Is Fighters firing first so bad?

[Target]

Note 80 AD at your fleet not ship. It's the crits that will probebly hurt the most. We say 12 fighters can surround just from when used counters.

Avengers can drop all it's fighters in 2 turns with no scramble scramble.
Once fleets are close e-mine become very limited as you can't accidently hit your own ships and most are fwd arc only. You also have to have a large amount of e-mines too make this very hard to use. Avengers are tough and can withstand a beating trying to close the range probably moving at 10.5 " to get quicker and get behind you. Most e-mine ships are lightly armed otherwise.
When a play my Centauri against narn i don't drop my fighters till im close real close.
The best fleet i could think of against a 5 avenger fleet would be 2 G'Quans, 2 G'Karith. Remembering the avengers will close to fire at you so that is more firepower not real scary or anything. That is the hardest it's going to get for the EA. Then they might only have 3 Avengers (24) furies, 3 Hermes (3) and 2 Sags . Can you say crit heaven.
Scout Saucers aren't anti fighter because they fire after the fighters and they ignore stealth. Hermes is going to take 1 fighter every 2 turns. Waste of a missle since you come with a fury.
The real problem with this fleet is that the Avenger is battle lvl ship in the raid slot for Early years. 1 raid pt is 9 furies but you can get 8 with a hull 5 40 hit ship.
If people start taking flights of fighters instead ships your ships die you genarally lose and you have less. Have fighters fire in groups and all the problems go away.

 

[Silvereye]

The best fleet i could think of against a 5 avenger fleet would be 2 G'Quans, 2 G'Karith.

Nah, sod the G'Quans, just go for a straight G'Karith fleet, Forward and Aft, non Slow-Loading e-mines? Or perhaps add in some Ka'Tocs for when the debris of dead fighters clears, but then 60 AD of vanilla e-mine damage is likely to put a crimp on a carrier after a turn or two.

 

[Target]

Only range 20 though. Fighters could get through. Avengers can hurt G kariths themselves.

 

[Silvereye]

20" is enough; a Starfury can only Afterburn 18" and Thunderbolts 15". The e-mines have a diameter of 3", so you can feasably hit targets 23" from the G'Karith. Also the secondary weapons on the G'Karith have a slightly longer range on the Fore arc then the Avenger.

Thing is, this is what I like about this game. Most of the time if Player A breaks out a twinky über-fleet, Player B can break out its nemesis.

 

[katadder]

but obviously not the Nemesis cos then people would laugh and point at you

 

[Target]

yeah the e-mines are defindnately the way to go against this fleet. The point about 23 " range the starfuries can sit outside till next turn thats why thought the G'Quan would more usefeul. All stopping when avengers are near is asking to be boarded. It would be all over for most fleets if early years had t-bolts. The problem of fighters firing first is now crap loads of fighters become deadly again espescially if you don't have e-mines. Luckily most people don't have 40 bases of fighters.

 

[JayRaider]

I had Huge reservations about this new rule when it was introduced. It didn't feel right.
However i've definitely come to enjoy it, it plays good and gave an added depth to fighters and their usage.
Its not perfect but i think its a step in the right direction. 8)

 

[Ripple]

<just withdrawing my comment, no time to write it up right.>

Ripple

 

[Reaverman]

20" is enough; a Starfury can only Afterburn 18" and Thunderbolts 15". The e-mines have a diameter of 3", so you can feasably hit targets 23" from the G'Karith. Also the secondary weapons on the G'Karith have a slightly longer range on the Fore arc then the Avenger.

Thing is, this is what I like about this game. Most of the time if Player A breaks out a twinky über-fleet, Player B can break out its nemesis.

Everyone keeps forgetting the Wide Burst E-Mine, its got a 5" radius. So it can have a range of up to 35" (from regular E-Mine launchers). It also means they have a 10" blast template too.

What some people miss, is that whilst they can space their flighters out to avoid the E-Mines. They are still playing right into the Narns tactics, since he's minimising the effectiveness of the enemy flights.

 

[Silvereye]

But you cannot put wide burst mines on a G'Karith.

Target@ But if you keep your fighters at more than 23" away from the G'Karith fleet to avoid the pulsar mines, you suddenly have just the 5 Avangers closing rapidly and eating a lot of AD each turn. The G'Kariths would have done their job in this instance in keeping the fighters out of the fight.

katader@ at least a Nemesis looks good, and is spikey enough to take someones eye out.

 

[Celisasu]

Yeah, even if the G'Karith only takes one or two fighter flights out with it's pulsar mines, if it's kept the enemy fighters away then it's done it's job. And if it does take out a bunch of flights then it's done an even better job.

 

[Silvereye]

They come with free Frazi's too.

 

[Target]

Only problem with G'Karith fleet it's no good against anything that isn't Super fighter fleet while the 5 avenger fleet is good every thing but a super e-mine fleet. The Gkariths will only do about 11pts a round to a venger if 10 fire at her. She has 40 hits, won't phase it much & no crits.
If was going to have 5 pt raid fleet i would go 2 avengers, 1 nova, 2 sags, 4 Hermes. 20 flights of furies is more than enough, lots of missles and the Nova.
So narn are safe if they know you are going to have 5 avenger fleet but lots of other races will get their butt kicked and there is nothing they do to stop it. Taking wings might stop the fighters but you when you lose your caps which have less of, you lose the game a lot of the time.

 

[Palthor]

Would not a solution be to allow those ships which have an Anti-Fighter weapon to fire them at those fighters attacking it before the fighters fire.

Those ships with no anti-fighter weapons could be still overpowered by fighter attacks, but those with anti-fighter weapons have at the very least a means of deterring an attack.

It would require some record keeping of which anti-fighter systems had been fired prior to the activation of that ship, but this could be easily done via using counters etc.

Those ships not under fighter attack could use thier anti-fighter weapons once activated as normal and fire at anything in range.

 

[Lord David the Denied]

How about having AF guns work a bit like interceptors? Say you've got a ship with turreted AF weapons and 4AD for them. Four fighter flights attack it and fire their weapons, calculate damage, blah blah, then the AF guns immediately fire back, splitting their AD against the attacking fighters that are in arc. In this case, 1AD per attacking flight.

In this way AF guns would privide at least some protection without totally nuetering fighter attacks, and you could still overwhelm the AF guns with numbers of flights.

Any thoughts?

 

[philogara_mk2]

How about having AF guns work a bit like interceptors? Say you've got a ship with turreted AF weapons and 4AD for them. Four fighter flights attack it and fire their weapons, calculate damage, blah blah, then the AF guns immediately fire back, splitting their AD against the attacking fighters that are in arc. In this case, 1AD per attacking flight.

In this way AF guns would privide at least some protection without totally nuetering fighter attacks, and you could still overwhelm the AF guns with numbers of flights.

Any thoughts?

Not sure how this makes much diffence, as far as I can tell from above, the fighters are still firing first. Or are you suggesting firing/damage is simultaneous?

Phil

 

[Celisasu]

Only problem with G'Karith fleet it's no good against anything that isn't Super fighter fleet while the 5 avenger fleet is good every thing but a super e-mine fleet. The Gkariths will only do about 11pts a round to a venger if 10 fire at her. She has 40 hits, won't phase it much & no crits.
If was going to have 5 pt raid fleet i would go 2 avengers, 1 nova, 2 sags, 4 Hermes. 20 flights of furies is more than enough, lots of missles and the Nova.
So narn are safe if they know you are going to have 5 avenger fleet but lots of other races will get their butt kicked and there is nothing they do to stop it. Taking wings might stop the fighters but you when you lose your caps which have less of, you lose the game a lot of the time.

I don't think they're saying use 10 G'Kariths. A mix of other ships with two or three G'Kariths mixed on. The problem is that this weakens the fleet against fleets that aren't fighter heavy although not as completely as a 10 G'Karith fleet does.

Of course at the higher priorities it's better to go with something using proper E-Mines just for that 30" range. The 20"(23" counting the burst) range on the G'Karith makes using them tricky as you can accidently find yourself in range of fighters if you aren't careful.

And it doesn't change the problem that the masses of fighters are deforming the environment, especially at lower priorities where ships have lower hulls and damage scores thus being more vulnerable to being swarmed before they can shoot back.

 

[Target]

Yeah my corvans get a pasting from EA now.
Had a 8pt raid Centauri vs 5pt early EA & 5 pt Narn (they jumped in turn 3) game on sat night. We were playin fighters fire in groups of four also had house rules that scrap the the dogfighting, fighters jsut fire at each other with the dogfight score modifying dodge. It just seemed to work real good. I was firing my Sentri's to stop my Corvans getting mugged or strip interceptors some of the time firing that ship thats just above being crippled. The game was a lot fun and we thought it was due to the way we play fighters.
If you don't have the dogfight roll just shoot instead it gets rid of the confusion about supporting flights. If you are supporting there is just more dodges to make when they shoot at you. Escorting flights just automatically shoot before the attackers.
Centauri lost 7-5, my Balvarian got boarded, a undamaged dargan got 6-6 with a flash missle so my primus jumped out, my Dargan & Primus messed up and didn't kill the Varnic which was heading into Gravity well that was make come out behind my Primus next turn after killing the remaining Dargan. More 6-* crits arggh.

 

[Ripple]

Celisasu hit it on the head...its the lower pls fights that see the strangest deformations and many of the anti-fighter specific things you can do, weaken you against capitol ships.

Ripple

 

[Silvereye]

True, but I'd expect 1 patrol of most Auxillary to be able to stand a good chance of ganking 1 patrol of Ships