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[Goumindong]

Onslaughts are some of the best choices for facing massed fighers actually. Load up on tons of dual flak, the Integrated Point Defense AI hullmod, Devastators in the side mounts, and the combat skill that grants +50% damage to fighters/missiles. Its not quite immune to fighters, but its darn close. You'll want to support them with interceptors - Sparks/Wasps/Talons in descending order of goodness (and availability).

The biggest issue with fighting enemy carriers however is AI: your own ships will be very unwilling to press. Using "Full Assault" helps, as does assigning eliminate orders. The best bet though is to just hop in an Onslaught yourself and burn drive through the enemy while cackling madly.

I tried to do that actually, but they have a fighter group that disable your ship when they got the hull. So when I rush with my onslaught to the enemy Astrals, my ship just gets disabled then I get absolutely demolished by a rain of missiles.

What is your onslaught fit? Does it have armored repair units?

[Warnoise]

Onslaughts are some of the best choices for facing massed fighers actually. Load up on tons of dual flak, the Integrated Point Defense AI hullmod, Devastators in the side mounts, and the combat skill that grants +50% damage to fighters/missiles. Its not quite immune to fighters, but its darn close. You'll want to support them with interceptors - Sparks/Wasps/Talons in descending order of goodness (and availability).

The biggest issue with fighting enemy carriers however is AI: your own ships will be very unwilling to press. Using "Full Assault" helps, as does assigning eliminate orders. The best bet though is to just hop in an Onslaught yourself and burn drive through the enemy while cackling madly.

I tried to do that actually, but they have a fighter group that disable your ship when they got the hull. So when I rush with my onslaught to the enemy Astrals, my ship just gets disabled then I get absolutely demolished by a rain of missiles.

What is your onslaught fit? Does it have armored repair units?

I have only equipped with targeting unit and reinforced armor mods.

I tried to equip it with a couple of devastators, the sheer number and speed of fighters overwhelm it and make it overflux (thanks to those damn sabot equipped fighters.) Then the longbows come in and finish it off.

My biggest problem is the speed at which the enemy fighters respawn. Even if you manage to destroy the first wave, the second wave will come in and just focuses on ship to finish it off while the AI is freaking out trying to deal with the missiles and other stuff.

I tried to rush them, the heron will just kite while the astral will just stay near the retreat point unleashing the squall to keep my ships from venting the flux while their tsunami of fighters come in and overwhelm my ships 1 by 1.

Fighting a carrier spamming army is a net loss since you always need to field a stronger army imo. The strategy that helped me in dealing with that army (only 2 onslaughts survived) is to have doom call ships which did an amazing job.

[Goumindong]

Not going to lie the hardest fight I had was the carriers. But take a look at the fits from the last 2 pages of this thread and it should help.

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=18810.45

I don’t like devastators all that much because they negate your primary way to kill things (large ballistic). And because they’re very “on/off”. And I don’t generally like flack because they remove the ability to add more HN. Though a single double flack would not be terrible so long as it’s close enough to the front. (IPDAI Vulcans also are just a lot more flux efficient)

[SaberCherry]

I was testing AA builds yesterday against the 3 simulator Condors (Talons, Broadswords, and Pirhanas).  Not rigorously; it's way too variable, just zooming in and watching closely repeatedly (it would be great if the Analytics mod worked in the simulator!) and it seemed like Thumper is pretty good, better than the HMG, due to the longer range and much faster projectiles.  It actually deals more damage versus Devastator Cannon was actually sort of decent sometimes, like against bombs; it just can't hit other ships, and overall I'm not convinced that it's as good as a Dual Flak except when the sky is absolutely full of fighters.  In the future I'll use Thumper over HMG in primarily AA roles instead of just selling them all like I used to.  Doesn't seem quite as good as even single Flak but it's a lot easier to find.

[Arcagnello]

I will hop into this discussion with my own method of combating the heresy that is fighter/sabot spam.

I returned to playing starsector after half a year or so now and I'm playing a High Tech, 90% laser oriented fleet, meaning that my decisions to counter the dreaded carrier cancer are..diverse.

1)I don't have anything over a cruiser (the only vanilla capital ship that would fit in my fleet would be the Odissey). Most of my ships are very fast with exceptional range and the ones that don't have speed usually are for extreme tanking like that wierdly shaped research cruiser with one large and two medium energy weapons at the front (sorry the name is eluding me at this moment).

2)360° shields are a blessing against fighters (they also remove the need of installing resistant flux conduits and armored weapon mount mods) provided they've got a good damage to flux ratio. Hardened shields is also really good since it exponentially increases the resilience of any ship.

3)Integrated Targeting Unit + Advanced Optics + Dedicated Point Defence AI + Advanced turret gyros makes almost every weapon on a laser ship PD capable and with disgusting range. Tactical Lasers, Graviton beams and Medium Combat lasers are especially good

4)The AI not wanting to close in and being stalled by fighters turns into an advantage when most of your point defence has a range of over 1000 units. They will clear the field and then pressure the carriers.

5) Most carriers also have pathetic flux dissipation, you would be surprised at how fast a couple dozen worth of tactical laser DPS across 3 small ships tears thru even sizeable carriers


I am playing with quite a lot of ship/weapon mods so I can't 100% point at all the high tech ships you can deploy in vanilla to overcome the no-skill spam menace, but I distinctly remember the Aurora being the best at the job: 30FP, 3 Grav Beams, an orgy of tac lasers and disgusting mobility paired with the capability of having a 360° shield make it capable of mostly everything.

Other options also include smaller ships like the Scarab. Don't also forget that LR PD lasers actually have a better flux to damage ratio than Tac Lasers and do not require as much flux dissipation or advanced turret gyros to do the job.

[Mondaymonkey]

Aurora being the best at the job: 30FP, 3 Grav Beams, an orgy of tac lasers

I am a big fan of a laser weapons, and use them frequently, even when I logically shouldn't, but THAT Aurora build is a heresy even in my eyes. Dude, it's a 30 DP cruiser, you can squeeze out much more performance from it, than just permanent frontal laser array. Yeah, 360° Hardened shields + mobility + range makes that thing almost immortal indeed, but is it really worth of 30 DP? And how long would it takes to melt Onslaught armor with that? PPT isn't infinite, right? Can it fight Paragon or Radiant? Even simple Monitor would be a problem.

In my experience full-beam Aurora can only be effective to distract large enemy forces without being destroyed. And nothing more.

[Arcagnello]

One of my first endgame wins was achieved by a mostly full laser Aurora fleet actually, the super long range version actually beats the onslaught 1v1 without an officer and AI controlled. Lasers are surprisingly effective against armor once the shield inevitably goes down from time to time.

In a more realistic scenario, playing a laser fleet is like shooting a water lance into a crowd of people. The lighter enemies are going to go first and once those go all the pressure will be diverted and concentrated into the stronger, still standing targets. It never ends up being a fair fight for the enemy capital ships once their support is gone and they are getting melted from all directions.

This is also made a lot easier by the fact the engagement range and mobility are so massive that they rarely block each other's firing line, so while only using Grav Beams and tac lasers may sound diminutive of a 30 FP cruiser, you're also assured that it's ALWAYS going to be applying pressure, in a way things like missiles can only dream of.

P.S: It may be a stretch, but you could also set some Aurora's I  your fleet up to be full missile vomiters and they're really good at it too, both long range and ultra short range variants.

Edit This is the [REDACTED]. You do not want to get close to it.


"
From the "Ship/Weapon Pack 1.11.0" mod by Dark.revenant &Co

[Arcagnello]

Whoops, I actually did not see the question about Paragon, Radiant and Monitor.

Enemy paragons are so damn slow that I do not even need to bother with an "avoid" order for my fleet to actually steer clear of, and once they're in a numerical disadvantage they actually shoot themselves into high flux, lower their shields and start getting melted

The radiant requires an avoid order and minimum amounts of micromanagement to not run part of your fleet into a corner of the map, but the fact it does not have a 360 shield makes it easier to be taken down than the Paragon once the enemy fleet thins out. The same applies to the Solar if you've got the same mods I do, a d that one is just disgusting to fight close range.

The monitor is quite the little bother actually, I could be wrong but a single laser Aurora actually manages to overload it eventually, although it's real fast with two since it takes mere deck da for it to die once the shield is down.

[Igncom1]

Yeah the Paragon is less of a slow battleship, and more of a fast space station!

[Arcagnello]

Paragon still is arguably the strongest ship in my game if we take bounty ships and special ones out of the equation (even then a Special Version of the Paragon IS the strongest special ship kek) but that lack of mobility makes it more of a burden than an asset of the enemy fleet if it can't use its fire power.

Also to note that I'm using a small 8 OP energy weapon called Reflector Beam in ships that can handle its flux and it's basically a roided up Graviton beam (or a miniaturized tach lance without EMP damage) with 800 range. Utterly disgusting in a long range setup altough it is a very rare weapon to find!

Edit: here are the stats of the thing for anyone interested
8 Ordinance Points
800 Range
400 Damage
200 Damage/second
150 Flux/Second
0.75 Flux/Damage
200% damage vs Shields, 50% Damage vs Armor (No hard Flux)