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[Chris0War]

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[Darvin3]

I'd recommend using specialized carriers rather than including hangars on your combat frigates. Dedicated carriers can just retreat at the start of battle, which avoids the risk of losing them and means you don't even need to bother equipping weapons (one laser just to win vs freighters is a good idea). This frees up a lot of weight on your carrier, allowing them to be much faster and more quickly return to your industrial worlds to load up with more fighters and reinforce the front lines.

For dedicated combat ships I wouldn't even bother with ion guns. Their range is too short to be useful against enemy frigates, and their accuracy too low to be useful against enemy fighters. Go with heavy ion guns instead; no less than 8 of them. I wouldn't even bother building combat ships until I have heavy ion gun unlocked, since the ion gun is just so terrible that it's a waste of resources building ships that use it (doubly so for humans, since their corvette is trash to begin with). You also should include heavy lasers, as regular lasers have range issues that prevent them from hitting long-ranged fighters and there is nothing more infuriating that seeing 5 or 6 fighters that your frigate just cannot hit dance around you for 5 minutes as they slowly whittle your big ships to death. Try to include at least one of your longest-ranged laser to avoid this issue. I'd also cut back on the number of lasers you have here; lasers are good for cleaning up small groups of fighters but are useless against big swarms, so you don't need too may of them on a single ship design. Later in the game once you have missile traps and active armor you can create "meat shield" frigates to sponge fighter suicide waves, but at this tech level I wouldn't bother.