Cadet II/Stealth fighter
Stealth fighter
Refresher
The academy entry for stealth fighters.
The stealth fighter is mostly designed for stealth assaults, as its name implies. In addition to its cloaking device it carries weapons with low signatures and long ranges.
Stealth fighters rely on remaining hidden to survive because they have little hull and poor agility, which amounts to dying quickly in a stand-up dog fight. They can mount small shields but it is strongly recommend that you leave it at home because nine times out of ten the extra signature is not worth the extra protection.
This also makes the stealth fighter poor at defense, but they excel at destroying the enemy's economy with their anti-utility weapons. It's a bit of a catch 22 though, because most enemy teams upon losing all their miners will focus on attacking.
Allegiance is an economy game - miners bring in the money, money buys the tech, team uses bought tech to win the game (most of the time at least). When your commander buys a Tac he wants you to kill enemy miners as quickly as possible to cripple the enemy team. Then your focus is making sure any new miners/cons they build die quickly, and making sure your bases and miners aren't dying. Do this for ten minutes or so and you will have a tech advantage great enough to win the game.
Flying a stealth fighter
Ship load out
Utility cannons devastate utility hull (not shields though) and suck vs everything else. Sniper cannons are decent vs anything except utility hull. Recall that all constructors, miners, tower drones, carriers - basically everything AI - has utility class hull.
As mentioned earlier, the small shield isn't generally worth taking. Fill up your cargo with Hunters, and you're good to go. This will allow you to launch with the lowest possible sig. While not the best loadout for every situation, it's common.
Tip: If you have a cloak activated when you dock, it will remain activated when you next launch.
If the enemy don't have any miners or cons then you'll probably want to take snipers. If they have cap ships you'll probably want to take Killers, which function a lot like dumbfires. If you're trying to kill a miner which is defended you'll have to work with other teammates. Either take snipers and concentrate on taking out the escort, or utils and wait until the escort is dead/distracted before attacking.
Basically your default load out should be both main guns, utl cannons if you're going to kill utility ships (carriers, constructors and miners) or snipers if you're going to kill anything else. Missiles and Shield UNLOADED. Cargo full of LRM missiles and a small shield or full of LRM missiles. With this load out you launch with the lowest signature without cloaking (this applies as well to fighters, bombers and anything that has a shield or missiles, keep in mind just stealth fighters carry cloak devices, all bios ship carry cloak devices as well). Again this isn't the ultimate load out but it's one of the most used ones. I'll list some of my preferred load outs as well:
Cloaking tips
Until you have adv tac with the energy upgrades and the cloak 3 device, managing your energy reserves is important if you want to hide when you need to, and attack when you want to.
- If you want to remain hidden as you fly around the map, you should cloak whenever you enter an aleph or fly within 2k of an enemy base.
- Your stealth fighter has a sig of about 50% when it's uncloaked and missiles unmounted. You can get fairly close to the enemy, especially if you're in their rear arc.
- Minor bases and techbases have a scan range of 2400m.
- Adv techbases have a scan range of 3600m.
- Garrison/Starbase has a scan range of 3600/4000m respectively.
- Scouts and miners have a scan range of 2400m.
- You should always cloak before loading missiles. Preferably you wait until the cloak is fully engaged before loading the missiles.
- If you are eyed and are unlikely to lose eye, then uncloak and save your energy for your weapons.
- When you are defending you should remain uncloaked until the enemy are about to enter the sector (i.e. cloak at the same time someone yells "Drop!").
- If you're attacking, then uncloak before firing your main weapons because they will drain your energy quickly.
- If an enemy is flying straight at you then unmount missiles and cloak to avoid getting podded.
Tip: Rebind "Swap missiles" to a more convenient key so that you can do this quickly.
Combat
The stealth fighter is a long range combatant. This is reinforced by its terrible torque and turn rates which make it hard for a sf pilot to keep a nearby ship in its sights. If you try to fly it like an int (like so many voobs do) you will be in a pod before you know it.
You want to lob a few missiles at your opponent to soften them up, then while they're blundering around trying to figure out where you are attack them from the side or rear. Do not head directly at them while you're softening them up, use your side thrusters to move around them. Remember that if you spend a long time cloaked trying to soften them up then you won't have enough energy to finish them off with your guns.
Against ints and figs you can expect them to use their boosters to get out of your missile range. Keep a close eye on the distance between you and their speed - when your LRM Hunter has a range of 1800m it's no good launching it at 1600m when they're doing 150mps the other direction!
Don't be afraid to abort your attack and try again. It is better to unmount missiles and hide than try to get one more missile off before they pod you. After all, the sf is not designed for taking down enemy ships but for destroying the enemy's economy.
Note Do not expect to rack up a lot of kills with a stealth fighter.
Remember, the more time you waste trying to kill an enemy pilot the more time that sectors are going unprobed, miners are going undefended, bbrs are going unnanned, and enemy miners are freely mining.
sf vs figs
Early game the fig is an easy opponent. Relatively poor scan range, large model, and slow. As the game progresses their speed and scan range will increase making them a tougher opponent. Use your side thrust keys to avoid getting hit by dumbfires, stay out of their gatt range and you should be good.
sf vs ints
Interceptors have the worst scan range in the game but if they spot you they are the fastest to close with you. Hindering you even further is the pulse probe they can carry, which spells doom for any sf that can't run quickly. A smart int will either use his booster to ignore you and kill what you are defending, or to close with you before pulse probing you out.
This is where mastering your ability to unmount missiles and cloak and change direction to avoid direction is sorely tested. Or your ability to time your missile launches so they will actually hit - just because hunter has better tracking, agility and range than a dumbfire doesn't mean it's any better at hitting the enemy! Time your shots so they will actually hit, for instance when they are reloading fuel, or trying to change direction to chase your miner.
Do not use your guns to finish him off until the last minute, as he will spot you and kill you that much quicker.
sf vs other sfs
The mouse and cat game, whoever gets eyed first dies most of the time, you're strategy against other stealth fighters should be remain unseen ALWAYS, if you get eyed for 2 seconds and they shoot a LRM at you, you have basically lost right there. In this matchup whoever hits first wins most of the time. Try to get the first missile in or shoot it with snipers, remember they are as fragile as you are :).
Against Scouts
Treat it as a worse fighter, you should never lose this matchup unless we're talking about heavy scouts. Just remember these ships will probably spot you way faster… also a scout attacking you from the back means bad news since all stealth fighters have bad turn rate, so by the time you bring your guns to bear you'll probably be in a pod already (this applies to all ships attacking you from the back or side actually :p).
Additional Notes
The best part of allegiance is that not all the ships are the same for the different factions, bios for example can carry cloak in all their ships, most belters ship can carry boosters, etcetera. So SFs are no different, I won't go into full detail here as this would get too long but I'm just going to point out the 2 most different SF's, the rixian and technoflux SF, all the other SF are pretty much the same, 2 main guns… either utl or sniper and a missile mount, they are not exactly the same though, the faction global attributes apply to them as well as other perks like the belter's booster and such. The main difference with these 2 SF's is that they do NOT carry missiles.
The rixian SF has combat pods which are like little turrets you drop and attack the target you had BEFORE you dropped the pod, it won't change targets and won't chase it either, you should pick a target and when he's in range of the pod, you drop the pod and it shoots your target. This SF can also carry proximity mines and probes to help with the lack of missiles. Not very newbie friendly.
The technoflux SF is probably the hardest to fly since it doesn't have missiles or combat pods, instead of that it has an extra gun mount, so you can mount 3 utl or 3 snipers, hardest path to go while playing TF… but that is for another guide to discuss, just pointing out the difference here ;).
DESTROYING THE ENEMY'S ECONOMY
Alright, the most important role of a SF… killing miners, if you are a Tac team and the enemy has miners, you are FAILING, it's understandable if the enemy team has a miner with major D on it, but they should never ever have more than 2 miners (even 1 I would say) if you have stealth fighters.
Ok so I've said how important is to kill miners, but how do we actually kill one?
I'm going to write down my method, it's actually very similar to other methods, and basically they all the same with 1 or 2 variants, as in using shield or not, and such.
First of all you need to find a miner to kill, how to do that? it's very easy actually, the easiest one is looking at your mini map and find a miner icon, duh. The other method is called "checking He drop", if a scout from your team has been to an enemy sector and left it, you can still see the sector, you obviously can't see what's happening right now in there, but you can check for "He drop", what's that you say? well the rocks the miners get money (Credits) from are He rocks with He levels, on your mini map when you highlight a sector you can see a He: X number next to it. If you keep checking it back and forth and you see the He: X number going down, it means a miner is in that sector, you can even see the rock the miner is doing by carefully watching the little white bar above the rock, just spot the little white bar going down and you've found your rock :).
Alright so you've found a miner, now how do you kill it? first you need to get to the sector… so you pick your load out and fly there, try to remain unseen all the way, beware of camped alephs or defended alephs with caltrop/towers.
So you got to the sector and have spotted the miner, next thing to do is check if it has any defense or not, if you're completely and absolutely sure there's no one defending it, just go for it, if you are very low on energy, uncloak and wait for about 3/4 energy and just go for it.
Your strategy should be something like this for a miner WITHOUT defense:
Spot miner. Get about 3k away from miner, uncloak and recharge energy. When energy has replenished, cloak first and start going full speed towards the miner. Load missiles and wait for lock sound, as soon as you get the lock sound, launch as fast as you can your missiles. As soon as you get eyed, uncloak and put your shield on if you brought one, and start shooting it with utl while you keep shooting missiles at it, it should die quickly. If the miner you found has light D like a scout, apply combat maneuvers and pod the defense first, then immediately engage the miner, no point in being stealthy anymore since enemy team already saw you making a try for their miner and they are probably coming to pod you.
If the enemy has about 2 or 3 ships on it, you're solo and don't have huge tech advantage like advanced SF with lrm3, sig3 vs counter 1, don't even try, if you know more people is coming to help you, wait for them to get there and shoot scouts first, then go for the miner. If you know no one is coming to help, at least delay their mining, shoot the scouts guarding the miner, hoping they pull the miner to their base, or anything that delays their mining, if the miner has huge D, 2-3 ints/figs plus scouts, the best plan is to call more people. There's obviously cases where you can solo a miner even with huge D but that takes a lot of planning, experience and skill and you're in cadet, so don't try hero stuff, wait for the cavalry to arrive to help you in those cases.
Constructors are pretty much the same thing, the only difference is that if you see one solo about to build you should kill it as fast as you can or even ram it, because if it lines up and goes into the rock… well you can't kill it anymore =/.
DEFENDING VS BOMBER/TRANSPORTS
When you get a Tac the first thing an enemy commander will probably do is either push a con next to the sector your Tac is and bomb it or put some people on miner D so they can buy bombers. Bottom line is you will get bombed at some point in the game and you need to know how to D against them in a SF.
The best defense against bombers/tranports is probes, if you get bombed "un eyed" being Tac, you will most likely lose that base. So first of all you should probe around your Tac or sectors they own besides your own sectors.
Ok so we eyed the bomber coming for our Tac/Outpost/Tp you name it… what now? The first thing to do is get a proper load out, get snipers if you have them, and fill your cargo with missiles, you can even launch with missiles loaded, next thing to do is camp the aleph the enemy is coming from, stay just in range of your missiles, if your missile range is 1700 stay at 1550 or so, you get the idea, first target is NANS, shoot the damn scouts first… when scouts die shoot the bomber.
Another very important thing lot of newbies do NOT do is staying away from the bomber's path, do not stand in front of the bomber shooting at it, it will close you down quickly and the turrets will kill you just as fast. You need to stay to the side of the bomber and shoot it from there, stay away as far as you can OFF the bomber path. Imagine the route the bomber has to take and stay to the side of that route.
Defending versus HTT or TT/Bomber combo is the same thing, shoot nans first then HTT/bomber, it's really that easy.
Another more advanced thing I like to do if I have a decent KB is, if you see the bomber/HTT getting too close to your base I start flying towards the nans and shoot them with snipers as well, no point in staying away and safe while your base dies, you are expendable and free (YES YOU ARE FREE!) your base isn't, it's price was valuable credits your team should try to conserve.
Finally… if they are "force bombing" as in scouts plus interceptors or fighters, the ints/figs will close you down, if they do that apply the same combat maneuver as always… unload all your sig raising stuff, cloak and fly away, this way the int lost his time while the rest of your team defending (hopefully) shot the nans. When he goes away load missiles and start shooting nans again.
In conclusion the most important while defending against HTT/Bombers:
Stay AWAY from the bomber/HTT path. Shoot NANS first. If an Int/fig closes you down, cloak and wait, or fly away and re-engage.
DEFENDING VS CAP SHIPS
Defending versus cap ships is the same thing that defending versus bombers/HTT, the only difference is that you need LRM killers to take down a cap with stealth fighters. Using LRM hunter against a cap is close to useless.
Also you need to launch the missiles as straight as you can, they don't have the tracking of the LRM hunter. Against frigates/cruisers with nans shoot the frigate/cruiser first with killers.
Against carrier bombing (Attack carrier + nans + bomber following behind carrier), your best best is to shoot nans first as well, since attack carrier is just a big gunship, it doesn't have base killing missiles like a frigate or cruiser.
CONCLUSION
I hope this was useful and gave you a better grasp of how to fly stealth fighters. In my opinion a good stealth fighter pilot can make all the difference in a game, killing 1-2 miner or cons (specially miners) has a huge impact in the game. There's much more to be said about stealth fighters but it would be too long to read, so go out there and get some experience of your own, try to apply a thing or two that you read here and good luck!
