Matrix Games Forums

Hi Guys, let's talk about your Weapon/Combat Tactics!

I noticed that carriers seem to be very useless. A single PD can shred it.
A few seconds after combat started, all my bombers and fighters are dead. And that is using superior tech.
All weapons have PD potential too. Making any ships with any form of weapon a counter.
I believe fighters need more speed, so they can actually retreat and heal and MUCH more countermeasurement. Also normal weapons should have no PD ability.

Speed and range are very ímportant metrics, and I feel these matter much more than raw damage. I always use the sub design that has the most engine slots and giving it the fastest engine.

I"d like to add to this, I find fighters/bombs completely useless, they die instantly to a single PD as stated.

I've also noticed that if you set neutral on ships, and they have a PD it will try to close into PD distance,
so when I tried to make a missile boat, that had a few pd's those missile boats would charge in as if they were on aggressive,
I had to set them all to cautious, which isn't optimal if you have 2 different types of missiles with slightly different ranges.

had fighters on a mining station and a pirate attacked... the pirate wasnt moving at some point anymore... and the fighters crawled around with speed 8 away from it and with like speed 12 back towards it, so they took forever to shoot again...
also the "star BEAMS" they should have were also way slow projectiles and not a beam atall but tiny projectiles.
it was weird...

My fighters are also slower than the motherships. They can not even return to the motherships if she is moving.

Very odd.

Agree with the posters. I've found fighters to be Meh. I've found missiles to be very effective despite their lower damage numbers relative torpedoes due to to their range and fire rate. I've also found dakka (rail weapons) to be quite effective.

More ships with lower firepower seems to work more effectively than one big battleship with higher firepower.

So my planned strategy of fast missile boats and pd picket ships sounds viable.

ClassicAz wrote: Thu Mar 17, 2022 10:21 pm Agree with the posters. I've found fighters to be Meh. I've found missiles to be very effective despite their lower damage numbers relative torpedoes due to to their range and fire rate. I've also found dakka (rail weapons) to be quite effective.

More ships with lower firepower seems to work more effectively than one big battleship with higher firepower.

Have you also compared construction and maintenance cost?!?

In my experience so far say that a mix of powerful ships and cheaper smaller escorts is the best most efficient combination. The escort will draw allot of fire while the larger more powerful ships do most of the damage...

In general I find fighters to work best if you also use torpedoes or missiles as they will draw allot of PD weapons fire. Fighters on their own will not survive against a decent PD screen, which seems fair in my opinion.

fair it is, still considering the thrust to weight ratio of fighters and full sized ships, the smaller vessel should be at least twice as fast.

At the moment ships and fighters behave like a Yacht and Jetski, with marginal differences in speed.
Double Speed for fighters would be equal to helicopters and light cruisers.
while they should behave like carriers and fighter jets.

I agree that fighters should be faster, not necessarily twice as fast but fast enough to matter. Although the relationships is not really that of a carrier and a jet plane, more like that of a ship and a speed boat as they go through the same medium.

Using vectoring engines my fighters are 115 top speed and 50 degree turning per second, my fastest ship is currently the frigate at 78, but could be 90 if I put another engine on them at 11 degree turning rate per second.

Not sure we need fighters to be that much faster than carriers or other ships. Exactly how fast they should be obviously can be discussed.

Fighters definitely works best with vectoring engines... otherwise their turning speed is very low.

Dampfnudel wrote: Thu Mar 17, 2022 6:15 pm My fighters are also slower than the motherships. They can not even return to the motherships if she is moving.

Very odd.

Seems bugged if fighters are that slow. Under ship design their speed is pretty fast. They should be good at evading things. If they are in a storm have them wear one ion armor and that’ll be enough to protect them

Under ship design what is the speed of your fighter vs the carrier? Maybe there is a design flaw

Fighters can be really good.
I havent had much luck early game with fighters against pirates (havent really tried hard to get it to work)
But mid late game, my god they are good.
Had some quite late game tech that i put on some bombers/fighters
Meridian shield
The secret armor (Can´t rember it´s name that you can get from a artifact)
Firestorm torpedo (From event i was playing as the desert rats)
4 carriers (first in the tech line) all decked out with 6 medium fighter bays.
They took on first 1 Hive ships. Then 2 more jumped in finished them of at the same time and then a 4th hive ship.
I recived no damage to my carriers and still had plenty of fights and bombers left.

With the same fighter/bomber setup my mining stations had just 1 medium fighter bay. 1 mining stations got attacked by 4 Gravalix´s all 4 had a sudden dead and my station could continue it´s work

My advice with fighter and bombers is to equip them with torpeods. The higher the base damage the better. missiles has a to low base damage, shields will just simply mitigate the damage and the missile will just deal 1 point of damage. Whears as torpedos comes with much higher damage. Also they provide a screen against PD weapons, so the torpedos act as a shield for the fighters.
Beam weapons, well in close combat they will turn around and that means less firing time. Though Titan blasters can be fun on fighters as a backup weapon if you cant fit 2 torps on it.