Cadet II/Fighter

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The Fighter

Fighters are about the most versatile ships in Allegiance. Their ability to ripcord, relatively high cruising speed and variety of armaments make them very deadly in the hands of a skilled team. Yes we said team, not single pilot.

Of all the techpaths supremacy relies the most on good teamwork and coordination. Although a single fighter packs the most firepower out of all the small class ships it is quite fragile - it doesn't have the excessive armour and agility of the interceptor nor the range and stealth abilities of stealth fighters. This means you need to cooperate with other pilots to achieve objectives (such as miner killing and base defence).

With the fighter's quick ripcord time you can quickly change from offensive actions to defensive. With a decent amount of teleports available a supremacy team can respond anywhere in the game faster than any other techpath. But without proper leadership this can be a sup team's downfall - trying to be everywhere and once and just becoming seperated from your group.

Dogfighting

Most of the time dogfighting will have you pitted against an int or another fighter. You should have your gatts mounted - disruptors will run out of energy before you can kill anything. As for the choice of missiles, you have two choices - either pack dumbfires or seekers. Quickfires are really only good for dogfighting against non-belter tac.

Now, back to the real choices. The Seeker was designed as a dogfighting missile - it has decent range, does moderate damage, tracks really well, but it can be spoofed by coutermeasures. Compared to that, dumbfire appear completely useless in combat - it's very poor tracking makes hitting anything smaller and faster than a miner impossible. But their punch when they do land more than makes up for it which is why many pilots take the time to learn how to use them correctly. You can find a graphical advise on how to make your dumbfires hit here

Tip: Load the combat training mission, eject your gattling guns, then try and defeat several waves of enemies using only your dumbs. Doing this a few times will force you to pay attention to how the dumbs behave, and you will learn how to use them properly.

Using seekers is easier - try to stay outside your opponents gunrange and fire them when they gain full lock (not earlier!). He will get close enough to hurt you eventually, but should be pretty beaten up by the 2-3 seekers that hit. Your gatts should finish the job.

Now, minepacks. If you have those handy little things, don't forget to pack one into dispenser slot. The default load out has a second one in your cargo but you may want to swap it out because they do weigh a fair bit. Or keep it instead of a spare rack of missiles - it's up to you. Minepacks are very similar to prox, so take a look at the {[R|Insert link here (scout lesson on using prox)}} to get some ideas. The key difference is that fighters get in different situations to scouts, so here are some basic scenarios:

• Minepacks are good to spam in a furball or near an enemy base during a galv run. Most of the time they aren't good to spam because of their short life time and small radius.
• If you are about to engage an int and he is boosting straight at you just backpedal in the opposite direction and drop your minepack at the right moment (mp take as long to arm as prox). You'll get one of two results - a int with a face full of mines, or an int that slows down to go around, giving you more time to lob seekers at him. A win-win situation!
• If you don't have the option of backpedaling you need good timing and/or luck. A decent technique is to drop them and stay nearby to dogfight. Hopefully your opponent will be so busy dodging your bullets they will side-strafe right into them.
• They are also useful for camping alephs, but since they expire quickly you need to make sure you don't drop them early.

One other tip to staying alive and slaying interceptors - most of the int pilots will use excessive boost to close the gap and get into minigun range asap - you already know that. When the int is coming at you fast you can make him overboost, even if the pilot thinks he timed it right. When the int is roughly 500m away (just outside mini range), hit boosters and zoom right past him. You might get hit with a couple of minigun rounds, but not enough to outweight the advantage you've gained - the int is now behind you, travelling in the opposite direction, outside mini range, but well inside your seeker's range. Turn around, start backpaddling and lob those missiles. Rinse, repeat, pod the bugger. A fair warning though - this manouver might not work on some of the better interceptor pilots!

In conclusion the fighter is a not an up-close-and-personal ship. You don't drive it like an int, boosting up to 300m and opening fire with gats, you need to keep your distance, use your minepacks wisely, learn to land dumbs and you should be fine.

Camping alephs

Let's assume your team has nice probes everywhere and you see the run early enough to form a camp. The commander should be keeping tabs on the inbound bomber/HTT and be calling the drop. Get 200m dead in front of the aleph, wait for the drop call and deploy your mines while backpaddling. Keep reversing till you reach the distance of 600m and wait.

If they hit your minepacks fast, they are toast and you can go home. If they delay the entry or go in slow, you should be ready to spike the bomber/HTT. "Spiking" a bomber is when you and a group of buddies launch a salvo of dumbfires at the bomber from about the same distance and same range. Ideally they all hit the bomber at the same time and the sudden damage spike is enough to kill the bomber before the nans can react.

It is easier at an aleph because the bomber will be slow and the nans disorientated for the first few seconds. You can try boost-ramming the bomber/HTT to confuse the nans even more or, if you are lucky, ramming it back to the sector it came from. At this point it should be nearly dead and easy prey.

You will note that, as always, this technique relies on a group of fighters. As the bomber begins moving around, more nans start focusing their fire, and your team mates begin spreading out it becomes less and less likely that each subsequent salvo will kill the bomber. If, for some reason, the first salvo is not enough to kill the bomber then you should immediately change your attention to the nans. If your team is ill-prepared for the bomber or dividing their firepower then it is likely that spiking the bomber will notFighters, due to the dumbfire's punch mostly, are the most deadly camping ships in the game.

Camping alephs vs. capital ships

An IC frigate has barely made it 1k from the aleph due to a 4 man fighter camp.
(Check the 'Caladonia' aleph icon at the bottom of the HUD)

These flying heaps of soon-to-be-scrap-metal have such a huge sig there is no way they will be uneyed vs. even a halfway competant team. They are slow, so you will have time and then some to camp for them. Enough that you can even change your loadout to optimise your capship killing.

So dock, hit F4, get rid of those gattlings and pack your weapons of choice vs capital ships - disruptors and galvonic blasters (if available). Those weapons are desinged to deal tremendous damage to shields, heavy armour and super-heavy armour. Capital ships have tons of both. Don't forget to replace your spare ammo racks with extra missiles or fuel! As for missiles, pack dumbs. Even if you think the smallest thing you can hit with them is a barn, pack them - caps are way bigger than a barn.

Now you are all set to face the enemy. Get on that aleph but this time don't sit 600m in front of it. Most capships are this large and spawn directly in front of the aleph, effectively "telefragging" you with a massive ram. Set up to the side of the aleph or even a little bit behind it. If you have minepacks and someone calls the drop, you can do a fly-by drop: boost accross the aleph and drop your load as you pass the middle. Brake fast and set up in the same position to the side.

Now the thing comes in. It is huge and packs a ton of turrets all spitting skycap death at your fragile fighter. Before the turret gunners locate you and lock their guns on you, you should close the distance to the capital ship (fire all you've got at it in the meantime, of course). Get really close - I mean close-enough-to-scratch-the-paintwork close and start orbitting the thing using your booster and thrusters. At point-blank range, the turrets will have a very hard time keeping up with your movements which will allow you to live quite a bit longer. Another advantage of smearing your nose on the cap ship is that your dumbs will always hit.

The enemy could have some nans with the capship which will probably be doing their best to hide behind it. You can usually ignore them because 1) Your disruptors are doing extra damage vs capship hull and 2) Nans do reduced repairs to capship hull.

Any capship treated in the way described above should die very very quickly - those disruptors are really effective on them (and only them, to be exact).

Defending against bomber/HTT mid-sector

Sooner or later you're not going to be able to stop them at the aleph. Either you failed to probe, failed to form a strong enough camp, or just failed. The main difference between stopping a run at an aleph and mid-sector is that they can see you coming - you are a lot more vulnerable to turrets and nans' prox clouds.

To stop the run you need to work as a group - a single fighter is a very easy pray to bomber's turrets or the interceptors escorting the HTT. Get a bunch of fighters in front of the run, stick close together, and when you're all ready boost towards the bomber/HTT. Watch for prox that a smart nan might deploy in front of the ship. Start lobbing dumbfires at 1500m - all of you at once. You will also want to ease off the booster so you don't overboost.

If the turrets open fire at you stop heading directly at the bomber. Circle around to the side - even if you can't get in gun range you can keep the turrets busy while your buddies get in range. Once in gun range open fire and drop a mine pack before side strafing around the side. Although this will make it almost impossible to land a dumb, you don't want to plow straight into the prox field behind the bbr, and more importantly you don't want to overboost and be left out of the action. Ultimately you want to sit about 300m behind the bomber where you'll be too close for mines to be activated, and in the perfect spot to lob dumbfires up his tailpipe or start picking off nans.

Tip: Keep a nan between you and the bbr to block the turrets fire!

Should you ram the bomber? Too often I've seen voobs screw up a perfectly dead bomber because they have rammed it away from a dumbfire spike and/or a face full of mine packs.

• If your team desperately needs more time to muster more defence, yes.
• If you are a long way ahead of your buddies, such that any rams will not screw up their dumbfire salvo, then yes.
• If you're part of a pack that has already launched their first salvo, then yes.
• If you're part of a pack that has minepacks then NO. Even if your first dumb spike didn't kill it, chances are that a face full of mine packs at full speed will.

Tip: If at any stage you happen to get podded try to podkill yourself on the nans' prox. Yes, even if you have a 30 kill bonus - a 0kb fighter does a lot more damage than a 30kb pod.

Defending against capital ships mid-sector

If you have to do this there is either an enemy shipyard in the sector, an assault ship lurking around, or your initial camp failed miserably. Not all is lost but it's going to be quite hard to kill that cap. Once again, teamwork is the key to success in this situation. You will need to get every available fighter together and assemble outside the turrets' range. Going in one-by-one, or even in small groups, is suicide - you'll all end up in pods before you reach gunrange.

Once you have your group prepared boost towards the cap, all at once. Some will be podded but they died for the greater good. The lucky ones will make it to the cap and will employ the tactic you would use while attacking from a camp position - touch the cap with your nose and start orbiting it while shooting all you've got. Once again, if you're at point-blank range, you can't miss and the turrets will have a hard time hitting you back. This is tricky though and requires a lot of coordination to pull off, especially against bigger ships with more turrets.

If there is a fleet of capships you should really reevaulate whether you attack at all. You'll probably be better retreating and forming a camp at the next aleph. This isn't always an option, you may have your last techbase in the sector - so then your priority is simple: kill the cap which has got anti-base missiles. Ignore the corvettes, the attack carriers, everything else in just the same manner that you ignore ints when you try to kill an htt.

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