Early game fleet composition vs Revenants & Arachnes, etc.

[Jabberwocky]

Hey there folks!

Have purchased the game bundle a while ago and started playing the story campaign recently. The next story mission is "Chapter 9 - Permissive Action LInk".

For a while, I mopped the floor with enemy corvettes and support ships using mainly Adamant Frigates, but now the Cylons have upgraded to Revenants and Arachnes which have much higher armor and pack quite a punch.

Most of my fleets consist of Artemis Battlestars and Adamant frigates at the moment, but I've got the blueprints for several ship classes unlocked:

-Artemis Battlestar
-Adamant Frigate
-Janus Cruiser
-Minotaur Gunship
-Berzerk Carrier
-Manticore Corvette

I also have armour-piercing munitions and Viper MK II unlocked.

What would be the best fleet composition at this stage in the game? I've noticed that my Adamant Frigates cannot take the amount of punishment that the Revenants and Arachnes dish out. So far, I've relied on Vipers to clear enemy missile volleys and have used Flak sparingly.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

The Minotaur gunship is a good choice for helping delete Revenants, otherwise more fighters or Battlestars. A Janus or Ranger with AP missiles in one slot and regulars in the rest can break through the armour of either foe and then do serious damage in a single turn provided the Arachne isn't carrying a Comet PCM.

Don't rely on Vipers for anti missile duty, Sweepers or flak take that role, use those fighters to take out enemy fighters and then set them after dangerous foes like the Revenant. The Arachne isn't too scary on its own, its fighters and missiles are easily dealt with and its guns are less impressive than the Revenant, it will lose to an Artemis or a Minotaur in a gunfight.

[Pingus Magical Blowjob]

You'll want to get underneath a revenant or get shots at the weak sides, if it focuses on something best have it go full defensive and keep presenting fresh sides of armor, while other ships finish it off, ideally a Janus fully loaded with torps going above it and dumping the entire salvo on the top side.
Arachne is actually only dangerous on the frontal facing side, if you can close up or get it to manouver with mines or whatever it has almost nothing to threaten you with. It also does not evade torpedoes very well since it has to be flying straight at whatever it wants to kill. So same trick with Janus, get the janus above it and dump torps on it's roof.

[Jabberwocky]

Thanks for the advice so far!

I would love to get underneath a revenant to tear it up from below, but it's kinda hard since the Cylon forces always seem to start way below the plane where I have to place my ships at the start of a battle. And movement per round does not allow my ships to dive down very far. In my experience, enemy ships have closed the distance to me and are tearing up my fleet's undersides before I can bring my ships even on the same level with them.

So far, I've mostly flown in formation and used broadsides to concentrate fire on one enemy cap ship while swarming the other one with guided munitions and a third one with my Viper MKIIs once the enemy fighters are cleared.

I've tested out two Janus Cruisers and they performed well, but could not stay in formation with the rest of the battle group since their turrets and main armor face forward.

I understand the Ranger cruiser also has a large complement of missile tubes. Is it capable of broadside firing, and if so, would that make it a sensible choice to have two of those fly in formation with my battlestars, frigates and gunships?

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Deploy your fleet as far from the enemy as possible if they are below you, group turn and drive away from them until at the same level and then turn to bear.

Rangers are squishy, and their guns aren't that impressive, they are good fro flying in formation with the fleet and probably best to stay above the Battlestar/s so they can ascend and fire over the flak wall, or keep them below to descend instead and still be fully capable of firing their heavy guns at anything inline with the fleet.

I tend not to bring missile boats, prefer the Atlas Carrier for adding more fighters into the mix so I don't need to worry too much about avoiding the flak wall that becomes more and more important as the Cylons bring more missiles to the table and heavier missiles too (like Nukes...). Eventually you get the Jupiter which doesn't really care if a Revenant is below them.

[Pingus Magical Blowjob]

Janus actually is a rarity in the colonial fleet, all the weaponry is on the bottom side so you don't have to actually keep trying to make it dive with the rest of the ships, and the main weaponry is fairly inaccurate so just keep it on neutral stance so you can squeeze out some extra movement, and then go full aggressive stance when you fire the salvos.

I often keep a janus or two hovering above the rest of my ships since they're nicely armored and can still bring all their guns to bear from where they're at, and raining torps from above is very lethal, bobbing and weaving on the vertical plane doesn't save the enemy ship from that.

Also I definitely recommend torps for Artemis. Arachnes keep trying to match the plane of the target they're engaging, to bring in all their weapons to play, but this is also true for the Artemis, they can bring a ludicrous amount of firepower on a target in front of them and on the same vertical plane.
Just play chicken with Artemis vs Arachne and dump torps and go full aggressive stance, it's not going to end well for the Arachne, if it doesn't die in one turn it's going to do it's best to evade and run away in the next turn, with a gaping hole in it's frontal armor.

[Jabberwocky]

Thanks very much for the good advice! I've gotten quite a bit ahead again thanks to y'all.

Have finished the 12th story mission and done a few side missions in the meantime, slowly building up my forces.

I have 7 fleets now. Most of them try to cover the Caprica/Picon system, as that seems to be the staging area for most Cylon attacks at this stage of the campaign, and 1 fleet at least is stationed in every star system, so I can quickly react to any side missions popping up. I have all the colonies on green loyalty, Most Cylon incursions get curb stomped via auto-resolve battles.

Since I've added Janus Cruisers and Minotaur Gunships to my attack fleets, even story missions are quite managable.

I haven't yet dared to research the nuke, since the game warned me about Cylons retaliating in kind. I'm not very good at micromanaging anti-missile countermeasures yet, so the risk of being hit by an enemy nuke is quite real. And I don't have the Galactica yet. I imagine the Galactica can tank a few nuke hits before going down, since that is what she did in the TV show. Not so sure about my current ship types.

The game's "Intel" window tells me to research the Ranger blueprint... but isn't that just an inferior missile cruiser less tanky than the Janus? Should I rather use the requisition points to unlock the Atlas carrier? More fighters seems like a good idea to me since I've seen a dozen viper squadrons melt down an enemy Revenant cruiser all on their own without needing capital ship support.

[Pingus Magical Blowjob]

Ranger isn't really inferior to Janus per say, it's just different. Janus is slow and spike a ton of damage in a short period of time, but the cooldown for those ordnances is long and the ship, while well armored, doesn't get much done with it's guns because they're inaccurate.

Ranger is the faster ship with possibly even wimpyer guns but they at least are more accurate, but it's quite frail.
The ordnances reload every other turn so it can really put missiles out if you want a constant output, but to get the most out of those you'll want the aggressive stance, making the ship even more frail so it needs a lot of babysitting.

It's a fun alternative, not really better or worse, just different. I use mine to lay out a disgusting amount of mines to discourage revenants from thinking they'll get away with diving under my ships.

[Pingus Magical Blowjob]

But to add to that, you'll want Atlas, perhaps even before unlocking the ranger but you'll get both reasonably easily, it's not like you'll run out resources if you do even the occasional side mission.

Atlas gives it's fighters extra evasion compared to other colonial ships, coming second only to the berzerk, and the ship itself is like a brick to smash cylon's faces in, not very subtle or quick but very hard to stop.

It might interfere with your overall fleet comp if you don't have the jupiter yet, atlas, janus and jupiter are some of the 'thicc'est ships you'll get, and appropriately slow.

I wouldn't even call your options as 'early game' because you already have all the tools to survive lategame even without jupiter, I still keep one or two 8k fleets without jupiters because while jupiter is great in almost all the things it does, is oh so incredibly unwieldy, with the finesse of a brick, and doesn't really benefit from having a fleet of fast ships escorting it.

One of my fleets has 3 artemis, janus, minotaur, 2 adamants and a celeste, doesn't really feel weak at all.

[Jabberwocky]

Yeah that sounds like my average fleet at the moment. I do not have any celeste ships. Do they come later? What can they do?

Also, is there a way to repel boarding parties? The heavy raiders stick to the hull of my battlestar. Is there anything I can do about that? Or do I just have to wait it out?

[Pingus Magical Blowjob]

Celeste is a support ship that comes with one of the dlcs, you can manage without but it's a handy thing to have around. It launches drones to reinforce the armor of one ship on one facing at a time, or restock ammo on ships.

There's really no way to repel boarding parties once they get into your ship other than flip the ship entirely to defensive stance which increases your own marine effectiveness to eliminate the boarders
Ideally you want to kill off the cylon heavy raiders before they get to that point, either with flak, debris mines, or just overwhelming viper superiority.

[Pingus Magical Blowjob]

Had to go and recheck the name, it's the broken alliance DLC, and the ship is celestTRA not celeste like how my brain keeps remembering it.

[Lack of Stuff]

If you own the DLC get the Celestra ASAP. It takes up the support slot like the Daidalos so there's no reason not to have 1 in every fleet barring group Daidalos.

[Jabberwocky]

Originally posted by Lack of Stuff:

If you own the DLC get the Celestra ASAP. It takes up the support slot like the Daidalos so there's no reason not to have 1 in every fleet barring group Daidalos.

Will do.

I have a few more questions about the gameplay:

If I have a battlestar group in orbit over a colony, fortifying it, and two cylon fleets jump into orbit over that colony, I can only engage one of those with my battlestar group via auto-resolve. The other one continues to hang around. But I don't see any option to attack it unless I jump away and then jump back again, or bring in a second fleet from elsewhere. Is that the intended game design? Or is there a button somewhere hidden in some sub menu or some UI element that lets me engage the enemy force threatening my colony while my fleet is already there to defend it?

Also: What can I do against Cerastes point-defence corvettes shredding my vipers to pieces? Do I just hold back my fighters until I have sniped those corvettes with missile barrages or artillery?

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

If you can get Vipers behind those PD ships the Vipers will rip them apart quite safely, Boarding them with Raptors will also make them far less scary. Missiles or ship cannons are the best way to deal with them, they aren't much tougher than a Nemesis.

Hostile fleets sticking around at a planet should trigger a battle at the end of turn iirc, I tended to pounce on their fleets whenever they arrived (after a certain point) so they never had the chance to double up.

[Jabberwocky]

Originally posted by Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia:

Hostile fleets sticking around at a planet should trigger a battle at the end of turn iirc, I tended to pounce on their fleets whenever they arrived (after a certain point) so they never had the chance to double up.

Thanks, I will test that out. In my case, two cylon fleets at once came out of Marathon and jumped into orbit above Caprica, but my battlestar group that was fortifying that colony could only fight against one of them. The other hung around, and I was looking for a way to get my battlestar group to attack that second fleet, too. But had to jump in another battlegroup in order to do so.

But I didn't wait till the end of the turn, so maybe I'll do that next time, so I don't have to shuffle around so many of my fleets all the time.