Questions about carrier bays

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
1

I just got the demo, so possibly some of this stuff isn’t functional yet, but do carrier bays work and are they useful?

The strat I have been working with is a line of ‘tank’ cruisers, minimal weapons, often mostly point defense or point blank ranged weapons, that have cloak. The idea is that the cloaking forces the enemy to switch targets, buying more shield regen time.

Backing them up, I have a couple frigates with the missiles that take out shields and emp, and missile cruisers with target painters. Does the target painting help only the ship firing the missiles, or do all missiles fired at a painted ship get the bonus?

2

All missiles fired at a painted ship get the bonus.

3

Well, i didnt try the demo, but i suposse if u can use the carrier bay, of course it is working. Remember that u NEED to give cautious orders to your fighters so they can retreat to repair at the carrier bay.

4

Carrier bays most emphatically do work.

In the Defend Caspian IV scenario, I had 4 tank cruisers, each with 2 blasters, super tractor, and the rest defenses. 4 Fast missile launching cruisers with 1 carrier bay each, and lots of armor and shields, 6 panthers in the back with 8 MWM each, and to swat fighters I had 3 panthers with a mix of tractors and blasters.

I tethered mixes of fighters rockets and lasers to each tank, and some laser equipped fighters to the middle carrier.

Now, the initial waves of fighters didn’t cause many of my fighters to retreat to their carriers, cause if the attacking fighters attacked a fighter, typically their whole squadron did. But on the other hand, their fighters didn’t last long. I had tried using frigates against the fighters, but the initial wave had such a high priority for the frigates that they just got swamped.

After the first wave, my fighters would start regularly coming in. They chewed up the enemy frigates like they should at max range, often before the frigates came in range of my Fast Missile ships. I saw 2 of my carriers with over 10 fighters waiting for service at one point. It was kind of fun, rooting for my fighters, trailing smoke and flying sloooowly towards my carrier. None of my carriers died with fighters on them. I estimate that I repaired at least 3 full squadrons of fighters on my total of 4 carrier bays.

Armor damage doesn’t trigger the cautious order, only hull damage, so take lots of engine 1, and don’t bother with armor. Fighter engines do lose efficiency, the more engines you have, sadly.

I am going to have to experiment with Tribe Fighters. Their health would pretty much guarantee they survive the first shot, unless they get hit by a tractor beam.

5

Carrier bays do their best work in long battles, and especially on large maps where it takes a while for the enemy to arrive. And if possible, you want the fighter battle spread out in such a way so that retreating fighters do not all converge on the same carrier.

I am still experimenting. Ideally, the carriers should have 1 bay each, armed with short ranged weapons right behind the tank line. Ideally, the tank line will only be about 50-200 range ahead of the CV line, and so the fighters tethered to the carriers will still be able to chew up enemy frigates before they get to your tank line and pop their shields.

My still developing philosophy is that any firepower concentration sufficient to endanger my tanks is going to be vulnerable, one way or another, to fighters. And since my tanks will take a while to die, no matter what, the carrier bays will greatly help in containing fighter losses.