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 quickfires or seekers. Quickfires are also good for dogfighting against 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.

Supremacy as Strategy

Flying a fig is not just about learning how to fly and shoot with the ship. It is also about learning how to work with your team. Read the quotes below and think about what they're trying to say, and incorporate that into your play style next time your commander goes Sup.

Sup is unsuccessful because commanders do not play it with finesse. As a sup comm you must position yourself to be able to strike multiple enemy assets at any given time and switch targets and sectors within a 10-20s period of time. Expansion has to commit in full force to everything they do and inherit the risks inherent to that playstyle, sup does not. The first reflex of your average team and commander when a dozen ints rush your miners is "WE HAVE TO DEFEND OH MY GOD OUR MINERS ARE GOING TO DIE" when it should, instead, be "they have 12 ints here, we have an opportunity to do even more damage to them than what will be done to us by bombing this close outpost in this sector or maneuvering this carrier to that sector and killing 4 miners." At that point, when expansion must withdraw and defend so that they may attempt to gain a later advantage, the sup team can pull back as well and remain positioned to inflict great damage if expansion overextends itself. And Sup is unsuccessful because teams of voobs like you (referring to the person NightRychune was arguing with), people who get booted because they cannot keep their distance from basic Omicron figs in an SR scout and die, people who cannot right click on a sector with a carrier and a bunch of miners in it, hit R, press tab 10 seconds later, and then shoot some miners and scouts. Or people who cannot press B, R, dock, get a bomber, turrets, scouts and muster an on-demand bomb run within 30 seconds in any given sector — Quoted from NightRychune

People bring that up (ripcord ability) constantly, but I can't $#@!ing remember the last time I was in an int and thought "wow I wish I could ripcord". If I need to get across the map I can just boost there in thirty seconds, and if I need to get back to base I can just boost to the top edge of the sector to pod myself and then self-podkill. Sure, that's not instant...but even though they can ripcord, figs' response time isn't really much better than ints'. Why? I'm pretty sure it's that since people can rip back anytime they want, they don't feel the same sense of urgency they would in an int - no matter how much you yell "NOW NOW NOW", they think to themselves "well it only takes me eight seconds to get back, so I'll waste thirty seconds finishing whatever unimportant bull@#(! I'm doing before I rip back to save our techbase" and then act surprised when there's nothing left but a cloud of debris when they finally arrive. — Quoted from Jimen

Commanders go exp because you're (referring to the person phoenix1 was arguing with) an idiot. Because when a commander sends a carrier to the mining sector, you rip in your figs and nans to keep the carrier alive, totally ignoring the chat that looks like this: KILL THE MINERS! STOP DMING AT THE CARRIER! IGNORE OUR CARRIER IT IS SUPPOSED TO DIE! KILL THEIR MINERS! KILL THEM! BOOST TO THEM THEY ARE NOW FULL AND DOCKING! WHAT IS TAKING YOU SO LONG?! WHY ARE YOU STILL DMING?! I only go sup if I am 100% sure that I have a team that will listen to what I'm saying, and understand that I'm looking at the big picture. Sure, the carrier is in a nice place and losing it will hurt. It won't hurt nearly as much as the two full miners you can bring down! Yes, that TP is in a very important position, but truth be told I'd rather lose it and kill their outpost in my backsector. Sure, that bomb run is bearing down on my garrison, but I already have TP2: get your figbees and blow up their sup. I find that sup doesn't work because most people can't understand the concept of "We had to be there yesterday." For example, the other day I had an expansion that was capped and right next to a TP. I told everyone to figbee our old expansion right now, since they had just launched bbrs to clear the ref, the 4 spec refs, and the TP in the sector (we'll ignore that they let someone cap an exp while we had mini3 heavies). I got podded, handed out four figbees, launched my own, ripped in, fired three missiles, and was then podded. No one else ripped in, and the TP died. A minute later, some total $#@!ing idiot asked, "Where should we go to figbee the exp?" — Quoted from phoenix1