Fighter Design?

[Robb]

How do you guys design later model fighters? I've generally been going with the best gun, crew/propulsion enhancements, and armor that I can with available mass. I've been thinking about going with just a gun and little or no armor/enhancements to drive down upfront cost and maintenance. Anyone tried that approach? If so, any success doing so?

[djrr]

I have done that successfully. I usually add 2 points to durability to give me a bigger hull and make sure I have a repair carrier to cycle fighters back for repair as needed. It works pretty well until the Xenos build a lot of higher level missle ships and can hit one ship several times in a turn for 20 or 30 damage each time.

[jayte]

Later in the game, I think you need to look at it from the other angle. Being that fighters are the only repairable units, I equip them with more defensive and evasive loadouts with precision strike. Keeping fighters on the front line to absorb the hits and repairing them is far less costly than dealing with low health slowly repairing cruisers or carriers.

And if they die, hey they're usually only about 5 turns to replace.

[jhester]

I've had pretty good success with heavy guns and low/no armor. I generally put more points into gun decks and durability to give them good hitting power as well as enough HP to be able to hang in the fight longer. Barrage and Precision Barrage 3 for the talents, then I try to cram either a +dmg upgrade to increase the punch or +defensive upgrade to offset the lack of armor. I will sometimes go with variants of both depending on whether or not I want the fighter to be able to operate a little further away from carrier support. Armor is usually the last thing I add in a fighter and even then it's only if I have spare weight allocation. Having said all of this, I haven't yet played on a higher difficulty than Normal so I'm not sure if different tactics would be required.

[Robb]

I've started a new game and haven't progressed far enough to really try anything yet but I'm going to try the high armor/defense approach Jayte suggested this game.
What kind of ratio cruisers to fighters do you guys use when building your fleets? I dedicate my cruisers to guns or torps and usually have around 1.5x fighters to cruisers. I think I'm going to try to get closer to a 2x ratio this game.

[jayte]

Aug 13, 2014 6:39:12 GMT -5 Robb said:

I've started a new game and haven't progressed far enough to really try anything yet but I'm going to try the high armor/defense approach Jayte suggested this game.
What kind of ratio cruisers to fighters do you guys use when building your fleets? I dedicate my cruisers to guns or torps and usually have around 1.5x fighters to cruisers. I think I'm going to try to get closer to a 2x ratio this game.

At a certain point, most of your damage comes from torpedo cruisers.  That is when I decide to armor up the fighters.

This usually happens when you're techhed out.  Early and midgame I would definitely go for fast reactor 7 (4 mp 2 AP) heavy gun low armor fighters - just keep repair things out.  In fact, for early game and deep into midgame, I use fighter damage for everything.

For clarity, I define midgame as when you start to push back and actively engage the xeno on their terrain.  I am playing on impossible now, and used exclusively fighters and a few repairs all the way until after I had taken a few of their colonies.  Once I set in on the new territory, I then started to build cruisers.

Now that I've teched out the top tree completely, battlecruisers and regular cruisers will be the source of the majority of my damage.  A torpedo hits for like 58? damage or more.  The xeno mass driver ships hit for like 60 damage against unarmored targets - they will chew you apart if you don't have some meat blocking them.  Since fighters tend to miss a lot vs the high rank ships (and you can't even put a good gun on them anyway...), their role changes as the game progresses.

[Robb]

Jayte, thanks for the advice. My current game is progressing nicely with a fleet made of almost exclusively of fighters, assault fighters and carriers.

[Cory Trese]

I have found that Cruisers with Torpedoes become super critical in late game.

This trend will only continue as the Xeno's ship designs extend beyond rating 15.

[Officer Genious]

Aug 11, 2014 12:36:37 GMT -5 jayte said:

Later in the game, I think you need to look at it from the other angle. Being that fighters are the only repairable units, I equip them with more defensive and evasive loadouts with precision strike. Keeping fighters on the front line to absorb the hits and repairing them is far less costly than dealing with low health slowly repairing cruisers or carriers.

And if they die, hey they're usually only about 5 turns to replace.

Trying this approach on Hard as I can finally afford a serious defense ring around a planet near two xeno worlds. I also have a dedicated Healer ship and two Assaults- an old model and a tankier new model.

I'll let you know what happens.

[Cory Trese]

This is where the Cruiser really shines -- once you've got a ring of fighters to absorb the melee combat, they can stand back and deal out hyperwarp death with torps!