Fighters! What are they good for?

[Rhinestone Cowboy]

Has anybody tried this fighter strategy?

Build massive amounts of your favorite fighters in a border system, Pre-invasion time. When the time is rightmove them to the wormholes and use carriers/transports to drop them on the other side. (after the wormhole defenses are taken care of)

Instead of tying up your carriers in the fleet they can keep dumping fighters into the front lines.

If you really like micromanagement you can have a string of fighters moving from ALL your colonies towards a front line.

Carriers strictly become Ferries (don't need a lot of engines or weapons or armor)

I have not tried this vs a human opponent yet, but it certainly overwhelms the AI's.

It really helps keeping the big warships in one piece while the unused colony build queues pump out the fighters.

Just a thought.

RhineStone Cowboy

[Q]

I like fighters very much and use them heavily. But a word of warning: If your enemy has ships with lot of PDC and phased polaron beams a combat with fighters alone might turn out very bad for you: I lost about 2500 heavy fighter against an AI empire with such designed ships! If you combine fighters with ships the polaron beams will probably be used against the ships and therefore the death toll of the fighters is much less.

[TallTroll]

If your enemy has a fleet equipped with lots of PDC and PPB, use ships with Phased Shields (if available) or Armour, no normal shields and strictly direct fire weapons. PPB doesn't do much raw damage, and it'll take forever to chip through the armour. Just leave fighters/seekers out of it.

Match your strength to the enemies weaknesses.

Fighters are great, if you use them for the right missions. The point is to use them as cheap attrition units. Deploy them in huge numbers, expect massive losses, but with the right equipment and tactics, they can kill ships many, many times their own value. Also, you can produce them anywhere, you don't have to occupy your "real" shipyards time with them.

A heavy fighter with a pair of Small Rocket Pod IIIs can do a ridiculous amount of damage. 2 or 3 solid hits can wreck a BC, unless its all armour/shields. Then move in your "real" ships to finish off the cripples, and pick up the experience. You'll lose lots of fighters, but hey, so what? They are really cheap and easy to replace

I usually create specialist carrier fleets, with 2 or 3 line carriers, based on a carrier hull, and 1 or 2 Aux CVs, which are transports kitted out to carry lots of cargo, with a few launch bays. Overall the fleet can launch loads of fighters, and after the fight, you transfer fighters from the transports to the line carriers. Then in the next fight, you can still put loads of fighters on the board quickly, and your losses don't matter so much (just keep topping up your Aux CVs). Mix in a few dedicated PDC ships, and a few real warships, depending on who you are fighting, and what equipment they use, and away you go. So long as you keep the fleet topped off with fighters, and don't let it fight a fleet that can kill the carriers, you can wreak havoc.

When the sector gets too hot, run away. A smart enemy will chase you with a PDC-heavy fleet. Thats when you jump the other direct fire weapon fleet on him. The PDCs become dead weight, and he loses again

If rearranging your ship production is difficult, use an alternative "molasses" strategy. Mix carriers with ships that carry loads of seekers. Design a "dummy" fighter, just cockpit/life support/engines, and put loads of them on your carriers. Launch seekers, follow up with a wave of "dummy" fighters. These will soak up most of the PDC for the turm. THEN move the wave of assault fighters in (1 x Small Rocket Pod, fill up with Kamikaze warheads). Once again, you'll lose loads of fighters, but you'll kill a LOT of ships. I think you'll be happy with the exchange

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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If your enemy has a fleet equipped with lots of PDC and PPB, use ships with Phased Shields (if available) or Armour, no normal shields and strictly direct fire weapons. PPB doesn't do much raw damage, and it'll take forever to chip through the armour.

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I am afraid that is not true at all.
PPBs have the highest damage Ratings aside from RipperBeams. 2.0 down to 1.67 at max range.
Rippers have a rating of 2.5, but short range.
APBs rate 2.1 at point blank range, but fade to 1.5 at max range.
Only MesonbLasters and racial-tech weapons even come close.

To fight PPBs, you need to stay out of range and use the big, inefficient guns like WMG.

(For a full list of damage Ratings, see This Thread)

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 24 October 2001).]

[Cheeze]

I agree that Phased Polaron beams seem to be the most effective weapon over most of the game. I wonder if they should have been designed more like the fighter PPB, which is not very good on damage save that it skips regular shields. The only difficulty to PPB's is their cost. Having ships largely carrying this weapon tends to be much more expensive than those that do not.

[dmm]

Fighters are great if you have lots of small colonies that are maxed-out with facilities. Just keep building fighters. Plus, they don't entail maintenance costs.

[TallTroll]

quote:

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>> If your enemy has a fleet equipped with lots of PDC and PPB, use ships with Phased Shields (if available) or Armour, no normal shields and strictly direct fire weapons. PPB doesn't do much raw damage, and it'll take forever to chip through the armour.

I am afraid that is not true at all.
PPBs have the highest damage Ratings aside from RipperBeams. 2.0 down to 1.67 at max range

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Sorry, I didn't express that well. Whilst I agree that PPBs do plenty Dam/kT/turn, that isn't the only factor. Firstly I should explain that I ususally take Organic and Propulsion experts traits. Thus, I can get some neat guns, Organic Armour, and I usually have ships that are faster than their opponents on the tac combat board.

As PPBs are quite short ranged, I find I can dance out of their reach for a turn or two, getting unanswered fire. Then there is a turn at range 5-6, where my MBs are still better than PPBs, and because I concentrate the fleets fire on a few ships to get cripples, not kills, I have usually spread him out so I'm only fighting half his fleet. As I'm using Kick-*** Organic Armour, I can usually take one volley without significant damage. Then I can defeat the rest of his fleet in detail, just mopping up. I'll take damage, probably lose a ship or two, but hey, I've trashed the enemy fleet

Also, a race can't be strong in everything. If they have big PPBs available, they have probably sacrificed elsewhere, so ships are poorly protected, or slow, or just can't carry enough guns, something. By the time the game has gone far enough that they can correct these flaws, I find that economics wins wars, not weapons. If my fleet is 300 LCs armed with DUC Is, I'll pulverise a dozen high-tech BBs with PPBs. I'll take big losses, sure, but if I can AFFORD those losses, who cares?

[Baron Munchausen]

To address the original topic, fighters are good for lots of things. You can make them easier to construct by reducing the hull cost from ten times the hull size to maybe five times. Then, use them in the classic "swarm of ants" fashion and they can be quite deadly. I think they are a bit vulnerable because of the short range of their weapons relative to ship-based weapons but this is where the numbers come in.

As for the other topics that have cropped up here:

Missiles and PDC are a problem. Since the AI is not smart enough to adjust its ship designs for the opponent it is facing you pretty much have to put PDC in the default designs of all AI ships. But this then makes the AI races designed to favor missiles very weak in the mid and late game. I hope, since MM is finally adding new features to the game, that a way to increase missile ECM will be added, or maybe even special capabilities like multiple launches in a single turn or something. We shall see.

PPB and other weapons: Yes, the PPB is a very nice weapon. Now that the Emissive Armor function works correctly every race has an effective counter-measure, not just the Organic and Crystalline tech races. When you run up against someone using PPB research Emissive Armor if you haven't already and cram your ships with it. Phased shields are an option too, of course, but more expensive in research points.

Even so, weapons are not everything. Superior tactics and just over-whelming numbers can beat any technology. I don't think the PPB is anywhere near as unbalancing relative to other weapons as the PDC/missile problem. At least, not for humans. The AI of course cannot cope with anything.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 25 October 2001).]