Strategies for using teleport raiders?

[laughingman]

I don't have much experience with teleporting ships. I used the Battlestations once, and figured out their utility pretty quickly. They work great as a mobile defensive force and are pretty good in mop-up operations.

I just started a game with teleport raiders and can't figure out what their utility is. They seem to have tremendous firepower on paper, but not in practice. It seems like within moments of any engagement, I've lost a third to a half of my ships. They are ridiculously cheap to replace, and I have a dedicated space dock just for them with the rally point set to wherever the front is, but it still seems like they don't add as much to my offense as they should.

When I have used them to fight bombers and guardians that aren't immune to their ammo, it seems like they are pretty effective.

They seem to get chewed up on defense against any significant numbers.

I can't really figure them out, except to excessively micromanage them. Am I missing something? What role do they play for you if you use them?

[Orelius]

Generally, teleport raiders are not very strong ships.  They're best used for sniping off key enemy ships and structures and soaking up hits for the rest of your fleet. 

When I've used them, I've pretty much had to micromanage them excessively.  However, micromanaging teleport raiders undoubtedly will have very strong results.  I often manage to almost completely neuter a world sans the warp gates (which are immune to minor electric ammo) with a few waves of teleport raiders, making liberal use of the tbs-friendly pause, to continually kite every single thing that has a limited range.  One of my favored  strategies is to use a stack of teleport raiders to draw ai ships far out of the planet's gravity well, and sweeping in with the rest of my attack fleet to assault the world with little resistance.

As they are so cheap (less than half the cost of a fighter of equivalent mark level), and travel so fast (they can move between planets in less than a second or two)they're extremely useful in clutch situations because they can be remade so quickly.

However, they are very, very fragile, and a fortress, flak guardian, lightning guardian, or a heavy beam guardian can pretty much decimate your fleet of teleport raiders if you don't focus on them.  If there are any of said above ships, go after them immediately, except for maybe the heavy beam  guardian, which, as a result of poor teleportation pathing in the game, can often wipe out your entire stack of teleport raiders.  I haven't used teleport raiders often because of my finding better stating ships, such as polarizers and normal raiders, so I'm not sure whether or not this has been fixed.

So, teleport raiders are great for an offensive early game, but become increasingly less useful with the more anti-blob ships and guardians, and are almost useless on homeworlds as the homeworld guard posts often hit so many of your ships at once, too many will probably die on the first burst to deal any significant damage.

So, unless you really like sniping off guardposts with kamikaze teleport raiders, it should be a path less traveled in favor of more general use ships.

[laughingman]

Orelius, thanks for the reply. I'm using them basically in the same way you do. After unlocking the MK II and III ships and keeping the whole raider fleet together, I'm finding them to be a much more effective quick-reaction force. Sending them to hostile planets on attack-move has proved to be a good way to soften up planets I'm planning on taking.

I noticed that when I turned on the auto-kiting that they seemed to survive a lot better. They have a decent 7000 range, enough to stay out of the way of many ships that would otherwise be deadly threats.

They also slaughter Raptors and bombers, for which I'm very grateful in my current game. I'm starting to understand them a little better and maybe even like them. I'm not sure I would choose them as my bonus ship, but I wouldn't be unhappy to have them unlocked by an ARS.

[Orelius]

Something else you might want to do rather than attack-moving would be to have the teleport raiders focus fire on guard posts or even forcefields.  Teleport raiders are at least half decent on destroying some lower-mark forcefields if you don't have bombers on hand or are unable to field bombers on that planet due to travel times and connected low survivability rates as a result of those travel times.

You're much better off sniping the guard posts than using them to soften up ships on a planet because teleport raiders are unlikely to do much damage against anything they don't have a bonus against. 

[laughingman]

You're right, they do a great job against Mk I & II forcefields. The full cap of Mk I, II, and III ships are better than bombers, in my opinion. They get there faster, can escape from unexpected trouble easier, and if micro'd properly suffer very little damage in the process.

I suppose I should have experimented with them for a couple of hours before asking the forum. The more I play with them, the more uses I see that they have. They're particularly effective against hulls they have a bonus against. I can see them causing a lot of pain paired with Armor Rotters, if I ever get so lucky.

They benefit more than any other ship I've played with from micromanaging. I don't particularly enjoy that aspect, but it's something I can deal with.

 I shudder to think what the AI would do with them, and am grateful I've never had to deal with that.

[Nalgas]

I shudder to think what the AI would do with them, and am grateful I've never had to deal with that.

The AI could do some really evil things with them, but thankfully it usually doesn't...at least as long as you don't let it.  If you give if the chance (e.g. don't do things like defend your wormholes with forcefields), it'll send them straight past wherever the main fight is going on into some distant system you haven't even looked at in hours and start picking stuff off while you're distracted and all your ships are busy elsewhere, but you can usually prevent that pretty easily with proper planning.

Compared to a lot of stuff I've had the misfortune of them throwing at me lately, teleport raiders are actually kind of a relief sometimes.  As long as you stay on top of them, they can be kind of...stupid when you block their opportunities to do anything evil, and then they go down relatively quickly.