Warfare & Tactics

100mn Tengu Fleets become more and more often.

We have in a group been discussing some counter fleet setups, and to be fair it seems hard to come up with something you'll say Yes this will work.

So if your not going to field another 100mn Tengu fleet vs a 100mn Tengu fleet what do you field.

Your thoughts?

The upcomming heavy missile nerf will counter them for you. Just wait and relax until the problem solves by itself.

Neuts, man.

Neuts.

if a web or two is nice a nuet or two is better.

dual web dual neut auto cane can blast a bad 100gu by himself

Void bombs and rail rokh's?
I have always thought using recons would be good for this.. rapier to slow them down, long range neuting curse, have seen fits for 60km heavy neuts, and arazu's. Fit them with light missile launchers and defender's to minimize incoming dps.. never tried this or seen it done, may not even work, but would be real curious to know its outcome if you do try it

I think too many people are calling the sky is falling with the HML changes, Tengu's will still hit you from 90ish km

EDIT---- You only need to slow down the anchor/fc to slow the whole fleet down

Well gee, maybe if you were less lazy in your OP and gave more details, people wouldnt waste their time giving ideas that you already tried.

For small gang, a suite of recons makes them very easy to deal with.

Curse + Huginn (T2 Kin Rigged) + Lachesis + 2x Logi (Basis Preffered) + DPS BCs (AC Nados are good, Rails are poor due to native resists)

On a large scale, NAVPOC (Foxcat) fleets with heavy logisics (Read Pantheon/Triage) and T3 tackle (Proteus/Loki).

Tengus are actually not that horrible to deal with, DPS is low and application is poor against smaller boats, they are highly neuting vulnerable and have poor agility, small scale Tengu groups are pretty easily counterable with some Recon support.

The lose here have nothing to do with topic, its was the first kill i found where i could show what i ment.

The carrier on kill was not baiting, but pilot fell asleep out of shield of a POS after a 48 hour operation. I dont blame him for that lost, just wish he would have moved under shield and logged.

Link was just to illustrate what kind of setup im talking about.

Considering you didn't really define the size of the gang until that link, and have yet to define the setup of the ship as you killed none of them, it's hard to give you any detailed comments.

If this is 100mn Tengu in ~25-man gangs we're talking about... the logical counters would assume anything that can match their speed (~2000 m/s) without losing accuracy (turrets, standard drones), that preferrably have a high offensive layering with stacking of many effects (such as webs and neuts) and enough tank to sustain 7500 dps / 30k volley (assuming 15 Tengus). Preferrably you'd want about twice those tanking figures (60k+ tanks).

Notable examples: Other Tech III gangs, Armor HAC rush with Tech III support (DP Deimos, DP Zealot) and faction-shield BS rush (Machs, Fleet Pests) have all been proven to work. There are also current trends involving the new improved AF with DP Logis (DP shield AF with Scimis, or DP armor AF with Oneiros), but my jury is still out on those tbh.

All of these setups should be capable of going 3km/s while sporting high-power and/or high-tracking weapons ontop of plenty of utility from drones and secondary tackle like neuts and webs, on defensive layers that HML have trouble with.

The largest issue for them would be to force the Tengus to commit after the layer of throw-away tackle have been blitzed (the Tengus are likely to bail once you snap the frigates and dictors). That's why the lynchpins become so important, it'll be your LR tackle on their back-row lynchpins (grabbing a Recon, Logi or Tengu to force them to commit to keeping it alive; keep in mind, if you are ontop of a lynchpin their Logi are not more than 60km from you, which is drone-range and new LR-tackle targets etc.). In turn, their EW support on your LR tackle and Logi, their frigs to stop your mainline rush and your utility to control or pressure their EW and Logi.

No matter how you turn that sceario, it is commonly a losing battle for them, since most scenarios force them on the defensive where they are more likely to cut and run than to gain enough control to turn offensive. If they start offensive it'll be much easier for you to apply your pressure as they must blitz your logi through EW and apply tackle, while you can position your logi depending on reach as well (putting even 100km setups within 60+60 of your offensive end).

That is, of course, assuming both FC are good.

BC (armored Oracles, armored Canes, nano Drakes etc.) or Shield HAC / faction Cruisers are probably a tad low on tank or mobility in general. The difference, of course, is that the first few gangs i mentioned are both going considerably faster on average and have tank support to be more natural to augment with expensive tackle.

The BC may be able to almost match the Tengus (going similar speeds, tanking just enough etc.), but do not have any exceeding advantages that would let them catch the Tengus (eg., deal with being warped in on or similar: they would crush distance too slow, not reach quite far enough etc.), so they wouldn't be practical even if it's possible on paper or in neutral and advantageous situations (such as Tengus jumping into you).

If it's slightly larger gangs (50+) you can consider more static gangs as well, with sig-projection (LR AHAC) or tank-projection setups (someone mentioned the Navypocs, and that's a typical example of something that become appealing first when you have larger fleets and don't need to nullify transversal to deal with 100mn).

You also have other drop-tactics with high secondary tackle concentration (with Vargurs / Bhaals / Vindis / Lokis etc). You can see that the Loki-Proteus combination is a recurring theme. It forces commitment, which is crucial - they either move to kill your Tech III tacklers or bleed ships, where your tacklers are as sturdy as them while their HML deal poorly with 100mn. The weak side of the Tengu in high-end engagement is the HML, people often forget that. Drops are more similar to the larger gangs though, only that you replace larger gang with larger ships - and they likely bring escalation.

VERY NICE Reply Noisrevbus, thats deffently had me rethinking some of our fleet doctrines.