My vote would be for making the basic hulls weigh more, and modules less. If it means torpedo boats are closer to the speeds of other fighter types, I’d say that’s good since their dramatically lowered survivability makes them a tad pointless right now. Ditto for fighter armor.
I’m not so sold on the fighter engine stacking, simply because the empty slots are better than having extra engines (and that’s before adding on extra power cells). Lighter modules will mean that another engine, without even needing to be given more thrust than they have now, should be worth it.
In my opinion, fighter hull weights that cap the speed at about 3.0 would do a lot to even things out, as I perceive 3.0+ being where fighters become immune to anti-fighter weapons. I’m all for fast fighters being good, but I’d also like to see heavily armored fighters, fighter-bombers, and other things being viable.
I think the idea of making fighter hulls heavier and modules lighter makes sense. Torpedoes are prohibitively weighty, meaning that they get one or two passes and are killed, even by weapons not really meant for tracking fighters. Rockets are effective on a few chassis, but Lasers seem more effective at killing big stuff since they fire inside shields, and rockets simply have no hope of catching fighters in a dogfight.
The biggest problem however, is that only the Rebels have any good fighters. They produce more power, which means they can mount weapons and engines more easily, even bypassing generators entirely. Not to mention that they have a good number of slots. The other races all have the following problems:
Too few slots. A 2 slot, 1 hardpoint hull that doesn’t generate at least 5 power can’t be used to be a laser fighter, since it will need a generator, which slows it down far too much. If you give it rockets, it’s slower, wastes .8 or so power, and isn’t as good as a laser fighter in general. 3 and 1 hulls can be good, but they need a decent amount of inherent power, or they end up quite slow due to either the weight of the laser or of an extra generator.
Bonuses that don’t do anything. Only speed bonuses matter right now, which gives an edge to rebels naturally. However, the hull bonuses are negligible (10% more hp out of 40 isn’t even another weapon hit of survivability), the power bonuses as they stand don’t actually give enough of a boost to equip any extra modules. You always end up shy of the .8 or 1.0 extra you’d need to make a laser a pulse laser or get another engine, and the only ones that have the boost already have enough power inherently to get the .2 you need for rockets. Thus, the bonus is pointless. Lastly, since armor is a bad thing to put on fighters at the moment, the armor bonus isn’t any good either.
These two problems are why almost every top entry on the Survival mode are Rebels. They get fast, powerful laser fighters for very little cost. You can run several cruisers and three squadrons of fighters, which seriously tips the balance in their favor. The fighters still have a hard time killing other enemy fighters, but they’ll never die unless something tractors them. Which is easy to prevent by having them escort a cruiser and having the cruisers go for enemy frigates first.
And having those fighters is absolutely key in making fleets. If you don’t you will tend to get your cruisers destroyed by enemy fighters long before your shields are ever breached by enemy cruisers. It’s possible to do well without them, as evidenced by the handful of high-scorers in Survival from the other races, but it’s much harder and relies on having cruisers/frigates managing to actually stop the enemy fighters, which they often can’t seem to hit.
The problem with the faster missiles is that they’re great at doling out damage in short range as they hit sooner and fire again sooner… if they hit. Otherwise the missiles will circle around for ages and not make a lot of difference. First of all I’d like to stop the missiles from circling at all if they’re never going to hit. Have them stop tracking after the first pass or after a set amount of time. Secondly I’d like to reduce the fuel on missiles. Have it so that they only just have enough to travel the full range of the missile and then explode, currently they often circle around for ages. I also think that missiles need to be more damaging seeing as they can miss and can be shot down unlike other weapons. I really like the disruptor and ECM missiles, lets have more variety of missiles, like ones that cause ships to turn off their engines or ones that bypass a portion of shields (phased torpedoes) or ones that stop shield regeneration or armour repairs for a few seconds.
I agree about the overshooting missiles thing - I think this is especially problematic with ‘mirv’-ish missiles that split, which is almost all of them - basically, if I recall from my modding experiments, it seems like as soon as the mirv spits the missiles all get their fuel counters reset - so if they use up 500 fuel getting to the point where they mirv, they then get that 500 fuel back - not cool.
But speed trumps all other design choices. If it’s a cruiser, speed is pointless, it will have 0-1 engines. Fighters and frigates only seem to work well in swarms of fast ships.
The best fighter design I have right now, is the achilles hull, with a level 1 engine and 1 laser. I leave the rest empty since it will only slow the fighter down. Armor is horrible in comparison to speed and adds unneeded cost. And sadly these are just too deadly for their cost. The only strategies that beat swarms of speedy fighters is defensive speedy fighters or tons of cruiser defenses. Typically speedy fighter can destroy at least 5X their cost.
Frigate design is a similar process, where swarms of speedy frigates do best. You can’t build a decently shielded/armored frigate anyway, the only possible method is to put a heavily armored cruiser in front of them to draw fire.
Speed adds far more potential for survivability and damage output on the smaller ships, and currently seems to drive most of the better designs.
The missiles are a very noticeable improvement, I feel, although a bit more improvement wouldn’t go amiss.
Missiles are the most disadvantaged weapon in the game- there’s a whole tech line dedicated to shooting them down (very effectively), as well as the need to travel to the target (especially since misses delay the next firing cycle). There needs to be fairly strong advantages to counter this. Already they have great penetration values for both shields and armour, but I don’t think some seriously competitive DPS is out of the question. There are a lot of ways to stop a missile from hitting you, but when it does, let’s see some fireworks.
I think that if missiles miss, they should detonate pretty much immediately.
I agree with Spinaljack that it makes no sense to let a missed missile take up a spot in your targetting computer just because it has fuel left, since it’s very unlikely to actually hit. You don’t want an errant missile flying off into space and smacking into a colony ship hundreds of years later. I think missiles already do detonate as-is when they’re out of fuel, it just has to do that a few seconds after it misses as well.
This should achieve the desired result of missile systems not being so great at long range (because they have to wait and guide the missile in), but more and more damaging at short ranges.
Decoys should probably continue to circle for awhile, but they shouldn’t take up the spot of regular missiles since they don’t need guidance (they aren’t trying to hit with decoys, just confuse point-defense systems).
As for fighters, there seems to be an agreement that heavier hulls and lighter components (like the developer first suggested) might help. Cliffski’s aware there’s a problem and we just have to wait for him to decide on and implement a solution.
I think the blast of a cruiser blowing up is a bit too damaging. Basically one cruiser on cruiser explosion pretty much rips off an entire armor section from every ship in range. This is especially frustrating when you have ships on escort that fly very close to one another with no seperation behavior and ESPECIALLY annoying on survival where the enemy ships basically rush to point blank and even sometimes spawn directly on top of you and the destruction of your armor means sure death from the wave after wave of respawning fighters.
Ah but that is one of the aims of the detonation blast, to ensure players do not pack their ships together too tightly. Plus it fits in with the sort of ‘bullshit-physics’ of space battle movies. If a star destroyer blows up and you are in the millennium falcon flying right past it, you really would be toast.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be there, I’m saying it’s too strong. Unless you set your troop in a rigid formation there is no way to STOP them from packing together. You do not have a command that tells your ships to maintain separation between each other. You do not have a command that tells ships to run away and never let an enemy cruiser get close enough so that their explosion damages them. In other words, you have no control over whether your ships are vulnerable to the explosion of other ships, especially in survival where entire groups rush right on top of you or spawn directly inside your formation. A single cruiser exploding leaves every other cruiser as nothing more than food for high speed laser fighters who can now tear them apart because the armor is gone.
If you balance reactor explosions for Survival (meaning, a strong explosion doesn’t vaporize an armor section) then they will be pointlessly weak in normal combat.
try using cruisers with fewer reactors, or keeping the range open so you arnt in danger range of enemy cruisers.
The biggest problem is the other team’s ships getting up in my face and blowing up. I’m not having trouble with my ships blowing each other up because my ships wouldn’t even be blowing up if it weren’t for their armor being just instantly stripped off all the time by kamikaze cruisers. I agree that there should be some effect from reactor explosions but I don’t think instantly stripping all armor, regardless of even how much armor repair is left is a very appropriate way of punishing the player they essentially have no control over. There is no way to tell your ships to even TRY to stay separated.
you can however tell your ships to attack enemies at a certain range, and they will actually retreat away from them or circle around them if those ships then get too close.
This command need better control, or ships need an improved turn rate. I’ve been using fast frigates with ion cannons against cruisers, and their worst enemy is the cruiser exploding. Ion cannons have a max range of 550. I actually put the max range of the frigates (0.46 speed) at 700 and keep moving. This way the only way to prevent the fast ships from getting too close to the cruisers. The problem is when they arc away from the cruisers they will often get out of the 550 range of the ion cannons. I’d like to be able to control this so frigates don’t suicide against cruisers, but also don’t fly 900 away from them, out of their own range.
I also have not had good luck with the Keep Moving order, even after the 1.12 update. I’ve watched missile and torpedo ships (cruisers and frigates both) end up wandering pretty much right into the enemy fleet. Part of it does seem to be an issue with the way turning works - it’s linked to forward motion, so ships can’t turn in place, then accelerate away. Thanks to the crummy turning radius, they have to do a huge U-turn right through the enemy’s field of fire.
The other part of it is that it is in fact a “keep moving” order, not a stay-at-range order. Once your ships finish their circle out away from the enemy, they’ll come right back in for more, rather than cutting their engines at max range.
I think we need two separate orders here, one for close-in ships like ion frigates that you want to keep moving continuously to dodge fire, and another for long-range ships like missile, torpedo, and plasma boats that you simply want to keep away from enemies.
Having sat frustrated quite a few times I think I’ve hit on why my ships always seem to get stuck in a clump both with each other and the enemy where they cannot move. Ships need to either have a non-penetration constant that keeps them from overlapping and returns a highly weighted vector away from collisions OR they need to be able to move through and past each other without collisions. Either one would be a decent fix for the fact that my cruisers almost always seem to get hung up in a giant clump for no good reason even when reasonably fast and put on keep moving, not to mention the cluster fuck whenever I do anything that trys to make them stay together.