I have been playing GSB for a while now, and have found myself more interested in the scenarios than the challanges.
Having played a few challenges i must admit it does offer something that the scenarios do not, but unlike in the scenarios i often find myself annoyed by the excessive use of fighters.
Now i must stress, unlike the title suggests i am not against the use of fighters, but there is definately a problem with how they are used.
I find that in most of the challenges around, in order to defeat the enemy you need to be ready to combat massive hordes of fighters, which in a lot of cases are accompanied by only a few larger ships.
The problem this presents is there is little room for tactics, it is eaither equip lots of fighters, frigs or cruisers to engange little more than enemy fighters, or proceed as normal and lose.
I personally feel that the use of fighters needs to be restircted (if only a little), and the easiest way i can see is to cap them. I suggest limiting the number of fighters to the number of frigs/cruisers. For example…
1 frig allows the use of 10 fighters and a cruisers 15 (2 frigs allow 20 and so on) . by doing this you ensure that there are enough larger ships to employ the interesting tactis GSB has to offer.
I welcome any suggests/critisms on the above, and only ask that all is kept polite
Well there is already a cap for fighters, and that’s available pilots, scenario dependant.
ALl in all, if you don’t like fighters, avoid the fighter heavy maps?
You don’t need to design your cruisers to deal with fighters. You can, but you don’t need to. A cruiser with a single piece of armor and a single repair bay is pretty much immune to damage from fighters. Eventually the repair bay will run out of spare parts but that will take ages. Put in a tractor beam on the cruiser and now even its heavy weapons can pick off the fighters one at a time.
The only thing that can really pose a threat to these cruisers would be torpedo bombers, but then torpedo bombers move so slowly the cruiser doesn’t even need to use the tractor beam to hit the torpedo bombers. The only things that will be able to get close will be the laser fighters, and minimal armor backed by a single repair bay can hold those off almost forever.
This is not true. Try NEC 1 and fight those fighter missions with cruisers that only have armor and a repair module. But in addition to that, playing the campaign will show you that your cruisers can be beaten by nothing but fighters and they will be gone before the enemy cruisers even get in range.
It’s all a numbers game - when there are hundereds of fighters to your handful of cruisers you will watch in horror as your cruisers get picked apart by laser fighters that are able to get under your shields and hit your ship directly. And some races have fighters that are awesome, unbelievable as they first swat your fighters then move on to eat your cruisers and frigates.
I am not good at making or using fighters but having played against hundereds of challenges (through the campaign system) I see people who know how to use fighters.
I guess this is the sort of thread I should start posting on, if I ever want to work my way out of the Space Academy…
So let me first say that I would rather be serving under Admiral Ramcat than Admiral Hyndis, who would get me blowed up, real good (SCTV reference there). Fighters are indeed able to wreak havoc on many fleets, armor and shields and repair bots notwithstanding. I use them myself, in moderation, because unleashing them with the right orders at the right moment can be really fun to watch (well, not so much from the ships they are attacking, but into every life some rain must fall).
Admiral Jukelo is also right, in that if you don’t like fighter-heavy battles, don’t play 'em. I personally don’t, as my least favorite kind of challenge is the one where your options for fleet composition and deployment are severely limited. And there seem to be a lot of those…all fighters, all cruisers, all frigates, maps the size of postage stamps, single ships, you name it, it’s been tried.
Anyway, even having said all that, forcing a cap on fighters in challenges is just as restrictive as limiting deployments to all left-handed frigates with half an engine and no shields…the point is that the pieces of the game are designed to work as a whole, and the fun is figuring out multiple solutions to the same problem, which cannot be done when the scenario “rules” are manipulated to force one particular kind of encounter, or limit player choices. It seems, for example, that most of the all-fighter encounters specifically prevent you from using other types of ships, which is the same problem in reverse.
There you go. My $.02 (or whatever that is converted into pounds sterling). Your mileage may vary, of course.
I also noticed the same thing…very few challenges online are played as “Fleet VS. Fleet”.
It’s always “Five cruisers against your five”, “Fighters only”, “No ultra heavy armor”…that’s why I like the scenarios so much more…you can play them once using a whole fleet…then try again using only cruisers, or maybe using budget ships to see how high you can max your score, or try to build a super-amazing cruiser that can take half the enemy fleet by itself.
I especially hate the “Beat my missile cruisers using nothing but cruisers” challenges…
Otticon: that’s why all the other fighter pilots like you…you’re plucky and you make good sense.
Of course, the answer is that the challenge board is what we make of it. Perhaps we should have our own tournament system, called, er, Balanced Fleet Demonstrations (ahem). The idea being to present fleets with all components in some semblance of proportion (no specific requirements, just a general goal), to create “fun” battles. Of course, monomaniacs with a missile cruiser fetish can come in and rack up a few easy victories, but that’s not the point. It would be a place for people interested in using more than one extreme type of ship to gather and exchange ideas in the form of fleets.
We could also form a BFD club, with our own bylaws, oath, rules, etc. etc., or maybe just a set of guidelines that we will all try to follow when creating fleets. If someone wants to cheat, it’s not like this is rated tournament play or anything. The only person they will really be cheating is themselves.
I’m game, I’de like to test out a fe of my fighter setups in a fighter only battle. That is if this is what your talking about.
And If not and this is about a non spam this type ship with this type weapons. Then I’ll be great too s i have many many differant design ships that should ALL work together to add into once force one hammer. But the spam ships/weapons just eat them up and are no true test. IE like the one challage i put up the requested no DLC race content, and i got a missle spam fleet that was impossable to beat witout trying to outspam it.
