Vipers vs Raptors?

[Sabaithal]

I can't find any guides about this and my experimentation has yielded limited results. So far I have observed the following:

Vipers - More units, stronger in dogfights, limited anti-missile capabilities. Less effective vs larger ships, but difficult for ships like nemesis to target, making them semi-effective chasers.

Raptors - Less units, stronger for support purposes, can be armed with small missiles that can be reloaded upon docking with a capitol vessel, making them semi-effective bombers. They can also boost firewalls which I have found only has a limited degree of effectiveness.

Any advice for how to use these?

[Supreme Doge]

You should treat Vipers as your primary attack craft for doing things like dispatching enemy fighters as well as attacking ships. Just make sure to load them on ships that provide high evade values for them (e.g. Atlas, Berzerk), while loading less important craft (raptors, sweepers) on ships that provide lower evade values (Minerva, Artemis). The evade value is basically an indicator of how much damage your squadrons can tank before going offline.

Raptors are the utility craft which aren't all that useful in combat, but are quite great for other things, like boosting firewalls or landing boarding parties. Ideally, you'd have at least 1 raptor out in the battlefield following your fleet. That way you can quickly land the raptor on a ship to boost firewall or send out a boarding party to strategically weaken an enemy flagship.

Assault raptors (ARP) are basically same as normal raptors, but they actually have a defined combat support role. You can use their target painting ability to buff your vipers, have the raptors assist in combat or launch rockets at enemy ships. This does, however, come at the expense of other utility.

[Sir Wagglepuss III]

Application of squadrons is considerably different between SP and MP. Most folks who ask about base level unit usage usually aren't hitting up MP yet, so I'm going to assume SP here.

Before I start, MattXzK is half-right about evasion. The evade stat is a flat percentage value that any incoming shot that has rolled as a "hit" will instead be rerolled into a "miss". Most Colonial ships with a hangar provide 20 evasion, notable exceptions are the Atlas (35) and Berzerk (50), making them prime platforms for your Vipers. Support squadrons are wasted in high evasion slots as odds are, they are gonna die anyway if caught by a proper Raider squadron - 50 evasion or not.

Vipers are your interceptors and primary AMD until you get flak. You'll always want at least 4 squadrons (3, if you are running Berzerks) in the air until Basestar grade ships (Cerberus, Basestar, Argos) start showing up. Vipers excel at chewing up Cylon squadrons, and can do reasonable damage to capitals when you get 3+ into a group. You'll always want to use Mk II's over Mk I's whenever possible, as the Mk II is a straight upgrade in performance.

Raptors are handy to have in the early game to deal with Cerastes and Revenants, if you are struggling to deal with them. The Raptor boarding party immediately debuffs the target by -25% subsystem repair speed, -15 accuracy and (if the target is Cylon) -20 processing power. Between the accuracy and processing power debuff, the Cerastes and Revenant gets squarely kicked in the nuts. The Raptor also has 4000m DRADIS range, making it a nice squadron for scouting, making missile locks easier when you aren't running a Manticore for recon. The Firewall boost when they are docked at a friendly ship is more of an icing-on-the-cake thing, ideally prevention is the best cure when it comes to hacking and you should focus down Nemesis before they become a problem.

Other utility squadrons come later on in the campaign, but you've asked specifically about Vipers and Raptors.

An example fleet and squadron loadout that I like to use early campaign is 2x Adamant 3x Berzerks. The Adamants hold 2x Raptors, the Berzerks hold 3x Vipers. Adamants hold out in front to take fire, Berzerks chew up targets with their medium guns. Vipers go out and scrap any squadrons, whilst Raptors wander out to ID hostile targets and board any threatening targets of opportunity (Cerastes, Revenants). Adamant guided missiles are held in reserve to slap about awkward Nemesis that need to be discouraged.

[76561198294367068]

why is evasion stat tied to the hangar ship type?

[Sir Wagglepuss III]

Originally posted by Bravo Mike:

why is evasion stat tied to the hangar ship type?

First off, sweet mother of necro, this is a 5 year old thread.

Second off, evasion being tied to the hangar subsystem is honestly a gameplay thing. Call it a ship's ability to communicate and direct it's squadrons under fire, or whatever tickles your fancy for lore reasons. At the end of the day, the Hangar stat is there to tie defensive (evasive) ability of your squadrons to a subsystem on the ship that launched them. It's all part of game balance, so that ships can specifically have high quality squadrons whilst having other drawbacks. The Berzerk is fragile, the Atlas is slow and not well armed, etc.

[konzacelt]

Raptors would be more useful if they simply let them also boost marine defense on any friendly ship they board. The Defender has this ability, but honestly it should be a standard function of all Raptors. If both sides could do it, I fail to see any balance issues there.

What's odd about the Defender's functionality is that using that special marine Raptor means taking away some of the Defender's own marine contingent. But when any ship uses marines to board an enemy ship, no such penalty is required.

So in other words, using marines to board another ship costs you nothing - they are entirely separate from the mother ship's marine count, and any ship that can carry a raptor can do this. But using them to defend another friendly ship has a hard cost - they are not separate at all; not only do you have to subtract them from the mother ship's total marine count, but only one late-game ship type has this ability.

Make that make sense.

[twosnark]

The entire boarding thing is . . .odd.

For the campaign; it seems to make sense as a "toaster terror weapon" to really complicate your defense, however as a practical matter having extra raiders or wardrivers would make much more sense.

Using Raptors to boost firewalls is a nice trick in hard battles against EW centric Cyclon fleets. I remember one hard battle where a jupiter lost armory, nav and fire control to EW. I had to sandwich the ship with a pair of Artemis until I could swat down all the wardrivers, Nemesis, and Phoebe's floating about. It wasn't pretty.

In terms of the "Defender" - - > its a neat game mechanic. In the campaign; I found it sort of cheesy because I always wound up buffing the Galactica. Tech support to boost fire control; send over 2 squads of Marines preemptively to deal with boarders (Heavy Raiders always went for the Galactica - - -> The missions were all very Galactica centric). Even with the Cheese; I liked the ship and had one in a number of fleets in lieu of one adamant.

[nephilimnexus]

Once you get the Atlas carrier it's moot because you get both in exactly the right numbers by default (2 Vipers + 1 Raptor standard load).