Thrust 2, weak hull, unarmed, 8 or so fighter groups. For the cost, you can deploy these in a fleet engagement and generally beat the tar out of your opposition that has more conventional forces with equal point costs.
You don't seem to see the fighter imbalances as badly with FB ships, unless you start piling on 12+ fighter groups against an enemy with non and with standard FB ships (little PDS/ADFC).
But when you have custom rules for creating SBCs, you can really go to town. I watched 25 fighter groups eat through an equivalent force of ESU ships (including 3 Komarovs) with ease. They killed a few PDS escorts first, then one by one ate their way through the Komarovs. The way that fighter attacks work, they only had to deal with one Komarov's guns at any given time (and only the PDS) and they hit with all surviving groups each round on one target - boom goes a Komarov every round.
The point being that there are many ways to abuse the existing fighter rules that point values do not acknowledge. It generally boils down to:
A has more fighter than B, by a significant margin (say as few as 20% more), B is in dire trouble.
A and B have about the same (+/- 15% each way say), then the game can be quite fair.
B has more fighters than A, A is in dire trouble.
Fighters just don't scale gracefully vs. existing PDS and ADFC nets. And FB designs further exacerbate the issue if run vs. custom designs of the same Point Value, but of free form construction, such as the SBC fleet.
Trust me, this problem has seen more attempted solutions and more test-list discussion than any other single issue, I believe.
You don't seem to see the fighter imbalances as badly with FB ships, unless you start piling on 12+ fighter groups against an enemy with non and with standard FB ships (little PDS/ADFC).
But when you have custom rules for creating SBCs, you can really go to town. I watched 25 fighter groups eat through an equivalent force of ESU ships (including 3 Komarovs) with ease. They killed a few PDS escorts first, then one by one ate their way through the Komarovs. The way that fighter attacks work, they only had to deal with one Komarov's guns at any given time (and only the PDS) and they hit with all surviving groups each round on one target - boom goes a Komarov every round.
The point being that there are many ways to abuse the existing fighter rules that point values do not acknowledge. It generally boils down to:
A has more fighter than B, by a significant margin (say as few as 20% more), B is in dire trouble.
A and B have about the same (+/- 15% each way say), then the game can be quite fair.
B has more fighters than A, A is in dire trouble.
Fighters just don't scale gracefully vs. existing PDS and ADFC nets. And FB designs further exacerbate the issue if run vs. custom designs of the same Point Value, but of free form construction, such as the SBC fleet.
Trust me, this problem has seen more attempted solutions and more test-list discussion than any other single issue, I believe.
