Legedi and I were have a discussion this morning about super fast fighters and dog fight issues. Our idea was that instead of the ability of a ship to hit another ship being the weapon tracking speed and the ship target speed, there should be an equal factor applied to the speed of the ship firing improving the effect of the shot. This would accomplish 2 things which both I think would be a vast improvement.
Ships sitting around doing nothing would not have the same advantage of ships actively moving. So Frigates flying around attacking a cruiser that was standing still would be more effective than a stand-still frigate firing at a cruiser that was actively retreating to heal
Super-fast fighters would be effectively combated against using a matched set of super-fast fighters. This would promote active dog fighting and prevent the endless loop of fighters attacking fighters but never hitting
I think this makes good logical sense in real world (haha) application. The weapons tracking speed would only need to overcome the relative speed of the target, not its actual speed.
I think this is key. In any space dogfight from movies, or even real world airplane dog fights, one of the fighters tries to get a position behind the other one, line up the shot, and take them out. It doesn’t matter if both planes are flying at 500 mph, or spaceships at 1000 miles per second. It’s all relative.
I still think there would need to be some kind of frigate/cruiser weapon (the one spinaljack mentioned in the balance thread with super fast rockets still sounds good) to keep it from a battle of who can take out one sides fighters first.
This really would prevent the infinite fighter loop.
Awesome idea of using relative speed! Yeah, I’ve been rather amused watching the endless fighter swarms now that have resulted due to current changes or whatnot. I basically have been deleting my fighters orders to attack other fighters and have just had them concentrating on frigates and cruisers in the current builds balance. Can’t wait to play the new more balanced versions that Cliffski is working on!
In theory surely just upping the tracking speeds of fighter weapons will also achieve this, as fighter weapons virtually never miss other targets now anyway, so it will effectively just make them more likely to hit other fighters.
I’d quite like to see Frigate Anti-Fighter Missiles do a bit better, since they’re the main frigate fighter counter-weapon. With a rate of fire that low they should have a much better hit rate, even against faster fighters.
I can’t seem to design an anti-fighter frigate that will kill a killer fighter swarm what so ever. If frigates do survive long enough to properly engage then they’re unable to kill more than a single fighter before they explode.
Whatever balances it works for me.