Cadet II/Fighter

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 article about proxing 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.