Once again I must start by saying that although I am putting this information together for posting here, the majority has come from others in the Homeworld community. I do not remember all of the people who I should list as contributing but I have already listed the most prominent that come to mind in the 'Tactics 101' post.
Tactics 102, specifics and particulars.
I last left off at super capitol ships but now am returning to strike craft. Lets start with some of the more widely used tactics from multiplay
Swarm is by far the most successful strike craft strategy in use today, lets break it down into some of the tactics involved in it's use. I must say though that I do not use it so am no expert at using it but having been whooped by it many times I should have most of the bigger points hammered out.
The first thing a swarmer will do is queue up 20-40 scouts leaving them to build as they pursue research. On the research front they will start with corvette drive as you get light corvettes (LCV) from that one tech. Then they will start fighter and cap ship drives. How they split the research varies with each person but what I've heard is 4 on corvette drive, then 3 fighter-1 cap ship, then 1 corv-3 fighter. From there you have many choices but fighter tech and corvette tech are maxed out before cap ship chassis is set on. As the techs make ships available for building ships, those ships are set into the build queue. The whole point of swarm is to kill your opponent's resourcing operations at the start of the game, making games as quick and short as possible
Now what do you do with those ships your building? Start setting them into formations of 5-6 ships each, usually in claw (F8) formation or sphere (F9). When using ships in a single formation they will target 1 ship as a formation, having the same number of ships in many smaller formations means you'll have more ships being targeted at one time. I.E. you have 40 scouts in 1 group, your opponent has 40 scouts in 8 groups of 5 each, setting all the scouts to attack each other without micromanagement will have the small groupings of the 40 come out the winner against the single group of 40. I can't give numbers as I don't have them but considering the number of times I've be wiped out in just such a manner you see my point. Anyway, you set all your strike craft in smaller groups in formation to attack, and protect your resourcing operation. Set all your LCVs in wall with support, if you have built any, and have them attack along with your strike craft. This further increases your firepower as generally strike craft are targeting other strike craft and are wide open to corvette attack. One side point, if you have all your strike craft in a single formation it makes it easier for the swarm to target it as they generally try to stay in that formation, where as if your craft are split up, the different groupings will go where ever they need while attacking making it harder to deal damage to the individual ships in the groups. If your opponent is still alive at this point you start on resourcers and controllers slowly taking out his RU supply until there is nothing left. You can salvage the enemy ships or just blow them away, your choice. Swarmers will still have strike craft building in the queue as they take the resourcers down, to replace lost units. In the end they kill your MS with all the strike craft and corvettes they have. A death of a million pin pricks, ouch. I usually scuttle at that point to get all the ships as I die, hehehehe.
Wolf pack is an older and still viable tactic as well, as stated before a wolf pack is really a group of LCVs in aggressive wall with support, either repair vettes or support frigates. If your not playing a swarmer the wolf pack is a useful and dangerous tactic. It takes many scouts to take one out, before the 1.05 patch it was practically impossible to take them out with scouts, now it's not so hard but still costly. What I usually do is have 20-30 scouts guarding my LCVs in a wolf pack for extra protection and guns. Make sure they are in aggressive (F4), so they fire at all targets that get too close. Again a wolf pack is 9 to 16 LCVs in aggressive wall with support of either repair vettes or support frigates both of which (support ships) are set to evasive (F2) to keep the ships from auto-retaliating. Mind you as you loose LCVs and build other corvettes to replace them (multi-gun or heavy) they can be added to the aggressive wall for harder hitting and better armor.
Last but not least is the scouting stuff going on now, that being ES (evil scouts) and CS (crazy scouts). Now I'm no expert at ES but I coined CS so I know exactly what it is. Okay, ES, ES starts with say 30 scouts, set them to aggressive and wall formation, when you start attacking the target you would hit a combination of keys, I believe they are F2, F4, k, z, F9 and F10, though I could be wrong about the F2, F4 part of it. ES when done right allows you to dodge even most projectiles and in tests I ran with one of the masters of ES, Pyromonger, the only sure fire defense was 4 drone frigates but the price difference is way too much for it to be a viable solution to ES. I will say that what most people overlook with scouts is that they rely on numbers to deal damage quickly. The more scouts you have the more damage you can do whether using scouts normally or it the manners I'm listing. Also most experienced players will shun those using ES with any regularity. Now for CS, CS is very similar to ES but not the same, in CS you set your scouts to aggressive wall (F4-F9) and as battle is joined you hit sphere F10 and z, keep switching formations from wall to sphere and hitting z in between to keep your scouts acting crazy, shuddering and shifting from one ship to the next as fast as they can kill them. Most people will confuse CS with ES so I've had to abandon my use of them, seems most people think micromanagement of scouts is cheating, oh well. To recap CS set scouts to wall F9-F4 aggressive, when battle is joined hit F10 and z sphere and speed boost. Hit those three keys in rapid succession for the best effect, F9 z F10 z F9 z F10 z, etc.. The faster you hit them the faster the scouts shudder and zip around.
One of the least seen and used tactics is called the battle ball. This is a sphere of strike craft, usually bombers, set to guard a single ship of like make. The center ship is in a group by itself and is the one move orders are given to. The sphere of ships are set to aggressive F4 to attack any ship coming in range of the center ship. If you guide the center ship around a target the sphere will continuously fire at the target until it is destroyed, or the strike craft are. This can be a good late game use of bombers in the midst of a battle, guide the center ship around the outskirts of the battle to hit enemy ships attacking you. I've used this a few times but since I like capitol ship battles I tend to allow the bombers to go unbuilt, a mistake I should rectify soon.
That's it for the strike craft and wolf pack, next time I'll get into good uses of corvettes and frigates. Please realize I'm just putting down the most prominent tactics I've seen not all those available. As I said before the tactics possible are limited only by your imagination.
Until next time this is 1_Alpha aka Alpha_1 signing off.