The Rise of the Frigate

I’m gay for cruisers. They scream “I got big guns and I cannot lie” to me.

Ok, if frigates are so awesome, i’ll take a crack at this challenge you made, and if i don’t beat it within 20 attempts, then you just might have something.

What’s the challenge ID?
Edit: beaten in 2 attempts

This reminds me of the “The Good Book” song by Tim Minchin. It is right because it’s right.

But frigates are great. They could use some more armament options, and some way to not get shot to pieces by evil fighters. :frowning:

Everything must rise and fall and all that is unmoveable will be moved eventually the cruiser on it’s unmoveable throne will give before the onslaught against it and fall as everything then another ship type will be on top and one day that will be the frigate for it is written that everything will have at least one day when it can look out and be master of all and soon that master will be the frigate and all other ships will be inferior to its power and its day will come until then the cruisers position can only weaken as it has everything to lose but nothing to gain while the frigate has nothing to lose but everything to gain so it will one day be strong enough to surpass the cruiser and be the greast of all ships I’m just waiting for all to see truth and realize that that day is coming very soon, very soon indeed

and then the fighter massacre will come, owning all frigates :stuck_out_tongue:

In my experience, there’s nothing a flight of pathfinders with tracking beams and armour, combined with as many flights of bombers and laser armed fighters can’t handle.
Atleast in campaign, just gotta make sure the pathfinders reach the enemy first so your torpedos eat their targets.

Well if you think it can work throw something together for the Tournament or the SAC challenges.
I just consider the campaign training for going against real human opponents.
One more day to get your fleets in for the ladder tournament. I got mine in did you get yours…

Berny

Bring forth your frigates, curr, and I will smash them to pieces and salvage their scrap to make more ammunition for my cruiser’s guns!

The only thing a frigate is good for is cannon fodder, to split the enemy fleet or tie up their guns until the real stars show up.
[/rp]

i already beat you :stuck_out_tongue:
That’s not to say the design i used doesn’t have a counter, but all i’m saying is that frigates are not the be all and end all.

That is very wrong. Cruisers may be good against other cruisers and frigates, but frigates themselves have several tricks up their sleeve besides exploding first. I’ve noticed that they make better anti-fighter platforms than cruisers. EMP missiles can render an enemy completely helpless without wasting a cruiser weapon slot on a high power-demanding EMP beam. Two or three frigates can tear apart a cruiser that is preoccupied with something else. The Imperial Shield Support Beam gives them a decent support role to the larger ship-pounding cruisers. They are plenty useful in their own right, but they can’t just go toe-to-toe with a cruiser,

Of course the OP here is a little overzealous about how great frigates are. You cannot make a good fleet entirely out of one kind of ship.

The problem with frigates is that they get badly slaughtered by Rocket Fighters + Beam Lasers. Since cruiser don’t draw aggro, you have to either mass them with some lures to win the damage race, or you can use them as long range EMP launchers and hope they stay out of Beam Laser’s range.

Of course, frigate spam can easily win against cruisers without rocket fighters. Cruisers simply get EMP locked, and never get to fire a shot.

You know - I still don’t see how a frigate is actually decent for AA defense. The shields just cannot stand up to rocket attacks and the amount of armour needed to keep them from suffering from under shield laser blasts means you need at least 8 point of avg armour. Not to mention critical hits will eat it up in moments. Now I threw a quick test - 5 fleets of laser and 5 fleets of dual rocket fighters. I used two AA designs, both shielded but one with armour avg around 18. I needed at least 8 of each to win. Cost - 14880 credits.

Now take a cruiser. Completely immune from all rocket attacks. Tack 2 armour units - lets say power armour because it’s fairly inexpensive and an advanced armour repair. Add on a couple of lasers (I used one pulse of CL) and a tractor. And now you have an anti-fighter cruiser for 1659. About twice as expensive but much much more survivable.

So you save money - you save pilots. It takes longer - but there is nothing to stop you now to start adding more weapons to - 2270 is my anti-fighter cruiser- that cruiser took on all 10 squads. Reality - if they were all laser fighters it would have gone down. But laser fighters are much more likely to be hit by other weapons.

I only pull frigates out when I notice that there are very few fighters on the map. I know I set my rocket fighters to go after frigates first. I use frigates as EMP/Torpedo launchers.

Berny

I was only being half serious; I do use a lot of frigates in some of my armadas, and they can certainly get the job done. :smiley: It does seem like the captains have the tendancy to mistake the “Fire!” button for the “Self-Destruct” one, though.

This isn’t exactly an anti-fighter unit, though, because cruisers do not really have any effective AA weapons. What you’ve created is a unit immune to fighter weapons.

There’s a key distinction to be made there, particularly in that armor is a selfish defense mechanism. It only protects that cruiser, and doesn’t immediately serve to make the fighter problem go away for anything else in the fleet. If the fighter AI were smarter, you could easily see a mass of them free-roaming around picking on unarmored targets first. If you’ve armored the entire fleet like that, the comparative cost is astronomical.

But you’re right, it does work. Partly because of fighter AI, partly because of the armor system being such a mess, partly because armor penetrating fighter torpedoes aren’t a threat to cruisers at all.

There’s a lot that could be done to encourage frigates as a more necessary AA platform, if we wanted to go that route. Budget AA frigates with armored distractions still work just fine for now.

Any weapon tagged to a tractor is an effective anti-fighter weapon. More over that tractor can hold the fighter for any other vessel wishing to take pot shots at it. Short of the anti-fighter missile, the tracking of a cruiser pulse laser is as high as any frigate weapon and it outranges the anti-fighter missile. So if you place your anti-fighter cruiser in with your other cruisers you can be sure that some of them will help picking off enemy fighters.

Well the longer the unit lives the longer it can be of use. And I do tend to make sure at least my front line cruisers have enough armour to take and ignore fighters up to the point of contact.

Berny

Technically this is possible if you can keep them out of beam laser’s range. Of course the AI is never very good at that so they just tend to get vaporized.