Warfare & Tactics

OK so back before Kronos when the Phoenix changes were being talked about I thought the changes were good for the ship and was pretty excited because I have a Phoenix pilot. However, some on the forums were concerned with a missile dread on account of the possibility of fire walling. I also spoke with some corp members about the Phoenix. Now I have one particular corp member who I have always felt was a generally caustic individual who is unnecessarily cynical, and in absolutely every case in which I have ever spoken with him has provided nothing but wrong information about the game. He mentioned to me that no one in their right mind would fly a Phoenix, which could have all of its damage neutralized by a single smart bombing Typhoon.

Well after this discussion I read as much as I could find about fire walling. I found that there was the INIT tactic of adding a smart bomb to every ship in your fleet, and there was the PL tactic of bringing some specially fit massively smart bombing battleships along with your fleet to create a firewall. I know both of these types of firewalls were basically used to counter massive Drake blobs, and with the death of the Drake blob fire walling has become a rarely used tactic. I saw a video of an INIT firewall fleet in action where it worked quite well. I have read that INIT only had occasional success with them though. I could not find a video of a PL firewall fleet. At that point I let the question rest a bit. However, the comment from my oft delusional corpie stuck in my mind.

Well now, as we prepare for Crius, I as a major industrialist have finally gotten off my duff and gotten onto the test server. Along with monitoring all the indy changes I decided to get in my Phoenix on one toon and get in an Apoc with 8 Large EMP smart bombs, a bit of tank, and cap stability. I then flew the characters to a POCO and let the dread unload. I flew the Apoc everywhere I possibly could. I left the Apoc at zero to the POCO. I left the Apoc at zero to the Phoenix. I played with staggering out the cycles on the smart bombs. I overheated the smart bombs. In absolutely no case did a single citadel torpedo ever fail to hit the POCO for full damage. I must have fired over 200 volleys.

Once again my corpie's comment about a single smart bombing BS or BC being able to completely neutralize a Phoenix was complete crap. To my knowledge missile hit points were not modified with this Phoenix pass and have remained constant for a long time. In all the bitching about missiles I read about I haven't read about any changes to them lately in the area of hit points or damage application time.

So my question is basically, is there a firewall tactic that can reduce or nullify Phoenix DPS? If so, what would it take?

Just a question.

Is the HP of a Citadel Torpedo > the damage dealt from a cycle of 8x Large Smartbombs?

Missiles dont collide with stuff anymore but you can still smartbomb them.

How are defender missiles still a thing then?

Firewalling is using smartbombing ships to kill incoming missiles. It has nothing to do with ships physical intercepting missiles, which I'm pretty sure was never a thing anyway.

That said, it's too impractical to be used effectively on the scale you're thinking. Dreads missiles are fast.

Ok so Phoenixes are effectively not able to be fire walled. This is good to know. So the Phoenix's problems are fewer than I thought.

Basically, the remaining problems are lack of damage against sub caps, although I am not so sure about that one since I do know the pre-Kronos Phoenix to have been popular with certain WH groups for going through sleeper sites, and lack of instant damage application for delivering a quick alpha, a point which I also have some questions about. But discussing those issues here would be leading us off of the topic of fire walling. I imagine I'll post something about them sometime later on.

Thanks a lot for the good info.