X3TC: Carrier tips/help.

[Nickvr628]

So I finally cracked and made an account on here, and I have a few questions. I am about three in game days into TC and have about 10m credits, I play vanilla and nothing you say or do can make me change that! I want to eventually buy a split M1 and I think I will buy a Elephant and use it as a mini carrier until I get a but-ton of cash. I will need a TL anyway for my factories and want my first big ship. Any suggestions for load outs and equipment? I am prepared to do a lot of micromanaging if I have too.


EDIT: I want to play full split my entire game, after a week or so of thinking, I want to make a war between the Profit Guild and the Borgon alliance.

[masternerdguy]

No man, use a TM!

All the races have them, they can each carry 4 fighters (except the chokaro which has 3), equip between 200mj and 600mj of shielding, depending on the race, and have decent point defenses.

I personally recommend either making friends with the Yaki and getting a Chokaro, or the Argon and getting a Zephyrus. The Zephyrus is my personal ship despite all the other stuff I own because it carries my 3 fighters (scimitar, nova, kestrel) for doing missions and an empty slot to retrieve ships with. It also has 600MJ of shielding so it's hardy.

And TMs are really cheap too, you can get started with a Magnetar for like 450k.

EDIT: Full split no problem, go Boa.

[Nickvr628]

Holy Miley that was fast. I have a TM and I want something a little bigger... Also I want a large fighter capacity so I can park all of my stolen mambas in it.

[masternerdguy]

Since you'll be using fighters for combat I'd fit your Elephant for point defense: flak in left/right, and ion shard railguns in the others. Keep the enemy away from your relatively fragile TL and let the 14 fighters do the dirty work like you said.

But I don't use split ships often so this might not be the best plan.

[Nickvr628]

Well see I was thinking that flak TOP and BOTTOM so they could have full coverage, HEPT left and right, and ISRs in the others like you said. Any comments on that?

[Nickvr628]

So I finally cracked and made an account on here, and I have a few questions. I am about three in game days into TC and have about 10m credits, I play vanilla and nothing you say or do can make me change that! I want to eventually buy a split M1 and I think I will buy a Elephant and use it as a mini carrier until I get a but-ton of cash. I will need a TL anyway for my factories and want my first big ship. Any suggestions for load outs and equipment? I am prepared to do a lot of micromanaging if I have too.


EDIT: I want to play full split my entire game, after a week or so of thinking, I want to make a war between the Profit Guild and the Borgon alliance.

Ok next question! What type of mamba should I use? Raider, vanguard, or a different split fighter altogether. Be warned I have a limited budget.

[ScorpiusX]

If parking space for your Mamba Owner's Club Continual Convention is what you're after at the moment then you may want to consider the following.

How flexible are you on your Vanilla Only statement? If the answer is just that you don't want to have the modified tag, then you may may want to consider the Advanced Complex Hub mod as this will NOT modify your game, it will however give you docking space at any NEW complex hub for 2 Capital Ships, 20 ships of TS/TP/TM/M6/M7/M8 types AND unlimited spots for M5/4/3s, and all without the dreaded modified tag. If that gets your interest then maybe TCM Tubless Complex Mod (performance increase in sectors with large complexes) will too as this also doesn't give you a modified tag.


TCM apologies for having to use google translate.
Advanced Complex Hub

If you DON'T want to do the above and you wish to keep vanilla as pure as the driven snow, then Teladi and Argon Trading Posts have unlimited fighter bays as do the Argon Super Shipyards (don't know if the other race Super Shipyards are the same), I think Military Outposts and Pirate Bases also have unlimited fighter spots (not sure on this part). This allows you to keep using your TM until you can afford/capture a M7 Panther (the Panther doesn't cost much more than an Elephant and is better than most M1s imo) or M1 Raptor.

You know you want those mods don't ya
You WILL turn to the Darkside young Padawan

[Nickvr628]

I would LIKE to have mods, but unfortunately I play on a Mac computer...
It runs like a dream on the highest graphics settings. But the Mac version does not support easy modding


My question was what subtype of mamba is best for taking out all things M6 or smaller.

[ScorpiusX]

Ideally I would use the Advanced Mamba (almost as fast as the Mamba Raider, the same shields as a Mamba Sentinel, the same weapons capacitor and regen as a Mamba Vanguard and more hull strength than any other Mamba and a larger cargo hold too), BUT you can't purchase them, you would have to cap one and reverse engineer it at the Player HQ then build your own. So therefore I'd say go for the Mamba Vanguard equiped with 8 Pacs and Thunderbolt Missiles (missile probability at 20-25%). You may also want to look at the Chimera M3+ its pretty good but costs more to buy.

Edit

Have a look at this Split Ships List on Roguey's X3TC site

[Nickvr628]

Thanks guys! I saw the link and I will definatly go to that site in the future. This community is great and friendly, not like others which will be hateful and critical if you ask the simplest question... Thanks guys for all the helpful info and you will bet I will continue my career on this site.

Oh and I support KFB, or Kentucky Fried Boron!

[Triaxx2]

For deployment, a bunch of Boas makes for a better platform than a single elephant due to the limited launch capacity of the Elephant.

However, the Elephant is just as good as a full carrier for carrying fighters to a launch area which is not in the battle zone. I use one for fleet supply with it's own fighter compliment.

That's really the best armament you can put on the Elephant. It's not as easily defended from fighters as the Albatross, but the mixed weapons mean it can fight off anything up to M6's with relatively little issue.

[sharkball]

Unfortunately... in vanilla, the juice ain't worth the squeeze. Fighter ai sucks and they will crash into each other often. use 1 elephant to park your capped fighters in so you can sell them. sell your ai fighters and buy Tigers. and a cobra.

[Nickvr628]

Unfortunately... in vanilla, the juice ain't worth the squeeze. Fighter ai sucks and they will crash into each other often. use 1 elephant to park your capped fighters in so you can sell them. sell your ai fighters and buy Tigers. and a cobra.

welllllll....... I computer (mac) has a super powered fusion nuclear core which can run even the busiest sectors on SETA x10 forever and without crashes on best graphic settings. Also in my 'Budding Billionare' start where I have full use of SE and unlimited money I have experimented with carriers and no crashes.

[Admiral-Dyroi]

I believe he meant that as an honest post, Vanilla Ai is pretty crappy. I play Vanilla but using a Carrier if you use more than 10 fighters at a time they tend to get stupid and ram into the exhaust of your carrier thus committing suicide.

I find the best Combo for the Elephant is run small trader vessels in it or like he said Store your capped ships in it. and use 2 M6's for escorts, they are more expensive but if you load your Elephant with Ion's and flak your corvettes can run HEPTs and no fighter or light frigate will contend with you.

Not to mention make friends with the Teladi. Freight Drones make life much easier if you plan on micromanaging a Station Holder as your economic hub.

Give you an example of their use. I run Argon vessels so I have a Mammoth and Mercury supers.
The Mercs pull up to the mammoth and Idle, I send Ore via freight drones to them and they sell for best price. meanwhile my mammoth continues to mine. NO downtime and I keep Energy cells in surplus to give to my mercury's so they can continue to jump. If I get low, one merc resupplies the mammoth as you can request a return ware with the drones also. they auto pull it from the cargo hold and return to the mammoth.


It is tedious but fun.

[Vyrebird]

If you're willing to accept that you *will* lose fighters, then it's possible to be happy with the fighter AI. I've mostly experimented with Solanos and Nova Raiders (with Panthers and Raptors as carriers), and they could kill things surprisingly well with only light losses (though repairing all the slightly-damaged ones got rather tedious ). Losing a couple million per engagement does get expensive, and it's generally more expensive than the alternatives, but that doesn't mean it's not still fun and surprisingly effective.

I tend to treat carriers full of fighters as the rich person's toy. In that scenario, the main annoyance is outfitting all the ships - even with Supply Command Software and the broadcast-to-wing etc commands, it's a lot of setup (and re-setup for replacement ships). Getting the raw volume of equipment can be annoying, too, though buying the 'L' models to start with can help there (if you don't mind buying whatever guns the 'L' comes with).

--

Moving from a TM to a carrier, managing all the fighters gets to be more of an issue. The 'Wing' system can be handy, or can be a royal pain - worth experimenting with, to see if you like it. Alternatively, there's also the 'Broadcast' commands, and setups where you have many fighters 'Protect'-ing or 'Attack Target of..'-ing a smaller group of fighters and you only deal with commanding those latter few.

--

I've only rarely had fighters suicide when docking with a carrier. Maybe it's the carriers in question (I use Split carriers, while Terran ones have the worst rep for fighter-death), but it's basically been a non-issue. The one exception was with my Raptor full of undertuned (~480 speed) Kestrels, but even then, the docking deaths were still uncommon. Far more likely to ram an enemy capital ship, a complex tube, or a nearby station

And I <3 the Elephant as a multipurpose early investment. TL, carrier, supply depot .... It's not very useful in a fight though, in my experience - it doesn't have the shielding to withstand much attention, even from fighters, and unlike TMs (which have a similar amount of shielding), it can't dodge. If you do bring it into combat, I'd recommend keeping a close eye on its shield level, and be ready to jump it out if needed.

I tend to fit carriers with flak, HEPTs, and PACs - cheap and reasonably effective, but I know I'm more fond of PACs than most people here. (anti-capital guns in the front turrets, like IBL on a Panther, can be very worthwhile, though)

[X-Tie]

Nick, I went for a Split Elephant in both X3:R and X3:TC as my first bigger-than-M3+ ship in my first play-through, and I never regretted that choice - it's a great home base of operations when you are starting out! At least for me, as it suits my playing style of being able to switch between trading, fighting and building (sometimes I even take the time to think )

That being said, and having played through this scenario many times, I do not suggest you start out by using your Elephant as a carrier - can you afford to lose the millions you'll have invested in buying and equipping one Mamba? Encounters at this stage of the game can get very very expensive... Instead, I suggest you use the Elephant as a fly swatter, which it can do pretty effectively, and hop into one of your fighters yourself when the action requires your fighter pilot skills. As Vyrebird pointed out, a carrier really is a rich man's toy...

That being said, what I did was assign two wingmen to my fighter, so that they would cover my behind, and I could quickly shoot enemies targeting my wingmen to prevent any losses - worked quite well and was quite the death-dealing M3 squadron.

Also, when building up your fighter fleet, bear in mind that you don't need to load them up with maximum number of guns - NPCs aren't the best when it comes to aiming, so depending on the weapon energy and energy regeneration of the fighter you are using, choose the appropriate weaponry and quantity. And don't forget to use missiles - giving all your fighters a decent amount of wasp missiles is great to increase their survivability. Don't give them missiles that could blow them up if the missile gets taken down when it is fired, as they have a tendency to enjoy firing missiles at the wrong time...

Oh and by the way, with the Elephant you can kite capital-class ships with the superior speed

[Triaxx2]

Normally my advice is to fill your carriers with M4+ Pikes, but since you're a Split player, I'd go with Mamba Raiders. The trouble is that the L-config of the M4's for Split is that they mount MD's and that gets expensive. L-config's of M3'scome with HEPT, which make them quite potent.

[Nickvr628]

Speaking of M4+, how do people think about the argon elite? The stats seem promising and I will most likely take on only other fighters and the occasional corvette. Thus I don't need an M3+. Also as someone pointed out, I do not have the resources to be outfitting 10 mamba sentinal, ect. I could always paint them red to match my other split ships.

[vr01]

Personally prefer the OTAS Solano to the Elite but from memory there isn't too much between them.