First, I hate fighters. Cruisers and frigates are all I play with. I haven’t figured out how to get fighters to do anything worthwhile yet, and my defense cruisers manage to swat them like flies.
So far, so good.
Bought the game a few days ago and I beat all the single missions, and am collecting up honor points now to unlock everything (which I just completed this evening).
On the last few I started a new tactic:
A front line made of tank (massive armor and shields) and balanced large cruisers.
A mid line of “defensive” cruisers (lots of point defense, tractors, and anti fighter stuff).
A backline of a swarm of missile-armed frigates.
The above formation has done a good job of overwhelming pretty much everything I have run it against. I’ll try it against some challenges now.
Just incase you don’t know Cruiser Lasers (fires little laser bullets) are very powerful for cruisers, and Ion Cannons are also really poweful for Frigates, with these weapons I managed to complete the non-tribe missions all (at all 3 difficulties) with around well mostly around 10k-12k Honor. Usually my cruisers contain 2 Cruiser Lasers and my Fast Attack Frigates carry 2 Ion Cannons.
Challenges are a very different ball game to the single player missions
Interestingly, posting challenges is also very different to taking challenges. For example, the sort of fleet you describe, will probably be quite good versus many of the challenges, but sounds very highly vulnerable to some simple counters - for example if an opponent deploys a large formation of rocket fighters, and sends them charging in with orders to only target frigates, then you’ll probably lose most of your firepower (it’s very very hard to keep frigates alive if an opponent throws a swarm of rocket fighters at you,) just leaving the defensive rows of cruisers.
I build a heavily armored frigate and surround it with picket cruisers with tractors and pulse lasers if I have to deal with hordes of annoying rocket fighters since they usually magnet towards frigates.
I have done exactly this with my Tribe rocket fighters (having two engines, their speed comes in at something between 3.5 and 4). It’s a little creepy how fast they carve through the frigates they swarm. And at the end of the day, the majority of my rocket fighter squads count as “Damaged” rather than “Destroyed” on the stats screen. And that’s without fielding carriers - the fighters go out there and shoot till they die.
