You should try this campaign map mod :
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=6650&p=52680&hilit=atellian#p52680
You will know how to build and use frigates effectively after playing this through a couple of times.
What I think is the reason frigates are lacking in usefulness is that hull integrity is 1/10th of a cruiser while only 1/3rd of the price. Lack of weapon, shield and armor power compared to a cruiser is fine considering the size and speed difference, but the comparative lack of hull integrity makes assault frigates (which would b a very logical design given the parameters) just too fragile when assaulting cruisers. Another issue is that cruiser lasers blast through the frigate shields so quickly, and that should be the weakness of those weapons. I think that is slightly unbalanced. It could be rebalanced by lowering the hit points of the shield but increase resistance to 21, so that it can take a few resisted hits from a cruiser laser before the generator goes. The problem of such a shield would then be the balance towards other frigates…
If GSB 2 gets made it will definitely make steps to redress the need to encourage true combined-arms forces. It should also hopefully support more ship sizes (ideally moddable).
That’s a very encouraging “maybe”, Cliff. When it comes to Positech’s future, I wish you fair winds and following seas. 
I look forward to a possible day where GSB 2 just might rise above a distant horizon.
Ditto that!
I know, i know, i have a too long list of “Ditto That!” posts. But with such a writter as Astro wich always get just too damn close to what i’m thinking (and sometimes even says exactly what i’m thinking, but with better words!), there is nothing else to do! lol
Back in topic:
I was getting a little tiny bit tired of modding GSB, but hearing about a possible GSB 2 gave me energy to let to another idea break thru my mind xD
I’m sorry but that’s like 2 or 3 ultraheavy armors on a maxed out cruiser. It will last maximum 30 seconds in 4x speed when facing fighter swarms costing the same as your fleet (assuming you didn’t arrive with just anti-fighter capabilities), and then it is absolutely necessary to, as you say, fill all the weapons slots with anti-fighter equipment in order to kill a few before dying. In Battle/Challenge mode building such ships are nice enough, but in Campaigns you don’t know what’s coming half the time and personally I avoid allocating that many resources into such specialized tools. I have built a combined anti-fighter and anti-assault cruiser that I place one to one with a MWM missile cruiser in a formation (behind them), and usually they form fleets of 4+4 or 8+8 (since I can produce four of each per turn). I think they have 25 or 30 armor (can’t remember right now) 2 defense lasers and 2 or 3 rapid-fire lasers iirc (those with 2,6 tracking), and a tractor beam each. The 4+4 combo has no chance vs 16 fighter squads of 16, and my fighters cost less than 1000 credits each while the cruiser fleet costs more than 20k. I rarely face AI fleets with better anti-fighter capability than that.
I still think that the one who wins the “fighter war” wins the battle. My point about anti-fighter frigates being weaker than anti-fighter cruisers is more on-topic though; longevity is essential against fighters because you need to maintain firepower over time against them to diminish their efficiency against armor they can’t hurt. Having a bunch of anti-fighter frigates gives a lot of firepower to begin with, but as one by one is killed off fighter-killing capacity drops and then time runs out very quickly since the fighters concentrate their fire even more the less targets there are. Basically, it is easy to kill off fighter swarms with cruisers if you know what’s coming, but when you bring along dedicated anti-fighter cruiser into a non-fighter battle you have a serious disadvantage. The defender fleet composition on frontier planets should not include cruisers like that unless you have an abundance of resources, but then it doesn’t really matter.
In the campaign it is simply put easier to have overwhelming forces of fighters than it is to have overwhelming forces of anything else, and Retreat works 100% of the time to its max usefulness if you are unlucky and the AI kills them off faster than the lucky shot armor damage can bring them down, contrary to many cruiser and frigate designes. I have only once had to withdraw a fighter fleet of 28+ units, but then that was a silly anti-fighter-only fleet that would lose against literally anything else. So it takes 28k and 448 pilots to “win the game” if it were not for the No-Fighter planets.
Okay, how about this one:
Imperial Legion Cruiser
4x Cruiser Plasma Launcher
1x Guidance Scrambler Beam
1x Cruiser Defense Laser
2x Ultraheavy Armor
2x Nanobot Repair
1x Power II
1x Power I
1x Reflective Shield
1x Multiphasic Shield
2x Supercharged Engine
1x Crew III
Cost 2991 credits, 284 crew, 1 pilot.
Rebel Icarus Fighter
1x Fighter Laser Cannon
1x Engine II
1x Engine I
1x Power I
Cost 90 credits, 1 pilot
20 cruisers of the above design can beat 976 fighters of the above design, with no supporting craft for the cruisers, although I’m not certain on how often they are capable of doing so (I only tested twice, with 1 win and 1 loss, so I don’t have enough information to estimate the win rate). That’s 59,820 credits of cruiser (occasionally) defeating 87,840 credits of fighter, and the cruiser described above is hardly a specialized anti-fighter cruiser. By the way, this lasts considerably longer than 30 seconds against a fighter swarm even at 4X speed. If I wanted an approximately equal cost situation, I could provide each of the cruisers with an escorting squadron of laser fighters and have enough credits left over for four squadrons of rocket fighters.
If I add in the fighters to create an equal-cost situation, the cruiser fleet wins, and if it were a campaign battle I would have gained about 19 squadrons of one of the best laser fighters in the game for the loss of 20 Phalanx laser fighter squadrons, 4 Phalanx rocket fighter squadrons, 5 cruisers destroyed and two disabled (no remaining weapons), and three more with varying degrees of armor damage (note - this is off of one test only; I will not guarantee that the cruiser fleet would always win or that the losses described are always accurate, particularly not if the fighter swarm ignores the fighter escorts and the fighter escorts have short leashes).
In the campaign, combined arms of some type is the way to go, at least initially. My preference is a fighter/cruiser main fleet and a fighter-only second fleet, but fighter/frigate and fighter-only fleets also work, as do cruiser/frigate and fighter-only. Combined arms works quite well in campaign, mainly because it allows you to make good use of the available pilots and crew before you have the income to build whatever you want of any given type of ship and are mostly constrained by shipyard capacity. Without any restriction on available crew in the scenarios, cruiser-heavy or cruiser-only is the way to go because they can cost-effectively beat most other things.
Anti-fighter frigates are also in some ways better than anti-fighter cruisers, because the anti-fighter missile has a much higher range than the cruiser defense laser and the frigates are much cheaper than the cruisers, meaning that it’s easier to squeeze one into the budget (either in campaign or in scenario) and easier for the frigate to provide protection to large numbers of ships. Problems are keeping the frigate alive, and crew-efficiency in campaign.
In short, I guess I’m advocating a limited combined arms approach, with ships partially specialized. The cruiser design above is a decent general-use cruiser; give it some escorting fighters and perhaps a more heavily armored cruiser, and it can form an acceptable battle line. The cruiser is primarily useful against other cruisers, but will also do well against slow frigates while fast frigates can be dealt with by supporting ships such as rocket fighters or cruisers armed primarily with pulse lasers, while fighter defense can be taken care of by adding in a few squadrons of laser fighters, or a few dedicated anti-fighter frigates. Especially early in campaign, and often in the scenarios, fighters and cruisers work well together since you often have lots of spare pilots if you’ve been focusing on big ships or lots of spare crew if you’ve been focusing on fighters in the campaign, and in scenarios balancing fighters and cruisers can help when cutting costs, since fighters are a cheap way to kill frigates rapidly or distract and destroy enemy fighters while your main force deals with the enemy’s main force.
Why build fighters worth 90cr each when you get the exact same speed and firepower for 60? One laser, power 1 and engine 1 is all you need. Take the smallest, cheapest fighter that has 1 hardpoint and 2 normal points. Don’t fill the fourth point with anything if it is there. This means that I have 30% more fighters than you do in the same experiment. Do this and the fighters will win against those cruisers with the same cost (or even less). Set them to Co-operate, Stick together 25, Last Stand and autorange (240) *. This maximizes fire concentration against cruisers and frigates but is worse against other, equally quick fighters. One gun and one tractor beam, 20 armor is not anywhere near enough to be competitive against three or four fighter units… The cruiser combo I describe above (4+4) has four tractor beams and 16 guns efficient vs fighters. If I encounter a similar amount of fighter units (8) I usually lose all the MWM cruisers and maybe one or two of the anti-fighter cruisers before winning. The 8+8, however, has such a capacity that the fighters die off too quickly to kill off anything, showing that you are right that it is the amount of guns that count both ways (i.e the amount of laser cannons vs the amount of laser defence cannons). 16 fighter units won’t win against that combo. 32 should, but I haven’t tested this. Needless to say, the 8+8 cruiser fleet costs 50% more than 32 ~1000cr fighter units.
- edit: and Vulture; that’s very important, because then they finish off the cruisers so that the percentage drops.
Unless you’re talking about rocket fighters, you cannot do this. The Rebel Icarus I described above can reach a speed of 2.68, whereas the fastest laser fighter design I can think of for 60 credits (in fact, the only laser fighter design I can think of for 60 credits) is the Swarm Osiris with Engine 1, Power 1, Laser Cannon, which reaches a top speed of 2.3 and loses to my Rebel Icarus at cost 4 out of five attempts. Empire comes next closest to the 60 credit mark, with a 65 credit Phalanx with the same modules as the Osiris, but it’s a slower and more expensive fighter and does not perform as well at cost against my Rebel Icarus. Swarm Seths with Engine 2, Power 1, Laser Cannon can beat my Rebel Icarus fighters at cost 4 out of 5 attempts, but those cost 68.6 credits each and move at 2.61 speed.
Rocket fighters theoretically have the same amount of firepower, but without painters they miss most of the time in dogfights, and can never hurt a shielded cruiser, so they can’t be used as the basis for a fighter swarm. And rocket/painter fighters tend to cost more than 100 credits apiece, while Swarm Osiris painter fighters cost more than 80 credits apiece, so the net result isn’t really any great cost savings here, especially since the painter fighters will tend to need frequent replacement.
Moreover, at least when I play campaign mode, I tend to find myself more limited by pilots than by credits for building a massive fleet of fighters. As a result, I’d rather have the best fighters I can get than the cheapest fighters I can get, unless I’m trying to fit them in with an expensive cruiser or frigate program (even then, alternating turns between cruiser production and fighter production tends to balance it well enough, though).
Have you actually tried this in the field? In my experience one extra fighter squad makes all the difference. My Rebel Phoenix (3 used points) reaches a speed of 2.49 at a cost of 72 (or 1216 per unit of 16) and lets me produce 10 of them each turn IIRC. One turn worth of these should beat one turn worth of yours every time, since you can only produce 9, er even 8. I haven’t even tried rocket fighters that much in campaigns, since laser cannon fighters are so much more versatile. I have found that armor, extra speed (to some extent) and other clever ideas have little meaning on the battlefield - what it all comes down to is the number of guns and the Stick Together instruction. Off against fighters, on against everything else. 10 units beats 9 beats 8 etc… except if the speed difference is enormous (or non-existent despite armor - but in that case the cost difference is enormous instead).
My point here is not really these details about fighter vs fighter vs cost battles - I don’t have enough experience and haven’t researched enough to really argue with you fact vs fact… I am sure you’ll win that discussion. This discussion kind of veered off in another direction. What I am aiming at is the OP’s cruiser-focused gameplay views. To me the campaign mode is not cruiser-focused at all. It is all about the fighters. If I spy on a planet and see a score of fighters, I know I cannot go in there with anything other than fighters. So I send them in and don’t really care about winning that battle, only about removing their fighters. Once that is done I can go in with my other fleets in relative safety. If I am attacked with a formidable fighter force, and I don’t have sufficient anti-fighter capacity I retreat - and if I do have a defending fighter force that is insufficient I let them destroy as many fighters as possible before losing the battle.
So the order of priority goes like this:
- Win the fighter war
- Get their frigate/cruiser shields down
- Finish them off as one-by-one as possible
If 1 fails, the two others are rarely possible for me. Maybe I should always go in with anti-fighter capabilities, but if there are no fighters the fleet is inefficient. I think that the cruiser/frigate dedication to anti-fighter capacity needs to be too dominant in order to be efficient enough. For instance the 8MWM + 8 anti-fighter/assault fleet I mentioned above gets in trouble when encountering an equally strong AI force that has relevant weapons and protection, simply because out of 104 hard points 40 are worthless or nearly worthless against non-fighters.
Assuming that you have the 10:8 Pheonix vs Icarus situation, your Pheonix design loses approximately 4 out of 5 matches (20 squadrons of speed 2.49 laser Pheonixes won once out of seven trials against 16 squadrons of my Icarus fighters). This gives your Pheonix fighters both numerical superiority and cost advantage (20 squadrons of your Pheonix cost more than 16 squadrons of my Icarus, since your Pheonix cost 76 credits to achieve 2.49 speed; if you’d like, I can redo the tests for Pheonix with Engine 1s, but those are slower and more expensive than the Swarm Osiris fighters with Engine 1s, so I doubt they’ll do any better at cost). The above was using what my experience tells me is one of the best order sets for dogfighting (Retaliate/Stick Together/Last Stand; switching Retaliate for Rescuer should also work well). Switching the Pheonix to make use of Cooperative and Vulture, your fighters went 0 wins in 5 trials, using the 10 Pheonix to 8 Icarus ratio. Moreover, your fighters killed fewer of my fighters when using Cooperative/Vulture than when using the orders I usually give dogfighters (against Cooperative/Vulture, the Icarus fighters won five times in a row with about 80% of the fighter strength remaining; against Pheonix with Retaliate, that number was more often between 30% and 40%, and once was 10%, and the one time your Pheonix fighters won, the Pheonix fighters had about 25% of their starting strength left). And yes, I know that Pheonix is misspelled, but that’s the way it is in the game.
Cooperative/Vulture is great for strafing cruisers, but isn’t that good for dogfighting. You might want to consider mixing in fighter squadrons with Pulse Lasers that start the battle with strafing orders for use against cruisers, and have the main body of the swarm be Laser Cannon fighters with Retaliate or Rescuer orders for clearing out fighters. Or separating parts of your fighter swarm into dogfighter groups with Retaliate or Rescuer orders, and strafing groups with Cooperative/Vulture orders, even if they both use the same weapons. Including a handful of rocket fighters in the swarm helps a lot with taking down frigates but doesn’t do anything worthwhile against shielded cruisers.
I agree that the campaign mode is more fighter oriented than cruiser oriented. But the early part of the campaign, when you have only a couple of planets to work with, works better with a somewhat balanced split between fighters and cruisers (or frigates) since you might as well spend the leftover credits on something that makes use of all the crew that’s piling up while you have only a couple of pilots left over, since early on you don’t have the fighter strength necessary to really rip through balanced fleets, and even later on it’s useful to have something available to deal with the occasional fleet that spends heavily on fighter defense and the worlds that don’t allow fighters to come to play. Plus if you have only one or two pilots left over, and sufficient construction capacity and available funds, you might as well build a few cruisers or frigates for occupation fleets, secondary groups, or reinforcements.
Campaign is fighter oriented mostly because it’s easier to accumulate large fighter fleets, dedicated anti-fighter fleets are a bit uncommon, and fighters can be built at any shipyard in the campaign. Cruisers, on the other hand, have a more limited availability, and repairing them costs you some of your production capacity, while you only need to make up lost fighters before you can begin adding to your fleet.
I did some basic testing and I can confirm most of Aeson’s fighter figures, for those who haven’t already done the math years ago. A shame since I was trying out the cheap fighter / greater DPS theory (and I thought an Outcast fighter might unseat the Icarus; it failed) as well.
Yeah I was probably fooled by the relative ease with which I could autowin by clicking ten times twice on Build rather than 7-8 times twice. I have switched between races a bit, and perhaps the costly fighters I built with Alliance were too slow? I built some very cheap but slow (2.0) fighters once (don’t remember the race) and they did just as well as the expensive ones I built earlier, but this might have been a late-campaign illusion based on overly superior forces. Even though it does not stand “scientific” testing the point about the ease which this can be done still stands.
What we all can agree on, I think, is that sending in a 20-40 unit force of pure fighters in Campaign mode is quick, cheap and simple and it brings victory more often than not. I also think we agree that if you lose the “fighter war”, which I call it, then you’re in trouble.
edit: come to think of it, maybe the fact is just that a 2.49 speed laser fighter is more than good enough to beat most AI-made fighters, especially when there are more of them?
It really depends on what you want your fighters to do - fighter battles usually go to the faster fighter in equal cost situations, but numbers count for a great deal in strafing cruisers. Cheap and numerous laser fighters will probably perform better against cruisers than fast and expensive laser fighters, since fighters mostly rely on achieving lucky hits to break cruiser armor, and more fighters means more lucky hits in the same time period. Whether fast fighters or cheap fighters work better in any given situation is going to depend on how much and what kind of fighter defenses are present, but fast fighters will in general take fewer losses in each battle, unless the opposing fleet is heavily invested in anti-fighter defenses (particularly cruiser defense lasers, as cruiser pulse lasers lose a lot of their utility against fast fighters).
To the best of my knowledge, all opposing fleets in the campaign are player-made, rather than AI-generated, and are pulled from online challenges or possibly campaign games.
Plus, most of the fleets I’ve faced in the campaign aren’t fighter swarms, so if the campaigns have our fleets facing similar-cost fleets, we can expect that if I deployed a fighter swarm, I have significantly more than cost parity with the opposing fleet’s fighter force. With enough of a numerical advantage, even the worst fighters in the game should be able to take down the best fighters, although then the question becomes whether or not I brought enough fighters that the losses I take don’t push me into a defeat while the enemy cruisers or frigates anchor the opposing fleet health. And hopefully there aren’t any well-armored and shielded anti-fighter (or even general-use) frigates present if my swarm is made up of laser fighters only, since laser fighters have a lot more trouble taking down that kind of frigate than they have taking down cruisers.
Yeah if I see the percentage countdown clock goes down faster for me than I can kill off their cruisers and frigates, I usually retreat. It means that the path is open for either MWM spam or assault frigates/cruisers, though. I didn’t mean that I meet fighter swarms in the campaign. They always have at least one frigate or cruiser in there, usually combined forces. But even 5-6 fighter units in a frigate/cruiser fleet will be lethal if I can’t kill them, and most of my designs can’t. So a large part of my fighter’s mission is to clear enemy fighters, and your Retaliation tip helped me do that today. I send them in, 20+ of them, and don’t expect them to always win. Very often they do very quickly, but if they manage to remove most enemy fighters before I lose I am perfectly fine with that. It means that I can send in the other two fleet designs safely.
Today I made a new assault frigate that let me produce 15 (or so) of them every turn in Campaign. They were able to beat a 30k integrity cruiser/frigate fleet while only having a total of 8k integrity. That was a fleet that smashed first a fighter fleet and a cruiser assault fleet that I sent in to die against armor walls, but the sheer amount of guns in my fleet eventually took them down. One point defense, one laser beam, two rapid-fire lasers and a phasor cannon if I remember correctly (takes down shields quickly then the combined lasers takes down armor) And quite a bit of speed. The principle is the same as I talk about in here; firepower IS central to this game… the number of guns is hard to overlook when designing fleets.
To answer my own question; yes Alliance’s fighters are too slow. The best one I could make cost like 100 or something and had 2.24 speed. The one I ended up making cost 78 with a speed of 2.14 IIRC. Obviously switching to Nomads or Rebels with an equal-cost fighter with around 2.50 speed was a huge improvement. The Icarus fighter mentioned above seems to be the best or close to the best that can be made and should therefore be a rare encounter in the campaign.
What would be interesting to know is this:
How much more speed must one type of fighter have than another, in order to beat it nine against ten? It seems from the tests done above that 0.2 is enough, but how small can a speed increase be to be worth one less production per turn in Campaign?
So I used the information here to go from cruiser heavy gameplay to fighter heavy gameplay, then experimented with frigates and found you can create some effective designs which can win a battle for you if you run up against the right enemy fleet (plasma heavy fleets struggle against frigates). So I took that information and headed onto Admiral difficulty on the Campaign; what a mistake.
80% of the fleets I encountered were large forces of slow (I’m guessing around .03), armored ((I’m guessing 60+) cruisers set to escort a lure. Mass fighter swarms useless, frigates risky given their high losses at the start of the campaign, other cruiser designs inferior. So how did I make any progress on the difficulty? Why by building my own slow, armored cruisers! If I ran into a fleet I couldn’t handle I’d simply ctrl-alt-delete my way out of the game.
Ironically, it was only when I started doing this that the match-making system appeared to give me force combinations of things other than other slow, armored cruisers. But, nonetheless, the game became incredibly boring. One battle took over 30 mins after I heavily damaged my opponent’s lure, which then fled taking his formation back with him.
Any advice for success on Admiral difficulty that doesn’t involve a grinding experience that makes me feel like I’m killing boars in the forest for XP? Admiral feels like GSB at its worst and, barring some good advice, I think I’ll stick with Captain difficulty.
I think that Admiral difficulty is silly-difficult rather than challenging. I built that MWM fleet I talk about over some time in the 20-planet campaign, and in one huge sweep I took all the planets to the south-west. Yet, with this 14k hit point cruiser fleet and some fighters on the home planet I had over 2k expenses and only like 3k income. Needless to say, they retaliated with a 40+k hit point fleet and at the same time the northeast planet attacked my home planet with superior forces and GG. I would have needed 50+ turns to build such a fleet that destroyed mine.
This always happens on Admiral. You have finally built up a fleet of 5-6 cruisers that can pack a punch, and then they retaliate with 30 cruisers and GG. If I could plan for it and there was a way of anticipating retaliation, it would be fun. I can’t and it isn’t.
Sadly, Captain is quite easy now. I try different races and different designs, but I know I will win. It is still quite fun, though.
I’m not an expert but I learned an hard lesson about campaign at Admiral level: never try to defend a planet!
Usually the invading enemy fleet outnumbers mine and if you have to defend you don’t have any clues about the enemy deployment.
In my opinion, counterattack is far more effective than defense. Usually I keep my border planets undefended. When the enemy will invade one of them, I’ll counterattack the next turn.
With this tactic I’m able to keep my losses at a manageable level.
Good luck!