Starter Fleet Guide:Maple

TF Maple

Centered around an escort carrier with a strong complement of sensor, interceptor, and bomber spacecraft, TF Maple is designed to secure total void superiority for your team. Launch Sundial SEWACs to establish radar coverage of the map early on, then start queuing up Claymore bombers for launch. The carrier is accompanied by two space defense frigates carrying long-range PDTs and anti-craft missiles, capable of zoning out opposing fighters and assisting your Tanto interceptors in any nearby engagement. Once void superiorty is assured, the Claymores can be escorted in for devastating torpedo strikes against isolated enemy formations. TF Maple is all about managing your elevator cycles to keep strike tempo up and ensuring dogfights are taken on your terms within your sensor and space defense bubbles.

Craft

B-86T Claymore

Maple Claymore

TF Maple's primary offensive tool, the fleet's claymores are configured for delivering torpedoes and cluster bombs via an S3 bay, and are upgraded with a missile control computer and high-coherence countermeasure launcher.

Size 3 Missile Bays are available to Claymores and are competitive with Size 2 Bays: between the two, Size 3 Bays use torpedoes which offer much greater cost efficiency than Size 2 missiles while shortening the range the bomber can fire at considerably.

The Missile Control Computer support module is chosen because it enables use of the CMD seeker on missiles, offering the ability for your craft to guide its own munitions on target rather than rely on easily softkillable seeker combinations or the relatively expensive EO seeker type. The alternative to using MCC would be the missile decoy projector module, or no module at all, to either aid in penetrating hardkill or aid in cost saving respectively.

The High-Coherence CM Launcher module is selected to improve the bomber's survivability against ACT and WAKE missiles, by detonating blast frag warheads that pass through the countermeasures and increasing the signature size of the decoys. High-capacity CM would increase the Claymore's endurance during prolonged missile exposure, while standard CMs would save it points in exchange for a chance of missiles reacquiring after flying through chaff.

E-448 Sundial

Maple Sundial

An extra sensor asset to complement your spyglass frigates, this Sundial is upgraded with high-coherence countermeasures only.

High-coherence countermeasures confer the same advantages and disadvantages for the Sundial as they do the Claymore, trading the potentially higher mission endurance of high-capacity CM for the greater safety of high-coherence CM.

PF-440V Tanto

Your fighter complement in Maple, these tantos are upgraded with 15mm Coilguns, Centerline Fuel Tanks, and high-coherence countermeasures.

15mm Coilguns are one of the four available options for the Tanto's nose slot, incurring a cost of 7 points in exchange for giving inarguably the best nose gun available to craft, and arguably one of the best hardkill PD weapons in the entire game. The downside to coilguns is straightforwards: with only six shots of endurance, they can win effectively a single engagement before needing to return to base. This also means tantos with coilguns must be carefully managed to make sure they still have magazine capacity while deployed.

Centerline Fuel Tanks are a free option in opposition to Size 1 Missile Bays or a Size 2 Missile Bay. Centerline Fuel Tanks impose a compulsory weight penalty to your tantos in all sorties in exchange for a substantially higher loiter time. On-balance, CFT tantos have far fewer missiles available for fighting enemy craft, but can be deployed and project force longer.

High-coherence countermeasures have been covered above in this guide but are noteworthy for tantos as size 1 missiles are especially dangerous to them; high-coherence countermeasures only have a chance to work, but do help to keep tantos alive somewhat more consistently.

Missiles

SDM-103 Thorn

Maple SDM-1

Used for air to air combat, Thorns are your long range anti-craft missiles and are employed in the two standoff loadouts available to your Tantos.

As only one seeker is made available to SDM1 missiles, a steerable ACT missile is chosen for the Thorn. Steerable ACT in this case has no extra cost penalty over fixed ACT, and is inexpensive enough while conferring a high enough kill rate to be a functional mainstay for your craft to craft engagements.

The missile's tunings contribute to its effective kill rate, being sufficient to chase down enemy fighters and bombers while staying maneuverable enough to hit them despite any evasion they perform.

SGM-1 Ceremonial Arming Missile

Ceremonial Arming Missile

This missile is not intended for offensive usage, or indeed any usage at all during a typical match. Arming missiles exist so that a ship with an arming missile counts as being offensively armed, an important feature in the Control gamemode most multiplayer matches take place within. Thus, firing this missile is not advisable, besides in very niche circumstances.

SGM-H-296 Tornado

Maple S2H ACM

Tornadoes exist to give your space defence frigates an edge for quickly depleting large amounts of incoming enemy planes. A size 2 hybrid missile, Tornadoes have very long range and are highly lethal once they stage owing to their exceptionally fast speed and (relative to your size 1 missiles) large warhead. Using an ACT/WAKE guidance package, they have a reasonable chance to acquire and hit enemy craft, even with the presence of countermeasures: ACT is somewhat consistent on its own, and WAKE helps the missile to reacquire on near-misses, whether induced by countermeasures or by bad luck.

It's worth mentioning that Tornadoes are not fully optimized, having too much speed for their role in the sprint stage & incurring a price penalty. Should you take these missiles for use elsewhere, it is recommended to reduce the sprint speed either to 500m/s, or whatever lowers the cost per missile to eight points.

SGT-375 Bardiche

Maple Torp

Bardiches are your primary offensive tool. Their use is straightforward: fire them off of bombers, keep the bombers on target to guide them into a track.

Bardiches use the CMD/SAH guidance package, and this benefits them in two different ways. The first is the more obvious one- CMD is a seeker that is difficult to jam, requiring dedicated infrastructure on a reasonably close ship. The second is much less intuitive; a CMD seeker with a backup, in this case SAH, will go in a straight line when it is jammed out and that SAH seeker is neither jammed nor guiding. This means that a CMD/SAH torpedo may only be softkilled by a combination of radar and comms jamming, or by using comms jamming and illumination of chaff. SAH in particular is selected for its half-point cost; this puts it in competition for HOJ or WAKE, which have similar benefits and downsides in a similar configuration.

Bardiches handle penetration of enemy hardkill via two different ways: the first is deployment in higher mass, as covered with the B-86T Claymore. The second is by their engine configuration and terminal maneuvers, which together give them a very maneuverable weave terminal for defeating kinetic hardkill solutions. About 2.0G of turn rate yields enough maneuverability for weave to work consistently, while 262 m/s is on the fast end for a torpedo.

SSM-172 Hengetort

Maple SSM-1

Hengetort missiles are not good, owing to their very short range. They have very high maneuverability and acceptable speed, thus are reasonably likely to get kills when they launch and acquire, but their short range makes them a weak choice compared to your Thorn missiles.

More generally, the SSM1 missile body trades on much shorter range by having discounted seekers, as well as two seeker slots, making them a competitive sidegrade to the SDM1 missile body due to their aggressive cost efficiency and acceptable performance. Once fighters have closed past the SDM1 engagement envelope, SSM1s are responsible for many kills before both sides formally close to gun range.

Ships & Usage

CVE-24 [Strike Carrier]: Of Martial Build

Using an escort carrier is more a matter of how you use craft than the ship itself, though there are some important things to know about using an escort carrier in general. The two biggest things to keep in mind are positioning to avoid dying, and positioning to optimize cycle times.

Positioning to avoid dying is both easy and difficult: the most basic way to avoid dying is to park your carrier near the withdraw line, where your radar can see incoming rocket shuttles or missile threats. Positioning near cover in your team's spawn, or near your team's spawn, often ends up being more of a threat rather than less- you're under less threat from gunfire, but it is dramatically easier to guess where the carrier is located and go kill it with a rocket shuttle or cruise missiles.

More than anything else though, the greatest way to avoid dying to cruise missiles or rocket shuttles is to change your chaff to manual. Automatic chaff is visible to all players in a lobby, which causes your position to be instantly known to enemy players who may be looking for you. Past that, perform as many softkill steps as you are able, and make sure your defenders are pointed roughly on-target. Rocket shuttles somewhat consistently lose to defender past about 1.5km, so opening the range or trying to keep range will both help you to live longer.

When positioning to optimize cycle times, the process is more straightforwards: you want to be closer to the front, so your craft travel less to get back. This puts you at more risk of easy discovery, but also lets you sortie craft faster, thus allowing for more damage per minute.

A final note is that Maple's description explicitly mentions optimizing pad cycles- while this does occasionally come into play, it's a skill you can let atrophy, as pad cycling is reasonably well handled by the game. Simply queuing all your craft at the start of the game is acceptable and common practice.

E-448 Sundial Usage

Sundials are highly mobile and feature an incredible radar, functionally of equal quality to the Spyglass radars on mainline warships. The tradeoffs are threefold- first is that Sundials are exceptionally fragile, the same as all craft, and can be killed with long range PD or enemy craft, as well as enemy anti-craft missiles. The second tradeoff is that Sundials- as well as all craft- are visible at a very long range relative to warships, meaning that a Sundial is liable to be spotted well before a smaller Spyglass platform, in particular your two frigates. The third tradeoff is that Sundials are exceptionally expensive, at 75 points before any upgrading- less expensive than a full sensor warship, but very pricey for already points-starved carriers.

This all combines to make it so that your Sundial largely exists to help supplement your Spyglass frigates, rather than replace them; send it anywhere that they can't see, but you absolutely need eyes on. Typical usages are somewhere a flank may be coming from, a supplement for friendly frontline assets, scouting the enemy backline when it's unsafe for a full warship, or generally trying to gain visual for a strike your bombers are performing. Throwing away a SEWACs tends to hurt, but if necessary it is better to lose a Sundial to win the game than to save one to lose the game.

B-86T Claymore Usage

In a similar vein, important enough that it deserves highlighting front and center, the best lesson to be learned about Claymores is that sometimes they must be thrown away to win games. The same is true of OSP's bombers, and part of mastering carriers is finding a way to prevent the enemy from having an opportunity to make that sacrifice at all, but in general there are times your craft making a strike is worth nearly certainly losing them during the return trip.

Before getting that far though, it's important to cover two more things- how your craft can position to be a 'sacrifice' rather than a waste in general, and how many craft you really should be spending on one-way trips. how to use claymore (cmd guidance, using cover, escape routes, when to sacrifice, expected attrition rates) how to not get farmed by grapeshot and sarissa

PF-440V Tanto Usage

how to use tanto escorting strikes

FF-141 [SpaceDef-1]: Clear Skies

talk about how you use this ship here!! in no specific order: positioning for spyglass positioning to help teammates with scryer positioning for sarissa to help your own craft when to use ACMs

FF-261 [SpaceDef-2]: Starlit Skies

talk about how you use this ship here!! in no specific order: the same as the above, but you've got a second of these