Launching Fighters |
Just had my first battle experience in game when dirty alien refused remove their ships from my sector and boldy answered to my demands with message that they dont think i can make them leave. So i had send our fleet to teach them a lesson, they had 5 destroyers, while i had 1 organic frigate (explorer) and 4 organic carriers with approx. 60 organic fighters onboard. I ordered carriers launch all fighters and then targeted destroyers one by one, in end they had damaged my carriers very badly, 3 of 4 was over 85% damaged, all that damage did happen because most of my fighters after launched didnt do anything but stand in space, eventually i got some of them on move but then noticed they dont fire targets for some reason so i had to ram enemy ships with 'em. Finally i won with ramming tactic, but now im interested what was reason to those fighters not fire targets? All of em was same design and as about 30% of em did fire i dont see any design flaws there. A bug perhaps or i just dont know how to do it right? Also after fight i could'nt retrive those fighters from space for some reason, even one of my carriers was unharmed, lucky bastard 
Anyone have any experiences from same kind of fleet battles?
Fighter problems workarounds (maybe)
In the stock game, one carrier with 60 fighters should be able to annihilate 5 destroyers all by itself and take no damage. But, as SirKid said, there seems to be an intermittent bug in the fighters that will cause them to lose all their supplies and ordnance when they are either launched from the planet into an existing fighter group or transferred on board a carrier. Then, when they launch, they draw supplies and ordnance from the carrier.
The best way to get around this bug is to alter the design of your fighters by reducing the number of engines to at most 12. Then, load up your Carrier with lots of spare Supplies. You might want to modify your VehicleSizes.Txt file in your Data directory so that the Fighter Bays only take up 40% rather than 50% of the hull space. This is Requirement 7 Formula for the Light Carrier, Carrier and Heavy Carrier. PM me if you need help with this.
In my last game, it seemed like this problem went away when I researched one or two levels of Cargo. Or maybe it went away when I had two generations of fighters or two types of fighter on my carrier or... I don't really know. Except that I know that later in the game, my fighters were *NOT* drawing supplies from the carrier when they first launched after being transferred from the planet.
Anyways, hope that helps a tiny bit--at least knowing others of us are frustrated by this too...

Supply/Ordinance
Make sure you included ordinance/supply storage on the fighters, too, common problem.
There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.




It might be a supply or
It might be a supply or ordnance problem. Carring that many fighters your carrier probly does not have enough supplies or ordance for them all. If the fighters launched with out supplies or ordnance they will not attack. If you have the file saved, reload and see if thats the case.