Should strike craft engines simply be way more powerfull but with a harsh stacking penalty? To such an extent that dual engines is something unusual that you only see when trying to lug something heavy.
If the powerplants become stronger and manuverthruster don’t count for stacking it should lead to an explosion of component usage. Just add in higher tracking speed for figher anti-fighter weapons and I think the results would become very interesting.
I’m okay with how tractors work now, they probably just recharge too quickly. When located near a friendly fighter squad, they hit on an target, and the entire squad dumps fire on it, killing it in under a second. This is likely keeping the recharge time really low as the beam isn’t running long enough to expend significant power.
The beam weight relationship is interesting. That four engine pig of a fighter I described earlier? It weighs 32. It can still somewhat maneuver when caught by the lighter tractor beams.
The Anti-Fighter missiles in GSB1 had 12.50 tracking; the missiles still missed regularly – even against slow cruisers. Give Tractors a tracking of 8.00-12.00. You can differentiate the tractor systems by Beam Weight, Tracking, and Recharge Speed. For example, the main feature of the Multi-Tractor is 3 beams; make it have a lower beam weight, lower tracking speed, and lower recharge rate relative to the standard Tractor as trade-offs. Frigate Tractors could have low beam weight but a high tracking of 15.00+ for a better hit chance.
An additional option for Tractors is that you could substitute ‘add X weight’ for ‘reduce speed/turning by X%’. This would simplify how Tractors interact with larger/smaller fighters and make it both easier to balance and more intuitive/consistent from the players perspective.
Also, go with what Yurch is proposing with engine weights in the other thread: by increasing engine weight and tweaking thrust/weight ratios, fighters will incur diminishing returns on more engines. This will put a cap on how fast fighters can fly – and it will also encourage the use of other ‘support’ modules for fighters. If fighter weight is concentrated in the engines, there is little benefit to more than 2 engines – leaving slots open for generators to power beam lasers, the tracking podule, or even armor. By going with his suggestion instead of generic stacking penalties, it avoids future balancing problems with the complicated interaction of racial/hull bonuses with stacking penalties.
If you don’t use stacking penalty and only go with high engine weight and trust you would still seec heavy torpedo gunships going the same speed as the fastest light fighter by just slapping more of the engine with the best TWR on.
If you go with stacking penalties, you can have light weight engines with better TWR because they can’t be spammed to move a heavier ship. They would insteald use heavier engines with slightly lower TWR but noticeably higher weight and thrust (allowing them to easily “swallow” the weight of other equipment and still moving say an armored dual pulse gunship at 2.5 and only one engine)
Note though that this would require strike craft generators to be more powerfull soy that you can pull of almost all builds with only a single (but with the changes expensive) generator. If the generators get noticably hevier with each power level it would also steer you towards bigger engines an cap your top speed due to the TWR if you want a high energy loadout.
How is that a bad thing? The important thing is that they will not fly significantly faster than the light fighter, despite all of those (expensive) engines. The whole point is to make different weapon/equipment setups viable (read: around the same speed) without allowing for extreme speeds. Those bombers need that speed to be a viable option. By allowing even bombers to fly at similar speeds to fighters, you simplify your target balancing numbers for anti-fighter weaponry and limit the number of edge-cases that you have to create ‘special conditions’ to deal with - like auto-hit Tractor beams.
The point of my desition is that even the heviest gunship they get a similar speed to a light fighter (just a hair behind due to lower TWR for the big engines) As long they pack two engines and a still decent and survivable speed with only one. Without a penalty the fastest strike craft would be a gunship spamming the engine with the best TWR and other engines that the one with the best TWR will not be used (Maybe to fill the last bit of power)
But fighters DO need to be faster. The whole reason fighters were useful in GSB1 (other than getting under shields) was because speeds of 2.7 to 3.2 were easily reached, often with just one engine. Higher were possible if you built entirely for speed. Unless you’re Yootan you just can’t do that in GSB2, and a fighter just can’t survive if it’s too far down the curve from a 3.0 speed.
Haha, yes, if that was your original intention for bomber builds then the balancing for those weapons has completely failed. The very idea of fighters or gunships presenting a threat of any kind to cruisers without some other cap ship there to puncture the shields and armor first is laughable under the current system. I too like the idea but it’s so far out of reality at the moment that I’m not surprised the idea has never come up.
If you want to accomplish this, you should probably split up the modules available for fighters and gunships. They should only share a few components, and most of those should be “support” modules like armor and tracking modules. Give gunships their own sets of weapons and engines and the reactors to support them. Make their weaponry a lot heavier; make each weapon designed to be effective at damaging one (and one only one) of a cap ship’s three health bars. That way, every single gunship having two weapon modules makes sense; each gunship is required to bring a weapon to crack defense (either shield or armor) and one to damage the hull. You’d be required to field two different variants of gunship in any given battle - either a wing of anti-shield/anti-hull configs and a wing of anti-armor/anti-hull configs, or a wing of anti-shield/anti-armor configs and another of anti-hull/anti-hull configs. Their survivability would need to increase quite a bit, too; it should be really tough to get a gunship to 3.0 speed, but they should be able to carry significantly more armor than they currently do without sacrificing that speed.
Even with these changes I think cruiser should be the maximum hull size that could theoretically be threatened by gunship wings. I’m leery of making a pristine dreadnought vulnerable in any way to strike craft without other cap ships available to soften it up first.
Changes to fighters in this system would be to focus them more heavily on interception and damaging other light craft. They’d exist in two variants as well, interceptors to bring down those gunships before they could strip shields or armor from the cap ships, and air-superiority fighters to sweep away enemy fighter cover so the interceptors can reach those gunships. Their weaponry would need to shift more towards higher-tracking, lower-damage varieties. Their speed should also shift upward. A speed of, say, 2.8 should be fairly easy to reach for all but the heaviest of interceptors carrying the heaviest fighter weaponry, but getting above 3.4 or so should be quite difficult without sacrificing something else.
I’m no mathematician so I’ve got no hard numbers here, just coming off the top of my head based on how current gameplay “feels”.
but then the dreads become overpowered, i’m not saying it should crumple like wet paper to them, but they should pose a threat to them, why because if they don’t, a player has no reason to use destroyers