An excerpt from this article: http://www.planetsmagazine.com/races/lizards/lizardguides/chasing-carriers/#more-1455
Chasing Carriers
A little example of how small ships can successfully be used to fight big carriers is the ‘Chasing Carriers’ maneuver I found during a Cyborg-Privateer attack on my core planets. It is derived from an idea to double-tow a carrier to keep it separated from its battle group for longer than one turn. What you need are two cloakers capable of towing, a little bit of fuel and need to be with one ship on the same position as the carrier:
- Tow the carrier just outside the warp well ending up empty, meeting with the fueled and cloaked second ship.
- Transfer the fuel to the tower, set it to cloak and tow the carrier a second time with the second ship for just one lightyear, meeting again with the initial tower that is now cloaked.
- Repeat.
- You can go on with that procedure for quite a long time, and the risk of losing the ships is very low as long as you tow the smallest possible distances to avoid mistakes. A desperate opponent will jettison cargo to mess up your fuel prediction.
There are only two ways of escaping that trap for the carrier:
- If the carrier or an intercepting ship has a lower id number than the empty tower it might be able to tow the empty tower while it goes back to cloak.
- Or, much more often, the carrier needs to set its waypoint more than 81ly away — and its speed to warp 9 — to break the tow lock. It is a very pleasant sight to see a carrier run away while burning large amounts of fuel, just because of two small cloakers.
Playing a cloaking race requires a slightly different mindset from playing a carrier race which often relies on pure strength. Since it is harder to separate and destroy each and every carrier, a cloaking race’s ideal should rather be to stop the carrier from fighting than to go for the direct clash. Separating the carriers from their support ships, manipulating their movement, and preventing them from fighting in the moment they need to can be a hard but satisfying task that may lead you to a successful campaign versus a carrier race.