I know what I'm doing wrong now, but looking for some tips how to do it easier/faster to get the 50 and hidden 100 & 200 kill achievements.



Only at 31/50 and that total rarely goes up and was wondering why, and turns out my LR kinetics designed fleets were slaughtering the enemy at phase 1 too fast. Go figure, kill too fast and you can't get these achievements.



So I'm still using battle fighters maxed on my fleets to increase my chances, but thinking about how to redesign my fleet so it won't kill too fast at long range - so far I've been spamming purely LR kinetics to win, but I guess in order to ensure my battles always go to phase 2 when fighter kills can happen, I will need to drop LR kinetics and ...?



Right now I'm thinking MR kinetics with a ton more defensive kinetic/shield/flak than usual so my fleet lives through phase 1 and 2 and possibly 3 because I let the enemy get close. Or would MR lasers be better since that's what they are designed for?



Will have to experiment next couple games how I can design a fleet that is really good at killing fighters, but not get killed myself by dropping my best weapons (LR kinetics).

My last 3 of 8 achievements including hidden ones are these kill fighter/bomber. Without a doubt most annoying achievements to get.



I've experimented and it's painful all around.



1. Maybe just random luck, but so far it seems the only way to encourage the AI to use fighter/bombers is to use fighters yourself - a lot of them - so the AI has to counter with own fighters.



-problem is can't use my best weapons or effective designs - e.g. if I use LR kinetics, I slaughter the enemy too fast before my fighters can engage - and observation so far is if my fighters don't engage, it doesn't seem to encourage the AI to build fighters. I think it's what reported on the battle scorecard that counts - e.g. most effective weapon, most effective defense - that the AI uses to determine what to counter with.



-so the only way to get most effective weapon = fighter, is build a fleet that is primarily medium range so my fighters can have a chance to engage, and not load up with many other weapons. These are what I call my bait fleets in early to early-mid game to hunt AI that start to build fighter/bomber fleets.



-massive problem with this is either the AI uses retreat spam or my fighter fleet gets slaughtered because frankly tonnage wise fighters are poor ton-to-MP weapon. Either my fleet is too strong and AI retreats before I can even engage at medium range, or my fleet is too weak because fighter designs kinda suck/ Or my fleet is just right because I've added other weapons to the mix, but then the battle card says best weapon = laser, and it seems the AI doesn't counter with fighters - so my bait fleets are so far kind of a total fail



When I do finally get a few AI factions to go fighter/bomber - it takes forever to get a valid fighter/bomber kill because again, you have to let the AI fleet live through phase 1 long range to give your own fighters time to engage and shoot down the enemy aircraft. So again, I strip my best combat fleets of their most effective weapons - long range kinetics or missiles, and go medium laser to try and give my fighters time to score some kills.



Again this either leaves me too strong, too ikea, and very rarely just right. Which is why over 2 days and probably half a dozen full games on medium galaxies, I've inched up from 24 fighter kills to 31 now.

If retreat spam is part of the problem, maybe just play Sheredyn (or Sheredyn-affinity custom race) to get this achievement. Since you're making some progress, maybe this would be enough?

Oh good idea. Yea I'll try Sheridan, that will help some - although I'd say its 70-30, 30% of the problem is retreat spam which sheridan will counter. But a lot more is just baiting the AI into making fighters/bombers without being too effective with my own weapons - then once that's done, have a fleet to shoot down their fighters that isn't too strong (or never get a chance to shoot down fighters since enemy ships all dead on phase 1).



It's total goldilocks problem, not too hot, not too cold. Gotta be just right. I will probably cry after getting my 50th fighter kill to get the first achievement and then realize I need 200 and 500 as next two hidden achievements

If anyone from Amplitude reads this, I don't see why it doesn't make sense to count as kills the fighter/bombers that are left stranded when you wipe out an entire fleet.



Not only would this make getting this achievement a lot more reasonable (but still take time as 500 fighter/bomber deaths even counting those left stranded after enemy fleet killed is still a lot), but would seem logical - otherwise, where do those surviving fighter/bombers go?

After much trial and error, here are my own tips to the next guy chasing this achievement. I've finally arrived at a somewhat slow (more so boring than slow as the number of turns is about the same as other large map games) but guaranteed method of farming and achieving the three tiers of fighter/bomber kills - 50, 200, and 500.



I've finally achieved the 50 and can only guess how far into next hidden tier as it annoyingly doesn't track for you like the non-hidden achievements. I would guess I am ~100.



Steps to setup, farm, and achieve fighter/bomber kills - starting with some observations:



A. Observation 1: Can't prove it 100% without someone from Amplitude commenting, but I am as sure as you can be without a dev confirming it that single fighter kills do NOT count. e.g. the graphic representing a single fighter is not what this achievement counts as "1" kill.



-from repeated observations, it appears you need to kill the entire fighter unit/squadron - when you kill a squadron of 5 fighters, you don't get 5 fighter kills, you get 1 - hence my observation



-I have seen this following the chase cam of my fights, I have seen my squadron kill the entire squadron, yet after the fight I will have a credit of +2 for my achievement count, so am as positive as can be without dev comment that this achievement is poorly worded - you need to kill 50, 200, and 500 fighter/bomber squadrons, not individuals.



B. Observation 2: Because of the above, you will not get a lot of kills per fleet engagement, even with the AI bringing 10 fighter squadrons and 6 bombers as an example, you'll get like maybe 2-3 kill count usually max. To achieve even this, you need to design a fleet that absolutely saturates fighter/bomber kill power, because if you kill 80% all 16 squadrons above - you get zilch for credit.



C. Observation 3: The only way to give your fleet time to kill the AI fighter/bombers is design a dreadnought tank fleet who's only goal is to a) launch your own fighters, and b) survive through melee range but NOT have a lot of normal combat mp firepower - too much and your ships will kill their ships too fast - but too little and your fleets will be forever stuck under a pile of stack warfare.



*the reason your ships being stuck under a stack is bad is because AI fighter/bombers regenerate very slowly, or not at all. The stupid AI doesn't seem to design with repair modules to max fighter/bomber regeneration.



**so if your fleet doesn't have at least a small amount of firepower to whittle away their "best mp" fleet in the stack, you will forever be stuck in even draw situation with a fleet that no longer has fighter/bombers for you to kill

example) you make an invulnerable dreadnought fleet with zero weapons but max fighters - groovy, on your first engagement you will barely get a scratch, and your fighters assuming better tech or more saturation, will slaughter the AI fighter/bombers. Next turn, you'll be stuck fighting that same fleet since your zero weapon fleet can't really kill anything and fighters suck beyond suck at killing capital ships unless your tech is so much more than the AI



Step by step guide to 1-seed galaxy to farm state, 2-start from seeded saved position, 3-farm fighter/bombers



1. FACTION - Pick any faction you like. Personally I like my custom Vaulter faction the best - big fleet + more tonnage + vaulter ability to teleport are the best advantages. Can really do it with any faction but teleport is nice because object of seeding this farm galaxy is not to win a conquering war, but holding the AI half of the galaxy at bay while you farm his ships. You are essentially letting the AI tech up and grind out their usual massive industry on Impossible or Endless mode, and not conquering more than half the map so you leave the AI an industry to churn out the ships you will need to farm to get even a few fighter/bomber kills.



2. DIFFICULTY - Open to debate but my observation is best done on Impossible or better yet Endless if you can handle it. If not, pick the highest difficulty you can handle. Reason for me at Serious or lower it doesn't really work is because the AI doesn't churn out stacks of fleets and no matter how you fine tune your invulnerable but not too much-not too little firepower fleet, on lower difficulty modes you always slaughter the AI too fast to get fighter/bomber kills reliably.

3 - GALAXY - Which AI uses fighter/bombers and why is totally whimsical, so best chance to get at least one AI is to play map with 6-8 AI. Remember you only need to generate this freak condition once - because once you get to seeded farm state, you can save the game and use that starting point to farm with. I would recommend a medium map + 6 AI on Disk-4 map.



*goal is to get it down to you against one or two AI - you with about half the map, the AI with other half, so it's ok if one or more AI kill each other off and start to grow in power - you want one AI that uses fighter/bombers as basically your "main" enemy.

** disk-4 map basically gives you nice choke point controls of about half the map you want to take and then hold, using the choke points as your farming grounds.



4- EARLY GAME: I have no proof of this, but my experience getting to this point has so far been that the AI likes to upgrade what they have - so be a pal and rush fighter/bomber tech, and then being such a great pal, give them for free this fighter/bomber tech. Because once you give them the tech - it is frustratingly NOT a guarantee that they will use it, but IF they do and they design a Defender 3 for example with 1 fighter squadron, by the late mid-game when you are finally ready to start farming - you'll have very nice Defender 16 class ships almost for sure with fighter squadron still aboard.



*they key seems to be to trigger the AI to start using fighter/bombers. Again zero proof and even a dozen games just isn't big enough stat slice to infer anything concrete, but in that dozen or so tries on different maps and conditions, it seems that best weapon = X , and best defense = Y, is what the AI responds to (assuming they have the tech to counter with)

** so that said, you need to use fighter/bombers in early game soon as you can, and while not needed - it helps to be a pal and give the AI fighter/bomber tech



4.1 Early game planets - you need to survive to conquer and hold half the galaxy, so in early game it is the same as in any other you want to win and win fast - get your core 10-12+ worlds up and running fast, designed as multi-use systems - no science specialist, no growth specialists, etc - they should all be good at everything and built to be your core shipyards



4.2. Early game fleets - long range kinetics, light defenses, insta-kill the AI to grow your empire

*I go through 3 generations of early game fleets, timed as such:

Gen 1 - first design from turn 1, corvette hull + max LR kinetics + 1 deflector - use these ships to hold off AI settlers and establish your core 12 systems, preferably at key choke points

Gen 2 - upgrade above with repair module 2 (10% heal) + LR kinetics tech 2 - this again is just so you survive long enough on Impossible or Endless to actually establish and conquer your neck of the galaxy



Gen 3 - the first bait ships, maybe useless or I'm paranoid but seems worked for me - cruiser hull that has 2 module spaces + 1 fighter squadron + LR kinetics tech 2

*this is still your killing fleet, not farming fleet. But it gets fighters out there and makes the AI think it needs to counter your fighters. I don't know if this step is needed but I did it anyways as the 1 squadron wasn't too much a tonnage burden to add



5 - MID-GAME: Get to mid game by conquering your entire portion of the Disk 4 map, so at least 1/4 of the map, preferably 1/3 - use the efficient killing machines fleets above or whatever is your personal style to kill, so far this is a normal conquer game to get to this point

*you should have at least your core worlds solidly up and running, all pre-terraform but able to churn out industry, with some outlying border outposts, all tier 2 weapons/shields, and tier 2 fighter/bombers



**Slog through mid game building up tech and planets, but don't conquer more than half the map - let the one or two other AI runaway with the other half. Proceed to tech up to dreadnoughts with tier 2 weapons/defense but preferably tier 3

6 - LATE MID-GAME / EARLY END GAME - The Farming Stage



This is basically where you save your game as reference point to start all future farming sessions. I can barely stand to do more than an hour or two max, myself. So I will start from this stage, play an hour or two to farm fighter/bombers, grow bored out of my mind, and quit. So pick a good place to save. You need to have for this point to be a good save:



Absolutely critical:

6.1 - 3rd gen fighters - shielded fighters or better; you can start with shielded, but eventually want to tech up to stealth 4th gen

*starting tech and 2nd gen heavy fighters absolutely suck at getting kills, worse than point defense. Note the wording - kills - they can shoot down some fighters, but you won't get kill credits because of prior observation you need to kill 100% of entire enemy squadron to get (1) kill credit. So lower tech fighters just don't have the saturation power to get kill credits



6.2 - (5) Dreadnought per fleet = 20 CP fleet, this lets you field (10) fighter squadrons (all 3rd or 4th gen tech)

*I find that no matter how good your tech, you need a sufficient volume or saturation ability and 3-4 squadrons just doesn't seem to cut it, unless you want to go looking for smaller AI fleets to chase. The easiest way is bring enough to the table you get some kills and let the AI horde of doom come at you in a giant stack.



6.3. NO hero in fleet. I've tried over and over, and no matter how weak your hero, they just add too much to the combat mix that you end up slaughtering the AI ships too fast to really get fighter/bomber kill credit.

**CRITICAL: if the AI ships die, you stop getting fighter/bomber kill credit - this is admittedly my observation and not a proven 100% fact but it sure seems that way. The second all AI ships die, not only does fighter vs. fighter combat stop, even the last second kills you get on chase cam don't count. So no heroes and even weak ones make your fleet just too darn efficient at killing.



6.4 Invulnerable defenses + some killing power : I suppose this is debatable, you could design a no-weapon fleet and just load fighters, but then you'd have to search out fleets with actual fighters aboard. My observation is the AI is very poor at designing regeneration into their fleets, so you need in my opinion be able to actually kill in 1 round or at least 2 rounds the fleet you are up against. Otherwise if you get caught under a stack, all that happens is you are stuck forever essentially fighting the highest AI MP fleet (with drained fighter/bombers). So you need enough combat power to kill that fighter-stripped AI fleet off and get to the next one in the stack



*best mix for me was Dreadnought + (10) each of 3rd gen deflectors / shields / flak, (2) armor units of 5th gen, (10) MELEE range kinetics, 4th gen repair module (with 5 ship fleet you could in theory juts use 2nd gen which also gives 10% each ship but I like 4th gen if I need to add a ship or two to the fleet), and (2) squadrons of minimum 3rd gen - preferably 4th gen fighters

**to fit all this, you'll need max tonnage tech (all 3-4 of them), plus the two tonnage module tech + the 30% more tonnage perk from custom faction

***if you can't fit all that because took a different faction, then cut down a bit evenly on the melee kinetics + 1 apiece from the defenses



The above design basically gives ~1000-1500mp dreadnought - meaning a 5-ship fleet will be 5k to 7.5kmp. Personally I've found ~6kmp to be about the best mix.

7 - START TO FARM



In my current farm galaxy I seeded 5 Hissho on a medium galaxy, got down to about turn 140 or so with me owning half the map, surviving Hissho runaway the other third, and the remaining inconsequential space by the just barely surviving other Hissho - which always eventually gets exterminated as well as I progress through my 50 turns of farming or so I can stand before I quit and then later reload the same stage game to re-farm again



You can use any AI race but key point is use all the above tips to get to here, where AI is really churning out their doom stacks industry, (1) or (2) max AI are left that can churn out those fleets, and you have a solid wall of choke points to control the farming points.



If you get here and the AI just won't use fighter/bombers, then just toss the game - over my dozen iterations or so of trial and error, I've found sometimes that that particular incarnation of the game and/or AI, they are just dead set against using fighter/bombers, and no further end game play will really change that. So whether it's seeding the bait by using fighters yourself early game, giving them the tech, or whatever - you just need to seed a galaxy to this point ONE time, then you can save it and never have to generate your fighter/bomber farming galaxy again.



7.1 I build up at minimum (6)-(8) 20CP dreadnought fleets of the invulnerable + modest amount of melee kinetic firepower + max fighter squadrons.

*On a medium map I fight you have at least 3-4 key points of contact you need to control so you'll need 1 fleet each plus a couple spares.



**Your just in case fleet for stragglers somehow getting into your core systems or a pesky scout that snuck in is a few of your old actual kill fleets from early game that you've upgraded with the usual LR kinetics or whatever long range weapon you like - all they are for is just in case the juggernaught AI you are deliberately leaving alive to churn out fleets sneaks an invasion in somewhere that your farming dreadnoughts can't get to, stuck under some stack.



7.2 Auto battle, nano-repair card if you want, but if you built the defenses as suggested, don't even need that - just click auto for faster farming



*Watch a few battles manually to make sure it plays out right but what should happen is that your ~6k dreadnought fleet should not have enough firepower to hardly scratch the AI 10-20k+ fleet on phase 1 - especially firing wildly and inaccurately the MELEE kinetics you have on board. The whole goal is to do zero or minimal damage on phase 1

(this is how I've gotten around needing to use Sheridan affinity - if you a) have what the AI thinks is lower MP, and b) do little to no damage phase 1 - they won't retreat and get suckered in for the slaughter



phase 2- your fighters get their first crack right at the end of phase 1 (if AI ships still alive due to observation re: no kill credit if ships dead) but you get most of the few to handful kill credits per fleet battle in this stage. This is why you want such modest dreadnought MP - if you see your manual battle right at medium range phase start really killing off AI ships, you designed or brought too much. The key is to have most the AI ships still alive almost through end or all of phase 2 as well because again, you get zero kill credit the instant that ship dies it seems. You need to kill the squadron before the ship it launched from dies apparently (a guess but seems to be what fits observation)



phase 3 - your fighters + melee kinetics ought to kill or mostly kill that fleet in this phase, and as noted, you really do ideally want to finish off that fleet as there won't be any regenerating fighters to harvest anyways



7.3 Rinse and repeat using the 4-6 key choke points or where ever your battles are - I call each of these areas a fishing hole. Do not engage yourself unless you already see there are good sized fleets to fight. The AI, being dumb, sends in un-coordinated streams of partial fleets at a time, and sometimes takes a few turn before a "fishing hole" is good to go.



To control mindless click spam, I just set all my worlds at this point to AI control for balanced. And whenever I need replacement ships, I just pick the top 5-6 industry systems and queue up and order of 3-4 dreadnoughts each, and set a one-time hassle of putting up rally points from all those worlds to either 1 gigantic fleet depot where all ships created go, or couple worlds each to each of the fishing hole sectors.



Using vaulters, I personally just set all the rally points to 1 main system and then disburse those ships as needed. This 1-extra turn to gather ships in one place far, far exceeds the bother of manually having to into each system hangar and create those mini fleets and then move those fleets manually.



7.4 No other explanation needed at this point other than how much boredom you can stand - you stale mate the AI, you don't touch their core industry worlds so they can keep sending you fish to farm, and for me - at best I'll go an hour or two before I rage quit in boredom.



I can only tell for sure based on my first non-hidden achievement how fast this goes because the hidden ones don't tell you how much progress into it you've made. But at 31 fighter kills of my first 50 kill achievement, it took nearly hour of battles before I got to 50 and awarded the achievement. YMMV depending how much time you spend managing your worlds, etc.



But far as I can tell, best measure is that I never got more than 2, max 3 fighter/bomber kills per fleet battle- and this is up against an AI that is bringing like (12) or more squadrons of mixed fighter/bombers per fleet battle. So (12) squadrons, I get credit for like 2 kills, 3 max.



Do the math and you'd need to kill something like 1000 AI fleets that are optimally loaded with (12)+ fighter/bomber squadrons per fleet battle.



I just did ~100 over couple hours and then quit. I would guess I'm at ~100-150 kills and somewhat close to 2nd hidden achievement tier of 200, but nowhere near to 500 needed. I would guess I will burn out on the game doing this before I hit 500. So this may be one of those for sake of wanting to keep playing the game, will just go back to regular play instead of chasing this achievement to 500 (and just stop at 200)



So if someone from Amplitude actually got to the bottom of this giant wall of text / FAQ - please note, you are letting an almost illogically conceived achievement damage your brand. If you are in marketing or have taken brand marketing 101, you'll know exactly what that means. Positive NPS to negative NPS. Just my .02 cents.



Like Civ 5, I can easily see myself putting in 2k+ hours over the years into this game, similar to my years/time with Civ 5. However, unlike Civ 5 achievements, some of the ones you have burn your players out on your own game vs. the ones in Civ 5 because if forces the player into a non-satisfactory play mode to achieve the achievement, versus Civ 5 which in my opinion only of course - lead to further engagement, joy, and positive reward challenge even if some of the achievements are really, really hard.



The key is hard = difficult challenge, strategy, execution, etc. Not difficult due to staggeringly illogical or unexplained mechanics.



If you really wanted this kill fighter / bomber achievement to be long to get but still fun, you'd give credit from every single fighter / bomber kill, and count as killed any left after all capital ships dead, but make the number 1k, 10k, whatever really high number. Knowing you make progress as you kill logically and just play the game, is far better than a mechanic that has to play the game in what I have to believe the designers would suggest is not positive - designing deliberately inferior ships in encounters deliberately designed not to kill too fast.



/end wall of text comment

One last reference point - after getting my seeded farm galaxy above - I played 242 turns to get from Slapping the Mosquitoes (50 kills) to Stomp the Ants (200 kills)



About 3 solid hours of some empire management, but mostly just clicking auto battle after auto battle with occasional need to build new ships. Once the AI gets up to sending Dreadnoughts at you (loaded with 2 bombers) it sometimes takes out one of your ships since you can't go too strong on offense - at this point I was using ~19k non-hero but veteran ships against ~30-40k AI fleets



@50 per hour with this particular farm galaxy, I'd expect last tier 500 kill to take another 6 hours of solid play. Motivation to do it is another thing.

jacozilla wrote:
My last 3 of 8 achievements including hidden ones are these kill fighter/bomber. Without a doubt most annoying achievements to get.



I've experimented and it's painful all around.



1. Maybe just random luck, but so far it seems the only way to encourage the AI to use fighter/bombers is to use fighters yourself - a lot of them - so the AI has to counter with own fighters.



-problem is can't use my best weapons or effective designs - e.g. if I use LR kinetics, I slaughter the enemy too fast before my fighters can engage - and observation so far is if my fighters don't engage, it doesn't seem to encourage the AI to build fighters. I think it's what reported on the battle scorecard that counts - e.g. most effective weapon, most effective defense - that the AI uses to determine what to counter with.



-so the only way to get most effective weapon = fighter, is build a fleet that is primarily medium range so my fighters can have a chance to engage, and not load up with many other weapons. These are what I call my bait fleets in early to early-mid game to hunt AI that start to build fighter/bomber fleets.



-massive problem with this is either the AI uses retreat spam or my fighter fleet gets slaughtered because frankly tonnage wise fighters are poor ton-to-MP weapon. Either my fleet is too strong and AI retreats before I can even engage at medium range, or my fleet is too weak because fighter designs kinda suck/ Or my fleet is just right because I've added other weapons to the mix, but then the battle card says best weapon = laser, and it seems the AI doesn't counter with fighters - so my bait fleets are so far kind of a total fail



When I do finally get a few AI factions to go fighter/bomber - it takes forever to get a valid fighter/bomber kill because again, you have to let the AI fleet live through phase 1 long range to give your own fighters time to engage and shoot down the enemy aircraft. So again, I strip my best combat fleets of their most effective weapons - long range kinetics or missiles, and go medium laser to try and give my fighters time to score some kills.



Again this either leaves me too strong, too ikea, and very rarely just right. Which is why over 2 days and probably half a dozen full games on medium galaxies, I've inched up from 24 fighter kills to 31 now.

Tried defensive fleets that use most of their tonnage to counter enemy weapons and dish out their damage via bombers? A few bombers wake really havoc with enemy fleets once they reach the enemy fleet. And having strong carriers that can take whatever comes at them wins surprisingly hard. The only issue is retreat spam, but as someone else said: Sheredyn might solve that problem.

The way I conformed aircraft kills was checking the pre- and after-battle report making sure enemy ships did carry any aircraft (shown under fighter/bomber tab) and how many of those were left after the fight. As I used a manual list at hand as well I can confirm that this way works when it comes to accuracy of destroyed aircraft.



I farmed by simply playing a game to a point where my opponent started to use aircraft (later tier have much more durability so kill ratio goes down), counter design my own ships and



- resolve 1 fight

- note down how many aircraft I destroyed

- load the last turn (auto-save)

- resolve the SAME fight

- not down how many aircraft I destroyed

- load.....





rinse and repeat as many times as needed....I had 140 aircraft missing at the time I thought of this strategy (yes...its cheesy). Took me something like 3 hours to farm the rest.



The same can be applied to trooper kills. Just wait and allow the enemy AI to instant invade one of your systems. Reload the last turn and do it again. Always note down the troop count you killed off each try (as stated in the battle report).