How do you defend against Fighters?

They do but not as well as fighters but 1.3x will apparently fix it at the moment your best defence and its not infallible is to use a variety of PD across your fleet and try to layer it Canon blasters beams short range, flack canon medium, bomlets long range.

you need PD tech for all of them but you also need DU weapon technology for PD cannon, energy pulse weapon tech for PD blasters and beam weapon tech for PD beam the other two flack cannon and bomblets you get by researching PD tech further.

I tend to play IRM mostly so have forgoten a lot about how the Stock Tech tree works

Disclaimer: my comments are based only on simultaneous turn, BM play, not tactical combat.

PD weapons can work well, but you need to program your strategies effectively. I'm away from the PC with the game on it, so bear with me here if I use incorrect wording...one way is to set it so that one of your higher targeting priorities is set for "targetted damage less than 150%" (or 125%); that means that if a fighter is targetted by your ship's weapons, once that much damage potential exists, your remaining weapons will move on to another target. You can combine this with damage amount definitions for fighters, for instance using weapons 100% destroyed, or engines 100% destroyed, to prevent your ship from wasting shots at enemies that can no longer hurt you.

Keep in mind, though, that there is risk in all of this: a high defense fighter might be hard for your weapons to hit, so spreading your pd among multiple targets could backfire (ie you split fire among 4 targets, damaging all but destroying none).

Test some strats in the combat simulator. It does make a difference.

Note: this functionality seems to be broken for "normal", non-PD weapons.

With fighters and PD.

Wz up Bro's

I use BM also.
Now as Gusset has stated with the Target damage % & along with a Layering ( Short, Med, Long & Range PD's ) and pikcachu20 is correct with "Fighters Vrs Fighters" Work well.

But There was Post about this subject some time back.

In this post We spoke of a "CAP" = Carrier Air Patrol or for outer space maybe "FDFP" = Fleet Defence Fighter Patrol button/option but from what I was told the programing/game will not let you set your Fighters this way.

But A Layered PD & Most advanced Fighters work for me.

Bomblet Missles and Flak Cannons and Messon Blasters are definitely the weapons to use... the more the better.

1) Defend ships against fighters with layered point defence as mentioned above - a few point defence on each of many ships generally works better than a smaller number of craft brimming with point defence, in my experience.

2) Of course use better fighters to defend if they're available.

3) Larger ships should make use of emissive armour, whose damage reduction is particularly effective against lots of small hits as are delivered by fighters.

4) Since fighters alone cannot warp, attempt to deny them access to the systems they'd like to attack. Freighters or carriers are required to transport them in, so concentrated warp point defences can help, probably with mines too.

5) Fighters can burn up a lot of supplies and ordnance with clouds of them all attacking at once. If they burst into your home systems, consider cutting off their resupply route behind them. Even if they run amok and all seems lost, they'll run out of steam and be unable to attack if they cannot resupply or rearm. At least at lower tech levels.

That's more or less based upon the Balance Mod - if stock fighters are still as deadly as they used to be, I probably wouldn't bother with trying option 3.

Alternative to Option 3 assuming BM and you have the racial requirement: Crystalline Armour. It's enough to stop even regular ships' Direct Fire weapons if you build defensively (offensive power can be made up for with sheer numbers).

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I have 1 or 2 PD blasters on every ship. After that, I find most direct fire weapons work nicely. The fighters always go ahead of their planet or fleet to attack seperately so I never have any problems with them. Now, if they would hang around inside the weapon range of their fleet or planet then I'd be toast with that strategy. Being able to have a fighter CAP would be a great idea on the defense.

I should note that I build PD not as a fighter defense but with missiles in mind.

My prefference is to use fighters to take down fighters. I find that PD systems work best against missiles for me.

"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
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Satelite with lots of PD&Emisive armor in tactical combat (where you can park your ships behind this)

This question is with regards to the BM, how many fighters do people consider dangerous? Because maybe I don't use enough of them, but I do not find them that effective.

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a couple of hundred i find to be invincible against the A.I don't know about players that actually make ship with pd though

Add ships to your fleet that have one capital weapon and the rest PD. Pair them up with your regular combat ships. Having enough PD weapons will toast any fighter swarm. Most PD weapons don't use much supply so they are cheap to use.

You could just do what we do now and make destroyers and carriers your main ships. When i make a carrier in this game, i typically forget the shields and armor and just load them with PD. Let the fighters be the main weapon and the defensive weapons, and just leave your carrier in the back.

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I think fighting fighter against fighters is the best defense. It makes a big difference how advanced the fighters are. If your going against large fighters they could have pretty heavy shield defenses.

SEV, more than a feeling.

Carrier escort ships never worked for me (picket or escort ships with lots of PD). If I'm transiting a warp point I'll usually send a fleet through first or set the carrier last in the queue if they go together. In combat, the fighters close to point blank and the carrier is set to "don't get hurt". Most fleets I go against have a hard time handling 80-100 fighters at a time.

The AI doesn't seem to be able to handle massed fighter assaults like this. If the position was reversed I think I'd do alright with my standard heavily armoured warships with as many weapons that can hit both ships and fighters as possible. PD doesn't do that much damage to fighters.

My favorite strategy was to use Beams+highly advanced targeting sensors. Fighters have much less advantage without their LEET evasiveness.