I’ve had a long running terran playthrough, since CoH came out. I’ve built asgard and Tokyo centred fleets. The asgards can one hit kill a K and even take out an I with a few shots. The asgard also had the same volume of ship slots for interceptors as the Tokyo. The asgard has L turrets.
The Tokyo can launch more ships at once and looks pretty cool, but really that’s it.
Am I missing something?
That makes sense. My asgards bleed fighters. I built a second carrier group to try it out a little more for defense. The auto repair is great. I’ll probably load it with 20 interceptors and 20 torpedo ships.
I’m still a bit confused on the logistics. I can’t assign a trader to the carrier. Does it need materials for repairs? Can I skip auxiliary ships in carrier groups?
Ok, so fleet logistics is a little more involved once you’re using fighter wings, and more so again once you’re using torpedo wings.
The carrier will repair docked fighters, but that’s pretty much it. Even that much is game-changing though when it comes to fleet resilience.
To do fleet logistics right, especially once you start using fighters with torpedos (which you absolutely should, as it’s the most powerful doctrine in the game), you need a multi-tier logistics approach.
Firstly, there’s your carrier, this would be the fleet command vehicle. You’d have your fighter groups attached to this via their intercept/bombard orders, let’s call them alpha and beta groups.
Then get yourself an auxiliary ship (the big XL ones that cost about 60 million credits to buy), attach this to your carrier as one of the later groups down the list, kappa or epsilon iirc, so that it doesn’t get in the way of your other flight groups, like destroyer groups or extra fighter wings and such that you may want to also attach to the carrier. (having it at the bottom of the list here isn’t necessary at all, but it’s a nice quality-of-life thing when it comes to organization). When attaching the auxiliary ship to the carrier, it should be attached under as “Supply for Commander”, rather than the usual attack/defend orders you use for your fighters/destroyers. This will tell it that its job is to see to resupplying/repairing the fleet under that carrier.
Now, attach to the auxiliary ship a number of M class trade ships, and group them as whatever group, let’s do epsilon again here as they’re non-combat, and add them under the order “Trade for commander”. This will make them go out and buy the necessary resources to fill up the storage of the auxiliary ship with whatever’s necessary. You can see the space that it has assigned to various resources in its info tab.
What this all does is that when your fighters need to repair, they can just go to the carrier and do it. When they need to resupply missiles, they’ll go to the auxiliary ship which will build them missiles out of the stored resources that’s in its cargo bay. When the auxiliary ship runs low on resources, the M-class traders attached to it will head out and find the resources to buy, then bring them back to the auxiliary ship and deposit them there, ready to make more missiles, etc.
The whole thing will work passively if you have the money to pay for everything. Once you start with torpedo wings, attacking things starts costing money so you need the financial foundation to back up a carrier group like that, presumably, that isn’t a problem if you’re on a long-standing playthrough. The auxiliary ship will also make its own open buy orders so that NPC traders will just come along and sell resources to it like with a station. It’s a good help to your own logistic traders.
On top of the above, the auxiliary ship can also happily repair your other capital ships should it have the required resources for it, they’ll head over and link up with the auxiliary ship as needed for repairs/rearming.
EDIT: A couple of additional points here would be that, along with repairing/resupplying everything in the fleet, the auxiliary ship will have good docking storage for ships, so you generally put spares in there for when your flight wings eventually take actual losses. The Honshu (Terran auxiliary) can store 40 S-class and 10 M-class ships inside. So, you can bring a mixture of spare fighters for your various flight wings so that you can replace losses instantly when in theatre. The 10 M-class slots can be used to store extra M-class transporters which can be kept permanently in there to expand the cargo space of the Honshu itself. You can transfer cargo from the M-class ships to the Honshu itself while they’re in storage by using the wares transfer menu, they don’t need to undock or anything. This is important as it greatly increases the amount of missile resupply that you can handle without having to get restocked from external sources using your fleet of M-class traders. Large wings of heavy torpedo bombers take enormous amounts of resources to resupply, so supplies tend to get stretched thin at some point.
Wars, after all, are won by logistics. This isn’t so true in X4 when using energy weapons, but once you move up to Heavy Torp wings it becomes an absolutely inviolable Law to live by.
That is very helpful. Thank you.