Has anyone seen this gem of a post over in the other forum?
That player had an interesting suggestion concerning the number of hit points assigned to fighter engine modules; check it out. Perhaps some experimentation by our informal “Mod Patrol” may yield usable results, even coming up with an alternate solution? I think that the last point in that player’s post is the least meddlesome/destructive solution…I really don’t want to see deflector shields on fighters. Introducing even bigger imbalances to correct a lesser one is, ahhh, “suboptimal”.
My own bias is this: I don’t especially like fighters in general, but have warmed to them a lot more once I began getting deeper into the “Star Blazers” mod. (The tech was a major part of those stories.) I like to have modded gadgetry on my own ships that smears fighters into a fine paste before they can unload on me. However, I have seen the same phenomenon that the other player mentioned in his post, despite mucho tweaking of my Cautious order. Therefore, despite my own dislike of fighters I can see that something deeper may be somewhat broken with fighter tech, and at the very least it deserves a look.
I don’t like much fighters, I never managed to make them survive enough and I hated the slowdown they suffer when being hit, and seeing that from my squadrons only a single fighter makes to the carrier didn’t help much (maybe my fighter designs suck). And I agree with you that adding shields will bring more trouble in balancing.
I know that, if one thinks realistically, when a fighter recieves a few shots in its engines, they tend to blow up in a ball of fire, but they are shot there a lot of times during a battle.
I didn’t have any plans of adding much to fighters in the 3xper1ment4l mod but I’ll will try different options to make at least the cautious order and carriers more useful, increasing engine hp based from the damage the anti-fighter weaponary have will be one of the first tests I’ll do when I get some time.
I’ll post here when I get some results.
Mmmm… And now that I think of carriers, I think the corvettes from my mod can get inside a carrier bay >.>
Mod content aside there are 3 things fighters were originally desiged to do
First: provide an escort for a Frigate/Cruiser against other fighters. Enemy fighters try to slip in your escort (in conjunction with some of the cruiser weapons) will chew up such a blitz.
Second: in the event there are no fighters on the map they were meant to seve as more or less kamikaze’s that would whittle down the enemy just enough to make the frigates and cruisers job a relative cakewalk…this is why they are positioned 16 at a time on a map.
third: Fighters are also well served keeping other fighters busy, they go after each other while the cruisers and frigates go ahead and blast each other into oblivion.
That being said…the modded content changes the face of the game by quite a bit: particularly what I call “flagship” class ships (a cruiser/dreadnaught with 10 or more turret points). Such ships have the capacity to place multiple anti fighter weapons like tractor beams and defense lasers while still maintaining an array of 7-9 weapons designed for use against cruisers and frigates.
To that end I have found a shield module with about 40 shield points, a recharge rate of approxiamtely .06 and a resistance of 12 gives fighters a LOT more survivability, in fact it makes ALMOST impervious to other fighters and still makes them relatively easy for frigates or cruiser to shoot down after a few lucky hits
I am also experimenting with what I call a “reinforced hull” an armor module that actually has HP…because the damage distribution IS random it gives the ship somewhat more survivability without disrupting game balance TOO greatly…bear in mind I’m still testing this.
the downsides to at least MY version of this technology are cost, weight and power consumption. equipping this shield module takes a lot of power and slows a fighter down to ABOUT 1.2-1.5 for speed. Which is significant when you consider most fighters can have speeds in the high 1.X’s and 2’s
Cost is another one: at least my shield is something like 100+ in cost…which means an entire squadron of these things will be at LEAST 1600 to field…and that’s not inclulding weapons or the special fighter reactors to power the whole thing.
The resilts I’ve met with so far have been promising: I get far fewer fighters out on the field BUT they have the survivability to stand up to enemy fighters. They are still fast/small enough to evade most cruiser and frigate weapons and the ones that they CAN’T have reduced effectiveness thanks to the shields so they end up holding their own until heavier ships can start knocking out the enemy shields, then while the enemy is focusing on my cruisers and frigates the fighters continue plugging away at the enemy whittling them down little by little.
I like that idea of a strong but expensive shield module. What is the weight of the module? If its light you could get a speed 3.0 or higher fighter that is immune to other fighters, and nearly immune to frigates and cruisers while still being able to dish out considerable damage.
A very heavy but strong shield module would slow the fighter down so that while its nearly immune to the weapons from other fighters, its slow enough that the larger frigate and cruiser guns have a decent chance of shooting them down.
Basically, gunboats. The space version of a PT boat. Something like that. Large, heavy, expensive ship, bigger than a fighter but smaller than a frigate, relatively immune to fighters (hard to kill at least) but armed with weapons to punch holes in frigates/cruisers.
These would make great torpedo bombers actually.
The light shields I had made are basically just a replacement for armor. They’re about equally as effective.
The shield has a weight of 2, consumes 1 power, has a strength of 20, 0 absorption so its fully vulnerable to all weapons, but it has a fast recharge. It can recharge to full in about 3 seconds. It doesn’t slow down the fighters very much but will harmlessly absorb the occasional laser blast or missile. If the fighter is hit by more than a couple lasers in a short period of time the shields are gone.
Fucking frigates. They do this with almost comical efficiency.
Screwing up pathfinding. Because “Ignore Fighters” isn’t an option, sending a single wing Rocket-Engine2 fighters into part of an enemy formation that’s ill-equipped to deal with them will cause those ships that end up in range to wander off trying to chase the fighters.
Forget about that part I said only a few fighters from my squadrons survive, I was using the cautious order in a wrong way -_-’
Also I’ve looked the weapon damages and most of the weapons with high tracking speed deal enough damage to kick with 1 shot the fighter engine III module (it has 7 hp and using it has the problem that its power usage forces the use of a power generator). The weapons that don’t reach that quantity of damage (rapid fire laser with 5 damage , fighter laser cannon with 4 damage and fighter pulse laser with 6 damage) have enough rate of fire to compensate the low damage. Of course as GSB randomly distributes damage between modules, the low damage weapons don’t affect that much if your fighter design uses all the slots in its design. And, If you aren’t using all slots the fighter has a higher speed to avoid more shots because of the lower weight.
I’ve tested some different fighter designs and with rocket + engine I they end up suffering 1 shot death most times. The same fighter with engine II avoids better incoming shots but still dies quickly. Then I pick the ‘useless’ (that’s what I thought) fighter design with rocket + engine III + power generator I with way lower speed than its brothers and most times they make it back to the carrier bay. Using a hacked engine III (no power cost) to avoid the use of the power generator make the fighter untouchable.
Finally, fighters are completely useless if there are enough Frigate Antifighter Missile Launchers. Their tracking speed, damage (19 O.O) and speed make them fighter killers and should be kept this way I think.
Then, after thinking about this topic, I concluded that is somewhat ‘fair’ how fighters are now (designs with high speeds/low cost as a swarmy attack force with nearly null survivavility, or low speed/high cost versions that have more hp or armor and can be combined with carriers).
I’ll keep avoiding using shields as a general race module (they are Empire exclusive in my mod :P), but to get more options to fighters I’ll try adding some engine models with higher hp (9-11) and more weight to them between other stuff I’ve got in mind. I’ll keep the idea that 3.5-4 speeds have to be for low hp fighters and 1-2 speeds for durable fighters (high hp, armor or shields).
P.s. This is just a thought, the double hp Tribe fighters in comparison to other fighters in the different races are ridiculously overpowered.
I made a fighter shield for my scavenger mod. I think the best method for balancing fighter shields is the price. As it gets multiplied by 20 (because of 20 fighters I think) the fighter squadron gets REALLY expensive ^^
I have found that the fighters while fast do not make it back to the carrier even when you have them set at 99% damage in the cautions order. I have not thought about the fact that the engines get taken out slowing them to a crawl. I have created a CORVETTE class fighter, and Corvette class equipment based off the fighters and frigates. Yes they have the own engines, armor, and power supply. They all need a little tweaking, but I feel that a 4 weapon corvette is a good ideal It has a 100% speed boost and produces 10 power on its own. YES YES i need to tweak that more too.
I have also been tweaking around with a standard and reflective shielding mostly for the corvettes witch are an enlarged leopard hull. Also to help improve the corvettes i have made a fighter class nanobot repair equipment, Witch i think is overpowered and is tweaking still. This corvette itself is 5 standard, 4 hard point 30 cost, 10 weight, 10 power, and 100% boost to speed that might change. No new weapons have been made for this craft, just the above items.
I also have a Super Eagle cruiser class witch has for now the same amount of hard points, and 2 extra standard slots, but there have been increases in the turret locations, as with more than one per hard point now. I’m tweaking the hull, and power boosts right now also. May or may not get an increase in hard points. I’ve also made an advanced wolf frigate hull that has two more standard spots and having its hull and armor boosts tweaked.
ALL of the above ships are overpowered, one of the Super eagles can single-hand take out a mission, with a neat setup that I have found for it. And the corvettes well they can take out stuff on there own if given enough time and corvettes. The Advanced wolf was edited as such to turn it into a carrier for the corvettes. But the fighters and corvettes rarely got back to it, or needed to be fixed.
