ive been playing GSB for a while and… it would appear as if the ONLY effective way 2 deal with fast frigs is via rocket fighters and the like…
which means that almost every challenge (given a reasonable pilot/budget ratio) without rocket fighters can be beaten by frig spam
and since rocket fighters are near useless in other conditions (due to shields)(except maybe on tribe?) almost every challenge that has rocket fighters can be beaten by the same strategy, except swapping those fighters for something else.
are there any universal purpose ppl use for rocket fighters regularly other than frig hunting?
plz post here
also if u think u got sumthing interesting plz send me a challenge…
thx
gunny
P.S: no im not posting this just cuz a fast frig fleet just kicked my CL Spam’s a$$
I like putting a squad of rocket fighters in with a half squad of rocket/painter fighters and have them escort my cruisers. They tear up other fighters and are good to help my cruisers finish off other cruisers once the shields drop.
I regularly pin rocket fighters to my cruisers. The cruisers do well enough to knock down shields and the rocket fighters do their work. They are still fast enough to be mostly immune to fighters and since thats where I keep AA craft any fighters that get sucked into a duel get chewed up pretty often. In fact I probably use rocket fighters more than laser fighters.
Rocket Fighters are a bit tricky, they have some trouble hitting most other fighters, and don’t have the power to get through the shields on cruisers.
On the other hand, if you build them right there are insanely fast, which makes them hard to kill.
I often set a swarm of them to attack cruisers and frigates. They can distract almost the entire enemy force while my cruisers maneuver into position…unless the enemy has really serious fighter defense then there will probably still be a lot of them left when the cruisers open up. And as soon as an enemy’s shields go down, the rocket fighters rapidly peck them to death.
I have a Challenge set up that demonstrates this, it’s # 4603615
I think RCIX has proven this to be false. The last 6 or so challenges have all been cruiser heavy with minimal air support, and there have only been like 3 frigate spams out of 16.
Cruisers can certainly last quite a bit while everything behind it can pound away. If your cruisers have a good formation (e.g., not in a ball), frigate AI isn’t so good that it can stunlock everything all the time, which is usually essential to winning. Basically, frigate spam takes full dedication to beating one type of challenge, whereas a balanced or cruiser heavy can make minimal changes to fend off frigate spam, and still perform well everywhere else.
I don’t know about that. 11 beat every fleet before it. You know how 12 won, 13/14 both max out their pilot counts.
It has less to do with formation than Rocket fighter/Laser Beam being a hard counter to frigate spam. At least 14/17 can’t beat 11 without those rocket fighters.
Frigates need fighters as much as they’re countered by them, I think. RCIX has a pretty poor pilot ratio.
Or maybe one just can’t reliably kill Tribe without air superiority or outplaying the hell out of them. I’m not sure that race belongs in any serious balance discussion.
As it is, people are using fighter spam to the limit (see RCIX-SACs 13 and 14). My aim was to get fighters to be used as a support unit, not have 10 or 20 squadrons just to attack the enemy.
