Wow - that is a huge post! I’ll come back to this and digest it more. Thanks for the ideas.
I’ve kindof grown to not like the escort orders for anti-fighter frigate for reasons you mention - the anti-fighter frigates tend to get out in front and get smashed up before they have a good chance to fight off the fighters - unless I make them really slow like you mention- or unless I have them escort a ship in the second row (which does sortof work too).
I didn’t realize I could completely delete the attack cruisers option for my AF frigates. I’ll have to do that.
Your point about matching speeds is important. I have difficulty figuring out how to manage fleets w/ differing speed ships right now. And the big glob of ships problems sometimes strikes me regardless of speed (some faster ships can get stuck in the middle) - and they all get stuck behind each other and can’t figure how to navigate around. I’d love to have a battle where one group of ships moves fast to one side, and then have them sweep upwards - sortof like an arm reaching out and swiping - but that behavior is hard to pull off without globing up the formation - especially when enemy fighters tend to get my ships pointed in all the wrong directions or my ships lock onto a different target than I was needing for that “sweep” to work.
Deleting ‘Attack Fighters’ orders from ships you want in the sweep will prevent them from maneuvering to engage fighters as long as there is something for which they have attack orders on the battlefield, though they’ll still shoot at fighters if fighters are the only thing in weapons range.
If you want to have a fast group of ships and a slow group of ships, your best bet is to either put all the fast ships at the front of the formation, or put fast ships on one side of the formation and slow ships on the other side. Unless you make use of the Direct Control option, though, ships are only ever going to maneuver directly for their current driving target. On maps with larger placement areas, you can kind of get this behavior by having a formation like this:
C C C F F F
where the Cs represent slow cruisers and the Fs represent either fast cruisers or frigates (you can also do it where the Cs represent slow frigates, or a generally slow formation of ships). If the target priority of the Cs causes them to move straight forward and the target priorities of the Fs lead them to fly on a diagonal, you can get a sweep, and if you had sufficient space between your formations and more importantly your fleet and the enemy fleet you can get a slashing or flanking maneuver going. The Fs could also be offset to start off slightly behind or slightly ahead of the Cs. You can also achieve a diagonal movement by combining formation and escort orders (the leading ship is in formation with a ship that is set to escort it - if you do this correctly you can get a diagonal movement of parts or all of your fleet).
If you haven’t read it yet, or if it’s been a while since you’ve read it, this thread has some advice for controlling the movement of your fleet: viewtopic.php?f=19&t=4681
Some of the information might be a little out of date, since it used to be that ships never changed driver targets until the current one was destroyed, but otherwise it should be fine.
You might also want to look through the stickied thread ‘Threads with Advice for New Players’ in this forum section, if you haven’t done so before.
Something that will help is keeping the longest range weapons on the slowest ships and the shortest ranged weapons on the fastest ships, but the amount of speed difference between ships of your fleet that is acceptable will depend heavily on the size of the map and the positioning of all the ships on it. Experiment and see if you find something you like, or deploy masses of ships that have the same speed. One thing that can help control this is by changing out engines and sometimes armor plates until you get the speed you want - weak engines with lightweight armors might end up being just as fast as powerful engines and heavy armors, and if the reason you’re using armor is protection from certain kinds of fighters, you might end up using the same number of armor plates with light armor as with heavy armor, or sometimes less as with Frigate Powered Armor.
I’m personally like frigates a lot, especially when they are the dominant unit in my fleet. Usually I use frigate fleets with no cruisers and with minimal fighter support. I must admit I didn’t play a lot, but I was able to beat every battle with this fleet on normal and is in progress of beating hard difficulty with surprisingly good honor gained. I also beat a few online challenges with this fleet. It’s not some unbeatable combination of course, but it has quite a bit of versatility. Plus it’s fun to watch.
Hmmm. I’ll have to try that. I’ve been building a fleet with painters combined w/ missile cruisers and then supported w/ anti-fighter frigates and some EMP frigates, but an idea of an all frigate fleet would make me learn how to use them better offensively. thanks for letting me know it works!
One tip I think I would give is to aim for 0.6 speed. This makes a lot of heavy weaponry and other hurtful things miss. If you want I could list my best designs, but I 'd very much like to see what you come up with first.
I don’t use frigates, because they are week, but some of weapons or items are maybe useful against cruisers. Cruisers are so strong, and i just designed a flagship with IST name. If there is no plasma launcher there or i didn’t see it, it could be some of rockets, it could be useful.
Frigates do have plasma launchers, long ranged missiles, shorter ranged rockets… quite a large assortment of usable weapons, TBH. Not forgetting the frigate-only weapons such as EMP missiles, disruption bombs and (for the Empire only) the shield replenishing weapon (the actual name eludes me). Anti-fighter missiles are effective too.
Ion cannons can destroy cruiser shields, paving the way for anti-armor weapons that would otherwise be reflected by the shields (e.g. cruiser beam laser). Of late, I’ve come to like having a swarm of fast frigates with the “Keep Moving” order; they’ll wade into the cruiser wall, within the cruisers’ minimum firing range, and keep chipping away. Some of them will perish along the way but enough of them will make it.
The most dangerous Frigates I encounter are EMP + Plasma combo, with Cruiser “lures”. A competitive number of those will fire volleys of plasma while paralyzing oppositon cruisers. I haven’t used that tactic yet, but I have designed the frigate employing it with Nomads. It was a 3-hard slot small frigate (iirc) with 1 EMP and two Plasmas, one shield, good armor and an engine. If tied to a cruiser laser beam tank with Formation or Escort, they will take down the shields of the opposition fairly quickly with concentrated fire and keep them harmless while the tank takes down their armor and hull. With a few fighters set to take care of enemy fighters as well, such a fleet could be quite strong against a large variety of opposition - I think the weakness would be MWM spam with anti-fighter support. If encountering that, retreat.
Also, I have stopped using anti-fighter frigates. The one weakness of fighters is taking down cruiser tanks, and therefore I design anti-fighter cruiser tanks. Frigates die too quickly against fighter swarms to be of any use. The best anti-fighter strategy is using more (and hopefully quicker) fighters, though, because then the dogfight happens in the middle of the battlefield and not on top of your cruiser formation.
I have an Imperial Weapons Platform design that packs 8 EMPs. A generous amount of armored anti-fighter frigates usually keeps them well protected, and they work well behind a row of cruisers.
