Please do.
I put up a few combined-arms Tribe challenges, mrblitz17, 18, and 19. When you win, please send a note and post the victorious fleet in a challenge of its own.
Pretty rough challenge (I think I was on #17 or #18). My attempt was an Alliance fleet that focused on armor and reflective shields (just one) to let the ships last a long time. But I made them MWM/Megaton-Missile ships, and used my frigates primarily for my close-in fighters. Your cruiser’s orders to close range is what defeated me, as I was on the upper hand for almost half the battle. Of course, once your ships got within my minimum range and my ships didn’t retreat, it was like blasting an ichthyoid in a hollow cylinder with fusion beams…
I won’t give your tricks away, but the anti-fighter technique you used were impressively effective.
First, thanks for posting!
Could only find #19 though.
Posted my challenge in response (under Hexes) that beat it first time out.
I deployed my fleet in tight formation, directly across from yours… I didn’t figure you would do the silly “Charge of the Light Brigade” fighter zerg rush, or I probably would have deployed in the opposite corner. 3 types of cruisers (I don’t use fighters, and rarely use frigates unless I think they’ll work well… lots of fighters on the other side usually means the frigates stay home…):
Defense Cruiser:
Valk hull
Couple of tractors, a Guidance Scrambler, 1 Beam Laser, 1 MWML, 2x Point Defense, shields, some armor, pretty slow design (.07 or so…).
Line Cruiser:
Valhalla Hull
4x Beam Lasers, 1 Fusion, 2x MWML, 1x EMP, 3x shields, armor, again - a slow design (.05 or so).
Light Plasma Cruiser
Fen Hull
6x Plasmas, armor, shields, relatively fast design (for me - .14 or so).
I forget the exact numbers at the moment… I think it was 3x Defense Cruisers, 1x Light Plasma Cruiser and I think 4x Line Cruisers.
Tactically, the fight went like this (this is all off memory… forgive me if I miss some things…):
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A couple of frigates wandered into range and got whacked.
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Your 3 close range cruisers closed. 1 was destroyed very quickly. The other two made it in close along with your fighters…
***I started sweating a bit at that point
*** -
My defense cruisers went about their business knocking down fighters, while your big cruiser closed into firing range. Because your other two were so close, my line cruisers basically ignored them and destroyed the big one.
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My formation started to spread a bit, and individual line cruisers started taking your close-range cruisers under fire. I think I lost a cruiser here - a line cruiser. The defense cruisers are still knocking down fighters.
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Occasionally, while #4 is going on, a frigate will wander into range, along with what I think was your carrier and they are taken under fire. The frigates tend to blow up, the carrier dances around a bit.
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The 2 close range cruisers blow up. My light plasma cruiser is out of formation now, chasing around frigates.
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The last of the fighters dies, and my slow fleet starts chasing around your carrier, only hitting it with MWML’s… the last frigates blow up after they wander back into range… then the carrier finally dies.
That was a LOT of fun, and a great challenge!
As scientific as I can bear to get with a game, I’m finding the problem to be about ratios.
Scenarios are capped primarily by cost. When comparing single designs against one another, every defense or utility module you add dilutes your ratio of offensive power. Speed is another direct ratio of weight/thrust, so engines sort of fall under a third category. Due to the specific tribe hull bonuses, we will want to observe defensive and offensive ratios only, without speed getting in the way.
So, for starters, any fair comparison of a cruiser type across two different races must be the same speed.
I selected a tribe design of mine that I feel is very strong against most challenges, even tribe ones… usually the only support I have to give it is air defense.
It is a shielded .26 speed assault cruiser with howitzers, a light beam and a scrambler, seemingly capable of defeating shielded and medium (up to 34ish) armored cruisers of many types, usually for cost.
I’ve run probably 60-70 nontribe designs at this point against this sole cruiser type in small-to-moderate sized fleet engagements (15-20), ranging from high firepower unshielded designs to quad-shielded armored repair tanks. The closer I stay to the cruiser’s archetype (.26 shortrange medium penetration cruiser with scrambler), the more obvious it is that this tribe cruiser has the advantage here over nearly every conceivable weapon:defense ratio. You can armor the nontribe cruiser beyond the penetration and crit capability of the target, but in fairness this is solved by a simple weapon swap on the tribe cruiser’s behalf - that is tribe’s battle to lose. Same thing with corner deployments vs line setups.
You can beat the design, of course, by straying outside the ship archetype - for instance dropping the speed ratio and the scrambler requirement, thus handicapping tribe by providing your fleet more available budget for offensive or defensive strength - but that is a somewhat uninteresting result. You can outplay any race’s designs by doing so, and it’s no mystery that Tribe can be outplayed in the same manner.
What is interesting is that Tribe is basically winning by default, at least in this bracketed instance. I don’t think I had a single fluke win by a nontribe side when equivalency was expected.
Whatever results I find are distressing not only in the fact that you are almost seem guaranteed to lose to an equally played tribe setup, but that the advantage is strong enough to throw off some soft counters. Many of my frigate designs, which usually eat unsupported assault cruisers for breakfast, struggle and often fail to take appropriately arrayed tribe equivalents down.
If someone really wanted to spend the time, a better evaluation would be to run tribe and nontribe designs against a static third party fleet rather than each other.
Given the tribe penalties, I can only imagine two things they can’t do as well - armor-based air defense and shield recharge-tanking (extended plasma battles, anyone?), although the latter can usually be made up for with the racial repair modules. I’d wager that both weaknesses indirectly hurt their frigates to a greater proportion than cruisers, but not enough to make them worse than nontribe designs.
It would be interesting to know if there was another archetype the tribe could not compete as well in, perhaps in similar classes of extremely slow or fast ship types. As such we don’t seem to have many alternate means of attacking them that they are weak against, especially when aircraft are limited.
My theory is that they would have difficulty in long-running distance fights that made use of minimum range orders and lots of shield recharge, but that’s not something we can feasibly experiment with at the present time.
The interesting (or not) part is, that these are not ultimate combat ships, but rather pursuit ships. There is very little in the way of repair modules, or missile scramblers in these designs. They’re ‘all engine’ (all cruisers are .38 speed, and frigates are .6+).
It sounds like these are fun challenges, and even at less than optimal combat capability, appear to give a good run for the money.
There was no aircraft carrier, by the way. I’m fairly certain you’re writing of the ‘flagship’ design.
That’s a very interesting observation. Do you think that restricting anti-armor weapons to non-tribe races and continuing the armor penalty on Tribe ships would be an antidote to their present power? Then they can hit your shields, but struggle to hit the armor and chew it down.
I find it hard to pin down just how much more powerful they are, or even if they are, depending on the situation.
OK, found #17 and #18. Same general deployment type as what beat #1 ship-wise, just added a little deployment depth to each to beat up the close-range cruiser rush.
Well, if that was the flagship, the Tribe hippie admiral lived the longest!
It was great fun, and you’ve obviously put a lot of good thought into your deployments and ship design.
Because that was a pursuit fleet, maybe that skews the fight. From my deployments and how my ships behave you can see that I de-emphasize speed and value concentrating firepower. As with anything in the game, I would imagine there’s a counter for this type of fleet also. This one just seems to give me the best general results over the broadest spectrum of challenges - slow, high firepower moderate defense designs, a depth of deployment to prevent “kinfe fighting cruisers”, dedicated AA cruisers for schwacking fighter swarms, and a second rank of missile spammers (if I see fighters, I use a cheap cruiser… no fighters, or few of them, then out come the frigates…).
I’d really enjoy some more Tribe fights. If there are others folks have in mind, please post them up!
“…the more obvious it is that this tribe cruiser has the advantage here over nearly every conceivable weapon:defense ratio.”
That’s what I’m seeing, too.
PacerX, I’m going to work on some heavier tribe fleets; and for the moment, just wanted to field something fairly competitive, which is fun to play against.
As for Rebel/Alliance and so forth, it does appear as though their ships are slow out of necessity. With the Tribe on the other hand, the engines are actually part of the ship defense.
Kudos on so readily dispatching the challenges in any event.
It would be interesting to see whether any other race could field a group of .38 speed cruisers whilst retaining any combat worthiness whatsoever; oh, and without cruiser lasers. These here challenges (17,18,19) are all based off of cruiser howitzers.
For certain, one thing which gives these particular cruisers fits are armored frigates armed with ion cannons. But then the thing is in clearing the area of Tribal fighters first. If you can get some clean shots on these cruisers with ion cannons, watch the cruisers quickly explode. The frigate ion cannon is one sweet weapon, at least in the right situation.
Anyway, I don’t want to come off as arrogant or anything like that in these posts. My opinion remains that Tribe are simply more powerful than the other races, but not enough so the game is less than fun to play.
One of the great things about having one ‘team’ (race) which is slightly better than the rest, is in finding ways to nonetheless defeat them. In game terms, it’s very satisfying to defeat a Tribal challenge on the first attempt.
I just cleared your MexallonII deployment with a batch of .38 speed unarmored empire frigates.
I’m not sure that scenario allows enough fighters to kill them quick enough… you may want to consider bringing more beamy weapons along in small deployments like that one.
I did a similar design and came to the same conclusions a few weeks ago. Also from it I came my solution. Don’t play against or with the tribe.
Don’t think so, It should be either a reduction of hitpoint bonus or an increased cost for all modules they use.
You do not at all, and I thought it was some good sporting fun!
PacerX, your ships pack a lot of firepower, but as it turns out, are susceptible to missile ships and laser fighters.
Maybe Tribe should be given a few more weapons: 1) intermediate range cannon, to replace beam lasers 2) long rang cannon, to replace missiles 3) kinetic anti-missile device. Then, take away their option for beams/scramblers/PD/missiles of any type. Make the Tribe totally kinetic.
If the Tribal intermediate-to-long range weapons were a bit inferior to their beam/missile counterparts, maybe that’s the way a balance could be found.
One of the problems with the way things are now, is that the Rebels are not the fastest Race.
Maybe it could be as simple as making Tribal engines at least a tad underpowered. Better yet, add more thrust to non-Tribal engines; Rebels in particular.
Yep, they are. The way the game is now, a person can look at the deployment and decide whether to bring more of one ship than another. I have a dedicated anti-missile cruiser, and add AA cruisers at about a 1 to 2.5 ratio to offset fighters.
That’s kind of unfortunate. A double-blind deployment would be nice.
Hmmmm…
Maybe. I just haven’t seen the reason to worry about speed all that much yet. Tight formations (which maximize superiority at the point of contact), can’t be used if the ships are going to utilize high speeds.
why not?
Check out the Tribal challenge, ‘top players only v2’ from the player, ‘all.’ I couldn’t defeat in about 7 or 8 attempts with Alliance. It took another 7 or 8 attempts to figure out what was going on, and to defeate it with Tribe. The victorious fleet is mrblitz21.
Anyway, whoever was looking for examples of Tribal toughness; hopefully some of the challenges referred to on this thread will provide an intro. There are a whole lot more difficult Tribal challenges out there, it’s certain.
That said, this being a non-challenge forum…‘and now, back to your normal programming.’
My conclusion from this is that other races have very little chance of accomplishing these 2 things at once: a) carrying any engines on their own ships (anything more than something like speed .10 on the cruisers, and b) defeating the Tribe.
It takes an extremely slow non-Tribal cruiser setup, in order to go toe to toe with the Tribe. If the Tribe slows down to speed .10 or .15 on their cruisers, they themselves become particularly deadly.
As alluded to earlier on this thread, it could be that any number of the players of this game eventually split into 2 camps; those who play tribe-on-tribe, and those who never play tribe either way (challengee/challenger). Well, that’s my current impression in any event. On the other hand, maybe there is enough of an overall ‘paper, rock scissors’ element for the better non-tribal players to ‘keep a lid’ on the Tribe.
Hey mrblitz,
The “top players only v2” challenge is one of mine…thanks for the compliment!
I wan’t aware that the challenge was coming up as “all”…I’ve only had the game for a week and a half now, so I’m still newbish.
The first night I started playing I picked your challenges since you were the last person to post a new challenge that night. Little did I know about how good you are at GSB.
To make a long story short, I quickly realized I needed to unlearn what I learned (which thankfully did not take long). In fact, if it wasn’t for your challenges I prob would have lost interest since the “single player” game was so easy. Now, I’m addicted to this game.
I’ll check out your response to my fleet…hopefully I can come up with something better.
BTW…I was picking the “all” button because I thought it would be posted for all to try…what should I be doing? Putting my profile name in the box?
Im not quite sure what you mean toe to toe. You mean on a 1v1 setting?
If not, i find killing tribe fleets not to be all that difficult. Nice thing is that you can pack alot of CLs if you are having trouble, since tribes armour is never to really stand up to that.
The only thing i cant figure out is what those fighters in mb21 are. Armoured rockets? OR double? They seem alot slower than id expect, but tore into my own fighters at quite a rate. Fighters for the tribe on paper seem quite overpowered. But rebels get faster and Empire get cheaper, so it might not be so clear cut.