Dataset & Fleet Details (xlsx download): docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTxi79g8aHdObkn5ppbnx32lNf5wMZs06R_9gMVtPNx-jy1ieFO4CXShd_jIzOWJLyKYWVHfmh4L2lt/pub?output=xlsx FAQ Q: How do these results compare to player-piloted ships? A: They don't. Player ships can't be tested in this manner. Your personal flying style and skill level will determine which one is most effective in your hands. Q: Isn't it harder to manage large groups of ships? A: Yes, somewhat. The minimum number of inputs (clicks + key presses) required to complete this test, replace losses, repair, and rearm is: 104 for fighters, 88 for carriers, 68 for destroyers, and 64 for battleships. That's using the featured compositions, my key bindings, and my command style. Q: How are the results affected by micromanaging ships during combat? A: That isn't testable in any statistically meaningful way. In general, micromanaging capitals is mechanically easier (fewer ships = fewer inputs), but micromanaging fighters is more effective (faster responses to commands). Q: What about mixed fleets of carriers, fighters, and destroyers/battleships? A: I tested them briefly and they seemed to be intermediate between the carrier and destroyer results, but closer to the destroyer side. They are still my personal favorite type of fleet composition. Q: How dare you say that fighters are good for station assaults?! A: I didn't.
The truly weird thing is this: the reason you would want a carrier is to allow fighters to return to repair. However, fighters usually die. Due to how X's boosters work, once the shields are gone, ships can not disengage. Especially not the blockheads you hire. So in essence, the main reason have carriers is gone. You can basically simply skip buying one and just buy 200 more fighters. Imho, x4 would make carriers much more useful if they had the ability to outright retrieve damaged fighters via teleport.
How so? You can simply build a carrier and assign them all to it. Carriers actually work now and launch/dock their ships when targets get close. You rarely lose fighters to capitals too if you have 20+
@@isimiel3405 That happens with anything in sector 🤣 I generally only use bigger fleets OOS unless im not bothered about losses. i lost an entire fighter fleet to a capital ship exploding when they first added that. xD
I am still pretty new to the game. I’ve played maybe 200+ hours and just have been trying to make a steady stream of money the TEL way. I’ve watched video after video about this game and honestly, it’s a lot. I just finally built my first Asgard. I really do appreciate your videos and others explaining the game.
Great video! Very helpful! Recently gotten back into X4 after taking a long break and really got stuck back into it (many many hours over the past 2 weeks!). Thanks for the tips!
Playing for 1200+ hours and only now test out carriers...The burst firing of my modded PAR plasma syns never let me down so far. Ks drop in less than 10s, I-class need 20s On my first playthrough i cleared all xenon sectors needed for that yaki mission only using 1 syn and 2 osakas for flak cover...no losses. I think thats my problem here: being ok with losing ships/fighters. Up til now i could not stand losing ships while achieving my goals. Destroyers and Asgaards (+earlking) did it for me on every of my 4 playthroughs Going for Shih fighter production in my new avarice facility next and try your proposal out now, though. Thx for the advice❤
Personally, carriers are worth the money instead of a fighter swarm in two situations: 1. Sector patrol. Pure fighters will suffer the attrition over time, but with a carrier attrition rate drops significantly 2. Player piloting. You can land your fighters and pull them through an enemy sector using travel drive, and undock them only at the final strategic destination
Talking about new players, I just picked up X4. I have about 2000 hours on X3 back from 2006 to 2010 because my first laptop was a MacBook and that was one of the only games I could find for Mac back in the day
Your videos are very nice too watch, nicely produced and I like your narrative style. Also, I would love if you'd make a video about missiles and torpedoes, especially after 7.0.
Thank you for the interesting and usefull data. I typically don't get involoved in the larger scale fights until I'm able to mass produce my own capital ship fleets so efficiency and effectiveness are not really as important at that point but its nice to know. My normall clear out the xenon sectors force is 1-2 full carriers and ~35 destroyers, I do nearly no micro and instead just focus on snowballing that force with reinforcements, I don't care about losses or put too much focus in to min maxing loadouts because quantity has a quality all its own. losing 5-10 destroyers per sector is totally acceptable but next time I play I'll try some min max carriers as that seems like it would be a little faster to get done. thanks
In low attention combat, I used to need two fleets: a carrier group to take on Xenon ships, and a battle group of battleship and destroyers to take on a defense platform. The logic behind the carrier group has been well explained here. I usually bother with a carrier for repairs and resupply for long campaigns taking over multiple Xenon sectors. But whenever I sent the fighters against a station, I would lose too many to make the campaign viable. I would need to rebuild the fighters, reassign to the carrier group and wait for their arrival. High attention combat seems to work much, much better here. A battleship and destroyers group worked well against the stations, generally surviving much better, meaning I could generally complete a campaign with the starting fleet. They do require some attention to make sure the destroyers didn't get themselves too close to Xenon turrets when repositioning, but nothing close to rebuilding a fleet worth of fighters.
So many blast mortars, so few pulse lasers. I guess it makes sense since you have the station assault in there, but I'm a little surprised that you didn't have trouble with the defense drones.
Defense drones were troublesome, but so were M turrets. The turret stripping (and straight up kill potential) of mortars ended up being more impactful than pulse lasers beyond a certain number of fighters.
Thanks for explaining to everyone why capital ships, sadly, suck in X4. You just nailed all the reasons that i keep saying as well. Completely flipped it on the head with how it was in the older titles. In X3 especially, capital ships were quite overpowered. Meanwhile, in X4, they have gone too far in the other direction, and now fighters are the overpowered ones. I feel that the L and XL ships could easily do with double, if not tripple their health, and at least doubling the damage on their weaponry, including M and L turrets. So they can at least defend themselves to some degree. Right now, the big boats are utterly helpless against small stuff.
That depends on which sort of combat you do. Simulated like he did? Large ships lose. But if you participate directly, fighters are getting shredded. 40 against 1 k? The 40 lose. Every time without making Any damage
@@fischersfritz468 you mean in high attention? Thats what he did. Capital ships stand no chance against fighters. What kinda weapons did you load them with that they lost so hard? Like, 20 Mako with heavy torpedos already delete an I without taking any losses. Not to mention a swarm of 100 fighters. As you see in the video. the big ships just cease to exist as soon as the fighters start firing. Low attention its even worse for capital ships. since turrets do even less damage there.
@@kajarslibrary5404 Capitals don't suck. You give me 160 million to build a capital fleet vs a carrier fleet with fighters, and 50 hours later, you've had to replace the fighters in that fleet 6x over, and the destroyer fleet hasn't taken a single loss. Yes, fighters are better at punching up and trading economically, but nobody ever said you had to take risky fights. Even easy fights, you are suffering attrition with fighters, because you will lose fighters. A fighter eats a stray graviton pulse, dead. A fighter gets jumped after boosting by escorts. Dead. Little by little it adds up, and 50 hours later, that 160 million fleet, actually now costs 1.2 billion, to accommodate losses, while that 160 million destroyer fleet hasn't suffered a single loss. Yes, his test shows that fighters punch up better, but why would you send your fleet into a fight like that where you might lose the entire fleet? In a last stand scenario where Xenon are coming in at you and you're down to the last few sectors? Sure, you're better off with fighters and carriers, but if you can pick the time and place of your main fleet actions, a death ball of destroyers is more efficient because they will take no losses, and need no replacements. The fighters will always need replacements after any sort of major engagement, easy or hard.
@@mercb3ast that is simply not the case. You will lose destroyers as well. They are slow, clumsy, and easily flanked. 160 million is at most 16 Behemoth/Phoenix/Odysseus, or 8 Osaka/Rattlesnake/Ray. That is simply not enough for a death ball. Heck, as you can see/hear in the video, the 160m in destroyers took similar or more losses in value as the fighters in the best case scenario. More often they got completely wiped out. Even if you got 50 or 100 destroyers. They will get stuck, flanked, or derp and you will take losses. They arent invincible either. You will lose destroyers for the same reasons you will lose fighters. Losses are a fact with either approach. Combined arms may yield even better results than each class on their own. I am very much the industrial player, i dont even have any combat ships other than my personal corvette until 20+ hours in. Then i just throw out 500 fighters to remove anything that moves, 10 destroyers to clean up stations, and 1 aux, and delete the xenon. I just find fighters a lot easier to manage, and a lot faster and more reliable at the job. If i have to pay a bit extra for that long term, than it shall be so. Especially if i can avoid the micromanaging and frustration of destroyer jank.
@@kajarslibrary5404 Destroyers will die without micromanagement because the AI is comically dumb and will just fly right into graviton range and get erased, fighters do the same thing but gravitons hit percentage is alot lower.
With active managment i find that destroyers suffer far less attrition compared to fighters. I constantly lost fighters in stupid ways because they overcommitted or stoped to recalculate their next action in front of enemy guns. I only recently started with the game, but with a fair easy to get destroyer setup (1x Syn form questline, 2x Behemoth requesitioned from Scale Plate, 1x Orca) i was able to take down several Xenon sectors without any loses. Just make sure they stay close together, line them up on the closest enemy approaching and have them concentrate fire. Fighting an enemy station and fleet at once is suprisingly an advantage. I normaly get the station beween me and the Xenon fleet. The attack command on the station makes it easier to lock the destroyers in place and the AI is realy bad at manouvering around the station making it easier to separate and defeat them in detail. Also about cost effectiveness: Aux ships with consumable spam. Setting down 100 laser turrets cost the same as 1,5 fighters and screen against any fighers. Aux ship can also carry 100 drones ... but their AI is iffy. Destroyer combat can be made without losses, but requires constant attention and minute adjustments to positioning. In the very late game a fighter spam might be better, but getting into the midgame and clearing out the first few Xenon sectors can be more effectivly done with destroyers. Kha'ak should allways be engaged with destroyers. They hardcounter fighters but can not harm destroyers.
To use carriers effectively, you NEED to use the "Protect Position" command. It is unique to carriers. It is great for patrolling sectors and locking down gates. You can use it offensively as well. You can keep your carrier safe way across the sector or even in a different sector. Your fighters will be much better about repairing and resupplying at the carrier when they need to with this command. You can also have very large numbers of fighters with minimal micro. Learn this command, you will not go back! (Also, fighters are kind of OP in vanilla. I like the VRO mod which makes capital ships more useful.)
This makes me appreciate the VRO even more. I feel like every ship class really has uses and weaknesses. While Vanilla remains so heavily fighter favoured. For majority of my 200h VRO run I did not have a steady stream of incoming credits. So any time I could I just bought the meaniest battleship I could and thought how OP battleships are and how they make every other ship class worthless. However the more I played the more I realized, that they have their own lackings in similar manner as the asgard you shown. Battleships proved to be really good investment and they spent majority of my run defending the gates - stoping Ks and Is. However once I wanted to go on the offense they just could not push through incoming xenon streams fast enough and eventually even they got caught in no return situation where Ks and Is with fighter wings charged them. They also struggled with gate keeping, because some xenon ships were so agile they just ignored them and attacked my other assets such as trading fleets far away from the battleship positions. They can be great bait - having them in far frontal position before battle. Or simply letting them enter the sector first before you engage your fleet... Letting them being focused so that your more mobile part of the fleet can engage clustered enemies who are baragged from battleships batteries in the meanwhile. When I started warring the Argon I got cocky and flew my modded personal flagship Gharial through battered Argon Sector which was supposed to be mostly empty. I got hit by single fighter after and after that argon torpedo bombers engaged from 10kms focusing my engines for "mobility kill" - after that I sadly gave my battleship a farewell as it was focused down by regular argon patrol fleet Battleships are amazing clunky mean "bricks" but that's all there is to it. *They proved to be more like mobile defense platforms.* Destroyers Have one and single purpose by my eyes and that is station destruction - this remains in VRO as well. *In group they can focus large battleships and defense platforms*, but that is all there is to it. However... eventually you will need them in VRO... because fighters are so so terrible against stations in VRO and battleships are pricey and don't have frontal guns so they are not cost efficient at station sieging either. M ships can be good and adaptible in many roles, but because I am running mostly split playtrough they are not cost efficient and so *I cannot share much experience here* - only maybe that the dragons get stuck and focused by Xenon heavy turrets. And that Cobras are just too expensive. M ships are good for anti khaak / anti pirate patrols. My favourite one is Rocinante.... I mean a Peregrine. Fighters - Fighters Are the kings even in VRO by my honest opinion. However everything else was buffed in the VRO so unless you have credits to replenish your losses you cannot simply go with 200 fighters and expect to be the king of the universe. Especially xenon beam turrets melt through fighters like they are made of wet tissue paper. Attacking any static defense - laser towers, defense platforms, factories, shipyards is just suicidal - Even 100 fighters with 50bomber/50 interception loadout gets wiped out attacking xenon defense platform. I tried several loadouts and fighters get decimated against defense stations even with a carrier - and that is why you need a dedicated destroyer fleet or cruise missile battleship to take down the most heavily defended stations. Against anything with engines however - fighters just win. They are mobile, they are flexible with their loadouts. They can engage really quickly. They overwhelm large ships in numbers - Especially torpedo / mortar bomber wings are just sadistic. With a carrier you can play chess with setting multiple position defense zones and push through the sector. *With Carriers and Fighters - you dictate the state of the battlefield*. Unlike in Vanilla - in VRO you need many of them and they really become effective once you have a carrier and credits or your own infrastructure to replenish them. So unlike in Vanilla they are more like lategame assets. You should have always some spare money and/or infrastructure to replenish loses. My favorite ones are Balaur and Shih
Naw VRO just makes Medium ship swarm completely broken instead of fighters. its just as borked and you cant use carriers as well with M ships making it even more annoying lol
I don't think this guys assessment is exactly accurate. It's sort of the result of meta group think that reduces everything in online gaming down to "optimal" vs everything being "trash". Fighters ARE effective and economical, but comparing the raw stats of a fighter, versus the raw stats of an Odysseus by cost is super over simplifying things. Capital ships are basically a long term investment. Fighters are short term. You take that 160 million spent on fighters vs capitals, and if you pick and choose your engagements with the capitals, you will have ZERO losses. Attrition on the 160 million of fighters are unavoidable. The lifetime damage dealt by those 160 million in fighters will be massively dwarfed by the lifetime damage dealt by those destroyers, because unless you foolishly throw them away, you will have most, if not all of them the entire game. Fighters are basically expensive missiles. They punch way up, but because they die so easily, they should be treated as disposable. That 160 million fleet of destroyers can be chugging along 50 hours after you bought them, while that 160 million fleet of fighters will have 600% turnover 50 hours later. You bought the destroyers once, you had to replace the fighters 6x over. Of course you CAN lose destroyers, but, that's a player decision on how they want to use them. If you want to throw a fleet of destroyers into a suicidal situation, go for it. You don't have to do that though. You can pick and choose your engagements, and in any situation where the risk is too great, you can just fly something yourself and deal with the situation.
@@mercb3ast If I select a wing of 10 Odysseus and order them to attack a xenon K, I might lose 2, because of misuse of travel drive and main batteries targeting issues, have plenty of tests that conform that. If I select a wing of 40 Ares with BMs, and order them to attack the same K, I might lose 2, but often, I would lose none. I would rather replace 2 Ares, than 2 Odysseus. And while I could jump in one of the Odysseus and deal with the K myself, I'm just not willing to do that every time a xenon K enters radar range, I'm one of those that want the AI to do stuff.
Good video, I admire your frustration resistance. I'm having problems at the moment, especially with M and stripping squads on carriers. 🥴 Btw anyone who has ever flown from Earth with an S/M squad to another system knows how important carriers are. The police are particularly annoying.😂
I did the solo Asgard play quite a bit. I gave it up when I've seen that a single xenon N can prevent you from going to travel drive, and spend an hour trying to reach a xenon defence station at 300 km away, because of the constant string of fighters the xenon were sending on my way.😐
Other takeaways are that the Shih with 3 shields is good enough to tank graviton shots and still has 250+ speed, and the blast mortar makes missiles look like a bad joke. I'd say this combination is what makes the fighter runs so successful.
Mortar Shihs and Pulse Chimeras are definitely great fighter loadouts, and there certainly is a big difference between a great fighter loadout and an average one. I did test other compositions with weaker loadouts, like Tau Takobas and Muon Dragons. They still did fine, especially vs Xenon capitals, but the station attack was noticeably more challenging for them than for the great loadouts.
@@CptSnuggles07 For fighters speed is the first defense stat and shields second. Once it can tank a single graviton it's better to be more nimble. The speed difference is noticeable with the Takoba and it can't take 2 hits either while being an easier target, the Dragon is M class combat ship which is trash in AI hands, those should be for player only until Egosoft greatly changes their behavior. Same applies for fighting against the other factions so once you do good against the Xenon the others become trivial.
The thing is that if you take other setups, you can get even better results. I believe someone ran the math and basic mk1 pulse Kyds are pretty much the peak loadout in terms of cost/effect.
@@gogudelagaze1585 If you like to throw around 200 ships yes. In a 40 carrier group size they wont even scratch the I. On a side note I really think X needs a command point system cause the player can always just throw more ships at a problem while the AI has limited fleet sizes.
@@csfelfoldi Yup, you do need huge groups, but mk1 kyds are incredibly cheap. iirc, with 10 million you can get around 60 of them from the faction wharf, and that fleet is incredibly powerful on its own.
Nowadays the Erlking is extremely good in clearing out systems full of capital-sized objects (i.e. ships and stations) - probably was this good since before the 7.1 patch. I even tackled the Vigor-related questline fleet of close to 300 fighters with the Erlking; granted, I had to withdraw twice and run to regenerate shields, but the end result was the swarm defeated and me being able to proceed with the questline. Taking the above into account - what would be the ultimate fighter build for anti-small ship cases? I imagine the weapons used in this video probably are aimed primarily at taking down larger targets.
If you had tracker missiles, especially EMP or similar to take out the travel drive, then taking out the Xenon would be a lot easier, but that would be best done with a couple of missile boats, and therefore either you are taking out a fighter bay from a carrier that could be on a more useful ship, or you have to use the M class to do it. Those, however, don't fare well against anything, they just flat out lack shield regen and so get swarmed by ships, but lack the sheilding to last against graviton fire. But the 7.10 update made bombards more useful, and if you merely use a couple to stop the charge by Ks and Is, then they should not be in much danger. There's little to no way to do that via orders, so you have to make a wing of them up and specifically call them and then dock them after their work is done. As for taking out the station, just use dumbfires. Not only do they take less space as bits, but they also do a lot of damage that doesn't matter it is dumbfire because stations, get this, don't move. This means a different loadout is therefore balanced, and the dumbfires aren't much use against anything other than the K and I at CLOSE range and stations. Destroyers with dumbfires can get close in and the Xenon capitals love to do that, so maybe your "destroyer only" group could do that. Sit 200 dumbfires, put a couple of dumbfire turrets on it, and set those to "attack capitals only".
Sorry if I missed it in the video, so this video pertains to in sector combat and no manual involvement? Since OOS combat is very different. As well micro managing capital ships yields significant better results as you need to keep your distance and never brawl. I can manually control 1 Asgard and take out a fleet of one I and multiple k’s without a scratch. Also would be nice to know what commands you used on the fighter carrier group and capital group, any coordinated attacks? What was the fighter behavior set at? Again sorry for asking if it was already in the video somewhere and I missed it.
Yes, high attention and no manual involvement. It's pretty trivial to win by flying certain ships yourself or by fighting in low attention, so there's not much point in spending hours testing either one. As for micromanagement, it just makes the experiment non-controlled, which would make the results invalid. The only way to ensure true replication between runs is to leave everything to the AI. Mortar fighters were generally om Attack, others were on Intercept. I did use some Coordinated Attacks, but they're pretty janky in this patch, so I mostly used queued attacks and multi-target attacks.
On a fair flipside, the most popular overhaul mod for X4 Foundations, Variety and Rebalance Overhaul, flips the script entirely that fighters are vulnerable to larger ship anti-fighter countermeasures and weapons, and I can see the argument working in this case that fighters would be a pointless waste of money outside of the far more situational use they see in the mod.
Yes please tell us how you came up with those compositions :D My only issue with OOS fighters is that they just seem to simply die to the stations, since to my knowledge you can't attack surface elements in low attention. A single xenon powerplant took out 40/100 shihs before I pulled the fleet from it, which was... Not something I liked to see :')
Sure. The choice of fighters was a little tricky because I included the station assault. They needed to be able to absorb at least two consecutive station module explosions without taking too much hull damage, meaning they needed to be relatively tanky, but the bombers still needed the firepower to shred XL ships and the interceptors needed the speed to catch M’s and PE’s, all with mostly Mk2 gear. That restricted me to about 6 fighter hulls and a handful of weapons, out of which the Mortar Shih and Pulse Chimera performed best, unsurprisingly. With carriers that had multiple M docks, I also had to pick M ships, using similar criteria. Once I’d picked my fighters and M ships, I just had to adjust the balance of bombers to interceptors based on which carrier I was using. The Shark can absorb tons of graviton fire but can’t clear enemy fighters quickly, so it needs a couple of strong interceptor wings, even at the expense of some bombers; the Raptor is the opposite, and the Condor is intermediate. As for assignments, interceptors obviously went on Intercept, and bombers needed to be on Attack for the station assault, although I did sometimes use Bombardment for the anti-ship stages. With the destroyers, you have relatively few “viable” loadout options compared to fighters, and I’ve already done tons of destroyer testing, so I know what loadouts are tough and nimble “brawlers” versus less-survivable but higher-damage “snipers”. I put brawlers (Ray/Phoenix in the “winning” composition) in the front, i.e., the fleet commander and its immediate subordinates, and snipers (Odysseus in the “winning” composition) in the back, i.e., the subordinates of the subordinates. Some ships, like the Syn, have a hybrid of brawler and sniper features, which unfortunately is not a good fit for the 7.1 battlefield. The featured Asgard composition was a little different; the Rays set to Attack moved ahead of the Asgard like a screen to slow down the Xenon capitals and help the Asgard line up its main battery shots, while the Rays set to Defend stayed behind the Asgard and only moved in once the Asgard was engaged in a brawl. Unfortunately, nothing I tried could provide sufficient support within my budget constraints. If you’re attacking stations with fighters OOS, 100 Shihs should be plenty, but you need to stack them all up beforehand so that they all hit the station at exactly the same time. If they’re even a little spread out, the station will pick off each wave of leading ships as they approach. If you're making a specialized station-killing fleet, I'd highly recommend just using destroyers; they're way more forgiving.
I honestly don't know how you make carriers work for station destruction, whenever I do it I watch as the carrier travel drives straight into the station graviton guns and dies and then even with attack turrets on I lose 40-50 fighters to the positrons.
Prior to the introduction of explosion dmg, station demolition was possible with fast fighters with BMs. But after, station demolition became an exclusively destroyers sport.
I'm curious if this remains true if you're not using the very best of the best fighters. For example, I'm doing a Boron only run, and in this video the Shark and Ray were the standouts while the Mako and Barracuda weren't even mentioned. Would a Boron only fleet benefit more than the min-maxed mixed fleets from having more of a Destroyer presence due to the strength of the Ray? Also, did you test any fighter-heavy lineups that only included one or two battleships only? I'm curious if "Why not both?" works here.
For this test, both fighters and capitals were fit with best available equipment within the budget constraints, so if we're talking about reducing the quality of fighter loadouts, it would be most appropriate to compare them against reduced-quality destroyer/battleship loadouts. L Pulse instead of L Beams, M Bolt instead of M Flak, faction-locked engines/shields/plasma, etc. Which is to say, weak fighters vs strong destroyers isn't a fair comparison. However, even in that unfair comparison, I'd still expect the fighters to be more cost-effective for anti-ship work in all but the most extreme cases. I only tested one mixed fleet of carrier + S/M escorts + destroyers. Its performance was intermediate between the carrier and pure destroyer compositions, but closer to the destroyer side, which was disappointing. I still personally prefer mixed fleets. Boron-only is a unique case. At the 160m price point, I'd probably go with a Guppy/bomber/Ray mix.
So, I'm still thinking about this video. As mentioned before, without Resupply Subordinates running carriers is way to much work for a lazy space cowboy like me, so I usually end up with a way oversized fleet of destroyers, some anti-fighter, some anti-capital, which is obviously more expensive and less efficient. This is in vanilla runs, which got me thinking: Why do we even care about efficiency in this game? Honest question. My point is, once you are at a certain point with your assets, you generate credits like crazy and with good strategical placement of your ressource hubs, you won't run out of ship building materials either. Before that point, however, every bigger loss is a catastrophy, one never financially recovers from. Regardless if they are 15 fighters or one destroyer. I'm not saying y'all are doing something wrong, I'm asking if I'm playing the game wrong. :D Btw.: Very good video again, I very much appreciate your consistency in quality and thoroughness. Thank you, Captain.
Capitals are only less efficient if you lose them. Otherwise they are way more efficient. Consider this. You are given 160 million to field destroyers, and 160 million to field fighters + a carrier. Fifty hours later of careful battle selection, you still have all of your original destroyers. The total cost of that fleet is 160 million + whatever incidental hull damage you've maybe had to repair over the hours, and maybe you threw some upgrades on them at some point. For all intents and purposes, your original 160m investment is still there. That 160 m fighter fleet though? You've likely had over 100% turnover at minimum, and more likely several times that. Even in the most standard battles in HA (high attention), you will lose fighters. Million here, million there, million, million, million. After 50 hours, you've replaced 100 fighters, that's 100 million. Your 160 million investment is 260 million now, or 400, or 800 million. Fighter losses are inescapable. Ultimately, they are tools that are suited for different things. Fighters + carriers are going to punch up, but they are going to take losses while doing it. They can also punch down, but they are going to take losses doing it. Capitals cannot punch up as well, and they will take enormous losses doing it, but they can also punch down, and take zero losses doing it.
There is no wrong way to play. You can completely circumvent the need for high-attention cost efficiency by using any of the major money-making cheeses, by focusing on low-attention fleets, or by just spending lots of time on economy before starting your military campaigns. I used cost effectiveness as my metric here because credits are the closest thing X4 has to a universal unit of measurement, not because you're obligated to care about cost effectiveness per se.
In the early game, destroyers make sense. You don't need to worry about losing them and having to replace them or needing to rescue the crew. If you got careless you can savescum. If you need to destroy a K, just fly or teleport over to your destroyer and handle it yourself. Otherwise your destroyer should be able to deal with small and medium ships on its own. Or you can just park it somewhere safe until you need to use it. Unless you decided to build a station near a hotspot, you can just ignore the Xenon.
I use hybrid tactics usually I have a few destroyers with maybe 1 or 2 carriers in support. I use to exclusively use L and M class ships but that got very expensive and wasn’t especially effective especially if the Xenon or whoever send a serious combined force which happened to me more than once turns out 80 fighters are cheaper more effective than 30 corvettes and frigates
Was off the game for a few month. Came back today and it feel like xenons have been nerf. I spent minutes under fire from a graviton turret and my shield wasnt disminishing. OK i was sitting in an asgard. But still it felt like that graviton wasnt as dangerous as i remember it to be.
What happens if all ships are on intercept (Cobras and Chimeras), I have yet to experience large fleet combat? Getting close to 500 hrs here in my 1st complete playthrough (I am trying to get as many steam achievement as I can), I usually start over when a new update comes out. The main thing I recommend to new players is to rush and build a Terran wharf, and produce/sell ships to ZYA for max profitss.
I did keep all the Chimeras and frigates/corvettes set to Intercept. It's very effective for keeping enemy fighters and drones away from the bombers, but you do need to be careful with your carrier positioning and/or toggle them between Launched and Docked to make sure they don't fly off and pick unwanted fights.
Wait, so fighters would actually go for turrets without you explicitly issuing the the "attack surface elements / turrets" order? or was it just the side effect from blast mortar's aoe?
They attack station surface elements automatically with Coordinate Attack. Otherwise, they do have to be told (via the fleet commander) to attack surface elements. Blast mortars will do some collateral damage with a standard attack order, but not enough to quickly cripple a station.
I tend to not play a military playstyle, avoiding combat where I can while having enough strength to deal with wandering threats and enough speed to get away from bigger threats. This being said, can we test out the strength of civilian fleet operations? My big ships are all freighters and miners (To counter both Khaak and pirates), occasionally running medium ships in territory where I can give them some coverage. Any serious threat I take on personally with a small fleet of at least one aux and a full compliment of S/M fighters.
buuuuuut the Terrans keep donating free Asgards to my fleet...it would be rude to tell them to stop giving those away and send carriers instead? I mean I'm not averse to being rude, it just seems ungrateful...
It's cheap even for vanilla. Had to cut some corners on equipment. And the price estimate is taken from the custom game creation screen, which I *believe* reflects the minimum prices at an NPC shipyard.
destroyers just easy to manage... Make 20 dtr and they anihilate everything whithout loss, but fighter setup you need constantly refeel, coz they die like a flyes
In X5, I hope they go to a more traditional naval role and class system.IE: Fighters: function as small fast intercepts and general dogfighters, can attack Capital ships, but you need a lot of them. Heavy fighters: the bombers of fighters, slower, more guns, and is the smallest class able to mount missile launchers and Torpedos launchers. Corvettes/gunboats/frigates: the only general classes I feel are where they should be. Destroyers: 1, maybe 2 main guns, along with a pair of L turrets, but bristling with Medium turret slots. These are the dedicated anti fighter and missile screen for larger capital ships. The Osaka is the only ship in game I feel actually deserves this title. Cruisers: the bread and butter of Capital ships, the Behemoth and Odyssey fit the role much better than destroyers. Should have 2-3 main guns, a battery of L turrets, with a snaller battery of M turrets. Battleships: If they don't have a main cannon like the Asgard, 4-5 main guns, a large battery of L turrets, and a small battery of M turrets. These are your long range brawler, they should be able to quash Destroyers and Cruisers, but weak to Heavy fighters and numbers. Carrier: self explanatory. Only 1 that I would add that is not an actual naval ship class, Siege Dreadnought: the premise being a gun like the Asgard, but the ship having to "set up" by transfering all power from the engines and turrets to the main cannon. Primarily billed as a station destroyer, but needing protection as it will have a relatively small L and M turret battery.
The real issue is that turrets themselves cant hit the broadside of a barn, and when they do, they do fuck all damage except for plasma and are hard carried by the absolutely busted slasher mod.
If same fleets are controled by player instead of AI, the results will be quite different: Asgard group will be total winner with zero loses (especialy if Asgard have reasonable mods). In this matter, the cheapest way to invade Xenon sectors is with single, decent moded Asgard with mixed loadout, controled by player: Xenon fighters dont have plasma, blast mortars or torpedos and cant break its shiled recharge. K and I now can use travel speed until reach 10 km range from their target and are quite dangerous for the carriers - ones slow and not well protected. In my games such wast carrier fleets are used to cut gates, patrol duties, guard production complexes etc. For example i have Raptor, parked in the little ore filed in the north west side of Family Nhutt guarding both my personal miners and those of the patriarchy. The loses in my games are minimal and the resources insead to be sinked in fighters production are reinvested in production complexes.
@@CptSnuggles07 The gunships should get more missiles, or at least the far worse than the peregrine minotaur. Technically you could then use them to EMP or Disruptor the Xenon Capitals. Well you probably still can, it doesn't need many missiles and should then be brought back and docked, they can't handle fighter swarms or graviton guns. But if they generally got more missiles, and/or especially that minotaur, then they have a return as a bomber in fleet use, whereas you either use a drone frigate or corvettes in a small wing as sector patrol. There is, currently, no real use in a fleet for them, except as extra turrets for capitals that can carry them (and therefore the meta Jian). Corvettes as sector patrols can take out several fighters OOS, or a couple of fighters IS each, but to take out a destroyer or similar takes a half dozen. Frigates could do it for the teladi and argon, because they don't have corvettes. But there is currently no reason to have gunships.
The reality of it is, it comes down to personal preference. No matter how you look at it, using carriers and primarily fighters to deal your damage results in losses often, massively increasing your micro management requirements. An effective destroyer/battleship fleet does not suffer as many losses, and if it does, it's usually one ship that you can put on order and have back in the fleet with a few clicks. Edit: I don't know how you lose so many destroyers and battleships, my experiences are different for sure.
Yep, it's a very forgiving game and you can win with anything, but some people like to know what the "optimal" choice is. I like knowing but don't actually play optimally, as you can see from my actual gameplay videos. Are you saying that you've seen different capital ship mortality in Version 7.1, unmodified, using ships worth 150-170m, under full AI control, in equivalent combat scenarios, consistently?
Best bang for buck is a Behemoth which is easily stolen from the SCA for free with zero rep loss, Equip it with 4 fast torpedo bombers (S ships) and it can take out Ks IS and OOS. L ships are practically invulnerable to fighters anyway so keep your torp bombers docked if there is a lot of fighters about and let your flak turrets on the behemoth deal with them. Also DONT attack stations with fighters and when you use destroyers make sure to surround the station. If they destroy station modules on one side of the station they will fly under it and die to turrets so they can get to the otherside.
I think the scale in consideration matters greatly. On a low budget (enough for one ship), a player destroyer is significantly better than a fighter group. The problem is scaling. Even with the improvements to AI, capitals are still utterly garbage in performance (compared to player), so adding a second destroyer provides significantly less "effect". Fighter AI is not particularly great, however thanks to speed and numbers, they're less likely to take catastrophic damage, and the raw stat efficiency adds up.
I like to sit on my flagship Asgard's bridge and seriously unnerve her captain. The amount of times i have seen her miss a K with the main beam is absurd. Same with main batteries on dessies. For AI pilots the L turrets might as well be the main armament. Main batteries or the beam of God are an afterthought. That's why they underperform.
its an interesting topic, didnt watch the video yet. most cost effective in my opinion now would be the teladi destroyer. mainly because its very cheap and tanky and its performance while beeing controlled by the ai pilots has been by far the best i have seen so far. (650 hour plus) teladi shields are also nice with the highest cap and the engines have the best acceleration deceleration and pitch yaw stuff for large ships. the improved models also look awesome and have very powerful firering angles covering everything arround the ship making it less vulnerable to the wonky steering of ai. teladi ships also can be produced faster and in larger numbers because their economy is usually the best supplied. while other factions often run out of supply quickly which increases the purchase price of ships. the rattlesnake is to expensive and when the ai pilots them they just die all the time. the ray is a very tanky ship good as an escort against fighters but horrible at beein a dps. anti capital ship. the behemoth is bad. just bad. paranid ship is good on paper but the ai tends to misshandle it allways. why get an osaka if you can get a syn instead. why get a syn if you can get an asgard. why get any other ship if you can just get asgards. erlking is cool but to squishy and to vulnerable to fighters with torpedoes and turrets. the main gun has the annoying charge mechanic, and it doesnt allow for customization so its just not fun. incredible dps against m ships and bigger tho. ONE IMPORTANT TIP FOR UNAWARE PLAYERS Large trade ships like the buffalo can make an great addition to a fleet. they can loot dropped wares for you with cargo drones. and they can function as tanky AA platforms that can tank alot of fighter and m class fire while dealing damage. especially those that have a L turret like the buffalo. you could get an L laser for anti fighter anti missle. or an Pulse for higher damage.
Against enemy Capital ships : Carrier Colossus Vanguard cheap and reliable (or Raptor if you are very rich) with 40 Balaurs (4 Blast Mortars + mk3 Split travel engine), K or I are quickly down, almost no fighter lost. Against enemy Stations : Destroyers Behemot Vanguard (and/or Rattlesnake) with Plasma L and Flak M, mod and spread 6 of them in half circle around a station and it should go down quickly. Usually if you send fighters against a station there will be to many losses, same for Destroyers against K or I although it's possible to add a few fighters to each Destroyer (2 per Behemot Vanguard for ex) and send these fighters against K or I, they will distract and damage them, greatly improving your Destroyer survivability.
Dataset & Fleet Details (xlsx download): docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTxi79g8aHdObkn5ppbnx32lNf5wMZs06R_9gMVtPNx-jy1ieFO4CXShd_jIzOWJLyKYWVHfmh4L2lt/pub?output=xlsx
FAQ
Q: How do these results compare to player-piloted ships?
A: They don't. Player ships can't be tested in this manner. Your personal flying style and skill level will determine which one is most effective in your hands.
Q: Isn't it harder to manage large groups of ships?
A: Yes, somewhat. The minimum number of inputs (clicks + key presses) required to complete this test, replace losses, repair, and rearm is: 104 for fighters, 88 for carriers, 68 for destroyers, and 64 for battleships. That's using the featured compositions, my key bindings, and my command style.
Q: How are the results affected by micromanaging ships during combat?
A: That isn't testable in any statistically meaningful way. In general, micromanaging capitals is mechanically easier (fewer ships = fewer inputs), but micromanaging fighters is more effective (faster responses to commands).
Q: What about mixed fleets of carriers, fighters, and destroyers/battleships?
A: I tested them briefly and they seemed to be intermediate between the carrier and destroyer results, but closer to the destroyer side. They are still my personal favorite type of fleet composition.
Q: How dare you say that fighters are good for station assaults?!
A: I didn't.
What really grinds my gears is, that having a huge fighter-dominant fleet in vanilla is micromanaging hell.
The truly weird thing is this: the reason you would want a carrier is to allow fighters to return to repair. However, fighters usually die. Due to how X's boosters work, once the shields are gone, ships can not disengage. Especially not the blockheads you hire. So in essence, the main reason have carriers is gone.
You can basically simply skip buying one and just buy 200 more fighters.
Imho, x4 would make carriers much more useful if they had the ability to outright retrieve damaged fighters via teleport.
@@trazyntheinfinite9895 The boosting logic/usage is just so fucking retarded honestly, just for the love of god unbind it from shields.
How so? You can simply build a carrier and assign them all to it. Carriers actually work now and launch/dock their ships when targets get close. You rarely lose fighters to capitals too if you have 20+
@@liammorris1018 im replacing the damn things CONSTANTLY
@@isimiel3405 That happens with anything in sector 🤣 I generally only use bigger fleets OOS unless im not bothered about losses. i lost an entire fighter fleet to a capital ship exploding when they first added that. xD
Never heard of or seen this game before but I got recommended it and watch the entire video even tho idk whats going on
If you sat through a detailed stat breakdown you sound just like the guy that would enjoy the hell out of this game
@@CraezyMacro yeah... All 10 hours of that video. 😂
I am still pretty new to the game. I’ve played maybe 200+ hours and just have been trying to make a steady stream of money the TEL way. I’ve watched video after video about this game and honestly, it’s a lot. I just finally built my first Asgard. I really do appreciate your videos and others explaining the game.
For SCIENCE !
Seriously now, thanks for the informative X4 guides.
Great video! Very helpful! Recently gotten back into X4 after taking a long break and really got stuck back into it (many many hours over the past 2 weeks!). Thanks for the tips!
Playing for 1200+ hours and only now test out carriers...The burst firing of my modded PAR plasma syns never let me down so far. Ks drop in less than 10s, I-class need 20s
On my first playthrough i cleared all xenon sectors needed for that yaki mission only using 1 syn and 2 osakas for flak cover...no losses.
I think thats my problem here: being ok with losing ships/fighters. Up til now i could not stand losing ships while achieving my goals. Destroyers and Asgaards (+earlking) did it for me on every of my 4 playthroughs
Going for Shih fighter production in my new avarice facility next and try your proposal out now, though. Thx for the advice❤
Personally, carriers are worth the money instead of a fighter swarm in two situations:
1. Sector patrol. Pure fighters will suffer the attrition over time, but with a carrier attrition rate drops significantly
2. Player piloting. You can land your fighters and pull them through an enemy sector using travel drive, and undock them only at the final strategic destination
Talking about new players, I just picked up X4. I have about 2000 hours on X3 back from 2006 to 2010 because my first laptop was a MacBook and that was one of the only games I could find for Mac back in the day
Your videos are very nice too watch, nicely produced and I like your narrative style. Also, I would love if you'd make a video about missiles and torpedoes, especially after 7.0.
Thank you. I appreciate these as both informative and entertaining videos. Look forward to the next one.
The only thing I dislike about mass fighters are.... keeping 3 to 5 star pilots alive.
Thank you for the interesting and usefull data.
I typically don't get involoved in the larger scale fights until I'm able to mass produce my own capital ship fleets so efficiency and effectiveness are not really as important at that point but its nice to know. My normall clear out the xenon sectors force is 1-2 full carriers and ~35 destroyers, I do nearly no micro and instead just focus on snowballing that force with reinforcements, I don't care about losses or put too much focus in to min maxing loadouts because quantity has a quality all its own. losing 5-10 destroyers per sector is totally acceptable but next time I play I'll try some min max carriers as that seems like it would be a little faster to get done. thanks
In low attention combat, I used to need two fleets: a carrier group to take on Xenon ships, and a battle group of battleship and destroyers to take on a defense platform. The logic behind the carrier group has been well explained here. I usually bother with a carrier for repairs and resupply for long campaigns taking over multiple Xenon sectors. But whenever I sent the fighters against a station, I would lose too many to make the campaign viable. I would need to rebuild the fighters, reassign to the carrier group and wait for their arrival. High attention combat seems to work much, much better here. A battleship and destroyers group worked well against the stations, generally surviving much better, meaning I could generally complete a campaign with the starting fleet. They do require some attention to make sure the destroyers didn't get themselves too close to Xenon turrets when repositioning, but nothing close to rebuilding a fleet worth of fighters.
Indeed, station demolition is a sport for destroyers.
Opened my eyes. Thank you! And thank you for all the awesome vids
So many blast mortars, so few pulse lasers.
I guess it makes sense since you have the station assault in there, but I'm a little surprised that you didn't have trouble with the defense drones.
Defense drones were troublesome, but so were M turrets. The turret stripping (and straight up kill potential) of mortars ended up being more impactful than pulse lasers beyond a certain number of fighters.
Thanks for explaining to everyone why capital ships, sadly, suck in X4.
You just nailed all the reasons that i keep saying as well.
Completely flipped it on the head with how it was in the older titles. In X3 especially, capital ships were quite overpowered.
Meanwhile, in X4, they have gone too far in the other direction, and now fighters are the overpowered ones.
I feel that the L and XL ships could easily do with double, if not tripple their health, and at least doubling the damage on their weaponry, including M and L turrets.
So they can at least defend themselves to some degree. Right now, the big boats are utterly helpless against small stuff.
That depends on which sort of combat you do. Simulated like he did? Large ships lose.
But if you participate directly, fighters are getting shredded. 40 against 1 k? The 40 lose. Every time without making
Any damage
@@fischersfritz468 you mean in high attention? Thats what he did. Capital ships stand no chance against fighters. What kinda weapons did you load them with that they lost so hard?
Like, 20 Mako with heavy torpedos already delete an I without taking any losses. Not to mention a swarm of 100 fighters. As you see in the video. the big ships just cease to exist as soon as the fighters start firing.
Low attention its even worse for capital ships. since turrets do even less damage there.
@@kajarslibrary5404 Capitals don't suck. You give me 160 million to build a capital fleet vs a carrier fleet with fighters, and 50 hours later, you've had to replace the fighters in that fleet 6x over, and the destroyer fleet hasn't taken a single loss.
Yes, fighters are better at punching up and trading economically, but nobody ever said you had to take risky fights. Even easy fights, you are suffering attrition with fighters, because you will lose fighters. A fighter eats a stray graviton pulse, dead. A fighter gets jumped after boosting by escorts. Dead. Little by little it adds up, and 50 hours later, that 160 million fleet, actually now costs 1.2 billion, to accommodate losses, while that 160 million destroyer fleet hasn't suffered a single loss.
Yes, his test shows that fighters punch up better, but why would you send your fleet into a fight like that where you might lose the entire fleet? In a last stand scenario where Xenon are coming in at you and you're down to the last few sectors? Sure, you're better off with fighters and carriers, but if you can pick the time and place of your main fleet actions, a death ball of destroyers is more efficient because they will take no losses, and need no replacements. The fighters will always need replacements after any sort of major engagement, easy or hard.
@@mercb3ast that is simply not the case. You will lose destroyers as well. They are slow, clumsy, and easily flanked. 160 million is at most 16 Behemoth/Phoenix/Odysseus, or 8 Osaka/Rattlesnake/Ray.
That is simply not enough for a death ball.
Heck, as you can see/hear in the video, the 160m in destroyers took similar or more losses in value as the fighters in the best case scenario. More often they got completely wiped out.
Even if you got 50 or 100 destroyers. They will get stuck, flanked, or derp and you will take losses. They arent invincible either. You will lose destroyers for the same reasons you will lose fighters.
Losses are a fact with either approach.
Combined arms may yield even better results than each class on their own.
I am very much the industrial player, i dont even have any combat ships other than my personal corvette until 20+ hours in.
Then i just throw out 500 fighters to remove anything that moves, 10 destroyers to clean up stations, and 1 aux, and delete the xenon.
I just find fighters a lot easier to manage, and a lot faster and more reliable at the job. If i have to pay a bit extra for that long term, than it shall be so.
Especially if i can avoid the micromanaging and frustration of destroyer jank.
@@kajarslibrary5404 Destroyers will die without micromanagement because the AI is comically dumb and will just fly right into graviton range and get erased, fighters do the same thing but gravitons hit percentage is alot lower.
Really really good video and you did a very nice analysis! Thanks for the insights!
With active managment i find that destroyers suffer far less attrition compared to fighters.
I constantly lost fighters in stupid ways because they overcommitted or stoped to recalculate their next action in front of enemy guns.
I only recently started with the game, but with a fair easy to get destroyer setup (1x Syn form questline, 2x Behemoth requesitioned from Scale Plate, 1x Orca) i was able to take down several Xenon sectors without any loses. Just make sure they stay close together, line them up on the closest enemy approaching and have them concentrate fire.
Fighting an enemy station and fleet at once is suprisingly an advantage. I normaly get the station beween me and the Xenon fleet.
The attack command on the station makes it easier to lock the destroyers in place and the AI is realy bad at manouvering around the station making it easier to separate and defeat them in detail.
Also about cost effectiveness: Aux ships with consumable spam. Setting down 100 laser turrets cost the same as 1,5 fighters and screen against any fighers. Aux ship can also carry 100 drones ... but their AI is iffy.
Destroyer combat can be made without losses, but requires constant attention and minute adjustments to positioning.
In the very late game a fighter spam might be better, but getting into the midgame and clearing out the first few Xenon sectors can be more effectivly done with destroyers.
Kha'ak should allways be engaged with destroyers. They hardcounter fighters but can not harm destroyers.
To use carriers effectively, you NEED to use the "Protect Position" command. It is unique to carriers. It is great for patrolling sectors and locking down gates. You can use it offensively as well. You can keep your carrier safe way across the sector or even in a different sector. Your fighters will be much better about repairing and resupplying at the carrier when they need to with this command. You can also have very large numbers of fighters with minimal micro. Learn this command, you will not go back! (Also, fighters are kind of OP in vanilla. I like the VRO mod which makes capital ships more useful.)
This makes me appreciate the VRO even more. I feel like every ship class really has uses and weaknesses. While Vanilla remains so heavily fighter favoured.
For majority of my 200h VRO run I did not have a steady stream of incoming credits. So any time I could I just bought the meaniest battleship I could and thought how OP battleships are and how they make every other ship class worthless. However the more I played the more I realized, that they have their own lackings in similar manner as the asgard you shown.
Battleships proved to be really good investment and they spent majority of my run defending the gates - stoping Ks and Is. However once I wanted to go on the offense they just could not push through incoming xenon streams fast enough and eventually even they got caught in no return situation where Ks and Is with fighter wings charged them.
They also struggled with gate keeping, because some xenon ships were so agile they just ignored them and attacked my other assets such as trading fleets far away from the battleship positions. They can be great bait - having them in far frontal position before battle. Or simply letting them enter the sector first before you engage your fleet... Letting them being focused so that your more mobile part of the fleet can engage clustered enemies who are baragged from battleships batteries in the meanwhile.
When I started warring the Argon I got cocky and flew my modded personal flagship Gharial through battered Argon Sector which was supposed to be mostly empty. I got hit by single fighter after and after that argon torpedo bombers engaged from 10kms focusing my engines for "mobility kill" - after that I sadly gave my battleship a farewell as it was focused down by regular argon patrol fleet
Battleships are amazing clunky mean "bricks" but that's all there is to it. *They proved to be more like mobile defense platforms.*
Destroyers Have one and single purpose by my eyes and that is station destruction - this remains in VRO as well. *In group they can focus large battleships and defense platforms*, but that is all there is to it. However... eventually you will need them in VRO... because fighters are so so terrible against stations in VRO and battleships are pricey and don't have frontal guns so they are not cost efficient at station sieging either.
M ships can be good and adaptible in many roles, but because I am running mostly split playtrough they are not cost efficient and so *I cannot share much experience here* - only maybe that the dragons get stuck and focused by Xenon heavy turrets. And that Cobras are just too expensive. M ships are good for anti khaak / anti pirate patrols. My favourite one is Rocinante.... I mean a Peregrine.
Fighters - Fighters Are the kings even in VRO by my honest opinion. However everything else was buffed in the VRO so unless you have credits to replenish your losses you cannot simply go with 200 fighters and expect to be the king of the universe. Especially xenon beam turrets melt through fighters like they are made of wet tissue paper. Attacking any static defense - laser towers, defense platforms, factories, shipyards is just suicidal - Even 100 fighters with 50bomber/50 interception loadout gets wiped out attacking xenon defense platform. I tried several loadouts and fighters get decimated against defense stations even with a carrier - and that is why you need a dedicated destroyer fleet or cruise missile battleship to take down the most heavily defended stations. Against anything with engines however - fighters just win. They are mobile, they are flexible with their loadouts. They can engage really quickly. They overwhelm large ships in numbers - Especially torpedo / mortar bomber wings are just sadistic. With a carrier you can play chess with setting multiple position defense zones and push through the sector. *With Carriers and Fighters - you dictate the state of the battlefield*.
Unlike in Vanilla - in VRO you need many of them and they really become effective once you have a carrier and credits or your own infrastructure to replenish them. So unlike in Vanilla they are more like lategame assets. You should have always some spare money and/or infrastructure to replenish loses. My favorite ones are Balaur and Shih
Naw VRO just makes Medium ship swarm completely broken instead of fighters. its just as borked and you cant use carriers as well with M ships making it even more annoying lol
I don't think this guys assessment is exactly accurate. It's sort of the result of meta group think that reduces everything in online gaming down to "optimal" vs everything being "trash".
Fighters ARE effective and economical, but comparing the raw stats of a fighter, versus the raw stats of an Odysseus by cost is super over simplifying things. Capital ships are basically a long term investment. Fighters are short term. You take that 160 million spent on fighters vs capitals, and if you pick and choose your engagements with the capitals, you will have ZERO losses. Attrition on the 160 million of fighters are unavoidable. The lifetime damage dealt by those 160 million in fighters will be massively dwarfed by the lifetime damage dealt by those destroyers, because unless you foolishly throw them away, you will have most, if not all of them the entire game.
Fighters are basically expensive missiles. They punch way up, but because they die so easily, they should be treated as disposable. That 160 million fleet of destroyers can be chugging along 50 hours after you bought them, while that 160 million fleet of fighters will have 600% turnover 50 hours later. You bought the destroyers once, you had to replace the fighters 6x over.
Of course you CAN lose destroyers, but, that's a player decision on how they want to use them. If you want to throw a fleet of destroyers into a suicidal situation, go for it. You don't have to do that though. You can pick and choose your engagements, and in any situation where the risk is too great, you can just fly something yourself and deal with the situation.
@@mercb3ast If I select a wing of 10 Odysseus and order them to attack a xenon K, I might lose 2, because of misuse of travel drive and main batteries targeting issues, have plenty of tests that conform that. If I select a wing of 40 Ares with BMs, and order them to attack the same K, I might lose 2, but often, I would lose none.
I would rather replace 2 Ares, than 2 Odysseus. And while I could jump in one of the Odysseus and deal with the K myself, I'm just not willing to do that every time a xenon K enters radar range, I'm one of those that want the AI to do stuff.
Good video, I admire your frustration resistance. I'm having problems at the moment, especially with M and stripping squads on carriers. 🥴
Btw anyone who has ever flown from Earth with an S/M squad to another system knows how important carriers are. The police are particularly annoying.😂
Giving me a fully modified Asgard any day of the week. Talk about being able to take over a sector.
I did the solo Asgard play quite a bit. I gave it up when I've seen that a single xenon N can prevent you from going to travel drive, and spend an hour trying to reach a xenon defence station at 300 km away, because of the constant string of fighters the xenon were sending on my way.😐
Great Showcase and analysis
Other takeaways are that the Shih with 3 shields is good enough to tank graviton shots and still has 250+ speed, and the blast mortar makes missiles look like a bad joke. I'd say this combination is what makes the fighter runs so successful.
Mortar Shihs and Pulse Chimeras are definitely great fighter loadouts, and there certainly is a big difference between a great fighter loadout and an average one. I did test other compositions with weaker loadouts, like Tau Takobas and Muon Dragons. They still did fine, especially vs Xenon capitals, but the station attack was noticeably more challenging for them than for the great loadouts.
@@CptSnuggles07 For fighters speed is the first defense stat and shields second. Once it can tank a single graviton it's better to be more nimble. The speed difference is noticeable with the Takoba and it can't take 2 hits either while being an easier target, the Dragon is M class combat ship which is trash in AI hands, those should be for player only until Egosoft greatly changes their behavior. Same applies for fighting against the other factions so once you do good against the Xenon the others become trivial.
The thing is that if you take other setups, you can get even better results. I believe someone ran the math and basic mk1 pulse Kyds are pretty much the peak loadout in terms of cost/effect.
@@gogudelagaze1585 If you like to throw around 200 ships yes. In a 40 carrier group size they wont even scratch the I.
On a side note I really think X needs a command point system cause the player can always just throw more ships at a problem while the AI has limited fleet sizes.
@@csfelfoldi Yup, you do need huge groups, but mk1 kyds are incredibly cheap. iirc, with 10 million you can get around 60 of them from the faction wharf, and that fleet is incredibly powerful on its own.
Hell yes. I've never gone into the proper endgame before so this time I'm doing an "Avarice Rebellion" playthrough.
Nowadays the Erlking is extremely good in clearing out systems full of capital-sized objects (i.e. ships and stations) - probably was this good since before the 7.1 patch. I even tackled the Vigor-related questline fleet of close to 300 fighters with the Erlking; granted, I had to withdraw twice and run to regenerate shields, but the end result was the swarm defeated and me being able to proceed with the questline.
Taking the above into account - what would be the ultimate fighter build for anti-small ship cases? I imagine the weapons used in this video probably are aimed primarily at taking down larger targets.
My personal pick for "ultimate interceptor" is the Moreya with TER pulse lasers.
Would have loved a spreadsheet with exectly how much ships/Credits where lost in each scenario! - But either way I love these videos keep them comming
Spreadsheet is now available! Check the pinned comment.
Every time a new fleet sim is made the battleship dies another death.
If you had tracker missiles, especially EMP or similar to take out the travel drive, then taking out the Xenon would be a lot easier, but that would be best done with a couple of missile boats, and therefore either you are taking out a fighter bay from a carrier that could be on a more useful ship, or you have to use the M class to do it. Those, however, don't fare well against anything, they just flat out lack shield regen and so get swarmed by ships, but lack the sheilding to last against graviton fire. But the 7.10 update made bombards more useful, and if you merely use a couple to stop the charge by Ks and Is, then they should not be in much danger. There's little to no way to do that via orders, so you have to make a wing of them up and specifically call them and then dock them after their work is done.
As for taking out the station, just use dumbfires. Not only do they take less space as bits, but they also do a lot of damage that doesn't matter it is dumbfire because stations, get this, don't move. This means a different loadout is therefore balanced, and the dumbfires aren't much use against anything other than the K and I at CLOSE range and stations. Destroyers with dumbfires can get close in and the Xenon capitals love to do that, so maybe your "destroyer only" group could do that. Sit 200 dumbfires, put a couple of dumbfire turrets on it, and set those to "attack capitals only".
Sorry if I missed it in the video, so this video pertains to in sector combat and no manual involvement? Since OOS combat is very different. As well micro managing capital ships yields significant better results as you need to keep your distance and never brawl. I can manually control 1 Asgard and take out a fleet of one I and multiple k’s without a scratch. Also would be nice to know what commands you used on the fighter carrier group and capital group, any coordinated attacks? What was the fighter behavior set at? Again sorry for asking if it was already in the video somewhere and I missed it.
Yes, high attention and no manual involvement. It's pretty trivial to win by flying certain ships yourself or by fighting in low attention, so there's not much point in spending hours testing either one. As for micromanagement, it just makes the experiment non-controlled, which would make the results invalid. The only way to ensure true replication between runs is to leave everything to the AI.
Mortar fighters were generally om Attack, others were on Intercept. I did use some Coordinated Attacks, but they're pretty janky in this patch, so I mostly used queued attacks and multi-target attacks.
@ thank you CptSnuggles I appreciate your hard work and analysis.
On a fair flipside, the most popular overhaul mod for X4 Foundations, Variety and Rebalance Overhaul, flips the script entirely that fighters are vulnerable to larger ship anti-fighter countermeasures and weapons, and I can see the argument working in this case that fighters would be a pointless waste of money outside of the far more situational use they see in the mod.
Love it, thanks!
Yes please tell us how you came up with those compositions :D My only issue with OOS fighters is that they just seem to simply die to the stations, since to my knowledge you can't attack surface elements in low attention. A single xenon powerplant took out 40/100 shihs before I pulled the fleet from it, which was... Not something I liked to see :')
Sure. The choice of fighters was a little tricky because I included the station assault. They needed to be able to absorb at least two consecutive station module explosions without taking too much hull damage, meaning they needed to be relatively tanky, but the bombers still needed the firepower to shred XL ships and the interceptors needed the speed to catch M’s and PE’s, all with mostly Mk2 gear. That restricted me to about 6 fighter hulls and a handful of weapons, out of which the Mortar Shih and Pulse Chimera performed best, unsurprisingly. With carriers that had multiple M docks, I also had to pick M ships, using similar criteria. Once I’d picked my fighters and M ships, I just had to adjust the balance of bombers to interceptors based on which carrier I was using. The Shark can absorb tons of graviton fire but can’t clear enemy fighters quickly, so it needs a couple of strong interceptor wings, even at the expense of some bombers; the Raptor is the opposite, and the Condor is intermediate. As for assignments, interceptors obviously went on Intercept, and bombers needed to be on Attack for the station assault, although I did sometimes use Bombardment for the anti-ship stages.
With the destroyers, you have relatively few “viable” loadout options compared to fighters, and I’ve already done tons of destroyer testing, so I know what loadouts are tough and nimble “brawlers” versus less-survivable but higher-damage “snipers”. I put brawlers (Ray/Phoenix in the “winning” composition) in the front, i.e., the fleet commander and its immediate subordinates, and snipers (Odysseus in the “winning” composition) in the back, i.e., the subordinates of the subordinates. Some ships, like the Syn, have a hybrid of brawler and sniper features, which unfortunately is not a good fit for the 7.1 battlefield.
The featured Asgard composition was a little different; the Rays set to Attack moved ahead of the Asgard like a screen to slow down the Xenon capitals and help the Asgard line up its main battery shots, while the Rays set to Defend stayed behind the Asgard and only moved in once the Asgard was engaged in a brawl. Unfortunately, nothing I tried could provide sufficient support within my budget constraints.
If you’re attacking stations with fighters OOS, 100 Shihs should be plenty, but you need to stack them all up beforehand so that they all hit the station at exactly the same time. If they’re even a little spread out, the station will pick off each wave of leading ships as they approach. If you're making a specialized station-killing fleet, I'd highly recommend just using destroyers; they're way more forgiving.
I honestly don't know how you make carriers work for station destruction, whenever I do it I watch as the carrier travel drives straight into the station graviton guns and dies and then even with attack turrets on I lose 40-50 fighters to the positrons.
Prior to the introduction of explosion dmg, station demolition was possible with fast fighters with BMs. But after, station demolition became an exclusively destroyers sport.
I'm curious if this remains true if you're not using the very best of the best fighters. For example, I'm doing a Boron only run, and in this video the Shark and Ray were the standouts while the Mako and Barracuda weren't even mentioned. Would a Boron only fleet benefit more than the min-maxed mixed fleets from having more of a Destroyer presence due to the strength of the Ray?
Also, did you test any fighter-heavy lineups that only included one or two battleships only? I'm curious if "Why not both?" works here.
For this test, both fighters and capitals were fit with best available equipment within the budget constraints, so if we're talking about reducing the quality of fighter loadouts, it would be most appropriate to compare them against reduced-quality destroyer/battleship loadouts. L Pulse instead of L Beams, M Bolt instead of M Flak, faction-locked engines/shields/plasma, etc. Which is to say, weak fighters vs strong destroyers isn't a fair comparison. However, even in that unfair comparison, I'd still expect the fighters to be more cost-effective for anti-ship work in all but the most extreme cases.
I only tested one mixed fleet of carrier + S/M escorts + destroyers. Its performance was intermediate between the carrier and pure destroyer compositions, but closer to the destroyer side, which was disappointing. I still personally prefer mixed fleets.
Boron-only is a unique case. At the 160m price point, I'd probably go with a Guppy/bomber/Ray mix.
I wish space engineers and X4 became one. Physics and building if its added it become best space game.
So, I'm still thinking about this video. As mentioned before, without Resupply Subordinates running carriers is way to much work for a lazy space cowboy like me, so I usually end up with a way oversized fleet of destroyers, some anti-fighter, some anti-capital, which is obviously more expensive and less efficient.
This is in vanilla runs, which got me thinking: Why do we even care about efficiency in this game? Honest question. My point is, once you are at a certain point with your assets, you generate credits like crazy and with good strategical placement of your ressource hubs, you won't run out of ship building materials either.
Before that point, however, every bigger loss is a catastrophy, one never financially recovers from. Regardless if they are 15 fighters or one destroyer.
I'm not saying y'all are doing something wrong, I'm asking if I'm playing the game wrong. :D
Btw.: Very good video again, I very much appreciate your consistency in quality and thoroughness. Thank you, Captain.
Capitals are only less efficient if you lose them. Otherwise they are way more efficient.
Consider this. You are given 160 million to field destroyers, and 160 million to field fighters + a carrier. Fifty hours later of careful battle selection, you still have all of your original destroyers. The total cost of that fleet is 160 million + whatever incidental hull damage you've maybe had to repair over the hours, and maybe you threw some upgrades on them at some point. For all intents and purposes, your original 160m investment is still there. That 160 m fighter fleet though? You've likely had over 100% turnover at minimum, and more likely several times that. Even in the most standard battles in HA (high attention), you will lose fighters. Million here, million there, million, million, million. After 50 hours, you've replaced 100 fighters, that's 100 million. Your 160 million investment is 260 million now, or 400, or 800 million. Fighter losses are inescapable.
Ultimately, they are tools that are suited for different things. Fighters + carriers are going to punch up, but they are going to take losses while doing it. They can also punch down, but they are going to take losses doing it. Capitals cannot punch up as well, and they will take enormous losses doing it, but they can also punch down, and take zero losses doing it.
There is no wrong way to play. You can completely circumvent the need for high-attention cost efficiency by using any of the major money-making cheeses, by focusing on low-attention fleets, or by just spending lots of time on economy before starting your military campaigns. I used cost effectiveness as my metric here because credits are the closest thing X4 has to a universal unit of measurement, not because you're obligated to care about cost effectiveness per se.
In the early game, destroyers make sense. You don't need to worry about losing them and having to replace them or needing to rescue the crew. If you got careless you can savescum. If you need to destroy a K, just fly or teleport over to your destroyer and handle it yourself. Otherwise your destroyer should be able to deal with small and medium ships on its own. Or you can just park it somewhere safe until you need to use it. Unless you decided to build a station near a hotspot, you can just ignore the Xenon.
I use hybrid tactics usually I have a few destroyers with maybe 1 or 2 carriers in support. I use to exclusively use L and M class ships but that got very expensive and wasn’t especially effective especially if the Xenon or whoever send a serious combined force which happened to me more than once turns out 80 fighters are cheaper more effective than 30 corvettes and frigates
Was off the game for a few month. Came back today and it feel like xenons have been nerf. I spent minutes under fire from a graviton turret and my shield wasnt disminishing. OK i was sitting in an asgard. But still it felt like that graviton wasnt as dangerous as i remember it to be.
What happens if all ships are on intercept (Cobras and Chimeras), I have yet to experience large fleet combat? Getting close to 500 hrs here in my 1st complete playthrough (I am trying to get as many steam achievement as I can), I usually start over when a new update comes out. The main thing I recommend to new players is to rush and build a Terran wharf, and produce/sell ships to ZYA for max profitss.
I did keep all the Chimeras and frigates/corvettes set to Intercept. It's very effective for keeping enemy fighters and drones away from the bombers, but you do need to be careful with your carrier positioning and/or toggle them between Launched and Docked to make sure they don't fly off and pick unwanted fights.
How I measure capital ship cost effectiveness: how many guns does it have
Rattlesnake has entered the chat. That ship IS a GUN
@@petrmatousek7422 And dies in seconds when not player controlled.
@@petrmatousek7422syn has blown up the chat with its superior general firepower package.
@@BauN3RD Rattlesnake has left the chat.
That kind of attitude fits your profile picture perfectly
Wait, so fighters would actually go for turrets without you explicitly issuing the the "attack surface elements / turrets" order? or was it just the side effect from blast mortar's aoe?
They attack station surface elements automatically with Coordinate Attack. Otherwise, they do have to be told (via the fleet commander) to attack surface elements. Blast mortars will do some collateral damage with a standard attack order, but not enough to quickly cripple a station.
I tend to not play a military playstyle, avoiding combat where I can while having enough strength to deal with wandering threats and enough speed to get away from bigger threats.
This being said, can we test out the strength of civilian fleet operations? My big ships are all freighters and miners (To counter both Khaak and pirates), occasionally running medium ships in territory where I can give them some coverage. Any serious threat I take on personally with a small fleet of at least one aux and a full compliment of S/M fighters.
buuuuuut the Terrans keep donating free Asgards to my fleet...it would be rude to tell them to stop giving those away and send carriers instead?
I mean I'm not averse to being rude, it just seems ungrateful...
Meanwhile me who hasn't played open universe without VRO since CoH: damn 144 mio for an entire carrier battlegroup, that's dirt cheap
It's cheap even for vanilla. Had to cut some corners on equipment. And the price estimate is taken from the custom game creation screen, which I *believe* reflects the minimum prices at an NPC shipyard.
destroyers just easy to manage... Make 20 dtr and they anihilate everything whithout loss, but fighter setup you need constantly refeel, coz they die like a flyes
In X5, I hope they go to a more traditional naval role and class system.IE:
Fighters: function as small fast intercepts and general dogfighters, can attack Capital ships, but you need a lot of them.
Heavy fighters: the bombers of fighters, slower, more guns, and is the smallest class able to mount missile launchers and Torpedos launchers.
Corvettes/gunboats/frigates: the only general classes I feel are where they should be.
Destroyers: 1, maybe 2 main guns, along with a pair of L turrets, but bristling with Medium turret slots. These are the dedicated anti fighter and missile screen for larger capital ships. The Osaka is the only ship in game I feel actually deserves this title.
Cruisers: the bread and butter of Capital ships, the Behemoth and Odyssey fit the role much better than destroyers. Should have 2-3 main guns, a battery of L turrets, with a snaller battery of M turrets.
Battleships: If they don't have a main cannon like the Asgard, 4-5 main guns, a large battery of L turrets, and a small battery of M turrets. These are your long range brawler, they should be able to quash Destroyers and Cruisers, but weak to Heavy fighters and numbers.
Carrier: self explanatory.
Only 1 that I would add that is not an actual naval ship class, Siege Dreadnought: the premise being a gun like the Asgard, but the ship having to "set up" by transfering all power from the engines and turrets to the main cannon. Primarily billed as a station destroyer, but needing protection as it will have a relatively small L and M turret battery.
The real issue is that turrets themselves cant hit the broadside of a barn, and when they do, they do fuck all damage except for plasma and are hard carried by the absolutely busted slasher mod.
so does this mean the two factions with the most sophisticated naval doctrine are the split and... the Boron?
If same fleets are controled by player instead of AI, the results will be quite different: Asgard group will be total winner with zero loses (especialy if Asgard have reasonable mods).
In this matter, the cheapest way to invade Xenon sectors is with single, decent moded Asgard with mixed loadout, controled by player: Xenon fighters dont have plasma, blast mortars or torpedos and cant break its shiled recharge. K and I now can use travel speed until reach 10 km range from their target and are quite dangerous for the carriers - ones slow and not well protected.
In my games such wast carrier fleets are used to cut gates, patrol duties, guard production complexes etc. For example i have Raptor, parked in the little ore filed in the north west side of Family Nhutt guarding both my personal miners and those of the patriarchy. The loses in my games are minimal and the resources insead to be sinked in fighters production are reinvested in production complexes.
My Fleet set up is enough Rattlesnakes till it works.
I'm a Split player.
Well this cool some degree.
no corvette swarm love? (i wouldn't try but was curious)
They're pretty fun, but definitely not cost-effective. I used some corvette-heavy compositions here and they didn't do well.
@@CptSnuggles07 The gunships should get more missiles, or at least the far worse than the peregrine minotaur. Technically you could then use them to EMP or Disruptor the Xenon Capitals. Well you probably still can, it doesn't need many missiles and should then be brought back and docked, they can't handle fighter swarms or graviton guns. But if they generally got more missiles, and/or especially that minotaur, then they have a return as a bomber in fleet use, whereas you either use a drone frigate or corvettes in a small wing as sector patrol. There is, currently, no real use in a fleet for them, except as extra turrets for capitals that can carry them (and therefore the meta Jian).
Corvettes as sector patrols can take out several fighters OOS, or a couple of fighters IS each, but to take out a destroyer or similar takes a half dozen.
Frigates could do it for the teladi and argon, because they don't have corvettes.
But there is currently no reason to have gunships.
The reality of it is, it comes down to personal preference. No matter how you look at it, using carriers and primarily fighters to deal your damage results in losses often, massively increasing your micro management requirements.
An effective destroyer/battleship fleet does not suffer as many losses, and if it does, it's usually one ship that you can put on order and have back in the fleet with a few clicks.
Edit: I don't know how you lose so many destroyers and battleships, my experiences are different for sure.
Yep, it's a very forgiving game and you can win with anything, but some people like to know what the "optimal" choice is. I like knowing but don't actually play optimally, as you can see from my actual gameplay videos. Are you saying that you've seen different capital ship mortality in Version 7.1, unmodified, using ships worth 150-170m, under full AI control, in equivalent combat scenarios, consistently?
What was the skill level of all ships?
3 star captains and "veteran" crew, which comes out to about 2.66 stars combined skill.
Best bang for buck is a Behemoth which is easily stolen from the SCA for free with zero rep loss, Equip it with 4 fast torpedo bombers (S ships) and it can take out Ks IS and OOS. L ships are practically invulnerable to fighters anyway so keep your torp bombers docked if there is a lot of fighters about and let your flak turrets on the behemoth deal with them. Also DONT attack stations with fighters and when you use destroyers make sure to surround the station. If they destroy station modules on one side of the station they will fly under it and die to turrets so they can get to the otherside.
I think the scale in consideration matters greatly. On a low budget (enough for one ship), a player destroyer is significantly better than a fighter group. The problem is scaling. Even with the improvements to AI, capitals are still utterly garbage in performance (compared to player), so adding a second destroyer provides significantly less "effect". Fighter AI is not particularly great, however thanks to speed and numbers, they're less likely to take catastrophic damage, and the raw stat efficiency adds up.
I like to sit on my flagship Asgard's bridge and seriously unnerve her captain.
The amount of times i have seen her miss a K with the main beam is absurd. Same with main batteries on dessies. For AI pilots the L turrets might as well be the main armament. Main batteries or the beam of God are an afterthought.
That's why they underperform.
its an interesting topic, didnt watch the video yet. most cost effective in my opinion now would be the teladi destroyer. mainly because its very cheap and tanky and its performance while beeing controlled by the ai pilots has been by far the best i have seen so far. (650 hour plus)
teladi shields are also nice with the highest cap and the engines have the best acceleration deceleration and pitch yaw stuff for large ships. the improved models also look awesome and have very powerful firering angles covering everything arround the ship making it less vulnerable to the wonky steering of ai.
teladi ships also can be produced faster and in larger numbers because their economy is usually the best supplied. while other factions often run out of supply quickly which increases the purchase price of ships.
the rattlesnake is to expensive and when the ai pilots them they just die all the time. the ray is a very tanky ship good as an escort against fighters but horrible at beein a dps. anti capital ship.
the behemoth is bad. just bad.
paranid ship is good on paper but the ai tends to misshandle it allways.
why get an osaka if you can get a syn instead.
why get a syn if you can get an asgard.
why get any other ship if you can just get asgards.
erlking is cool but to squishy and to vulnerable to fighters with torpedoes and turrets. the main gun has the annoying charge mechanic, and it doesnt allow for customization so its just not fun.
incredible dps against m ships and bigger tho.
ONE IMPORTANT TIP FOR UNAWARE PLAYERS
Large trade ships like the buffalo can make an great addition to a fleet. they can loot dropped wares for you with cargo drones. and they can function as tanky AA platforms that can tank alot of fighter and m class fire while dealing damage. especially those that have a L turret like the buffalo. you could get an L laser for anti fighter anti missle. or an Pulse for higher damage.
Sit some fighters as CAS for the Behemoth. The four bays means that they can deploy quicker.
i´m betting you work with analysing data of some sort for a living, right ?
Applied science! I crunch a lot of numbers, although I'm by no means a professional statistician.
Against enemy Capital ships : Carrier Colossus Vanguard cheap and reliable (or Raptor if you are very rich) with 40 Balaurs (4 Blast Mortars + mk3 Split travel engine), K or I are quickly down, almost no fighter lost.
Against enemy Stations : Destroyers Behemot Vanguard (and/or Rattlesnake) with Plasma L and Flak M, mod and spread 6 of them in half circle around a station and it should go down quickly.
Usually if you send fighters against a station there will be to many losses, same for Destroyers against K or I although it's possible to add a few fighters to each Destroyer (2 per Behemot Vanguard for ex) and send these fighters against K or I, they will distract and damage them, greatly improving your Destroyer survivability.
Consider adding some visualization of what you say in future.
It's just to expensive in my eyes. Lose 20 Fighters and you have to restock for a while. With only capitals you can just fight on unlimited.