I think a better solution would be to rebalance the thrust-to-power ratio on fighters. Currently, you put the weakest engines on because your ship actually goes faster. If fighter power generators weighed less, it would become possible to gain speed when you use a better engine. This would reverse the fighter paradox. My earlier suggestion of making speed more important would also mean that having a higher tracking weapon lets you kill the enemy’s expensive fighters. With this system having huge swarm of rocket fighters with engine ones will lead to them being wiped out by a small squadron of laser fighters.
That’s a good idea, too.
The root cause of the Fighter Paradox is that fighter speed, the most important thing, is as free as air; it costs money to go slow. This is a carryover from the same ship design system as used by frigates and cruisers, where the hull itself has insignificant weight: all the weight is in the modules. With a big ship, where you’ll be hanging all sorts of weapons and defenses on the basic hull, plus the crew and power they need, this works fine. But it’s bass-ackwards for fighters, where the hulls provide enough power to run enough engine and carry a low-power weapon and still be too fast to hit with most weapons.
Maybe make all hulls weigh 10 instead of 1 would help. That would be an insignificant increase to frigates and cruisers but would be a lead weight to fighters. Then you’d have to buy expensive engines and the power generators to feed them to get them fast. Also, as it stands now, only a few fighter hulls can actually use the Fighter Engine 3 to advantage because it weighs so much more than the extra thrust it provides coupled with its greatly increased power demand. So, rebalance fighter engines and power generators to match the increased hull weight, and you’d break the Fighter Paradox. Of course, it would also help if fighter rockets weighed more, too :).
I am quite happy with rocket fighters being the ones devoted to destroying frigates - they are unsuited for any real other task (when working independently) as cruisers are immune and anti-fighter scrimmages are a waste of time.
World war II destroyers where horribly vulnerable to cannon and rocket mounted aircraft - and as many of these aircraft where simply modified fighter aircraft - they were able to operate at much the same specs as a standard fighter. The last thing I want to see is a swarm of fast frigates ignoring the fighter screen and Ion/Phasor spamming the cruisers.
As for the unarmed fighter spam trick I will have to try it but truthfully I’ve used the whippy suckers with disappointing results - the main being that often they are ignored as they have no weapons (while an unarmed armour tank with nothing but a couple of anti-missile defense systems can kill a rush flat (although the annoying I am stopped but I the game thinks I am at full speed so everything misses is annoying, thanks for picking that one up Bullethead)
Now an easy solve to rocket fighters would be - limited ammo.
Make the fighter Torpedo much the same weight - giving torpedo fighters a living chance.
Now we have to figure out how to get weapon slot to ignore certain classes (if other classes exist)
They get 4 salvos and then have to whip back to the carrier to re-arm. We did want a reason for carriers right?
Toasts a fast frigate, but now they have to up and re-arm.
So these fast light fighters with rockets - if pinned in the cruiser formation will keep fast cruisers out of Ion/Phasor spam (since they can reload quickly as the cruiser is nearby… right?) but if left on their own they lose effectiveness as they start streaming back and forth.
Berny
Mom thinks its outrageous I still have my baby-blanky - its only 40 years old.
I would rather not see the introduction of limited ammunition to some weapons and not others, and certainly would not want to see all weapons having restricted ammunition supplies. I think a better way to boost carrier modules, if cliffski’s planning to do other-ship booster modules, would be to make carrier bays increase the rate of fire of fighter rockets and torpedoes, and maybe increase fighter speed slightly (although this one’s very iffy).
The main reason why I oppose the addition of ammunition limits for fighter weapons (or really, for any weapons) is that in this game it is possible to restrict the numbers of certain types of modules that can be brought to a battle, or prevent certain types of ships from appearing in a battle. So fine, if I want to use rocket fighters I now need to bring a carrier. There are scenarios available which do not allow cruisers to come to the battle, and these are the very battles that I’m most inclined to bring large numbers of rocket fighters, but carrier modules are only available on cruisers. If my rocket fighters could only fire four shots during the course of the battle, I’d be furious since that would prevent me from bringing in the most effective frigate killers available to me in that situation (four shots per fighter might be enough to take down the shields and maybe break the armor of a fair number of frigates if you bring a fair number of rocket fighters, but after those four shots, a large portion of your fighter force, and thus of your fleet, becomes useless since you cannot bring a carrier to the battle, and laser fighters are not nearly as appealing against frigates as against cruisers and other fighters, while bringing frigates of your own can be hit-or-miss, depending on how good your frigate designs are and the type of opposition you face - mostly frigate beam lasers and ion cannons? Forget the frigates, I’m taking squadron after squadron of rocket fighters). It would also significantly reduce the appeal of rocket fighters in the campaign, as campaign ships already need to be generalists, and adding one more thing that the cruisers have to do isn’t going to help them out much at all (or help the campaign feel more fun).
I’m fine with carrier bays enhancing fighter performance. Making carrier bays absolutely essential to the use of rocket fighters is unacceptable to me, though.
Sure, let rockets keep killing frigates. BUT, that means that right now, cruisers are good at killing everything and supporting each other, fighters are good at killing frigates and supporting cruisers, and frigates are good only at being killed by both cruisers and fighters. OK, that’s a bit harsh. Under certain circumstances, frigates can support cruisers. But in general, anything 3 frigates can do for or against cruisers, 1 cruiser can do better for the same money, and anything 3 frigates can do for or against frigates, fighters can do better for less money.
Well, those WW2 destroyers that had the misfortune not to have dual-purpose guns (basically everybody except most USN, some IJN, and a few RN) certainly got munched by WW2 jabos (and even slow, otherwise harmless bombers). But those destroyers with DP main batteries did quite well against air attack. Especially the USN and RN later in the war when they also had fire control radars and then VT fuzes.
Due to the current lack of a real battlfield role for frigates (however important they might be on the non-gratuitous trade lanes), I think of GSB more as circa 1890-1900 than I do as WW2. You have predreadnoughts (aka cruisers with 17-18 slots), armored cruisers (aka cruisers with 14-16 slots), and you have torpedoboats (aka fighters). And just as torpedoboats of that era weren’t much threat to battleships except when surprised at anchor at night, so can GSB cruisers in general shrug off fighters.
But OK, let’s consider frigates as WW2 destroyers. In WW2, destroyers were something you brought along with the battlefleet primarily to keep submarines away from the important stuff while it was in transit, and to run into minefields while the important stuff still had room to stop. If you were USN, IJN, or late-war RN, you also had destroyers along to defend against air attack. But when opposing battlefleets squared off in daylight (which is analogous to the GSB situation), the destroyers got the Hell out of the line of fire between them, taking station ahead or astern where they contributed nothing to the main event except eye-witness memoirs. When 1 side or the other had enough, they would usually have their destroyers lay smokescreens to cover their retreat. Only very rarely, when things were extremely desperate, would destroyers be ordered to attack the enemy battlefleet. Sometimes they got some torpedo hits, usually they missed but instead made the enemy turn away for a little while (which is impossible in GSB) which facilitated the escape of the weaker fleet. But regardless of the torpedo results, in nearly all cases the destroyers took heavy losses.
So, now look at GSB. Other than tying frigates to sacrificial “release on death” units, there’s no way to hold “destroyers” in reserve to cover the battlefleet’s retreat but that’s sort of a wash because there’s no way for the battlfleet to retreat anyway (except in the campaign). GSB frigates can’t lay smoke, suck at air defense, and there are no submarines to worry about. So the only option for them is the absolute last resort of WW2 destroyers: a daylight torpedo attack against the enemy battle line. But with the exception of the Disruptor Bomb, the frigate weapons that can hurt cruiser shields are either best used from long range (missiles and plasma) where the frigates can hide amongst friendly cruisers, or from ranges shorter than the Cruiser Pulse Laser where frigates evaporate. The Disruptor Bomb is about the only thing frigates have right now that cruisers don’t but it’s not a very high-success weapon given expected cruiser missile defenses. And while it can be fired from just outside the range of Cruiser Pulse Lasers, rocket fighters can see to it that it never gets there.
Another good idea for dealing with the Fighter Paradox.
Unfortunately Aeson in the post above showed the obvious flaws for fighters that are not escorted.
I am now though unsure of your wishes though…
If we strengthen a frigate so it is invulnerable to rocket fighters… And is fast enough to avoid cruiser weapons… you’ve just created a spam scenario where everyone will pick frigates.
My idea was to make frigates invulnerable to fighter rockets, if you choose that route, but now slow enough not to be able to spam rush cruisers. This makes them ideal anti-fighter weapon platforms in a formation of cruisers.
I realize you are trying to avoid the fighter paradox - but cheap one off design rocket fighters are useless against anything but frigates. If you have fighters and you want to kill cruisers you bring up laser fighters which are so much more expensive. If you make rocket fighters more expensive or slower - why use them? Laser fighters will kill frigates, cruisers and all other fighters with enmity.
Berny_74
Also you sent me a challenge with mod content something I don’t like doing but I will have to DL - against my wishes.
My wish is to have a use for frigates. I got into discussing fighters because Cliffski mentioned making frigates way faster than cruisers, with the obvious intent of having them “zip around” by themselves away from the cruiser line. Such frigates would thus have to fend for themselves against rocket fighters, which they can’t presently do cost-efficiently compared to the other options for the same job. To change this, you need some substantial tweaks in 1 or more other areas of the game. So far, this thread has turned up quite a few alternative ways of making independent frigates viable against rocket fighters. I think most of them concern tweaking fighter stuff instead of frigate stuff because fighters in general seem to need a major overhaul anyway due to the existence of the Fighter Paradox, and also because seriously tweaking frigate stuff will require numerous balancing tweaks to cruiser stuff.
However, as others have mentioned, frigate stuff should probably have a fairly significant across-the-board price cut, regardless of what happens with fighters vs frigates. This is because even if the frigate vs. fighter affair becomes more balanced, frigates also compete with cruisers. Right now, for the same amount of money, 1 cruiser can usually do a better job than 3 frigates. In fact, given that most cruisers can swat most frigates out of existence without breaking a sweat, and each lost frigate takes a substantial fraction of the frigate group’s overall firepower with it, 1 cruiser can probably do a better job than 5 frigates. So it would be nice if you could get 5-6 frigates for the price of 1 cruiser instead of only the 3 frigates you can get right now.
Maybe the new race has a Shark cruiser class and a Suckerfish Frigate Class. During battle setup, with a new specific Order, the frigate could be fixed at the cruiser hull: the final result is a new ship with two hulls that during battle can’t be separated: they fight as a single ship and so it’s a single target for enemy fire.
The cruiser protects the frigate within his shield bubble and the frigates offers additional firepower, traction beams, ecm, and so on.
With an additional level of integration the cruiser could lend some of his repair nanobots and the frigate engines could give some more speed to the ship.
From the graphical point of view the two ship should have a shape that makes “cool” this kind of connection.
This is just an idea, I don’t know if it makes sense and if it’s a nightmare to implement, but in this way frigates could play a new role in some cruiser-heavy battles.
Just want to point out that, while fast frigates aren’t great at dodging fire from fighter rockets, they aren’t bad at it either, and against moderate numbers of fighters (i.e., 1 or maybe two squadrons per frigate) there is a reasonable chance that enough of the fighter rockets from the first volley or two will miss (roughly 50% chances, before accounting for hull size) that the frigate’s shields will survive the volley, or at least take all the damage from the volley, even if there’s only one shield generator on the frigate. This, naturally, doesn’t hold when target painters enter the mix, and if you can get enough rockets in the field to have two or more rocket fighter squadrons per frigate you probably don’t need the painters to mostly guarantee that frigate shields drop on the first volley.
What hurts fast frigates most against rockets is that frigates tend to have poor options against fighters. I think Antifighter missiles are better than Bullethead thinks they are, especially if supported by target painters or tractor beams (even frigate tractor beams will work), but they are somewhat lacking when there are significant numbers of fighters present or when the fighters enter the wheeling and turning part of their maneuvers. Other frigate antifighter weapon options are also questionable, as the Frigate Pulse Laser is the next highest tracking speed weapon for frigates, but it has a large-ish minimum range and a short maximum range and has a 2% chance of hitting most single rocket fighters and painter-only fighters (anything above 2.8 speed), and Ion Cannons, which have the highest tracking speed after Pulse Lasers, have a 2% chance to hit almost all fighter designs (exceptions being torpedo fighters and slow, armored fighters).
I do think it would be good to see the new race focusing more on frigates than the other races have, as it would be a fairly substantial difference from the other main races. With the races currently in the game, I don’t usually see a need to use frigates, though they can be effective and useful on occasion. Maybe the new race should have generally poor Cruiser hull bonuses, perhaps some penalties, while at the same time having good bonuses on frigate hulls and getting frigate modules that are more appealing than whatever their equivalent on a cruiser is (e.g., much cheaper, more effective in high volume, etc) to encourage more use of frigates. Swarm sort of does this, due to their racial hull penalty making cruisers somewhat less appealing, but between their frigates having the same penalties and bonuses that their cruisers have and most of the interesting special modules being cruiser modules, the Swarm frigates aren’t that appealing.
I was going to toy with the idea of a race that is made up of dark energy and is fairly ethereal. I had thought to change the ship types to include a negative WEIGHTBOOST, but alas it seems that that isn’t a variable you can adjust…
ah well
You could give them a race-specific module with negative weight.
Making it simply have a speed boost would produce alternative but still effective results. The only thing weight even really affects is speed. The problem with near zero weight is the fact it would probably result in a single MK I cruiser engine producing a ship with 1+ speed.
If I could throw in a quick two cents, the Alliance has a lightning gun that sounds awesome but is terrible in practice. It would be nice if there was a more effective version, or if you could improve the current one.
The Anti-Fighter Missile is the best fighter defense frigates have because the Frigate Pulse Laser / Frigate Tractor Beam combo is even less useful. And painters are wasted on the AFM because it already has BY FAR the highest tracking speed in the game (12.5), better than 50% more than the speed of even the absolute fastest fighter it’s possible to build (Swarm Osiris, nothing but a single Engine 1, speed 8.05). It’s not like the AFM is a fighter rocket with a tracking speed of only 2.0 and thus nothing but the default minimum chance of hitting an offensive fighter by itself. Yet despite its huge tracking speed, the AFM can ONLY hit when fired within about +/- 15^ from dead ahead or dead astern of the target fighter, because the missile’s turn radius is MUCH larger than even the slowest armored torpedo fighter. This is true whether the target is painted or not. If the target is painted but the missile is fired from outside the above arcs, it’s physically impossible for the missile to hit the target due to the difference in turn radii. Thus, it takes a minimum of 4 AFMs to defeat 1 squadron of 16 1-rocket fighters before the fighters kill all the frigates in the group. And if the fighters have Retaliate orders, dedicated anti-fighter frigates with 3-4 AFMs are going down first, leaving the other frigates cold meat.
Meanwhile, the 2 squadrons of 1-rocket fighters cost less than the 3 frigates necessary for an independent frigate force (1 dedicated anti-fighter, 1 dedicated anti-missile, and 1 dedicated anti-cruiser–frigates don’t have enough slots to be generalists). I didn’t mention dedicated anti-frigate because 1-rocket fighters do a better job for less money. Also note that the above ratio of 4x AFMs to 1x 1-rocket squadron is ONLY when the frigates are operating in isolated groups of 3 frigates. When facing total frigate AFM spam fleets, the AFM it totally useless because the fighters NEVER head directly towards or away from any given frigate except for the initial run-in to launch range. After that, the fighters are turning continuously and thus physically impossible for the0 AFMs to hit. But with small, isolated groups of frigates, the fighters occasionally pull straight away from them for a while, then turn and come straight back. During these periods, the AFM will kill nearly 1 fighter per missile. But the rest of the time, the AFMs all miss due to huge turn radius compared to the fighters.
It sounds like there is general consensus that the anti fighter missile is not currently good enough, and that it really needs to have a much much better turning speed, which sounds fine. Would people also generally agree that a faster rate of fire for that missile, would be a good idea? possibly as a new race-specific ‘advanced anti-fighter missile system’.
I think that a faster rate of fire would be most helpful.
Which is why you’d add a frigate tractor beam in addition to or in place of one of the antifighter missiles - it’ll hold a fighter in place or slow its maneuvers down long enough for one or two antifighter missiles to hit it, and antifighter missiles have a high enough rate of fire that if you have a couple antifighter frigates, you should probably see one or two shoot up the stopped fighter before the tractor beam expires. I also don’t think that a dedicated antimissile frigate is particularly valuable in an independent frigate group, as I’d rather see another set of frigate ion cannons to help with killing cruisers or breaking cruiser shields than a set of point defense weapons that generally seem to fail to do anything particularly useful. Also, cruiser missiles tend to have issues hitting fast frigates in enough quantity to overwhelm the shield and kill them unless a fairly large batch of missiles all target the same frigate or a painter is targeting the frigate at the time two or more cruiser missiles are launched (by cruiser missiles, I mean any missile carried by a cruiser, rather than the weapon of the same name).
With regards to independent frigate groups, though, I wouldn’t use them if I believe there are large numbers of rocket fighters on the field. Armored frigates hidden in or behind the battle line, perhaps, but not independent frigate groups in the face of large numbers of dedicated antifrigate forces. Also, painters do help antifighter missiles. Perhaps it isn’t a large enough bonus to justify bringing large numbers of painters into play to have the bonus, but it’s still there, and it will bring the hit chances up at least a little against fast moving rocket fighters. Personally I’d sooner bring a tractor beam on the antifighter frigate than a few painter fighters to escort the frigate, but either one helps.
A higher rate of fire, or a race-specific advanced antifighter missile system with a higher rate of fire, would be nice.
That sounds cool, provided it doesn’t become something as deadly as Parasite flak :).
Just tightening up the AFM’s turn radius would make it more effective than it is now, but has to be done with care. This is because the AFM’s tracking speed is so high already at 12.5. The average 1-rocket fighter has a speed of about 4.2 and a length of 11m. If I understand the to-hit forumula correctly, this would give the AFM a 35% chance to hit with every shot were it not for the current turn radius issue that keeps it from hitting except when the target is at the right angle. As you decrease the AFM’s turn radius, you increase the “off-angle” at which it can physically hit fighters (assuming the to-hit roll was good), so more fighters will die in less time than now, without increasing the rate of fire. And once the AFM’s turn radius becomes less than a fighter’s, the to-hit roll might be the only factor in hitting.
So, give evrybody’s AFM a tighter radius, but one that’s still somewhat bigger than a fighter’s, making everybody’s better than now. Then for the new race, have 2 options: you could give them an even tighter turn radius, or you can increase their rate of fire (or maybe both). Either one would make the new race’s AFM better than everybody else’s.
Actually, some weapons have a knockback chance. Weight affects how much the ship moves. I found this out when I was making OP modules with no weight. The ships could be sent flying off the screen with a lucky missile hit. Damage is also a factor. I was thinking of making a race with low weight that could be beaten using this. If the negative weight module was an engine, you could mess with the thrust-to-weight ratio to make the ships faster, but not by too much.
If you were to give all the races hulls a large costboost (maybe 10000%) you could make any modules you want (including race-specific variants of vanilla modules you want in low weight) with major reductions in cost and weight. The result would be default modules being realistically unaffordable, while the custom modules would cost approximately the same as normal. You may also want either give the race a large speed reduction or create modules with low thrust.
It’s more complex but there’s less chances for issues like negative weight to occur this way.
And I think we’re also getting off-topic…