Of course I idealized the situation. I was just trying to answer; in a scientific, quantifiable manner; a simple set of questions as follows:
ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, does having a carrier bays make your fighters more effective against enemy fighters?
====If so, is this always the case or is it situations?
=========If bays are situationally advantageous, how much difference do they make in various situations?
=========What is the best ratio of bays to squadrons in the situations where bays are advantageous?
Note that I was only interested in the effect of bays on fighter vs. fighter combat. So, I isolated the variable of the presence or absence of carrier bays to answer these questions. The underlying assumptions here were that 1) the fighters on both sides were equally set to attack each other, 2) the fighters on both sides were evenly matched in all respect except for 1 side having a carrier and Cautious orders, and 3) everything else going on in the “background” (that is, the hypothetical “real battle”) affected the fighters of both sides equally.
The answers to the above questions, when framed as stated, is that bays are definitely advantageous in certain situations but not in others, as I explained in my previous posts. And this really shouldn’t come as a surprise. I think most folks accept the value of cruiser repair modules, and bays are just fighter repair modules.
Having established to my satisfaction that fighter bays do in fact have some intrinsic value in the context of purely fighter vs. fighter engagements, it’s possible to move on to questions of whether this value is worth the costs at the higher level of the overall battle. But at this level, things are much harder to quantify. So I’d say it’s more a matter of whether you prefer to play with rocks, paper, or scissors.
Fighters armed with no weapons will ultimately get ignored in the end. I have tried that tactic and found that after the first melee when a new target is acquired it will ultimately be an armed vessel not a disarmed (or unarmed) one. Especially if retaliate or rescue is chosen as an unarmed fighter won’t trigger those buttons. That’s why my decoys always have grade a rockets.
True about the lures - and the complaints - but exploiting the weakness in the AI is is close as we can come to exploiting the fallibilities of human nature, nobody cheats at war - they exploit. The problem in the end though is that once an exploit is discovered it can easily be countered - you fix your fighters to cruisers, I fix mine to disposable picket frigates, to be unleashed in one fell swoop at an offending cruiser.
Rocket fighters can’t lure in small quantity though, they will get hit and die. The weaponless fighter lure works best when the other guy for some reason set high priority against fighters and you are not using other fighters. I mean they work wonders sometime when literally 1000 fighters got distracted by 60 of those things instead of killing my cruisers. Or put 2 on top of my anti fighter tank which lures all those fighters to that direction, then focus on a 20 armored tank with multiple repair that they can never break.
While lure kinna kills the point on the challenger side, I personally got no problem using lures when I am hosting, or in SAC/NEC. If the other guy can’t figure out a way around my lure/tank/weapon setup knowing that they are there, I don’t see how that’s my fault.
I don’t watch whale watch. In fact I don’t watch television.
While I’m not going to argue with 123stw’s greater experience, there are a few things regarding fighters and carrier bays I’d like to discuss. I’ve noticed in a number of battles a fighter has taken hits solely to it’s weapons, rendering it unarmed. Now it’s not taken engine damage, so it’s no slower than it’s wingmen, nor has it taken sufficient damage to trigger the vulture order. Now assuming the same rules apply to fighters as to cruisers, at this point, this unarmed fighter isn’t going to be tanking hits for his mates as he’ll be ignored in favour of his more dangerous wingmates. He’s not doing any damage, nor is he absorbing any so what role is he playing? None. Surely it’s better for him to go off, strap some more guns to his craft and get stuck back in than just taking a joy ride until he’s the only target in range of some enemies guns?
This sort of thing isn’t something that happens all the time, but it does happen often enough for me to notice it. What if we take a handful of carrier bays (two or three depending on fleet size) and set the cautious order as low as possible? Fighters stay in the fight until nearly dead (at which point they’re highly unlikely to get home) or they’ve lost their guns. So they’re always capable of fighting back without running for it while relatively healthy lessening the fighter firepower of the fleet.
In theory anyway…not had a chance to put it into practice yet.
Just be sure that all your carrier bay eggs are in 1 basket. Any advantage there is to having carrier bays is short-circuited if you have too few too close to the fight.
I hadn’t thought to try that before. As it turns out, it works brilliantly. Without cautious orders, a weaponless fighter will go to a bay and then circle around where ever he left the cruiser. But with cautious, they will rejoin the battle afterwards, and the 100% cautious makes sure he doesn’t leave unless he needs to. Great find Redd13! (just tested this, and it worked great!)
I also noticed something about repair behaviour. It turns out that a fighter will ALWAYS be ejected from the bay the second it hits 100% hull (even if it still has a dead armor plate). However, modules are ALWAYS repaired in order. If you place the armor on the slot with the lowest ID, you can ensure it is always repaired before the fighter leaves the carrier.
Example:
Federation Leopard:
Armour in Upper Left Hardpoint → Always fixed first
Armour in Lower Right standard slot → Never fixed at all
Unfortunately, this isn’t possible to do with every fighter, since some of them are single weapon fighters with the hardpoint being the lowest ID (like the Phalanx), but you can try to work around it by placing armor in the next lowest slot. There are also some hulls with the hardpoint being the highest ID slot (like the Ballista and Tarantula), so you can put armor anywhere. The module ID order doesn’t always make sense, so be sure to check it out, either on the deployment screen (modules are listed in ID order) or in the data files.