Fighters! What are they good for?

[Saxon]

Fighters. They worked for Luke Skywalker, how come I don�t see much in the forums about them.

I have never played with them, so please share your experiences. I hear they are good for system and warp point defense. I know you can eat them up with some decent point defense cannons.

What do people think? Waste of time and research or valuable addition to the armory?

[Seik]

I like fighters and use them much in early and midgame phase.

Vs.AI they will help because the AI mostly did nt put enough PDC onboard.
Vs.human players ... well, they use it to counter my fighters.

In the end-phase (all-tech, much resources) fleets tend to be much bigger - and so there is also much more PDC.
I think fighters are not worth building them for such battles.

I use fighters to hunt down such little raider/-fleets because one carrier can fight a stand alone battle with say 75 medium fighters easily vs. 3-5 Dreadnoughts and lost only one half of his fighters.

[Q]

Fighters are extremely valuable IMO.
First build them whenever you have spare resources. You can store the fighters and you don't have to pay maintenance. They are a very good defence for colonies (same reasons as above) and in battles between large fleets, that would be otherwise more or less equal, they will decide who wins. They give you a important additional fire power. And Last but not least the famous allegiance subverter does not work against fighters, so they are a must against psychic races.
However you will always lose more or less of them in battle. Therefore if I have enough ships to defeat the enemy I don't use them but keep them as reserve.

[CW]

When you are near the end of the game with lots of techs, a single heavy carrier with 100 or so heavy fighters armed with rocket packs or time distortion burst can be very devestating. I'm sure that not all of your colonies have a shipyard and some of them have nothing to build after being filled up with facilities. Why waste their build queues?

[dogscoff]

I oftn find myslf using fighters as an emergency defence: If an enemy has managed to get into an undefended system and is only one turn away from my planets, fighters are the best defence I can build in just one turn:

Sure, I could build some weapons platforms or sats but one turn's worth of weapons platforms isn't much good. However, one turn's worth of fighters is worth more becasue it's one turn x several planets. You can group them up next turn and they will the equivalent of a good ship which would otherwise take several turns to build.

Think of it as a way of spreading a ship's build queue across several planets in order to get it built quicker.

The problem is that fighters can't move immediatly after launching=-(

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[Taqwus]

Fighters can also have higher combat speed than any ship, which is nice for nailing fleets whose ships are designed for long-range fighting.

And, of course, they're nice against missile-heavy fleets...

But yes, the main use would be emergency defense. Fighters don't take maintenance, and ones in planetary storage don't count against the unit limit, so you can stockpile large numbers of fighters. As long as you have early warning (like cloaked sensor/scanner satellites up to two systems away from your colonies), you can launch 'em faster than you can get a defense fleet there. Unless the game's progressed to warp-point-opening combat, of course, in which case offense wins. *shrug*

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