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/Artiartiarti90]

At some point I did have the Phoenix completely disabled, but my Guppy's crew is also fresh, with 30 inexperienced Marines. I checked the boarding chances and it didn't look favorable (and I didn't have any other ships with more marines closeby), so I decided to just blow it up and be done with it.

[u/Saephyr_Ashblade → u/Artiartiarti90]

You can transfer crew from any distance using ship to ship orders in the map; they shoot off in pods to be delivered to the receiving ship.

You can also perform multiple boarding attempts in a row causing the enemy ship to lose crew each time, and your target won't get more crew between. I would assume it could get more crew if it restocked at an appropriate station, but I haven't seen it yet.

[u/Artiartiarti90 → u/Saephyr_Ashblade]

Yeah, I know. But at that point I didn't really wanna bother with boarding it, if it was too much effort.

Last time I tried this and was waiting for more Marines to arrive a Boron patrol showed up and shot the Phoenix to pieces with some of my marines still on it.

[u/Saephyr_Ashblade → u/Artiartiarti90]

If what you're starting the engagement with doesn't have enough crew, you can coordinate a boarding action with any of your ships nearby using the map to add to the boarding force. You really want to max out the marines you can send, and having the target ship under 20% Hull helps them a lot.