Experimental Branch Exofighters

[rittstar]

does anyone know how to use them or are they just passive? i build them in my countries but dont know how to use them

thx

[Premu]

I actually had a useful situation for those exofighters.

I was building up my space stations, but was not outright going for war with the aliens yet. The protectorate decided to visit my space stations with a small fleet, and I only had a limited fleet myself. Fortunately I controlled lot more exofighters which helped me to handle those pesky Protectorate fleets.

[Ravenous]

they are excellent when you defend your station. A few extra nukes is always welcome.

They are also very very very excellent and nuking enemy faction stations out of orbit. It seems enemy faction AI uses exos to do that too. I was storming this one station with marines (serveant station, aliens blow up all my stations) and freaking Protectorate blow it with exo. I was like, "that was really smart move"

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by ExavierMacbeth:

But I am still in a stage of the game where 200 boost is still easier to come by than the 250+ water I need for each of those Escorts fuel tanks.

Why do you need 250+Water in your Escorts? These I would consider very wasteful - my first combat ships for defensive static combat have literally 1 tank (later they are refitted to interplanetary ones with up to 12 tanks for very early offensives) and my first combat ships for defensive maneuvering combat have 3 tanks (with Teardrop you can still have 3.4G acceleration and 9.2km/s deltaV). Even mature designs of Pegasus Escorts with over 20km/s deltaV (which is much more than needed to fight safely even 4G enemy fleets) have only 9 tanks.

[ExavierMacbeth]

Originally posted by Pawleus:

Why do you need 250+Water in your Escorts? These I would consider very wasteful - my first combat ships for defensive static combat have literally 1 tank (later they are refitted to interplanetary ones with up to 12 tanks for very early offensives) and my first combat ships for defensive maneuvering combat have 3 tanks (with Teardrop you can still have 3.4G acceleration and 9.2km/s deltaV). Even mature designs of Pegasus Escorts with over 20km/s deltaV (which is much more than needed to fight safely even 4G enemy fleets) have only 9 tanks.

Shrug, different design methodologies then. On the experimental branch the aliens like to try and deploy stations to Earth-Luna L1 or Luna Orbit so I generally need something that is a bit more mobile than a static orbital missile pod. Especially when they kick my shipyards out of earth orbit in retaliation.

I should also point out that in my current game the AIs have been rather merciless about sniping science so I ended up stuck with Dumbo Drives ALOT longer than I expected. Side effect of taking a 2 year brake from the game and not accounting for how much better the AI is lol

EDIT: I am also still learning which drives are good now... Last time I played the Pulsar/AdvPulsar was king... not so much anymore as I found out lol

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by ExavierMacbeth:

Last time I played the Pulsar/AdvPulsar was king... not so much anymore as I found out lol

Yes, in 0.4 they are no longer attractive. If you do the static combat I would recommend Fission Frag if you do early Jupiter Rush or Ion to Grid Drive line (Helicon a little later - all those drives you can have with 100% probability when researched right), if you do the maneuvering one - Teardrop to Pegasus is cheapest working well in defense (Firestar line is an alternative - for all those drives there is no way to have them with 100% probability in an unmodded game). I would actually recommend both kinds of combat for different purposes (static - for very early defence with Ion and for very early offensives with Grid).