Plz Buff Siege Frigates (srsly)

from Sins Forums
Who actually uses siege frigates?  I know the AI does raids of 10 of them, and it is scary.  But 3 hangar defenses with fighters can gut any serious Siege frigate raid.  They take 12 supply.  3 of them take nearly the supply of a Dreadnought.  A Dreadnought provides vastly more ship to ship firepower and comparable bombing power to 3 siege frigates, but the Dreadnought doesn't pop like a balloon when a fighter gets near it.  I don't understand all the siege frigate whining.  Counter them with fighters. 

My suggested buff - keep the costs, health, and damage the same.  Bring down the supply to 8.  That way I might consider building a few and bringing them along instead of teching up and buying a dreadnought.  As it stands, I don't build siege frigates because they die too easily and take way too much supply.  You cannot mix in 2 or 3 without losing a real combat edge.  Not to mention if you only bring 3, they will be focus fired by a competent opponent. 

How to kill siege frigates:
Hold Alt.
Left Click a fighter squad.
Hold shift.
Right click each siege frigate individually.
They will die before they kill your planet IF you bought 1 emergency fortification upgrade.
15,245 views 27 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
So what do you do, spend ten minutes dropping a planet with two capital ships while your entire fleet jacks off?

10 siege frigates following behind your attack fleet are very good at accelerating the process. Time is a primary tactical advantage you need to maintain during an assault. The longer you're tied down killing a place off, the more the defenses will be built up at your next target.

They aren't an effective raiding force because they're supposed to be sieging planets down, send them in after the threat is gone and they work just fine. Give your capital ships something more useful to do.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Quite, you know not what you say :P

(refering to original poster)
Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
So what do you do, spend ten minutes dropping a planet with two capital ships while your entire fleet jacks off?10 siege frigates following behind your attack fleet are very good at accelerating the process. Time is a primary tactical advantage you need to maintain during an assault. The longer you're tied down killing a place off, the more the defenses will be built up at your next target.They aren't an effective raiding force because they're supposed to be sieging planets down, send them in after the threat is gone and they work just fine. Give your capital ships something more useful to do.


Having 10 siege frigs around means your fighting force is 120 supply short. Thats 20 LRM the enemy has more then you. There will be not much to do for the siege frigs since your main force gets pounded to stardust with that disadvantage in numbers.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
With Vesari, 10 Purge Vessels and a Rapture Cruiser with 1 or 2 Domination Auras usually seals the deal on planets for me before anyone can act.

And since the Purge Vessels are being "focus fired", why don't you try some kind of backhand strategy where your main purpose isn't really to siege the planet, but to destroy other things or escape easier. This is a game about tactics. Come up with something crafty.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Advent. Purges are advent ships. So is the rapture.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
That's lovely but i think you missed the point of siege frigates which is to secure planets after the fighting is over, not to play chicken with fighters.

"hay guys halp my colony ships are getting destroyed, next time i guess ill just use the colonize cap instead because it doesnt die in one LRM hit"
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
So what do you do, spend ten minutes dropping a planet with two capital ships while your entire fleet jacks off?


No usually the gravity well is full of buildings which take just as long to destroy!

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
So what do you do, spend ten minutes dropping a planet with two capital ships while your entire fleet jacks off?No usually the gravity well is full of buildings which take just as long to destroy!


Actually he's right, more often then not I'll have my cap kill the planet while my fleet kills the rest of the buildings. My fleet will finish killing the buildings like 45 seconds before the planet goes pop, so seige frigates simply aren't needed.
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
(bursts out laughing)

lol :LOL:
to think there was a HUGE fight saying the siege frigates were to powerful.
and the devs diluted them a bit now there are complaints that they are to weak it seems that every time the deves change something at players behest there is a anothere group advocating that the changes are no good and the opposite needs to happen

it is true what they say there is just no winning in some cases lol

 :LOL: 
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
Having 10 siege frigs around means your fighting force is 120 supply short. Thats 20 LRM the enemy has more then you. There will be not much to do for the siege frigs since your main force gets pounded to stardust with that disadvantage in numbers.


You make it sound like you should have all your forces at one planet per time, neh, that is not tactical, I say. ;P

Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
(bursts out laughing) lol to think there was a HUGE fight saying the siege frigates were to powerful.and the devs diluted them a bit now there are complaints that they are to weak it seems that every time the deves change something at players behest there is a anothere group advocating that the changes are no good and the opposite needs to happenit is true what they say there is just no winning in some cases lol  


You're never gonna please anybody. I'd rather have cap ships (the colonizer for the Advent, that 20% cost reduction in the start is SO helpful) than seige frigates.
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
Siege fleets are as useful as they've ever been, even after the cost increase.

There's nothing like attacking one planet and sending your siege fleet to another one not on the border. If you send enough siege frigs, you should be able to take out 2 or 3 planets before the enemy can get a strong enough force to kill the siege fleet... and in the meanwhile, your main fleet is doing dmg elsewhere.

If you manage to outmaneuver your enemy with a siege fleet, you generally get a win win situation. If he focus on your main fleet, your siege fleet will do serious dmg, if he goes for your siege fleet, your main fleet has an advantage
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
Bla blah, siege frigates are there for harassing, pre-colonizing and "sieging", not for fighting. :p
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
wow, am i the only one that uses siege then? with all the defenses removed, 8 purges start to work on the planet i left behind. takes just as long as 2 cap ships doing nothing but. in fact, i think its faster. i dunno, i'll have to test it out now that i'm thinking about it. but you move your fleet on instead of trying to destroy one planet. its what siege is for. if we are gonna talk about sucky ships, how about the advents hysteria? or whatever that is. that power sucks. or was it a percentage? damn, can't remember now. oh well, cheers.
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
I would not mind seeing siege frigates receive double their current damage against planets.
Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top
First everybody complains that they are too powerful..
Then they got a tiiny hitpoint nerf.
Now you complain that they are too weak?
LOL, is what the devs must say while reading this :)

20 of them can destroy any homeworld no matter how upgraded it is, within minutes.
As long as you have normal fighting ships to take the heat, OBVIOUSLY.
You wouldnt send just 20 catapults to lay siege to a medieval city, they would be burned down in under an hour.
You bring armies as well.
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top
I think they're just about right. I'd hate to see the pirates pillagers get any better at bombing.
Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top
Who actually uses siege frigates?


Humans use them, not just the AI.

I know the AI does raids of 10 of them, and it is scary. But 3 hangar defenses with fighters can gut any serious Siege frigate raid.


3 hanger defenses will not dent a siege frigate raid - you will lose your home planet, even after buying bomb shelters. I have the video to prove it (I even played Advent, with teched up hangers for more fighters), and these are the nerfed siege frigates, not the original ones before the patch.

The last thing siege frigates need are a rebuff. If anything, their survivability needs to be nerfed down even more.

Reply #19 from Sins Forums Top
I am just not impressed with them. I usually have two fleets, Alpha and Beta. Alpha has the lead cap ships and tries to take planets. Beta has my defensive group and tries to hold the lines, maybe a capship or two. Alpha needs combat vessels. Siege ships eat my supply like mad. Thus, if I field more than 3 siege frigates, I start hurting in offensive potential. And 3 siege frigates gets wiped out before they do any real damage. I can't find a use for them that seems ... good. I know, 20 of them against your home world, oh noes! But that is what Beta fleet is for. I wouldn't mind Siege vessels being MORE expensive, if they took LESS supply. They just eat up too much of my Alpha fleet offensive power at 12 supply to make mixing them in worth it.
Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top
The problem with siege frigates is that a bunch of siege frigates can completely level the planet before your defenses can do anything about them: Even if you have a massive armada of ships, 60 siege frigates will likely wipe out your planet before you can kill them. This led to massive siege-frigate-spam. Personally, I think the problem is that siege frigates are too hard to kill, not that they took up too little supply: They should be made more crunchy, less supply-intensive. The 12 supply costs kinda makes them a questionable purchase, as I'm not certain 3 siege frigates do as much damage as a capship for the same supply cost.
Reply #21 from Sins Forums Top
JasonWolfe please go to a hole about the same size as you and proceed to bury your self in it. Seige Frgiates should be nerfed *again* IMHO. It is an extreme pain to lose a planet early on in the game or a planet behind your frontlines to 3 purge vessels simply because your fleet is 2-3 jumps away, Especially when your playing a huge map and you need split your forces into 3-4 groups and even then its impossible. The damage done by fighters to me seems very reasonable.
Reply #22 from Sins Forums Top
Staticguy, it sounds to me like everything in the scenario you described is as a result of you expanding too fast, having too little mobility on your defensive screen, having too few recon assets, neglecting planetary defence, and concentrating your forces too much.

3 siege frigates is only going to be a danger to a planet(oid) with 1500hp - no planet upgrades or bomb shelters or hangars or similar. A single hangar with two groups of fighters should be able to deal with that, if that is all there is, extremely easily. Fighters love running into unescorted siege frigates. Don't depend on static guns - static guns are best at defending orbital structures in a big tight ball shape and a repair yard buffing them. Use hangars to cover the whole gravity well.

If you have lumped your entire fleet into one group and have nothing operating as a fast picket line for defense in back, why on earth wouldn't another player take advantage of that? You left this big tempting target out in the open and defended it with a wish that someone wouldn't come and do something horrible to it. Can you see why that would not work well as a defence? If your fleet is on the far side of 3 jumps away from a fresh planet, you have taken them too far away to be useful as a defensive force. When you say 'fleet', you mean you lumped every ship you had into one group and sent them all off to the front, don't you? That is a super bad idea.

What is the state of your reconnaissance that someone is able to sneak those ships up on you? Not good, I'll bet. Once you have the first fleet cap upgrade you should try and make about 5-10% of your total fleet in scouts. Good intelligence is critical. If you are in a fight somewhere else they are nice and fast and can assemble and hit someone in their back territory, harass strung out rally pointed reinforcements as they are mobilised, etc. Scouts rule.

On SFs generally - I think a small nudge downwards in upkeep would make siege frigates a bit more useful online. I haven't found much reason to ever build more than a couple. In a few games I have not even bothered researching them. They just do not look like a good deal as compared to the siege-specific cap ships (evacuator, marza, the advent one with terrorise, etc). The problem with them offline is more to do with the AI being completely stupid and making whole fleets out of them and a cap ship, which is half the reason it plays such a terrible game of Sins. It does not understand fleet composition or the underlying economic game well at all. Siege frigates have very low bang for buck right now.
Reply #23 from Sins Forums Top
60 siege frigates will likely wipe out your planet before you can kill them. This led to massive siege-frigate-spam.


If someone has 60 siege frigates, I know they have 60 siege frigates and probably bugger all else! That is like writing 'idiot here' on their forehead. Take a small force to deal with the frigates, eat the damage to whatever planet they think they might kill and rebuild it, and mobilise as much as possible and point it directly at their homeworld. There's nobody at home.
Reply #24 from Sins Forums Top
so fighters do more damage to SF's than bombers? I can never remember all the armour types, i wish it would tell you (I.E WC3 or something)
Reply #25 from Sins Forums Top
Siege frigates cost too much supply and resources. Mostly a TEC player, I go with the Marza Dreadnought and upgrade the planet bombardment ability as a second priority. Does a heck of a lot of damage and saves me from having to spend so much supply cap, resources and micromanagement time on siege frigates. Then I just fill out my fleet with a few siege frigates in reserve, wherever supply cap permits it.