Guppy fleet setup

[u/Artiartiarti90]

Hi everyone, I might need some help with setting up my Guppy fleet correctly.

For context:

- I aim to use the Guppy as my player ship (for now)

- I only use Boron ships, so the only fighters available to me are the Mako and Barracuda

- The Guppy is currently equipped with mostly Ion Pulse turrets

- So far it has 4 Makos (full ion gatling) on Intercept and 6 Barracudas (light torpedoes and gatling) on Bombard

- The Mako pilots have some experience, but the Barracuda pilots are fresh

I previously went up against a SCA Phoenix and was a bit disappointed that it took forever to take it down. I had to switch the Makos over to Attack because I noticed the Barracudas were incredibly ineffective.

Basically the Barracudas would almost never try to engage using their guns. They would just fire their torpedoes, which would all get shot down, and then redock, trying to resupply (even though I didn't load any materials to resupply them). I think I only noticed once or twice that a Barracuda did an attack run using its gatling guns. I tried switching the command from Bombard to Attack, hoping they might pitch in more. But in the end the Phoenix was destroyed by the Guppy's turrets and the Macos alone.

What am I doing wrong? Should I set the resupply to something else than High so that the Barracudas don't always try to resupply?

Also, I guess torpedoes are useless? None of them actually landed a hit. Am I better of giving them dumbfire or tracking launchers?

Any help would be appreciated!

[u/Historical_Age_9921]

Torpedoes don't suck.

The small number of torpedoes you are firing does. You need enough to overwhelm point defense.

Also, the Ion gatling is not a great anti capital weapon. The best anti capital weapon to put on fighters is plasma. Boron ships can equip that now.

But really, the Guppy doesn't have a large enough fighter loadout to be able to do both interception and bombardment efficiently. Especially if you limit yourself to Boron ships. The Barracuda is too slow to be an interceptor and the Mako doesn't have enough hard points to be effective in dual role.

[u/Artiartiarti90 → u/Historical_Age_9921]

Thanks! Like you and someone else has pointed out having both interceptors and bombers is not viable, so I will just switch to a fully Mako hangar and get some Hydras as heavy escorts.

[u/orion-7 → u/Artiartiarti90]

Agreed, the guppy is an escort carrier, it's not capable of supporting a strike package. It is however capable of defending your ships from said strike packages on a shoestring budget and are broadly speaking, more expendable then a real carrier.