I’d suggest trading in frigates for cruisers, in that setup.
The thing is, I’ve never seen a fleet that couldn’t have its frigates wiped out by a fighter rush. Never. Which makes it dangerous to put all your anti-fighter defenses on them. A handful of escort fighters can go a long way, but only so long as they have tractor beam support…scratch that and they’re just about on par with attackers. If you put the tractor beams on cruisers instead, you could be sure that they’d stay in play longer than the enemy’s small craft.
Frigates are well-equipped to deal with laser fighters, the main threat to cruisers.
Frigates used in this way are just part of an AA diversification. If fighters are wiping frigates out that harshly, they’re doing it with a specialty weapon (namely: rockets) which are near harmless to cruisers and not an immediate threat to most fighters.
Spamming any one thing leaves you extremely vulnerable. Its about balance, not spamming. Give each cruiser just one escorting frigate, put some AA on that escorting frigate, and the cruiser will live much longer than a cruiser without escort. The cruiser helps protect the frigate against other cruisers while the frigate helps against fighters or chips that close to point blank range. Think of it like a semi-attached gun turret.
Combined arms fleets can deal with most threats very well. A gimmick fleet that uses just one approach but no others will probably kill the combined arms fleet, but that gimmick fleet will be nearly useless against everything else whereas the more generalized combined arms fleet can handle a wide range of threats reasonably well.
The problem is that I have yet to see a fleet which can’t have it’s frigates completely butchered by 2-3 squadrons of rocket fighters. You can stick on tractor beams, escort fighters, cruisers with defense lasers, whatever you like - the rocket fighters will butcher the entire frigate force. I forget the name of it, but there is a ‘only frigates and fighters’ scenario in the original game pack which can be completely wrecked by fielding a mix of laser fighters and rocket fighters with no frigates whatsoever. This is despite the fact that, on the expert setting, the enemy uses combined-arms tactics with tractor-beam equipped ships being supported by rapid-fire ships and their own laser fighters! The rocket fighters simply destroy the frigates too quickly for the combined arms to do any good.
Frigates do have many uses, especially as EMP support. However, those uses are entirely contingent on the enemy not bringing those 2-3 rocket fighter squadrons. If well-designed rocket fighters are present, frigates can’t survive without massive amounts of anti-fighter measures, usually several times the cost of the rocket fighters. It’s fun when I’m the one with the rocket fighters, but not so fun when I’ve tested dozens of variants of anti-fighter frigates and watched them all get turned into hulks after a couple rocket salvoes.
I don’t mind rocket fighters being capable of downing frigates (they’d be kinda useless if they couldn’t), but it would be nice if the frigates could endure a bit longer. Maybe if the damage from the rockets was toned down a little, or given power requirements on-par with lasers? A big part of the rocket fighters’ strength is that you can push them up to speeds above 3.0 pretty easily with fighter designs that don’t require a generator. That means they have plenty of time to zip around like frigate-eating locusts of doom before the anti-fighter weapons finally score a hit. Tractor beams are neat, but you have to buy a hell of a lot of beams to stop a squadron before it chews up your frigates.
Rockets aren’t as unendurable as you think. There’s a simple trick.
Have more then 12 average armor. That turns your frigate from a brief diversion to a hard-to-digest lump. It’ll still fail eventually if the fighters don’t get wiped out first, but it takes much longer.
Rockets have terrible sustained damage. 9 damage per 2100 reload.
The nature of their threat to frigates is entirely due to the burst factor of rockets fired in huge swarms. Rocket fighters fall off quickly to a support role when they actually take losses, as they tend to disperse fire after a while and start getting over-saturated with PD/Shield Recharge/Distractions.
The fact that they’re allowed to sit at speeds over 3.0 is what makes thinning that herd so hard. An intercepting fighter swarm doesn’t work, because fighters can’t hit +3.0 targets at higher than 2% without a painter and rockets, and even that takes ages to do.
Battle above Edyai IX on expert is a good example (or should I say, a really bad example). It doesn’t have any tractor beams, painters, or frigate AA missiles at all - as a result, the whole thing is virtually defenseless vs fighters in the +3.0 spectrum.
So yeah, solutions should probably relate to the ease of obtaining and maintaining huge numbers of the fighters. They’re too cheap and too survivable.
Power is one way, cost is another. I’m partial to a simple weight increase of the rocket pack, just because it won’t cause existing challenges/designs to become entirely invalid.
armor is all fun and games, but with armor that tough (should probably take at least 2 armor modules to achieve) will not leave a lot of room for shield and engine, leaving them unshielded or slow, easy target for cruisers either way
I seldom use the ultra-fast one-rocket fighters. The not-quite-so-insanely-fast two-rocket fighters have a damage rate that compares much better with the fighter laser. Possibly beating it entirely when you take into account the better engagement range, ability to drop frigate shields, and painted accuracy. And they can still outrun fighter laser tracking, at least in Rebel or Swarm versions.
I’ve also never seen rocket squadrons get diluted into ineffectiveness as you describe.
…what are frigate shields going to do against cruiser fire, unless your frigate has such incredibly high movement it’s almost never getting hit?
I’ve never tried to make frigates that tolerate cruiser fire except by pure speed (which won’t save you from rockets and thus can’t be used against fighter-using groups). It doesn’t seem like it should be possible. If your frigates need to resist both fighter rockets and cruiser energy weapons, I recommend making them either fighters or cruisers.
Getting a rocket-repellent frigate up to medium speeds (around 0.5) is quite possible. Getting them to adequate cruiser-escort speeds, which are usually rather lower than that, is simple.
There is little reason not to use two rawkit lawnchairs, especially if you can stay over that ~2.9+ speed threshold. Cost-per-rocket drops that much lower, and the defense is still passively handed to the fighter in the form of speed. It’s pretty ridiculous, considering how hard it is already to fend off the single weapon variants.
There’s a third option: dropping weapons. Average armor value is a ratio, so you can get the value a bit higher by just having less modules. You’ll just go crazy trying to fit 4-5 weapons at high speeds.
You can put additional AA weapons on other units, but the frigates that eat the opening rocket volley (and subsequent beatings) need the armor. There’s just no other way to survive that.
almost never gets hit, the difference between armor and shield is with armor they stay damaged and with shield they can recover from the occasional lucky shots from the enemy
I use fast attack frigates, around 0.85 speed or so… acting as anti missile/plasma spammers.
well… my fast frigates are only using 2 weapons as it is… one weapon they will barely scratch cruisers so dats not rly gonna work.
a problem with armored frontliner is they lead the charge against beam-toting cruiser formations who absolutly, mercilessly shred armor.
I don’t think there’s any way to protect that sort of frigate against fighters. They’re only going to be usable as offensive units against challenges that have no aggressive fighters, or on challenge setups where the enemy can’t field fighters.
Myself, I use speed 0.51 cruisers for that…
The one way it might work is if you can spoof the fighters into going after armored bait frigates.
The armored frigate doesn’t want to fight the cruiser. It doesn’t even want to be in range of the cruiser, necessarily. It wants to fight with fighters. If it eventually gets clobbered by the cruiser, it shouldn’t matter anymore, because its job is already done.
Of course, if the fighters are pinned the the cruiser, that might not fly so well…