Armada Formation
by Xen Xander

The most successful armadas I’ve built are ones that can attack incoming fighters and missiles and dish out even a moderate sum of damage. The “PD” bug still seems to be an issue, and I’m not sure if the “1 missile per rack – 5 racks” strategy keeps your PD weapons working. I tend to have a lot of LR ships as “Escort” (6), and missile ships as the “Recon” picket (4), with the Carriers as the main focus (8). (4), (4), (10) also works well. The AI loves to build the LR ships over the others (probably due to their cost vs. the other two). Having a few LR only armadas isn’t that bad when aside the Carrier armadas.

I’ve also attempted the strategy of making every ship a “recon” class ship, no matter the design so that I could always make an armada on the fly, if I had to. This does work as well, but when you assemble your armadas, ensure you’re putting the ships you want inside them[(6) (4) (8), (4) (4) (10), whatever]. If you do this strategy, try to squeeze in one ECCM on at least half of your ship designs, as the recon ‘picket’ layer seems to have the best chance of spotting enemies (not sure on this, I didn’t view the data sheets), and NPCs love to add ECM to most of their mid to late game ship designs, making it very onerous to hunt them down.