I agree. I don’t really see a way to solve that problem without nerfing fighter rocket shield penetration down to 9.5, putting it between the Shield Generator and Shield Generator 2. Going without the bigger generator exposes you to rockets, but Shield Generator 2 would provide a lot of protection. Because frigate shield bubbles are so small, the vast majority of rockets are fired from outside it. Thus, the frigate would only have to worry about the small number of rockets fired from inside the shield. It would thus certainly survive the initial volley fired as the fighters first come into range, and would probably survive some time while the fighters swarmed around it, mostly hitting the shield. This would allow fighter AAA to have a chance to work, especially if the turn radius of the AFM gets tweaked.
I don’t see this change having much other impact on the game. Against cruisers, rockets can’t get through the shield already and most are fired from inside the shield anyway. Against Tribe and frigates without shields, there’d be no difference because armor penetration remains the same. And non-modded fighters don’t have shields anyway.
I’ve been perusing the comments about fighter/frigates for a while and this statement struck me…
As far as I can tell, a rocket’s minimum range (250) means fighters with rockets will always be firing outside the shield, either a cruiser or frigate. As long as a shields resistance is above the shield penetration of the rocket the ship in question is immune.
Therefore if a frigate has a higher rated shield (modded shield or nerfed rocket) it will be invulnerable. As it is now rocket mounted fighters have no ability to hurt a cruiser.
Hmm, well, you know better than me so I must be halucinating when I think I see rockets fired inside shields. OK, so besides nerfing the rocket’s shield penetration, shortern their minimum range (and perhaps their max as well), so they can fire from inside a frigate’s shield. I think this is the better solution to the problem of frigate survivability because giving the frigates a rocket-proof shield also makes them fairly cruiser-proof unless the Cruiser Pulse Laser gets a shield penetration increase.
Having thought over this a little more, I now believe that, if we were to either add a frigate shield that provided invulnerability to rockets or nerf rockets to be unable to penetrate certain frigate shields, rocket fighters would become significantly less appealing to use in the game, because their primary purpose right now is to kill off frigates and wounded cruisers, and to distract other fighters, and you’d start seeing most frigate designs carrying a shield that provides immunity to fighter rockets. Rockets already cannot hurt the majority of healthy, shielded cruisers, and need painter support to do very well in dogfights, so removing or greatly reducing their ability to kill frigates off would hurt their utility.
This might be interesting, but it would have to be one great tractor beam for me to consider bringing a frigate along to carry it into the fight rather than relying on a cruiser-mounted tractor beam and cruiser-mounted anti-fighter weapons. It could also turn out to be a curse for the frigate carrying it, if it happened to trap part of a squadron of rocket fighters close enough that the rocket fighters kept shooting the frigate. Possibly if you could make the tractor beam hold fighters just outside the frigate’s shield bubble, or if it could hold multiple fighters using one tractor beam, it would be worth having. In fact, I think if this tractor beam could hold two or three fighters in place for a second or two, it would be something that I would regularly bring along in battles where I expect to see large fighter groups, though I suspect that I’d be relying more on fighters of my own to clear out trapped fighters than on weapons mounted on nearby cruisers.
I think the frigates would still have a fair amount of trouble with fighter rockets, as that initial volley from a squadron of rocket fighters will probably take down the shields of a frigate or injure unshielded and inadequately armored frigates, so you might want to consider adding in a defensive option for frigates that will help them against fighters. Maybe, to combine what other people have been asking for with cloaking devices and weapons that can fire from under them, give this new race a Frigate Cloaking Device and have this special tractor beam be able to fire, or at least remain active, while the cloak is active? Or a frigate version of the Swarm’s Smart Bomb Pulse Generator (the area-of-effect antimissile module)?
I suspect what you’re seeing is that the rocket fighters are in fact firing from beneath one ship’s shields, but they are firing at the next ship over and hitting its shields, and these ships happen to be close enough that you see rockets impacting on a shield bubble that crosses over the hull of the first ship. Also, most frigate shield bubbles are tiny - even laser fighters with minimum range Attack Frigates orders will spend the vast majority of their time outside the shield bubble wasting their fire. If you change the minimum range of the Fighter Rocket so that it can fire from within anything’s shields, you are probably going to greatly upset the balance of power in the hierarchy of fighters, especially when strafing cruisers.
(When a missile weapon shoot while under the shield, the missile will be “intercepted” by the shield.)
(So, until the shield is down, missile weapon can’t damage armour nor hull (with the only exception of Radiation missile who, if they can damage the shield and there is no armour, will damage the hull))
Do people not think improved shields or armor for frigates will mitigate the frigates-easily-destroyed issue. Doing this would in no way affect the balance of any module in any other situation, it would just mean that the frigates last that tiny bit longer, long enough to get a better volley off at their attackers, especially if combined with a range boost (or new longer range variants) of frigate weapons (specifically frigate anti-fighter weapons).
I’m thinking of maybe a frigate ‘sniper’ laser, which could pick off incoming fighters, not enough firepower to really worry other frigates, or penetrate cruiser shields, but enough to vaporize a few fighters per squadron before they got close enough.
Random thought: If a frigate could hide under the shield bubble of the cruiser it was escorting, then it would last longer in battle.
The trick would be:
A) How close does it need to be for the shield bubble to cover
B) Telling the game that any incoming fire for Frigate A is directed to Cruiser B
Make frigates across the board cheaper. For the budget minded developer.
If shield resistance is upped - it makes rocket fighters a much more useless commodity.
I think the shield strength should be increased, doubling it for frigates for sure. And figuring out why a Turbo shield is so much inferior to the Shield Generator 2.
I’ve had a relatively fast (.95) ship last long enough to take out 1/3 of a rocket armed squadron with AA missiles before the shields (Shield Generator) dropped. Tweak that so an average frigate with an appropriate AA weapon has the chance to take a standard rocket squadron.
I’m not all that worried about making a frigate more survivable in a cruiser battle. Give them the option of A) Speed, B) Long Range Bombardment (behind the Cruiser Line). Give them longer lasting sustainability against rocket fighters.
I see GSB as a WW2 facsimile - and no destroyer stayed in a line of battle. They provided AA protection, AS protection, and tossed long range (up to 30 knots in some cases) torpedoes outside of accurate gun range.
To my way of thinking, the real problem with frigate armor is the weight. Once I get a frigate armored up to where it doesn’t worry too much about fighters, it’s now weighed down to the point where anything other than fighters can slice it to bits. If I could make an armored frigate that could still maintain a respectable speed (for a frigate), that would change the dynamics in a positive way. (Whenever I make armored AA frigates, they do their job quite well until the enemy cruisers come into range, and then my frigate lasts about two seconds.)
I think this is because the Shield Generator 2 has enough resistance to reflect shots from the Fighter Laser Cannon, but the Turbo Shield does not. Since the Fighter Laser Cannon is one of the two most common fighter weapons, shields that resist fire from them are appealing even though the Turbo Shield is 10% stronger. Also, the Shield Generator 2 has a higher recharge rate (7, as opposed to 6 on the Turbo Shield). A 10% boost in shield strength isn’t enough to make up for vulnerability to one of the most rapid-firing weapons in the game.
It could certainly help mitigate the issue of frigates being easily destroyed. What I no longer believe is that frigates should have a shield capable of resisting fighter rockets, since I think (and apparently so do others) that this would greatly reduce the utility of fighter rockets. Improved frigate armor could be useful, if it would allow me to achieve somewhat higher speeds or use less armor plates to attain certain levels of protection, since it would allow partial immunity to certain attacks - as long as it doesn’t allow me to make useful armor tanks out of frigates and doesn’t let me create useful frigates that are essentially immune to frigate weapons (so, whatever the new armor is like, it would need to not be able to stack to more than 49 average armor on any armed frigate, and would preferably not be able to reach that high unless the frigate was virtually or completely unarmed).
This could work. In order to not be a threat to frigates and cruisers, just having a very low shield and armor penetration would be sufficient. I’m not sure, but I think most fighters can’t get to more than about 5 average armor, so an armor penetration around that level would be sufficient, and wouldn’t really cause concern for cruisers. It could be a problem for fast frigates, but unless you plan on adding fighter shields that have nonzero shield resistance at some point, having a shield penetration of zero (or, really, anything strictly less than seven, since that’s the lowest shield resistance currently in the game) would mostly solve that problem, or completely solve that problem if the minimum range of the frigate ‘sniper’ laser is too large to be fired from beneath frigate shields.
It could also be interesting to have a very low rate-of-fire frigate weapon intended specifically for use against armor tanks (i.e., some weapon or another with armor penetration of at least 90, probably more like 95 or 100). You could give it very low tracking values, since it would be intended for use against very slow cruisers, and would be an incentive to bring frigates along to help break up a cruiser armor tank while not really being able to hit mid-speed or fast cruisers (i.e., anything over about 0.1 or 0.15 speed).
Maybe this could be done using a ‘Cruiser Shield Projector’ module or something like that, which maintains a shield bubble around a nearby frigate instead of around the cruiser but otherwise acts like a shield generator?
I agree with this opinion, although, depending on targeting priorities and fleet deployment, my frigates might manage to last until nearby cruisers are gone, if the opposing fleet’s frigates and cruisers are more interested in killing my cruisers than my frigates.
I just wanted to touch on this - I think the main reason why frigates don’t seem to bridge the gap between fighter and cruiser movement speeds isn’t because frigates are too slow, but more because the fighters which would fill in the speed gap (mainly torpedo fighters and heavily armored fighters) are slow enough that they die quickly to the more common fighters which run around at speeds greater than 2.0. We can get frigates with speeds up to about 1.0 (and in extreme cases, like the Nomad frigate with +22% speed, up to nearly 1.2 speed, maybe higher), and torpedo fighters are generally between 0.8 and 1.3 speed, while heavily armored fighters, if anyone were to use them, might run speeds from 1.5 to 2.0. There is still a use for these types of fighters (I occasionally use squadrons of torpedo fighters to give my beam cruisers massive missile batteries that have roughly the same range as the beam weapons the cruiser carries) but they require a fair amount of effort to keep alive in the face of opposing fighters and anti-fighter weapons, and don’t really seem cost-effective compared to cruiser missiles, cruiser rockets, cruiser lasers, and cruiser plasma weapons. The heavily armored fighters might have a use in situations with heavy anti-fighter defenses, if those defenses are things that fighters can shrug off with one to three armor plates. The thing that keeps these from showing up is that there are more cost-effective ways for your fleet to achieve the same purpose. Heavy anti-fighter defenses in the enemy fleet? Don’t bring fighters, just rely on your cruisers. After all, every anti-fighter weapon on the enemy ships is one less weapon useful against cruisers that they’ve mounted (unless their primary anti-fighter weapon is a Cruiser Pulse Laser - that one is useful against cruisers as long as the armor ratings aren’t above 50 or as long as the fleet with the pulse lasers also brought beam lasers or proton beams and your fleet isn’t using armor tanks of 73+ average armor). Large fleets of fast laser fighters (which is more or less the target that a heavily armored fighter would be intended for use against)? Put a tractor beam and a pulse laser on a couple of your cruisers or perhaps frigates, and put escorting fighter squadrons on those, and you’ll probably win the fighter duel unless your fighters are completely outnumbered or outclassed.
So to reiterate, I think the reason why frigates don’t seem to bridge the speed gap between cruisers and fighters is more because the slow fighters are not used (or are rarely used) rather than because the fast frigates aren’t fast enough.
Also, don’t get me wrong: there are certain situations in which armored fighters and torpedo fighters perform very well. Armored or high health fighters are perhaps the only reasonable fighters to bring along in scenarios where the speed reduction anomaly is in force and has a significant magnitude, and can perform reasonably well against fast laser fighters or mid-speed rocket/painter fighters. Torpedo fighters can do well in an environment where you can assure local fighter superiority (or, especially, supremacy), especially if they are attached to a cruiser that has a painter, or carry a painter themselves. A squadron of torpedo fighters, particularly torpedo fighters with paired torpedo launchers, can take down the shields of almost all common cruiser designs with their opening volley, especially if either the fighters or another ship nearby has a target painter to make the torpedoes more likely to hit a particular ship - as long as you can protect the torpedo fighters from enemy fighters and keep more tempting targets within firing range of the opposing fleet’s weapons.
I think the main problem with frigates is how much roles overlap. As it stands now, the only weapon considered an anti-frigate weapon is the fighter rocket launcher. If the formula that determines whether or not a shot his was changed so speed affected hit chance more, this would leave more room for dedicated anti-frigate weapons. Weapon stats could be changed so frigates and cruisers can each have dedicated weapons for killing each other. This would allow many currently useless weapons to be repurposed, and give frigates a use as a ship able to avoid anti-cruiser weapons, but tank anti-fighter weapons.
As for the new race, I think they could use a new effect. What about cruiser pulse guns that damage shield stability? If they had a range of about 700, they could be used with beam weapons effectively.
(My perspective here comes from someone who is trying to maximise honour from the single-player missions)
One of GSB’s weaknesses is that the module balance feels a fair way off. There are too many things that feel like they should work, but don’t work out at all in practice - fighter torpedoes, armour on fighters, frigates doing anything apart anti-fighter or spam, most of the race-specific weapons, many of the fancy cruiser systems (Camo, target boosters, repair systems for anything other than armour tanks). There are also too many modules that all do the same thing, and too many modules that seem to do nothing whatsoever.
I would also far prefer GSB2 over a new race for GSB.
I like the thinking here, but I’m not sure it would work. The problem is that I want most of my non-fighter ships to go at the same speed, so they don’t get separated. Even a frigate with a speed of 1.00 is still not fast enough to dodge many cruiser weapons, and gets chewed up horribly by any fighter.
Also, big frigates just can’t get the modules they would need to make themselves survivable against cruiser weaponry. The Imperials have a 15-slot frigate (same as a small cruiser), and by filling 9 slots with shields and the rest with an Ion Cannon, power, crew and an engine, then at a cost of 1361 creds (half a cruiser) I get a ship with minimal firepower, a speed of 0.08, and a shield that is comprable in performance to what I’d get if I used a single Cruiser Multiphasic Shield module. Why would I want to do that?
I do think that giving most of the interesting utility modules to frigates rather than cruisers is an excellent idea. Stuff like cloaking devices, good point defence, EMP, command modules, or whatever other shiny things you come up with (cruisers don’t get them because of the enormous inverse graviton flux generated by cruiser power systems, obviously ;)). That means that frigates can fill cool niches that the cruisers don’t cover.
Some suggestions:
Any race-specific item should be actively good. They should either do something unique and useful, or be at least on a par with the nearest generic alternative. As an example, both the Alliance Fusion Torpedo Launcher and the Lightning Beam compete directly with the Cruiser Laser. They all have similar range, power/crew requirements, and all of them can penetrate shields. However…
The Cruiser Laser does 46.5 DPS
The Fusion Torpedo does 9.4 DPS
The Lightning Beam does 4.6 DPS
(assuming 1000 ticks in the fire interval listing is 1 second)
This renders both of the Alliance’s special weapons pretty much useless (yes, I know that both of these guns have better AP than the CL, but we all know that this doesn’t come close to making up a 5 to 10 fold difference in DPS). The same is true of most of the special weapons and kit (particularly the ones that go on fighters, there is not a single piece of race-specific fighter equipment that I have found useful)
There’s nothing wrong with giving every race something that is actively awesome, and does something that no other race can do. That helps to make them feel more distinctive (the Swarm and Tribe already do this very well). Super-long range missiles, shields that are half the strength but recharge very very quickly, torpedoes that aren’t useless, etc.
Anti-fighter missiles are plenty effective at the moment, IMO. I use frigate designs like this a lot:
Swarm Hathor Frigate
3 Anti-fighter missile
2 Frigate Armour 3
1 Crew Module
1 Frigate Engine 2
3 Empty Slots
Speed is 0.26, average armour is 16.70, cost of the ship is 487 creds.
Tie 4 painter fighters on close escort orders to it, tell it to loosely escort a cruiser toward the rear of your formation, and for 814 creds you have a really excellent anti-fighter platform lurking at the back where the enemy cruisers don’t see it. I don’t need to use tractors or other anti-fighter measures on my cruisers.
Fighter rockets are also fine. Rocket fighters do plenty of useful things; they are so fast as to be very survivable, they murder unarmoured frigates and damaged cruisers, and they do a great job of distracting enemy fighters. I don’t tend to armour my cruisers much, so when the AI has a huge laser fighter swarm that kills my cruisers faster than the frigates can do their thing, I spend ~2000 creds on 30-odd rocket fighters escorting the cruisers to zip around and distract them while the AFM Frigates do their thing.
Finally, if you’re considering hypothetical plans for GSB 2 I’ve got a fairly radical suggestion for it, which is to make the ‘slots’ paradigm for ships far less granular.
What I mean by that is that GSB 1 is that everything on a ship takes up the same amount of space - 1 slot. Sometimes it’s a weapon hardpoint, sometimes it a non-weapon slot, but it’s always one slot. That can make things a little wierd and very dependant on specific breakpoints - 290 crew need one slot, 291 need two. You also need to have all the guns at around the same power level, because they all take up exactly one hardpoint.
What if, instead of 3-20 slots which you drag and drop into, each ship had an internal capacity. Every module you added took up ~blah~ units of internal capacity. Power generators and crew quarters would be controlled by sliders - you can slide it upwards to add crew and/or power when needed, with tick boxes if you wanted to use special kinds of those systems, say, zero-gee crew, droid crew, armoured crew, or whatever.
For weapons, you could have a set amount of capacity that could be devoted to weapons. That would mean that you could have lots of little weapons, or simply have a ship with one, gratuitously huge uber-cannon of doom.
A lot of what I’ve read posted in here seems more like what people want from a new update rather than from a new race, so I’ll keep my comments to what I’d like a race to do.
What I liked about the Parasites was the fact that they effectively destroyed two of the more boring fleets that were seen; the fighter swarm and the multi warhead missile spam fleet. If the new race made the use of lots of armoured tanks more of a liability, it could in my mind, only lead to more interesting fleets being formed. Certainly if the new races’ frigates could get in on that act, it would make them attractive. Also, I do agree with an earlier poster that giving them weapons capable of being fired while cloaked would firstly be unique, and secondly get some use out of the cloaking device. A frigate sized cloak for them in that case wouldn’t go amiss either.
As things stand right now, any frigate shield that can stop fighter rockets also stops the Cruiser Pulse Laser. Cruisers really don’t have any other medium-range weapon with decent tracking speed, so if the CPL can’t hit fast frigates, cruisers are in trouble, especially if you make frigates faster than they are now for the same load of modules.
Frigates have 2 possible roles: 1) being slow, staying with and supporting the cruisers while sheltering under their defenses, and 2) being fast and going out on their own to attack the enemy fleet independently. It’s this latter role that most exposes frigates to rocket fighters, so has the most need of improved defenses. But frigates fast enough for this role, which can survive rocket fighters on their own, pose a serious threat to cruisers, especially if the cruisers have the enemy cruisers as their priority target.
What about if you made the fighter rocket weigh about as much a the fighter torpedo? IOW, any fighter carrying them would be slow and vulnerable both to ships and enemy fighters. But if they every got through, they could still wipe frigates out. One of the main factors that makes the fighter rocket so devastating to frigates is what I call the “Fighter Paradox”: fighter effectiveness is inversely proportional to fighter cost. You can put just a rocket on most fighter hulls and they’re too fast for anything to have more than the default minimum chance to hit them. 1 painter on a few other fighters mixed in is also extremely fast and makes the rockets extremely accurate, and both fighters are dirt cheap. So put some weight on the rocket pod and rocket fighters will be much less effective.
So, combined arms… Laser fighters would now be the fastest. They go out first and take out enemy rocket fighters. This allows the fast frigates to get out ahead and do their thing. If the laser fighters aren’t there or are ineffective, the fast frigates get eaten by the enemy rocket fighters. But otherwise the fast frigates are free to roam, provided they stay out of CPL range. And this done without nerfing rocket shield penetration or increasing frigate shield resistance.
However, I WOULD like to see a frigate shield proof against rocket and CPLs, PROVIDED it was so heavy that a frigate so equipped had no choide but to stay with its cruisers in a supporting role.
I think someone above posted a solution much like one I am thinking. Give the frigates the ability to be able to use some cruiser equipment by doubling up their slots. Some frigates would have slots paired that could put on two standard frigate units or one cruiser unit.
This would increase the sustainability of a frigate that has been suped-up, but since only a few slots can be doubled it will not make any frigate truly super. Given that a Imperial Hasta frigate is larger than some cruisers, and has 11 non-weapon slots, let it have 4 slots that could take two cruiser pieces.
It wouldn’t dynamically change frigates over all, but it would give some frigates the ability to take on rocket armed fighters.
Something that just occurred to me today, and might be quite easy to implement is a mass-dampening module. Effectively, a module that reduced the weight of everything on a ship. I think this would be a great way to make a ship faster without introducing yet another engine variant, and it could be frigate-specific.
Plus, if implemented right, it could be just one in a range of global ship capability modules. There could be an ‘automation system’ module that reduced crew requirements for everything on a ship, or a ‘reinforced structure’ module that boosts the hit points of everything on-board, even a ‘power distribution matrix’ which reduced all that ship’s module’s power requirements.
Just thinking out loud
I certainly intend for some definite crowd-sourcing of the final stats of any new modules or capabilities. I’ll think about it more intensely once new ship designs are available.
Just to let you know Cliff, those clever people in the GSB modding community have been creating and using “Claytons Reduction Requirements” modules for a good long while now. With each modder trying to bring something new to the community, they have already experimented with and implemented quite a few of the ideas suggested in this topic (read: using workarounds with vanilla items) already in play for a year or more.
By using negative values, the modders can sort of replicate the same effect as your describing. Granted these modules only provides a static reduction and not a percentage reduction as you have proposed. (But it works nonetheless)
For example:
One of the mods has a negative weight engine. Not only does it provide thrust but it reduces the total weight of the ship at the cost of power.
Another module I have come across is Solar Panel Armour (with neg power requirements). Does not provide much Armour value, but it reduces power requirements of the ship without the need for extra crew.
Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what various types of augmentation these new module types will provide.
Ah, didn’t see that. Thanks. Hmm… Very interesting idea.
However, that doesn’t really solve the basic problem, which is that the frigates that really need protection from rockets are the ones fast enough to operate independently of the cruisers. If you put cruiser shields on a frigate, I wager it would be too slow to run ahead of the cruisers.
So I still think removing the Fighter Paradox would be a big help to fighters. The Fighter Paradox says that fighter effectiveness is inversely proportional to cost. This is because fighter effectiveness is dominated by speed, which is a function of weight, which is a function of money spent adding modules. So, the fastest and cheapest fighters that can still inflict damage have only 1 engine and 1 weapon. And it just so happens that the cheapest, lightest (and thus fastest) such fighters carry rockets, which are what eat frigates alive.
Furthermore, the fastest and cheapest fighters of all just have 1 engine and no weapons. While they can’t directly hurt the enemy, they can, with proper orders, provide invaluable support by tying up fighter defenses being maddeningly hard to hit, allowing the slower (but still very fast) fighters with 1 weapon and 1 engine a lot of free shots. For instance, the unarmed fighters can scream around with a range of 100 while the rocket fighters stay out at 350. The defenses concentrate on the close-in, unarmed fighters and the rockets have lunch. And it only takes a few unarmed fighters to do this, and not a single, expnsive, heavy painter.
Because of the Fighter Paradox, it’s not cost-effective to use independent frigate forces (which need speed and therefore can’t use cruiser shields). The cost of frigate fighter defenses is disproportionately more than the number of rocket fighters those defenses can deal with at once. And by the time you buy enough of them to give you any hope in the face of even 2 squadrons of rockets without bait, then add in whatever offensive potential you wanted the frigates for in the 1st place, you’ve spent at least as much as you would have on a cruiser. And that cruiser would have more firepower and be more survivable.
So, if fighter rockets weighed a lot more, so rocket fighters were much slower, frigate defenses would be much more effective. Thus, frigates wouldn’t need as many and could carry more offense for the same money. Then it might become cost-effective to use independent frigates.
