Call-in Vessel



Call-in Vessel is one of the fleet roles in Star Trek Armada 3. As their name suggests, call-in vessels can be made avaliable by call-in abilities, which grants players the capability of deploying emergency support fleet to gravity wells within controlled space.

Call-in Vessels can be both buildable vessels with their specific fleet roles, or non-buildable ships that can be acquired solely by call-in fleet abilities, examples are Oberth Class and Son'a Jalak-Su Battlecruisers.

Strengths
Call-in vessels can reinforece defenses within player-controlled space, or filling up losses of the main fleet. They arrive in a small fleet, most call-in fleets are mixed with ships ranging from frigates to heavy cruisers, certain vessels like the Melbourne Class and Jalak-Su Battlecruisers are even powerful enough to rival heavy cruisers in the main fleet, both in terms of firepower and health.

Some players tend to fill their main fleets with call-in ships, since they arrive in a combat-ready fleet that has multiple ship types complementing each other.

Weaknesses
However, call-in vessels are designated as emergency support vessels, due to their lack of special abilities, relatively firepower and health, which is why are generally weaker than ships in the main fleet, with few exceptions. For instance, the venerable fleet are composited of aged ships with few heavy hitters, while the Federation Third Fleet also tends to lack heavy hitters, only to be further bothered by its disproportionately large composition of destroyers.

Another main issue is their high fleet supply cost: take the Third Fleet as an example, each ship can cost 30 fleet supply and the whole fleet of around 10-15 ships can devour up to around 300 supply, despite their huge cost, most of them are not very suitable to take part in fleet operations.

Call-in ships are perhaps not the best ship to serve as the mainstay of a main fleet, whilst a large number of call-in ships may compensate for their lack of toughness and firepower (They do not have ability buffs similar to the ones Miranda Class and Scarab Class possess, which benefit greatly form the buffs when used en masse), their issues of lacking fleet support abilities and heavy hitters would surface during large-scale engagements, the immense cost required for spamming call-in fleets will also greatly hinder post-engagement recovery.

Role
Call-in ships are best suited for defensive use: defending player-controlled space, providing assistance to the main fleet or existing defensive structures against enemy attacks. They will be most useful when attempting to defend a player-controlled gravity well without any sort of protection, or when the main fleet is in desperate situation and is in urgent need of reinforecments.

Its is not recommended to spam call-in ships or have them made up a large proportion of a main fleet, although several ships are exempted from the issues that plaqued most call-in ships and is comparable to or exceeds ships in the main fleet.