Fighters rule |
I've been struggling with some ship designs trying to design a ship that will be effective against the AI ships in the space simulator and all my regular ship designs are flops- frigates, destroyers, light cruisers vs. AI frigates. I like to use shields and energy weapons while the AI uses DUC and armor. The AI ships would easily defeat my ships even though my ships have better tech (i.e. my energy weapons higher level than his DUC, and my shields higher level than his armor). It was so bad that even a level 3 destroyer of mine couldn't defeat a level 4 frigate of the enemy, which had level 5 DUC and I had level 8 Anti Proton guns, level 8 shields.
Anyway, I decided to try fighters and oh man what a difference. Just a few fighters killed that frigate, half the cost of the destroyer. So I build a fleet of 4 carriers with total of 120 fighters and it's like I acitvated god mode... The swarm of fighters just glide through space like a swarm fo locusts and anything they come accross almost immediately blows up, even planets with all their population. Thats kind of funny, fighters performing complete genocide on a planet's population from space in a matter of seconds- but that's for another thread.
Anyway, looks like I'll just be building fighters and carriers from now on, much cheaper (overall including the carriers) and much more effective. My carriers also have a space yard so they can replace lost fighters without returning to my colonies. Not that I really lose many fighters anyway... just ran over the AI's main fleet of 20 mixed frigates/destroyers and all I lost was 5 or 6 fighters
Fighers are way over powered
Fighers are way over powered in my opinion. Especaily once you start to get +50 tech guns, once you reach 100 tech guns you can have fighters that are individualy doing 5-8000 points of damage every 2 seconds, without any sheilds just using ECM for defense and still only taking a couple of casualties for taking down dreadnaughts.
I think small weapons should max out at lvl 50, and that point defense needs to be improved so it can deal with fighters better. Bomblets are cool, but fire to slowly and the rules the game uses for targeting PD don't work very well.
However there are modders who are trying to find ways to deal with some of these problems.
Bad scaling for fighter weapons
If you've ever noticed, both full scale weapons and small weapons increase their damage by 5kT/level. Small weapons are smaller, cost less, but still fire at the same rate as their larger counterparts. This means that smaller weapons will dish out massive amounts of damage for their size. It's a horrible balance problem.
DUCs at level 50 do ~260 damage. That's 8.7 dmg/kT and 130 dmg/s
Small DUCs at level 50 do ~250 damage. That's 83 dmg/kT and 125 dmg/s
Each Small DUC can keep up with a normal DUC, but is 1/10 of the size. That doesn't make any sense.
-----
Give me atmopshperic manipulation cannons, or give me death!
Dealing with fighters
I think small weapons should max out at lvl 50, and that point defense needs to be improved so it can deal with fighters better. Bomblets are cool, but fire to slowly and the rules the game uses for targeting PD don't work very well.
However there are modders who are trying to find ways to deal with some of these problems.
Yep, there are modders trying to fix the problem. Fighters are quite ballanced in my mod, you need swarms of them to kill heavily armored ships, but the time it takes depend on their loadouts (rockets and torps are deadly against ships, but normal guns aren't so good). Fighters do quite well against the smallers ships and other fighters though. It's all in the way my mod handle armor and shields, it's not just about stacking lots of weapons, they need some power to pierce the heavier armor and damage to shields is reduced by a %...
I'm almost done making my next alpha of Inter-Related tactical mod, should be out later today.
Merry xmas and all that bollocks.
Cool will try and have a look at it later, getting stuck into the whole xmas thing now against my wishes *GRRR*
Yep, Stock Ai is absolutely
Yep, Stock Ai is absolutely clueless about fighters... doesnt't produce them, doesn't use carriers (it builds them, just doesn't put fighetrs on them...), doesn't scramble them in planetary defence even if it has them in cargo, doesn't put effective defences on its ships. 3 or 4 dozens fighters will have you rule any battle (at the beginning of the game, just a dozen or less).
It is a bit better with the verious mod arounds (at least, PD is thought of at that point), but not that much.
If I'd find another two or three players in my area I'd like to set a lan game (is it possible at all, haven't looked into it at all) to have a bit of competition... at that point, we would probably hve the equivalent of space Midway and Coral Sea battles...
A