Hello! Welcome to my Container Liner (CLN) guide!
I am gnomeRemover. I like CLN and have been playing it non-stop for eons, starting from 2024, when it was really REALLY bad and the only options you had were trivially softkilled.
The addition of the submunition container and some other tools during the carrier update has given the CLN many new and exciting abilities that have not yet been documented in a guide.

One of the most powerful tools CLNs have gained is the instant-release R2 rocket box, a specific configuration of rocket container that bursts on the first thing it sees thanks to using a 2000m seeker and a 2000m release range. These can savagely annihilate AN cap fleets.
ACT/[Validator] conventional warhead boxes are extremely easily softkilled by experienced players... The methods to defeat them are so readily available that almost any kill using with them is likely scored only because of a mistake on the enemy's part.
...However! ...There are now new exotic options that are much harder to softkill, including SAH cruise containers and illuminator pike target painting.

(Note that in pub lobbies, softkill skill level tends to be all over the place. It takes a while to get proficient at it.)

Apparently its downright oppressive, capable of both shutting down cap fleets and annihilating capital ships.

For those interested in further cap warfare, It is even possible to make a ~1500 point CLN loaded only with instant release R2 boxes in combination with a ~1500 point cap fleet in an attempt to capitalize both on the CLN's anti-capper capability and OSP's cheap hulls.


As you go about your Neb journey, it is important to take in mind that the quality of advice you get may vary... There are a lot of high play-time players that have not done much stack vs stack, so you may need to take some balance opinions with a grain pile of salt.

Some of the information is provided here more as things that are possible for you to do. It is worth exploring what is good or not on one's own. I tried to minimize my opinions in this.
Some edits and additional info provided by iriS.exe.

Time on Target: In Nebulous, this is the art of synchronizing several missile salvos to all hit at the same time. This guide includes information on how to do a ToT.
Capfleet: a fleet of small ships that is focused on grabbing and holding capture points.
Halfcap: a fleet with half of the point value spent on cappers, the other half on something else.
Yub/yubbing: Neb slang named after a missile slinging player named Yub-Nub. Refers to the act of launching cruise missiles or ships / players that do so. OSP does not have many yub options. ANS has a larger degree of yub choice, usually its frigates, barebones destroyers, or a beam equipped heavy cruiser.
Points cringing: refers to cheaping out on ships by taking out as much unessential stuff as humanly possible. Cringe cappers are the most extreme example of this, being a shuttle or corvette with a CiC, drive, chaffbox, and DC.
Natural: Enemy capture points close to their spawn. You can deny these at the start of the game with yub.
Ceremonial Arming Missile: You can put a singular missile set to "offensive" in a chaffbox to count as armed so you can contest a point.
Comm Jam: In terms of missile warfare, this refers to the CMD omnijammers, the AN Interrupt and the OSPN Warbler. These disrupt CMD missiles and makes them go haywire unless they have a backup seeker. The shape of the Interrupt jammer gives it a variety of silly names, like "balljammer", "commball", "disco", etc.
Small ship "Blob"/Swarm: A type of fleet composed of a clump of smaller ships that travel as a group. Watch out for the Corvblob, able to reposition lightning fast and capable of hiding behind jamming at a wild 5km, fighting these without a counter on hand (ocello, MNs) is a very painful experience.
TRP: Target Reference Point. A type of signal marker you can use to waypoint missiles off of. The only way to do Cruise CMD.
fACT: Fixed Active Radar seeker. 2000m range.
sACT: Steerable Active Radar seeker. 2000m range. Spins around when searching to increase FOV.
eACT: Extended Steerable Active Radar seeker. 5000m range. Spins around when searching to increase FOV.
HEI: High Explosive Impact. Standard anti ship missile warhead. It ignores armor angling and only compares penetration depth with armor depth. A two pip warhead container can penetrate Solomon armor.
SubM: Submunition warhead. You can load various things into it, such as R2 or R3 rockets.
IMPORTANT: SubM boxes use distance measurements to determine when to trigger. In a patch soon to come, HOJ, SAH, and WAKE, which do not measure distance, will cause boxes to trigger instantly.
R2: Midsize rocket. Pens up to CL armor. Originally a weapon for rocket shuttles. Large groups of Ruttles can pen up to BB, but containers have much worse spread than a Ruttle and so boxes are realistically limited up to to CLs. R2s die to flak.
R3: Torpedo sized rocket. Extremely powerful bomber weapon but quite dubious on a container. Resists flak.
Damage threshold: Abbreviated as "DT". Certain modules require a certain amount of damage delt in a single instance order to destroy. If this damage is not met, the module will survive with no HP remaining and can tank indefinitely. This is especially important for missile players to know about, as standard high explosive missiles do damage by casting rays of 50 damage into a target. Some hulls resist a percent of damage, and the Solomon and Axford have so much damage resistance (40% DR) that missiles can only do a maximum of 30 damage per ray, not enough to break reinforced DC lockers, reinforced mags, reinforced CiCs, and other durable components.
Your teammates will need to finish them off, or you can use subM containers with KBU-22s to finish ships. (KBU spacecraft bombs do 75 damage per ray.)

In Neb's missile nomenclature, seekers are listed in series from Primary to Secondary to Tertiary.
Primary seekers take precedence over secondary, and secondary over tertiary. [Validators] are listed in [Brackets]. The missile system was only designed for two seekers, and the container triple seeker was added later, so double validators do not function properly. Validators apply to all seekers in the missile.
Validators ignore the range of their base seeker.

Ex. Steerable Act, Wake val, Home on Jam backup would look like this:
sACT/[WAKE]/HOJ
Seeker/[Validator]/BackupSeeker

If a primary seeker is jammed, a missile will swap to a secondary seeker.
It is possible to use a secondary seeker with very high exclusivity, such as WAKE, HOJ or SAH, to make the missile essentially go dumbfire when jammed.

A deeply enriching technique for CLN gameplay is the Time on Target strike.
Missile time on target attack (ToT) is the art of pathing two or more missile salvos so they all hit the target at the same time.
A time on target strike from multiple angles at once can allow you to avoid chaff with instant release rocket boxes, preform rear aspect wakeval, and much, much more.

Effective use of the CLN will require knowledge of ToT strikes.

The following is a modified excerpt from my ToT guide.


When firing a missile, a tooltip widget shows up next to the cursor, this contains an estimated flight time. This tool is essential for a time based ToT, which is essential ToT type for a multiaxis strike.


Note that the flight time displayed assumes perfect following of the line path. Sharp turns in the path will result in longer flight times, or even messed up missile routes if they do not have enough maneuver.



The bread and butter of a multi-directional strikes is the travel time based ToT.

To preform a ToT using this method follow these steps
1. Plot a salvo and measure the time the missile will take to get to the enemy.
2. Plot the next salvo and make the flight time X seconds less than the salvo before it, where X=Prog time.
3. add even more salvos if desired.

The paths can be extremely dissimilar, key for allowing you to hit from multiple angles.


It is possible to use both time or distance as the metric.

To use time as the metric:
[New salvo travel time] = [Previous salvo travel time] - [programming time]

-

Base programming times for a CM-4 Container is 20s

To find your programming time:
[Base Programming time] / [Programming speed modifier]

Ex: CM-4 Container with 150% prog speed buff
20s/1.50
13.3333 second programming speed.

-

It helps to have a nice even number for programming time / meters traveled per prog interval to make this method easier, such as a ~10 sec prog time for CLNs.

For best accuracy, you can measure directly to a target, or use a TRP as a static release point.
You can use several TRPs as multi axis release points, as long as they are the same rough distance from the CLN.
You can even drop a signal marker near where you predict the target will go and measure to that if the target is moving, or if you expect to lose track.
Players don’t mind (or never say anything) if you drop a ton of markers.
Eventually you develop a feel for it after practice.


In tactical view, it will show all the other missile paths you and your team have programmed. This can help visualize how much shorter the next path you make should be.
...unless it bugs out...
...which it does a lot.


The HOLD fire setting can help buy time to program several different cruise paths, However, it does have some odd bugs. Launch orders given during hold fire do not program, but you can set weapons free to start programming, and set back to hold and they will continue to program.

It is also important to not have more than 1 Salvo waiting to be programmed. Salvos that are queued are fired in a random order. ESPECIALLY important for triple or higher ToTs,
Having one currently programming and one queued is OK.

When preforming ToTs, be aware that by necessity, you add flight time to account for extra salvoes. This limits your range. It depends on the speed of the target ship, but 1min 20sec tends to be the upper limit of how long you make a path before targets start dodging.

If you are firing on a stationary/entrenched asset, such as a DD, very long flight times can be fine.

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Note that if you order a salvo that is under your maximum salvo size, then order another launch after that, it will wait for the first salvo to finish despite spare programming channels.
If you have a mixed salvo that is under the maximum salvo size, you can launch multiples of it within one launch order as long as you have enough channels.

There is a function of mixed salvos that frustrates me) where they will not fire if you are missing any of the prerequisite missiles (if you run out, or lose a container bank).

When you do a mixed salvo, the order the missiles are launched is the same as the order you added them to the salvo planner.
Though sometimes it does not launch in order, and I am not sure why.

A legendarily bizarre and gloriously overkill type of "multi-axis" ToT thought up by another player called Cheramie is to do a ToT on several cappers at once, so the missiles hit the separate targets all at once and overwhelm the cap player's micro. I've actually still never tried this.

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CLN is generally very forgiving with ToT time windows because of how slow the missiles move coupled with all the decoys clogging up PD.

I'm sure that anyone who wants to play a 3k CLN wants to turn Axfords and Solomons into debris fields... but note that most of the really good anti capital container tech will require stable tracks. CMD and SAH are your premium options, so it can occasionally be worth it to wait a little bit until you can confirm softkill equipment is destroyed.

Focus on killing cappers first, and try to take down beam destroyers as quickly as possible. The CLN is EXCELLENT at flushing out entrenched DDs. Use multiaxis ToT strikes with instant release boxes and shut them down before they can lock down your cap player.
Fend off skirmishers like light cruisers if necessary, then decisively eliminate capital ships when they emerge (if you are equipped for it).
When firing on capitals, you will have juggle between firing early to take pressure off your team, and waiting to fire so you have better tracks / or when the enemy missile defense becomes degraded.

Watch out for sarissas, the long ranged coilgun PD with the fast turquoise shots; You must create a erratic cruise path to dodge sarissas (the "sarissa wiggle"), and even then, they can easily thin out a container salvo, especially after the sandshot hurtbox buff.

Most importantly...
Apply pressure! A CLN is a massive map presence debt!
If you are not firing... The enemy will walk over your frontline, and your cap player will get slowly picked off. Beam DDs will have time to get into position and deep fry anything that pushes.
Your team is down anywhere from 1.5k or 3k in assets if you are not applying pressure!
Pay back your debt!
Shower the enemy team in boxes!
Deny their naturals, relentlessly fish for carriers and backline assets, identify and excise destroyers, and when capitals are forced out of hiding, decisively cripple them.

Make the enemy cap fleet play a bullet hell game.

The CLN now has a variety of exotic softkill-mitigating container types that are good to know about.
All of these benefit from multiaxis Time on Target attacks, which is where you strike the target with two simultaneous salvos from two separate directions.
The exotic containers will be discussed in depth in a later section, but as a quick overview, they are:
- Instant release rocketboxes (AKA TTGI box). R2 containers with a 2000m seeker set to release the moment they detect a target. As they will release on the first thing they see, the way to defend versus these is to put chaff between the container and target ship. A multi-axis strike makes it very hard to put chaff between all the boxes coming from different directions.
- Pike illuminated SAH containers. Cruise SAH boxes that go for targets painted by pikes with wingpod illuminators. Pikes can be shot down, and SAH can be defeated by ships illuminating their own chaff... However, the missile must be at an angle where it can see the illumination reflecting off the chaff. (in game, the angle is about 90-180 degrees, I think?). This means you can use multi axis strikes to make it very hard to self illum.
- CMD/backupseeker HEI containers. CMD guided boxes that have a backup seeker like WAKE so that when they are command jammed, they go straight like rockets. You can use multi-axis ToTs to make these harder to dodge by checkmating them out of directions to evade in.
- CMD standoff release SubM containers. A pet project of mine to get working, but not particularly good. These avoid softkill by releasing SubM just outside comm jam range but are very easy to dodge. Multi-axis benefits them in the same way they benefit CMD/backupseeker boxes.



The primary order of affairs when playing CLN in more organized games is usually to deny naturals if distance permits, fish for backline assets, then start relentlessly yubbing cappers and beam destroyers to deprive the enemy the ability to either flip or deny points.
Ferret out entrenched beam DDs ASAP. They get nastier the longer they exist and can utterly lock down a capture point.
Fend off skirmish assets like light cruisers or corvette blobs using R2 containers if needed.
Eventually, if enemy cap assets are sufficiently depleted, it will force capital ships into advancing, where they can be containered using a selection of the advanced box types.


ToTing is incredibly important for a CLN. It is basically mandatory.

Fishing for backline asset with fanned rocket containers early game is important as well. (it can help to have very long range on the R2 boxes (25km+).
It is possible to path a waypoint into the backline and use +ALT add missile to create a fan of missiles to find enemy assets... but note that Sarissas, the long range coilgun PD, make it exceptionally hard to fan backline. Containers flying with seekers on and searching for targets cannot dodge.
You can use real-space view (not tac-view) to observe your containers and see what countermeasures are deployed versus them. Chaff will always show in realspace view, and you can note any PD nets that activate.
Similarly, set your chaff to MANUAL. Observant enemy yub can use it to locate you.
If you can avoid the Sarissa fire, you can often find a lot of cappers and possibly even some backline this way.
Skilled enemy backline assets will wander around in the very far back of the map or fly to strange positions to try to avoid being struck, but destroying them can be game changing.
Carriers can launch fighters to jam and shoot down your containers, and escort units to make containering the escortee require Time on Target attacks. The carrier can also conduct its own strikes versus your teammates and cut them down. The earlier the CV dies, the better.
Try to locate CVs (boxes tend to die around them, and aircraft noseguns looks different from ship PD)... if you find them, you can do multiaxis ToTs on their suspected position and make it hard for them to defend.
Relentless double or triple axis ToT is withering and very hard to defend against, even with coilgun Tantos.
If you can find the CV... go all out on it ASAP before it runs. Carriers usually conduct the most damaging torpedo strikes mid to late game.
Missile frigates are very dangerous, as they can both cause a lot of damage to your team and attempt to directly counter-yub and kill you. These are very small and mobile targets, but they are very soft.
The CLN is a very large and monolithic ship, so if you are found, you can easily be sniped by missiles. High skill missile players will also attempt to yub suspected Moorline spots.
CLN has a monsterous mag depth compared to ANS yub, and things like missile frigates tend to bring minimal softkill and no PD. Spraying areas you predict them to be might score a fast kill and reprieve you and your team of the missile threat.


There is another CLN guide that mentions the Sarissa isn't very useful, but from my observations in stack vs stack, it is quite powerful versus boxes.
Sarissas necessitate creating erratic cruise paths the "sarissa wiggle", which is harder than plotting straight paths. This is mostly annoying rather than effective, but the Sarissa wiggle requires a certain level of container maneuverability. Even more sluggish boxes can dodge Sarissa fire, but absolutely minimal maneuver struggles. The annoyance has evolved recently, as there have been Sandshot buffs which make it so that Sarissa can reliably shave 1-3 containers off of the more clumsy engine configs as they evade.
Even more importantly however, the Sarissa completely shuts down attempts to "release" containers from their cruise paths and let them find their own targets. Sarissa guns can easily shave 8 "released" containers down to a near useless 2.
This is a very big deal, as releasing early is essential to fanning containers into the backline, and releasing early with large kill-salvos would normally provide a larger search volume in case the target moves.
With Sarissas present, fanning is incredibly difficult, and large salvos must either be "released" directly on top of targets, or have a "screen" in the form of a second salvo airborne (ToT or just airborne at the same time) to distract the Sarissas.

If you wish to give Moorline players nightmares, you can put Sarissas on a CH or BB, to make it incredibly hard to kill the PD platform.
Apparently Sarissas can even stop HBURN EVADE bombers, so you can rope CV into this misery too.

As you missile targets, anticipate where they will want to be and aim there.
Firing directly at targets is not ideal, as boxes have a very long flight time and allow the enemy to change their plans. Instead fire in ways that limit their options.
Launch boxes into the cover the enemy wants to move to, send boxes to capture points during seemingly opportune moments for the enemy to cap, or launch them in anticipation of a beam DD coming out of cover to deny a point.

Be wary if you end a cruise path with a sharp turn, it may struggle to hit the last waypoint then give up. If you're very familiar with your container's particular behaviour, you can use last waypoint sharp turns to manipulate the seeker cone.

High speed container speeds are excellent.
Note that flight times over 1min 20sec will tend to give an aware target enough time to get away unless they are locked down by combat.
Longer flight times like 1:35+sec is OK vs entrenched assets like DDs.
As for container speeds, 200 is what I consider a minimum.

Pathing boxes behind cover and "ambushing" with them can help offset longer flight times.

Attacking targets from behind is also generally advantageous.

Staying for too long in the backline as the gamestate evolves can be dangerous. Try to keep your allies between you and places the enemy could be.

"TTGI" is a specific missile behavior that causes fast ACT missiles to go for the first thing it sees
Shortstop is a name came up by a group of regular players to refer to this type of insta-release box

It is possible to make a rocket box that emulates this behavior and immediately dumps submunitions at the first target it sees by having the release range set to the same as the seeker range. Practically speaking, this means setting the release range to 2000m and using a 2000m ACT seeker, such as steerable ACT.
R2s anti capper is an ideal application for TTGI boxes. Small ships are very weak to R2s and have very limited chaff and hardkill. Capital ships can carry up to 40 units of chaff and play the attrition game, but cappers usually have around 6-10 chaff.



Here is an example R2 anti capper container similar to the ones I use.


SubM boxes use distance measurements to determine when to trigger. In the most recent patch, HOJ, SAH, and WAKE, all do not measure distance .
HOJ or ARAD will stage instantly if encountering jamming. Will need WAKE backup
ToT can help since jamming is direction limited.

*You can make an utterly insensitive backup seeker to counter jamming by doing WAKE/[ACT] and setting WAKE to reject unvalidated, so that when jammed it will go dumb and will not stage on WAKE trails. Its free, so it's a flat upgrade.
THEM functions the same as WAKE, and all ACT seekers function and cost the same when set to validators, so you can do sACT/THERM-reject/[eACT] to make people upset.




The example missile has the minimal speed band range at 200m in exchange for a near 30k range for aggressive backline fishing (it has minimum maneuverability since R2s can be launched in a gimballed cone).
As of May 2025, ~4 rockets per box gives a good blend of power and engine tuning. ~3 per box is cheaper and gives much better engine maneuver, but struggles vs anything greater than 2 defenders. ~5 per box is very powerful, but has terrible engine tuning options.
This box is of the 4 rocket type, tuned for max range.
You can experiment with different tunings.




TTGI boxes are super controllable and are incredibly devastating versus cap fleets. Since they burst on the first thing they see, simple chaff is not sufficient to defeat them because the seeker might see the ship first. The target must put chaff between itself and the container to defeat the box. With practice, it is possible to even do small multi-axis ToT attacks on cap fleet assets to even further deny ships from maneuvering to put chaff between them and the missile.


These boxes are exceptional at rooting out entrenched DDs, especially if they are used in small multi-axis ToTs. Try to kill DDs as early as possible so they don't have an opportunity to lock down points and to free up movement options for your team. If the game state changes to where your team has to push into their beams, it may be too late.

Note that backing up is one of the more common evasion patterns players take, so shooting them from behind can be quite nice if the flight time is <1:20sec.


Assuming the 4-rocket-per container type, launching a total of ~5 boxes is around sufficient for killing corvettes or DDs. DDs with rebounds will need more, usually around a total of 12 total across a ToT.

It is possible to give them a fixed ACT primary and a extended ACT backup so that the eACT seeker guides the container into the target at long range, but the box triggers on the first thing the fACT seeker contacts. These are a bit more expensive, so it is traditional to run 3 rockets per box rather than 4 rockets.

It is very powerful to pair shortstops with non-instant releasing [WAKE] val rocket boxes, to make rear aspect attacks extremely hard to escape, If the target tries to fly away to put chaff between themself and the shortstops, they will validate the [WAKE] non-instant and get hit anyways.

star1954 has devised a seeker combo they have nicknamed the "Tallstop", which after some adjustments by others, has become eACTreject / [WAKE] / any 2000m ACT, and a release range slightly higher than 2000m (EG 2100m).
The eACT will only go after wake validated targets and has priority over the other 2000m ACT seeker, making them function as both box types at once. Quite expensive.
Affected by jamming.

Using 25km+ range 200+ speed containers also allows you to fish the backline for carriers, cappers, and missile raines via fanning. Watch out for sarissas.
It can be tempting to make specialized box types, but this can create somewhat painful situations where you want to do something but have run out of the only boxes that could do that job. Ideally, keep the capabilities of your boxes high, and keep the abilities similar.

Rockets are weak to flak, There may be merits to finding ways to sneak decoy launchers into an R2 salvo to confuse rebounds.

Ships with exceptional lateral thrust (sprinters) can dodge single axis R2 released at 2km if they know the missiles are coming.

Weaker than expected versus small blobs of ships, as they will often stage on only a few targets at a time, leaving the rest of the small ships untouched.



TTGI R2 anti-light is considered the best/only viable option for TTGI boxes, but it is possible to do TTGI R3 boxes. I'm unsure if there is any practical use for an TTGI R3 box. Maybe something flak related?
I have some R3 TTGI on the ToT trainer CLN, as they have more hope of hitting capital ships than ACT/[Validator] HEI.

____
What is TTGI?
Normally, missiles will run a roulette and pick a random target within their seeker cone to fly into, favoring things closer to the center of the cone, and things with bigger radar signature (eg. chaff).
TTGI, or Time to Go Intercept, in Nebulous refers to a missile behavior where the missile will stop re-rolling the roulette and stick to one target a few seconds before impact. (~2sec?)
Ultimately, its became slang for a missile that will go for the first target it sees, because it is possible to make an extremely fast moving (usually S2h) hybrids with fixed ACT that (ab)uses TTGI behavior to make it immediately stick to the first visible target.

SAH Illuminator pike anti capital-ship boxes.
This is a strong anti capital ship container type that is good at bypassing softkill by use of SAH illumination.
It is possible to put multiple hangar bays in the Moorline and fill it with around 10 SAH pikes for use in illuminating targets.
It is possible to softkill it by illuminating your own chaff, but it only works if the missile can see the side of the chaff being illuminated, and if either the chaffbox or illuminator are destroyed, the trick is impossible.

It is very, VERY, high micro.

SAH pikes have a crazy 6k range, 1 degree illuminator.
Note that to use illumination, you must give an attack order to the pikes, and they will not use the full illuminator range unless set to STANDOFF.
As of a recent update, you can order a non-attack illumination orders via Shift-rightclick similar to using an EO pike.
Also note that pikes can illuminate forward and backwards, but cannot illuminate while turning around, so if using a single pike, there can be some dead time without illumination.

You can turn the RADAR off of the pike to get a -25% sig size bonus. Pike radar is pretty bad, so there is no reason not to do this unless you need a radar track.

It is possible for the victim of a SAH attack to spoof SAH guided missiles by illuminating a chaff cloud or dead ship. (Active Decoys have a malus against illumination)
Missiles will only go for self illuminated objects if the missile can see the side of the object that is being illuminated, so multi-axis SAH ToT strikes from different angles can defeat self illum.

[THERM] validators are EXCELLENT for SAH seekers, since when you are bowtanking, you need to fly forwards to get a good illumination angle... which sets off the therm val... It's a checkmate situation.

SAH boxes can be set up with or without ACT backups. Be sure to make SAH the main seeker.
Note that SAH does not have velocity data, so make sure they have enough maneuver to hit the target.
ACT/[SAH] is unfortunately broken.

Illuminating via pikes requires tracks. Although capital ships tend to spend a lot of time spotted, It is often excruciatingly difficult to maintain tracks long enough for a strike to program and get to target during the early to mid-game where capitals can afford to stay back and kite. Even losing track for as little as 5 seconds can ruin an entire strike.Having good sensor coverage is very important. Very high container speeds can help get the boxes to target before track is lost... but your team is essentially without your contribution until the gamestate evolves to the point you have steady and actionable track.
There is merit towards bringing your own spotting via sensors craft or other means.
In emergency, pikes can resort to using their own radar or visual targetting, but TQ of Vis tracks is VERY bad, leading to spotty illumination, and the pikes themselves often do not survive getting so close.


Note that you have low quantities of pikes, and an unbuffed launch rate.
SAH Pikes have to get quite close and as such die readily and violently to SDMs and Sarissa fire. Some ANS builds carry over 20 SDMs, and HBURN EVADE will not save pikes from 5km Sarissa.
RPF can also make short work of a close pike.

Being forced to FQ to launch pikes makes this type of CLN have to stop moving very frequently, making it much more easily caught out than ones with minimal/no craft. Pikes can, however, defend versus yub if they are positioned in the path of the missiles.

As this CLN requires large amounts of setup, you must launch pikes preemptively. As of May 2025 pikes cannot carry fuel pods, so timing is important. The moment you see a captial ship track is a good time to queue all your pikes for launch.

Pikes have difficulty surviving in a zone controlled by enemy craft, but are stealthy, can outrun most threats on HBURN, and can stay near allies to hide in their pd. You can even turn RADAR off on pikes for more stealth.
As an added bonus, allies provide tracks and are likely engaging the enemies you want to strike.
They can be pressed into defending allies from incoming missiles and even to kill bombers and do minor dogfighting.

You do not need pikes anymore once you land all your SAH containers, so consider sending 3x wings of 2 (or even more wings) to illuminate key targets.

I have never tried to use this container on a skirmish asset (CL / Corvblob), but it is likely terrible at it.

CMD is a very strong anti-capital ship missile type, as the only defense is the command ball, which is expensive and tend to get shot off easily.
It is faster to set up attacks than SAH (no need for illumination), and does not introduce weak points such as illum pikes that can be shot down.
Ships that have been in combat for a while are prime targets.

Normally, when a CMD missile is comms jammed, it will start wiggling eratically and be rendered unable to hit the target.
It is possible to set up CMD boxes that go straight when command jammed and try to hit the enemy with the boxes once they go dumbfire.
Multiaxis ToTs can be used to make it so if the enemy dodges one direction, they still run into boxes coming from another direction... but the low speed of boxes may limit the efficacy of this strategy.
These can be created by having either CMD/secondary or by ACT/[CMD] set to REJECT. ACT/[CMD] reject will go straight if comms or radar jammed, is less sensitive to track quality, and will not go for flares unlike CMD/WAKE... however, it lacks midcourse guidance.
For the truly wicked, you can use CMD/SAH + pike illumination, to make softkill incredibly difficult. Both the CMD ball and the Illuminator and Chaffbox must be alive, or it is instant death.
[THERM] validators are EXCELLENT for SAH seekers, since when you are bowtanking, you need to fly forwards to get a good illumination angle... This ON TOP of the CMD makes softkilling a herculean task.

ToTing with TRPs is very vibes based.
TRP markers do, however, give a distance read from the CLN both when and after they are being placed. This can be used to roughly tell how far salvos should be spaced from each other so that the flight times synch up.
You can usually figure out some distance that the TRPs should be placed with some practice.

These can be optionally be supplemented with conventional ACT/[WAKE] boxes fired from the rear to make evasion tricky... but launching these and CMD at the same time is hard, and it doesn't seem too good.
From what I have been told, there is an interesting process for launching ToTs using mixed TRP and pathed cruise at once.
Place a TRP and measure the travel time for the cmd boxes,
Then create a free cruise path that arrives [programming time] faster or slower
Then launch salvos in the appropriate order and start the ToT

Some caveats.

-The inflexibility of the single waypoint pathing forces the CLN into weird positions to get around map geometry. You may want dual drives.
There is a bug (as of APR 2025) where TRP fired cold launch missiles turn to the target, NOT the TRP point, first before igniting engines. This forces Hot Launch.
- Tracks are mandatory for this type of CLN due to the nature of command. Although capital ships tend to spend a lot of time spotted, It is often excruciatingly difficult to maintain tracks long enough for a strike to program and get to target during the early to mid game where capitals can afford to stay back and kite.
Even losing track for as little as 5 seconds can ruin an entire strike. Having good sensor coverage is very important.
Very high container speeds can help get the boxes to target before track is lost... but your team is essentially without your contribution until the gamestate evolves to the point you have steady and actionable track. There is a merit to bringing your own sensors via craft or other means.
- Due to the nature of TRP pathing, you are also unable to sarissa wiggle or path to hide containers from craft. Making the containers fast helps with these issues by reducing exposure time. The TRP swerve can also throw off sarissa, and excessive ToTs (3+) can confound sarissa and craft.

I have no idea how this container would preform vs CLs if you kept a track on them. Usually CLs die to gunfire anyways if they are tracked, so this container type probably isn't the way. Harming a corvblob is likely an impossiblity.

An absurd and janky build I tested extensively. A cool concept, but with crippling flaws.

It is possible to set up a CMD guided submunition container to release its rockets outside of, or just inside, the 4000m command ball range, before the CMD jamming affects the box. Trivial to orbit dodge if the enemy has full thruster HP, making it's use extremely limited.

The CLN's premier anti capital options are extremely track dependant and take a long time to bring to bear on the enemy. It can be worth forgoing anti capital on some builds and go all-in on the cap warfare strengths of the CLN. One such way is to become a capfleet yourself.
Construct a 1500k CLN with the bare bones necessities... programming speed buff modules and little else, and fill it with many, many TTGI r2 boxes. The cap fleet is up to you to fill out.
Once good choice of cap assets is a 2 gun shuttle wings and some cringe cappers.

A jam shuttle wing is a group of 3 shuttles, with one of the following distributed across the wing:
Huntress Radar, Pinpoint FCR, Bellbird Jammer, Warbler Comms jam, EO Dazzler, chaffbox, and 4 T20 guns.

If you are feeling particularly cruel, you could fill the cappers out with cheap C30 tugs with reinforced drives in the center module component and bridge CiC.
These are.... disproportionately powerful for their cost.

Destroy DDs, trim away enemy corvettes, and send containers preemptively to back up your own cappers.
Be careful with auto chaff, as chaff has no IFF.

You may want to put a T20 gun on the CLN just in case it needs to contest with a corvette.

It is a good idea to carry ~120 R2 TTGI anti-capper containers + some bonus specialist boxes. (Eg. anti capital ship). You can usually carry 8 salvos of specialist boxes along with the 120 R2 TTGI.

Speed is GOOD.
Speed increases the guaranteed intercept range versus mobile targets, as flight times above 1:10 seconds will start to allow target to move out of the way of the seeker cone.
Fast missiles also ensures missile pressure arrives to help your team earlier, and you can deny cap points faster.
I consider 200 is around the minimum for container speed.

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The penaid of choice for a CLN is the standard decoy dispenser. (Cluster is very expensive for its effectiveness, specialist build stuff.)
Decoys have an important interaction with PD where as long as the decoy is incoming towards the target, they force the PD turret to fire on them first.
About 2-3 units of decoy per defender is generally good. 12 units of decoy is needed to pen most capital ship PD. This can be across several salvos, in case of ToTs.
I tend to use ~6 decoys per salvo, and do double or triple ToT attacks.
You can place the decoys in the seeker slots of standard containers, or place them in the warhead of CM-S-4 support containers.
"1 unit of decoy" refers to a single pip of decoy if placed in the seeker slot of a box, or 1 tick of decoy in the warhead of support box. Decoys are the only penaid that can scale if put in the warhead slot of a missile.
Decoys launch at a fixed rate, so a warhead filled with decoys will take a while to empty.

Place your decoyed missiles in the back of your salvos. You don't want them getting shot down immediately, and by having them at the back, they are considered incoming for much longer.
When doing a mixed salvo, missiles are launched in the same order they were added to the planner... usually.

Self Screening Jammers and the boosted variant are generally used to protect missiles from AMMs, which containers are near immune to. From what I have been told, the sig size of containers and missile decoys are far to big to jam once they get in PD range.

If you choose not to use dedicated support boxes and place decoys in HEI boxes, note that they will release decoys very quickly, and may spray them everywhere if there is a sharp turn in the waypoint path.

If using support boxes, it is possible to put decoys in the warhead AND in the seeker slot. Both decoys dispense at once, making a de-facto cluster decoy launcher.
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Container Datalink Arrays are very expensive, but give you extra missiles in a salvo. This is not very useful for R2 TTGI salvos, as 6 is sufficient for small ships, but for anti capital work, it is excellent.
There is another CLN guide out there that says the Datalink is not worth it, but I have found that this observation is not correct. Having larger salvo sizes increases the chances a missile gets though hardkill. You also have the luxury to dedicate a lower fraction of your containers per salvo towards carrying decoys and have more damage per salvo, or carry more decoys per salvo but still have equivalent damage.
It overall alleviates the need to conduct excessively large ToTs to penetrate targets, which is boring, but very beneficial. The more salvos you add to a ToT, the more flight time you need to add to accommodate for the additional programming time, and long flight times allow the target to move away from the target area, break track, or otherwise evade.
This being said, Adding one Datalink is probably the limit unless you are doing something weird.
Datalinks are notably very durable, so you can put them in a part of the CLN you expect to get shot in and tank the damage with it.

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Moorlines have a randomized hull made up of a nose, middle, and engine segment.
Each of these segments have 3 different variants.
The nose and middle section variants have the container banks arranged in different ways.
Below is an image of some CLNs showcasing the possible container bank arrangements.

The ships in the picture have matching nose and middle sections.

The closest CLN has dual triangular sections with the banks angled slightly upwards in a "V", The middle CLN has dual "tray" shaped sections and has banks on the top and bottom, and the furthest CLN has banks on the port and starboard sides.

Ideally, you will want to chose a hull that groups your missiles as close as possible, and runs the least risk of accidentally launching containers into rocks.
Traditionally, this has been either a double triangular segment hull with missiles set to HOT LAUNCH, or a top-bottom "tray" CLN set to COLD LAUNCH.

The triangular hull allows you to roll the ship around to avoid terrain in one direction, and hot launch keeps missiles clumped together. Cold launch has an issue where if the path towards the next waypoint is blocked by the hull, the missiles will wait forever to ignite their engines until they are clear of the ship, splitting salvos. Hot launch avoids this, with the downside that you must be aware they launch forwards and can slam into rocks ahead of you.
The top-bottom tray CLN with cold launch allows you to launch missiles and immediately path them to the sides of the ship without worrying about hot launching them into a rock, but a lot of mindfulness is needed to avoid the cold launch ignition issue.
A lot of the hull stuff is tradition. The important part is maintaining shot grouping, so there's room for some experimentation.


The CLN can become startlingly durable if you chose to take some DC, but it isn't always the best thing to invest into. Generally, the idea with a CLN is to use gamesense to avoid getting damaged so you can bring more missiles.
The major ways a CLN will be taking damage will either be from hybrids, ambush from skirmishers, or from gunfire at the end of the game when you will need to sit on a point to contest.
There are some "knife fight" type CLN builds such CMD that necessitate getting close where the DC would be appreciated to mitigate risk, but note that there is a cost benefit trade off... if you get disabled, and cannot repair in time to escape, there's not much use in bringing more DC. Enemy yub is particularly nasty at finishing crippled ships off.

There might be merit in bringing a crapload of AMMs.


The CLN can bring a pair of launch pads, so consider bringing sensors skiffs or EO pikes to help your team. If you have the spare room, you can add internal hangars to further increase craft complement.


The order missiles get arranged in the list outside of testing range is strange. Container bank #2 takes priority at the top of the list, then bank #1, then either #3 or #4 depending on the hull type.
I have no idea why it is like this.

Remember that that exceptionally unmaneuverable containers may not be able to do the sarissa wiggle, or might even struggle to hit their targets if they are HEI. (SubM seems to be able to launch in a roughly 45 degree cone, so maneuver is not as important for them to hit a target)


Rockets have excellent penetrance vs weak PD nets (EG 2 defenders). Adding decoy dispensers to salvos with rockets can greatly improve their penetrance vs flak. This might be useful for penetrating flak armed CLs or corvblobs. These ships are also fast and very hard to intercept. I have thought about making CLNs with special anti skirmisher missiles, but I'm still testing it for viability...
You can put decoys on a rocket box, but make sure it dispenses all the decoys before it finishes dumping all its missiles. It takes a little more than a second to launch all 3 subunits.

Unfortunately, dual validator missiles do not work. The missile system was only designed for only 2 seekers originally, and the container tri seeker was added later.

Remember that you can use a secondary seeker with high exclusivity (WAKE, HOJ, SAH, THERM) to make a container go dumb if jammed. (THERM functions as WAKE if used as a seeker. THERM is pretty funny for the confusion factor.)

Containers have 1/2 discount on most missile features, so weave costs 0.5 points for them. Neb rounds up missile costs, so you can often get free weave that lets boxes continue to dodge Sarissas when in their final approach to target. Free weave is excellent with extended ACT.


A t20 gun can kill a corvette on a cap point during late game. They can be nice to have. You can also use offensive S1 missiles, since the CLN has many free prog channels.

Missile do damage in chunks of 50. ANS Heavy Cruisers and Battleships have up to 40% damage resistance, making it so that missiles cannot break damage thresholds to kill modules on those ships.
You will need teammates or KBU submunitions to help permanently kill ships.

Missiles tend to come from above, and usually hit center of mass, taking out the middle stack. Gunfire tends to disable the large container banks first, then the small ones second. It is possible to set up DC and arrange where missiles are stored in anticipation of this.
On the triangular hull, you can also try to angle your container banks away from gunfire and even make the belly of the CLN tanky.

I have made some example CLNs for players to try out. I do not want to make a steam upload, so they are located in the AFK voice channel chat on the main discord.
THE R2 BOXES ARE OUTDATED, MAKE THEM ACT/WAKE-reject/[ACT]
Control-F for "PreciousCargo"

Note that they all require quite heavy use of ToTs. Minimum double ToT to penetrate capital ship PD.