Since 5.5 launched my team and I have been hard at work trying to figure out not only the best ship builds but also compositions and strategies to use them in. My regular team consists of 4 players so all of our strategies are setup for a team of 4. I would like to mention that these strategies were designed primarily for 8v8 games. Now that most games are 12v12’s I’m sure we’ll come up with some new strats/comps in the future however I still felt these would be useful information for anyone out there trying to setup their own 4 player team.

I’m only going to present a few strategies we have, not all of them, if there is more interest in the future I can try to add more of them. They are pretty indepth so this is already going to be a pretty long post.

Team Deathmatch

Our standard go to comp is as follows

2 Pile Driver T1 Strikes

1 Repair Probes T3 Strike

1 T1 Gunship

This setup has a nice balance of high raw damage and shields piercing damage. With 3 Proton locking Strike Fighters on the map you’ll be capitalizing on each other, forcing missile breaks, and then landing those Protons. Once a Proton lands on a player it’s very easy for one of the Heavy Lasers or Slug Railguns to finish them off, or just land a second Proton for an easy no shield damage kill. The Repair Probes ship makes sure to help keep everyone topped off if they do take damage and let’s the other 3 take more aggressive copilot abilities, it also reloads their ammo so all 3 can fire Protons as fast as they can lock them. The high damage output from the Lasers and Railguns of the 3 dps ships can absolutely melt targets in under a second, especially if you’re focus firing on the same target.

This setup is great at controlling Damage Overcharges and the T1 Strikes are highly mobile and can do great damage with one.

It’s also very nice how flexible this comp can be, you can easily swap out a Pile Driver for a Remote Slicer to give it a more balanced feel or add in a Gunship for a more long range artillery setup.

This next comp is one of my favorites, we’ve nicknamed it the Brain Juice Comp.

2 Remote Slicing T3 Strikes with Lockdown

1 Repair Probes T3 Strike with Lockdown

1 T1 Gunship with Ion Railgun set to reduce the regeneration of the target hit by it.

This setup is all about targeting the enemies Engine power. It’s a heavy crowd control setup that absolutely punishes enemies for being out of position. The idea here is to find targets that may have wandered a bit too far from their allies onto your side of the map, or maybe they charged your Gunship which is the trap you’re trying to set. No matter how they got there, once there you use Slicing, Lockdown and Ion Railgun and drop their Engine power to 0 very quickly. Since they can no longer boost or use their engine maneuvers it’s very easy to finish them off with Lasers or Railguns. With all this engine burn and engine lockout flying around the 3 Strike Fighters are all using Protons to capitalize on the fact that no one can break their missiles and once again the Repair Probe Strike the does the healing and reloading allowing them all to run Lockdown to maximize their ability to drain engines.

This one has very little wiggle room, if you want to run this comp it’s pretty set in stone as you want all these pieces working together to really punish the enemies Engine power.

Domination

Our standard comp is as follows

1 Speed Tensor T3 Scout (Tensor T4/5 left) > T1 Gunship or T2 Scout or Pile Driver T1 Strike

1 Regen Tensor T3 Scout (Tensor T4/5 right) > Close range T2 Strike or T1 Gunship

1 Close range T2 Strike

1 Dom Pile Driver T1 Strike

We play domination a little differently then Deathmatch, because we really like to open with 2 Tensor Scouts to get the maximum speed and engine power opening to get the Satellites quickly we have less wiggle room on how to open these matches. We often open with the standard comp and then adapt as needed based on how the match is progressing.

The Speed Tensor Scout usually changes ship on first death. If we need more damage and have the defense of the nodes covered he’ll grab the Pile Driver or Gunship, however if the enemy team is really putting on the pressure and our “tanks” (Close range T2 Strike and Regen Tensor Scout) are struggling to hold onto our nodes he’ll go for the T2 Scout which can do double duty both tanking and devastating damage while on the node.

The Pile Drivers job is more like a Gunship in Domination: he hunts players that are in route to the node, especially Bombers and Gunships, to keep the enemy struggling to get a foothold.

If the enemies are continually assaulting one specific node over and over that’s when the Regen Tensor Scout will swap ships to give us even more damage since we need less tanks at that point and just more clearing power. The T2 Strike gives us a little more fire power while still retaining some tanking power, while the extra Gunship gets added if we need to just clear targets even faster.

As a general statement we like to always keep atleast 2 players playing some kind of tanking role that way we can always have one on each of the 2 nodes we need to hold to win the game.

I know this one might be a little confusing, if you have any questions please let me know and I’ll try to explain myself better. The key to domination is often being fluid with ship choices though and just counter playing what your opponent is bringing.

This next comp was thought up by Verain for Denon specifically. It’s still very much in the experimental stages but I thought I’d share it here anyways.

1 T2 Scout

2 EMP T1 Scouts

1 Regen Tensor T3 Scout

This setup is super mobile and has a ton of AOE effects to disable all the targets on the nodes. With 2 EMP fields and 1 EMP missile constantly going off you’re putting out tremendous AOE pressure on nodes with all those debuffs.

With Tensors being added to double turning Scouts you have these ships that turn on an absolute dime on the nodes and can line up any other ship to get the damage they need in. The Repair Drone from the T3 Scout gives you constant refills for the Rocket Pods these ships want to run. I myself have been testing Thermites to great success on my T1 Scout as well so that’s definitely an option too, although I don’t think you’d want more then one on the team, we haven’t tested multiple yet so I can’t say that for sure.

While this comp was specifically designed for Denon to deal with how damn big that map is, the more we play it the more I like it even for the other Domination maps too, more testing is definitely in this comps future.

Well that’s it for now I hope this inspires more teams to get together and try these out or helps out the other budding 4 man teams just getting started. As usual if you have any questions please let me know!