I put up “Tribe Killer Rev. 2”.
I stuck with the same underlying concept – fighter spam (I have something like 289 pilots).
I found I was doing the best with double rocket launcher Icarus fighters. Laser fighters got beat up too much.
I should really have more speed but I’ll have to play with it tomorrow to see if I can do that and still win the current challenges (as it is I have 2 supercharged engines per cruiser, so not entirely a “brick” fleet).
It killed my fast Tribe fleet handily… But you’re right about it being a bit slow, it only managed to kill one ship from my first attempt at a Tribe missile fleet. You either need more range, or more speed.
Chill out before my might space fleet dude.
posted: 12/10/09
Is defeating
Tribe Killer rev 2 - now with more death for tribe fleets
with about 40-50% of the fleet remaining. Which is odd since I could of sworn that it beat that formation earlier today…
More range would be tricky. The thing with Tribe is you need lots of DPS to kill them and long range weapons don’t have great DPS.
I may try replacing all of my weapons with plasma, though. The fighters are the main DPS, so the cruisers really just need something that can break the shields and armor and maybe plasma would be good enough for that. Could also use missiles but my experience is that “plasma spam + scrambler > missile spam”.
I think I’ll also jam the fleet into a corner and put all the fighters on a rear ship towards the middle of the map. It would be better to have them all firing once the engagement starts rather than the ones at the edges being out of range for so long.
In my experience, the Tribe is the most powerful race. The key is in the hitpoints, and in the cruiser damage repair unit.
At first, I thought that the Rebels would be the fastest, but the Tribe is able to build speedy ships too; and the hitpoints are out of this world.
The one Tribe fighter with the 2 hardpoints is by far their best fighter hull. It may not be the fastest fighter, but with double hitpoints it sure can get back to a carrier in one piece for quick repairs.
Sometimes a Tribe frigate is almost like a light cruiser, while some of the cruisers from other races are almost like heavy frigates.
The Tribe kinetic weapons are fun, but the cruiser laser is still the best close-in weapon.
I’d like to see the kinetic weapons more powerful, and the hull bonus dropped to 50%. As a matter of fact, scrap all of the various bonuses for the other races and have something like:
Tribe: +50% hull integrity
Rebel: +40% speed
Alliance: +60% armor
Federation: -25% cost on all components
Empire: +50% shields
Yeah, not needing to waste slots on shields/armour, beyond whatever minimum you feel necessary to survive fighter, means more slots for engines… So they compete pretty well on speed, and the high hp/speed/cheapness combo makes for great rush fleets.
I agree. Maybe 75% instead of 50%, though. Small steps. As someone else pointed out, maybe 100% seemed balanced, when testing them using the kinetic weapons… Turns out the hulls are OP, and the weapons UP 
Ahh, but where would the fun be in picking hulls, if the only difference was length, module configuration and the minute difference of 1 or 2 points of power. I want to be made to want to use those 250m long hulls, despite their size making them easy pickings for fighters, rather than going for the shortest one every time (like I do with Tribe, where the ships are otherwise pretty much the same.)
As for the suggestions… -25% module cost for Federation? Instant best race 40% speed on Rebel does sound like a pretty epic bonus though. It’s only ~10% now, for cruisers, and it makes them a very attractive race. I’d be making speed 1.0+ frigates, or 0.5+ cruisers… As for the fighters, they’d be sick.
The tribe are my favourite race, but i think they are pretty well balanced. Ive been using the tribe armourless, shield less and recently repairless config. 1k for a laser cruiser, lovely hit points… I use a cookie cutter fleet to beat just about everything. But there are fleets out there that a pretty well balanced that can crush 80 or so incoming cruisers. Fighters are the bane of my existance, and i still think rebels have the best fighters. That extra speed makes a way better differance.
Before anyone calls OP remember that you probably havent come across fleets using their races strengths to full efect, mostly.
Tribe is good becuase its easy to figure their good setup. But i see so little alliance fleets, it makes me wonder whos actually making the most out of some of the other races.
Also, dogthinker, beating a fast missle fleet with a slow one isnt cheap. Its the huge glaring flaw in a fast missile fleet, that no matter how fast its going, its never going to have a better range.
Also, kinetic weapons? That tribe fleet already does not pwn.
Tribe is overpowered. The other races Don’t have such an overwhelming advantage that can be used like Tribe.
Alliance gets a slight boost to their Armor, which translates to maybe 3 extra resistance or so. 1 beam laser hit and that bonus goes away.
The Imperials get shield bonus’s, But shields can be dropped with relative ease. Their main form of protection also suffers relatively severe stacking penalties. Imperial ships are also to big, They seem to get in each others way to easilly, and they can’t mass for concentrated fire very well.
Both of these races have to devote considerable amounts of module space to gain the benefits of their specialized forms of protection. For Tribe every module significantly improves the survivability.
Tribe’s repair module is probably just plain broken. It fixes things nearly 50% faster. Keeps working twice as long, and costs 8 points more. or about 4% more then the next best repair module. And don’t forget it has twice the hit points making it tougher to knock out early, a detail that applies to all tribe modules.
In terms of combat, Tribe ships ability to repair faster and to not lose their weapons quite so fast means they can tip the scales of battle in their favor early on and then ruthlessly ride that advantage to victory.
The way to defeat the tribe is to concentrate fire on a single target so heavily it dies before it’s regeneration rate can have much of an affect. My current method of achieving this goal is Beam lasers and Fast missiles. MrBlitz (I think) managed to make a tribe cruiser that was breaking my Cruiser Laser ships.
Well, shields are better on paper, at least, with the fact that they can have infinite recharge, and are able to completly reflect certain weapons. Like you said, focus fire (Which most fleets do) completly removes the advantage of repair modules. At that point, repair modules just become more expensive junk.
My tribe fleets fall to fighters oh so quickly. You cant armour against them and you probably wont have shields, so ever attack of theirs should hit. Same for frigates. Well ordered fighters will rip apart a fleet.
If a tribe fleet is all missile, other races can make much better tanks to close the distance. If its all laser, missile those mofos! They have crap tanks, which are quite important.
I havent met a tribe challange yet that i havent beat quite easily. The hardest people to face seem to be the rebels.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of swearing I’ve directed at my computer trying to get armored Alliance fleets working. Not only is armor in such a poor place right now, you also have to deal with the added indignity of trying to make their awful fighter force work, with Empire being even worse at that. Good luck killing Tribe without fighter dominance.
Meanwhile, I’m tooling around with a 100k hitpoint Caspian IV tribe deployment, which has the same basic weapon options as everyone else. The hitpoint saturation is pretty absurd.
I am surprised that no one has died by melting their brains trying 2 find a kills all fleet.
Beat it with a ~66,000 point CRUISER ONLY Rebel fleet.
I think I can pull the buy down a bit.
but most fleets cost less than that… SO BEAT IT!
Usually when I try to fight a Challenge I like to at least on paper have my fleet look of equal size to the enemies or around that mark, but how are you supposed to fight fair if you don’t know how much the enemy challenger spent on there fleet?
the tribe no longer pwn.
repair module depreciation has been adjusted methinks
I only have/need 2.
i used to pack 4 in a cruiser with no shields or armour and send them off on the rampage 1 by 1 (MwhaH Ha haaa)
one by one? you can’t use that level of control!
yeah, its called my cruiser versus everyone else (COME ON AND HAVE A GO IF YOU THINK YOU’RE HARD ENOUGH)
Either that or put x2 in a large gap formation with the lead ship on keep moving orders.
I’m waiting to see when different SP missions are released where the setup window varies (like TT mini ganes)
think your hard enough for 70 cruiser laser? AT THE SAME TIME!