[Atrocities]

I love players like you. When I play hot seat, one of my friends uses tons of fighters in his fleets. I always obliterate him because he has not learned that PDC's kick fighter and missle butt.

This tatic also works great against AI's. Most AI are too stupid to utilize fighters, and therefore are useless. Thats when I use fighters.

Mephisto's Mod uses the EA, and they use fighters. This surprised the hell out of me the first time I engaged them in combat. I lost my entire fleet to them. 16 ships up against 8. Even though I had a two to one margin on them, they still wiped me out. I promptly updated my designes with Point Defense Cannons. I also established 3 Sat types at the warp points. Point Defense, Missle, and Beam. I deploy 75 of each, and NO AI as of yet has been able to penatrate my defenses.

This buys me time to build up a new navy and such.

One thing I should point out is that I have also adjusted the KT amount each fighter type can carry. I increased each by 10. To me, this gives the fighters a tad more importance in the grand scheme of things.

I use fighters, mines, and sats to defend my worlds. They work fine, but are quickly picked off by the AI as soon as it realises that I am using fighters, it begins using PDC's.

This negates my fighters stratigy, but also sets the AI up for a big fall. Once I know the AI is producing large numbers of ships with PDC's, I start building heavy beam ships.

Sometimes, I may have two types of the same class of ship. IE, two Battle Ships with the same components except one will have PDC's for AI's that use fighters and missles, and the other will have Beams for the AI's that don't. I then deploy these Batttleships according to the territory I am defending.

I seldom if ever use my carriers as I have discovered that they often are the first thing lost in battle. Most AI's target them right off as easy pray. Even the fighters I do get launched are often more than not, wiped out seconds after the AI begins its turn. So in essance, fighters are good for a select portion of the game, but after that, its a no go.