flak frigs arent useless

If the carriers go bombers, then the only response to carriers is indeed carriers (Halcyon, Kol, and Kortul work great, but you need fighter backup to clean up the stragglers).  In general, though, I totally agree.  Flaks are awesome at dealing with fighters, but you really need sufficient numbers of them.

If the enemy is going bombers, you could just go with your own carriers with fighters.  The fighters also counter enemy fighters, so as a general rule it's good to have some for that reason in addition to the flaks.

im not talking about using carriers. and you dont have to even use carriers if you use flaks right. even if he uses bombers flaks wil still work

flaks dont do much vs bombers....so what's the ratio that you feel would work superfleet?

I tend to agree; without something like a Kol or Halcyon helping out, bombers will rip up your capital ships long before flaks will deal with them.  Hell, if you have enough of them bombers will kill your caps before fighters destroy them.  Against large bomber fleets, you'd better have fighters of your own, and special abilities to fend off the bomber swarm.

You need a balanced fleet.

Which should include both flak and carriers. and LRM and LF. Some HCs do good too

The whole argument is moot i think

lol

readyman, i posted this before i learned about the 75% slower build rate for fighters and bombers in combat, but still for bombers its best to have combitnation of flak and fighters, but if you have enough flak and keep it close to your caps not very many may amek it though. for a bomber spam you will need lots of flak and fighters and carfully micro-managed ablitys.

For your perusal superfleet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p7xc_snd9Cc-6o2UwvPEWUg&gid=1

Notice that anti-strikecraft class ships (i.e. Flak) do 150% base damage to fighters but only 75% to bombers. Notice also that fighters have the same to hit chance as flak for attacking bombers but do 200% base damage.

Flak frigates are the counter vs. fighters, but versus bombers they aren't actually that good. A strong fighter screen is the only thing that will protect you from bombers adequately.

If I take the Advent Defence ship as an example it has a DPS of 18 split 3 ways. So assume one gun at a time can fire at a single advent bomber squadron. It is doing (18/3)*.75*.75 DPS to that squadron =, or 3.375 DPS. Each bomber has 75hp so it takes 22.2s to kill a single bomber.

Bearing in mind that there are 7 bombers in a squadron, you can see that it's going to take a while.

Working out the numbers for fighters being flakked, it taked approx. 6.3s to kill a single advent fighter (9 per squadron).

My point is that fighters and special abilities are the only proper counter to bombers, fortunately, bombers are only good vs buildings, HC and caps.

Bombers are good against everyting except fighters. If you use them right, you can destroy a entire cap ship in a single pass with a large enough group (around 50 squadrons)

Bombers do only 50% dmg vs anything but capital or heavy cruisers.

Bombers do more raw DPS than fighters (11.7 to 17.5 for advent, for a squadron), but the damage modifiers make them only really good vs heavy cruisers and capitals. Fighters are only good vs light (bombers, LRF, civilian, colony, siege, scout). Bombers do more damage vs medium and heavy than fighters, but you'd be better off investing in LRFs to take down LF (medium) or LF if they're using lots of cruisers/flak.

Or you could just spam LRFs as they're fairly good vs everything (except SC).

I don't dispute that a big enough swarm of bombers can reduce cap ships to debris, I just dispute that they're good vs anything but those two classes.

bear in mind that i said if you have enough flak not very many are goign to get through. i recently palyed a game where a guys was outnumbered in sc squads 3-1 and he won cus he had 60 flak. nothing gets througha ccover liek that.

Yes, its frustrating to see people not recognizing the power of flak.