Does anyone else agree with me on the feeling that the Swarm is horribly overpowered? A majority of challenges nowadays I’ve seen have been mostly with Swarm fleets and most of them have involved a stack of ships loaded down with Disruptor Lasers.
Given the Swarm’s cost reduction, Smart Bomb Defense and the range + Tracking Speed of the Disruptor Laser, there is almost no counter to those cruisers. Worse, with their reduced costs and speed, the Swarm can also outmatch Rebel Fighters.
I feel that the Swarm needs to have more disadvantages because the combination of Cost and their race specific modules makes them too powerful.
Yeah the health and shield drawbacks do nothing to match the speed and cost bonuses. One of my Swarm fleets can easily overpower any of my other fleets. Maybe a bit more hull debonus, and it might be balanced, and make the “never-ending strong ships” into “never-ending weak ships” like the Swarm is supposed to be.
The bonuses/penalties may be a bit skewed, but I don’t find the swarm to be too much easier than the other races - they bat away a few missiles, but lose out to swarms of them (pardon the pun)
I think I just encountered the challenge(s) that set you off.
Yeah.
Swarm masses are really irritating, and if they just go “herp derp hoards of ion cannon frigates” with a low-ish pilot limit, the only thing to do is make a similar fleet, possibly with any additional fighters you can manage, and watch them smack into each other.
Also, all those challenges are from the same person.
Luckily, those Ion Cannon Frigate Fleets do terrible against heavy armor. I’ve trumped them with a Rebel Frigate Fleet consisting of 1000 credit Frigates with 2 Beam Lasers and a Phasor (I think they have about 20 armor) and about 20+ poorly armored dual beam laser, dual torpedo frigates that are worth 500 each.
Ion spam isn’t unique, but my 80k Locustravesty setup (Locusts are a model of Swarm Frigate I use with .43 speed, 2 beam cannons and an ion cannon, preferably deployed in a stack) is exactly what it sounds like - I just throw so many in for so cheap that they can close and start murdering anything in sight faster than they can be killed.
I haven’t played against Tribe 'cause I don’t have that expansion… so yeah.
Pandarsenic, where the Swarm wins by swamping you with cheap ships that die quickly, the Tribe just throws fewer ships that just won’t die at you. Heck, they even have a repair module for frigates! Even the Swarm have troubles dealing with this, but the Order… not so much (they’ll still have issues, it’s just that they can do hull DoT with the Rad Cannon and Nuke Launcher).
Also, Pandarsenic, would I be correct in assuming that your forum avatar comes from a website with a half dozen comics done in text adventure form?
Mmm, I don’t buy it. The damage rate of the disruptor laser is pathetic… it’s a nice combo of range, tracking and penetration, but you have to have a ridiculous # of them to hit critical mass because of that low damage.
as for fighter speeds, well, we all know rokkit fighter balance is fubar.
Swarm are theoretically meant to be balanced by it being easier to remove particular ships from the battle, but… honestly, 5% isn’t enough that it really works that way. That’s one point off out of every twenty.
Empire get shields - with the disadvantage of huge shield bubbles.
Alliance gets armor - with the disadvantage of that it’s, well, armor.
Federation gets… whatever they get. I don’t know. I don’t play them.
Rebels get speed - which is useless in some points and can make it hard to keep fleets together in extreme cases, but all in all they have the most solid bonus of the basic races, IMO
I ought to remark that ignoring the sheer module capacity of Imperial cruisers is silly, too. You can put together an incredible frontline Praetorian cruiser–big enough to be targeted first, enough modules to last almost forever, enough hardpoints to shoot back a bit, too.
Also, the Weapons Platform hull is a great thing to stick behind a cruiser in formation mode to provide some fire support.