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[Quasarlight]

Hi fellow Spacers,

I'm experimenting with some Frigate Setups at the moment. But I can't really get anything out of them, than scouting or diverting parts of the enemy fleet from my fleet.

Any interesting suggestions/ideas? Vanilla or modded.

[Mondaymonkey]

Classical scheme - tempest escort. 2-4 tempests able to grant point defense (say "hello" to a terminator drones) to your cap alongside repelling  smaller crafts. Works best with close combat caps. Casualties are inevasible, tho.

[Kpop]

What do you mean by, "setup"?

Fleet composition, flagship, loadouts?

Well of course you can use Tempests. They are objectively the best frigate in vanilla and most of modded barring a few like the morpheus and excelsior(although difficult to use if you dont have the right balance of enough things shooting at you and not beam weapons). Missile of choice + Heavy Blaster + Phase Lance with ITU and hardened shields minimum. Starlight cabal Tempest can mount a light needler in addition to the other two. They have great stats all around and pack lots of firepower and point-defense in their drones.

Omens are great supporting ships for hunter-killers like Eagles, Falcons, and such due to their ship system, can handle close support duty with its 360 shield coverage and good shield flux stats, made better with forward shield conversion and hardened shields.

Afflictors are phase ships with enough missiles to bring down the largest of ships provided they have the opportunity to do so.

Brawlers have a solid weapons loadout(but not great) and are difficult to kill thanks to their damper system.

Wolves aren't anywhere close to being the equal in versatility and effectiveness of the tempest, but they can easily distract many ships on their own and survive for as long as their CR allows.

[shrek_luigi]

I like towing around 2 or 3 centurions with a very PD-heavy loadout (low flux & lots of OP to spare for defensive hullmods). they have trouble punching above their weight but can mulch enemy fighters with ease, and can take a hell of a beating thanks to their decent base stats & damper field. once you've turned the tides of battle your way, you can order them to slowly chip away at pretty much any ship, in tandem, as they are very efficient at making trades when grouped, and in a pretty safe manner.

also, 3 or 4 shepherds (especially the TSC ones) so I can send my enemies to the Drone Zone.

[Eji1700]

General note- Safety Overrides are worth considering on a lot of these but i forgot about it until i was almost done so here's a general reminder rather than me editing everything.

Afflictor/Gremlin/Hyperion-

Pilot only but super good to kit up with some hammers/reapers and fly around at the start of the battle sniping carriers/cruisers/capitals.  I sometimes to keep one on hand, start the battle with it deployed, nuke a ship or two, then retreat and swap to something else.  The gremlin is ok here while the afflictor is possibly super ship status with anti matter blasters (which are basically like high ammo torpedoes in this setup).  The Hyperion is insane at this sort of thing, but often costly overkill, so i'd suggest only using it if you find it fun, as it's hard to find and expensive to maintain.

Lasher/Wolf-

I tend to kit these out with a couple of different builds and then team them up with each other/some destroyers(hammerhead/sunder usually) so i have small mobile kill squads (having 3 escort 1 who then gets an order to hunt down a carrier on the edge or something).  These can be more "fire and forget" in that you don't need to pilot them/constantly order them and can usually do work.  LMG's/vulcans/mortars for the lasher (assault cannon is often too heavy on the flux when you've already got ammo feeder) and some mixture of tac/PD lasers/ions, and then the heavy blaster/mining laser in the mid slot.  In both cases it's almost always a mix of harpoons and sabots as well, and you kind of treat the blob of units as one ship, so while one might work on the flux the others pop the ship when the shields go.

PD escorts-

Cent/Brawler/Omen come to mind for this.  Just kit them out with some ok stuff and have them follow your weaker crusiers/carriers around to help make sure they don't eat a reaper.  Obviously focus on PD here and the Omen is insane.

Tempest-

Gets its own slot because i feel that it's the "do it all" ship.  You want something fun to fly that can punch way above it's weight and isn't as finnicky as the afflictor?  Ok.  Want to throw this in a pack of wolves/lashers and wreck ships?  Ok.  Want to just spam these and annihilate everything?  Ok.  The ship has some great slots and can bring a whole slew of crazy weaponry to the field while its drones do general work.  They're always good to have and it's hard to go wrong with them.

Chasers-

Sort of a unique role (and maybe not worth it right now but i hope it changes) but i like to have a least a few frigates that exist solely to hunt down fleeing enemy ships/convoys.  They're often kitted out for top speed and usually have some form of ion/disable weaponry + high impact stuff like hammers so they can chase down and kill all those running ships.   Again questionable value since i've rarely gotten something insane from this, but it's a role that only frigates fill well.


Mods-

Mods have a MUCH better selection of frigates (one of the biggest area's in imo the base roster is lacking), which isn't to say the vanilla ones are underpowered, but there's a ton of frigates in the various mods out there which pull major weight and are fun to fly.  It's been a bit since i've messed with anything as I've been testing vanilla, but if you have any installed it's always worth checking them out.