I absolutely LOVE the idea of having fighter speed increase the tracking of its guns! It just plain makes sense, though it requires some reason to not just load up with engines. That reason could be armor, though it’s not at the moment.
Fighter armor, currently, is completely worthless. It makes a fighter slow as snot and extremely expensive without actually granting the survivability that (cheap) engines do. Engines should cost much more than armor, at least for fighters, and armor should be more effective. If there was a hierarchy of fighters where you could armor a bomber well enough to shrug off fighter laserfire and light point-defense, but be too slow to outrun rocket fire, then fighter design might take on its own rock-paper-scissors system.
Actually, it’s below the tracking of fighter lasers (2.80), so I suspect it’s not that great at all compared to the 3.08 & 3.12 speed rebel laser fighters. Wondering now if they’re a big reason why the survival scoreboard is exclusively rebel property.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Simply making fast interceptors better at hitting fast-moving targets would exert pressure to add armor to bombers, but if the armor isn’t good enough it might just lead to the abandonment of bombers altogether.
I mentioned making weapon accuracy a function of both the target and attack’s speed a while ago. It would have implications for every class of ship. Say that accuracy is some function of (weapon tracking+attacker’s speed-target’s speed). Now fast frigates are more accurate, and harder to hit. Now having a bunch of plasma cruisers with no engines get destroyed by fast 0.20 cruisers, blazing for a cruiser :). I think it could add a lot more depth in deciding how many engines to put on a ship.
On a totally different note, the three level of fighter power generators don’t seem very balanced. If you can just use a level 1 generator and put two level 1 engines on it is almost as good as as a level 3 generator with two level 2 engines (can’t even use level 3 because that generator only gives 2.0 more power). Now that might put fighters over the hump of getting 3.0+ speed right now, and make them tons better at the moment. But once fast fighters aren’t practicably invincible to everything but tractor beams I think it will make more of a difference.
I’m pretty sure you hit the nail on the head. I’ve had a few Survival games now where my capital ships have all died, but my fighters flew on and continued to blast away at the enemy capital ships. Once you lose all of your capital ships, your score can’t increase anymore, but it was till fun to watch a couple of squadrons of fighters blow up ships 1000x their size.
I don’t like the idea of the speed of the weapon platform changing the speed of the weapon tracking. It doesn’t make any sense is the thing, and it’s attempting to solve a problem (fast fighters can’t dogfight-- they can’t hit eachother) that should be solved in a more direct manner. Weapons need to be able to predict where a fast-moving object is going to be, at least some of the time, and successfully intercept them.
I suppose things would be better if we couldn’t stack engines like we can now, and fighters don’t break that 2.5 barrier where they become invincible. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of making really fast space-superiority fighters and the like, but the implementation right now is broken.
I haven’t found tractor beams to solve the problem, since they’re too expensive in terms of Power / Crew to deploy enough to make a dent, and the new super tractor beam seems even less effective. Deploying a whole fleet of anti-fighter cruisers got zilch, while a whole fleet of anti-fighter frigates with regular tractor beams at least began to whittle the enemy down. It still wasn’t enough, the frigates all died before the 8 squadrons of rebel super-fast fighter did.
I think the armor nerf needs some adjustment. There seems to be a flat critical hit chance, meaning a swarm of fighters with lasers very can quickly annihilate an absurdly heavily armored (110 average) alliance cruiser. A cruiser with regular levels of armor goes down even easier. It’s rather pointless to bring along torpedoes right now if super-fast fighters with beam weapons are both 1) impossible to kill, and 2) able to defeat any level of armor. Even a single-engine fighter with beams is innately faster and more survivable than a torpedo bomber, and so more worth the money.
I’m all for there being a chance to do damage against even the most absurdly shielded / armored ship, but it would be nice to have a proportional scale to balance it out. It seems like, and I could be wrong, that low-penetration fast-firing weapons are now better against armor, than a high-penetration slow-firing weapon that’s 1 point lower than the enemy’s average armor. I base this purely on how effective beam fighters are against cruisers now.
I agree with Stromko on all points. Combining ship speed and tracking speed only confuses things. The problems right now are:
[]You can make a fighter fast enough that it can’t be hit[/]
[]Tractor beams are largely ineffective[/]
[]Fighters can quickly tear apart heavily shielded and armored cruisers[/]
I think there are direct solutions to each:
[]Make more fast weapons. All ships should have some weapons that are very fast tracking, short interval, short range, low damage, low armor and shield penetration. They are really only good against fighters. Perhaps the point defense systems could double as this.[/]
[]Tractor beams need to work better. Make them smarter (so they don’t team up on the same ship) and make them faster (let them last longer with shorter firing intervals)[/]
[]If there is some kind of crit hit system, perhaps remove it entirely, or change how it works (if crit hits currently bypass armor, perhaps make them do significant armor damage instead).[/]
One thing that I have been noticing also is that we don’t have any close range heavy hitting weapons. In Babylon 5 wars for instance, plasma was a close combat weapon. It had horrible targeting at range, but it was designed for in close brutality. If we could add mass drivers or Particle cannons or something for close combat punch… basically something that can actually pierce shields, then that would add some variety. Maybe we could lower the range of fusion cannons and up their shield piercing?
I was also noticing we don’t have equivalents for microwave lasers either (i.e. short range beam weapons that barely damage shields, do NO damage to armor but blow systems out with gusto.)
EDIT to note that maybe I just haven’t looked close enough at the cruiser laser. I should make a spreadsheet.
Use Cruisers lasers, or Ion Cannon for frigates. These weapons have short ranges, have very good shield penetration, and do very high dps (not a lot of damage per hit, but fire very fast). They can’t take down heavy armor, but as long as another weapon can break the armor they will tear up the hull.
We can now make 3.42 laser-totin’ fighters on the Rebel Achilles hull in 1.12. … Empty slots are fun times!
Now they’re cheaper, better, and FASTER. Oh dear. XD Looking forward to seeing how the new tractors stuff helps.
Edit: We now have trivially easy to create STUPIDFAST fighters. What you do is you find a hull which produces power. You stick on any weapon that is within the limits of that power but still leaves enough energy for an engine. You stick on one engine. AWAY YOU GO.
Also there are a number of possible builds where - for instance - two level 2 engines are faster than two level 2 engines and one level 1 engine, for three engines total.
EditEdit: While this build is fast, it is very, very fragile - one sharp tap to the jaw slows it down enough for other fighters to kill it. Also, interestingly, targetting lasers on a fighter make megaton missiles hit them quite regularly. CRAZY.
Yep, definitely did not fix the problem. I think fighter hulls are too light in general. And the rebel fighters also have too much power base. The Achilles produces 5 power and has an empty weight of 1.0. A level 3 engine produces 5 power… and weighs 3.9! That is totally wrong! If anything it should be reversed. More likely all hulls should weigh 5.0-10.0 empty, and make modules lighter if needed. Just don’t reward people for leaving slots empty.
I’m not sure I agree. Leaving a slot empty should be a major sacrifice: that’s one less engine, shield, weapon, or other thing that you get to use. The problem for fighters is, the only things you want are more weapons and faster speed. Weight and power generally make it unreasonable to fill all available slots with weapons, so the obvious answer is to leave it empty and get the speed benefit.
Maybe we need to make weapons use less power so that fitting all weapon slots is a reasonable tradeoff for the speed loss. Maybe we need to give them more secondary modules, like shields. Maybe we should open fighters up to more roles than just fast moving DPS machines.
Consider the target painter. If the thing wasn’t so bloody heavy (25 weight?), it could be really useful: load up a carrier with stupidly powerful missiles and get a fighter squad to paint a target (think the Ghost in Starcraft that paints the target for the nuclear bomb). As it is, though, not only is the fighter defenseless because it has displaced a weapon, it’s a sitting duck because it has been reduced to about 1.0 speed.
On the other hand, I agree that (compared to their Federation counterparts) the Rebel fighters are overpowered. You can make some ridiculous ship designs with Rebel hulls that you couldn’t hope to create (or even counter) with Federation hulls.
It’s certainly not my intention to allow for any faster fighters (quite the opposite). It just doesn’t occur to me when I test and build fleets to leave empty slots on ships. I guess I need to rebalance fighters (again!), maybe consider forcing all slots to be full on fighters, or increasing base fighter hull weight and reducing fighter module weight.
Hopefully all the other fixes and improvements of 1.12 make up for any temporary loopholes. A ton of stuff got fixed and tweaked.
Are missiles more usable now?
I’m finding that rocket fighters make surprisingly good dogfighters when backed by spotter cruisers…
Also, re: Fast Fighters problem - Why not make it so the faster the fighter is, the less accurate its weapons? Basically your fighter’s whirling around at mach 90, and that means that your TARGET relative to you is whipping around at that kind of speed.
Alternately, how about changing fighter hulls as follows:
Remove all ‘free’ power. To compensate, a couple more kinds of reactor, and maybe a couple more slots on most of the fighter hulls. As it stands it is impossible to make a stupidfast fighter that HAS a reactor. I very much like the balance of fighters OTHER than the empty slot/free power problem.
Edit: New Tractor behaviour is much improved - but how about an additional ‘timer’ - if my target is being tractored, wait until it’s not being tractored anymore before firing? That might make multiple tractors a little TOO powerful - a behaviour like this with ECM weaponry would be NASTY.
No, so as to make it so that multiple tractors with one target try cooperate so only one tractor is active on a given target at a given time - so if you have 5 tractor beams which are active for 1 second, but take 5 seconds to recharge before activating, each one will ‘wait’ for an opportunity to tractor its target if possible, so instead of slowing down a target A LOT, it’s slowed down as much as one tractor can slow it, but all the time.
This wouldn’t be very good for slowing down frigates and the like, I imagine, where getting them stationary takes awhile - but for fighter-countering it’d be fabulous.
The tractor beams seem to be a bit better, but are still hampered by the fact that the other weapons don’t prioritize targets that are held in tractor beams.
