Atackign bases, fleets, and beta and alpha attack techniques

PART I - Attacking Fleets

Alright, it's time for your battles. Let's assume you are using the fleet outlined above. Fighting over an empty astro, start by moving forward your fleet carriers filled with fighters onto the astro. Land and retract your fleet carriers. Then, attack all out with a large fighter wave (use a bit more then your opponent has total). You will smash through their unshielded ships with minimal cost damage to yourself. Ships will only attack ships they can do damage to, thus your fighters will swarm all over those undefended ships. A corvette has x2 a fighters stats yet costs 4 times as much. The cost effectiveness of a fighter is devastating to any foe. Without meat shields, your opponent's fleet is extremely vulnerable and is easy to smash through.

If your opponent had a large amount of cruisers/HC it may not be time to do a heavy bomber drop. Same thing as the first step mentioned above, but this time with some HB instead of fighters.



Now, moving in your fleet, the prior outlined fleet composition will utterly devastate the opponent's fleet. It is imperative that you LEAVE CARRIERS AND RECYCLERS OUT OF THE BATTLE. Move to suck up the debris as quickly as possible before moving on. Also, NEVER, EVER use fighters from the hangars of your cruisers or Heavy cruisers to make a drop. If you are going to attack with cruisers/HC they need to be filled with fighters, so make sure you have enough hangar capacity in your carriers/FC or else you'll be hurting big time.

Part II - Attacking Bases

When attacking an enemy base there are two tactics that most players will employ, the ALPHA STRIKE & the BETA STRIKE. In this article we will discuss the BETA STRIKE first since it is the easiest of the two to perform.

I. BETA STRIKE

The BETA STRIKE is the strategy of ignoring the defenders fleet when you go to make a hit. This strategy can only be used if each class of ship guarding an enemy base has less firepower than all your ships' shields. Using a BETA STRIKE at the wrong time can destroy your fleet!!

A. BETA STRIKE is usually only performed with Heavy Cruisers and larger ships. Here is a classic example of a BETA STRIKE:

Attacker (GB MEMBER) Defender(Poor Guy)

500 Heavy Cruisers(91.2,105.6,7.0) 5000 Fighters (6.5,4.3)
10 Disrupters (332.8,550.4,14)
10 Delection Shileds (3.1,1100.8,17.5)
Command Centers 10

In this example the attacker will fire on the base ignoring the fighters completely. As you can see in our example the fighters attack power even with the command centers is 0.5 below the shielding of the Heavy Cruisers. Since all the defenders ships (fighter) have less firepower than the our ship's shields (Heavy Cruisers) we are simply going to attack.

The result of this first attack will be ~35 Heavy Cruisers Destroyed (16,500CR) for the Attacker, and ~4000 Fighters Destroyed (19,985CR) and the turrets and shields destroyed for the defender. Clearly we won this battle. We make a repair and easily overcome the remaining 1000 fighters. Overall we took the base with less than 20k in losses.

Had we chosen to drop fighters on the base, instead of the BETA STRIKE it would have taken ~5500-6000 fighters to clear out the fighters costing us 30,000CR before we even hit the turrets!!!!!

The BETA STRIKE is designed to take bases efficiently when they are protected by units with weaker Firepower. CAUTION: If the fleet has units with FIREPOWERS greater than your fleets shielding this technique will not work, you will then have to use the ALPHA STRIKE. Do NOT try a beta strike on a base with p-rings....you'll lose hundreds of heavy cruisers.

B. ALPHA STRIKE is a two step strategy of using fighters/bombers (FIGHTER DROPS) to clear fleet screens out of the way for your main fleet(ALPHA STRIKE) to hit. Using our above example for the BETA STRIKE I will plug in some more fleet:

Attacker (GB MEMBER) Defender(Poor Guy)

500 Heavy Cruisers(91.2,105.6,7.0) 5000 Fighters (6.5,4.3)
1000 Bombers (12.0,4.3)
100 Cruisers (68.4,51.6,3.4)
10 Disruptors (332.8,550.4,14)
10 Deflection Shields (3.1,1100.8,17.5)
Command Centers 10

If we were to try and BETA STRIKE this fleet we would lose 70,000CR in ships to our enemy's 41,000CR and still have 2700 Fighters, 3 Disrupters, and 3 Deflection Shields left. Since the BETA STRIKE will cost us way too much in losses we need to get rid of the unshielded units with a fighter/bomber drop.

So STEP 1 we will attack them with a Fighter/Bomber drop:

Attacker (GB MEMBER) Defender(Poor Guy)

3000 Fighters (4.3,4.4) 5000 Fighters (6.5,4.3)
2500 Bombers (8.4,4.4) 1000 Bombers (12.0,4.3)
100 Cruisers (68.4,51.6,3.4)
10 Disruptors (332.8,550.4,14)
10 Deflection Shields (3.1,1100.8,17.5)
Command Centers 10


After the Fighter/Bomber strike we will have lost 40,000CR and our opponent will have lost 48,000CR, giving us better than a 1:1 ratio on a fighter drop which is very good.

STEP 2

We now will strike the remaining fleets and defenses with our main fleet or ALPHA STRIKE:

Attacker (GB MEMBER) Defender(Poor Guy)

2800 Fighters (4.3,4.4) 35 Cruisers (68.4,51.6,3.4)
800 Corvettes (8.6,8. 10 Disruptors (332.8,550.4,14)
500 Destroyers (15.2,17.6) 10 Deflection Shields (3.1,1100.8,17.5)
500 Cruisers (45.6,52.8,3.5) Command Centers 10
100 Heavy Cruisers (91.2,105.6,7.0)

As you may notice our ALPHA STRIKE is 2 blocks of the "Perfect 100K Fleet" from up above. This fleet will take the base easily in one shoot costing us only 15,000CR in losses and the enemy 7,000CR in losses. So at the end of the day we lost 55,000CR and our enemy lost 55,000CR in credits. Giving us a 1:1 ratio while taking a base. Which is good!!! In an alpha strike, it may be worthwhile to leave out the heavy cruisers if you have enough firepower without them to take the base in one shot. In this case, you could leave them out and you would get an even better ratio (explained further in section IV).

BASE ATTACK SUMMARY

BETA STRIKE - Only use this when all your enemy's ships have a lower firepower than your ships shields.
ALPHA STRIKE - If you can't use a BETA STRIKE then you need to perform this 2 step attack to minimize your losses.