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[Dampfnudel]

Hi I am new to the game.
My fleets struggle versus carriers.

I am doing exploration/scan ship tasks and sometimes encounter pirates/ai remnants.

While these big capital ships are not scary at all, some small fast carriers are a huge pain. My ships are constantly scared by the fighters and are busy fighting them. As they replenish, this leads to a fight until combat readiness is exhausted. I use every small weapon slot for PD. It does not help.

Using engage order does not help. using the eliminate button does help, but then my ships fight way too dumb.

I am not a good enough player to use my flagship to solo the entire enemy fleets, so I need to rely on my other ships to help me.

[SafariJohn]

PD weapons are not a good choice against fighters because fighters are like little ships - they have armor and sometimes shields. Stuff like Light Assault Guns and Pulse Lasers work fairly well. A Locust launcher or two will also do a number on fighters.

Of course the best choice is to kill the carriers. I usually do that with bomber strikes or a fast, powerful flagship.

[Dampfnudel]

PD weapons are not a good choice against fighters because fighters are like little ships - they have armor and sometimes shields. Stuff like Light Assault Guns and Pulse Lasers work fairly well. A Locust launcher or two will also do a number on fighters.

Of course the best choice is to kill the carriers. I usually do that with bomber strikes or a fast, powerful flagship.

I tried outfitting my ship with pulse lasers. But it does not seem to work.

Any ship 1v1 versus an astral. AI controled. No amount of PD/assault guns/Pulse Lasers make it work.

The only thing that worked was using my own carriers.

[Modo44]

The Astral is an edge case. It can and will keep sending bomber runs with near impunity. You really need a fleet to counter that effectively.

In my experience, the best anti-fighter weapons are Swarmer/Locust missiles, and beam or fast turning medium guns. PD weapons can only deal with small, shieldless fighters. It also helps to have wide, efficient shields (either by using hulls that come with them, or by adding shield-improving hull mods).

[Dampfnudel]

The Astral is an edge case. It can and will keep sending bomber runs with near impunity. You really need a fleet to counter that effectively.

In my experience, the best anti-fighter weapons are Swarmer/Locust missiles, and beam or fast turning medium guns. PD weapons can only deal with small, shieldless fighters. It also helps to have wide, efficient shields (either by using hulls that come with them, or by adding shield-improving hull mods).

What about the condor? It is a super cheap ship with 2 bays and only takes 10 deployment.
Meaning a legion (40 deployment) has to face 8 wings. how to play that?

I currently spam condors and AI has no chance at all.

[Modo44]

What about the Condor? It can be rushed by anything, since it does not have enough ordnance points to bring actually OP fighters. When you hit real opponents, especially of the <REDACTED> kind, things will get more interesting. You are correct in general, though. Carrier spam is currently the strongest fleet strategy.

[Kpop]

Carriers are just strong OP. Best counter to carriers is either piloting your own ship and taking them out since the AI won't usually risk getting into a position to attack enemy carriers. If they do it's going to usually be a frigate or quick destroyer which won't pack enough punch to bring it down easily. Frigates also risk getting swarmed by fighters and destroyers getting clipped by a few units of heavy ordinance. SO destroyer or cruiser or phase ships are the best.

Second option is to bring your own carriers slapped full with fighters or interceptors. Not very exciting but PD just doesn't deal with fighters/bombers very well unless massed, and then your ship won't be very good at doing anything else.

The thing that makes carriers so strong is their ability to saturate an area with firepower. You can only fit so many ships into a single space, fighters/bombers though can be massed infinitely. Additionally carriers do have their fighter strength depleted over time but it doesn't put them at risk and regenerates as long as CR holds up. It's very risk free if you have a half-decent frontline to stall while the fighters/bombers work over the enemy fleet.

[Dampfnudel]

What about the Condor? It can be rushed by anything, since it does not have enough ordnance points to bring actually OP fighters. When you hit real opponents, especially of the <REDACTED> kind, things will get more interesting. You are correct in general, though. Carrier spam is currently the strongest fleet strategy.

4 Ai controlled Condors beat any AI-controlled ships of the same deployment cost. (Except for astral)
I spam Condors and have not lost a single ship yet.

[Megas]

Use Dooms.  Mines hurt fighters... and everything else.

[RustyCabbage]

Any ship 1v1 versus an astral. AI controled. No amount of PD/assault guns/Pulse Lasers make it work.

An Onslaught can do it. It takes like five minutes, but eventually it can grind down enough fighters to burn drive into the Astral and take it out.

Also for what it's worth, the Predator or Prey Mission, which pits a Dominator, Condor, Lasher and Hound against an Astral can be beaten AI controlled with no orders.

But yes, in general ships have a lot of trouble dealing with large amounts of fighters, especially if they aren't on aggressive or reckless personality.

[SafariJohn]

Doom obliterates Astral.

[Igncom1]

Those phase 'capitals' are great as support to a regular fleet for that reason and more.

Got mine in my last game (before I encountered a crash to desktop that I don't know how to solve) armed with some of the yuri mod's missile launchers and thus is even more broken. They aren't the capitals I deploy for the majority of the battle, instead I deployed say some conquests supported by drovers, and then when the drovers ran out of CR I withdrew them and deployed the dooms to help mop up the PL's carrier fleet with their super fast herons.

They massacre anything without a significant escort or PD capabilities. The mines massacre the strike-craft and can easily cripple carriers with poor PD weapons (LRPD lasers simply cannot deal with doom mines.) They sweep across the battlefield killing anything they encounter unlike what even their smaller phase counterparts. Absolutely amazing!..... for about 2-3 minutes then they need to run away because a phase ship without their phase ability are more vulnerable then civilian freighters.

Mid battle deployment is a tricky but powerful way of changing the fate of any battle.

[Warnoise]

This is why I always avoid carrier heavy fleets. You need doom-class ships or capitals with tons of fast projectile guns to beat them.

Not only that, fighting against them is not fun. Having to grind through wave after wave of bombers (which can flank you if you are playing with a low tech ship) coming from all sides isn't fun.

[TaLaR]

Or you could just personally delete all offending carriers with an Afflictor (or several, if it's literally 300+ DP of carriers). A lot of them before yours and enemy fleets even come in full contact. The only carrier that has decent resistance to AM Afflictor is Mora (because DF activates instantly and is omnidirectional).
And based on current patch notes, while Reaper build will be completely removed, AM build won't receive any nerfs (except maybe side effects of skill revamp).

Depleting fighters isn't that hard either. Capitals with maxed out officer/player have enough firepower to simply do so, at least against typical AI carrier fleets. They don't deploy 20+ Spark Drovers after all.

[Arcagnello]

I personally also found carrier spam to be an issue until I modified both my fleet composition and way I play battles against a lot of carriers.

The first thing you need to do is to not have your units wander off by themselves. A carrier lives and dies by its ability to pick the enemy off one by one and you must not make it easier for the enemy to do that.

The second thing is proper fleet composition logic. All my capitals are more or less PD bastions for my forces to anchor around. It gets even better if your capitals also have an aggressive officer making them naturally more prone to be targeted by carriers and leave your other assets alone. I also never and I mean never use bombers unless I have a carrier centric fleet myself. They will not be useful if you do not have the fighter advantage.

The third thing revolves around ship retrofitting. The best combination of tools to deal with fighter spam is Point Defence AI, Integrated Targeting Unit, Dual Flaks and Kinetic Damage small PD mounts. Give up on frag or energy damage PD weapons as they are generally better against missiles with very few exeptions.

You carriers should also get something in the way of effective PD capability but the most important thing needs to be their fighter complement. Your carriers will usually focus on covering allied ships when encounteri g a fighter disadvantage, so you have to pick sturdy and/DPS intensive fighter LPCs to both outlast the enemy fighters and help deal with them until the enemy starts running out of CR and you can push into their force, slaughtering the helpless carriers.

You can also look into using a Doom phase cruiser since it's great against fighter swarms as people before me said, but there also are very useful utility frigades like the Monitor, Tempest and Scarab that offer amazing resilience and PD capability and will gladly get swarmed by enemy fighters/bombers instead of your other, more vulnerable units.

Edit: autocorrect is killing me.