Have been ages since i have played Ironclads, i decided to give it another shot.
Tried to make a Pirate based fleet. Pretty tough to play, pirates got so much universals mounts on such weird spots with so much different weapons. It's difficult to know what shoot what and where. So i rather tried something simpler, a carrier based fleet. At first i tried to balance my fleets with frigates and cruisers but without shields and effective PD systems, they make very easy targets against torpedoes and each loss really hurt the whole fleet efficiency.
So i went with just a Hulk, a scavenger (the carrier destroyer IIRC) and filling the rest with Hunters, harpoons and Sparkers. Worked quite well but unfortunately, Sparkers, while pretty deadly, cost an enormous amount of FP (16 i think?) and were still pretty easy targets against big ships. Harpoons too, but i haven't found them very effective to begin with.
And then i tried something else for the lulz, one hulk and the rest full of Darts with fleet points skill maxed.
Nothing was able to resist this, not even the Alien mothership with its fleet (gave me quite a beating though). You just have to unlash hundred of those little pesky fighters to gain control over every strategic points at the beginning of the battle and then you unleash even more of them, overloading to death enemy shields and PD systems, and eventually riddled their hulls with gazillions of bullets
The Moscow dreadnought, while eventually got destroyed, was damn effective against this tactic. Each of his shots with his giants built in guns could instantly blow dozen of fighters with the AOE damage. Was a fun fight.
I'm going to start a new game and try to go full independent/miner fleet. I'm curious to see if i could take on the Aliens with those...
But enough talking about this. I saw that aliens are still missing description, do you plan to add them eventually? Also, i'd like to put in a request which probably have been asked a million times but... Can you add the Russia class in the campaign? Even if it's not available at the RSF station, i would really, really like to be able to fight that thing in the campaign mode. I know it can be easily modded by the player but it would be better if you could make it official and all. Like an RSF out-system intervention fleet who randomly appears in the Barnard system like the Alien mothership to wreck havoc.