Uber Multi-Challenge Challenge. Man enough?

So, challenges are all well and good. After playing a few I feel like - ‘so what?’ Any challenge is crackable. So here’s my counter-challenge, which should result in a pretty sweet fleet cooked up by somebody:

Make a group of ship designs, a ‘fleet’ if you will, and then see if you can beat several challenges with that same group of ship designs. I will arbitrarily set some limitations. Your fleet shall be composed of:

One race
Six total capital ship designs.
Three total fighter designs.

Three (3) hard challenges must be defeated with these designs. Deployment can vary from challenge to challenge, you don’t have to use all of your ship designs in each mission, but you are limited to the 6 + 3 total designs.

The Challenges:

  1. Rebels - BlueBreaker - Rebel Aggressive Fleet (updated) - 12/29/09
  2. Empire - Galadriel - The Emperor’s Fist - 1/15/10
  3. Tribe - mrblitz01 - mrblitz26… tribal patchouli cruisers - 1/31/10
  4. ALTERNATE - Federation - yurch - Federation Purchasing and Procurement - 1/30/10
  5. ALTERNATE - to be determined Alliance challenge.

A colorful run-down description:

Bluebreaker’s Rebel Aggressive Fleet I took a few hacks at last night, and it is rough. Lasers and beams and speed galore, these guys have firepower and will steamroller over you. A low pilot limit and decent armor means you will have trouble besting this fleet with a fighter swarm. You’re probably going to have to beat it at it’s own game, somehow.

Galadriel’s Emperor’s fist is also rough. There is possibly a bug he is exploiting here which let him make an impressive stack of fighters. They will cause you some incredible pain. If too much trouble or you think that is cheap, exchange this for one of the alternate challenges. An impressive fleet, apparently some people have beaten it. I don’t know how, I did not. Also, Galadriel gets props for apparently making effective use of carrier modules in this fleet.

The Patchoulli cruisers are a fast stand-off fleet which will frustrate you and rain down death in the form of rockets. Also, you will have to deal with a ridiculous and painful swarm of rocket and rocket + painter fighters at some point. A masterful exercise in engagement ranges and ship design, you are probably doomed. Good luck.

BONUS 1 - Federation Purchasing and Procurement. I’ll tell you one thing: You aren’t going to have much luck taking this fleet down with any kind of guided ordinance. Missiles will be swatted away effortlessly. And are those frigates shooting at your cruisers? Yes, yes they are.

BONUS 2 - an Alliance challenge. I wanted to get all the races in, but couldn’t find an uber-challenge alliance fleet out there. Also, I wanted to find a challenge by somebody other than the people already in this multi-challenge. First person to suggest a hard alliance challenge gets it added here. We’ve got a stand off fleet, a knife fight beam fleet, a couple fleets heavy on fighters, so I was thinking maybe an EMP or missile spam heavy fleet here would be good.

When done, post whatever configuration of your hulls you like in a challenge for us to take up, with your own credit and pilot restrictions (keep it pretty high and the big map size though). If we get three winners, they will become the new Uber Multi-Challenge Fleets. Also you should post your hull types and how many you used of each to defeat each of the three challenges you selected. You get a gold star if you manage to beat the three +2 bonus challenges. Also, use engines for everything, don’t be lame and set up some floating rocks of armor or something.

Right, I suppose I should try to beat this challenge myself first to see how feasible it is - who knows - maybe one of you already has a fleet that can cream these fleets.

I find it it odd that you consider Caspian IV to be a low pilot limit. Anything more than 300 seems outright absurd to me. :stuck_out_tongue:
(I have a smaller Caspian IV version of that fed fleet as well - Flailing Feduhration Formation 1/26/10)

So the idea here is to beat all of those fleets using 6 + 3 designs or less?

That seems doable.

If you can do it with even fewer, knock yourself out. Fewest hull designs used gets the biggest ego points. I just picked that number arbitrarily, I would be deeply impressed if you could go less. 3 + 2 would be the ulimate, but I SERIOUSLY doubt that is possible.

I agree, over 300 starts to get to be a bit much. I also kind of hate the huge pilot limit maps and all the damn fighters… but hey, you gotta deal with’em.

I think I may have already beaten most of those challenges using my BlackFleet1 deployment which fits your rules (if you disregard my 1 decoy frigate in the corner): 4 tribe cruiser designs and 3 fighter designs

I’ll give them another whack just to be sure.

BTW…try it out if you haven’t. I thought my BlackFleet1 thru 4 series turned out good; I learned a lot of the game mechanics in the process of making them. (BlackFleet1 is the end product…2 thru 4 are the steps I took before reaching that final deployment).

If you want, I could post a new one minus the 1 frigate, with an engine in the decoy cruisers and maybe ditch 1 cruiser design to bring the number of cruiser designs down to 3.

Edit: I think I confused the challenges listed with ones with similar names. I want to give these a go with a new fleet. On a side note, I’m digging the new patch.

Okay. I decided on an Alliance missile fleet, since you seem to be missing that.

It’s centered on escorting around a large block of budgeted missile platforms. Since I have plenty of reach, the fleet will only be 0.20 speed or faster.

The fact you can tailor deployment to each challenge makes it easier. I did all of them 4 + 0, with the EMP frigate probably being optional.

My selected designs (writing as I play, designs get introduced as I see fit)
Budgeted missile carrier “Katyusha”
Light attack/AA frigate “Pulsehound”
Heavy EMP frigate “Swampboat”
Experimental air support cruiser “Hiver”

If you want the specifics, I’ll post them later.

The Emperor’s Fist - 60 Pulsehounds, 26 Katyushas - probably would not have made it through (or been a closer match) if the enemy fighters were disciplined better.

Rebel Aggressive Fleet (updated) - 32 Pulsehounds, 28 Katyushas, 4 swampboats - The behavior of that slow armored unit in front causes ranged units to drive through the middle of his fleet with a deathwish.

Tribal patchouli cruisers - 31 Katyushas, 15 Hivers, - I hate you for including this one. Not even gunna try to use frigates with all those rocket fighters. I think it took about 20 minutes to chase down the last of the cruisers.

Federation Purchasing and Procurement - 32 Katyushas, 3 Hivers, 34 Pulsehounds, 6 swampboats - The frigate-based nature of this one actually assassinated all of my AA cover, making this sort of close in the end.

I’ll try to throw together a fleet matching the general gist of what I used after I take a break. I should add a fighter type to keep it honest - It will be an easy fleet to beat if you don’t spend any cash on air defense, considering how much deadweight AA I have to drag around.

I did it with one cruiser design and 3 fighters. The cruiser is my general purpose combo cruiser from my first challenge (1/25/10). The 3 fighter types I put in a new challenge 3 Fighters (2/18/10).
Piece of cake.

I think I’ll pass on posting the fleet, I just don’t think it’ll make an interesting challenge.

Without an estimation of the opposing fighter force, having the wrong ratio of so few unit types would make it too easy.

Cool stuff. Dang you guys have a handle on this game. I just barely managed to barely whack the first one, finally.

itcamefromouterspace - post the names and dates of your challenge fleets so it is a bit easier for me to find them.

yurch - yeah, let’s see the specs on those hulls if you don’t mind spilling the beans. - also, what is the name/date of the alliance fleet you think would be good?

follick. 1 + 3? damn. You win, I guess. Those have to be some nasty fighters you put together. I could have sworn the Rebel challenge would not be beatable with a fighter heavy approach.

I can’t think of any particularly noteworthy alliance fleets off the top of my head. Whenever I make a decent fleet as Alliance, it always seems to end up as another race. It’s odd, because I consider myself an Alliance player.

Here’s the missile carrier I used. The rest of the units were basically AA or other support for it:

[code]hull = Alliance Alligator Cruiser hull

[modules]
0 = cruiser_targetpainter,
1 = cruiser fastmissile,
2 = cruiser fastmissile,
3 = cruiser fastmissile,
4 = cruiser fastmissile,
5 = cruiser_engine VI,
6 = cruiser_engine VI,
7 = cruiser crew,
8 = cruiser shield reflective,
9 =
10 =
11 =
12 =
13 = cruiser power,
[/code]
Yes, that’s a 'gator with 4 empty slots. 0.2 speed. It’s cheap (1608!!) and and easily grouped into a violent swarm.

The fast missile system is incredibly effective (at around 680m) in a feedback loop with the target painter, to the point where the other missile systems just look like a joke.

One of these days I’m going to try to see if I can build a small missile fleet on the backs of stock assault ships.

Interesting, I usually use Multiple Warhead Missles for missile spam. I’ll have to give that a try.

For that challenge I just used enough fighters to hold their fighters off of my cruisers. The combo cruisers did the heavy lifting. The other three challenges fell to my 3 Fighter deployment.

The challenges I was referring to are BlackFleet1, BlackFleet2, BlackFleet3, BlackFleet4 all dated 2/4/10. They are under the name of TheBlackFleet since itcamefromouterspace won’t display properly in the UI.

Haven’t made a new deployment yet…lately I’ve been doing the survival challenges.

Ok, i’ve started in on this a bit, beginning with the Aggressive Rebel fleet. I chose to be Alliance here.

After 3 or 4 defeats with different combinations of fast missiles, i arrived at a design which is rockets and emp disruptors. It’s got 9 rocket launchers, and 2 emp bomb thingies, about speed .15, so it would probably get hammered by an opposing missile fleet.

The rebel fleet has just a few missile launchers, but a great number of mid-to-short-range weapons. It appears there’s a wall of armored ships, backed by the weapons ships.

I took the liberty of designing a frigate. Maybe we should allow 3 or 4 frigate designs. My answer to the Aggressive Rebel Fleet included several of these frigates. Fielding pulse lasers, they’re close-range, speed .23, 12.47 armor; around 540 points apiece.

My fighters were simple rocket fighters and painters. The 4.04 speed rocket plane had the type 2 engine… i think it’s 65 points.

The 3rd fighter design will probably be a pulse laser fighter; or maybe a cheapo laser fighter instead.

So, next is ‘Emperor’s Fist.’

edit: …atempted to attack this one with around 500 laser fighters, and a truckload of frigates. The way the Imperial fighters are clustered is very interesting. They took out my frigates in no time. Meanwhile, my fighters were distracted in fighting their fighters.

2nd attempt: Dispensing with the obviously flawed notion of unarmored frigates, instead fielded a cruiser with tractor beam, and 3 cruiser lasers, and with 30+ armor coverage. The design was speed .05 or something slow like that, and it was fairly expensive at around 2900 points, but the main thing was the survive the fighter swarm.

As for my own fighters, purchased 256 laser fighters, and dedicated them to attacking Empire cruisers. Then, purchased 512/128 rocket/painter fighters, and gave them orders to only attack fighters. This combination laid waste to that challenge. The thing is - battle one having a big budget, and allowing for 1000 pilots - a fleet has to take into account the possibility of a major fighter swarm. In each attempt, the side which wiped out the other side’s frigate/cruiser contingent got the upper hand. In the 2nd battle, those cruisers with 30+ armor which i fielded; they held up much better under mass laser fighter attack, than did the Imperial cruisers (which my 256 laser fighters had a field day with). In the 1st attempt, my laser fighters must have been overly preoccupied with fighter-on-fighter, and not attacking cruisers.

So, thus far i’ve got 2 cruiser designes, 2 frigate designs (both with pulse lasers; one armored, one not), and have filled out the 3 fighter designs, with the 3rd being a laser fighter. With 640 rocket/painter fighters dedicated to fighter-versus-fighter, the 256 laser fighters were able fairly easily take out all of the Imperial cruisers. I was impressed by the way the 30+ armor on my own cruisers held up against massed laser fighters. The final score was 82-9.

All in all, there were over 900 pilots in my fleet.

The mystery with that challenge yet remains: How did the challenger stack the main group of his fighters like that? I’ve never seen such a tight cluster of fighters.

Galadriel is presumably a female name?
She stacked most of her fighter squadrons (pulse lasers I think) in a turtle one on top of the other. It does seem to pack more of a punch on first contact before they disperse. I’ll have to do that more often.

Been meaning to give this a go for a while…

Just aced all the challenges using 2 cruiser designs and 1 fighter. I used the Tribe though, which likely made things a bit easier.

My fleet mainstay was a 0.16 speed Harmony cruiser with a bog-standard Cruiser Laser / Beam Laser loadout. These guys also pack a tractor beam each, along with one fast recharge shield unit and three tribe repairs.

For the Rebel Aggressive and Emperor’s Fist challenges I only used this design, escorted by Serenity laser fighters on a rough ratio of one squadron per two cruisers. The Rebels went down quickly, thanks mainly to the Tribe’s ability to outlast their assault cruisers.

The Emperor’s Fist was a fair bit tougher, and I lost a lot of my fleet early on. Those fighters are scary! Nonetheless, after we closed in on their black ships of doom (with about 70% of my fleet remaining) the CL/BL combo won the day. I’d somehow missed this challenge when it went up, and really enjoyed playing it. Good find.

The Patchouli Cruisers challenge was by far the toughest one for me to beat (I remember pulling my hair out over it a few weeks ago). After a couple of attempts beating it using a massed fighter attack, I went back to the drawing board and designed a flak cruiser: Paradise hull, 3 tractors, 4 pulse lasers. Six of these guys were enough to thin out the rocket fighters while my Harmonys mopped up the rocket boats. It was a close thing though, I won with only 17% of my fleet remaining.

Yurch’s Fed Purchasing has also given me fits in the past, but using the exact same deployment as I’d used on mrblitz’s challenge I won handily. Turns out those Paradise aa cruisers are also awesome frigate killers.

If I can come up with an interesting deployment using my designs, I’ll post it. Most of the deployments I used would be pretty boring to play though I think.

The multi-challenge challenge is a great idea though. Hopefully we can find an Alliance one somewhere…

Ugh, I just gave your TheBlackFleet1 challenge a shot, and it is tricky. Gave it two goes and it wiped me clean both times, it is going to take another crack or two some other time to get it down.

-edit- I should have tried lots of laser fighters sooner. Still, very good and strong challenge.