Taking out 2 or more destroyers

Games Homeworld2 HW2 Strategy Guide
1

recently, in a 3v3 against chiken, kaskara, borderlord, and myself were bombarded with DDs, usually about 2 at a time. we all know that DDs can not destroy 2 marine frigates if the marining is in progress. and 2 DDs can cover each other with overlapping lines of fire so that they can destroy marine frigates.

“So pit, i built a swarm and now im doing adv frigs, but i dont have enough ions to take out both DDs, what should i do?”

well, believe it or not, DDs are amazingly easy to take out if you have a swarm, lets say that you are playing position 2 of CB, and 2 dds jump to you, with your swarm, destroy the DD that is Farthest away from you’s engines. this makes it so that if the other dd moves forward, the imobile DD cannot cover it from marines, this makes it so that the DDs have to either stay where they hyper, or get marined. and while the dds engines are recovering, you can build enough ions to destroy them

hope this helps

Pit Viper|SF

2

This is a pretty cool tactic. There were a number of DD’s (about 3 I think) advancing on our base, and Chikens had control of the center. They didn’t have much swarm though, so mine had just finished some RU/Mod raids in their territory. I’d just finished building a few torps but I didn’t have anywhere near the firepower needed to kill the DDs. I did have some marines up though, so I sent the torps to kill their collection at center while my swarm docked.

One of the three was on it’s own, so I targeted that while Pit worked on killing engines on the other two. By the time Chicken decided to scuttle the first one, the other two had been separated. Once I latched on those two we had pretty much halted their main offensive. Three DDs taken out in the span of a few minutes with nothing but four frigates and an AC swarm. Pretty sweet!

3

Just a quick update here that REALLY drives the usefulness of killing DD engines home.

Pit, Border and I just played a game against EmperorXENO, TOMcatXENO and a somewhat iffy guy named Broken_Arrow on CB where this was pivotal.

TOMcat managed to get out about six destroyers by passing them to Emp, and while we were harassing them HEAVILY with swarm (look for details on this in another thread soon), that many DDs would have really ripped in to the Ion fleet I had sent in to their base area to start killing production ships. I figured I could buy some time with my superior speed but I wasn’t liking the prospects.

Pit managed to use his swarm superiority to start killing their engines though. In a few minutes they were ALL dead in space. 12,000 RU worth of ships were effectively out of commission. We maneuvered our other ships to stay clear of them and continued to hit our primary targets (MSs & CCs).

At the end of the game there were still about five DDs floating like derelicts in their base. It was a beautiful thing! GG guys.

4

to add to Kaskara’s post, it is very important to choose carefully which DD’s engines you are going to take out.

In our situation, kaskaras ions had just taken out the position 2 MS, with the 6 dds coming from the position 1 slot . by taking out the DDs that were closest to the ions AND closest to the position 3 MS, i gave kaskara’s ions enough time to kill 2 ms, 1 cc, and a handfull of frigs before even having to consider working on DDs.

The game against XENO was a textbook example of how to use a swarm to win a game. heres what happened

kas was hiig, posi 3, border was hiig, posi 1, i was vay, posi 2.
emp was hiig posi 3, tom was hiig posi 1, and BA was vay posi 2.

I went swarm with an early GW. and after probing, we saw that both tom and emp were going to build an extra CC and triple pump ints to ions, by this time, kas had 14 bombers, i had a full swarm, lvl 2, with emp. we attacked, efectively destroying the vaygr carrier, 3 mobile refineries, about a jillion modules, and 2 carriers. (bomber kills) i lost 2 interceptors and 2 scouts the whole time. XENO was desperate after that point. We succesfully raided their collectors, carriers, and modules for over 10 minutes, not allowing them to get more than some DDs, about 6 tops, and only a handfull of ints that were quickly dispatched by our ints covering the bombers. We destroyed 9 carriers that game. and won by simply not allowing them produce

If we had recording, this would have been a must for all SF to study.

Pit Viper|SF