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[TaLaR]

Burst PD are decent.

In very few specific cases. Like when they are installed on Paragon and fire at MIRV/Sabots from afar before they split. Or for for intercepting few high value missiles when there are no distracting targets.

But that's not what usually happens. Talons and Broadswords just swamp them with swarmers/flares. Fighters will eventually die, but Burst PD fails to kill them quickly enough to prevent damage from going through or to make a dent in carrier's replacement rate.

The only real PD that can win against significantly superior amount of Carriers (weighted in DP)  is Devastator, Flak and Vulcan(by sheer dps and mostly as support for Flaks).
Another option is to have Paragon shield + range bonuses and just burn fighters with beams, leaving their ordnance for shield. It doesn't work nearly as well for lesser ships.

[StarGibbon]

The only real PD that can win against significantly superior amount of Carriers (weighted in DP)  is Devastator, Flak and Vulcan(by sheer dps and mostly as support for Flaks).
Another option is to have Paragon shield + range bonuses and just burn fighters with beams, leaving their ordnance for shield. It doesn't work nearly as well for lesser ships.

*Shrugs*.  My carriers ate dual flak dominators and enforcers for breakfast, because they're not heavily shielded enough to protect themselves, and without turret speed hullmod, pd ballistic turrets just aren't fast enough.  A single buffed Drover (assuming fleet support keeping its shields down and shielding the carrier) could wipe one out, if you want to compare deployment costs. The *ONLY* thing that slowed them down were heavily shielded targets like the Paragon.

My feeling is, if you want to be effective at PD you have to spec primarily for it, which means you aren't *also* going to be as  effective of a strike craft. All supplemental PD is supposed to do is slow them down a bit while you destroy the carrier.  Otherwise, fighters *should* be a threat, and carriers *should* be powerful, but they should also be much more fragile and vulnerable than they are now, requiring significant escort.

Otherwise, I feel like the .8 fighter potency is very one sided in favor of the player vs the AI. I've never lost anything larger than a frigate to fighters in a fight I hadn't already bungled in some other way by getting myself blown up.

[Schwartz]

Locust was a great anti-ship weapon in 0.7.2. It was the best large missile I could mount on a Conquest, edging out even the MIRV for sheer pressure. Not necessarily against fighters, but against other ships all the way up to capitals. Notably I also had all the missile buffs. Haven't tried it in the new version yet, but I imagine it's still good at that. What it lacks to excel at this is some range.

Fighters in overwhelming numbers get problematic. My fighter fleet was once badly outgunned when a Tri-Tach bounty fielded two Astrals at the same time. It was raining Sabots and Atropos. The tactic that finally won the engagement was that I soaked up much of that firepower on a Medusa's shield, backing off and re-engaging so both the bomber wings and the Astral's Squalls were always trying to catch up with me. Infinite respawns vs. infinite flux pool. That should show you how borderline broken two Astrals with bombers are. Meanwhile a reckless attack of my remaining carriers took out one Astral, then the other.

You can't handle Atropos or Sabots very well with PD, they move too fast. Likewise with tons of Talons and their swarmers. Get efficient shields and the flux pool to dictate the engagement. Get Tac or Pulse Lasers that can deal with small threats without being distracted by PD duties. And ideally get fighters to even the odds. But with the right ships, it can be done the old-fashioned way. Low-tech loses out here. They should do very well against traditional fighters and slower missiles like Harpoons, but a mass of Atropos, Sabots; even Annihilators or Swarmers if numerous enough will overwhelm Flak PD and then they're left with inefficient shields.

If you played vs. Templars in 0.7.2, you got plenty of practice with this dealing with Clarent swarms, pretty similar to the new Atropos except twice as lethal. In the end, Burst PD and flares en masse were the best way to actually take out these missiles, coupled with efficient shields and good coverage when you could not take 'em out.

[Flare]

I generally ball up my ships so that fighters that dare fly an attack-run on the outermost ships finds themselves in the middle of a PD shootout.

[goduranus]

My usual go-to solution, take an Afflictor and torpedo the carriers. The fighters will retreat shortly after.

[borgrel]

i fight paired ...... i deploy 1 enforcer and 1 drover or 1 conquest and 1 heron for eg, the enforcer/conquest tanks and kills other ships, the drover/heron fighter wings (i like wasps + xyphos, wasps + sparks, wasps + talons if OP short, wasps + wasps if i find enough LPC)

1 enforcer+drover and me in a medusa is enough firepower to take out 2 moras and 4 destroyers without significant damage.


its not about how many fighters u deploy: 2 wings can beat 6
its about a balanced deploy.

[Droopy The Dog]

Has anyone extended experience with the Locust? The few times I tried it, it didn't seem worth the large missile slot.

As an anti-fighter, yeah it's pretty rubbish, the missiles spend too long chasing their tails. I actually find it pretty good as a supplementary weapon against frigate/destroyers nipping at cap-ship blindspots though. Too fast to evade easily, heavy enough to dent armour, and too numerous to quickly shield flicker through so they have to shield tank for a decent amount of time, a bit short range though. Great screening for bombers/bigger missiles in slugging matches too.

I could see it being a fantastic anti-fighter weapon with an AI change though. It just needs pre-emptive overkill prevention (The RTS Zero-K is the best example of the system I can think of off the top of my head). That is, it doesn't initially send the whole volley of swarmers after the nearest fighter, then change targets when it dies. Rather, on launching, it sends send enough missiles after each fighter to reasonably assume it's toast (say 200% of EHP in missiles, tweak till it works) then targets the next fighter along, right from the start. Some fighters might get away due to some lucky evasion, but no fighter in range will get a free pass. With that kind of system the missiles should then fan out and home in on all the fighters simultaneously and I can imagine that being brutally effective, and at least more effective than the current targeting algorithm.

[Gothars]

A simpler effective change might be to give them area damage. A swarm of fast, homing phase mines sounds deadly.

[Droopy The Dog]

Yeah, maybe. Though if they all home in on the closest fighter and that splits off from the swarm, they'd still just kill one fighter before running out of fuel. Plus I worry that'd be too much like a devastator in a missile-slot, when it could do more interesting things.

Plus overkill prevention is a reusable system once it's set up. I bet there's a few other systems it could make more effective, like MRM spam on a fleet level.

[A.Winge]

graviton/tac are probably the best. PD is really trash besides flak imo and that isn't really that effective against anything but maybe talons.

beam PD should probably get a small buff tbh, it's mostly a waste of time against any sort of fighter-carrying platform you don't significantly outmass/outnumber.

This so much.  I am seriously considering removing PD from all of my ships and spending the OP elsewhere.  It doesn't even do a good enough job against missiles.

Even when I use PD and it hits, it doesn't do enough because most PD is fragmentation damage, and many fighters have armor (even if its not a large amount).  Heavy fighters I get having armor/shields, but those tiny little specs on the screen?  Those should die very quickly to basically anything.

[DeltaV_11.2]

Locust needs more missile speed, they just can't reliably catch up to even fairly slow fighters, and fast interceptors are basically immune to them.

Probably the best anti-fighter weapons are the support beams. HIL especially, HE means that fighters are killed within a fraction of a second by it.

[Vind]

Default medusa anti-fighter tactics - shields up covering engines and turn ship to head away from enemy fighters - once they overfly ship after spending all their initial salvo on shielded engines - you main pulse lasers will kill them very fast. Best tactics is to draw strike craft away using frigate or some such fast ship and attack carrier while they away -if they stay guarding carrier you new best friend is devastator flak gun.

[Burlap]

My fleet currently sports two Centurions kitted out for this task.

Tac lasers with better turret gyros (or even without) seem to be good at this, especially in the hands of an officer with the advanced countermeasures skill. I generally keep the rear facing mounts using some form of PD to deal with missiles. As has been said already, 360 shield coverage is pretty key to this role. A Front Shield Emitter works very nicely for this on the Centurion.

Alternately the Medusa can do the same sort of thing, and the Monitor looks like it's basically purpose built for the role.