Building an anti-Nanite Fleet from scratch. Help!

[The Grumpy Buddha]

So, between an ill-advised early L-gate opening and a bad autopilot-to-a-planet route that used said L-gate, I lost most of my fleet, so I have to build up to slay some Nanites from scratch.

What's the best build in 2.2? I read that maybe Corvette swarm with swarmer missiles and autocannon? If so, do I even need to bother putting armor/shields on them? Would maybe battleships with massive flak and neutron bombs work better, or no? Is there any advantage to having a mixed fleet?

Help!

(Damned autopilot ... hate it. Last game, the AI part of my federation lost 1 destroyer every minute or so bcs it autopiloted them through the L-gate ...)

 

[dessoul]

I can´t tell anything about the best fleet. I just build one, which is bigger then the enemies. and as one of their fleet is about 36.000 (strengh?), i try to have two of them against it. The last time i tried, i had 4 fleets this size and were quite succesful. I normally concentrate on battleships, as they are cheaper then maintaining a fleet made out of smaller ships. To the moment, you lose a battleship, you have mostly lost a lot more smaller ships, which have to be replaced all the time.

And the autopilot was stupid before, too: i just put my fleet close to the entrance of the gate and the moment an enemy fleet was trying to fly to another area, they were shot to scaps... Enemies are no problem this way.

 

[Sigma 582]

Nanite ships field energy weapons (which are effective against armor and hull) and strike craft (which ignore shields). They also have decent armor and shields themselves.

So, I would go with all-shields PD corvettes wielding disruptors. If your PD is strong enough to eliminate all their SC, your shields will give very good protection against nanites' weapons. Corvettes having high evasion will get even less damage obviously, as large part of the shots will be missed. As for offensive, it's probably easier to ignore their tough shields and armor with disruptors than trying to break through them with kinetics+plasma.

Make sure to attack nanite fleets while you outgun them. Having greater force naturally leads to smaller losses per Lanchester's law, but in case of SC (or rockets) vs PD the effect is multiplied by the fact that small number of SC is totally negated by PD while after certain point (at which PD is saturated to capacity) SC start to break through and deal damage; the more SC amount is above PD capacity, the more negligible PD becomes. Bottomline: when you outgun the enemy, their SC deal no damage; if you don't - it's gonna hurt.

EDIT: I forgot that SC are still broken as hell and can be neglected. Unless you are using any mod which fixes SC behaviour, you'll be better off ignoring SC completely, so go for normal corvettes instead of PD version.

 

[Sigma 582]

Alternatively, if you have lots of territory to spare, battleships and void cloud techs, but are somewhat short on alloys, you could go with all-shields penetrator battleships, trickster admiral and hit'n'run doctrine. Engage, kill a few ships, retreat when it's getting hot, rinse and repeat. The enemy will advance, but you will grind them down bit by bit until they are weak enough to be crushed.

 

[The Boz]

Have at least a third of your fleet (numerically) be high-tracking PD destroyers. Use lots of shields. They have no PD, so using strike craft or missiles or torpedoes will work.

 

[VanguardKing]

PD for whatever reason wasn't seeming to do pretty much anything in my current game. My first few fleets had a contingent of pd destros and they would only manage to shoot down about 1 fighter each, before being eviscerated. To effectively shut down their fighters you'd need aprox 5-6 destros per HANGER, and at that point you've sacrificed too much damage.

 

[Derp]

mass torp vettes

 

[The Grumpy Buddha]

mass torp vettes

That's what I am going with now and I'm destroying them. Admittedly I had almost twice their fleet strength and and +33% vs crisis jerks, but I think I lost only 1 corvette with my 45k vs 25k battle.