u/Cronos988

How do you like the capital ship combat currently?

I've reached the "fleet combat" stage of the game (if we can call it that), and must say that while I quite enjoy carriers, Destroyers and Battleships are frustrating me.

For one, I feel like capital ships just die *way* too quickly. A Guppy with well-equipped fighters will delete a K in under 2 minutes. If one of your destroyers wanders too close to a station or an enemy ship, you basically have to teleport over and take the helm, wrenching the ship around and boosting away in order to save it. In low attention it's somewhat better, unless the game decides your destroyer is now in range of *all* the turrets and just deletes it in 3 seconds.

Missile turrets are pretty cool, but they arguably make this worse. Heavy guided missile turrets can put out inordinate amounts of damage. They frequently waste dozens of missiles because the target is long since dead by the time they arrive.

There's very little sense of tactics or sense of proper fleet composition. While travel drive is generally one of X4s best ideas, in combat it means you have little time to react between a ship appearing in sensor range and it smashing into your face. Station keeping, while necessary, just makes the combat even faster as ships now face off motionlessly for a few seconds until someone dies. Not having any sense of self-preservation doesn't help. I don't get why my small fighters get to boost away and avoid dying most of the time, but a destroyer will just sit there ignoring hull damage or all it's modules being blown up.

The battleships are a bit sturdier, but they're just a nightmare to get anywhere. Your fleet is getting hammered but your Asgard does a *slow* circle around the gate trying to move into position. Because everything dies so quickly, ships that end up out of position for a minute might as well not exist. Sure deleting a K instantly with the ATF beam is fun the first two times. Afterwards it's just part of the same kinda silly instant death meta. It does make station sieges slightly more tolerable, at least.

And god forbid you need to restock one of these ships. Have fun watching your ships jiggle around the auxiliary for minutes, then repair instantly and spend several more minutes "undocking", which usually means drifting aimlessly in a random direction.

I would really like these ships to feel like strategic assets that you can carefully position rather than big fighters that regularly die more frequently than your actual fighters.

After my earlier test for dogfighting (Moreya's slap) I decided to test various bomber configurations. The test was fairly simple, 16 fighters of various types fight a Xenon K which spawns in knife fighting range.

I didn't do many tests per loadout but the results seemed nevertheless quite robust:

First, Torpedoes are really good. Ships with torpedoes killed the K at least 50% faster (survival time of the K was cut by at least a third) than the best gun armed fighter.

For guns: just use Plasma. I only tested Plasma against Muons, Meson Stream, Shard and Pulse but Plasma always won by a significant margin. Muons are borderline useable but still significantly worse.

Edit: testing Blast Mortars, I found them surprisingly about on par with Plasma, at least for purely gun-equipped fighters. Their stats don't really suggest a comparable role, perhaps an interaction with their AoE component.

Fighter type matters a lot less than armament. In my tests, it went Gladius>Eclipse>Chimera>Barracuda. But only the Gladius was significantly faster, about 13% compared to the Barracuda, while the difference between the Eclipse and the Barracude was only half that (all without torpedoes in that test).

So if you're trying to maximise anti-capital firepower per slot, use a torpedo armed fighter, with both Eclipse and Barracuda being strong candidates.

Edit: Further tests with mixed fighter groups suggest that having only 25% of the squad be armed with torpedoes is sufficient to get a similar time to kill. This reduces ammunition consumption significantly.

Note that torpedo consumption of fighters is significant. The fighters expended about 100 Torpedoes per K, that will run a carrier dry fairly quickly.