I've been thinking about using heavy fighters instead of standards for the
same reason that I like the idea of using L2 screens on my ships: The extra
survivability gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, even if it isn't quite as
efficient.
How many of you use heavy fighters regularly? If you add in the carrier cost,
the upgrade to a heavy doesn't seem that expensive for what you get. Anybody
disagree?
How do you feel about using heavy interceptors or heavy attack fighters? Are
there any rules against mixing variants like that? I
wouldn't try mixing a heavy-interceptor-attack variant, but heavy or
fast seem okay to mix with the other options.
What's the best way to use fighters? Depending on who I face I'll be fighting
anything from a standard FB fleet with a few ADFC to a custom fleet with a
fairly strong area defense net. Should I hold back the fighters until I can
whittle down the escorts? Go after the escorts themselves? Concentrate on
smaller ships that are outside the main defense net?
Thanks, Joe
***
How many of you use heavy fighters regularly? If you add in the carrier cost,
the upgrade to a heavy doesn't seem that expensive for what you get. Anybody
disagree?
***
They last longer, but they don't get any extra punch. I think the cost is
about right, but YMMV, obviously.
***
How do you feel about using heavy interceptors or heavy attack fighters? Are
there any rules against mixing variants like that? I
wouldn't try mixing a heavy-interceptor-attack variant, but heavy or
fast seem okay to mix with the other options.
***
Actually, the Texaco FreeTrade Naval Service uses fighters that are
darn near heavy/attack interceptors, but I haven't worked out all
the details; as heavy gunboats, I'm assuming they are vulnerable to all ship's
gun to some extent. Believe me, their strength will be balanced against the
effervescent nature of the converted bulk
transport carriers they fly from. ;->=
Below is a snip from a note from the Nobel Jared Noble of his rules
for modular fighter design. I think it's all pre-fleet books, but
worthy a look, nonetheless. I haven't played much with it, but assumed I would
be before the TFNS would be taking to the table...
***
Here's the link to by FT stuff, including the ship design worksheet which has
been Superceded by schoon's v0.5.
http://www.alaska.net/~jnoble/FT/index.html
The modular fighter construction rules specifically are located at
http://www.alaska.net/~jnoble/FT/FT_mod_ftrs.html
***
The_Beast
-Douglas J. Evans, curmudgeon
One World, one Web, one Program - Microsoft promotional ad
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer - Adolf Hitler
> I've been thinking about using heavy fighters instead of
> How many of you use heavy fighters regularly? If you add in
It depends on what scale you're throwing fighters into.
If you're only flying, say, ten or so fighter groups for good sized task force
(e.g. ~5000 points as per my usual battles, which could probably be called a
"good sized task force") then no, it probably isn't too expensive to throw
heavy fighters into it rather than regulars.
However, a task force consisting primarily of carriers can throw
_fourty_
fighter groups without hardly breaking a sweat. If you wanted to get really,
really ridiculous and number-crunch your carriers to throw the maximum
number of fighters for the least cost possible, the most efficient design you
can
get is to build a 23-mass fragile-hulled varmint with thrust 1 and two
fighter bays; carrier plus fighter groups is 123 points, so for 5000 points
you could build fourty of these and one 12-mass fragile-hulled critter
along the same lines, for a total of 81 (normal) fighter groups. If you were
to use heavy fighters you'd be down somewhere in the 60's. The side with more
fighters could pretty trivially go for about 25-40% or so in
interceptors at no cost, give themselves a high likelihood of winning the
dogfights with
the heavies, and _still_ have enough striking power to shred most any
enemy task force that came along.
So, as stated, it depends on your scale. Personally, I never use them. They
don't give you enough extra help for the cost, and anyone equipping
all-normals
can just swap off interceptors on a percentage of their fighters to hedge
their bets against encountering heavies if they're worried about losing their
striking power.
> How do you feel about using heavy interceptors or heavy attack
We _used_ to allow this (pre-FB1) but we don't any more. The rules in
FT/MT
suggested that you could mix them (though it probably was up to house rules)
but don't really give a "yes or no" answer on it. FB1, to me, seems to imply
pretty strongly that you shouldn't.
Whatever the case, my own experience is that if you allow it, then you wind
up with a paper-rock-scissors situation with heavy interceptors.
(Granted,
this was in pre-FB1 rules, and we didn't use fighter morale... one or
the
other of these _might_ change things, but I'd tend to doubt it.) That's
because heavy interceptors will shred every other fighter mix, but they're a
very expensive piece of uselessness against enemy forces that don't use
fighters. Carrier-v-carrier battles where one side has heavy
interceptors and the other doesn't very quickly devolve into a game where the
"hints" form up a Chinese Wall and devour the opposition's fighters, then make
way for the strike force of torpedo bombers behind them to similarly devour
the opposition's ships. There is no other fighter mix that can contend with
the
hints; heavies give up a 4-to-3 kill ratio, ints give up a 3-to-2, and
normals
give up a 2-to-1. However, that logic only works if your enemy is
actually
_carrying_ fighters. If you decide that "hints" are a good anti-fighter
weapon (and they are) but your enemy doesn't bother stocking fighters of their
own, you've basically wasted a lot of expensive ordnance. Which means that,
when you're deciding your fighter complements, your first question, which
might decide the game straight off, becomes a guess as to whether your
opponent is going to also put out a good number of fighters. If you guess
wrong either way, you may as well not bother with fighters at all.
We didn't like this, so even before FB1's implication that the features can't
be mixed, we had already prohibited heavy interceptors (though we allowed
basically any other mix you wanted). When FB1 came out, we extended this to a
general rule that you only are allowed to use one specialization choice per
group of fighters.
> What's the best way to use fighters? Depending on who I face
First off, I'll stick out the caveat again that in my circles we don't use the
fighter morale rules at all, and we consider the six-fighter-per-group
number to be nothing more than an arbitrary convenience to tell you how many
fighter markers to stick on the board. A number of (optional) rules have come
up since I started playing the game that have made a good deal of hay out of
that number, and my groups simply don't use them. Fighters can recombine into
bigger groups, fire at (and be fired upon) in those groups, and in all cases
they're considered one larger squadron when they fire and fly together
(i.e.
if a fighter group rolls more than 6 casualties when firing at such a scrum,
it all rolls over; we just roll up the whole pile of damage and just peel off
however many groups of 6 we need).
That said, my usual tactics with fighters go about like this:
1. Use a lot of them. There's not a terrible amount of point in flying
fighters if you don't at least halfway expect to have a superior number of
them to your opponent.
2. Use all regular fighters. They're the cheapest things out there and they
can deal with the most possible combinations of potential enemies with the
least risk. If your enemy brings enough fighters to beat yours or if he brings
higher quality fighters to beat yours, you have the fallback position
that your ship-to-ship armament will probably be superior to theirs and
when their fighters are through with yours they probably won't have enough
striking power left to offset this advantage. Torpedo bombers and heavy
fighters are about the only thing I'd even consider working with other than
regulars, but
both of them are expensive gambles -- bombers will force their side to
stock up on interceptors if they want to win any fighter battles, which
diminishes the usefulness of their added striking power, and you may not gain
much from
it anyway because your enemy's PDS are _always_ going to fire at your
bombers first even if you don't go with interceptors; heavy fighters also
diminish their striking power (because they're less cost efficient) in
exchange for a relatively insignificant boost in survivability.
3. Have a backup plan in case your opposition throws a strong area defense
grid at you. I use one of two backup plans, myself. Either I'll throw fast
skirmish ships with needle beams at them in order to take down their ADFC's,
or I'll throw plasma bolts to give that PDS something else to shoot at.
4. Have the bulk of your fighters fire at as few ships as you can get away
with at once. This has two effects. First, if your enemy doesn't have ADFC,
you're minimizing your fighters' exposure to PDS fire for the amount of damage
you'll be doing. Second, you'll be maxmizing your chances of destroying your
opponent's ships outright and thereby making sure that those PDS that fired at
you won't be there next time.
5. All other things being equal, if you have a choice between firing at ships
with ADFC and ships without them, fire at the ones _with_ them first.
The principle here is the same as the previous one: minimize your PDS exposure
for the damage you inflict. Unless the enemy has a non-ADFC ship that
simply is a much greater threat than the ADFC escorts (e.g. they have a giant
dreadnought and a bunch of unarmed escorts) you will pretty much always want
to aim at diminishing their ability to harm your fighters first and then hit
them hard once your fighters are free to attack.
The general thinking I subscribe to with fighters is, behind all these
details, pretty simple: get overwhelming fighter superiority and annihilate
your opponent one ship after the next, or it's generally not worth the bother
of stocking fighters at all.
> Joseph L. Poulin wrote:
> I've been thinking about using heavy fighters instead of
There are lots of weapons which ignore screens, but only three which
ignore the Heavy modification - and of those three the human B1 and the
Kra'Vak K1 guns are rather weak to begin with :-/
> How many of you use heavy fighters regularly? If you add in
Not me. IMO the Heavy fighters are pretty well balanced against the other
types (and no, I wasn't involved in determining those points costs).
> How do you feel about using heavy interceptors or heavy attack
I'd probably also protest if someone equips a single squadron with more than
one armament option, unless they pay extra points to do so.
Interceptor vs fighters with Standard vs ships is IIRC worth about +1
pt per fighter (+6 per squadron) and combining Interceptor with Attack
or Torpedo is worth +2 per fighter in addition to the cost of the
Attack or Torpedo option; but as long as each fighter only has one set of guns
it can combine any engine, fuel tank and fuselage options it wants for the
points costs specified in FB1.
> What's the best way to use fighters? Depending on who I face
As you say it depends entirely on what fleet you're facing. Against a
closely packed custom-built ADFC phalanx I usually hold back until the
enemy breaks formation or I destroy some of the ADFCs, and I'll usually
concentrate the fighters against one or a few targets. Killing reteating
cripples is a common fighter task in such battles. Against Phalons I tend to
spread the attacks out to draw Pulser fire away from my ships, or hit their
escorts to clear the way for a missile launch
(for some reason Phalons are wary of shooting down well-aimed missiles
with plasma bolts larger than strength-2 <g>); and against an FB1 fleet
I may do either... the most important word here is "usually", I think. If you
stick rigidly to a single tactic your opponents will soon
develop a counter-tactic and beat you :-/
Regards,