Normally people advise fighters as the early game carrier unit. This seems to make sense since fighters are the counter to LRMs and bombers. However, I recently discovered that fielding a bomber fleet in the early game can be decisive in certain cases with the goal of killing or crippling the enemy's cap ship early on.
Basically, few people provide adequate strike craft counter in the early game.. especially if they haven't scouted you properly. If they do see a carrier fleet, they are inclined to build flaks unless they already are building a sizable carrier fleet themselves. If the opponent has a carrier fleet the bomber strategy is less effective since fighters counter bombers effectively. Flaks in early game numbers do not, though, and leave the opportunity to bomb the enemy's cap and kill it rapidly. I found this to be very very effective against eggs. Without the egg, the early vasari rush is pitiful (not that it wasn't before). Someone sent me eggs on easter, and each one cracked open before my bombers to reveal all kinds of goodies inside.
The cap is critical to early game aggressive action so taking it out can be extremely demoralizing and economically painful for an opponent to replace, not to mention it will be several levels below your own cap. Without a cap providing early game fleet support, it should be relatively easy for you to use your cap and assisting units to advance aggressively. Depending on the enemy's fleet, once the cap is dead, you should either advance and bomb infrastructure or retire the bombers and build fighters to kill his LRMs.
Fighters are still essential to early game play, of course. This strategy is effective because of how quickly bombers can kill a low level cap in the early game. Once the cap is gone, proceed as normal! This is probably most effectively played by an Advent player, and you should upgrade lasers as quickly as possible (double benefit since this improves both your bombers and your illums).
That is a good strategy. However, it all hinges if the opponent has researched flak soon enough. I've also found Bombers to be quite useful in dealing with early caps. A good counter to an early Marza is a Carrier capital ship with two Bombers, since they can fly around and never be injured while dealing good enough damage.
Mid, Early or late game, I use more bombers than fighters, just for their sheer destructive force. 1.5 Bobmers for 1 fighter is how I set my carriers, and I have my fighters kill off enemy fighters, and my flak kill off enemy bombers. Then, my bombers take control, free to destroy anything.
Koda0
I disagree. Bombers are only effective in the early and mid game against cap ships and structures. On the other hand, fighters can take out other bombers, other fighters, and enemy LRMs, which are the primary destructive unit. Because they focus fire very well and deal lots of damage quickly, they are good at overcoming repair and shield restore abilities. Using a mixed fleet in the early or mid game (some bombers in the mid game, or even entire bomber fleets are justified only if you are consistantly fighting in enemy gravity wells) means you aren't using your fleet effectively. In any case, if you aren't targeting something specific with your bombers they should be docked.
Bombers weren't put into the game to sit in their carriers and wait. They were put in for a purpose, and its up to the player to put them to use. The bombers I use generally target enemy carriers first, to eliminate the threat of long-term fighter exposure. My fighters take out enemy fighters, and my Garda's and Hoshikos deal with bombers. This works VERY well for me, I can generally have 1/3 of an enemy fleet gone by the time LRM's are in firing range. I don't see how different fighters and bombers are, besides that bombers do more damage, have a stronger hull, are slower and can't target other strike craft.
the only issue with building bombers early is keeping them alive since they're extremely vulnerable to fighters. even a small amount of enemy fighter squadrons will make your bombers almost worthless unless you can dispose of them. this basically means you don't get to use your own bombers until you've got enough Fighter squadrons or Flak frigates to cover them. thats the real obstacle for early game bombers.
the real reason we go fighters early game isn't just that they kill LRFs faster (which they do, and thats good) its that they perform two tasks at once. they fighter for squadron supremacy at the same time as providing offensive fleet support. its basically a way to save yourself some fleet logistics that you would otherwise have had to spend on Flaks.
let me put it another way.
there are two very common configurations for offensive fleets.
1) LRFs screened by Flak Frigates
2) Carriers(fighters) screened by LRFs
both of these have the same general template of <offensive ship> with the unit that counters the thing your offensive ship is weak to. its 2nd level gameplay, you're countering the counter so your primary strategy works.
if you were to go with
3) Carriers(bombers) screened by Flak Frigates
you wouldn't have your counter counter available. this configuration runs a severe risk of being dominated by Light Frigates, particularly so if the light frigs are supported by a few repair cruisers.
Yes, but the config. I use bends things a bit.
3) Carriers(Bombers/Fighters) screened by Flak/LRM
Two in one, kinda. My fleet can never spam, directly, and I rarely use Kodiaks. Here's a list of where my fleet supply goes (in order by size)
1. Cap ships
2. Percherons(1.5 Bomber, 1 Fighter)
3. Hoshikos
4. LRM's
5. LF's
6. Flak
7. Cielo's
8. Krosov's
9. Protev's
10. Arcova's
It works for me!
Hmmm... looking at my list, I might want to switch LRM's and Hoshiko's (I just double checked on my current game)
From a damage optimization perspective, your fighters should deal with the bombers while your flak deal with the fighters. I realize there is a tactical advantage in the way you run it (assuming you keep your flak with the rest of the fleet to protect it from bombers), but the damage i/o differential between the two tactics is significant, so you might want to focus at least some of your fighters on bombers. This is easy since if you don't tell your fighters to do anything, they will just go after the bombers, so you can simply give your "attack fighter" command to a subset of your total fighters.
you can use hybrid strategies if you want but its more or less just an exchange of potency for versatility. the pure Carrier/LRF build probably packs the greatest amount of offensive punch of any frigate fleet in the game (at least until late game when you can use Heavy Cruisers). diluting that mix with Flaks in order to add more bombers in to your squadron mix probably won't do much for you in the end.
what will happen is that you're losing both the offensive support and the light frigate countering ability of the LRFs that you swapped for flaks. this makes you more vulnerable to light frigates. this might be an acceptable trade off if you can be certain that you're gaining more offense from using more bombers then you are losing offense by swapping LRFs for Flaks. in my experience this is simply not the case.
i generally push a fleet of Carrier(fighters) mixed with LRFs until i reach a critical mass point of about 16 fighter squadrons and 10-12 LRFs. at that point i consider adding bombers or just teching up to heavy cruisers. i dont generally think its a good idea to compromise the strategy in the early game though.
Thx, VitaminJ, one for agreeing with me, and two, for optimizing my approach.
P.S. Karma!
Just like to point out I killed Tyr's egg just now in a game using the strategy I outlined at the start of this thread. It isn't foolproof and it isn't a push button win but it is very effective at halting an early rush. Without his egg (and I'm assuming he scuttled his cap yard) Tyr couldn't push through and capture planets from the ally I was assisting.
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