After getting very very bored of playing Tribe, I gave the good old Empire another try.
That weapons platform is one hell of an anti-fighter platform.
Sheild, 14+ armor count, .10 speed, quantum blaster, tractor beam, 3x anti fighter missile launchers. It costs in the high 900s, which is more than I prefer my frigates to cost. There is room to upgrade to an Ion cannon, or add heavier armor, but for added cost that is hard to justify. It’s great for offloading fighter defense from the expensive cruisers so they be better bruisers.
One or two supporting every 4-6 cruisers makes short work of any fighter threat as long as you have some fighters to distract any laser fighters that pose an obvious threat if and when the shields go down. I’m wondering if it would be worth dropping the shield for more armor.
Not sure if there is somthing special I can do to post a direct link to it on these forums.
This is somthing I use in “Defend Caspian IV”, not sure how well it will fare against surprise fleets. A fast rush fleet would certainly pose a concern.
Please post that same fleet, unchanged. use a map with 600 or 800 pilot cap, w/out changing the fleet you’re using or using more pilots. Then you’ll see what i mean. As it is, my fleet isn’t CLOSE to yours in size, because of the 299 pilot cap
Yes. By posting a challenge with pretty much exactly the same number of pilots that you used, you are allowing Ikohime to exchange 24 of your cruisers/frigates for 24 more fighters in his setup. To give him credit, he gave it a shot, but the deck was stacked in your favor by , oh, I’m guessing 28,000 HP?
close, only 21k HP. my FT swarm’s limit is PILOTS, not credits. keep the credit count the same; i was at 45% when you were down to 74. If i had 80k CREDITS of FT (ie, more then 3 times what i had in the posted challenge, which ran ~25k credits) i’d have DESTROYED that fleet.
I tried it v three fleets; my rebel dual laser fleet, my rebel dual rocket fleet, and my swarm rocket/laser fleet. Unsuprisingly, the FT fleet killed the most of your fighters and did the most damage
What is the point? There is no defense against 800 fighters. No armor tank can survive, no anything can survive, even if it’s only lucky shots that get through.
Seriously, do the math. 800 fighters, times a fire rate of X, blah blah blah…I could have every one of those cruisers carrying nothing but tractor beams, defense lasers, pulse lasers and then double the number of anti fighter frigates escorting them and they wouldn’t stand a chance. Maybe with the tribe I might be able to do somthing, but it would still involve a fair bit of fighter spam to have a chance.
Anyone who actually allows that many pilots surely must know that’s all he’s getting in response is fighter spam. I just don’t see the point…any relatively fighterless fleet capable of surviving an 800 fighter (and if you seriously want 800 fighters, my 270 or so is essentially a fighterless fleet) assault would be so specialized with defense and pulse lasers that it would be toothless against anything else.
That may be the only way to get anywhere in the campaign, but as long as I can control where the fight takes place, I’m not going to vountarily open the door to an unwinnable situation. FInd a way to beat it as it is.
Actually yes it’s possible to defend 100% credit worth of fighters and still put up some fights. Don’t believe me? Check out NEC1. NEC1 runs in the background of 100% fighters but they still have to fight against each others cruiser fleet. It did eventually degenerate to Tribe only but that’s another matter. And yes a random challenger can exploit this by not using fighters at all. This is why NEC/SAC was invented in the first place, as beating any one fleet with a counter has always been mindlessly easy.
That aside a fair match would be somewhere around 200 to 300 credit/pilot.
I think Ikohime’s request makes perfect sense, in light of what appeared to be the original premise of your topic. “Any fighter threat” doesn’t really describe a situation where you limit the threat to the size of your own fighter escort. At least give the poor guy a few extra pilots…
“The point” is you claimed to have an EFFECTIVE EMPIRE FT DEFENSE PLATFORM. I am yet to see an empire fleet that can handle FT over half it’s health. You gave me a quarter your health to work with, and i was able to bring you down to in the 60’s before i was auto-loss’d. I have seen Alliance Anti-Fighter frigates that can take my 40k HP FT swarms, at 16k health themselves, and knock me down to the low 10’s. There is ALWAYS a defense, even if the defense is "i kill 5 times as many of you as you do of me.
You came here making a claim, that you had the “ultimate fighter defense.” If you don’t allow us to test this the way it SHOULD be tested, to destruction, then you can’t make that claim.
If you don’t like that, tough. It’s unfair to assume otherwise.
It is impossible to win the Campaign game with an exclusively FT fleet. There are systems, and branches of the map, where fighters simply cannot go. In the early phases of the campaign, fighters are indeed essential to any fleet, because you are generally fighting greatly superior fleets at quite frequent intervals. However, complete dependence on fighters can lead to disaster because there are a significant number of fleets that are nearly impervious to fighter attacks, and if all you have are fighters you may well lose your home world with no way to take it back.
Fighters are definitely a useful part of any fleet, as are frigates. The only ship class that I have almost no use for right now is cruisers, although occasionally I will design and build one for laughs or entertainment value.
Arguing that this somehow means that the game is unbalanced is, I think, the wrong way to approach the question.
Alright, none of the default challenges allow more than 300 pilots. That’s all I play because if I have access tot he internet, I’ll play a better game.
Not having tried, nor particularly caring to try any of the NEC challenges you are talking about, I can’t imagine any conceivable way to kill the fighters off fast enough to matter. What does FT stand for btw?
Show me a cruiser or frigate design that could survive more than 5 or 10 seconds against a swarm that size. Don’t ask me to download a challenge, unless there’s some convenient way to type in the ID number and go right to it, just post the ship designs and a rough outline of the defense that doesn’t involve at lest 600 of your own fighters.
Until I see this fictional fleet that isn’t 800 fighters itself, I don’t see it being possible, and again, even if it is it would just be a bunch of ships with nothing but anti-fighter weaponry that wouldn’t be of use against anything else, which is stupid because there’s no way these tiny fighters are holding more than a days worth of air…surely they’d have to be carried into battle by a larger ship?
When I said ultimate fighter defense, I meant a cost effective way to deal with a reasonable fighter threat…reasonable being 300, the most I’ve ever seen. I’m not concerned with rocket fighters, they are harmless. I don’t see how anyone can stop so many laser fighters with cooperative, vulture, and stick together orders on them. Even if they didn’t do damage normally, and only did damage with the 3% lucky shots, no cruiser would last more than 15 seconds (a little longer, my math assumes 800 fighters arrive on target at the same time, which isn’t realistic, but neither is only doing damage with 3% lucky shots). I can’t see frigates fairing much betters even without rocket fighter dropping shileds.
Is there a way to watch someone elses battle? I’d love to see this counter you speak of, without spending days trying to come up with it myself.
Unfortunately, the challenge you posted doesn’t demonstrate the point you were trying to make. Saying “I can defeat 300 fighters, with 272 of my own plus a bunch of cruisers and frigates” is kind of a self-evident proposition, and doesn’t say anything about the effectiveness of your anti-fighter frigate design.
To really test your concept, you need to either allow more pilots, or reduce your own number of fighters.
Riktoven. You made the claim that have an effective fighter defense frigate is what kills the FT; however, it’s your fighters that do the work for you.
If you had NO fighters on that fleet, or maybe 1/10th as many as you do, i’d have a chance to effectively evaluate your design. Short of you posting your design for us to modify and work with…
(Also; your frigate’s don’t stand up for even a few seconds even WITH that FT cover; i tweek orders to deal with threats, and since i knew this fleet had was anti-FT FR i used my dual laser FT to kill FR first. It did, all of them Empire fails as an effective anti-FT race, if only because they can’t have armor thick enough to last long enough to do anything against them
A point that i’ve made many many times is that the reason FT are the most effective unit when par’d slightly higher on cost, or even up to equal or half HP. They have more guns, which simply put means they can outgun anything. I did an experiment with FR using FT weapons; guess what ended up happening? If your guess involves them not being a 10th as effective, simply because you couldn’t employ a similar number of guns…
Empire fails as an effective anti-FT race, if only because they can’t have armor thick enough to last long enough to do anything against them