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[SYDWAD]

[ OLD STATEMENT, READ BELOW ]

Ive been doing the math and i think you're better off going with many Condors over few Astrals because it comes up cheaper in all categories, as long as you can protect them you can field far more fighters at a much lower cost. Three Condors hold 6 fighters same as Astral but they use 30 supply instead of 45, 270 crew instead of 450, 9 burn instead of 7 and have a top speed of 40 instead of 30. So far i just dont see a reason to go out and spend 400k on a single Astral when you can get 12-13 Condors fielding 24-26 fighters for a similar price. As for ordnance points for a little less than an Astral you can field 5 condors (10 fighters).

Am i missing some massive benefit of choosing an Astral aside from the faze recall? At the very least condors seem better for heavy fighter spam instead of bombers.

[goduranus]

Dude wut? Glad to see I am not the only one who plays video games drunk from time to time.
Try destroying 10 Onslaughts with 4 Condors in one battle.

[Trensicourt]

Condors are a starter carrier for several reasons.

• No System Fighter Benefit
• Lack of OP to defend/support
• Expanded Hangar Deck is OP expensive
• No Mobility
• No armor or hull

What does an Astral have? Two functioning Large Missile mounts that has more firepower than 10 Condor mounts combined. OR! Have enough laser point defense with increased range that it fighters cannot reach. Furthermore, you cut down on losses significantly with its system and allows for coordinated firepower with bombs.

[SYDWAD]

• Expanded Hangar Deck is OP expensive
• No Mobility
• No armor or hull

But my point at the end was they could be better for heavy fighter spam due to the shear amount of them you could output. And yes Condors have basically no armor but what do you mean no mobility? They have about the same mobility as an Astral but higher top speed. And the 95 OP you save by using them can be put into a better capital to defend them, and TBH i find if your carriers are facing fire you're doing something wrong, i tend to favor specialization over generalization, im not a fan of the Legion. Im not trying to say they would be better overall but they could be better in some circumstances where more fighters is more important than the armor, the loss of the two large missile mounts is a big one for sure.
Lets say you have 200 deployment points in a battle, you could put out 4 Astrals with 24 fighters or 20 Condors with 40 fighters, thats almost double. As long as you could micro them enough to keep the Condors out of fire they could be more effective support.

[intrinsic_parity]

The astral exists for abusing recall with bombers (which is one of the strongest things in the game). Using it to field fighters is a criminal waste. An astral with good bombers is 10x better than 4 or 5 condors.

That being said:
- The astral will survive way longer than an equivalent amount of condors though if put under any pressure (which is inevitable). Condors are not fast enough to escape enemies, no matter how well you 'micro' them.
- There is a fleet cap, you can only have 30 ships total in your fleet so it is much more fleet slot efficient. You can have other stronger ships in your fleet instead of 15 condors. Having 15 condors makes it much harder to defend those ships with the remaining 10 (and ~5 logistic ships) but 3 astrals leaves 20 + ships to fill out the rest of the fleet.
- peak performance time: the astral has almost double the ppt meaning it stays in battle twice as long. In some sense this is twice the output.

If you're going to spam fighters, the drover is much better than the condor (and also better than the astral for fighter spam) since it is much faster and has a much better ship system. Condor is a bottom tier carrier with little ability to defend itself, escape, or buff its fighters in any way. Spamming drovers is a legitimately super strong strategy though.

[goduranus]

Each bomber on an Astral with worth 2 on a Condor, due to the Phase Recall. So Astral has effectively 12 bombers for 45 points, vs 2 bombers for 10 points on the Condor.

[sotanaht]

No, there's no reason to use an astral other than phase recall.  That's the entire point of the ship.  Phase Recall more than triples the effectiveness of bombers.  Not only do they perform bombing runs at least twice as fast (removing the return trip each time), but they also are less likely to get shot down and more likely to stay together on a group for better volleys because of that system.

If you are using non-bombers, don't use Astrals.  Any other carrier, even condors would be better for that role.  The best carriers for non-bombers are of course Herons and Drovers.

[SYDWAD]

You're right, i completely forgot about the 30 fleet cap in the base game. Thats probably one of the biggest downsides. But about the part about micro'ing the condors it wasnt so much about keeping them out of range of attackers, more so not letting the chance happen, keeping sure where all ships are in the back of your head and not engaging in any battle you cant win without reason. All that "Sun Tzu" crap lol

[SCC]

Reasons to use an Astral over 4 Condors:

• You need just a single officer to boost 6 wings of fighters, versus 4 officers to boost 8 wings.
• The ship system is borderline broken and gets you much higher performance per wing than Condor.
• You have more OP to spend per wing.
• Astral is more survivable, due to its good shield efficiency. Condors are just slow and fragile.
• Ship cap, if you don't change it.

The real contender against the Astral is the Drover, though it's similar in that it's not really balanced.

[TJJ]

Captains is another reason.

Astral needs just 1..... Condors need many.

I'd sooner take an Astral over a dozen Condors.

[Null Ganymede]

Something people haven't mentioned is AI confidence. Friendly AI loves big ships and feels safe pushing in front of them; enemy AI is scared to attack them even when it obviously has an advantage. Also, maybe fuel... Maybe.

Otherwise, hell yeah, small hulls are more deploy-point-efficient than larger ones! Up until the 30-ship fleet cap Condors are bang-for-buck amazing. Once you have well-specialized officers you'll want expensive combat carriers to make full use of their non-carrier skills, but until then go ham on Pilums and Talons.

It's tempting to go for big expensive ships because let's face it, Onslaughts and Legions and Paragons are the coolest. They're objectively less effective than equal DP worth of smaller stuff with one or two big anchors, though.

[sotanaht]

Something people haven't mentioned is AI confidence. Friendly AI loves big ships and feels safe pushing in front of them; enemy AI is scared to attack them even when it obviously has an advantage. Also, maybe fuel... Maybe.

Otherwise, hell yeah, small hulls are more deploy-point-efficient than larger ones! Up until the 30-ship fleet cap Condors are bang-for-buck amazing. Once you have well-specialized officers you'll want expensive combat carriers to make full use of their non-carrier skills, but until then go ham on Pilums and Talons.

It's tempting to go for big expensive ships because let's face it, Onslaughts and Legions and Paragons are the coolest. They're objectively less effective than equal DP worth of smaller stuff with one or two big anchors, though.

Not really true in the long run.  Sure a well built fleet full of small ships might be stronger in a single fight, but small ships almost inevitably suffer losses, even in fights they are overwhelmingly superior in.  Frigates and Destroyers die to stupid AI mistakes all the time.  Large ship fleets are far less likely to suffer from attrition, so over a longer campaign you get more value out of them.  Even late game when replacing ships is trivial you still have to worry about cutting your current "mission" short and going back for replacements.

[Plantissue]

This is probably where simplistic analysis of a single stat gets you instead of just trying things out, or taking analysis as a whole. Collossus MK III is has better fighter bays per DP anyways. Even if what you want is heavy fighters, the Drover is better as well because of its ship system anyways.

Is there any reason to use Condors?

[Thaago]

Re: Reasons to use Condors:

It really is just plain inferior to the Drover, but it has a few redeeming qualities:

Salamander Pod in the medium, backed by fast missile racks, is good.

Its easy to find in campaign.

I don't feel bad when it explodes.

...

Wow thats really all I came up with. I hope its out of combat stats get a buff.

[DatonKallandor]

Much like the Buffalo mk2 and most of the unshielded frigates, Condors exist as fodder for the early game. They're basically pirate ships, which are worse than the alternatives by design. That doesn't mean they need a buff - some ships need to be kobolds, not everything needs to be an orc.