they are shoot they die easily. So its acceptable to waste shoots on other things to get the frigates if they are a threat.

If you want to kill frigates, rockets are a lot better, they are ALOT faster. And have a more generous min-max range than torpedo allowing them to actually hit what you want them to hit.
Torpedoes have serious troubles to hit what you want to hit them when there is something arround it. Not to say that torpedos have the lowest real dps of all weapons.
Fighter lasers are in some situations, good enough at killing frigates and shooting within cruiser shields.

ok. final post (for me).
1.I don’t see what’s wrong with the torps, as 95% of them hit when I use them (when they launch at close range, but I don’t use them all the time, usually It’s situational (say, less flak, many enemy fighters, and enemy is frigate screened, or plenty of other scenarios). Also, the funny thing about torp range is that (for me) one volley of my bombers is enough to take down the shields permanently, which is the main point in the first place, so that’s all you really need (consider the fact that except for Tribe, frigates only have one regen system- the shields) and then the next volley goes to another frigate, then they begin flying in cirles, dying and so on, but also damaging the frigs enough to kill them anyway, without flak. also, I use stay together, which creates this volley, and several squadrons at a time, which adds to firepower. One might also consider the stress i am making on timing, as with the “cruisers arrive first” strat, the fighters and interceptor (rocket/fighter hybrid) and rocketeers (pure rocket zoomiming mosquitoes that annoy the heck out of the enemy) who all arrive first are getting the most of the flak until they die, and you can’t say 'target bombers only, as they are technically fighters, and since the ships seem to target on a squadron basis, my bombers are fairly safe for the first 30 sec or so, long enough to destroy several frigates before the battle lines close, which is the point.
2. notice the “ish” and, wasted ammo is still wasted ammo, and wasted time, as while they were doing that I was whittling away at their shields and soon they will die en masse.
3. If one were to try out my point of view in game, then one might see that I make at least some sense. The biggest problem in the world is when people find one way to do something, they ignore all other possibilities and don’t listen. I have tried your way and see that it works, but I say that there is another way, and ask that you try as well. I’m out of here, as I don’t want to check here everyday and have a month long argument. cya!
Edit: did I mention yesterday was my birthday? not that it really matters but, just thought it was worth mentioning somewhere.

…Wait, your point is using torpedoes to kill frigates? If you find it at all difficult to kill any but the most specialized of frigates using fighters, there’s something terribly wrong with your play. I think every weapon other than torpedoes will do the job quite well, so torpedoes working too isn’t saying much.

Torpedoes are heavy and costly to use. They’ve got to do something that the light and cheap weapons aren’t already excellent at before anyone cares. For reference, I don’t think I’ve played a challenge that allowed fighters in which I didn’t annihilate all enemy frigates before they could engage my cruisers.

I’m generally unimpressed by screened frigates because they tend to catch enemy missiles and what-not, and I always kill them with fighter squadrons, but there might be something there. Torpedo bombing frigates sounds like fishing with a shotgun, though.

^With the recent armor buffs its much easier to create frigates that can bounce rockets.

it’s not like either any of the frigate weapons is going to have problems to kill the slow torpedo bombers

Or is it?

I just replayed a challenge that I’d originally tackled in a rather strange manner (using high-speed frigates to dodge plasma launchers). The anti-fighter capability came entirely from frigates with heavy armor (enough give significant rocket-resistance…possibly more so with the latest patch than as originally designed, since I’d previously wiped them out with rockets), tractor beams, and AF missiles. Supported by some unarmed pointer fighters. And I noticed: AF missiles only have 6 penetration…

You can make a Rebel Atlantis torpedo bomber with over 7 armor resistance, and 1.07 speed.

My torpedo bombers, with a dubious assist from some rocket+painter units, easily and as best I can tell without losses carved the heart out of the fleet before my gunnery cruisers hit the front lines.

This was very circumstantial, I think. My bombers should have had a much harder time if the enemy had any dogfighters or guns with even moderate tracking and fire rate, especially on their cruisers. But against that particular fleet, it worked beautifully.