It’d be nice for there to be some way of knowing how many fighters were being repaired, yeah.
Obtusely, this reminds me. In the statistics screen after the battle, you get one entry for each squadron of fighters… But it appears to only show the data of an individual fighter from the squadron. It’d be nice if showed something more representative, such as an average across the 16 ships.
This would be fun, but one potential problem with this, is it might mean they launched as a very dense clump (i.e. 10 fighter squadrons in the space you’d normally see 1 squadron,) when the deployment screen seems to be intentionally designed to prevent us deploying ships like that.
Sure, but the problem is that all those fighters would be starting at the same spot on the map. Which means they’ll all pick the same target, and they’ll all arrive at that target at the same time. It focuses your fighters far more than you can when placing each squadron individually. Which means they’ll face less return fire (as they aren’t as spread across the enemy’s front line) and they’ll cooperate better (all hitting the same target, at the same time, at least initially.)
Until there’s a disadvantage for fighters being tightly packed (i.e. some sort of area affect anti fighter weapon) then in most cases, when using fighters offensively, the tighter you can bunch your fighters the better.
Even if I didn’t plan to repair, I’d gladly put a single bay on one of my cruisers, to get this effect.
And on the flip side… Using fighters defensively would be made more difficult, since in that case you want to spread them out more, spread across your frontline to make sure all rocket/torpedo squadrons will get intercepted.
Well I think we need a dedicated order for Carriers and fighters. The cautious order feels clumsy.
On the Carrier Repair order for fighters simply have a tick box for “Start loaded on Carrier”. That way you can choose to have your fighters loaded or not on startup. That would also carry over to weither or not the fighters dock after the battle.
Darth Vader: “Damn that Han Solo! I must fly back to the Death Star for repairs.”
Yeah, I don’t think the nearest carrier is the best of plans. Least Damaged cruiser with a carrier module should do the trick. The exception would probably be if they are escorting the cruiser. But, as has already been discussed, there are many new and interesting avenues this opens.
EDIT: I’m getting a bug with the carrier modules. Sometimes when a cruiser with a carrier is destroyed, there is still a spot on the map that they enemy targets and flies around. I don’t know if it has to do with the fighters being inside when it is destroyed because there was one case where there clearly could not have been any. However, in this case there was one fighter flying very slowly apart from the battle. It was not engaging the enemy or approaching for repairs. I don’t know if that has anything to do with it but it is certainly suspicious.
Yes, I’m seeing this too. In fact, it seems to be happening most times that I fight against carriers.
The ships will just get stuck flying around this radar ghost… I haven’t noticed any ships changing targets to attack the radar ghost, so I think it’s just ships that were targeting something specific that died (or didn’t die correctly…) Once all the ‘real’ enemy are dead, the ships do break off and return home like normal.
That bug also happens if you got fighters in a bay with no more supplies. Enemy fighters that targeted those fighters before they docked fly around the dock point in circles.
Regarding running out of supplies, would it be possible to have a flag set on a bay that says “no more supplies, don’t dock here!”. Here’s why.
I’ve got two carriers on a map, one was running slightly ahead of the other, well, all my fighters wound up using the closer carriers bays till it was out of supplies, to the point where the 1st carrier had 1 bay with 7 fighters cued, totally out of supplies while all the bays on the 2nd carrier were still full. If the first carrier had some sort of “wave off” flag then the fighters could’ve gone to the 2nd carrier.
Another thought on carrier ops. I’d like to see an order for fighters called regroup. I’ve got a big battle, 2 enemy fighter swarms guarding separate cruisers. My fighters sortie and take out the first swarm and then are returning to the carrier for repairs. However when they get repaired they immediately launch and go to fight against the second enemy swarm. One vs 16? Toast.
A “regroup” order in conjunction with “cautious” would have the fighters launch and circle the carrier until either a set number or all the remaining fighters in the squadron have come back for resupply, and then carry out their other orders.
This is an important point that I noticed too. If a carrier is far away, all the bays actually end up doing is thinning the fighter pack early (since they exit the battle when they are damaged instead of when they are destroyed) then sending them back into battle single file to be destroyed almost instantly.
You ideally want the entire pack to decide that it has taken too much damage and to fly back to the carrier, or for the repaired planes to wait in the carrier for their comrades to return before setting off again.
I’m testing some fixes for the carrier modules AI right now. I’ve just fixed two phenomena:
Fighters would pick a destination module, but if whilst en-route, it ran out of supplies, they would not re-route themselves. I think I’ve fixed that
When modules ran out of supplies, they would not tell all the docked fighters to undock, thus effectively rendering them unusable for the rest of the battle. I think I’ve fixed that (they undock)
What I should do post-release, is a new order where fighters are cautious only if a carrier is available. That needs alot of testing, so i won’t stick it in now, but it would certainly allow more tactical flexibility.
Carrier ops have a lot of potential for a lot more depth. I’d like to see carriers that “delay” launching their fighters so you can’t tell on the pre battle screen if you’re facing fighters or not. That way bombers could be more “protected” from interceptors until the carrier reaches a player determined range, launches fighters, they group and then strike out for target.
The fighters separating because of repair time in the bays could be resolved with a simple check-box option for each named something like “Stay grouped” It would cause the entire squadron to do actions together, like head back to repairs together, and wait to attack until together, or even always target the same ship.
Squadrons not checked would allow ships to act independantly, splitting targets, heading back for repairs on individual ship status, etc.
Don’t know the complexity of the code behind it, but the same control fields should work for wether or not the box is checked, just compaired to the whole squadron vs individual ship depending on the check.
Perhaps with the above post idea a sliding bar option for fighter squadron integrity should be included. When a certain percentage of a fighter squadron breaks off for repairs the rest of the squadron also returns to orbit the carrier until everyones repaired.
This should prevent the lone undamged fighters from being picked off while everyone else is reparing.
Perhaps I have a different opinion than most, but I think you could apply the same sort of judgment to all ships with cautious orders.
As the game works right now, having a non-repairable ship retreat is of no advantage in terms of honor or chance of winning. It is almost always better for a damaged ship to fight to the death, as it will divert enemy fire from the more effective undamaged ships while it lasts (and its weapons might deal a little bit of damage before it explodes). Heck, even the reactor explosion itself is a potent weapon for cruisers that get in close to the enemy.
What I suggest is that the cautious order be ignored if the ship has no internal ability to repair (because it lacks repair modules or because they are out of supplies) or if the ship is a fighter that cannot be repaired on a carrier (because there are no carriers alive or because they’re all out of repair supplies). This would allow the cautious order to be useful to get damaged ships out of the fray while they are patched up, but won’t result in ships uselessly headed for the edge of the map.
I like the idea of having fighter squadron integrity too, but I suspect it will need to wait for more sophisticated squadrons and groups in general. Right now, I’m pretty sure each fighter is effectively acting alone.
Ahh, but the game awards victory at 90% killed… If I can get a heavily damaged ship to take itself out of the fight, that may actually gain me victory. The most obvious and common example, is in a fight where your fighters have won a crushing victory, but will need more time to work through the enemy cruisers - time you won’t have if your last cruiser goes up in flames.
Also… You mentioned reactor explosions. Those tend to hurt your own ships a lot more than they do the opponents (although I’ve never used cautious to protect myself from that particular case, they don’t really do that much damage, only really an issue if you’ve got cruisers going up close to frigates… I even tried making cruiser-bombs once, just engines and powerplants for a nice big blast, but they didn’t really deal much damage at all.)
I’m of mixed opinions about fighter squadron integrity. If damaged ships don’t rush straight back to the carrier, they will die. However I definitely wouldn’t want the whole squadron retreating just because one or two were damaged. Maybe if the fighters could wait for a certain number of repaired ships to be circling the carrier before they depart, that would be helpfull, but I’m not sure how easily this could be implemented (as it’d mean mixing squadrons into new ones, effectively.)
I assume that the fighters would retreat individually. do squadrons have any effect after deployment? or do fighters in the same squad just tend to pick the same targets for most of the game?
Squadrons do seem to stick together a bit, normally, though - if you have a massive dogfight in the middle, sometimes you see what looks like whole squadrons coming out chasing individual ships that are returning for repairs. I’ve never moused over to check to see if they are all the same squadron or not, when this happens.
On finishing their repairs, ships seem to pick a new target independently, rather than returning to squadron. Again though, I haven’t paused the game to verify this is what’s happening, rather than just what it looks like.
