How on earth are EAW rebels so damn weak in space?

[^9[DSS]Dahaka]

Am I missing something? How is it that about 30 nebulon mk2 frigates can barely scratch 5 victory class star destroyers? I literally lost 20 Y-wings, 30 nebulon mk2 frigattes, and 10 corvettes just to destroy 1 tier 4 space station, and 5 victory class star destroyers. It's absurd. I can take on pretty much anything with the rebels in FoC, how are they so weak on EAW? Granted I'm doing the campaign on hard, but still. Also the Empire now has fleets with 40 and 50 of those damn victory destroyers, and bringing along y-wings does nothing cause they get destroyed after, or even before launching their first torpedoes due to a gazillion imperial fighters spawned from the aforementioned victory cruisers.

What am I doing wrong, and how to deal with this?

EDIT: I got it mixed up, its not called a nebulon mk2, its just the MK2 frigate, or alliance assault frigate.

[Prof_Nekko]

Nebulon's are good fire support, but they are notoriously fragile with only a few hardpoints so getting hit by a bomber run is downright crippling to their damage outputs. Combine that with a tier 4 space station having a significant amount of guns at its back in addition to constantly spawning fighters, bombers, corvettes and Acclamator class Star Destroyers til you take out the hanger. So you're basically throwing your head against a brick wall and hoping to break it with low tech spaceships like that

[joeball123]

Originally posted by ^9DSSDahaka:

What am I doing wrong, and how to deal with this?

Seeing as you haven't actually described what you're doing, I don't know, but running a bunch of Tech 1 units head-first into a nearly-full fleet of Tech 2 units sitting on top of a Level 4 space station and then feeding your reinforcements piecemeal into the meat grinder would be my guess as to what the problem is. If you want to run your fleet head-first into a slugging match against a (relatively) well-defended high-level space station, tech up and bring out the Mon Calamari Cruisers - that's kind of what they're meant for.

Seriously, the computer might not be a particularly competent tactician, but five Victory Star Destroyers and a level 4 station is a lot of firepower to take on all at once with a fleet comprised of only Nebulon-Bs, Corellian Corvettes, and Y-Wings, especially if you haven't taken the time to whittle down the fighter ball by draining the Star Destroyers' reserves and aren't careful enough with your bombers to keep them safe from the fighters or the station's respawning pair of Tartan Patrol Cruisers. The best way to approach something like this with the fleet you've listed would be to try to lure the Victory Star Destroyers away from the station, kill the Star Destroyers while they're comparatively unsupported, and then follow up with a bomber strike to take out the station's shields and hangar - which is the greater priority is a bit open to debate, but Nebulon-Bs aren't really designed to slug it out with high-end stations and even a fairly large wave of them might struggle to take down a high-level station's shields so I'd probably rather have the bombers pop the shield generator before I started worrying about the hangar since damage inflicted to the station's hull is permanent (at least while the battle lasts) whereas shields regenerate. Another plausible way to go about this would be to lead with a massive wave of bombers (maybe supported by some Corellian Corvettes and fighters to break up the Imperial TIE ball) and try to pop a few of the Star Destroyers before committing the rest of the fleet to the engagement, though that's a bit less effective in EaW than FoC since EaW doesn't allow you to choose your initial wave. A third option is to deploy enough Marauder Missile Cruisers to kill the station from beyond its effective range, which will either force the Star Destroyers to come out and meet your fleet on more favorable terms or allow you to neutralize the station before dealing with the Star Destroyers - though be warned that overcoming the station's shield regeneration may require you to deploy a lot of missile corvettes. A fourth option would be to tech up to Corellian gunships and use their speed and missiles to whittle down the Star Destroyers and space station with hit-and-run tactics.

Also, both Ion Cannons and Boost Shields are abilities that the FoC autocast AI uses somewhat competently, but EaW does not have autocast functionality so EaW Y-Wings and Nebulon-Bs (and Assault Frigates and Mon Calamari Cruisers) are somewhat weaker than their FoC counterparts if you're not inclined to bother with manually activating their special abilities.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Why didn't you bring Corellian Gunships or Alliance Assault Ships? Both are far better against Victory Class destroyers and stations.

Alternatives include Mon Calamari Cruisers and Han Solo or simply raid the planet and capture it so they don't have a station any more.

[Neifirst]

Do not attack high tier space stations until you unlock Mon Calamari battleships, those are your assault units. Nep-B frigates and corvettes are support units suitable to escort big ships, garrison duty and attacking unfortified worlds.

[Prof_Nekko]

pretty much that. Rebels really want their Mon Calamari units for taking on tougher stations. The frigates can be just as effective as bomber squadrons if not moreso, and the Capital ships can eat a ton of damage to their shields and then round them out with corvettes to swat down any bombers that threaten to sneak in as well as put your primary targeting on missile bays and hangers, or if fighting the consortium Mass Drivers and their capital ship special weapons to remove the threats that can ignore the MCC's shield wall.

[Comrade Sky]

Originally posted by Neifirst:

Do not attack high tier space stations until you unlock Mon Calamari battleships, those are your assault units. Nep-B frigates and corvettes are support units suitable to escort big ships, garrison duty and attacking unfortified worlds.

Just use the missile artillery. No need to engage space stations in this game.

[^9[DSS]Dahaka]

Originally posted by Prof_Nekko:

Nebulon's are good fire support, but they are notoriously fragile with only a few hardpoints so getting hit by a bomber run is downright crippling to their damage outputs. Combine that with a tier 4 space station having a significant amount of guns at its back in addition to constantly spawning fighters, bombers, corvettes and Acclamator class Star Destroyers til you take out the hanger. So you're basically throwing your head against a brick wall and hoping to break it with low tech spaceships like that

Originally posted by joeball123:

........

What I'm doing is, I send in the nebulons to draw fire, then I use the bombers to bomb the space station shield generator and the hangar, so they can't spawn anything more. But it legit takes 5 nebulons about 1 to 2 minutes to destroy one victory class, its absurd. Also T2Bs take FOREVER to dispatch 1 unit of imperial infantry. Maybe the difficulty is just artificially inssane with enemy units having 3-4 times more health than normal, idk.

Originally posted by Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia:

Why didn't you bring Corellian Gunships or Alliance Assault Ships? Both are far better against Victory Class destroyers and stations.

Alternatives include Mon Calamari Cruisers and Han Solo or simply raid the planet and capture it so they don't have a station any more.

It's in campaign. As soon as the planets reveal themselves, they already have a tier 4 or 5 space station on them. On the ground, pretty much every planet has turbolasers, shields and a magnapulse cannon. I did capture some planets by raiding with t4bs and mptls, but it takes like 1 hour of carefully planning EVERY move, or you immediately get annihilated by the artillery walkers combined with ATATs....
Also, I can't tech up any more, until I complete some more missions, and han solo is not available yet to me. Problem is, there are like 6-7 imperial planets, constantly launching attacks on my planets, with insane fleets like 25 victory classes, and 40 interdictors. They overwhelm any fleet I have and destroy the tier 4 stations I build with ease. In FOC, I can take on ISDs with a tier 5 space stations, here I just get owned by victory cruisers.....

[Prof_Nekko]

T2Bs are expressly designed to not do high damage to infantry, granted you can just drive the tanks over them and kill them instantly. Though swapping to the rocket payload does decent damage to infantry since it hits the whole squad instead of one individual.

As for taking a space station, If you want to use just Nebs and Bombers, you would want to have the bombers take out the hanger of the station and just the hanger, then hang back and remove the Star Destroyers. Keep some corvettes to protect you from enemy bombers and fighters and focus fire the Turbolasers on the cruisers. Without turbolasers their damage drops hard and even if it takes a little bit you will crush them since standard laser batteries can't break the nebulon's shields and if you're focus firing the shield generator won't protect them that much. After that just swarm your bombers on the station and leave the frigates behind. Since the bombers don't have to worry about shields make your focus with the bombers in order concussion missile launchers > laser batteries > turbolasers > proton torpedo tubes.

I do feel you are exaggerating a bit on the 1-2 minutes thing since when I play while a Victory will beat a nebulon 1v1 if you outnumber them you can win easy.

[^9[DSS]Dahaka]

Originally posted by Prof_Nekko:

T2Bs are expressly designed to not do high damage to infantry, granted you can just drive the tanks over them and kill them instantly. Though swapping to the rocket payload does decent damage to infantry since it hits the whole squad instead of one individual.

As for taking a space station, If you want to use just Nebs and Bombers, you would want to have the bombers take out the hanger of the station and just the hanger, then hang back and remove the Star Destroyers. Keep some corvettes to protect you from enemy bombers and fighters and focus fire the Turbolasers on the cruisers. Without turbolasers their damage drops hard and even if it takes a little bit you will crush them since standard laser batteries can't break the nebulon's shields and if you're focus firing the shield generator won't protect them that much. After that just swarm your bombers on the station and leave the frigates behind. Since the bombers don't have to worry about shields make your focus with the bombers in order concussion missile launchers > laser batteries > turbolasers > proton torpedo tubes.

I do feel you are exaggerating a bit on the 1-2 minutes thing since when I play while a Victory will beat a nebulon 1v1 if you outnumber them you can win easy.

Thats the T4B, the heavy tank with the missiles, yeah, those arent great against infantry, but I was talking about T2Bs, the light tank with the rapid fire cannons. They take forever to disppatch one group of infantry, which makes, not much sense to me. Problem with the victory cruisers is that they constantly spam fighters and bombers, and they also target down my corvettes first, they seem to do a LOT more damage with their weapons than the nebulons, and I can almost never outnumber the empire, because as I said, they have giant fleets of 20 and 30 of the damn things.
Let it also be noted, that the AI is better at micromanaging the units, they somehow employ better hit and run tactics than I can, they come in, fire some shots, then retreat to regen shields, even when I use the pause function and try to maneuver each unit separately myself, they seem to just be slower than the imperial ones.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Of course the Victory class does more damage than a Nebulon B its a tier above, the Acclamator is the imperial counterpart to the Nebulon B.

And you should have had opportunities to send out the droids and get more techs, only time I ever was Outteched in the base campaigns was a single mission where I had Victory class destroyers against Mon Calamari Cruisers in a campaign mission. You should have had the chance to get the Alliance Assault Ship by now which is the counterpart to the Victory class.

[^9[DSS]Dahaka]

Originally posted by Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia:

Of course the Victory class does more damage than a Nebulon B its a tier above, the Acclamator is the imperial counterpart to the Nebulon B.

And you should have had opportunities to send out the droids and get more techs, only time I ever was Outteched in the base campaigns was a single mission where I had Victory class destroyers against Mon Calamari Cruisers in a campaign mission. You should have had the chance to get the Alliance Assault Ship by now which is the counterpart to the Victory class.

wait, my bad, i got the names mixed up. its called the mk2 frigate. I misremembered, i though that thing was called the nebulon mk2, but i was confused with the nebulon b2 frigate from some old mod. Thats what im talking about, the mk2 frigate, the bulky round ship, its weak AF and get owned.
I can steal no more tech currently. Im still missing the speeders and the mon cala cruisers.

[mosser1989]

Originally posted by ^9DSSDahaka:

Originally posted by Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia:

Of course the Victory class does more damage than a Nebulon B its a tier above, the Acclamator is the imperial counterpart to the Nebulon B.

And you should have had opportunities to send out the droids and get more techs, only time I ever was Outteched in the base campaigns was a single mission where I had Victory class destroyers against Mon Calamari Cruisers in a campaign mission. You should have had the chance to get the Alliance Assault Ship by now which is the counterpart to the Victory class.

wait, my bad, i got the names mixed up. its called the mk2 frigate. I misremembered, i though that thing was called the nebulon mk2, but i was confused with the nebulon b2 frigate from some old mod. Thats what im talking about, the mk2 frigate, the bulky round ship, its weak AF and get owned.
I can steal no more tech currently. Im still missing the speeders and the mon cala cruisers.

Mk2 is a very fragile ship only meant for supporting larger ships since their shields are the only thing they got going for them. Frontal assaults on VSD 1's with this missles is suicide for fighters and weaker ships. I would try the long range support units, but its been years since i played vanilla (didnt know ppl still did that lol) so im not super sure on whats the best tactic here.

[Prof_Nekko]

shields are the core advantage of all the mainline Rebel ships. MCCs, Nebulons, and Assault Frigates all live by keeping their shields up.

[Kimbo]

Originally posted by ^9DSSDahaka:

Am I missing something? How is it that about 30 nebulon mk2 frigates can barely scratch 5 victory class star destroyers? I literally lost 20 Y-wings, 30 nebulon mk2 frigattes, and 10 corvettes just to destroy 1 tier 4 space station, and 5 victory class star destroyers. It's absurd. I can take on pretty much anything with the rebels in FoC, how are they so weak on EAW? Granted I'm doing the campaign on hard, but still. Also the Empire now has fleets with 40 and 50 of those damn victory destroyers, and bringing along y-wings does nothing cause they get destroyed after, or even before launching their first torpedoes due to a gazillion imperial fighters spawned from the aforementioned victory cruisers.

What am I doing wrong, and how to deal with this?

EDIT: I got it mixed up, its not called a nebulon mk2, its just the MK2 frigate, or alliance assault frigate.

Only good Rebel space units in battle. Building any other ship is a waste

Mon Calamari Star Cruiser ( fighter/bomber hanger and "power to shields" )
MC30c Frigate ( Long range torps/small ship/fast/Can solo entire fleets with fighter cover )
B-Wing ( B-Wing )
A-Wing ( Lure is broken )
Corellian Corvette ( Build 3-4 and the AI suddenly has 0 fighters/bombers )
Corellian Gunship ( Good in small packs/can snipe shield generators )
Nebulon B Frigate ( Stronger in numbers/able to tightly pack them )
Alliance Assault Frigate Mk. II ( The Rebel "fire ship"/Shield wall )

Quick edit here. The name of the game is removing the hostile units which can pierce Shields from the area asap. The longer your shield piercing units stay alive, the faster/easier a battle will be. I'll go as far and say the second the AI loses their shield piercing units you have won.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Vanilla Mon Cal Cruisers don't have hangers, no rebel ships do. Just like how the VSD only has Turbolasers and a single Ion cannon battery and a hanger.