[Slick]

Fighters are definitely hard to use, but not impossible. Like any other weapon or strategy, they should not be used as your sole weapon or strategy. In the unmodded game, as stated numerous times, PDC and normal weapons will easily overcome fighters. Some things you can do to extend their usefulness (some redundance with Posts above):

- Hide them. Don't make their presence known to your enemy until you think it will make the most impact. If your enemies know you are using fighters, they have 2 advantages: 1) they can adjust their defenses ahead of time, and 2) they know you are spending research on fighter-related techs so you must be lacking elsewhere - and PDC is cheap to research and implement as a defense.

- When you do reveal them, numbers count. There are 3 parts to the numbers element:
---- 1) If your enemy wasn't expecting fighters, he probably has to react in some way to retrofit some of his ships and this can delay him a short time,
---- 2) Fighters are most dangerous when they can overwhelm the enemy and get in close to their targets. Size your fighter Groups according to your enemy designs. Large Groups can do massive damage when they are in close (especially the way their weapons stack and sensors apply to all in a stack) and fighters in the group are "shielded" by others in that group by the way that the stack takes damage (one at a time), but large Groups can quickly be decimated by concentrating of enemy firepower. Small stacks can overwhelm PDC and defensive fire and also cause all the remaining damage from a big gun to be lost but small Groups don't have the advantage of damage stacking, sensor applicability to the stack, and can quickly cause a traffic jam to prevent fighters in the back row from closing with the targets. So stack size should be tweaked based on enemy. A good starting number is 10, which I think is the default.
---- 3) since PDC chews up fighters and main weapons can be devestating to fighters, you can minimize this by designing fighters to travel the same speed as your fleet when attacking. This way the enemy has to choose to fire main guns at your fighters or ships. Either way, if fighters fight alongside ships, the enemy doesn't have the advantage of engaging fighters first then your ships next - effectively dividing your forces. To make this even more effective, put some missile ships into your fighter fleets. Choose the smallest, fastest-firing missiles you can, you arent' expecting to have any of these actually hit the enemy. Even the slowest missiles are faster than fighters and the objective is to overwhelm enemy PDC with missiles so that fighters have a better chance to close with the enemy. Enemy PDC will fire at the closest available target so you want your missiles to be faster than your fighters.

- If you do use fighters, take full advantage of their "unit" status. This means that you can build them at planets that don't have a spaceyard and they don't have any maintenance cost - just make sure you keep some free cargo space available. Set up your inner or distant systems to make them when the systems are fully developed and create an automated delivery service of fighters to the front. You will need lots of replacements. Small/Medium transports can be put on "repeat" orders to collect fighters in a system and dump them at a large/huge planet. Then Medium/Large transports can be put on "repeat" orders to move them to the front lines. Carriers can be constructed and then automatically be sent to a waypoint to pick up fighters on the way to the front lines too.

- Since Carriers have cargo space, they can *deviously* be given the ship type of "Troop Transport" instead of "Carrier". This has some cool effects. Your carriers will still fight and use thier fighters in combat as before. But if you have troops in the carrier cargo, they will capture planets too (set up your fleet strategy accordingly).

Hope this helps.
Slick.