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[qsdoosix]

Hello every one. I just got a very unpleasant experience in this game.

I started as hegemony with 2 cruiser and 2 destroyer. And get intercepted by a pirate fleet with about 8 frigate+destroyer (I can't tell what exact class it is, but some of them can blink around to avoid damage). I thought it should be easy, but i'm wrong. I was totally defeated by that fleet and now feel very frustrated about it.

The one i'm chasing just stay about 1000m away from me while all others stay away from the battle. I have no way to do anything about it. Then after 20 minutes chasing i lost all my Combat Readiness and lose the fight. I just wondering is there any way i can deal with this kind of behavior? I just start the game and haven't get any Carrier yet. And actually i think even if i had one, my drones can't do much either.

Now i feel there is no way to win such a quick swarm-ish thing. Maybe a Battleship sized weapon can help a bit? i don't know but surely i won't have it any soon. So what is the point of the upper-class ship to exist?

[Igncom1]

Are you playing with mods? As you can only start with 2 frigates in the base game.

One cruiser should be enough for that match up when player controlled, with the others just order them to a single point on the map and don't split up. Frigates can rarely win in a straight up fight and must rely on flanking and swarming to succeed. Don't let them flank.

Frigates will try to avoid your weapon range if possible and when out numbered, try to kill off the enemy destroyers with your high range cruisers and then have your own destroyers attacks the enemy frigates. If they get too brave rush in with the cruisers and kill anyone who lingers in your range.

Destroyers and frigates espically have very low combat readiness timers, so you should be outlasting the enemy with your cruisers.

What ship classes are you using and with what weapons? What tactics are you employing? Are you commanding a cruiser or a destroyer into battle personally? The game isn't really designed for you to not be piloting as player skill easily trumps AI subroutines.

What ship classes are you fighting? Phase skimmers like Wolf frigates are hard to catch, with the full phase frigates being near impossible. But most pirate trash should be easy to kill. Most won't even have shields.

[Megas]

You have experienced cowardly AI that loves to turtle, and would make the Spathi (from Star Control) proud.  The easiest way to counter that nonsense is to bring fighters - lots of them.  Unfortunately, the OP stated about not getting enough carriers to be a viable option.

Two cruisers and two destroyers... what happened to the starter frigates?  Gone?  Did you buy the bigger ships, or find them?  Did you play the tutorial?  If not, do it for your next game!  You get some free clunkers - Hammerhead, Wolf, and Condor.  Condor is probably the most useful.

Four of your ships vs. eight of them?  Yes, do not split up your fleet in that case.  In that fight, the enemy did not outnumber you enough for them to surround and gang-up on your fleet.

If your big ships have no means to catch the enemy, your only hope is to outlast the enemy with peak performance/CR advantage, and kill them while they are at 0 CR.  Put Hardened Subsystems on everything, even if it hurts.  AI loves to turtle way too much, even with more aggressive behaviors, which causes fights to drag on.  Also, get Fleet Logistics 3 for maximum CR boost for the whole fleet.  (The other levels also feature very nice perks.)  It is a boring way to fight, but it is effective.  Do not chase enemy ships you have no hope of catching.  The enemy AI will happily kite indefinitely.  If you must stand off in a deathball of your own, and you have the peak performance advantage, wait until the enemy runs out of CR first, then kill them.

Ultimately, you want a massive fighter swarm to deal with enemy fleets with weaker but numerous ships like these.  Get Fleet Doctrine 3 to beef those fighters up.

Get Coordinated Maneuvers 1 and Electronic Warfare 1.  You want the minor fleetwide speed and range buffs from the start to have either an advantage at best or parity at worst.  Yes, once you fight enemies other than pirates, they will have skills too!

[Sarissofoi]

You playing Nex and Dyna sector?
I bet you play Dyna sector.

[qsdoosix]

You have experienced cowardly AI that loves to turtle, and would make the Spathi (from Star Control) proud.  The easiest way to counter that nonsense is to bring fighters - lots of them.  Unfortunately, the OP stated about not getting enough carriers to be a viable option.

Two cruisers and two destroyers... what happened to the starter frigates?  Gone?  Did you buy the bigger ships, or find them?  Did you play the tutorial?  If not, do it for your next game!  You get some free clunkers - Hammerhead, Wolf, and Condor.  Condor is probably the most useful.

Four of your ships vs. eight of them?  Yes, do not split up your fleet in that case.  In that fight, the enemy did not outnumber you enough for them to surround and gang-up on your fleet.

If your big ships have no means to catch the enemy, your only hope is to outlast the enemy with peak performance/CR advantage, and kill them while they are at 0 CR.  Put Hardened Subsystems on everything, even if it hurts.  AI loves to turtle way too much, even with more aggressive behaviors, which causes fights to drag on.  Also, get Fleet Logistics 3 for maximum CR boost for the whole fleet.  (The other levels also feature very nice perks.)  It is a boring way to fight, but it is effective.  Do not chase enemy ships you have no hope of catching.  The enemy AI will happily kite indefinitely.  If you must stand off in a deathball of your own, and you have the peak performance advantage, wait until the enemy runs out of CR first, then kill them.

Ultimately, you want a massive fighter swarm to deal with enemy fleets with weaker but numerous ships like these.  Get Fleet Doctrine 3 to beef those fighters up.

Get Coordinated Maneuvers 1 and Electronic Warfare 1.  You want the minor fleetwide speed and range buffs from the start to have either an advantage at best or parity at worst.  Yes, once you fight enemies other than pirates, they will have skills too!

Yes i'm playing with a mod called DynaSector. It allows me to pick my start up, so i go with the hegemony medium start, which gave me 2 Cruiser and 2 Destroyer at beginning. Sorry my first language is not English so i can't tell what is the type of that cruiser, but it start with rapid shooting 700 meter range kinetic weapon and many machine guns.

And yes, i'n not splitting my fleet, i order everyone to guard me and maintain formation to push forward as i'm expecting some harassment. But the problem is, it feels only the one i'm actually chasing off is in combat, and all others are way out of battle, i doubt if they are losing any peak performance time at all.

[Sarissofoi]

Yes i'm playing with a mod called DynaSector.

Well your first mistake. Dyna is cool don't get me wrong but its also much harder than vanilla.
Next time get cheap carrier with talons and let your gays chase just add them some escorts(like one buddy protecting the other).
You can also invest in long range weapons and add Hardened subsystems for longer peak so you outlive enemy.
 

[Thaago]

On your destroyers, put on Unstable Injector. The range penalty hurts but if you are fighting frigates you need the speed. You could also try using safety overrides. It drastically changes ships into high speed, low range, low duration brawlers. If you find some heavy machine guns and the high explosive rotary cannons (forget the name) then go nuts.

On your cruisers, are you using the Dedicated Targetting core? Its basically a mandatory hullmod. OR do Safety Overides.

There are also ways to build your cruisers to kill frigates, depending what type they are.

Eagle: Phase Beams + Kinetics. A few shots from the kinetics isn't enough to scare off a frigate, and a triple phase beam blast will simply pop them. Burst damage + the system should let you kill any enemy frigate in pouncing range.
Falcon: Same only easier because of the speed.
For both these cruisers the system makes them pretty good at killing frigates and destroyers. The Falcon is faster than all destroyers but the Medusa with its system.

Dominator: Salamander pods to knock out their engines, but its tough. Its a big strong ship but a total pig and not good at frigate fighting. Ballistics, while in general superior, do not have the burst damage that energy weapons can have.

[Linnis]

Looks like what you needed was carriers like what you said.

The cruiser + destroyer start really is what the problem was.

You need to have either frigates or carriers no matter what stage of the game your at.

[TaLaR]

OP didn't say which DEs and Cruisers he had. Something like 2 Mules and 2 Ventures would be quite weak. Especially against Dynasector pirates, which can have quite decent hulls and variants, unlike vanilla.

[Null Ganymede]

You have a firepower advantage but problems with mobility/projection. Possible solutions include:

- Safety Overrides on a fast flagship. Works best with combat-focused skills to make maximum use of the limited Combat Readiness.
- Points in mobility skills to avoid being flanked. (Especially if you can fire enough weapons to threaten frigates while staying below 5% flux. The 0-flux bonus improves speed, acceleration, and turn rate.)
- Salamander EMP missiles to disable engines and pick off frigates one by one.
- Rely on fighters for projection, maybe backed by some light missiles for cracking armor.
- Missile-heavy loadout to destroy high-flux frigates before they can back off to vent.
- Large ships captained by an officer with Gunnery Implants II and set up with an Integrated Targeting Unit and some long-range high-alpha projectile weapons. (Gauss, hypervelocity drivers, heavy maulers.) The range and precision will pick off frigates that don't respect them.
- Points in Electronic Warfare skills (and appropriate amounts of ECM mods) can drastically improve your odds while outnumbered. Every extra second of freefire on ships as they close into firing range tips the flux war in your favor, especially when you have a ship size advantage.

Practically, your fleet can bring a few of these at the same time depending on available hulls/skills/enemies. The analysis from Megas is correct for carrier-heavy fleets (who wouldn't play defensive against a swarm of fighters?) but is by no means the only effective strategy.

[qsdoosix]

You have a firepower advantage but problems with mobility/projection. Possible solutions include:

- Safety Overrides on a fast flagship. Works best with combat-focused skills to make maximum use of the limited Combat Readiness.
- Points in mobility skills to avoid being flanked. (Especially if you can fire enough weapons to threaten frigates while staying below 5% flux. The 0-flux bonus improves speed, acceleration, and turn rate.)
- Salamander EMP missiles to disable engines and pick off frigates one by one.
- Rely on fighters for projection, maybe backed by some light missiles for cracking armor.
- Missile-heavy loadout to destroy high-flux frigates before they can back off to vent.
- Large ships captained by an officer with Gunnery Implants II and set up with an Integrated Targeting Unit and some long-range high-alpha projectile weapons. (Gauss, hypervelocity drivers, heavy maulers.) The range and precision will pick off frigates that don't respect them.
- Points in Electronic Warfare skills (and appropriate amounts of ECM mods) can drastically improve your odds while outnumbered. Every extra second of freefire on ships as they close into firing range tips the flux war in your favor, especially when you have a ship size advantage.

Practically, your fleet can bring a few of these at the same time depending on available hulls/skills/enemies. The analysis from Megas is correct for carrier-heavy fleets (who wouldn't play defensive against a swarm of fighters?) but is by no means the only effective strategy.

Thanks a lot for the advice. I have started a new game with carrier starting, and whola it works like charm, no more frigate swarms.

But what make me surprised is why nobody think about things like tractor beams? which can pull smaller things toward you, so the large ship has some way to deal with those small fast flyers.

[DeMatt]

But what make me surprised is why nobody think about things like tractor beams? which can pull smaller things toward you, so the large ship has some way to deal with those small fast flyers.

In the unmodified game, the Graviton Beam already has the ability to send fighters or frigates spiralling out of control.

From a story perspective, perhaps gravitational technology isn't precise enough to lock onto attacking fighters.  Or perhaps it's merely too slow, and the fighter will have launched its missiles before the tractor beam can grab hold.  Or perhaps developing a tractor beam would be expensive, while building fighters and frigates of your own is cheap.

From a gameplay perspective, imagine playing against the tractor beam.  You're flying your frigate at a giant behemoth of a battleship, shots whizzing by to left and right, and feeling pretty badass and confident.  Then - WHONK - your controls freeze as the tractor beam grabs you, and all you can do is sit and watch as the guns you'd been dodging reduce your frozen frigate to a smear of space-dust.  Doesn't sound very fun, does it?

[Megas]

Graviton Beam can divert missiles too.

[Thaago]

Every once in a while when you fire a reaper at a graviton Eagle the beams will deflect a missed shot right into it

[Camael]

First... play the tutorial in vanilla or vanilla with some of the more polished faction mods. It's there for a reason. That reason being, SS is incredibly hard at first and has a steep learning curve. Once You know what to do, well...

Second. Always bring something to kill kiting frigates. I tend to leave cruisers and destroyers on auto and fly my own wolf-frigatte in the early game, for exactly that reason. Seriously. Get a wolf or two (not the pirate versions) - they are pretty common, so it should be easy to pick one up.

Third, now for the cheese, or to actually answer Your question:

One method that works is to outlast them by kiting Yourself. Get some cheap junk from salvage, throw it into battle one at a time until enemy CR is mostly done (for frigates, You can see it when hovering the cursor over their ships), then bring in the fleet. For some reason the AI does not seem to retreat 0 CR ships immediately, so there is Your window of opportunity.

A second, somewhat stupid way is to push them into a corner. (Yes. In space.) Try maneuvering to make them run into the edge of the screen - they can't move away from there. Try using the bottom corners in order to avoid them disengaging. It'll take a little practice, but this kind of tactical deathballing kind of works in the early game.

... then again, what are You doing out there hunting frigates with no frigates or condors?