Huh. I came in here to ask if Fighter armor was totally useless and I guess it isn’t.
I tested the design Rocket/Eng3/Ablative/Ablative Design, 4 squads of that and 1 squad of painters on Edyai on Impossible.
Holy. Crap.
Final result 80% vs. 8%. No squads fully eliminated.
Huh.
I’ve been using Rebels and love their fighters but I have yet to try the Target Laser Fighter + Rocket Fighter.
What I had was an unarmored Icarus Laser Fighter and a Target Laser + Rocket Phoenix Fighter which have served me well. I tried a Pulse Laser and a Torpedo Variant with very little success.
Anyone had any luck with carriers?
Fighters just seem to die far too rapidly for it to matter at all. It seems like as soon as the fight gets hit it slows down due to engine damage, and then within a fraction of a second that first hit is followed up by swarms of laser blasts, vaporizing the fighter.
If fighters had more hit points where they could survive a bit of damage then perhaps carriers might be more valuable. Right now fighters are just very binary. Either completely undamaged or dead.
I’ve modded in shield generators on my fighters and it does help out quite a bit, but the fighters still die far too quickly to make it back to the hangar.
Perhaps modding fighter engines so the engines have tons of HP may be a solution. This would mean that due to the random damage distribution, weapons will be disabled just as fast as they currently are (which is instantly) but if engines had 10x the HP they currently do the fighter will still be able to escape back to the hangar for repairs to get its weapons fixed up.
Thanks - that is an intriguing notion. Perhaps the “Mod Patrol” should be made aware of it.
I don’t know whether my carrier use has been consistently cost-effective, but it most assuredly has not been useless in most battles. Certainly, some fighters do death spiral due to speed loss from the first hit, but plenty more don’t. (And I do use speed-first designs, as a rule, so no armor.)
Your ‘swarms of laser blasts’ suggests to me that you’re dealing with enemy dog-fighter wings set to stay together, which I have noticed tends not to leave survivors. Similarly, tractor beams tend not to leave a fighter able to limp away. But loose-formation dog-fighters, weak antifighter defenses, and even unpainted AF missile frigate groups will often let a damaged fighter get away.
A swarm of loose fighters with prefer to shoot at easier targets on their own. Easier means slower. This means that if the engines are hit the fighter slows down, and then it becomes a bullet magnet. Because its slow it can’t avoid them and takes more damage, which slows it down more, causing it to attract even more lasers. The vulture command makes this even more apparent.
I’ll give this a try myself and tinker with it but you can do this yourself. Its really easy to mod. Just go into the modules files, find the fighter engines, and add a 0 onto the HP for each module. Save and you’re done.
Now all fighter engines have 10x the HP. This will also drastically increase the HP of fighters of course, but will not increase the firepower. So you end up with durable hulls and weak guns, meaning dogfights are much longer and more drawn out. In theory. Haven’t tried it yet.
I noted with interest your proposed solution, but before going further I wanted to ask what percentage you’ve been setting your fighters’ Cautious order to, and at what distance from the core of your fleet you’ve been locating your carrier(s). An incorrect Cautious order or too lengthy a trip back to a carrier (esp. if it passes close to the enemy’s fighting front) will doom just about any damaged fighter regardless of other factors.
I haven’t tried this myself. While at work sometimes I get bored and tinker with things in my head. 
The shield generators work great though. I gave them a fast recharge but no reflect so all weapons penetrate the shields easily. If the fighter is hit occasionally it’ll escape without a scratch because the shields can handle it. If it gets hit several times in a short period of time the shields fail and the fighter soon explodes.
With carriers I’d say set them to be extremely cautious. Fall back to the carrier when they take even 1 HP of damage since fighters have so few HP.
Also there’s no point in having carriers hide way in the back. Assuming the engine HP thing works to make fighters last long enough you could just put 1 carrier module on each of your cruisers. Or maybe half of them. The cruisers close to within laser or missile range and do their thing, which means it is always a very short trip for the fighters to repair at a cruiser.
Pilots aren’t all that intelligent about picking a carrier to dock with - they’ll seem to just all pile into the closest one. Combine this with the fact that damaged carrier modules repair slower (and thus back up with fighters) and you have a recipe for disaster.
Once the module dies, so do all fighters inside of it. Front line cruisers with damaged modules become magnets for squads of fighters that will inevitably keep them company in their last fiery moments.
A code change to the cautious order provisioning for armored units might get some of us using carriers a bit more. As of now, an armored fighter doesn’t take ‘damage’ (and won’t retreat) until the armor plate is gone.
My point is that I regularly have fighters escape from such a furball to be repaired. I’m aware of the logic of the death spiral, but in practice it’s not so reliable as to leave no survivors.
Well, part of it. Also, plenty of the time there isn’t a swarm of loose fighters, and most larger ship weapons result in plenty of banged-up fighters getting away.
In my experience, a carrier module is worth it if you have fighters set to escort your main fleet group. That way, any damaged fighters in the main group only have to survive a couple seconds before they reach the carrier and are repaired. It really extends the life of your fighters and lets you cut down on the amount of air cover you need to keep your fleet consistently protected. Fast rocket fighters can also escape destruction depending on how much they have to fly through to get home, as they can generally manage a respectable velocity even when damaged.
One interesting side-effect I found is that sometimes my damaged rocket fighters will lure enemy fighters with ‘vulture’ orders back to the main fleet where they can be quickly dispatched by the fleet guns (I usually have painters+AA missiles hanging around, but even anti-cruiser weapons will knock down a fighter if they pump out enough shots). It doesn’t happen often enough to really be a legitimate tactic for reducing the enemy’s fighter strength, but it’s still funny to see a couple lone laser fighters suddenly evaporate under a hail of disruptor beams.
Wow… that is a lot of neat information.
I am trying to figure out a way to have lone painter fighters reliably stay near my Assassin Frigates (ECM missiles and Disrupter Bombs). Unlike my other ships, I WANT my Assassins to focus on different cruisers.
My painter fighters have radically different speeds from my other fighters, so it requires some tuning to have them arrive together.
What I would love would be an order for torpedo fighters that they would move away from (fighters/frigates/cruisers) when their weapons were recharging.
I’ve noticed that many people have experimented with a pairing of Target Painters and Rockets to improve effectiveness in that regard. I was wondering if anyone had tried Torpedos and Painters, or perhaps both equipped to some of the fighter designs with two weapon slots, just to see if that improved effectiveness.
I’ve noticed that a big problem with Torpedo Bombers is that even when they do get to fire, half of them miss. With one Painter, none of them miss, so it might kill things fast enough to be viable. I’ve tried this in the past and it seemed to improve their effectiveness, but of course they still die just as quickly…
On a related note, I have had some success using Target Painter Fighters as a sort of ‘targeting drone’ design, wherein you deploy two or three of them to guard an Anti-Fighter Frigate design equipped with Anti-Fighter Missiles, which dramatically increases their kill rate.
Any thoughts?