Re: Fighters vs. Heavy Fighters - another newbie question

>	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?

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
> 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.

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
> 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?

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.
-- 
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 The Stilt Man		      stiltman@teleport.com
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