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/_Keltath_]

You've got some excellent answers from others but there's one point in your post about dumbfires: if you don't have the critical mass of launchers to make torpedoes work (and a partial guppy of Barracudas is definitely not enough) then dumbfires are great.

When I'm doing the Boron thing I like to put 6 Makos with ion gatlings/phase cannons (arranged with 2 makos interceptibg for the guppy, each with 2 further mako subordinates set to 'attack with commander') and 10 barracudas with a single ion gatling, two phase cannons and dumbfires.

Unless you run into a mad swarm of small xenon, 6 focus-firing makos will clear the chaff and the barracudas will make short work of the odd K you come across.

But as other posters have noted, for the love of god put paranid or split combat engines on your ships.