On Frigate survivability

I find it is a good practice at times to put at least a minimal plate of armor on frigates.

You’re using it as an absorption barrier at this point and not for armor immunity, but 25-50 points of damage absorption is significant on a frigate, where each gun usually has a mere 10 hitpoints.

Explosions of nearby cruisers can do 20-30 internal damage easily, and the order rad cannon leaks through shields for some reason if the craft is unarmored. Plate your guns, 20 damage is all it might take to reduce your frigate to a meaningless investment.

Indeed, i’m definitely sold on armored frigates. i’ll have to give the shield thing another look.

I can barely find the slots for a decent shield tank and a decent speed as well as running the guns, I don’t think I could spare a square slot for a spare armour plate.

I guess most people are getting their extra slots for all this support equipment from the weapon hardpoints? I’ve never thought that allowing folks to put non-weapons in the weapons hardpoints was a great idea from a balance perspective. I think that’s how armour tanks got broken the first time, isn’t it? People filled all the weapon hardpoints with armour except for 1 gun and made invulnerable ships?

Such a ship is far from invulnerable. With only one gun, it most likely can’t take any shield down (or it would take it a long, long time), while at the same time, it would still take damage from criticals.

Of course not, tank whores are designed to get hit while unprotected armed ships do their job.

I have a series of designs of rebel fast attack frigates, generally fast (around 80+ speed) and a fair shielding (shield module 3 or up), with the keep moving order they can do great against missile/plasma spamming noobs who think they can take care of their problems by not allowing fighters in the challenge :smiley:

they’re also good to take some hits (so the other guys shoot them but miss instead of shooting the battleships and hit) as frontliners before the big guys come in.

I find rebel frigates most effective cuz of their natural speed boost, armor and turbo shields arent exactly gonna be worth the money and weight to put on frigates.

whats the deal with turbo shields anyway… im not sure right now but as far as i can remember turbo shields are worse in every aspect from the other frigate shields available… i never even tested them when i saw the crappy stats they have
is there a trick to that? or were they adjusted since i last checked?

I use them as long range missle / EMP againsts crusiers. They pack just enough wallup to be annoying, and can be fast enough to stay out of the crusiers range. Nothing more annoying then your front line cruisers getting EMP’ed from a disatnce while it is not coming form the front line. Or I use them as ion frigs w/a fighter escort for countering fighter swarms. Enemy fighters normally target the fighters, a tractor and a few ion cannons work ok for most fighters while the frigate will survive the onslaught and then engage the crusiers.

Their existence is completely pointless, yes.

To be precise (and a bit pedantic), turbo shields cost more, require more power and crew, have a higher weight and fewer hit points, recharge slower and have a lower resistance than the shield generator 2. The only area where turbo shields have a better stat is in strength, which is a whopping 10% increase over the generator 2.

In all honesty, without the hit to resistance and recharge rate, you could probably find someone who spotted a niche the higher strength would help you fill. But as is, Bluebreaker is right. Pointless.

(As was this whole post, except that it presents more detail.)

Don’t see why you would use a frigate for tanking in the first place, when the opponent is always going to have cruisers. You can’t win a toughness race with inferior toughness.

For my frontline frigates I prefer a balanced skirmisher unit, something with good firing range and decent defense, which is also cheap enough to be built en-masse. Having 4-5 of these escorting my mainline cruiser is very good protection. Some missions I lose half my frigates, but my Cruisers are completely unharmed.

Long range frigates can just hide behind cruisers for the most part and theyre fine. Not being targeted is a pretty good form of survivability. Don’t even bother putting useable defenses on them, not worth the money.

I like the torpedo frigate - low end engine, crew quarters, as many torpedoes as you can fit. That’s it. Maybe a shield generator if you have enough power left.

Hideously vulnerable to fighters, but they are so cheap (350-500) that it doesnt matter.

I, personally, place 1 or 2 emp missile 2, 1 tractor beam (rarely) and 1 anti fighter missile/pulse laser on a frigate, small engine and stick them in formation behind the forward cruisers to pop fighters and disable enemy cursers if they get too close.

In a no fighter mission I stack engines and ion cannons get then up close and swarm the enemy until the cruisers get close and begin pounding away. If some frigates are still alive by the time the cruisers get there then they soak up a bit more fire.

I’m glad they have escape pods.

I prefer to use frigates in more of a supporting role. I load various frigates with things like EMP missiles, dispruptor bombs, AA missiles, target painters, etc. and use them to support cruisers. This allows me to be able to build really deadly cruisers without having to use some of their slots on these necessary extras. When I do build a dps frigate, I usually try to load them with longer ranged weapons, such as the frigate missile. In my experience, frigates that try to get close to anything wind up dead long before the enemy does.

Most of the time I use Frigates as support ships. I tried setting up balanced cruisers and balanced frigates and it didn’t work out very well. Even with specialized bruiser cruisers (high armor/shields and mid-short range weaponry) my frigs generally were eaten up pretty quickly.

A typical load out for me would be an EMP missile, Point Defense, Anti-Fighter Missle, and a tractor beam. Always one shield and one armor because they have to stay alive to do their job. On Tribe frigates I replace the shield with a repair system.

I place one per one or two Cruisers in formation to one side and just behind a cruiser. They get to take out a few fighters and their EMP missiles give my Cruisers an edge. In no fighter scenarios I swap out the AF missiles and tractor beams for frig missile launchers and/or the longest range gun turret I can get(beam IIRC).

The only trouble I have with this setup is loads of rocket fighters. They take out my frigates pretty quick. Adding a ton of armor seems to do the trick but I normally have to delete a turret to do so.

I am curious about experimenting with hot rod frigates after reading some of you all’s posts. Next chance I get I will be toying with that idea.

Cruisers are your tanks and frigates are your DPS guys, to borrow some terminology.

I’ve had very good luck with creating a bunch of slow, tough cruisers with long range weaponry, and then escort each cruiser with 1-2 frigates. Depending on the opponent I can use AA type frigates to shoot down fighters, or long range frigates loaded with missiles and plasma. Or a mix of them.

The cruisers tend to attract most of the attention and soak up the damage while the frigates hang just behind the cruisers and unload on the enemy ships. Frigates are fragile but they pack a huge amount of damage per price. Your average frigate probably costs about 1,000. Most crusiers are around 3,000ish.

Within that cost, depending on the hull you can hit 4-5 weapons on that frigate. For a cruiser you only get 6-7 weapons. For cost you get about 1 frigate weapon per 250 cost. For a cruiser its more like 1 weapon per 500 cost. This means that for the same amount of money you get twice as many weapons to shoot.

The drawback to this is that frigates can dish it out but they can’t take it. Its a decent tradeoff. Keep your frigates safe by sending in cruisers to soak up the damage while the frigates dish out the pain.

1-2 generalist frigates escorting each cruiser makes for a well balanced and formidable fleet. On each frigate add in an anti fighter missile to protect against fighter swarms and a few long range weapons so they can engage targets at longer than beam range. If the frigate gets within beam range its probably dead, but its small size means that it has a good chance to avoid missiles or plasma.

I think frigates are much more useful in offensive fleets than defending challenge fleets, barring unusual scenario settings.

Frigates deployed in challenges have to be prepared for the enemy to throw wings of rocket fighters at them. And generally, they aren’t. A handful of cheap fighters can quickly clear the board of fleet-support frigates.

In an offensive deployment, you can field frigates optimized to deal with what the enemy is showing. And more often than not, the enemy doesn’t have any rocket fighters anyway…

Frigates can handle rocket fighters quite well. Just make an armor frigate. Give it a tractor beam and a few missiles, and the armor will last long enough for it to clear the sky of fighters. Your average fighter costs around 100. A frigate costs around 1000. An armored frigate with dedicated anti-fighter weaponry should be able to kill more than 10 fighters before it dies.

Glass cannon frigates are great against cruisers in large numbers, but they are chewed up by fighters within seconds.

That depends heavily on the number of fighters and frigates fielded. Armor-heavy frigates can trip up a fighter force that expects to meet soft-shelled targets, but a well-prepared attacker will tear right through them. Unless the defender has deployed a large concentration of heavily armored frigates with anti-fighter weaponry, which restricts fleet positioning and acts as a large dead weight if the attacker opts for a non-fighter strategy.

One thing that can enormously increase frigate survivability against fighter attack is nearby cruisers with heavy guidance scrambler payloads. It’s unlikely to totally stop a rocket storm, but it thins them out quite a bit.

Yup, its all about combined arms. This is why I have my frigates escort my cruisers in close formation. This means all of the guidance scramblers overlap giving significant missile protection. I don’t use keep moving for my cruisers, so while they are vulnerable to plasma, they also pack long range weapons so they’re not helpless against plasma. The fling it back as good as they take it.

The frigates help keep the cruiser safe from fighters and also fire at any other frigates or cruisers that get too close. My cruisers are entirely long range so they can engage outside of beam range, which hugely extends the lifespan of frigates.

You can also add in some fighter squadrons escorting your cruisers. A mix of fighters and frigate anti-fighter missiles and tractor beams will utterly destroy any attacking fighter squadrons. You only need maybe 1-2 squads of fights for this. Dogfighting with the homefield advantage hugely increases their odds of success.