Power of Custom Formations

I'd like to hedgehog my ships, that is stack them together so they can fire (and defend) at the same range. Its hard to do a custom formation for that.

You know just today I was thinking exactly how many fighters it would take to destroy say a small fleet of 50 ships...sad I know! but it was just to show that fighters are not the be all and end all that they have been made out to be. Now I don't think I have too...your picture says it all!

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stacked a bit too high for my liking there, I'd like to be able to have my ships mostly on the same plane though that would leave me more vulnerable it seems like stacking is an exploit

In Star Fleet Battles you could stack to your hearts content but if a ship blows up it damages any ships nearby (in this case all of them). Damage a stack enough you could set up a cascading explosion that would take them all out. It may be interesting to have this in SE. Fighter swarms couldn't help being too close to a ship when they blow it up. Now that would take the sting out of those uber-powerful fighters (and my ships would have to stop using a point blank offense!).

The concept is called AOE i believe... basically splash damage. And I don't think it can be done in SEV. So yes the stack is king.
SEV, more than a feeling.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that range is only calculated in the horizontal plane. Therefor you could theoretically stack your units infinitely high and they would still all have the same range. Sounds more like an exploit to me.

I don't think long processing times would be an issue if there's thread parallellism for rendering graphics and physics separately, although I'm not sure what the degree of physics calculations is we're talking about in the current game. These days all CPUs sold are multicore anyway, but patching an existing piece of software for that may be a bit too much work to favor it instead of switching to an entilely new game engine.

More important question: can custom formations be used as an exploit on PBW? I would hope the system keeps these things a level playing field!

Formations are restricted to what is available in the data files. Users cannot add their own custom formations.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I would argue that your fleet's success against fighters is not due to formation, but rather due to the unbalanced AP beams in BM. The to-hit bonus, combined with cheap expense and decent range and damage make them the ultimate ship-mounted weapon in BM. The to-hit bonus is so powerful, it makes all other direct-fire weapons pale in comparison, and even negates the defensive bonuses of fighters (since AP beams are also one of those "target anything and everything" weapons... i.e. they have no flaws and lots of benefits).

Conversely, weapons like the high-energy magnifier are near worthless thanks to their to-hit penalty. I don't understand its existance in BM. Why not just remove it, rather than making it so blatently bad, and probably hosing crystalline AI ship design in the process?

To-hit is pretty much everything in BM, for direct-fire weapons, since care has been taken to balance their range and ship speeds decently, as well as balancing PD with seekers. AP beams are king for that reason, and that's why your ships best the fighters. They wouldn't fare as well with any other weapon, I'm thinking, without some serious penalty (like sheer cost, for PPBs, for example).

From the screenshot, It doesn't look like the costs of the fighters vs the defending ships is too well balanced either. A battleship costs as much as around 70-80 small fighters in BM. Just what you've got pictured looks like several hundred fighters worth of resources. Even if the entire enemy fleet is similar in value, a faster group of fighters will naturally separate from the main group, and cause said fleet to be divided and conquered -- essentially amplifying the distribution issue that your formation addresses, and the other formation does not.

Test an equal value of fighters, pre-launched so their can maintain a tight group, against your fleet -- even with its unbalanced AP beams. The fighters will be victorious if they are using incinerator or graviton weapons (or some of the racial techs), or if your PD is anything less than supurb, they will decimate you if they have torpedos.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, by itself -- fighters *should* be the scissors to another tech's paper. I just think there's no rock out there to smash the all-incinerator beam fighter addict at all. You might argue that graviton weapons are *only* decent on fighters (and cost a fair amount to research), making the graviton-fighter-user utterly predictable (which is a severe disadvantage)... but the same cannot be said for incinerators in BM.

I think fighters should have a strategic penalty to outweigh these tactical and their other strategic advantages... high maintenance (true in real-life for fighters as well), for example, for a powerful unit you can produce speedily and anywhere.

At the ranges depicted in the battle, MBs would probably be just as effective. They might hit a little bit less (10% less at 40 range) but they are doing 15-20% more damage per kT.

As a side note, I did drop the to hit penalty on the Crystalline HEM for the next update. However, the general weakness of the APB versus some of the other DF weapons is that it loses about 30% of its effectiveness against Emissive Armor, while other DF weapons like HEM only lose 5% etc. Weapons like Ripper Beams or Meson Blasters are intended as shorter range weapons, which do a bit more damage per kT but hit slightly less.

Remember, Crystalline ships will usually use a mix of their racial weapons. Their ships usually have to do much less damage to disable/destroy an enemy because many of their weapons skip armor. So maybe the HEM is not as great all-around as an APB, but it's effective enough to knock shields out almost as fast.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Fighters armed with the small incinerator beam can defend themselves pretty well against oncoming interceptors, whereas AM torp armed fighters cannot, and they can still punch through emissive armor decently well, while being relatively cheap to produce in quantity.

Balancing escort fighters with torpedo bombers is a tough balancing act, and thus small AM torps deserve a little extra oomph, I think. I haven't used them enough to really say they are too powerful or too weak... your opponent is almost definately required to research fighters with good dogfighting weapons to combat them, however, which may be a little unbalancing in and of itself (having to research a load of different techs, and then build your fleet around them, merely to defend yourself against a couple).

The front-loaded nature of AM torp damage, and 100%-to-hit if the PD guns are firing at the fighters, of a TON of incoming torps, pretty much annihilates the first few ships of any formation, no matter their size. You could claim that "AM torps are real easy to shoot down"... except you only have N PD guns to actually shoot. The sheer quantity of incoming torps will overpower almost any reasonable PD -- thus the only real defense is fighters of your own, used as interceptors.

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"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

That's only really true for regular mounted guns, which are pretty rare. The advantage of the AP beam increases as its damage goes up, and the range of engagement increases -- both of which happen with large, huge, massive mounted weapons.

I only think they are just slightly outta whack... its not too far off from a decent balance with other "basic" DF weapons like blasters, incinerators, etc. like they should have 60-70% the regular range penalty instead of 50%, or their damage should drop off a bit faster to keep the balance there when the larger mounts up the damage overall vs emissive armor, etc. Its enough to make a difference, however.

If this decreases the effectiveness of regular mount AP beams even more... I think that's okay. Primarily because regular mount AP beams are an early-game occurance, where having standoff DF weapons isn't really limited by emissive armor as much, and where the +hit bonus is even more of a bonus factor, due to the small ships involved. Regular mount AP beams would suffer a bit in the endgame for it (not much, IMO, their damage output/kT/cost is still probably close to that of any other weapon, even vs max level emissive armor with the huge +hit at max range), but I think that's a fair exchange -- if you want tiny standoff DF ships in the late game, don't use AP beams. Heck, there are hardly any other situations where using AP beams is not an advantage anyway. If that one situation was it, I think that would be acceptable.

+hit scales the damage up in a superlinear fashion to non +hit weapons, with range -- so +5% to hit at a range of 20 may yield a +9% damage increase over a weapon of equal damage, vs ships of say +30% defense ((0.6 * X) / (0.55 * X)) at the same range, but a +25% tohit bonus at a range of 100 could yield a +125% difference with the same setup ((0.45 * X) / (0.2 * X)) . That's titanic, and probably beats a small drop in performance vs emissive armor at any range, in the endgame.