Sins Forums
The get eaten up by AoE, nano leach, Maw, and seem to be more of a liability.
Vs Titans yes. Flip side, engage the Titan with a Titan/Cap fleet of your own and send the frigates behind the lines to create misery for the your enemy works well.
what do you mean behind the lines? Where do you send your frigate fleet?
... Ugh.. It's where you go... behind enemy lines... As in, you let your titan slug it out at the attacked planet and send your frigates to their other worlds to create havoc.
Easier said than done...
Anyway, to the OP, frigates aren't useless per se, but they are most certainly marginalized...the game is "Sins of a Titan"...
Sins of a Titan are becoming great. Not sure what the hell youd use corvettes for, even weaker than frigates
hmmmmmmm... no.
Frigates:
#1 detonate antimatter. If you are fighting bomber spam, use detonate antimatter on the enemy carriers
#2 flak frigates. Owns corvettes and helps stop bomber spam.
#3 corvettes. Great early game unit to spam. useful in small numbers late game as electronic warfare frigates
#4 lrfs. LRF's have been marginalized in Rebellion but in large numbers are still quite effective. Illuminators are better off than before.
#5 repair. Robotics cruisers are as necessary as always.
#6 nukes. needed in small numbers to speed up planet bombing tremendously.
Cruisers:
#1 better off than frigates because of higher health but still susceptible to aoe attacks.
#2 Heavy cruisers. You dont need as many now as in diplomacy, what with aoe attacks making you less dependent on cruisers for dps. Still needed in limited numbers as a capital counter. (Although i hear KoK can pull off a killer Kodiak rush)
#3 carriers. self explanatory.
#4 guardians. Most beneficial unit by far. helps protect entire advent fleet. Ultra useful and always needed.
#5 support cruisers. Vasari support is the best with subverters and opressors, though all support units are needed in at least limited numbers in any late game fleet.
So no. Frigates and cruisers are not a liability.
Frigates, never said cruisers. Frigates get eaten alive by AoE, Maw, Nano Leach, malice, chastic burst, etc
That is a slight exaggeration.
A Titan without a frigate fleet can very easily have its AM depleted and is then extremely vulnerable.
Edit: The Maw rarely comes into play because the VL Titan struggles to get the required exp. It is also easily interrupted so frigates are free to do their job. Dunov, Akkan, Radiance and Kortul are all key anti-ability ships that bring frigates back in the game.
As I said in the other thread in more detail, cruisers ARE frigates. There is no ability in the game that will work on frigates but not cruisers or vice versa, so cruisers are affected by all of those abilities. The only advantage they have is that they tend to be individually more powerful, so don't get hit quite as hard.
Like I said, they aren't useless, but the game is all about titans...once titans start coming out, fleet compositions revolve around titans 100%...you build bombers to kill the titan, you build fighters to protect the titan, you spam support ships to buff the titan and caps, you build flaks to deal with fighters (used to protect the titan), you spam HCs or LRFs to focus fire on the titan in case your bombers are countered by fighters/flak and/or cap abilities....the caps you build are selected to counter SC, drain the titan AM, or protect the titan...
It really is all about the titan...every late game "final battle" I've been involved in ended with only titans, caps, SBs, and carriers on the field in any significant numbers...
Once the early game is over and titans start rolling out, frigates and even caps simply exist to support and/or kill titans...if you don't believe me, step back and take a moment...think, why are you building the units you are building? Why are you picking the cap abilities you are picking? Ultimately it's all because of titans...either it kills the titan, or it protects the titan...that's the game now...
To my knowledge the Maw and Nano Leach only work on Frigates and NOT cruisers
QFT
This matches up nicely with modern fleet tactics, where battles are all about the carrier. You will have missile cruisers to screen aircraft away from the carrier, submarines to keep shipping at a distance, helicopters and destroyers to hunt enemy submarines, and the various aircraft to perform their missions.
It's all about the "big ship". Small ships are supposed to do small ship jobs. Generally this isn't in the middle of a pitched fleet battle unless they offer some kind of support role.
Smaller ships are used for harassment, economic interdiction, breakthrough (as mentioned earlier), picket duty, merchant ship protection, etc.
So the "Sins of a Titan" approach really is a reflection of modern fleet deployment.
Whether it makes for a better game - well that is a good question. If small ships dominate the game even after capital ships are built - then why have capital ships? What is their role if not to dominate battle? The same holds true for the Titans. These empires were driven to build the massive ships, at great expense. Doing so wouldn't make sense if if these ships weren't so effective as to be mandatory.
What you are not realizing is that in game code cruisers don't exist. So in a sense you are correct. Everything built from the Frigate Factory (Heavy Cruisers and all) are all classified in game code as frigates.
Unfortunately you are thinking that cruisers do exist in the game code and this is where you are wrong. The problem comes is the fact that all frigates from the cruiser build area of the Frigate Factory have sufficient HP to withstand the AoEs that affect frigates and don't wilt as fast. But they are still affected by the AoEs because in game code they are frigates.
Or in english, The Maw will eat your Kodiaks for breakfast... 
Disciples can steal anti-matter from carriers but i didn't think the Cobalt's Sabotage Reactor worked on carriers because making strike craft isn't an ability. Am I wrong? (if so, that's great). I don't play Vasari so I don't remember what the skirmisher has.
All light frigates do get a damage bonus vs. carriers though.
Generally speaking, only disciples can use their abilities against carriers...that being said, I guess technically cobalts and skirmishers could affect AL aerias that have the "mine capture" ability, but that's a very rare situation...
All that semantic bullcrap aside, Maw and Nano Leach will NOT eat any ship selected from the Cruiser button on the frigate factory. No carriers, HC's, support cruisers. They are not affected by Maw or Nano Leach.
Abilities and buffs in this game utilize a "target filter"...this "target filter" determines what entity types can be targetted by the ability and/or are affected by a buff...you specify in the target filter what classes of objects can be targetted....
"Frigates" is one class of objects, and includes any entity that is specified as a "Frigate"...anything that can be built at a frigate factory is a frigate, anything, including corvettes and cruisers...some other things are also technically considered frigates (missile platforms deployed by the Sova, siege platforms deployed by the Vulkoras, construction frigates)...there is no class of objects called "cruisers"...as far as the game is concerned there is absolutely no fundamental difference between a cobalt and a kodiak, they are both frigates with just different stats...
The UI can only have 9 frigates under a single "button"...since there are more than 9 frigates for each faction, the devs gave frigate factories 2 buttons, allowing a max of 18 units that can be constructed via the frigate factory...you can specify in a faction's player entity file which ships appear under what button, but for simplicity the devs decided to group all the larger frigates together and call them cruisers...
CRUISERS AND FRIGATES ARE TREATED THE SAME BY EVERYTHING IN THE GAME...the only difference is what UI button you click to build them...
If you don't believe me, use the dev.exe and spawn whatever ships you want and try to use abilities on them...nano leach, just like any other ability that affects frigates, will affect kodiaks and cobalts alike...
There is one unusual thing in Rebellion in regards to the target filter...if a target filter includes "frigates", that ability/buff will then also affect corvettes (which are technically frigates)...however, the target filter can also include only "corvettes", which are distinguished from other "frigates" by their specified role type in their entity file...
Any ability that affects frigates also affects corvettes...abilties set to affect only corvettes will not affect other frigates....
Thank you, Steal Antimatter.
(by the way, that list wasn't in order of effectiveness. It was in order of things that come to mind.)
probably because you're either
1. ur out of range
2. you're glitching
3. You're not paying attention.
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