I've recently picked up my Rebellion game after taking a break for the last year or two. I'm not a master gamer or anything of the sort, I just enjoy playing this every once in a great while. However, recently a friend of mine and I started talking about it and it's kicked off a discussion between the two of us on how to build the best fleets.

 

What is the best ships to use for fleets? As Imperials, I've always tried to stick with numerous Vic destroyers and the regular Imps when possible and a crap load of Lancer frigates and Carrack cruisers to match. Would it be better to instead build numerous escort carriers and fill them with fighters?

 

As for the Rebels, I'm at a loss for fleet make up. Same for the Fighters. I saw in another post that somebody had a fleet of something like 10 escort carriers and 60 y-wings. Would a fleet like that be better for attacking and then subsequently bombarding a planet?

 

Help me Rebellion gurus, you're my only hope.

If you're playing the unmodified game, then yes, carriers and fighters are the way to go. As long as the fleets aren't very small, the ability of fighters to swarm capital ships one at a time, and overcome their shield's regeneration quickly, proves decisive. Additionally, fighters are by far more cost-effective in bombardment, since a single squadron of Y-W or T-B has the same Bombardment value as many expensive capital ships.

 

An equal mix of T/I and T/B for the Empire, or X-W (or A-W if you prefer) and Y-W for the Rebels, works well. Have the T/I, A-W or X-W attacks fighters, and have the T/B or Y-W attack capital hips.

 

With Rebels, you may prefer to get Liberator cruisers when they become available, they're really the best ship in the game. They are carriers, but also effective in their own right. In that case you may want a higher proportion of fighters (T/I, A-W, X-W) than bombers (T-B, Y-W).

 

Of course if you're just playing against the computer, anything works really, so do whatever's fun for you. The computer is stupid, and you can take your time and demolish planetary defenses with sabogate rather than bombardment.

 

Once you have the measure of the unmodified game, I recommend you check out my rebalancing ideas in the Multiplayer forum. My modification weakens fighters, raises their costs, and strengthens the bombardment of capital ships, to the point where many different fleet compositions are similarly effective, and in fact it's possible to compose a somewhat viable fleet while skipping on fighters entirely. Also T/D and B-W become relatively better, since they were really not that cost-effective in the unmodified game.

Thanks for the idea. To be completely honest, I'm entirely new to the actual space battling. I've always just done the simulated outcome that the computer does. Recently I made a fleet (Imperials) of Lancers and Escort Carriers full of T/D's and would send them to a system and have them mop up any fighter defenses. Immediately I'd follow up with a fleet of 5 Vic II star destroyers carrying only T/B's and would then lay waste to shields and ground troops alike. I did it this way because the when I would put T/B's in my normal fleets they'd get annihilated by the system defensive star fighters when I would use the computer generated outcome. It looks like I'll have to sit down and try and figure out how to actually do the space battles so as not to lose them next time.

If nothing else you could combine the two fleets, take command of the battle and tell your bombers to return to their ship/carrier before they launch. This cuts down on your pre-invasion work and saves your bombers for the bombardment.