Fractal Softworks Forum

Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: BeornK on December 23, 2019, 01:24:52 PM

Title: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: BeornK on December 23, 2019, 01:24:52 PM
By now most its appears clear the massed fighters strikes are very effective.  I'm not sure I think this is good for the game balance since drovers or other cheap carriers with massed fighters seems overly effective against other fleet compositions.  Increasing the effectiveness of point defense/flak or nerfing fighters would penalize smaller deployments of fighters without addressing the issue of massed fighter wings.  However, I think have simple solution that will work well to reducing the effect of massive fighter swarms without nerfing fighters and in keeping with the existing mechanics.

Add a limit to the number of active squadrons that can be deployed at once before degrading fighter performance.  Perhaps a max of 10-12? squadrons deployed at once then start applying penalties to fighter performance as the number increase.  In game lore this would be limited fighter channels for coordination.  This follows the similar mechanics in game that penalize doing the same thing to extremes.  You could even add a carrier hullmod for a new battlecruiser sized carrier that raises the max limit since you can't spam battle cruisers. 

Thoughts? 
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: CrashToDesktop on December 23, 2019, 01:34:11 PM
Well, there's always going the route that Company of Heroes did to combat Pioneer spam - in there, Pioneers suffer a 5% damage received debuff for every other Pioneer unit within 10m.  Maybe something like that could take into effect when there's more than 3 fighter wings in the same general screen space?  Of course all the numbers could be tweaked, but what about the general idea of it?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Igncom1 on December 23, 2019, 01:41:17 PM
I've never liked the idea of putting simple number limiters on things like this. Not my jam.

One reason that fighters are so effective is that they are essentially mobile turrets for fully sized ship weapons. Which in the case of bombers is fine, as they are supposed to be combating full on ships. But for fighters it gets problematic as you have swarming drones fitted with ship scale point defence weapons (Wasps/Sparks) to be used against craft that have corvette levels of endurance (the idea being that a fighter is just the next size down from frigates, as in they are more like corvettes.)

My solution would be to make fighters more like real life aircraft and essentially make them very vulnerable to anything that can touch them reliably. Bullets, flak, proxy mines, you name it. But then make them far easier to replace, perhaps when the squadron is recalled entirely to the carrier, to make up for the rates of attrition they'll be facing. Possibly making certain scenarios where overwhelming flak might necessitate not deploying them at all. Like how missiles are not always a good idea to use due to overwhelming PD.

As it stands a fighter like the warthog or broadsword, or an interceptor like the spark, are far more comparable to a corvette that endlessly re spawns rather then a valuable reusable fighter craft like in a ww2 setting. You could make an argument that like missiles you should have only a small number of replaceable per battle, so must be used conservatively lest you waste them all, but that isn't for me.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: SCC on December 23, 2019, 01:49:34 PM
There's only so many ships that can fire on a single target, and even when they are together they have to watch out for friendly fire. Fighters have virtually infinite force concentration and no friendly fire. That's the main issue, besides AI ships not dealing with fighters especially well.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on December 23, 2019, 02:32:36 PM
My solution would be to make fighters more like real life aircraft and essentially make them very vulnerable to anything that can touch them reliably. Bullets, flak, proxy mines, you name it. But then make them far easier to replace, perhaps when the squadron is recalled entirely to the carrier, to make up for the rates of attrition they'll be facing. Possibly making certain scenarios where overwhelming flak might necessitate not deploying them at all. Like how missiles are not always a good idea to use due to overwhelming PD.
That used to be the case when fighters were ships instead of missiles during 0.6.x and 0.7.x.  Unfortunately, there were no fighter skills back then, and (during 0.7.x) warships with officers trumped all.

As for topic, the skills update a few blogs back shows diminishing returns after fighter bays in fleet exceed six.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: BringerofBabies on December 24, 2019, 06:18:23 AM
There's only so many ships that can fire on a single target

This particular part I think should be fixed - PD/Anti-Fighter weapons should be able to fire over friendly vessels (when targeting fighters), much like the Tempest's drones. Then ships could better support each other against fighters, particularly dedicated PD escorts. It would however, have the side effect of making it harder for missiles in general to reach their targets.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: TJJ on December 24, 2019, 09:14:28 AM
Extremely fragile, but rapidly replaceable would be an interesting direction to go; it'd turn them into a short range defensive tool rather than an extreme range offensive one.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: SonnaBanana on December 24, 2019, 09:25:22 AM
Just increase their replacement time, double at minimum.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Thaago on December 24, 2019, 02:19:42 PM
There's only so many ships that can fire on a single target, and even when they are together they have to watch out for friendly fire. Fighters have virtually infinite force concentration and no friendly fire. That's the main issue, besides AI ships not dealing with fighters especially well.

Another way of combating this would be to reduce the engagement range of carriers - part of the power of thunder spam is that the carriers can be so far away.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Sutopia on December 24, 2019, 09:25:20 PM
Make EWAR deal double penalty to fighter control range, done.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: shoi on December 24, 2019, 10:46:01 PM
fighters are only a problem when they hit "critical mass" so to speak, so nerfing them outright is dumb because they are otherwise balanced and probably would end up being useless in any other situation.

The best approach is implementing something to penalize fighter/carrier spam, which is something I think alex is already aiming for.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on December 25, 2019, 04:09:42 AM
fighters are only a problem when they hit "critical mass" so to speak, so nerfing them outright is dumb because they are otherwise balanced and probably would end up being useless in any other situation.
I would not want to see fighters become Pilums 2.0.

I tried reaching critical mass with Pilums, but could not do it with unskilled officers.  I suspect I might if I get ten officers built for missile spam.  Without critical mass, Pilums are mostly useless and act much like old pre-0.8 Thumper - waste of OP.  I do not want to see fighters end up like that.  Then carriers become useless like they were during 0.7.x.

If fighters lost range, then they cease feeling like fighters.  Fighters are already too similar to missiles or ship weapons.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: BeornK on December 25, 2019, 06:57:54 AM
The reason I suggested reducing the effectiveness of mass spammed fighters instead of just boosting point defense or nerfing fighters outright is that fighters are not the problem.  20 Squadrons of fighters at once is the problem.  Nerfing fighter respawn rates or toughness in general has a much bigger effect on limited fighter deployments than the giant murderball deployments.  Its only once the fighters get "critical mass" that point defense gets split among lots of targets and they overwhelm defenses.  Nerfing fighters is not the issue.  Its nerfing massed fighters that needs to be addressed IMHO.   Hopefully any mechanics that reduce the effectiveness of the "critical mass" deployments will be decoupled from the fighters themselvs so that small numbers of fighters aren't useless.

My suggestion would be to allow say 12 squadrons then start applying across the board debuff to fighters after that number get higher.  Reduced Max range, Rate of Fire and Replenishment should be pretty easy to implement and balance.  I don't think fighters need nerfing.  I just think mass spammed fighters need nerfing.  I think -5% per squadron after hitting the max squadron limit for Range and ROF until you hit a max of -50% and a 5% Increase in deployment times per squadron (no limit) would be a reasonable starting point.

You could even have classes of fighters that this doesn't apply to allow different mechanics.  How about a variant Talon Interceptor that has to stay close the the carrier like a Xyphos (with a touch more range) but doesn't count towards the max squadron limit. (It only helps defend the carrier and nearby ships.)  Or A Combat Information Control Center(CIC) build in Hull Mode for a larger carrier that lets that large carrier's squadrons not count towards the limit.  After all you can't spam Astral sized ships like you can drovers.  A midline Battle Cruiser  Carrier with a CIC and 6 Hangars that didn't count towards the limit (due to the CIC hullmod) would make for a neat variant late game carrier if you wanted to run lots of fighters.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on December 25, 2019, 08:45:01 AM
How about a variant Talon Interceptor that has to stay close the the carrier like a Xyphos (with a touch more range) but doesn't count towards the max squadron limit.
That is what Mining Pods are for.  Of course, mining lasers are rather lame.

As for limits, Alex has hinted skills in the next release will have a limit before bonuses get smaller to discourage "mono-fleets".  Only time will tell if it works.  (History has shown it has not so far - more ships was always better than CR bonuses from unused Logistics during the 0.6.x releases.)

Unskilled fighters are not too powerful aside from Sparks.  Spark spam is very strong even unskilled.  Also, battle map size helps.  500 map size is more fighters than 300 map size.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: TaLaR on December 25, 2019, 08:41:10 PM
I tried reaching critical mass with Pilums, but could not do it with unskilled officers.  I suspect I might if I get ten officers built for missile spam.  Without critical mass, Pilums are mostly useless and act much like old pre-0.8 Thumper - waste of OP.  I do not want to see fighters end up like that.  Then carriers become useless like they were during 0.7.x.

I don't think Pilums can ever reach true critical mass. They have too low missile health, simple 4 OP PD Laser counters ~2 Pilum launchers in skill-less fight. You can't win out against odds like this unless enemy has no PD whatsoever.
I mean you probably could find vulnerable AI compositions and in many cases AI would probably find creative ways to get killed by some behavior quirks in presence of mass Pilums (despite not really being threatened). Still, Pilums can't compare to unstoppable waves of Drover Sparks.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on December 25, 2019, 11:49:06 PM
I've never liked the idea of putting simple number limiters on things like this. Not my jam.

One reason that fighters are so effective is that they are essentially mobile turrets for fully sized ship weapons. Which in the case of bombers is fine, as they are supposed to be combating full on ships. But for fighters it gets problematic as you have swarming drones fitted with ship scale point defence weapons (Wasps/Sparks) to be used against craft that have corvette levels of endurance (the idea being that a fighter is just the next size down from frigates, as in they are more like corvettes.)

My solution would be to make fighters more like real life aircraft and essentially make them very vulnerable to anything that can touch them reliably. Bullets, flak, proxy mines, you name it. But then make them far easier to replace, perhaps when the squadron is recalled entirely to the carrier, to make up for the rates of attrition they'll be facing. Possibly making certain scenarios where overwhelming flak might necessitate not deploying them at all. Like how missiles are not always a good idea to use due to overwhelming PD.

As it stands a fighter like the warthog or broadsword, or an interceptor like the spark, are far more comparable to a corvette that endlessly re spawns rather then a valuable reusable fighter craft like in a ww2 setting. You could make an argument that like missiles you should have only a small number of replaceable per battle, so must be used conservatively lest you waste them all, but that isn't for me.

I completely agree with the "in-game fighters are not boats/craft but ships in disguise" part. However I completely disagree with the reusability as a main trait of the real fighters (WWII). They were not as expandable, as you consider them. The most accurate representation of the WWII realities would be the limited number of a fighter squadron usage with the complete lack of staying power. Just as missiles. Honestly speaking, WWII planes were beyond-gun-range missiles for the fleets of that era.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Igncom1 on December 26, 2019, 01:41:57 AM
I mean more as 'reusable' missiles, when compared to disposable normal missiles. As otherwise we essentially agree.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Histidine on December 26, 2019, 01:45:38 AM
I wonder if making fighters collide with each other would prevent them from swarming at the volume where fighter blob becomes an issue.

(I vaguely suspect the main side effect would be killing CPU when fighter AI has to take collision avoidance into account)
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: SCC on December 26, 2019, 02:50:39 AM
Considering that one of the good(/broken) things about fighters is their infinite force concentration (or, can we call it that, density?), taking that away should help with fighter spam. What I would have done is to make wing leaders or wings in general repel one another in some simple way. It could create a situation where some fighters prevent other fighters from engaging enemy ships, but I'm not sure if that's undesirable. It would help if there was some "general fighter behaviour" setting (for entire fleet or for individual ships — preferably the latter), where you could either pick force concentration or distributed presence.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Igncom1 on December 26, 2019, 03:04:53 AM
I suppose at the very least if they can't shoot while stacked, that should be close enough.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Beep Boop on December 26, 2019, 06:22:14 AM
Fighter swarms would probably be less effective if, say, there were more PD weapons with AOE effects that could hurt fighters particularly well, the same way a Doom can utterly gut fighter spam: All the fighters stack, the mine goes off, they all die.

Of course, ultimately, I know of no game where fighters are ever "balanced". In every game, ever, fighters come in two flavors: Useless, or, if they can be massed at levels which hit a critical mass, overpowering. All swarm units in every game, and most likely in real life, function like this: They're either useless and can be swatted down before they inflict real damage, or they hit critical mass and can no longer be brought down before they cause real pain, at which point it turns into a case of "AAAH, BEES!". And there is ultimately, no functional distinction between fighters and missiles. In any game where one is OP, the other will almost certainly be also. Ultimately, a fighter is just a missile with 4x the delta-V it really needs.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Schwartz on December 26, 2019, 08:30:58 AM
Don't need to fix weapons.

Fighters were quite a bit weaker before they were turned into fighters-as-weapons. What we have now is their strongest iteration yet, and nerfing them (a bit) is perfectly OK. I would start by reducing their speed.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on December 26, 2019, 10:18:28 AM
Fighters were quite a bit weaker before they were turned into fighters-as-weapons. What we have now is their strongest iteration yet, and nerfing them (a bit) is perfectly OK. I would start by reducing their speed.
Back then, there were no carrier skills and no carrier hullmods.

Today, most carriers need to ultra-specialize into carrier duty (and/or get more Sparks) just to do their job well.  No more warship-lite carriers except maybe Legion.

If there needs to be a fighter nerf, I suggest removing all carrier hullmods so that carriers can only spend their OP to properly equip and use weapons of a warship one size lower like they used to, and not ultra-specialize into being superb carriers at the cost of being unarmed or nearly so.

Fighters do not need to be too slow.  Warthogs are useless because they are so slow that cruisers can outrun them.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Eji1700 on December 26, 2019, 02:55:23 PM
I think some of this can be solved with just some better defined roles and being better about what qualifies those, and maybe making fighter range depend on the carrier (either partially or wholly).

This gives another metric to balance on (yeah drovers are mobile, but they need to use their mobility to stay on the front lines so their fighters can get somewhere because they can't support as far), and then with some tweaking of weaponry/OP i think you can get the rest of the way there (A ship carrying a burst PD weapon should really qualify more as a gun ship, and have similary stats to a bomber, not a fighter).


As always I also think higher costs and scarcity would also go a long ways towards solving the issue on two ends.  Who cares if a spark ball can hit critical mass if it's very hard to actually find enough sparks and ships that can mount them, likewise so what if Talons are somewhat lackluster if they're dirt cheap and easy to acquire.  A lot of this games balance issues revolve around how easy it is to mass stuff that really shouldn't be easy to mass (well i took three good trips to the outer systems and now I can spam drovers with sparks gg).

Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on December 29, 2019, 03:03:43 AM
Fighters were quite a bit weaker before they were turned into fighters-as-weapons. What we have now is their strongest iteration yet, and nerfing them (a bit) is perfectly OK. I would start by reducing their speed.
Back then, there were no carrier skills and no carrier hullmods.

Today, most carriers need to ultra-specialize into carrier duty (and/or get more Sparks) just to do their job well. 
In the past there was a bug which applied the multiplied the lowered replacement rate twice.

________
Anyways, there are two ways to hit critical mass. One of bombers and one of fighters. Why is it that this thread is concentrating msotly on fighter type fighters?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on December 29, 2019, 06:04:54 AM
In the past there was a bug which applied the multiplied the lowered replacement rate twice.
During 0.8.x, when characters got fighter skills and ships got carrier hullmods.  Also, some fighters were overpowered in earlier 0.8a.  Talons were free and better than 8 OP fighters, Warthogs were overpowered, and Sparks had two burst PD instead of one.

I was referring to 0.7.x and earlier, when there were only three trees and personal skills were very strong at 10, and fighters were ships instead of missiles.  During 0.6, player could outfit most carriers to be capable brawling ships while offering some fighter support, much like modern Legion.  While carriers were not quite as strong as skilled warships, skills were limit to fleet commanders during 0.6, and carriers were viable if not top-tier.  During 0.7, when skilled officers came along, carriers became a gimp option (because there were no fighter skills).

Today, carriers can be strong, but they need to build for being a carrier.  They need all of the carrier skills and hullmods, plus strong and expensive fighters, at the expense of nearly all OP, to be good.  (I tried classic warship-lite loadouts with Talons or Mining Pods, but they were sub-par compared to unarmed carriers with good fighters.)  My point was if fighters are too powerful, then remove the carrier hullmods and encourage classic warship-lite loadouts.  Classic warship-lite loadouts were fun.  Now, if I want to pilot a carrier, I eschew weapons and run, run, run away if I want to be optimal.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Grievous69 on December 29, 2019, 06:13:22 AM
Fun little drinking game for the brave souls since it's the holiday season: Open random posts on the forum and every time you see Megas mention older versions of the game, take a shot.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Schwartz on December 29, 2019, 08:40:49 AM
He's got a point though. Having to use weak carriers just to use powerful fighters may be a valid balance mechanism, but it isn't fun and it isn't pretty to look at.

Would much prefer if hangars had their own separate ordnance points. A fixed amount per carrier model.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Grievous69 on December 29, 2019, 09:28:39 AM
He's got a point though. Having to use weak carriers just to use powerful fighters may be a valid balance mechanism, but it isn't fun and it isn't pretty to look at.

Would much prefer if hangars had their own separate ordnance points. A fixed amount per carrier model.
But then you remove any sort of choice from the customization. You're always gonna have full ''flight deck OP'' or you're basically shooting yourself in the foot. Carriers will always have the same OP for weapons and hullmods. I think the current system is fine, it's just as you said, fighters are strong currently. So I keep suggesting the same thing, nerf all fighters/bombers and buff carriers (or just give them extra OP). When the fighter rework came, Alex said he would give extra OP to carriers for compensation but some are still super OP starved that you can barely fit any decent weapons.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on December 29, 2019, 09:46:54 AM
Even with Loadout Design 3, many ships OP starved enough that mounts need to be left empty.  (They need to prioritize on flux stats to support the guns mounted.)  Most carriers are really OP starved, and most fighters cost too much OP.  To be their best, most carriers should not use weapons at all (or maybe a few PD guns).  The only "carrier" that can get away with having enough guns to fight like a warship while still having decent fighters is Legion.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Igncom1 on December 29, 2019, 09:59:51 AM
That's only because flux stats for ships at their base level is so low that you mostly need to put them into caps and vents.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Astyanax on December 29, 2019, 11:35:49 AM
I'm not too well-versed with fighter mechanics, but...

Would increased CR decay for fighters work? This would limit their effective range and duration.

Fighters also aren't supposed to be self-sufficient, so returning to a hangar would reset their CR, and, if more balancing is needed, replace destroyed fighters (instead of field replacements).

EDIT- perhaps resetting fighter CR and replacing destroyed fighters could modestly reduce the carrier's CR, instead of reducing the replacement rate?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on December 29, 2019, 11:42:11 AM
Add a limit to the number of active squadrons that can be deployed at once before degrading fighter performance.  Perhaps a max of 10-12? squadrons deployed at once then start applying penalties to fighter performance as the number increase.

I wonder if making fighters collide with each other would prevent them from swarming at the volume where fighter blob becomes an issue.

(I vaguely suspect the main side effect would be killing CPU when fighter AI has to take collision avoidance into account)

I suppose at the very least if they can't shoot while stacked, that should be close enough.

While I agree with the overall idea of reducing spamming effectiveness and think that is the appropriate place to target balance changes to fighters, the above implementations have more potential problems than I think is worth the effort.

1) In the case of global wing limiters: similar to the CR mechanic (A historically polarizing update to the community) these types of mechanics run the risk of feeling like gimmicks purely for the sake of game play balance. You can explain them away with lore or WWII examples possibly, but I think its going to feel weird to the player anyway because its a relatively arbitrary global limiter.

2) In the case of stacked fighter collisions and stuff like that, there is the performance issue with collision avoidance and the addition of a new layer of balance to consider. This balance layer scales exponentially rather than linearly. What I mean by that is there will be a sweet spot of fighter numbers that maintain optimal effectiveness, but once the threshold is crossed suddenly the effectiveness completely tanks. Not a good feeling for the player in my opinion.

3) You have to effectively and intuitively explain this information to the player. Just like how supplies per day UI can be confusing to new players, all players are going to see is that "as I get more fighters they get worse for some reason." You might assume a player would ask about it on the forum, but I believe the statistic iirc is around 6 players will feel the same way but only 1 out of those 6 will investigate on average. The others will likely just assume fighters are bad and not use them.

4) Spamming all fighters shouldn't be the obvious best strategy by any means, but I would caution against design changes that outright force or overly encourage certain play styles. It feels a little like railroading away from fighters on purpose just because they are strong now. Nothing is outright forced at the moment, it just so happens that a fighter strategy is optimal and so some players feel subjectively forced to use them in order to feel optimal. My advice is to dampen that feeling without railroading away from the fighter play style on purpose.

5) Finally, and arguably less important, there is modding to consider. The above proposed changes would at best require modders to work around them for fighter heavy mods, and at worst kill those types of mods altogether.


My proposed solution:

There's only so many ships that can fire on a single target, and even when they are together they have to watch out for friendly fire. Fighters have virtually infinite force concentration and no friendly fire. That's the main issue, besides AI ships not dealing with fighters especially well.

I personally think AI tweaks are the best route to take here. Instead of reducing fighter effectiveness when stacking or causing losses and performance hits by implementing fighter collisions, instead limit the number of wings that can be active on any one target (by hullsize). So fighters are no longer overly spammable on any one target instead of just globally. This would sort of act as a soft limit, however, in that if a single carrier has more wings than the limit for a single ship, that is ok and won't cause a penalty, but no other carriers will be able to send their wings against that same target or can be assigned to the same fighter strike order. Attempting to do so fails and gives a brief "you can't do that" sound effect. Actually, I've thought about it and that could grow frustrating if you needed a specific vessels' fighters to engage a specific target due to tactical necessity. Instead, new fighter strike orders override old orders but the soft limit prevents over-saturation as was the original intention. I think that tidies up that issue I hope.

(The way to teach new players this mechanic could be included in a simple popup the first time a player issues a fighter strike order on a "saturated" target.)

I think the idea of "target saturation" is more intuitive than seeing your fighters get weaker or completely ineffective when clumped. The same reasons (fighter coordination etc) apply and hullmods could reduce the number of active wings allowed on the ship for better fighter defense ship-to-ship.

It would help if there was some "general fighter behaviour" setting (for entire fleet or for individual ships — preferably the latter), where you could either pick force concentration or distributed presence.

This also makes the AI spread out fighters kind like the distributed idea above, and allows for fighter strikes (force projection) to be balanced more easily without worrying about the critical mass problem. If you can calculate exactly how many fighters of each type can actually strike at one time, then as long as PD can handle that specific amount unless otherwise distracted (like by an enemy combat vessel or missile spam) fighters should theoretically feel like they are in a very good spot.

Rough example of wing limits off the top of my head:

Frigate: 3 wings
Destroyer: 5 wings
Cruiser: 8 wings
Capital: 12 wings
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: shoi on December 29, 2019, 04:18:55 PM
+1 to that suggestion. I forgot to mention it in my post but the real issue with the "critical mass" thing is that it seems AI tries to assign as many fighters as possible to attack 1 ship at a time. Spreading out that distribution would help tons
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Schwartz on December 30, 2019, 12:50:34 AM
So in other words.. introducing a system that will artificially bottleneck single-target fighter swarms.

I guess it can be explained reasonably well. But I don't think this is a good direction to take on principle. You don't have a limit for # of destroyers ganging up on a frigate, either. The numbers game and the tactical application of it is at the core of winning battles, and this suggestion is going completely the other way. It's like nursery school for fighters. If I bring a fleet with 20 fighter squadrons and I have a single target selected for fighter strike, I want them all to strike that target. Unfair situations happen constantly in this game, and it's up to the player to deal with them. If you overextend and find yourself in the middle of a dozen fighter swarms in a frigate, guess what, you're supposed to die.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: SCC on December 30, 2019, 01:16:04 AM
It's actually way more likely for the player to exploit this, than the AI. Only Persean League gets close to fighter spam and even then, they don't go to the extremes the player can.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: TaLaR on December 30, 2019, 01:41:47 AM
Yeah, that would look as stupid as a typical Dynasty Warriors game - horde of enemies in front of you, politely waiting for their turn to attack.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Schwartz on December 30, 2019, 01:45:24 AM
It's actually way more likely for the player to exploit this, than the AI. Only Persean League gets close to fighter spam and even then, they don't go to the extremes the player can.

See: Pretty much all endgame Tri-Tach bounty fleets.

If by exploiting you mean purposefully massing fighters on single targets, well, neither the player nor the AI can actually direct fighters with pinpoint accuracy anymore... they do what they want, and if that happens to be piling on a single target, that's that then. The player can certainly try by bringing tons of them and then only selecting one target for fighter strike, but I would be surprised if that worked as well as I made it out to be.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on December 30, 2019, 09:40:07 AM
Yeah, that would look as stupid as a typical Dynasty Warriors game - horde of enemies in front of you, politely waiting for their turn to attack.

So a magical dampening field to fighter strength as they grow in numbers is the answer then?? That's not stupid?

-1

You don't have a limit for # of destroyers ganging up on a frigate, either. The numbers game and the tactical application of it is at the core of winning battles, and this suggestion is going completely the other way. It's like nursery school for fighters. If I bring a fleet with 20 fighter squadrons and I have a single target selected for fighter strike, I want them all to strike that target. Unfair situations happen constantly in this game, and it's up to the player to deal with them. If you overextend and find yourself in the middle of a dozen fighter swarms in a frigate, guess what, you're supposed to die.

Right. But there isn't a balance issue with ganging up on a frigate with destroyers because there is a realistic limit through spacial collisions to how many destroyers you can bring. You simply can't do that with fighters without causing more problems.

The point is to solve the balance problem without some arbitrary wing number limitation reducing damage... that just doesn't make sense by your own admission through the above post.  It will be confusing and counter-intuitive.

10 fighter wings kill a frigate in 5 seconds. 20 fighter wings kill a frigate in 10 seconds... see what I mean?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: SafariJohn on December 30, 2019, 11:02:48 AM
Well, there's always going the route that Company of Heroes did to combat Pioneer spam - in there, Pioneers suffer a 5% damage received debuff for every other Pioneer unit within 10m.  Maybe something like that could take into effect when there's more than 3 fighter wings in the same general screen space?  Of course all the numbers could be tweaked, but what about the general idea of it?

Very first reply and, while not perfect, IMO the best suggestion in here.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Igncom1 on December 30, 2019, 11:04:26 AM
That feels like a 'too much fun' penalty to me.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on December 30, 2019, 12:31:09 PM
^ Agreed. The beatings of Fun will continue until morale improves... :P

In all seriousness though, again, how can a mechanic like that result in intuitive game play learning? Its directly counter to that concept. I just can't justify it any other way at the moment. I'm not saying people shouldn't try and convince me or anything, but right now I fail to see a compelling counter-argument for this important issue.

*EDIT* (Wanted to also make it known that my own suggestion definitely has its own flaws and I recognize that. Really not trying to be a jerk, here, if that is the impression some are getting, but I do want to challenge things that I foresee causing a lot of negative feedback in the future. This is my opinion of course, but I try and choose these kinds of "battles" wisely. Just a disclaimer on intent. :) )
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on December 30, 2019, 12:55:51 PM
Radical solution:

Turn fighters into mere recievers of the carrier's energy. Flux generation is proportional to a normal weapon rate and a distance-from-carrier based multiplier.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on December 31, 2019, 09:44:20 AM
Well, there's always going the route that Company of Heroes did to combat Pioneer spam - in there, Pioneers suffer a 5% damage received debuff for every other Pioneer unit within 10m.  Maybe something like that could take into effect when there's more than 3 fighter wings in the same general screen space?  Of course all the numbers could be tweaked, but what about the general idea of it?

Very first reply and, while not perfect, IMO the best suggestion in here.
I would think that as not a good suggestion as it is anti-intuitive and oddly specific. The player doesn't have fine control of the position of units like you would in Company of Heroes.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Serenitis on December 31, 2019, 11:03:35 AM
I wonder if there's a way of making any weapon deal splash damage or gaining passthrough, but only to fighters?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Thaago on December 31, 2019, 11:40:45 AM
Hmm, don't fighters have their own collision group? I'm not sure if we have the tools in the API, but that kind of thing should be very easy to do engine wise.

Now that I think of it, doesn't plasma have passthrough on missiles and fighters? We could make a PD weapon with the same projectile type?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: SCC on December 31, 2019, 02:04:11 PM
It passes only through missiles. Fighters are properly hit.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Snowblind on January 01, 2020, 03:53:25 AM
I am reasonably sure plasma passes through fighters as well.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Schwartz on January 01, 2020, 08:54:38 AM
The thread could have been called: Balancing Sabot swarms without nerfing Sabots. Balancing capital spam without nerfing capitals. Balancing beam spam without nerfing beams. Balancing kinetic spam without nerfing kinetics.

Any kind of overwhelming force is going to wreck stuff. Fighter swarms may be worse because they're long range and ammo-less. Which is why I am all for nerfing fighters. But please, don't even think about patching this by changing how PD works, or by applying some arbitrary limit for fighter swarms vs. a given target. Before these options are even considered, I would prefer fighters not be touched at all.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Igncom1 on January 01, 2020, 09:00:58 AM
Yeah if anything the presence of some fighter weapons to break armour, despite being PD craft, is the problem.

Sparks are armed with frigate scale point defence beams that are surprisingly effective vs armour. But that's only needed because missiles and fighters have frigate comparable levels of defence. In my opinion.

The same could be said for wasps or talons or broadswords. Point defence weapons are often just shorter ranged and more accurate frigate cannons.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 01, 2020, 09:16:29 AM
To be honest, this so called fighter swarms are not much of a problem at all. It can only be done by the player deliberately creating such a fleet. Also the discussion confuses between fighter-type fighters and bomber-type fighters, of which Sabot armed Longbows are part of and Atropos armed Daggers are part of. It's not always clear which is which when people are discussing. It is also not clear if people are discussing Sparks in particular, or say the Talon/Broadsword example or even just Thunder.

As it is anyways, next release seems to hint at 6 fighter bays being an optimal number and perhaps frigates as well by giving a limited number of those a boost. I would imagine that there will be a reduction in fighter replacement rate as well, though that would be less of a nerf against the likes of bomber-type fighters.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 01, 2020, 12:43:43 PM
Before these options are even considered, I would prefer fighters not be touched at all.

This is kind of where I am at right now, too. Just leave them alone rather than implementing anything arbitrary.

To be honest, this so called fighter swarms are not much of a problem at all. It can only be done by the player deliberately creating such a fleet. Also the discussion confuses between fighter-type fighters and bomber-type fighters, of which Sabot armed Longbows are part of and Atropos armed Daggers are part of. It's not always clear which is which when people are discussing. It is also not clear if people are discussing Sparks in particular, or say the Talon/Broadsword example or even just Thunder.

As it is anyways, next release seems to hint at 6 fighter bays being an optimal number and perhaps frigates as well by giving a limited number of those a boost. I would imagine that there will be a reduction in fighter replacement rate as well, though that would be less of a nerf against the likes of bomber-type fighters.

I just really hope this mechanic is through skills. Even if it is, I still don't like it honestly because it still violates the above concepts I've already mentioned, but it might be tolerable if its an optional skill that requires the player to pursue it for it to take effect.

Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: FooF on January 01, 2020, 03:29:41 PM
I think the primary issue with fighter swarms is that PD is just not that effective against them. PD is geared toward missile defense rather than swatting fighters and it shows. If you're going to add an arbitrary mechanic to dissuade mass fighter attacks, increase the effectiveness of PD against fighter hulls and make them take losses. As has been said, granular control over individual fighters isn't possible but an attacking player could be warned that condensing a ball of fighters onto a single target makes them more vulnerable to anti-fighter weaponry.

I don't know what that looks like, per se, but the chief mechanic for fighting carriers is depleting its replacement rate. I feel it's better to lean into this mechanic than anything else.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 01, 2020, 03:56:55 PM
To be honest, this so called fighter swarms are not much of a problem at all. It can only be done by the player deliberately creating such a fleet. Also the discussion confuses between fighter-type fighters and bomber-type fighters, of which Sabot armed Longbows are part of and Atropos armed Daggers are part of. It's not always clear which is which when people are discussing. It is also not clear if people are discussing Sparks in particular, or say the Talon/Broadsword example or even just Thunder.

As it is anyways, next release seems to hint at 6 fighter bays being an optimal number and perhaps frigates as well by giving a limited number of those a boost. I would imagine that there will be a reduction in fighter replacement rate as well, though that would be less of a nerf against the likes of bomber-type fighters.
I just really hope this mechanic is through skills. Even if it is, I still don't like it honestly because it still violates the above concepts I've already mentioned, but it might be tolerable if its an optional skill that requires the player to pursue it for it to take effect.
According to the blog, the bonuses from fleetwide skills like that decrease after the fleet exceeds some threshold, such as the six fighter bays.  It does not seem unskilled characters will take penalties for having too many carriers, just those that have skills to discourage "mono-fleets".

I don't know what that looks like, per se, but the chief mechanic for fighting carriers is depleting its replacement rate. I feel it's better to lean into this mechanic than anything else.
This is why Expanded Deck Crew hullmod feels mandatory for carriers.  Slower drain, faster recovery.  No way I have OP left to build a warship-lite carrier after I spend OP on good fighters and hullmods carrier needs to do its job well.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 01, 2020, 06:56:14 PM
According to the blog, the bonuses from fleetwide skills like that decrease after the fleet exceeds some threshold, such as the six fighter bays.  It does not seem unskilled characters will take penalties for having too many carriers, just those that have skills to discourage "mono-fleets".

I'll have to reread it I don't remember all the details. I don't think I caught that the first time I read the blog. I guess I can take some consolation in the idea that skills will most likely be heavily moddable so I can likely increase the threshold number.

Back to possible solutions:

If going the nerf fighters route, based on my experience I would agree with Schwartz: changing PD requires a rebalance of missiles too. That might get pretty involved before all is said and done. Would reducing fighter defenses (and thereby increasing PD effectiveness that way) be out of the question? What do we think is the threshold of that kind of health/armor reduction before fighters themselves become unattractive?

Radical solution:

Turn fighters into mere recievers of the carrier's energy. Flux generation is proportional to a normal weapon rate and a distance-from-carrier based multiplier.

In concept, I like this idea because it's a "tried and true" balancing mechanism for any sort of weapon, including fighters. If this were the route taken, I would recommend flux be generated each fighter replacement that scales with replacement rate increasing that amount as more and more fighters die. Each fighter entry would have its own flux cost per replacement in the wings csv file. Max flux carriers stop replacing all together until they vent?

However, this might be a lot of work. I'm not sure. It also might run the risk of overly promoting weaponless carriers, which would feel a little off. And venting is fast enough that it might not even matter since fighters have such a large range... hmm second guessing it now. While good in principle it seems like there might be a lot of complications. Not saying it couldn't work though.

*EDIT*

I think the primary issue with fighter swarms is that PD is just not that effective against them. PD is geared toward missile defense rather than swatting fighters and it shows. If you're going to add an arbitrary mechanic to dissuade mass fighter attacks, increase the effectiveness of PD against fighter hulls and make them take losses. As has been said, granular control over individual fighters isn't possible but an attacking player could be warned that condensing a ball of fighters onto a single target makes them more vulnerable to anti-fighter weaponry.

I don't know what that looks like, per se, but the chief mechanic for fighting carriers is depleting its replacement rate. I feel it's better to lean into this mechanic than anything else.

I agree with the last part about replacement rate. Even if you could effectively warn the player, though, since they don't actually have that much control over what AI fighters do, I think that warning will in reality only translate to: "Don't give fighter strike orders or fighters will get worse and hope that the AI doesn't do it for you"
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 01, 2020, 09:43:34 PM

Radical solution:

Turn fighters into mere recievers of the carrier's energy. Flux generation is proportional to a normal weapon rate and a distance-from-carrier based multiplier.

In concept, I like this idea because it's a "tried and true" balancing mechanism for any sort of weapon, including fighters. If this were the route taken, I would recommend flux be generated each fighter replacement that scales with replacement rate increasing that amount as more and more fighters die. Each fighter entry would have its own flux cost per replacement in the wings csv file. Max flux carriers stop replacing all together until they vent?

However, this might be a lot of work. I'm not sure. It also might run the risk of overly promoting weaponless carriers, which would feel a little off. And venting is fast enough that it might not even matter since fighters have such a large range... hmm second guessing it now. While good in principle it seems like there might be a lot of complications. Not saying it couldn't work though.


Max flux will prevent both replacement and usage of weapons by fighters (not including zero flux weapons like missiles).

I'm already running weaponless carriers. For the most part I add weapons to them because I have OP to spare. But if not, weapons are first to go.

On the long range they will generate more flux too. In melee, LDMG generates 25 f/s for 208 dps. Make it 500 f/s for when fighters are at max range. My typical current Drover design will have to vent each 2 seconds or raise the number of caps/vents, take Power Grid Modulation for an officer and so on. Not so spamy now...

Idea in general is to force fighters act like bombers: "get in - unload - get out". No staying on top of the target till it shredded and consumed.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 01, 2020, 11:03:05 PM
Idea in general is to force fighters act like bombers: "get in - unload - get out". No staying on top of the target till it shredded and consumed.

I will say I do like this a lot. It's a concept that seems to work. I'm thinking about how to get around some of the complications though. The weaponless carriers issue in particular is not ideal. Even if that is the current reality, a side goal would be to preserve the hybrid battlecarrier. I'm definitely open to suggestions there.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 02, 2020, 12:20:47 AM
The most efficient way of using fighters will be at melee range. And its look like a good reason to keep regular guns on a carrier.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 02, 2020, 10:16:36 AM
Before these options are even considered, I would prefer fighters not be touched at all.

This is kind of where I am at right now, too. Just leave them alone rather than implementing anything arbitrary.

To be honest, this so called fighter swarms are not much of a problem at all. It can only be done by the player deliberately creating such a fleet. Also the discussion confuses between fighter-type fighters and bomber-type fighters, of which Sabot armed Longbows are part of and Atropos armed Daggers are part of. It's not always clear which is which when people are discussing. It is also not clear if people are discussing Sparks in particular, or say the Talon/Broadsword example or even just Thunder.

As it is anyways, next release seems to hint at 6 fighter bays being an optimal number and perhaps frigates as well by giving a limited number of those a boost. I would imagine that there will be a reduction in fighter replacement rate as well, though that would be less of a nerf against the likes of bomber-type fighters.

I just really hope this mechanic is through skills. Even if it is, I still don't like it honestly because it still violates the above concepts I've already mentioned, but it might be tolerable if its an optional skill that requires the player to pursue it for it to take effect.
To be honest I don't like the idea that much either for the same reason. It was off an image of a blog post about skills and there is no guarantee that would be the case. The way it was phrased seem to imply that the bonus was distibuted by beingshared after 6 fighter bays, so perhaps it doesn't create the "optimal" number I was writing anyways.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: DatonKallandor on January 03, 2020, 07:36:59 AM
The fighter bay bonus that was shown (and the other scaling bonuses mentioned) scales in a way where no matter how many you are "above the limit", you will always get a benefit from adding another of those items. Your fighters won't get worse if you add a 7th hangar - it'll still be an increase over 6. It's just a skill that you take if you want your strikecraft to be better, it doesn't matter how many hangars you have.

As for fighter balance, having fighters act more like fighters (air superiority, anti-strikecraft) would help a lot. Nerf their weapons against non-strikecraft targets, buff up their agility and speed, change their AI to priotize strikecraft/dump flares for bombers. That alone would help differentiate them from bombers and stop clouds of them from quite so overwhelming to proper ship targets.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 03, 2020, 09:31:46 AM
There is a little problem. Our so called "craft" are more like "ships". Too survivable.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 03, 2020, 10:02:47 AM
The fighter bay bonus that was shown (and the other scaling bonuses mentioned) scales in a way where no matter how many you are "above the limit", you will always get a benefit from adding another of those items. Your fighters won't get worse if you add a 7th hangar - it'll still be an increase over 6. It's just a skill that you take if you want your strikecraft to be better, it doesn't matter how many hangars you have.

As for fighter balance, having fighters act more like fighters (air superiority, anti-strikecraft) would help a lot. Nerf their weapons against non-strikecraft targets, buff up their agility and speed, change their AI to priotize strikecraft/dump flares for bombers. That alone would help differentiate them from bombers and stop clouds of them from quite so overwhelming to proper ship targets.
What happens when there are no fighters or no carriers left in the opposing fleet? Then there is nothing for them to artificially prioritise and their behaviour is exactly the same. I don't really like the idea of directly nerfing their weapons to be worse against non-fighters. A weapon should act the same way no matter the target. A MG on a fighter should do exactly the same damage on the shields of a fighter as it would do on a frigate.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 03, 2020, 02:06:26 PM
The fighter bay bonus that was shown (and the other scaling bonuses mentioned) scales in a way where no matter how many you are "above the limit", you will always get a benefit from adding another of those items. Your fighters won't get worse if you add a 7th hangar - it'll still be an increase over 6. It's just a skill that you take if you want your strikecraft to be better, it doesn't matter how many hangars you have.

Ok that seems pretty reasonable. Diluting the skill bonus may still counter-intuitively discourage players who like a lot of fighters from taking the skill, though, unless there are no better alternative skills to compete against it. A small offensive bonus is still better than no bonus after all, but if the dilution is enough that a defensive skill for the carrier itself is much more effective then that defensive skill will be that much more attractive of a choice. That is still a concern I have, but there are enough unknowns that I'll try and keep an open mind to the idea. It at least seems to be a lot better than I had originally feared.

Another side effect of that kind of skill design will be to encourage small, diverse fleets in order to get the maximum bonuses from your skills. The real challenge is going to be making sure that it doesn't go too far and make those kinds of fleets optimal- just more competitive with maxed out fleets. Campaign fleets will have to likely get smaller but I think that was in the works already anyway.

Mono-fleets of any kind are particularly boring to me, so I ideally wouldn't want them to be optimal either, just not at the expense of max fleets or carrier (aka flight deck) heavy fleets especially.

As for fighter balance, having fighters act more like fighters (air superiority, anti-strikecraft) would help a lot. Nerf their weapons against non-strikecraft targets, buff up their agility and speed, change their AI to priotize strikecraft/dump flares for bombers. That alone would help differentiate them from bombers and stop clouds of them from quite so overwhelming to proper ship targets.

Well, I have a fair amount of experience with that particular design style. I can give my feedback here from my lessons learned implementing Archean Order's combat balance:

Spoiler
What happens when there are no fighters or no carriers left in the opposing fleet? Then there is nothing for them to artificially prioritise and their behaviour is exactly the same. I don't really like the idea of directly nerfing their weapons to be worse against non-fighters. A weapon should act the same way no matter the target. A MG on a fighter should do exactly the same damage on the shields of a fighter as it would do on a frigate.

Granted, fighter weapons do deal less damage to ships in general in Archean Order because they are built in (fighter) versions, but to tackle the air-superiority issue I would advocate that buffs to damage will feel better and leave fighter balance against ships alone so the above idea will still remain true to a point. Similarly, I increased all strike craft weapon damage against weapon emplacements and engines under the same concept. Hard numbers: I use a built-in hullmod that increases damage to fighters and engines/weapons by 200%.

However, as a side note you can also easily argue that a fighter-based weapon can hit more concentrated weak points and that is why more damage occurs. It's certainly a bit of hand-waving and does fall apart a tiny bit in the case of shields, but IMO it gets the job done well enough in this specific case. It's not a new concept to these types of games by any means at least.

I also implemented ammo/charge clips with timed "reloading" of those clips for all fighter weapons, even beams. The AI currently does not actually support the implementation of limited ammunition for non missile weapons (AI just leaves the fighters on the target even when they run out of ammo unless they have missiles that run out) but that could be changed and allow for a max calculated strike potential in order to make all fighters behave like bombers and promote the "strike run" concept here:

Idea in general is to force fighters act like bombers: "get in - unload - get out". No staying on top of the target till it shredded and consumed.

Again, the limited ammunition storage is pretty easily explainable and remains intuitive for fighters (no built in forges unlike larger warships, etc).
[close]

So what does all of this translate to in actual application? Right now, fighters mostly only target each other in transit to their intended target, but during those small "clashes" with other fighters or bombers losses are more easily accrued and a defensive screen of air superiority strike craft becomes more meaningful because it prevents massive bomber losses that would otherwise occur without them. If air superiority craft prioritized fighters/bombers the entire time, the extremity of the damage boost could likely get reduced I would imagine. Just something to consider as well.

Ships, on the other hand, still take damage from air superiority craft (and from assault-oriented craft that provides a hybrid between the two extremes) but even if the other fleet is completely bereft of air superiority craft to provide a screen, the ship takes some initial damage from the attack run and then has a window to recover and either strike back against the fighters or retreat to a better defensive position within the fleet itself (such as behind a PD dedicated frigate or two to act in the same fashion as the air superiority craft).

This seems like a nerf on the surface- and it kind of is to an extent!- but only in the "staying power" of fighter craft- which afaik is the problem in the first place. Initial strike damage from fighter runs would remain roughly the same.

*EDIT* I forgot another important concept of this design: You can now change ship AI to completely ignore fighters and bombers and only retreat or not based upon the damage received post strike or have a way of calculating the incoming damage (since its fixed now) and allow the AI to make a more informed decision about whether to retreat in the face of an incoming fighter wave.

That will solve the AI's issue with being too timid around fighters to the point that they never really have an impact in the battle (especially phase ships).
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 04, 2020, 05:29:33 AM
If staying power of fighters is identified to be the problem then the easy fix would be to to simply change their staying power, whether by HP of hull and Flux of shields or by changing fighter replacement rate. There is no need to artificially make it so certain weapons do more damage to certain hulls. It'll be like making Tachyon Lance do half damage to Frigates so it wouldn't be so easy for a pair of Tachyon lance to instantly kill a Frigate.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 04, 2020, 12:32:28 PM
If staying power of fighters is identified to be the problem then the easy fix would be to to simply change their staying power, whether by HP of hull and Flux of shields or by changing fighter replacement rate. There is no need to artificially make it so certain weapons do more damage to certain hulls. It'll be like making Tachyon Lance do half damage to Frigates so it wouldn't be so easy for a pair of Tachyon lance to instantly kill a Frigate.

The staying power portion of the request was actually the limited ammo. The increased damage to fighters is just to increase the usefulness of interceptors and anti-fighter fighters, mostly. It can be separated out of the idea without impacting it very much, though IMO it makes fighter clashes "more cool" to look at. That's subjective for me, but since this is one of the few suggestions not completely experimental and actually implemented and tested to a certain degree, I can say that with a fair amount of confidence coming from my perspective.

Also, the custom fighter weapons (just so as to have limited ammo- otherwise a copy paste of the csv entries and changing two fields) can be implemented in a day's worth of work, maybe even less.

The real challenging part to this suggestion as far as work goes is the AI tweaks. I can't speak very much on how long those changes would take, but considering the other AI threads floating around... well, this is one of those times where I think the work is worth it. Like Alex likes to say (paraphrasing): Hard things to implement aren't worth it just because they're "cool", there needs to be a design problem to solve. In this case, there are several, so its multiple birds with a single stone- so to speak.

*EDIT* As far as the idea of changing defensive stats of fighters to reduce staying power, you'd think that would do it, right? I thought so too. The problem with that is then you are also inadvertently reducing their alpha strike potential because they then also die more easily to ship weapons- sometimes before they can even get into firing range. It reduces the effectiveness of a small number of fighters. To say the problem is complex would be an understatement, I think. I'm not saying that couldn't work, but to be honest I think it would become surprisingly involved even compared to the above suggestion, and it only solves one of the underlying problems just mentioned.

*EDIT 2*
Still, if nerfing fighter alpha strike potential would be considered fine and no additional changes had to be made, then that could perhaps be considered the easy road. I'm not quite convinced that's true, though, as from what I've gathered most feel that the alpha strike of fighters is in a good place right now and that's part of the reason this thread was made. Specifically, it seems like the staying power of critically massed fighter spamming is too overwhelming. My suggestion targets that very specific issue because it was an issue I also dealt with for a long time in Archean Order. Spamming fighters is an inherent feature of that mod.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 04, 2020, 10:17:59 PM
I think its another case of the self-invented problem.

Interceptors came into being as an answer to the fire solution problem. It was too difficult to computate the necessary leading for the stationary gun against fast moving aircraft. Hence the idea to use an aircraft to get another aircraft. Guns were brought rigth next to the target. It was a thing even in the early missile age. However, the needs of the anti-ballistic-missile defence produced a solution to that problem and, in turn, that made the whole "fly higher, fly faster" concept null and void. After that only two approaches left: stealth (as low level penetration and anti-radar coating) and saturation. As of today, in the presence of the modern aerospace defence, stealth has become a mere means to achieve neccesary stand-off for a saturation attacks. And everything has devolved into drone/missile spam while all piloted platforms were forced into second line. Due to maintenance problems, modern interceptors no longer able to provide fronline air-defence and have to be protected by other means (from ground based air-defence to moving bases beyond the reach of the bulk strike options). Situation has completely reverted.

Another way of usage for the interceptors was the interception of the enemy interceptors over the objectives they were protecting. Or achieving the air superiority. And the whole fighter-bomber/strafer idea was the byproduct of it since there was a need to put to good use all those planes after they have crushed the enemy air force. With the movement of the manned interceptor into secondary position, same thing happened to the multirole version of it.

And here comes the Starsector...

Please write here about what happened first with our current implementation of the fighters. Either you learned how to direct your interceptors to attack enemy strike craft or the first thing was destruction of the enemy carrier with your interceptors.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 04, 2020, 10:24:24 PM
Please write here about what happened first with our current implementation of the fighters. Either you learned how to direct your interceptors to attack enemy strike craft or the first thing was destruction of the enemy carrier with your interceptors.

Can you say this another way or flesh it out for me? This is likely my fault, but I am not 100% sure what you are saying here.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 04, 2020, 11:04:40 PM
Try to remember your first attempt(s) at deploying fighters. Did you just pressed Z and watched them go and attack ships or did you intentionally started targeting enemy strike craft in attempt to protect your ships?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 04, 2020, 11:45:35 PM
Try to remember your first attempt(s) at deploying fighters. Did you just pressed Z and watched them go and attack ships or did you intentionally started targeting enemy strike craft in attempt to protect your ships?

Gotcha, if you are speaking on the pre .8 implementation where you gave direct control and any fighter losses cost supplies, then yes I remember. There were a lot of good things about that, and a lot of not so good things too. I can explain if you would like (it's a little lengthy), just let me know if my opinion on the pros vs cons interests you.

And then, we can travel even further back (I can't even remember the version atm) where fighters were even more like ships- in the sense that if the whole wing died that was it. Fighters lost. Carriers could only replace a wing if one fighter survived. To me at least, that was a great learning opportunity from an early system that resulted in the much better systems that came after (when looking at it in hindsight).
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 05, 2020, 12:15:06 AM
I'm talking about current state of the game. Sorry for asking but are you (or anyone else for that matter) even aware that it is still possible to divert your fighters into enemy ones?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 05, 2020, 01:03:31 AM
I'm talking about current state of the game. Sorry for asking but are you (or anyone else for that matter) even aware that it is still possible to divert your fighters into enemy ones?

Don't be sorry at all. I truly was not aware of it.  :-[

Where is this shown? Did I not read something?? It's certainly not intuitive to me obviously, lol, but could you educate me? I haven't been able to do this afaik. Is this mechanic player ship only or can you do this with AI ship's fighters as well?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 05, 2020, 02:16:37 AM
If you have some carriers assigned to escort your ship then setting an enemy fighter as a target will make wings from the assigned carriers to go from they default stand by into flying to attack it. This way you can actually intercept bombers before they unload.

But this situation nicely shows up just how superfluous interception functionality is on the our so called "interceptors". Why bother with the interception when "interceptors" can just go and blow up a carrier? Thats how we intercept things here.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: SCC on January 05, 2020, 02:19:07 AM
I don't remember AI doing such a thing on purpose. Interceptors go after other fighters only in the passing, on their way to attack enemy ships or escort yours. If carriers with interceptors focused on destroying enemy bombers and fighters, that would be very helpful.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 05, 2020, 02:21:45 AM
I think it is clear that AI cant do it and the target had to be manually set.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 05, 2020, 02:34:50 AM
I think it is clear that AI cant do it and the target had to be manually set.

Then that's kind of useless in principle (as far as an overall balancing concern, I get that it can be key to player survival at times). That only invokes the inevitable power creep of the player which hurts the game as a whole as far as I can tell. If you have fleet allies in the first place, then they have to be at least partially as capable as you are or they are just cannon (or fighter swarm) fodder. When the numbers game matters this becomes especially important. Giving the player the sole ability to direct fighter orders to intercept bombers while the AI cannot do this only results in the AI seeming "bad" when it's very clearly not that at all.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 05, 2020, 02:50:35 AM
Yes. Exactly. I dont even know how things ended up like this. I think its mostly from the initial idea of the fighters being true ships. And they still act like ones.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: DatonKallandor on January 05, 2020, 04:48:02 AM
A weapon should act the same way no matter the target. A MG on a fighter should do exactly the same damage on the shields of a fighter as it would do on a frigate.
But it's not the same weapon. The fighter version is better because it builds no flux! And it's on a regenerating 3000+ range platform. Why should it be allowed to also do full damage to ships on top of that? It's clearly a miniaturized strikecraft gun variant.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: shoi on January 05, 2020, 06:30:09 AM
But it is the same weapon, lol..otherwise they'd use a specialized variant, like one of the fighters uses a fighter version of SRM missile

 Nerfing attack power and defense of fighters will just make people bring more to get the same effect and make them useless when there are a limited number on the field.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 05, 2020, 09:01:15 AM
For me, the biggest pro of pre-0.8 fighters is carriers were outfitted like warships, and could fight like warships of a size smaller.  I miss this.  Now, because fighters have become weapons, carriers must focus mostly or solely on fighters instead of real guns to do their basic job competently.  What is the point of weapon mounts on dedicated carriers now?

As Morrokain says, player could have direct control over fighters in older releases because fighters were like ships in most ways.  They could capture points or follow other orders just like normal ships.  Fighters also had other special commands.

Before 0.8, Z (or some other key) was used to control personal drones from ships' systems.  Tempest had Terminator Drone, Gemini and Heron (and Prometheus) had machine gun drones, Apogee had sensor drones, and Astral has LR PD drones.  Except for Terminator Drone, all of the drones were limited like missiles.

There is also significant differences (for fighters) between the 0.5.x releases and the releases between 0.6 and 0.8.

But it is the same weapon, lol..otherwise they'd use a specialized variant, like one of the fighters uses a fighter version of SRM missile
I want the fighter version of the Swarmer for my ships.

P.S.  Before 0.8, you did not need carriers to use fighters, but player wanted carriers anyway to replace losses.  Before 0.6, carriers could restore partial wings (which ate supplies) during combat.  After 0.6, fighter wings were immortal if there was a carrier in the fleet.  Without carriers, fighter wings could be wiped out permanently like ships.  Speaking of ships, player boarded ships after combat.  Pre 0.6a boarding is very similar to modern ship recovery.  After 0.6a was terrible gambling.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Cyber Von Cyberus on January 05, 2020, 01:25:01 PM
I wonder, what do you all think of giving them limited ammo ? It would reduce their staying power as they need to return to the carrier to rearm but they would still keep their alpha strike potential. Of course they should have enough ammo to at the very minimum engage a target for 20 seconds.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 05, 2020, 01:27:55 PM
@Megas:

Thanks for clearing up the details I had forgotten so everyone has a correct foundation for the discussion (in case they weren't there at the time).  :)

What I miss about direct control of fighters pre-0.8 was the ability to use them to scout and capture points. To be fair, this kind of limited the role of frigates in that regard, but that is a separate topic. It was also useful from a modding perspective to select a single wing and a single opposing wing in the simulator and really be able to fine tune exactly which wings typically beat which opponents. Having the carriers present muddies the waters a bit- though not enough that I would want to go back to pre-0.8.

Here's why:

1) First and foremost for me, I didn't like the inability for fighters to be assigned to a specific carrier. *EDIT* (Both in the sense of fleet setup and variant files since that wasn't clear in how I worded it.)

The global hangar stat and the soft and hard limits that were tried didn't feel very good to me, and you couldn't predict which carrier would replace the wing's individual fighters- sometimes leading to fighters spawning from a carrier already under attack and immediate getting destroyed. Or, if your carriers near the front lines had their bays saturated with replacements already building, you could get the replacement wing you really wanted to spawn close to the battle instead spawn in another carrier far, far away.

2) Fighters also didn't spawn from the carrier. They burned in like the rest of the fleet. That felt really weird to me.

3) Carriers became supply vacuums which made them uncompetitive compared to warships.

4) Fighters had infinite range, and tended to ball up and mass on targets even more than now. I think that would exacerbate the issue we are having with critical mass. At least right now far off carriers can't send their wings to attack anything within vision on the map.

5) It would require so many additional changes to so many things, including all the AI changes I've mentioned. Not worth that kind of effort for the pros to me, and definitely not worth it when the pros could be implemented in the new design, which I think they can.

6) I actually like the trade-off balance of weapons vs fighters in the 0.9 system. I don't think the balance is quite there yet as you have said, but I think its fixable without a reversion back to pre-0.8.

Off the top of my head:

Give all carriers a hullmod like the Legion that reduces weapon costs and makes them feel more competitive. I'd even be ok with making that hullmod completely take off the "base" cost of the standard weapon of each size. Then only "upgrades" actually cost any OP. It's similar to the idea of the talon being free so there wouldn't be any fighter-less carriers acting like warships.
OR
Reduce fighter OP costs across the board to make both weapons and hullmods feel more competitive in the sense that you have more room to work with.
OR
Increase the OP of carriers. Same concept as the one above.

I think the main concern with any of those is that fighters still seem more preferable than weapons due to their range, correct?
--------

I wonder, what do you all think of giving them limited ammo ? It would reduce their staying power as they need to return to the carrier to rearm but they would still keep their alpha strike potential. Of course they should have enough ammo to at the very minimum engage a target for 20 seconds.

In Archean Order, its around 5 to 6 seconds, but again there is clip regeneration to account for the current AI limitations. The window between reloads is around 12 seconds, so about double the time of the attacking window. That would of course change if fixed ammo could be possible. 20 seconds seems reasonable at a first glance.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 06, 2020, 08:51:15 AM
If staying power of fighters is identified to be the problem then the easy fix would be to to simply change their staying power, whether by HP of hull and Flux of shields or by changing fighter replacement rate. There is no need to artificially make it so certain weapons do more damage to certain hulls. It'll be like making Tachyon Lance do half damage to Frigates so it wouldn't be so easy for a pair of Tachyon lance to instantly kill a Frigate.

The staying power portion of the request was actually the limited ammo. The increased damage to fighters is just to increase the usefulness of interceptors and anti-fighter fighters, mostly. It can be separated out of the idea without impacting it very much, though IMO it makes fighter clashes "more cool" to look at. That's subjective for me, but since this is one of the few suggestions not completely experimental and actually implemented and tested to a certain degree, I can say that with a fair amount of confidence coming from my perspective.

Also, the custom fighter weapons (just so as to have limited ammo- otherwise a copy paste of the csv entries and changing two fields) can be implemented in a day's worth of work, maybe even less.

The real challenging part to this suggestion as far as work goes is the AI tweaks. I can't speak very much on how long those changes would take, but considering the other AI threads floating around... well, this is one of those times where I think the work is worth it. Like Alex likes to say (paraphrasing): Hard things to implement aren't worth it just because they're "cool", there needs to be a design problem to solve. In this case, there are several, so its multiple birds with a single stone- so to speak.

*EDIT* As far as the idea of changing defensive stats of fighters to reduce staying power, you'd think that would do it, right? I thought so too. The problem with that is then you are also inadvertently reducing their alpha strike potential because they then also die more easily to ship weapons- sometimes before they can even get into firing range. It reduces the effectiveness of a small number of fighters. To say the problem is complex would be an understatement, I think. I'm not saying that couldn't work, but to be honest I think it would become surprisingly involved even compared to the above suggestion, and it only solves one of the underlying problems just mentioned.

*EDIT 2*
Still, if nerfing fighter alpha strike potential would be considered fine and no additional changes had to be made, then that could perhaps be considered the easy road. I'm not quite convinced that's true, though, as from what I've gathered most feel that the alpha strike of fighters is in a good place right now and that's part of the reason this thread was made. Specifically, it seems like the staying power of critically massed fighter spamming is too overwhelming. My suggestion targets that very specific issue because it was an issue I also dealt with for a long time in Archean Order. Spamming fighters is an inherent feature of that mod.
I would consider nerfing so called alpha strike perfectly fine. If you don't want to nerf alpha strike, then only the fighter-type fighters can have the defensive stats changed and the bomber-type fighters can retain their defensive stats. Take for example wasp vs spark. They have similar weapons and speed, but the wasp is far easier to shoot down and so is less likely to become a problem by massing. As you say, it's the easy road. There's no need for complicated game mechanics when simple elegant stat changes can better solve perceived problems.

________________

A weapon should act the same way no matter the target. A MG on a fighter should do exactly the same damage on the shields of a fighter as it would do on a frigate.
But it's not the same weapon. The fighter version is better because it builds no flux! And it's on a regenerating 3000+ range platform. Why should it be allowed to also do full damage to ships on top of that? It's clearly a miniaturized strikecraft gun variant.
Weapons on fighters don't continuously shoot. There is no need to artificially place an inelegant game mechanic. If you want fighters to do half damage, just half the number of guns on a fighter. Some missile weapons on fighters already do this.

_________

Anyways, I am somewhat fine with OP on Carriers. Sure, carriers have the same OP like normal ships without taking into account of their fighter bays, but fighter bays are basically the best most OP efficient weapons in the game right now, and typically no-one has problems with leaving empty mounts in normal warships, only on carriers. I feel like that changing the OP of warships, could make carriers, especially the combat carriers better warships than actual warships.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 06, 2020, 09:29:17 AM
There's no need for complicated game mechanics when simple elegant stat changes can better solve perceived problems.

This is a stretch to me. Easy isn't "elegant" its easy. Very different things. I'm not saying your logic isn't sound or that the suggestion is bad, but don't try and disguise it as "better design" just because its a couple spreadsheet changes instead of implementing new mechanics or improving AI.

*EDIT*
Tiny nitpick, but when I said alpha strike I wasn't talking about bombers, though it is true I should have clarified that. It just means the initial damage of the strike remains the same for whatever viable duration the craft can stay on target without getting destroyed, retreating or otherwise losing its ability to attack. Lowering defensive stats effects the first of those scenarios- and that is the most damaging to the carrier itself because it affects replacement rate the most.

no-one has problems with leaving empty mounts in normal warships, only on carriers. I feel like that changing the OP of warships, could make carriers, especially the combat carriers better warships than actual warships.

*Raises hand* I do. I hate empty weapons for "optimal builds" and wish it just wasn't a thing that was ever encouraged, but that is a separate discussion. As far as your concern, I think it is definitely a valid one.

*EDIT*
Though I also think there are solutions that would not result in that happening, too, if that wasn't clear. The point is for me: I would rather have all carriers have built in weapons than no weapons because you feel encouraged to have to spend all your OP on fighters and fighter improving hullmods. It's just plain silly to me.  ;)
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 06, 2020, 10:33:40 AM
I am not fond of empty mounts on warships either, but most do not need to leave too many mounts empty.  The few that do (e.g., Shrike, plasma Odyssey, non-missile Aurora, that one Atlas 2 with two gauss and two mirvs) are just as annoying as unarmed carriers.

Carriers are more OP starved than warships, if carriers want to fill mounts with guns.  If carriers ignore guns, then they have OP to do their job of tending fighters.

Pre-0.8 fighters, the main disadvantages of the time were no skills, no capacity (for fuel and cargo), and they took up a fleet slot or logistics, and DP in combat.  Most fighters cost as much as a frigate to deploy, though few like Warthogs cost as much as a destroyer to deploy.  When officers came in 0.7, carriers and fighters were not viable.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 06, 2020, 02:34:21 PM
Quote
Anyways, I am somewhat fine with OP on Carriers. Sure, carriers have the same OP like normal ships without taking into account of their fighter bays, but fighter bays are basically the best most OP efficient weapons in the game right now, and typically no-one has problems with leaving empty mounts in normal warships, only on carriers. I feel like that changing the OP of warships, could make carriers, especially the combat carriers better warships than actual warships.
Carriers do not have the flux stats or the mounts to match ships of their class.

Currently, Legion is the only one that can get away of being a carrier and warship hybrid.  Even then, with Legion, I end up with something like Mark IX, HAG, and two dual flak; and most mounts are empty, but because heavy ballistics are good, they are enough to swat smaller ships or even brawl big ships.

In older pre-0.8 versions, I could put Heavy Blaster and few burst PD on Heron, and brawl with it.  That is not a good option anymore, although I try to make it work occasionally (because it did work at one time).  Similarly, I used to put a bunch of heavy blasters on Astral and use it like a fat Odyssey with more flight decks.  It was sub-optimal, but it could work.  Today, I just mount few burst PDs on Astral and throw everything into high-end bombers and hullmods.

I just want more carriers beyond Legion to be able to use guns and typical fighters (like Broadswords, Gladius, and Thunders) equally well like they used to in pre-0.8 releases (at least from 0.5.4a to 0.6.5a).
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: TaLaR on January 06, 2020, 09:52:16 PM
Vanilla doesn't offer good slot fillers, so you leaving empty mounts becomes the only solution for many builds. I rarely do that when I have Mini-blasters and Reliants (SWP, I think?).
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: SCC on January 06, 2020, 10:06:15 PM
While I understand the desire to make carriers not so barren, with current state of fighters, it's something of a necessity, to balance their long range power. Reaching a carrier only to find out it isn't actually vulnerable in close combat would make their great weakness balancing their great power otherwise.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 06, 2020, 11:23:41 PM
Vanilla doesn't offer good slot fillers, so you leaving empty mounts becomes the only solution for many builds. I rarely do that when I have Mini-blasters and Reliants (SWP, I think?).

Is this because they are very low OP? Are they very useful? (I'm unfamiliar with the stats and I'm curious)

While I understand the desire to make carriers not so barren, with current state of fighters, it's something of a necessity, to balance their long range power. Reaching a carrier only to find out it isn't actually vulnerable in close combat would make their great weakness balancing their great power otherwise.

I agree its true that carriers have to have a vulnerability considering the strength of fighters. It doesn't have to be a lack of weapons though. For instance, they could just as easily be very vulnerable defensively(lower armor, lower flux stats, etc) - to serve as their intrinsic weakness to dedicated warships. And it goes without saying that they should at least generally be slower so they can be caught in the first place.

I'd rather have that than weapon mounts you can't use. Just having weapons doesn't make them OP when caught up to necessarily, though it could without other considerations being made.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: TaLaR on January 06, 2020, 11:56:06 PM
Vanilla doesn't offer good slot fillers, so you leaving empty mounts becomes the only solution for many builds. I rarely do that when I have Mini-blasters and Reliants (SWP, I think?).

Is this because they are very low OP? Are they very useful? (I'm unfamiliar with the stats and I'm curious)

Very low OP and dps, but decently efficient.
Reliant is ballistic 1 OP, 50 kinetic dps, 25 fps, 450 range. Mini-blaster is similar weapon for energy slot. Both are hard flux and qualify as PD.
Won't carry any build, but worth 1OP for most ships.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 07, 2020, 01:35:15 AM
Very low OP and dps, but decently efficient.
Reliant is ballistic 1 OP, 50 kinetic dps, 25 fps, 450 range. Mini-blaster is similar weapon for energy slot. Both are hard flux and qualify as PD.
Won't carry any build, but worth 1OP for most ships.

Ah ok that makes sense. So the idea there is 3 sliders of building a carrier variant:

PD quality in small slots | Fighter quality | Weapon quality on slots medium and above

- with likely some assumed hullmods that vary according to the specific hull in question. That roughly sum it up?

That at least feels better to me than no weapons at all, but also not the ideal carrier balance imo. One reason is because as you said fighter strength necessitates so high of a weight on the fighter quality slider that players are unlikely ever to reduce it below "maximum possible" and feel good about it.

But to that point: I've already roughly gone over specific reasons on certain things that were suggested, but I feel like the tricky part about something like nerfing fighter stats is that for this particular balancing act its less of a spectrum and more of a tightrope walk. Its very easy to fall off. So I'd rather take careful time to get the perfect balance than rework it a bunch of times each time the pendulum switches. I think it's already so close honestly. If doing a cost-benefit analysis on dev time, I'd suspect that the second option would end up netting more cost for even potentially less benefit, if that makes sense.

If I could only choose one change and had to choose the most important one to me, though, I would want the AI of the interceptor AI tag to cause attack commands from AI ships and the player to target and pursue bombers by priority instead of escorting allied bombers and attacking with them. Since fighters blur the lines in some cases, fighters with the "fighter" AI tag that are designed to attack with bombers and do things like drop flares to distract PD have the same behavior as now.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Schwartz on January 07, 2020, 04:25:04 AM
I can only repeat the gist of what I think would take the fighter meta in a better direction:

1) Make fighters weaker (for example slower, less agile). Make them cost less OP.

alternatively,

2) Give carriers two separate OP pools for fighters and for itself. Make these OP pools able to be exchanged for the other at a 2:1 ratio or something like that. So a carrier with 40/60 OP who only uses 38 OP for fighters gets 61 OP points to use for itself. The point of this would be that carriers across the board can get more OP (because they need it). At the same time, fighters can still be made weaker.

Currently, carriers feel okay but quite handicapped. Fighters feel good but not like fighters. More like swarm missiles. The old autonomous fighters felt like fighters. The only improvement fighters-as-weapons has brought, IMO, is making them more powerful.

Btw, at least the Reliant HMG is quite useless as PD. I'd rather leave it off and give the point to the shield. ;)
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 07, 2020, 06:27:33 AM
There's no need for complicated game mechanics when simple elegant stat changes can better solve perceived problems.

This is a stretch to me. Easy isn't "elegant" its easy. Very different things. I'm not saying your logic isn't sound or that the suggestion is bad, but don't try and disguise it as "better design" just because its a couple spreadsheet changes instead of implementing new mechanics or improving AI.

*EDIT*
Tiny nitpick, but when I said alpha strike I wasn't talking about bombers, though it is true I should have clarified that. It just means the initial damage of the strike remains the same for whatever viable duration the craft can stay on target without getting destroyed, retreating or otherwise losing its ability to attack. Lowering defensive stats effects the first of those scenarios- and that is the most damaging to the carrier itself because it affects replacement rate the most.

no-one has problems with leaving empty mounts in normal warships, only on carriers. I feel like that changing the OP of warships, could make carriers, especially the combat carriers better warships than actual warships.

*Raises hand* I do. I hate empty weapons for "optimal builds" and wish it just wasn't a thing that was ever encouraged, but that is a separate discussion. As far as your concern, I think it is definitely a valid one.

*EDIT*
Though I also think there are solutions that would not result in that happening, too, if that wasn't clear. The point is for me: I would rather have all carriers have built in weapons than no weapons because you feel encouraged to have to spend all your OP on fighters and fighter improving hullmods. It's just plain silly to me.  ;)
In this case what is easy is also elegant. There's no need for complicated -10% effective within a certain range, or only a set amount of fighters can attack a ship, or fighter weapons do double damage to other fighters, if you can adjust pre-existing values of HP or flux capacity or fighter replacement rate.

If you are concerned for the" initial" damage of the strike for the viable duration the craft can stay on target, "alpha strike" is kind of the opposite of that in common gaming parlance. In any case, that is kind of the point. By reducing values of HP or flux capacity is just an alternative to reducing the fighter replacement rate. Both are a suggestion with similar aims. To reduce the rate of auto regenerating fighter "cloud". The first has a bonus in reducing the ability of fighters to simply destroy frigates with ease.

To be honest, I'm fine with carriers to have more OP as long as it excludes the possibility of making them better combat warships than dedicated combat warships. However, with a fighter slot being the most OP efficient weapon in some respects, even without hullmods, I would think it seems a bit much to essentially buff carriers in the current state of the game. I think that all carriers should be slower, to be the speed of the slowest ship of their hulltype. The Heron and Drover is a outlier to the paradigm of the relationship between weapon range and ship speed. Fighters generally outrange everything, yet those ships are fairly speedy themselves. Though if opposing ships cannot move past fighters that is a moot point anyways.

As for weapon mounts being left, most often they are small weapon mounts on ships that have medium and large weapon mounts available. Small weapons are costed for as if they are compared to other small weapons, but their worth decreases vastly once larger weapon mounts are available. LDMG and PD Laser might be worth 4 OP due to small frigate to frigate combat it might have a dual role, but in larger ships, it would be rare to see them being worth that OP, short of perhaps destroyers with safety overides hullmod. It's like another version of the frigate vs capital problem. It probably doesn't help that for instance that many small weapon mounts have small coverages that overlap with larger coverages. For instance I advocate that a Dominator can leave 2 or even 4 of its side small mounts empty, as it simply doesn't need that many if equipped the the PD-specialised vulcans. Perhaps empty weapon mounts should be automatically filled with almost useless PD mount for free. Or perhaps Cruisers can have a -1 OP and Capitals have a -2 OP reduction to small mounts, but that come with the disadvantage of being a significant boost to cruiser and capital power, when they do not need it.

But in the case of carriers, it is due to the carrier themselves don't need weapons. They have a range 4000 weapon in the form of fighter bays. At the moment, carriers have a weapon count as if they were one hull size lower. Why would you want them to move closer to a range they can barely fight at? If carriers were given more OP, that OP can be used to make carriers better weaponless carriers.  Or if they could use their OP to fight like them, and with their fighter complement as well, all carriers, being viable as combat carriers would eclipse warships as combat ships. The carrier OP / empty weapon mounts on many warships is a separate issue and a fairly complicated one at that.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: SanHolo on January 07, 2020, 06:46:31 AM
Maybe the problem comes from fighters not being subject to "pressure" (when ship decide to move back).

I mean, they do apply pressure and force ennemy to pull back. So there certainly are 2 thresholds of the "spam" : Wheter or not the "pull back" is sufficient in terms of time it takes to come forward to cover up for the loss of fighters creating respawn timer reduction, and beyond that threshold, wheter or not the pressure is sufficient to cause persisting damage to ennemies.

In which case fielding fighters allow to trade time (Respawn reduction) against time, armor, ammo in some cases, flux and hull damage. Beside, forcing the ennemy to keep the shield up due to being pressured by the fighters can by itself nullify a target.

It's the only element of battle that doesn't really trade any permanent resources for their utility : even shield and non-ammo weapons are parts of tradeoff at some point (hard flux and flux consumption forcing some balance between permanent armor/hull damage and firepower output, mobility and maneuverability being the balancing point between hull sizes that implements very different amount of those permanent ressources)

If fighters wings were susceptible to "pressure" (that is, the AI craft willing to trade some of its firepower and presence to stay alive), it would bring them back into something more manageable without the need to change stats values ? I.E. fielding PD weapons would become more effective even when they are not enough to take down every fighters allowing to counter "more fighters" with "more PD".

That is, to allow fighters to use their nominal range, it would be necessary to pushback any anti-fighters ships that prevents them to move freely and this could only be achieved with "normal" warships that aren't as afraid of the pressure from PD weapons and can outrange them.

This would also make the "unused small mounts" far more valuable when it comes to designing bigger ship as a balance between pressure against heavy warship and pressure against smaller ships including fighters.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 07, 2020, 08:03:36 AM
As for weapon mounts being left, most often they are small weapon mounts on ships that have medium and large weapon mounts available. Small weapons are costed for as if they are compared to other small weapons, but their worth decreases vastly once larger weapon mounts are available. LDMG and PD Laser might be worth 4 OP due to small frigate to frigate combat it might have a dual role, but in larger ships, it would be rare to see them being worth that OP, short of perhaps destroyers with safety overides hullmod. It's like another version of the frigate vs capital problem. It probably doesn't help that for instance that many small weapon mounts have small coverages that overlap with larger coverages. For instance I advocate that a Dominator can leave 2 or even 4 of its side small mounts empty, as it simply doesn't need that many if equipped the the PD-specialised vulcans. Perhaps empty weapon mounts should be automatically filled with almost useless PD mount for free. Or perhaps Cruisers can have a -1 OP and Capitals have a -2 OP reduction to small mounts, but that come with the disadvantage of being a significant boost to cruiser and capital power, when they do not need it.

But in the case of carriers, it is due to the carrier themselves don't need weapons. They have a range 4000 weapon in the form of fighter bays. At the moment, carriers have a weapon count as if they were one hull size lower. Why would you want them to move closer to a range they can barely fight at? If carriers were given more OP, that OP can be used to make carriers better weaponless carriers.  Or if they could use their OP to fight like them, and with their fighter complement as well, all carriers, being viable as combat carriers would eclipse warships as combat ships. The carrier OP / empty weapon mounts on many warships is a separate issue and a fairly complicated one at that.
I would not fill small mounts on some bigger warships because either range do not match or I already have flux problems with the bigger weapons, especially with Dominator or Onslaught.

I would not be worried about carriers fighting as well as warships.  They did not in the pre-0.8 releases, except maybe Heron, and that was in part due to overpowered skills and (for Heron) heavy blaster hitting for hard flux even during fade-out... against enemies without skills.

As for "Why would you want them to move closer to a range they can barely fight at?"  Easy, the enemy comes to the carrier (especially enemy frigates against your carrier) and carrier will die if it cannot defend itself, or I want to pilot a carrier and smash things.  Maybe not smash things as well as a battleship, but I would like to smash weak stuff of opportunity.  It feels silly fleeing from a frigate because my carrier has no guns because all OP was spent to make the carrier competent with fighters better than Talons or Mining Pods.  I would like to see something like Heron pop that frigate with Heavy Blaster spam like in the later 0.6.x releases.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: SCC on January 07, 2020, 09:45:28 AM
There are two notable differences between warships and carriers. The first one is that fighter bays have no size restrictions. They are small, medium and large weapon mounts all in one. They are supposedly treated as giving 10 points, when assigning OPs, but the numbers are more in line with other ships, if you treat fighter bays as weapon mounts adding no OP at all. This means that not only they have less OP per weapon mounts (and fighter bays) than warships by default, they also... perhaps not have to, but can mount fighters that are relatively way more expensive, than expensive weapons.
The other thing is that adding more fighters doesn't make any other fighters worse. If you add too many weapons, you might not have the flux to fire all of them, while also not having as much dissipation, as some more modest designs. When it comes to fighters, though, the only negative effect other fighters can have is limiting the entire formation's speed. Other than that, performance of other fighters is never worsened. You might not end up synergising, but that's way less important, than too many weapons on a ship getting in one another's way with flux, while also reducing how much flux there is to go around.
To be honest, I'm fine with carriers to have more OP as long as it excludes the possibility of making them better combat warships than dedicated combat warships. However, with a fighter slot being the most OP efficient weapon in some respects, even without hullmods, I would think it seems a bit much to essentially buff carriers in the current state of the game. I think that all carriers should be slower, to be the speed of the slowest ship of their hulltype. The Heron and Drover is a outlier to the paradigm of the relationship between weapon range and ship speed. Fighters generally outrange everything, yet those ships are fairly speedy themselves. Though if opposing ships cannot move past fighters that is a moot point anyways.
This is an issue, too. Fighters are counterable, but not always. Carriers in a mixed force can hide behind warships or buy some time with their swiftness. And on their own, they can be really hard to catch, without you also taking damage from fighters, too.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 07, 2020, 10:01:09 AM
The other thing is that adding more fighters doesn't make any other fighters worse. If you add too many weapons, you might not have the flux to fire all of them, while also not having as much dissipation, as some more modest designs.
That is a thing I do not like about warships.  Onslaught really suffers here.  (Legion, even more, but at least it has fighters.)  Back when skills were overpowered, I could fill up every mount on most warships with whatever weapons I wanted and have some OP to spare for the essential hullmods.  Today, most warships need to skimp a little to be optimal.  Few warship loadouts need to skimp too much on weapons to be optimal, and they are just as guilty as unarmed carriers when optimal looks ugly or feels silly.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 07, 2020, 10:50:20 AM
Ability to fill all mounts with any weapons robs the player of the real choice. You can just remove fitting option altogether. At least now Onslaught is not some abstract "DP slot" (like carriers) but very distinctive melee brawler with the memorable character.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 07, 2020, 02:22:19 PM
Some of these replies seem to indicate a misunderstanding of how carriers should fit into the the tactical battlefield- at least traditionally in these types of games. Many people take issue on the "fighters as weapons" part of the design destroying warship viability unless carriers are actually made to be bad. They are willing to sacrifice carriers' overall viability because they like flying warships more than carriers (gee I wonder why? Maybe because carriers as glorified fighter barges that can't even pick multiple targets to attack are boring compared to the flux war?  :) ) and range and eternal wing replacement seems too powerful. It really isn't though. I mean, I get why that mentality exists when used to flying a warship, but you are trying to make carriers balance along the same operating principles as warships. That will quite frankly never work without a complete redesign. At least right now flying a carrier lets you do something (press z on a targeted enemy) whereas in pre-.8 flying a carrier was even more boring. Fighters were separate entities so you could control them without any need for flying the carrier itself. Not ideal.

Aircraft (and their modern version- drones), as a concept and historically have always been "OP". That doesn't mean they have to be from an overall design standpoint, however. To make a good strike craft/warship balance you make the carrier vulnerable but still able to use its strike craft effectively. That is what results in good gameplay tactics. Weaponless carriers do have that effect, true, but it is a boring and off-putting way of implementing that. There are much better ways.

If the Heron has enough guns to destroy a frigate in the flux war, that does not make carriers OP even if its strike craft can kill a destroyer or damage another cruiser at range. Its a cruiser. It should kill a frigate almost no matter the circumstances and destroyers should mostly lose as well. That is how the Eagle operates too... there really isn't a difference except since strike craft have so much range they are the priority threat. That point, in particular, is the main issue I think some players struggle with. They don't want that to be the case but it has to be for strike craft to feel worth it to use. Otherwise, they will be mostly flavor- like they have been for every update pre-.8 imo. I used them because I liked them, not because they felt good. The only way back then to make them work was, ironically, picking the most optimal ones and mono-spamming them (remember the old Thunder?). In small numbers they were borderline useless.

Now an Eagle vs a Heron? First of all, the Heron should be at least 1/3 or more weaker defensively. The carrier has less flux stats and defense. It should also be quite a bite slower. Quite honestly, if two Herons are fighting an Eagle without escorts.... the Eagle should barely win most of the time. But a Heron and a destroyer escort to screen it? Much different story.

Fighters are counterable, but not always. Carriers in a mixed force can hide behind warships or buy some time with their swiftness. And on their own, they can be really hard to catch, without you also taking damage from fighters, too.

Yeah, this is a big part of the problem. On their own, they should be sitting ducks to anything their hullsize. They should, however, be capable of lightly defending themselves against smaller threats. Smaller threats should rely on wolf-pack tactics to combat them (just like when fighting a regular warship of a larger hull size) but have such higher speed that the fighters can't pick too many of them off before they close the distance.

In this case what is easy is also elegant. There's no need for complicated -10% effective within a certain range, or only a set amount of fighters can attack a ship, or fighter weapons do double damage to other fighters, if you can adjust pre-existing values of HP or flux capacity or fighter replacement rate.

Ok then, I'm open to your interpretation though I don't agree right now. Give me an example of how that would operate once implemented. What is your "vision" (be as specific as possible) of how stat changes will solve these problems?

If you are concerned for the" initial" damage of the strike for the viable duration the craft can stay on target, "alpha strike" is kind of the opposite of that in common gaming parlance. In any case, that is kind of the point. By reducing values of HP or flux capacity is just an alternative to reducing the fighter replacement rate. Both are a suggestion with similar aims. To reduce the rate of auto regenerating fighter "cloud". The first has a bonus in reducing the ability of fighters to simply destroy frigates with ease.

The first sentence makes me think you don't quite understand what I am saying unless I have been misunderstanding alpha strike- which I certainly could be. In military terms, its just how many fighters/bombers (really just damage) you can field in a single sortie on one target. The limited ammo idea I suggested relates to this because alpha strike for fighters, atm, is unlimited because it relies on fighter losses in order for it to be reduced in any way (bombers notwithstanding) Limited ammo makes interceptors like the spark and thunder also follow this rule and makes it easier to balance massed fighter clouds. This would be a huge nerf to the staying power of all fighters which don't currently have limited ammo because it reduces the alpha strike vs time- which makes large fighter clouds so effective since they can just move to a new target without providing a window of opportunity for any counter reaction.

If interceptors and anti-fighter fighters better followed their role, that nerf wouldn't really matter. We don't want interceptors to be ship killers any more than we want a cruiser sized carrier killing a cruiser in close combat. Strike craft killing frigates with ease (should they hit them) is as it should be. To make them not do that would make them incredibly bad against larger ships. Frigates must rely on larger targets acting as shields, positioning, numerical superiority and allied fighters to survive. That's what its speed and maneuverability is for. It's on-board PD is a deterrent and additional support- not a solution in and of itself. A frigate is a tactical combat vessel whereas a battleship is a brute force combat vessel.

As for weapon mounts being left, most often they are small weapon mounts on ships that have medium and large weapon mounts available. Small weapons are costed for as if they are compared to other small weapons, but their worth decreases vastly once larger weapon mounts are available. LDMG and PD Laser might be worth 4 OP due to small frigate to frigate combat it might have a dual role, but in larger ships, it would be rare to see them being worth that OP, short of perhaps destroyers with safety overides hullmod. It's like another version of the frigate vs capital problem. It probably doesn't help that for instance that many small weapon mounts have small coverages that overlap with larger coverages. For instance I advocate that a Dominator can leave 2 or even 4 of its side small mounts empty, as it simply doesn't need that many if equipped the the PD-specialised vulcans. Perhaps empty weapon mounts should be automatically filled with almost useless PD mount for free. Or perhaps Cruisers can have a -1 OP and Capitals have a -2 OP reduction to small mounts, but that come with the disadvantage of being a significant boost to cruiser and capital power, when they do not need it.

But in the case of carriers, it is due to the carrier themselves don't need weapons. They have a range 4000 weapon in the form of fighter bays. At the moment, carriers have a weapon count as if they were one hull size lower. Why would you want them to move closer to a range they can barely fight at? If carriers were given more OP, that OP can be used to make carriers better weaponless carriers.  Or if they could use their OP to fight like them, and with their fighter complement as well, all carriers, being viable as combat carriers would eclipse warships as combat ships. The carrier OP / empty weapon mounts on many warships is a separate issue and a fairly complicated one at that.

That's a good analysis. It also means small weapons aren't doing their job correctly- or large weapons are doing their job too well. Larger weapons should not be able to hit frigates or fighters reliably unless they are specifically balanced to do so by being weaker in their primary role.

Take the dominator example: The small weapon mounts you advocate are unnecessary should be necessary to prevent a frigate surround from pinning the dominator. For a warship, it shouldn't be about just PD. Small assault weapons should hit fighters more reliably as well, its just that PD is equally as good or better and can also stop missiles. I digress...

The point is, even if its true that more OP just leads to better weaponless carriers, then other solutions should be considered. It can't just be left how it is, imo.

Ability to fill all mounts with any weapons robs the player of the real choice. You can just remove fitting option altogether. At least now Onslaught is not some abstract "DP slot" (like carriers) but very distinctive melee brawler with the memorable character.

Agreed, though I don't think that is what anyone is trying to advocate. Its more that a player is encouraged to fill all weapon mounts with something. :)
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: iamlenb on January 07, 2020, 05:33:53 PM
What about setting a max op per hanger bay?  Separate from the weapon, vent/cap, and hull mod general pool.  Say, 30 OP per bay for the astral, and maybe 24 OP per bay for the heron.  This will limit smaller carriers to fielding smaller fighters.  If you elect to load smaller fighters than the max bay size, shuffle the leftover hanger OP to the general OP pool at a balanced ratio, or even at a variable rate as you move more hanger OP into the general pool.  This gives a design choice to put less fighter power in return for diminishing increase in regular warship capabilities.  You can have your close combat Astral with an all mining drone loadout.

Maybe create a hull mod that adds hanger OP and allows smaller carriers to field larger wings.  Or a hull mod that removes a hanger bay in return for increasing the OP size of the remaining bays.

It'll require a bit more balancing but will add more design freedom with additional constraints on the maximums.  Not sure how to balance it against drover/sparks spam but it'll give us a few more ways to nudge it into balance.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 07, 2020, 11:26:11 PM
Fighters, as a concept and historically have always been "OP".

They never were op. Especially against warships. The best strategic achievement of the carrier based fighters is the penetration of the Japanese defence system based on the land based long range torpedo-bombers (situation turned upside-down and the hunters became the prey). Have little to do with the warships. And for a good reason. Antiship capabilities of the early-mid war fighters were limited to luck as if hitting onboard unprotected ammunition storage. Latewar saw the introduction of medium caliber general puropse bombs on fighters however the problem was training of pilots. There was barely enough time to train fighter pilots and ability to hit a moving ship with a bomb required even more skill. This is why fighter-bombers were mostly limited to strafing (no need for complex targeting) and ground-support (fixed targets). While bulk of the anti-ship work was done by the specialized attack craft.

Situation didnt change much even after war and not taking into account the nuclear strike capabilities. Last Intruders were phased out in mid 90th. Super Étendards in the 2016. The main reason being the indroduction of the new advanced avionics with the mostly automatic anti-surface targeting and autonomously guided munitions. However even that cant fix the inability to change the aircraft's loadout in flight. Going full strike leaves only limited air-to-air options, mostly self-defence.

Going full gun-ho against large warship? Welp.

Thats modern 25-mm and 30-mm ammo. Against a boat.

https://youtu.be/5FAPcK9uPwo

25-mm had difficulties of penetrationg the shell plating (of the boat...) 30-mm did some local damage.

Using this to blow up an armored battleship!? Nonsense. Its still limited to lucky shots against unprotected ammunition storage. You can imagine how much sorties had to be done to dig through heavy armor plate with fighter guns. Even given the most capable APFSDS ammo.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 08, 2020, 12:51:44 AM
@lucky33

Sorry, I mean't to say "strike craft" or "aircraft." I sometime use "fighters" as a catch-all to mean "things that come from a carrier." Its a bad habit.

So mostly bombers and torpedo bombers are what I'm referring to here (edited the original post to clarify)- but that's related to the concept of the interceptors > bombers > warships kind of relationship. Bombers could be stopped from dealing much damage if enemy fighters/interceptors caught them without an escort before they reached an optimal range because they had such poor mobility compared to fighters or interceptors. This has happened to my knowledge during both land based and sea based aircraft assaults. You make some valid points, certainly, and I wasn't really trying to get into these kinds of specifics because they somewhat derail the conversation, but:

Using this to blow up an armored battleship!? Nonsense. Its still limited to lucky shots against unprotected ammunition storage.

Probably from my wording error, but you are talking about mm cannons when the power of aircraft came from bombs and torpedoes. Some of the largest and most fearsome warships in history have been harassed and sunk by aircraft due to the ability for them to evade ship based defense systems and land devastating strikes to ammo storage (as you said), communications towers or create a large enough amount of breaches to the hull with torpedoes that the vessel could no longer sustain water influx damage control and sunk. It was largely felt, at least according to what I have read, that warship based anti-aircraft guns were sub-optimal and rarely could stop a sortie from causing critical damage even if it caused a few losses to the wing in return. Smokescreens were actually far more likely to work in comparison due to the training issue you have already mentioned.
---

Now, all of that said, I don't want "aircraft" (what I will use to avoid confusion) to be that strong, but they should be intimidating enough to warrant pursuit and priority of the carrier and force the engagement of the warship protective screen.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 08, 2020, 04:04:25 AM
The other thing is that adding more fighters doesn't make any other fighters worse. If you add too many weapons, you might not have the flux to fire all of them, while also not having as much dissipation, as some more modest designs.
That is a thing I do not like about warships.  Onslaught really suffers here.  (Legion, even more, but at least it has fighters.)  Back when skills were overpowered, I could fill up every mount on most warships with whatever weapons I wanted and have some OP to spare for the essential hullmods.  Today, most warships need to skimp a little to be optimal.  Few warship loadouts need to skimp too much on weapons to be optimal, and they are just as guilty as unarmed carriers when optimal looks ugly or feels silly.
Strange, I feel like that the Onslaught has way too much OP. I can fill it up with plenty of hullmods. it's good that you are forced to choose how you want to fit your ships. What's the point of having OP for customisation if you can have all the options you want and more?

Spoiler
Some of these replies seem to indicate a misunderstanding of how carriers should fit into the the tactical battlefield- at least traditionally in these types of games. Many people take issue on the "fighters as weapons" part of the design destroying warship viability unless carriers are actually made to be bad. They are willing to sacrifice carriers' overall viability because they like flying warships more than carriers (gee I wonder why? Maybe because carriers as glorified fighter barges that can't even pick multiple targets to attack are boring compared to the flux war?  :) ) and range and eternal wing replacement seems too powerful. It really isn't though. I mean, I get why that mentality exists when used to flying a warship, but you are trying to make carriers balance along the same operating principles as warships. That will quite frankly never work without a complete redesign. At least right now flying a carrier lets you do something (press z on a targeted enemy) whereas in pre-.8 flying a carrier was even more boring. Fighters were separate entities so you could control them without any need for flying the carrier itself. Not ideal.

Aircraft (and their modern version- drones), as a concept and historically have always been "OP". That doesn't mean they have to be from an overall design standpoint, however. To make a good strike craft/warship balance you make the carrier vulnerable but still able to use its strike craft effectively. That is what results in good gameplay tactics. Weaponless carriers do have that effect, true, but it is a boring and off-putting way of implementing that. There are much better ways.

If the Heron has enough guns to destroy a frigate in the flux war, that does not make carriers OP even if its strike craft can kill a destroyer or damage another cruiser at range. Its a cruiser. It should kill a frigate almost no matter the circumstances and destroyers should mostly lose as well. That is how the Eagle operates too... there really isn't a difference except since strike craft have so much range they are the priority threat. That point, in particular, is the main issue I think some players struggle with. They don't want that to be the case but it has to be for strike craft to feel worth it to use. Otherwise, they will be mostly flavor- like they have been for every update pre-.8 imo. I used them because I liked them, not because they felt good. The only way back then to make them work was, ironically, picking the most optimal ones and mono-spamming them (remember the old Thunder?). In small numbers they were borderline useless.

Now an Eagle vs a Heron? First of all, the Heron should be at least 1/3 or more weaker defensively. The carrier has less flux stats and defense. It should also be quite a bite slower. Quite honestly, if two Herons are fighting an Eagle without escorts.... the Eagle should barely win most of the time. But a Heron and a destroyer escort to screen it? Much different story.

Fighters are counterable, but not always. Carriers in a mixed force can hide behind warships or buy some time with their swiftness. And on their own, they can be really hard to catch, without you also taking damage from fighters, too.

Yeah, this is a big part of the problem. On their own, they should be sitting ducks to anything their hullsize. They should, however, be capable of lightly defending themselves against smaller threats. Smaller threats should rely on wolf-pack tactics to combat them (just like when fighting a regular warship of a larger hull size) but have such higher speed that the fighters can't pick too many of them off before they close the distance.

In this case what is easy is also elegant. There's no need for complicated -10% effective within a certain range, or only a set amount of fighters can attack a ship, or fighter weapons do double damage to other fighters, if you can adjust pre-existing values of HP or flux capacity or fighter replacement rate.

Ok then, I'm open to your interpretation though I don't agree right now. Give me an example of how that would operate once implemented. What is your "vision" (be as specific as possible) of how stat changes will solve these problems?

If you are concerned for the" initial" damage of the strike for the viable duration the craft can stay on target, "alpha strike" is kind of the opposite of that in common gaming parlance. In any case, that is kind of the point. By reducing values of HP or flux capacity is just an alternative to reducing the fighter replacement rate. Both are a suggestion with similar aims. To reduce the rate of auto regenerating fighter "cloud". The first has a bonus in reducing the ability of fighters to simply destroy frigates with ease.

The first sentence makes me think you don't quite understand what I am saying unless I have been misunderstanding alpha strike- which I certainly could be. In military terms, its just how many fighters/bombers (really just damage) you can field in a single sortie on one target. The limited ammo idea I suggested relates to this because alpha strike for fighters, atm, is unlimited because it relies on fighter losses in order for it to be reduced in any way (bombers notwithstanding) Limited ammo makes interceptors like the spark and thunder also follow this rule and makes it easier to balance massed fighter clouds. This would be a huge nerf to the staying power of all fighters which don't currently have limited ammo because it reduces the alpha strike vs time- which makes large fighter clouds so effective since they can just move to a new target without providing a window of opportunity for any counter reaction.

If interceptors and anti-fighter fighters better followed their role, that nerf wouldn't really matter. We don't want interceptors to be ship killers any more than we want a cruiser sized carrier killing a cruiser in close combat. Strike craft killing frigates with ease (should they hit them) is as it should be. To make them not do that would make them incredibly bad against larger ships. Frigates must rely on larger targets acting as shields, positioning, numerical superiority and allied fighters to survive. That's what its speed and maneuverability is for. It's on-board PD is a deterrent and additional support- not a solution in and of itself. A frigate is a tactical combat vessel whereas a battleship is a brute force combat vessel.

As for weapon mounts being left, most often they are small weapon mounts on ships that have medium and large weapon mounts available. Small weapons are costed for as if they are compared to other small weapons, but their worth decreases vastly once larger weapon mounts are available. LDMG and PD Laser might be worth 4 OP due to small frigate to frigate combat it might have a dual role, but in larger ships, it would be rare to see them being worth that OP, short of perhaps destroyers with safety overides hullmod. It's like another version of the frigate vs capital problem. It probably doesn't help that for instance that many small weapon mounts have small coverages that overlap with larger coverages. For instance I advocate that a Dominator can leave 2 or even 4 of its side small mounts empty, as it simply doesn't need that many if equipped the the PD-specialised vulcans. Perhaps empty weapon mounts should be automatically filled with almost useless PD mount for free. Or perhaps Cruisers can have a -1 OP and Capitals have a -2 OP reduction to small mounts, but that come with the disadvantage of being a significant boost to cruiser and capital power, when they do not need it.

But in the case of carriers, it is due to the carrier themselves don't need weapons. They have a range 4000 weapon in the form of fighter bays. At the moment, carriers have a weapon count as if they were one hull size lower. Why would you want them to move closer to a range they can barely fight at? If carriers were given more OP, that OP can be used to make carriers better weaponless carriers.  Or if they could use their OP to fight like them, and with their fighter complement as well, all carriers, being viable as combat carriers would eclipse warships as combat ships. The carrier OP / empty weapon mounts on many warships is a separate issue and a fairly complicated one at that.

That's a good analysis. It also means small weapons aren't doing their job correctly- or large weapons are doing their job too well. Larger weapons should not be able to hit frigates or fighters reliably unless they are specifically balanced to do so by being weaker in their primary role.

Take the dominator example: The small weapon mounts you advocate are unnecessary should be necessary to prevent a frigate surround from pinning the dominator. For a warship, it shouldn't be about just PD. Small assault weapons should hit fighters more reliably as well, its just that PD is equally as good or better and can also stop missiles. I digress...

The point is, even if its true that more OP just leads to better weaponless carriers, then other solutions should be considered. It can't just be left how it is, imo.

Ability to fill all mounts with any weapons robs the player of the real choice. You can just remove fitting option altogether. At least now Onslaught is not some abstract "DP slot" (like carriers) but very distinctive melee brawler with the memorable character.

Agreed, though I don't think that is what anyone is trying to advocate. Its more that a player is encouraged to fill all weapon mounts with something. :)
[close]

We all have thoughts on how carriers should fit into the the tactical battlefield. You don't get to say how others misunderstand how they should. What I am interested is in how carriers are used in the game and how they can or should be used. Same as with all fighters and with frigates and battleships. I'm not particularly interested in your personal interpretation of inaccurately perceived historical roles of ships and your assignation of such. In game there are frigates intended to fight fighters, frigates that are brute force and capitals which are "tactical combat vessels". Your personal interpretation of ship hulls and their roles does not matter. Fighters countering frigates contributes to the feeling that frigates are nearly worthless in the later game.

Alpha strike in common gaming parlance refers to a first and sudden high damage attack. You can see that usage constantly all over the forum, referring to missiles like Reapers or ships like Harbinger or Aurora, so I don't know why you are acting so confused for. Using it to describe variable damage over time that could extending all the way till the battle ends is the very opposite of that. I am not interested in discussing etymology to be honest. We are playing a game, not playing a specific military arm of a specific side in a war 40 years ago; it shouldn't really need to be said which usage is which.

What about setting a max op per hanger bay?  Separate from the weapon, vent/cap, and hull mod general pool.  Say, 30 OP per bay for the astral, and maybe 24 OP per bay for the heron.  This will limit smaller carriers to fielding smaller fighters.  If you elect to load smaller fighters than the max bay size, shuffle the leftover hanger OP to the general OP pool at a balanced ratio, or even at a variable rate as you move more hanger OP into the general pool.  This gives a design choice to put less fighter power in return for diminishing increase in regular warship capabilities.  You can have your close combat Astral with an all mining drone loadout.

Maybe create a hull mod that adds hanger OP and allows smaller carriers to field larger wings.  Or a hull mod that removes a hanger bay in return for increasing the OP size of the remaining bays.

It'll require a bit more balancing but will add more design freedom with additional constraints on the maximums.  Not sure how to balance it against drover/sparks spam but it'll give us a few more ways to nudge it into balance.
Schwarz suggested the same thing. It's a good idea but I feel like at this point we are all discussing several areas of discussion at the same time. If the ideal is to make carriers not have empty weapon slots, it is difficult to say what the impact will be as any spare OP can be used for hullmods and caps and vents and not go into weapons at all. It'll have to be a lot of spare OP to force a player to fill all weapon slots so as not to waste the spare OP. Personally I would suggest that whatever the OP transferance ratio should be, it shouldn't be possible to exceed whatever the player can do currently by filling its fighter bays with Talons or the 0 OP mining pod auxiliary. As it is I think carriers could do with +8 OP per fighter bay to make them more comfortably fit weapons of the player decide to do so, but since people think carriers are powerful at the moment, it must be accompanied by other balance changes at the same time.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 08, 2020, 04:25:11 AM
Quote
Strange, I feel like that the Onslaught has way too much OP. I can fill it up with plenty of hullmods. it's good that you are forced to choose how you want to fit your ships. What's the point of having OP for customisation if you can have all the options you want and more?
In case of Onslaught, it is in part due to dissipation.  It is too hard to use heavy weapons with it.  As for OP, since Onslaught needs missiles and Expanded Missile Racks, I have no problem guzzling all of its OP even with Loadout Design 3, and this is leaving the small (insignificant) mounts empty.

I think all mounts should be filled, and it is a crying shame that the game discourages this, either through lack of OP, dissipation, or both.  It is really awful for some ships, such as Odyssey with two plasma cannons and almost nothing else, Atlas 2 with two gauss and two MIRVs, or the unarmed carrier.  I do not care if it is optimal, it looks very stupid and ugly.  What is the point of mounts if we cannot use them?  It would be better if the mounts were not there.

However, I doubt merely adding more OP will fix the problem, as that will be shoved into flux stats or hullmods or bigger fighters, instead of more weapons to fill up mounts.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morbo513 on January 08, 2020, 05:07:25 AM
I've not been satisfied with fighter mechanics since I started playing. I don't have an exact understanding of the current fighter mechanics, but I've always found them to be exceedingly powerful compared to non-carriers of equivalent OP/DP. They can successfuly counter most dangers the game can throw at you in sufficient numbers, and losses in combat have close enough to zero bearing on the outcome of a battle when stacked up against an opposing fleet's CR and composition. In other words, they almost always outlast an enemy fleet that lacks a significant complement of fighters.

I'm also very much against hard limits. My idealised version of fighter mechanics would entail another overhaul, but would end up somewhere between the current and old implementations.

The least intrusive "buff" against fighters I can think of, is allowing weapons directly targeting them (and/or PD weapons in general) to pass over/through other non-fighter ships.

The next is giving all fighter weapons limited ammo, which once depleted forces them to return to the carrier.

Not sure exactly how to go about it, but there should be much greater consequence to fighter losses within combat. Crew losses mean nothing to AI and are irrelevant during the battle, and right now it feels like destroying fighters has no real effect on the overbearing presence they have in combat

 UI concerns aside, I think it'd be very important to be able to give commands to each fighter wing deployed, as well as being able to issue them as  targets - especially with the above changes. This would make PD-heavy ships much more valuable, and allow players with carriers to assign each to appropriate targets - ie being able to tell your fighters to escort your bombers, or intercept an enemy fighter wing.
This also means that commands given to the carrier can be deconflicted from those given to its fighters.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 08, 2020, 05:11:49 AM
@lucky33

Sorry, I mean't to say "strike craft" or "aircraft." I sometime use "fighters" as a catch-all to mean "things that come from a carrier." Its a bad habit.

Thats much better.

So mostly bombers and torpedo bombers are what I'm referring to here (edited the original post to clarify)- but that's related to the concept of the interceptors > bombers > warships kind of relationship.

Strike craft were op even before they learned how to fly. Torpedo boats forced the Dreadnought revolution and finally made line tactics obsolete. And the earliest examples of the torpedo craft were actually carried by the larger ships (the very first successful torpedo attack was launched in this manner).

Bombers could be stopped from dealing much damage if enemy fighters/interceptors caught them without an escort before they reached an optimal range because they had such poor mobility compared to fighters or interceptors. This has happened to my knowledge during both land based and sea based aircraft assaults.

Yes. Thats my whole point. Fighters are viable since they can stop strike craft. Before aircraft era that role was occupied by the torpedo boat destroyers.

But.

Here goes our game.

Real interceptors and destroyers were balanced by the fact that their guns although perfectly capable of destroying strike craft were too weak to endanger larger ships. In Starsector, strike craft once were ships. And still are. For example, Trident can survive the direct hit of the most powerfull guns supposedly designed to punch holes in the battleship plating. To cope with it you have to buff interceptor's capabilities. Making him dangerous to the warships. Here you go. Battleship eating fighters.

Probably from my wording error, but you are talking about mm cannons when the power of aircraft came from bombs and torpedoes.

Yes. Very limited ammunition. Not guns.

It was largely felt, at least according to what I have read, that warship based anti-aircraft guns were sub-optimal and rarely could stop a sortie from causing critical damage even if it caused a few losses to the wing in return. Smokescreens were actually far more likely to work in comparison due to the training issue you have already mentioned.

For the pilot without special training warship under way was almost impossible to hit with the bomb or torpedo. It was very difficult either way. It took about 100+ torpedoes to sink Yamato. As you can guess, most of them have missed. Thats why japanese introduced kamikaze tactics. Removed the need to keep certain bearing, speed and altitude for a weapon deployment. Without it... Only spray and pray.

Now, all of that said, I don't want "aircraft" (what I will use to avoid confusion) to be that strong, but they should be intimidating enough to warrant pursuit and priority of the carrier and force the engagement of the warship protective screen.

I'm completely ok with our current state of the attack capabilities of the strike craft. Since they have limited ammo their dps is limited too based on the range. Thats balanced. My problem is anti-ship capabilities of the fighters.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 08, 2020, 05:22:02 AM
In case of Onslaught, it is in part due to dissipation.

Its mostly because you are too much into the zero caps meta. Spend some points for caps and armor.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 08, 2020, 07:56:42 AM
Its mostly because you are too much into the zero caps meta. Spend some points for caps and armor.
I do not remember if I have caps on Onslaught, although I try to put some points in caps on ships if I can.  (I frequently trade caps for Hardened Shields if I cannot get both.)  As for armor hullmods, it slows Onslaught too much.  I tried Heavy Armor, and it slowed turning too much for comfort (and I do not want to spend even more for Auxiliary Thrusters).  I do not have armor skills in my last game because they went into colony skills, before I learned about Pather bug and the intricacies about cores.

But more caps will not help if I give Onslaught to AI and they flux cap too fast because they use flux much faster than they dissipate.  Onslaught has what, about 1000 dissipation if I min-max that stat?  While heavy weapons that are not Hellbore or Devastator take about 400 to 600 flux per gun, and this does not include smaller guns in other mounts like heavy needlers or the like.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 08, 2020, 09:01:06 AM
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=16137.msg257132#msg257132 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=16137.msg257132#msg257132)

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Onslaught
Capacitors: 0

Not the hullmods. Skills.

Under zero caps meta you just give an enemy 18000 lead and 10000 handicap to yourself. Its beyond reason.

Since Onslaught has only 1000 dissipation you have to choose weapons accordingly. Not stuffing it up with:

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Weapons: 2x Devastator Cannon, 1x Mjolnir Cannon, 4x Heavy Needler, 2x Hypervelocity Driver, 3x Dual Flak Cannon, 6x Vulcan

Four HN require 4800 flux to shoot a volley. Two Devastators need 1800. Thats 6600. Third of your entire flux pool. You cant use them if there is enough flux for the full burst. This means that when you see your fluxbar at 2/3 you just lost some of your fancy weapons you've spent some much op installing. When less than 900 flux left you are as good as dead. Most of the guns will not shoot. Thats 100 op spent... for what exactly?

Onslaught is really a gambling glass cannon

No wonder. But this is exactly how you built it.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 08, 2020, 09:58:52 AM
@ Lucky33: I figured you would dig up an earlier post.

I have not used that Onslaught loadout lately, not since I tried to find a loadout that can fight in an Ordos battle and some of the tougher sim experiments.  Now, if I use Onslaughts against Ordos, I use mostly Heavy Needlers, with TPCs and missiles for anti-armor.  (Could use Storm Needler instead, but 700 range is not enough.)  Any Devastators (the only heavy weapons) I mount are for anti-small ship that try to flank in battles against human factions.  Also, I do not put weapons on Onslaught's small mounts anymore, since none of the weapons there have sufficient range.

Armor skills would be nice, but there is no way I would get those with the save I have, due to points sunk in colony skills.  For the game I have, it is too late, and I am in no mood to replay the (current release of this) game just to grind and respec the character (for all combat and no industry) and go through more babysitting torture.

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Since Onslaught has only 1000 dissipation you have to choose weapons accordingly.
This is a thing I do not like about Onslaught's design.  It has three heavy mounts, but it does not have the dissipation to use them!  I see heavy mounts, along with the plethora of other mounts, and I should be able to mount and use heavy weapons decently enough.  But Onslaught cannot.  Better if it did not have heavy mounts.  Conquest and Paragon can use their heavy mounts.  But Onslaught, I mount one good heavy weapon on it and it cannot use anything else.

P.S.  I would not mind having high flux use if I can vent spam, but that does not cut it for AI use or any tough battles like Ordos where enemy can easily punish in recent releases.  In some older releases, I could flux cap quickly, vent, kill a few ships, flux cap quickly, vent, repeat.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 08, 2020, 10:42:29 AM
We all have thoughts on how carriers should fit into the the tactical battlefield. You don't get to say how others misunderstand how they should. What I am interested is in how carriers are used in the game and how they can or should be used. Same as with all fighters and with frigates and battleships. I'm not particularly interested in your personal interpretation of inaccurately perceived historical roles of ships and your assignation of such. In game there are frigates intended to fight fighters, frigates that are brute force and capitals which are "tactical combat vessels". Your personal interpretation of ship hulls and their roles does not matter. Fighters countering frigates contributes to the feeling that frigates are nearly worthless in the later game.

Alpha strike in common gaming parlance refers to a first and sudden high damage attack. You can see that usage constantly all over the forum, referring to missiles like Reapers or ships like Harbinger or Aurora, so I don't know why you are acting so confused for. Using it to describe variable damage over time that could extending all the way till the battle ends is the very opposite of that. I am not interested in discussing etymology to be honest. We are playing a game, not playing a specific military arm of a specific side in a war 40 years ago; it shouldn't really need to be said which usage is which.

Wow, I can feel the salt through the computer screen. Look, I'm not trying to get too deep into history or anything. I know its off topic and we are playing a game, I was just responding to others' posts. As far as the original post- that was not just a historical reference, that was mostly a gaming reference. The best military games or space games I've played that handle the "carrier conundrum" use that design:

- at least traditionally in these types of games.

Also, just to be clear, I understood what alpha strike was in gaming parlance and was using it both ways with the limited ammo suggestion because you brought it up. Remember? If you didn't want to get into an etymological debate then why did you start one?

If you are concerned for the" initial" damage of the strike for the viable duration the craft can stay on target, "alpha strike" is kind of the opposite of that in common gaming parlance.

At this point it feels a little antagonistic. You have also used the word "inelegant" to describe other peoples' suggestions. That is not very courteous. (I was going to let that go, btw). I get that you are passionate. I am too. I am trying to keep this debate as civil as I can and no, I am not trying to force my "worldview" on history or anything on anyone. I am trying, very hard, to solve the problem using all the resources at my disposal and giving every suggestion a fair chance in my personal evaluation. I'm also not arrogant enough to assume my personal opinion means more than anyone else's, but if I do not say what I think and the changes down the road feel bad to me, I will only have myself to blame. See what I am saying? I am not trying to fight- just debate. I have 8 years of experience tinkering with fighter design in this game. If I don't use that experience and lessons to give my opinion here when the question is asked, that would be a waste. I have absolutely no doubt that some, or maybe even plenty, of people think some of my more radical design changes that I've implemented are bad or not to their liking. That's fine, but it can at least serve as solid evidence one way or the other.

Limited ammo is not variable damage. It's fixed. That was the point- so it is calculable (unlike now) during the "best case scenario" where no strike craft dies to PD. I brought up the military term because it better described the non-limited ammo situation- though certainly not perfectly and admittedly the use of the Alpha Strike vs time analogy doesn't make a lot of sense considering the term, but how else do I describe it?

FWIW I understand and appreciate your concern with frigate combat becoming obsolete. I am trying to help solve that too- just not at the expense of fighters becoming bad again.

I even (genuinely I might add) asked you what your ideas were on stat changes:

Ok then, I'm open to your interpretation though I don't agree right now. Give me an example of how that would operate once implemented. What is your "vision" (be as specific as possible) of how stat changes will solve these problems?

Instead of taking the opportunity to state your case, I get this?

------------------
@lucky33

Sorry, I mean't to say "strike craft" or "aircraft." I sometime use "fighters" as a catch-all to mean "things that come from a carrier." Its a bad habit.

Thats much better.

*snip*

I'm completely ok with our current state of the attack capabilities of the strike craft. Since they have limited ammo their dps is limited too based on the range. Thats balanced. My problem is anti-ship capabilities of the fighters.

Yeah that really was my fault for the sloppy wording.

Overall, though, I think we are on the same page as far as design intentions. Now its just a matter of "can it be done and how much work will it be?"
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 08, 2020, 11:03:20 AM
@Megas

You could use officers with the armor skills.

HNs are barely flux efficient against Remnants. And, as I said, they choke you.

Of course you dont have enough range. Because you cant use burn drive to close the range since you dont have hp to spend. But the trick is to get into melee. In a 5 sec burst, HMG deals about the same amount of damage to shield as HN. For half the flux and they require only 60 of it for their "burst". Compair that to HN's 1200. Melee variant will not stop firing only because it close to max flux.

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It has three heavy mounts, but it does not have the dissipation to use them!

It has caps to use them. And armor to not waste it for protection. Oh... You dont havy any. Such a shame.

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But Onslaught cannot.

It perfectly can. I'm typically running 3 Hellbores. Problem of the whole ballistic weapons system is the lack of 750 dps close range large HE weapon. Chaingun can do 600 and this makes everything else unneeded for Onslaught. Hellbores are good for widening gap made by the Reapers but thats it.

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but that does not cut it for AI use

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17496.msg276083#msg276083 (https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17496.msg276083#msg276083)

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In some older releases, I could flux cap quickly, vent, kill a few ships, flux cap quickly, vent, repeat.

It works just as good. Just remember to keep vent time at about 5 sec or less.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 08, 2020, 11:08:14 AM
Overall, though, I think we are on the same page as far as design intentions. Now its just a matter of "can it be done and how much work will it be?"

You tell me.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 08, 2020, 11:23:26 AM
Overall, though, I think we are on the same page as far as design intentions. Now its just a matter of "can it be done and how much work will it be?"

You tell me.

Well, I think the limited ammo to fighters would go a long way and that is trivial.

Ideally I would want the guns on fighters/interceptors to be weak to ships somehow. Also trivial, but others really don't like the idea of separate weaker weapons on fighters or hullmods improving damage to strike craft. Removing weapons to reduce damage has been suggested.

The big unknown:

It's the AI changes to interceptor attack orders that is the question on workload and I can't speak to that. To prevent a complete overhaul back to .8 or something new, the best way I can think of implementing this concept in the new system is to separate out the carrier "Fighter Strike" command into a ship attack variant that stays the way it is now- and a "counter incoming strike craft" variant that can only be used on ships with flight decks. This attack could either still send the carriers' bombers/assault fighters to target the enemy ship alone, or leave them safely back with the carrier. Whatever feels better. The interceptors and anti-fighter fighters, though, would pursue that target's strike craft (bombers having priority as targets) relentlessly even at the carriers docking bays until the command is canceled.

*EDIT* Hmm, thought about this a little more. What if... the two commands were independent toggles that could either be stacked on one target or separated out onto two separate targets?

"Intercept Strike Craft" would send interceptors and anti-strike-craft fighters to target strike craft as described above, "Bomber Strike" would send bombers and assault fighters to attack the ship itself. Support fighters, erm, off the top of my head would probably escort bombers during "Bomber Strike" but that is debatable.

The benefit to this would be to increase the ability of using tactics while flying a carrier (including AI ships very importantly) whilst keeping the vast majority of the current system intact. It also promotes diversity in carrier strike craft builds for the player (to increase the ability to use tactics that is still reliant upon actually piloting the carrier yourself) and even if the AI cannot be made to do this on their own (seems like they should be but not an expert there) the player's specific commands in the tactics screen allow the player to direct the battle tactics of fighter deployments more easily and would even increase the value of command points as a nice bonus. (Operational Command hullmod has more usefulness now.)

Some important details/suggestions for implementation:
Not having strike craft of the appropriate type would result in the command being unavailable with a popup explaining why upon mouse-over in the tactics screen. Pressing Z while targeting a fighter issues a "Intercept Strike Craft" order on the fighter's carrier while targeting a ship itself defaults (selecting a "Bomber Strike" while interceptors, etc have their own orders would not override them) to both commands but interceptors/fighters can be manually disengaged by issuing another Z press on a strike craft. Pressing Z without a target returns all bombers first, and a second press returns all fighters. If no orders are currently active for the player carrier and they press Z without a target, all strike craft pick their own targets.

Pressing Z on an allied ship results in only the interceptors, etc coming the the ship's aid to escort it, but bombers, etc would be retained in order to still be able to provide an unescorted sortie if that was desirable to the player.

To me, this feels like the most intuitive way of handling the details of personally flying a carrier without creating a new hotkey and still allowing for two separate strike craft commands in the tactics screen.

Give carriers two separate OP pools for fighters and for itself. Make these OP pools able to be exchanged for the other at a 2:1 ratio or something like that. So a carrier with 40/60 OP who only uses 38 OP for fighters gets 61 OP points to use for itself. The point of this would be that carriers across the board can get more OP (because they need it). At the same time, fighters can still be made weaker.
What about setting a max op per hanger bay?  Separate from the weapon, vent/cap, and hull mod general pool.  Say, 30 OP per bay for the astral, and maybe 24 OP per bay for the heron.  This will limit smaller carriers to fielding smaller fighters.  If you elect to load smaller fighters than the max bay size, shuffle the leftover hanger OP to the general OP pool at a balanced ratio, or even at a variable rate as you move more hanger OP into the general pool.  This gives a design choice to put less fighter power in return for diminishing increase in regular warship capabilities.  You can have your close combat Astral with an all mining drone loadout.

Maybe create a hull mod that adds hanger OP and allows smaller carriers to field larger wings.  Or a hull mod that removes a hanger bay in return for increasing the OP size of the remaining bays.

It'll require a bit more balancing but will add more design freedom with additional constraints on the maximums.  Not sure how to balance it against drover/sparks spam but it'll give us a few more ways to nudge it into balance.

I think these have potential to be a good solution. I'll mull it over at work today.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morbo513 on January 08, 2020, 03:51:42 PM
My problem is anti-ship capabilities of the fighters.
This is half of what it boils down to for me.  I feel like the strongest fighter weapons should do negligible damage to frigates+, while only bomber weapons should be anywhere near on-par with those used by regular ships.

To this I would propose a pair of different armour/hull and damage types for fighter hulls and weapons. This means they can be balanced against one another, but nerfed against frigates+ - as well as allowing for more specialised anti-fighter weaponry for the larger ships. Ie a fighter's weapon would do 100% damage against fighters (then kinetic/frag/HE factored), but 30% to frigate+, while bombers' primary armament would do 100% to frigate+.

The other half is that most bombers and many fighters are a practically limitless supply of dangerous missiles, that would otherwise be severely limited as regular ship-weapons for the same OP.



Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 08, 2020, 07:16:12 PM
Ideally I would want the guns on fighters/interceptors to be weak to ships somehow. Also trivial, but others really don't like the idea of separate weaker weapons on fighters or hullmods improving damage to strike craft. Removing weapons to reduce damage has been suggested.

Well. You can also remove flux dissipation on fighters. Like, entirely. No dissipation - no staying power. Fighters are forced to return for recharging.

It's the AI changes to interceptor attack orders that is the question on workload and I can't speak to that.

I dont speak Java so I'm of no help here.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 09, 2020, 05:06:37 AM
Morrokain, I apologise if you feel like I am being antagonistic. Perhaps "inelegant" isn't the exact right word, but I did try to use words like complicated, simplier, to easier to understand afterwards to explain what I meant. If for example, you view fighter weapons as too powerful, instead of have fighter weapons do half damage, causing a visual discreptancy for what is occuring on the battle, why not simply half the number of weapons on that fighter, or change a dual light machine gun into a single machine gun, or halve it's rate of fire as with some pre existing missile weapons, would that not keep the visual feedback and have the exact same aim? After doing that, if for some reason you want these fighter weapons to do just as much damage to other fighter type fighters, you can half their HP/shield. Sure fighters will die faster against weapons on ships, but that's also ties into that some people also view some fighters as being tough, so it stands as a suggestion on its own. Afterall, in the end pilums didn't get "solved" by hard to communicate visual discreptancies or with a change in AI programming, but by lowering their HP.


Anyways, all this belies that the most dangerous anti-frigate fighter isn't any of these fighters like spark or thunder or talon spam , but is the Longbow and Dagger. Of course that is somewhat balanced out that it costs much more OP than just about every other fighter.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 09, 2020, 02:52:50 PM
Morrokain, I apologise if you feel like I am being antagonistic. Perhaps "inelegant" isn't the exact right word, but I did try to use words like complicated, simplier, to easier to understand afterwards to explain what I meant. If for example, you view fighter weapons as too powerful, instead of have fighter weapons do half damage, causing a visual discreptancy for what is occuring on the battle, why not simply half the number of weapons on that fighter, or change a dual light machine gun into a single machine gun, or halve it's rate of fire as with some pre existing missile weapons, would that not keep the visual feedback and have the exact same aim? After doing that, if for some reason you want these fighter weapons to do just as much damage to other fighter type fighters, you can half their HP/shield. Sure fighters will die faster against weapons on ships, but that's also ties into that some people also view some fighters as being tough, so it stands as a suggestion on its own. Afterall, in the end pilums didn't get "solved" by hard to communicate visual discreptancies or with a change in AI programming, but by lowering their HP.


Anyways, all this belies that the most dangerous anti-frigate fighter isn't any of these fighters like spark or thunder or talon spam , but is the Longbow and Dagger. Of course that is somewhat balanced out that it costs much more OP than just about every other fighter.

Thank you my friend. :) And thank you for the details of your concerns. That helps a lot for me to try and help solve them.

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Sure fighters will die faster against weapons on ships, but that's also ties into that some people also view some fighters as being tough, so it stands as a suggestion on its own.

Consider two things:

1) The AI changes I'm advocating will mean fighters/interceptors are often not actually fighting the ship- they are protecting bombers or engaging other bombers elsewhere. That alone reduces their anti-ship threat even to frigates. But that certainly is not enough.

2) If fighters are too tough, I get that simply weakening defensive stats would help, but:

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causing a visual discreptancy for what is occuring on the battle

If this is your primary concern with built in fighter weapons causing less damage (they would have (Fighter) after them or a completely new name to prevent confusion with warship weapons), then I have a potential solution that seems to convey the message viscerally that is also not very dev intensive. I'll get to that in a second.

Firstly though, I think the immediate objection to implementing separate, weaker weapon statistics for built in fighter weapons is conveying this information to the player when planning builds in the refit screen or trying to gather tactical info when examining an enemy fleet. Iirc, I think Alex plans to let fighter weapons be visible in the UI so that the stat details can be seen when planning builds, etc. Would that help?

But, for the idea of viscerally intuitive combat learning, all you have to do to convey that is reduce bullet size by 50% (It's a bit of extra work because you would copy paste the projectile files of each fighter weapon from their counterparts' projectile files, modify their size stats or reduce the size of their bullet sprites, and link them back to the fighter variant of the weapon.) This lets the player know in an intuitive way that "ok, fighters use weaker weapons than warships and basically can't do much to them as a result"- yet: That is only ok as long as fighters and interceptors focus upon their proper targets- bombers and assault craft. If not, they become virtually useless and mass bombers will become the only viable strategy.

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why not simply half the number of weapons on that fighter, or change a dual light machine gun into a single machine gun, or halve it's rate of fire as with some pre existing missile weapons, would that not keep the visual feedback and have the exact same aim?

I'm not sure this will be enough to reduce the effectiveness of mass fighter spam. Maybe, but conceptually it does nothing to really solve the complexity of that problem. Yes, it might be enough if both that nerf occurs and their is also a reduction in defense stats, but if the AI changes are not also added into the equation, it will only translate to: Never use fighters unless they have flares to cover bombers.

I don't think that's what we want. That reduces all the variety of that strike craft role to a single ship system. That would be a shame, imo.

On the other hand, limited ammo, or:

Well. You can also remove flux dissipation on fighters. Like, entirely. No dissipation - no staying power. Fighters are forced to return for recharging.

Really the same thing but a different way of implementing it- that would help in the concern quoted below when combining it with the concept of slow and vulnerable carriers that can only defend against minor swarm threats through their assault weaponry or defend against enemy strike craft with their PD- and even then not indefinitely. Battlecarriers can go "toe-to-toe" with a hullsize lower or a lighter variant of the same warship role (by hullsize). This, again, helps to solve the problem of:

The other half is that most bombers and many fighters are a practically limitless supply of dangerous missiles, that would otherwise be severely limited as regular ship-weapons for the same OP.

So, why does all of this extra effort and detail matter? Back to:

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Sure fighters will die faster against weapons on ships

Are you familiar with the "butterfly effect"? This kind of effect in game design terms represents that concept. We have already discussed this, actually, in Swartz' concern that increasing PD effectiveness will nerf missiles and cause only more and more cascading changes to get the balance back into equilibrium. I'll give a concrete example from my own lessons of trying this idea out in order to better explain my thought process.

Scenario:

The enemy carrier is screened by two destroyers and I have two destroyers available for my defensive screen as well. I have a superior advantage in fighters, while my enemy has only a single fighter wing and has then dedicated the rest of their focus to bombers. The engagement begins:

If fighters are just weak to ships in general as far as defense is concerned, then the clash in the center when the two waves meet is irrelevant according to the current system. Let's say each carrier has 4 bays. 1 Fighter:3 Bombers vs 2 Fighters:2 Bombers.

The fighters take potshots and minor losses as they pass each other and obviously the 2:1 ratio means that my fighters probably fare better in the exchange. Does that matter, however, when they meet the two destroyers guns and get obliterated? Now my two bomber wings get through the destroyers, but- my enemy had three bomber wings. Let's say that, again, when passing by each other, my fighter advantage reduced one bomber wing by half (That's not even guaranteed considering the variance of distance between the two forces. If my fighters happened to meet the bombers at the enemy destroyers, for instance, they would have no effect whatsoever and would be a complete waste of OP- buildwise.) Even still in the case that does not happen, my enemy has the "bomber advantage" in the end and likely does more damage to me- even though I tried to better specialize in "anti-bomber" tactics at the expense of less strike capability. It completely kills fighters' viability to simply nerf them like that. More complexity is likely a requirement in this case to solve the important nuances- but that doesn't mean it has to be unintuitive or even necessarily a massive dev effort not withstanding the unknowns.

I want to be clear, however, that this concept doesn't mean stat changes aren't warranted in specific cases, such as:

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Anyways, all this belies that the most dangerous anti-frigate fighter isn't any of these fighters like spark or thunder or talon spam , but is the Longbow and Dagger.

I can't speak to that. Those are fixed damage strike craft, conceptually, so adjustments there are not the focus of my concerns. You may be valid there. What I am debating is that stat changes in and of themselves won't be enough to solve the underlying problem when considering the above complications.

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Afterall, in the end pilums didn't get "solved" by hard to communicate visual discreptancies or with a change in AI programming, but by lowering their HP.

See, I don't think they were "solved" at all- at least not in the concept of mass spam. I think their mass spam was nerfed by HP reductions at the expense of their overall viability compared to other missiles. Their only competitive edge at this point is a much larger ammunition storage and regeneration of that ammunition for increased staying power. See the comparisons?

You can't leverage that balancing mechanism against fighters because they all regenerate.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: DatonKallandor on January 10, 2020, 06:05:14 PM
Well. You can also remove flux dissipation on fighters. Like, entirely. No dissipation - no staying power. Fighters are forced to return for recharging.

Well the problem there is that it does basically the same thing as limiting ammo, except it screws over shielded fighters entirely and also the AI wouldn't know that returning to carrier because of high flux is a thing - but the AI very much DOES know that running to carrier because no ammo left is a thing.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 10, 2020, 06:24:11 PM
Well. You can also remove flux dissipation on fighters. Like, entirely. No dissipation - no staying power. Fighters are forced to return for recharging.

Well the problem there is that it does basically the same thing as limiting ammo, except it screws over shielded fighters entirely and also the AI wouldn't know that returning to carrier because of high flux is a thing - but the AI very much DOES know that running to carrier because no ammo left is a thing.

The AI only seems to know that for missiles IIRC. But making it recognize gun ammo probably wouldn't be a far extension of that.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 10, 2020, 07:51:58 PM
Well. You can also remove flux dissipation on fighters. Like, entirely. No dissipation - no staying power. Fighters are forced to return for recharging.

Well the problem there is that it does basically the same thing as limiting ammo, except it screws over shielded fighters entirely and also the AI wouldn't know that returning to carrier because of high flux is a thing - but the AI very much DOES know that running to carrier because no ammo left is a thing.

I'm completely OK with the problems of the shielded fighters. For me its a nice feature and not the problem.

If fighters will be used as an addition to the strike groups they will be returned with the rest of the group. AI knows that much. AI dont know how to intercept on its own so the capabilities of AI controlled carriers o intercept are of no concern without fixing that inability first.
On the other hand the ability to create the free roaming deathball of fighters is deemed as a problem in need of fixing. If someone is to do the good old Drover/Spark spam only to find that the only way to recharge Sparks is to get them destroyed... What can I say. Problem is fixed. No, its not an elegant solution but it gets the job done. And I cant help with anything what requires programming skills anyway. However if anyone will produce the better solution I'll support it.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 11, 2020, 06:41:52 AM
It is the intended purpose of the suggestion of changing hull and shield values is that fighters will die faster. So that is not a problem that they will at all.  There may be a sharper tipping point between being useful and dying but that can be fine too. An alternative is to change the fighter replacement rate. It's not really clear to me what you think the the underlying problem with fighters is though other than that you think they don't fit your personal perspective of what fighters should do, especially since you touch on all sorts of suggestions including AI changes.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 11, 2020, 08:56:48 AM
@ Lucky:  I tried the melee loadout, and I am not fond of it, at least not without all combat skills.  Without more armor, Onslaught often takes too much damage, and it is a pain chasing down small ships to get in range.  However, it does mulch enemy Onslaughts and the like because they flux themselves out first, and melee Onslaught can handle swarms a bit more easily when enemy gets too aggressive.  I would also need Aggressive/Reckless officers (which I do not have) or fleet doctrine (which messes up my other non-melee ships) for AI to use a melee loadout.

I am not fond of Hellbore on Onslaught because it stinks against small ships (too slow).  The only other heavy weapon that is not too flux hungry is Devastator, and I like the AoE against the small ships that flank Onslaught.  Everything else from Marx IX and up is too flux hungry if I try to use three.  It does not help that AI is too trigger-happy with TPCs.  That is why I write Onslaught cannot use heavy weapons.  If I use Conquest, I have no flux problems with any of the heavy weapons provided I do not pile on flux-hungry energy weapons too.  On the high-tech side, Paragon can use heavy weapons decently enough, at least well enough to vaporize anything from human factions.  (I like 4x lances against anything from human factions - they die too fast at longish range before flux reaches max.  Against Remnants with Radiants, I need and use a different loadout.)

After looking at my ships recently, I am very fond of Efficiency Overhaul and Augmented Engines on capitals, which costs a lot of OP.  That OP has to come from somewhere, and that usually means capacitors.  If I totally ignore campaign needs or QoL, I can probably squeeze some in capacitors or other flux saving hullmod.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 11, 2020, 12:25:20 PM
It's not really clear to me what you think the the underlying problem with fighters is though other than that you think they don't fit your personal perspective of what fighters should do, especially since you touch on all sorts of suggestions including AI changes.

They don't counter bombers or each other. So, because of this, they are essentially just bombers themselves- just infinite ammo bombers. You are advocating making them "weak bombers" for this reason. But if the AI stays the same, then the line between interceptor/fighter/bomber is practically nonexistent as far as behavior is concerned. Interceptors only fight each other when around the enemy or allied ship. If they are weaker to PD, then their clashes around ships are more meaningless because the real threat is the PD guns and not the interceptors themselves. As I have stated before, I'm not even saying you can't weaken them defensively. They may need that and limited ammo to become more balanced. But, none of that will make fighters feel good- especially compared to bombers- until fighter and interceptors have a role that isn't just being another bomber that sometimes "fights" other bombers briefly before settling back on the target. 

So my question to you is, what do you think is the role of fighters and interceptors? How would you use them? Would you use them? If they are just "weak bombers" then people will just equip actual bombers and ignore fighters- we have already discussed why less OP is not enough of a reason to make them attractive if they are just bad in comparison.

All of my suggestions have a purpose. They are pieces of the same puzzle. If you would like me to explain that further please let me know.

It is the intended purpose of the suggestion of changing hull and shield values is that fighters will die faster. So that is not a problem that they will at all.  There may be a sharper tipping point between being useful and dying but that can be fine too.

How is that fine? Would you be ok with that design if it were like that for frigates? I suspect not...

*EDIT*

Quote
An alternative is to change the fighter replacement rate.

Forgot to respond to this point. Ironically, it just so happens that this was the second balancing mechanism of the new .8 fighter system I tried when attempting to combat fighter spam in .9. To break it down:

There are two ways you can do this:

1) Reduce fighter and interceptor individual replacement rates so they take longer to replace a wing member.

2) Reduce the minimum threshold cap for replacement rate as it decreases.

(I guess you could also do both if you really wanted to. If the replacement rate threshold could go all the way to zero, that would make fighters more in line with vanilla missiles as a concept of limited burst damage- with a weird mechanic where as long as you don't let it get too low it could theoretically be infinite... Not only would this direction also probably require a lot of AI changes so that fighters aren't wasted (missiles have already gone through this transformation), it practically reeks of player abusiveness leading to unexpected power creep without some serious AI nuance. If AI refinement is the concern, then this suggestion would be even more work.)

To discuss this, an overview of how replacement rate works is required. I believe that replacement rate starts to decay if any wings are under ~50% members? (Someone correct me if I am wrong) What effect does this have? The longer it takes to replace an individual wing member the more impact that wing has to replacement rate when the wing takes losses over the threshold. This compounds upon itself because obviously the continuous lowering of replacement rate further hurts the wings' ability to replace their members and get above the threshold where replacement rate begins to increase again... so in effect this means bombers are often the hardest hitting factor on replacement rate and losing a bomber wing can mean the replacement rate goes from 100% to remaining at 30% the rest of the battle.

If fighters are changed to take longer to replace each wing's members, then fighters are more closely aligned with bombers in their effect upon replacement rate. So, instead of having a more nuanced system where bomber-based carriers are more easily handicapped by being stuck at 30% replacement and fighter/interceptor-based carriers have more of a wax and wane effect as they take and replace losses, all carriers just quickly get to- and remain at- 30% replacement rate for the majority of the battle. So this further emphasizes the "fighters as bombers" role the system already encourages.

How does this solve mass fighter spam? It does nothing to really reduce the staying power of the fighters themselves compared to bombers, because fighters still have infinite ammunition while bombers do not. The unstoppable fighter waves may come less often- or even only once considering the exponential effect replacement rate has- but this results in two and only two scenarios:

1) The first and likely only wave focuses on a single target and beats it handily- then moves to another and does the same- then moves to another and does the same, etc. Massed fighters are still optimal.

2) The first and likely only wave focuses on a single target and takes enough losses to weaken the swarm before the target dies. The swarm moves to the next target. Gets weakened further and takes out the target or dies. Either way, fighters are no longer useful for the remainder of the battle. Carriers sit there as useless paperweights and may as well be retreated (leading to player strategies that never let the carrier die while AI carriers get slaughtered.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 11, 2020, 01:27:01 PM
@ Megas

Since you can make it work with a lvl 20 officer its cleara that you dont need all combat skills.

This is why you make more armor. 100% CR, DC3 and IM1 turns your whole hull into solid slab of medium armor. Going for IM3 and EM3 turns anything but the powerfull HE into peashooters. And only either combination is fine. Taking all of it is just broken.

You dont chase small ships. They are obsessed with your flanks. Let them go for it. Right into HMG+AC battery. Typically, most of the time you simply ignore anything small.

You ended up without anything of use... Yes I know. You see that's the problem.

You have nine medium gun mounts to evaporate small ships.

Devastator is 900 flux per uninterruptable burst. How is it "not too flux hungry"?

Onslaught can use heavy weapons. The problem is that all other heavy weapons apart from Hellbore are worse than either AC or HMG. They all are longer range versions of them with the higher flux cost for the same or even lower effective DPS. You dont need it in the melee. Hellbore is not great in the DPS department but each shot landed on armor will save several thousands flux worth of the AC fire.

Yeah. Another self-invented problem. "I wanna to take my full battlefleet wherever I go even if I have to reduce its combat strength to the point of losing my capability to attack and will have to spend most of my time in battle hugging map's border". Sounds reasonable.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: DatonKallandor on January 12, 2020, 06:14:46 AM
Fighter replacement rate is not a useful lever for fighter balance.

What other levers are there?
Behaviour, out-of-combat stats and combat stats.

Out-of-Combat stats aren't a good lever either for obvious reasons.

Combat stats alone aren't enough, because the problem isn't just that fighters are too good, it's that they're too good in certain situations (when massed) because of the way they operate.
You gotta tweak both the stats and how they behave - their AI, their controls and their role in a fight.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Brokenmind on January 13, 2020, 05:37:02 AM
what about limiting the ammo for all fighter, bombers, interceptors

example
sparks have capacitors for  20 shots form the burst pd
broadswords have magazines for 100 shots for the light machine guns
after that if should reload in the carrier by doing this is is slightly reducing the CR of the carrier.

more or less to limit the max damage output of a single run of the fighter
this will remove the endless staying power  of the swarm and will make very hard to coordinate all fighter to attache the same target as they will rung out of ammo at different rates

in game explanations could be that frigates and higher have generators .ammo storage onboard,fighters don not.



Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: DatonKallandor on January 13, 2020, 06:13:35 AM
That makes mixing fighter types even less optimal. And that already sucks. You're supposed to build cool mutually supporting wings, but most things make doing that worse than just spamming one fighter type.

Plus, it doesn't actually make swarms worse, it just builds in a cooldown between every time the swarm pops a ship. You still have infinite scaling fighter balls that get exponentially better with every extra wing in the ball.

Oh and you'd need new AI, because a player would be smart enough to call back all fighters for refills after every kill and in regular intervals because the only thing that matters is huge alpha - but would the AI be smart enough to do the same?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Igncom1 on January 13, 2020, 06:26:09 AM
What about the idea of only having a certain number of replacement fighters per wing?

If my sparks only have 10 replacements then they'll get ground down eventually right? Forcing me(or AI) to be more mindful of their use. Kinda like how missiles are not infinite with the exception of support missiles. I know we have a fighter replacement timer that can then get buffed with player skills and ship mods, but that has always seemed to nebulous to me.

Also as for fighting fighters directly, my big ships get way way way too frightened when they are swarmed which can often kill them as enemy carriers can sit back in safety as my cruisers freak out. I know there is a AI PD hull mod that makes shooting down missiles and so forth easier, but I'd love an anti-fighter hull mod to make killing those a little easier.

Finally, we have things like the Proximity Charge Launcher and Swarmer SRM Launcher missile weapons but due to their limited ammo vs infinite fighters they seem utterly terrible in comparison. The Locust SRM Launcher is actually pretty good even against frigates and destroyers because oif the ungodly swarm they produce, but even still in a protracted battle their missiles are not re-spawning, but fighters are? Not to mention fighters and bombers with missiles of their own that re-spawn!
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 13, 2020, 07:06:56 AM
They don't counter bombers or each other. So, because of this, they are essentially just bombers themselves- just infinite ammo bombers. You are advocating making them "weak bombers" for this reason. But if the AI stays the same, then the line between interceptor/fighter/bomber is practically nonexistent as far as behavior is concerned. Interceptors only fight each other when around the enemy or allied ship. If they are weaker to PD, then their clashes around ships are more meaningless because the real threat is the PD guns and not the interceptors themselves. As I have stated before, I'm not even saying you can't weaken them defensively. They may need that and limited ammo to become more balanced. But, none of that will make fighters feel good- especially compared to bombers- until fighter and interceptors have a role that isn't just being another bomber that sometimes "fights" other bombers briefly before settling back on the target. 

So my question to you is, what do you think is the role of fighters and interceptors? How would you use them? Would you use them? If they are just "weak bombers" then people will just equip actual bombers and ignore fighters- we have already discussed why less OP is not enough of a reason to make them attractive if they are just bad in comparison.

All of my suggestions have a purpose. They are pieces of the same puzzle. If you would like me to explain that further please let me know.
We are talkign about two different issues. Sure I might touch on it during this thread long meandering conversation. You are interested in the historical uses of various designation of fighters and how they should be used and the AI changes for that. I don't care about that; I only care about how the game works.

It is the intended purpose of the suggestion of changing hull and shield values is that fighters will die faster. So that is not a problem that they will at all.  There may be a sharper tipping point between being useful and dying but that can be fine too.

How is that fine? Would you be ok with that design if it were like that for frigates? I suspect not...
Frigates already work like that right now. They are useful till they suddenly die when fighters appears. I would greatly prefer a smoother tipping point as seen in numerous other posts, but such is the design of the game.


Quote
An alternative is to change the fighter replacement rate.

Forgot to respond to this point. Ironically, it just so happens that this was the second balancing mechanism of the new .8 fighter system I tried when attempting to combat fighter spam in .9. To break it down:

There are two ways you can do this:

1) Reduce fighter and interceptor individual replacement rates so they take longer to replace a wing member.

2) Reduce the minimum threshold cap for replacement rate as it decreases.

(I guess you could also do both if you really wanted to. If the replacement rate threshold could go all the way to zero, that would make fighters more in line with vanilla missiles as a concept of limited burst damage- with a weird mechanic where as long as you don't let it get too low it could theoretically be infinite... Not only would this direction also probably require a lot of AI changes so that fighters aren't wasted (missiles have already gone through this transformation), it practically reeks of player abusiveness leading to unexpected power creep without some serious AI nuance. If AI refinement is the concern, then this suggestion would be even more work.)

To discuss this, an overview of how replacement rate works is required. I believe that replacement rate starts to decay if any wings are under ~50% members? (Someone correct me if I am wrong) What effect does this have? The longer it takes to replace an individual wing member the more impact that wing has to replacement rate when the wing takes losses over the threshold. This compounds upon itself because obviously the continuous lowering of replacement rate further hurts the wings' ability to replace their members and get above the threshold where replacement rate begins to increase again... so in effect this means bombers are often the hardest hitting factor on replacement rate and losing a bomber wing can mean the replacement rate goes from 100% to remaining at 30% the rest of the battle.

If fighters are changed to take longer to replace each wing's members, then fighters are more closely aligned with bombers in their effect upon replacement rate. So, instead of having a more nuanced system where bomber-based carriers are more easily handicapped by being stuck at 30% replacement and fighter/interceptor-based carriers have more of a wax and wane effect as they take and replace losses, all carriers just quickly get to- and remain at- 30% replacement rate for the majority of the battle. So this further emphasizes the "fighters as bombers" role the system already encourages.

How does this solve mass fighter spam? It does nothing to really reduce the staying power of the fighters themselves compared to bombers, because fighters still have infinite ammunition while bombers do not. The unstoppable fighter waves may come less often- or even only once considering the exponential effect replacement rate has- but this results in two and only two scenarios:

1) The first and likely only wave focuses on a single target and beats it handily- then moves to another and does the same- then moves to another and does the same, etc. Massed fighters are still optimal.

2) The first and likely only wave focuses on a single target and takes enough losses to weaken the swarm before the target dies. The swarm moves to the next target. Gets weakened further and takes out the target or dies. Either way, fighters are no longer useful for the remainder of the battle. Carriers sit there as useless paperweights and may as well be retreated (leading to player strategies that never let the carrier die while AI carriers get slaughtered.
I'm fine with that. It's not really that much of a problem to reduce the staying power of the fighters themselves compared to bombers, when the purpose of the thread have been discussing the staying power of fighter type fighters. I don't mind if replacement rate was changed to be affected as soon as one fighter is destroyed in a wing. Nobody talked about bombers till I brought them up afterall. There's a lot of inter-related issues with fighters.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 13, 2020, 10:19:36 AM
That makes mixing fighter types even less optimal. And that already sucks. You're supposed to build cool mutually supporting wings, but most things make doing that worse than just spamming one fighter type.

Plus, it doesn't actually make swarms worse, it just builds in a cooldown between every time the swarm pops a ship. You still have infinite scaling fighter balls that get exponentially better with every extra wing in the ball.

Oh and you'd need new AI, because a player would be smart enough to call back all fighters for refills after every kill and in regular intervals because the only thing that matters is huge alpha - but would the AI be smart enough to do the same?

If they stay as pseudo bombers then yes it only creates a cooldown for other ships when you give fighters fixed damage. Almost no matter what, however, AI changes are going to be necessary to truly solve the problem. Below, for example:

What about the idea of only having a certain number of replacement fighters per wing?

If my sparks only have 10 replacements then they'll get ground down eventually right? Forcing me(or AI) to be more mindful of their use. Kinda like how missiles are not infinite with the exception of support missiles. I know we have a fighter replacement timer that can then get buffed with player skills and ship mods, but that has always seemed to nebulous to me.

Also as for fighting fighters directly, my big ships get way way way too frightened when they are swarmed which can often kill them as enemy carriers can sit back in safety as my cruisers freak out.

- Would also require a large amount of AI changes. As for the bolded portion of your response, if you want to make that feel better then I think something like this is the best course of action. If anyone has other ideas to do the same thing I'm definitely open to it.

Spoiler
To prevent a complete overhaul back to .8 or something new, the best way I can think of implementing this concept in the new system is to separate out the carrier "Fighter Strike" command into a ship attack variant that stays the way it is now- and a "counter incoming strike craft" variant that can only be used on ships with flight decks. This attack could either still send the carriers' bombers/assault fighters to target the enemy ship alone, or leave them safely back with the carrier. Whatever feels better. The interceptors and anti-fighter fighters, though, would pursue that target's strike craft (bombers having priority as targets) relentlessly even at the carriers docking bays until the command is canceled.

*EDIT* Hmm, thought about this a little more. What if... the two commands were independent toggles that could either be stacked on one target or separated out onto two separate targets?

"Intercept Strike Craft" would send interceptors and anti-strike-craft fighters to target strike craft as described above, "Bomber Strike" would send bombers and assault fighters to attack the ship itself. Support fighters, erm, off the top of my head would probably escort bombers during "Bomber Strike" but that is debatable.

The benefit to this would be to increase the ability of using tactics while flying a carrier (including AI ships very importantly) whilst keeping the vast majority of the current system intact. It also promotes diversity in carrier strike craft builds for the player (to increase the ability to use tactics that is still reliant upon actually piloting the carrier yourself) and even if the AI cannot be made to do this on their own (seems like they should be but not an expert there) the player's specific commands in the tactics screen allow the player to direct the battle tactics of fighter deployments more easily and would even increase the value of command points as a nice bonus. (Operational Command hullmod has more usefulness now.)

Some important details/suggestions for implementation:
Not having strike craft of the appropriate type would result in the command being unavailable with a popup explaining why upon mouse-over in the tactics screen. Pressing Z while targeting a fighter issues a "Intercept Strike Craft" order on the fighter's carrier while targeting a ship itself defaults (selecting a "Bomber Strike" while interceptors, etc have their own orders would not override them) to both commands but interceptors/fighters can be manually disengaged by issuing another Z press on a strike craft. Pressing Z without a target returns all bombers first, and a second press returns all fighters. If no orders are currently active for the player carrier and they press Z without a target, all strike craft pick their own targets.

Pressing Z on an allied ship results in only the interceptors, etc coming the the ship's aid to escort it, but bombers, etc would be retained in order to still be able to provide an unescorted sortie if that was desirable to the player.

To me, this feels like the most intuitive way of handling the details of personally flying a carrier without creating a new hotkey and still allowing for two separate strike craft commands in the tactics screen.
[close]

We are talkign about two different issues. Sure I might touch on it during this thread long meandering conversation. You are interested in the historical uses of various designation of fighters and how they should be used and the AI changes for that. I don't care about that; I only care about how the game works.

Sigh, no we are not. I've already explained that I am talking about how games (including this one until the .8 update) have historically defined the roles of strike craft.

How long will you continue to dodge the questions I ask and instead try and poke meaningless holes in my ideas? *EDIT* (I wanted to be clear that I am only saying this because I want your input on these issues in more than a "don't bother just nerf" kind of way- or, at the very least if you are drawing a line in the sand on that point, an explanation as to what you think the fighter/interceptor role should be and why stat changes will be enough to make that feel balanced. You know a lot about the game and are very active on the forum, but you seem to be unwilling to even try and solve the issue other than using what I will call a stat "bandaid" of sorts- which feels like you just want to be done with it and move on to other things in the design. I'm not trying to overly criticize here, truly, but it seems to me that more could be done and that nothing about the suggestions that have been made by anyone seem unreasonable. They offer varying degrees of work in multiple design areas which can scale with available dev time. The spectrum of work vs design reward is useful in and of itself to better plan a path moving forward.)

Frigates already work like that right now. They are useful till they suddenly die when fighters appears. I would greatly prefer a smoother tipping point as seen in numerous other posts, but such is the design of the game.

So, what you are saying is you don't like this type of design yet you advocate it for fighters simply because it exists? We are trying to solve that problem with frigates too. Introducing it to fighters would be a step backwards not forwards.

I'm fine with that. It's not really that much of a problem to reduce the staying power of the fighters themselves compared to bombers, when the purpose of the thread have been discussing the staying power of fighter type fighters. I don't mind if replacement rate was changed to be affected as soon as one fighter is destroyed in a wing. Nobody talked about bombers till I brought them up afterall. There's a lot of inter-related issues with fighters.

Huh?  ??? Your suggestion doesn't reduce staying power though, it reduces or removes replacement of the initial staying power of the first wave or reduces overall viability of the strike wave to begin with so that more losses are accrued. I also don't see how your comment on bombers is even relevant, to be honest. If you want to reduce the staying power of fighters, give them fixed damage.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: DatonKallandor on January 13, 2020, 01:26:52 PM
What about the idea of only having a certain number of replacement fighters per wing?

If my sparks only have 10 replacements then they'll get ground down eventually right? Forcing me(or AI) to be more mindful of their use. Kinda like how missiles are not infinite with the exception of support missiles. I know we have a fighter replacement timer that can then get buffed with player skills and ship mods, but that has always seemed to nebulous to me.

Also as for fighting fighters directly, my big ships get way way way too frightened when they are swarmed which can often kill them as enemy carriers can sit back in safety as my cruisers freak out. I know there is a AI PD hull mod that makes shooting down missiles and so forth easier, but I'd love an anti-fighter hull mod to make killing those a little easier.

Finally, we have things like the Proximity Charge Launcher and Swarmer SRM Launcher missile weapons but due to their limited ammo vs infinite fighters they seem utterly terrible in comparison. The Locust SRM Launcher is actually pretty good even against frigates and destroyers because oif the ungodly swarm they produce, but even still in a protracted battle their missiles are not re-spawning, but fighters are? Not to mention fighters and bombers with missiles of their own that re-spawn!

It's almost like having some weapons with limited ammo and some without creates massive balance issues. Yes, missiles should be infinite, because their counters are too. Fighters are basically missiles, except they are infinite, and some of their counters are not.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Rasip on January 13, 2020, 02:05:17 PM
Has anyone suggested adding deployment costs to the carrier for each mounted fighter? That would go a long way towards cutting down on massed fighter spam while still making them useful.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: isyourmojofly on January 14, 2020, 09:23:11 AM
If you want to cut down on fighter spam, increase the cost of crew. When every dead fighter = 200 credits, suddenly throwing a mess of interceptors at enemy fleets doesn't look so appealing.

There are obviously points that need addressing here. Specifically, you can still spam Sparks - but these are rare and difficult to find LPCs for. Also, Talons and other low-tech fighters inevitably die en masse. Perhaps low-tech fighter pilots come with a greater chance to be recovered after a battle (because of their redundant safety features, or whatever).

This also makes crew recovery hullmods & skills very relevant. They're usually sub-optimal, since you usually just want to stack the best fighter wings/offensive skills you can.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Thaago on January 14, 2020, 12:00:02 PM
I think lower fighter ranges across the board would help. Carriers would be in more danger, and fewer carriers would be able to attack the same target.

4k --> 3k for all 4k fighters, and make the Thunder be special in that is has 4k range (down from 8k).
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Harmful Mechanic on January 14, 2020, 12:49:32 PM
Lower fighter ranges would do it, although I think your Thunder nerf is slightly too harsh - 5K would be fine, it's a light, fragile fighter.

This does bring nearly all carriers within the station-weapon envelope, however; a not-inconsiderable nerf given that smaller carriers are already less desirable. Off the top of my head, I think that's fine; most weapons don't have 1000/1200 range, the ones that do have notable drawbacks, and destroyer carriers regularly fly right up to stations and die as it is. Another reason to make larger, tougher carriers your striking arm.

It's worth testing to see if there are any unintended problems.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 15, 2020, 07:22:47 AM
Morrokain, we are talking around in circles. As you clearly have given this a lot of thought and time in writing, I want to pay respect to that by reply back to your post. The effects you describe as of the suggestions is part and parcel of the intention and I am perfectly fine with those effects you describe.  I am perfectly fine with reducing the initial staying power of the first wave, as a way to prevent the warding off effect of fighter-type fighters and I'll it leave with that.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: MrDaddyPants on January 15, 2020, 03:13:34 PM
I've been active in fleet building tourneys and can't really speak for campaign balance.

The problem with fighters balance is that they are (speaking about vanilla) very very weak dps wise. 3 Drovers (36dp) with reserve deployment attacking your ship is not much rly. Probably equivalent of one SO HH with ammo feeder active (10dp). So nerfing them may relegate fighters to niche roles like astral bomber combo, or some extra missile pd.

What makes them broken is two aspects.

1) Ai. Once you reach critical mass AI just tries to shoot fighters, kites back, and basically never reaches carriers because it's afraid and tries to kill the fighters first.

2) Killing fighters does nothing or very close to nothing. It doesn't affect replacement rates enough, and it doesn't affect CR of carriers, you are just shooting fighters and slowly take hull damage or loose ships. And in vanilla there are very few ships and weapons that can actually kill fighters efficiently. One could even argue there is no ship or weapon combination that can actually counter fighter swarm.

What ends up happening is that most tourney winning fleets (and they are usually very very good fleets) would just straight up loose to a good carrier fleet in equal DP. And it's usually a shame (no carriers die). And to actually counter carrier fleet you almost always need even better carrier fleet, a fleet that has it's own carriers and combination of ships and wpns that is better at carrier warfare than the other carrier fleet. So i'm big proponent of fighter limits in fleet building tourneys.

My proposition for balance is CR loss to carriers when fighters die (or just decrease replacement rate more rapidly). It doesn't affect fighters hp and dps, which is pretty low in vanilla, it doesn't upgrade AI (which is super hard), and which could make carriers useless. It may solve critical mass carrier fleets stomping opposition because killing fighters would actually have meaningful impact on battle.

Buffing effects of replacement rate decrease may be overall better solution, because direct CR loss might lead to ppl not wanting to put any fighters on ships like odyssey fearing CR loss.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Thaago on January 15, 2020, 03:42:17 PM
I'm not sure about CR loss for the exact reason you state, and because in campaign CR loss = more supplies needed = money (and also subsequent fights if forced to chain battle). Increasing fighter replacement times, or making carrier replacement rate go down significantly faster, would be good to stop the issue of killing fighters not doing anything: thats an issue I've also noticed, especially on Drovers, whose system can boost their wings above the replacement threshold, letting their replacement tick up instead of down while the system is active.

Another tweak could be for Expanded Deck Crew to come with a malus of some sort, and to not have a skill that effects replacement rate.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 15, 2020, 04:49:54 PM
Another tweak could be for Expanded Deck Crew to come with a malus of some sort, and to not have a skill that effects replacement rate.
Rather see that hullmod disappear so carriers can get ITU and some guns (or maybe Expanded Missile Racks and missiles) instead like they used to.  Barring that, a replacement hullmod that negates the penalties from carrier (D) mods (and maybe Converted Hangar), with no cost beyond OP.  Aside, Expanded Deck Crew has a malus, +20 crew requirements.  That is not insignificant for some fleet configurations earlier in the campaign, before player has effectively infinite resources.

With current Expanded Deck Crew, I am highly incentivized to get it and min-max carrier stats to have the best fighter spewing machines, because the point of the carrier is to spew fighters.  If player must throw everything into high-end fighters and carrier hullmods to be the best, while leaving every mount empty, so be it.  If their stats need to be weakened, do it by removing the enablers so that the player is forced to branch out, like getting enough guns to shoot down weaker ships because player may not have anything better to spend OP on.  Not by weakening the enablers to the point to where player must min-max and get the very best fighters and all of the fighter enablers at the cost of everything else just to be on par, and failure to do so results in a weak ship.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: J3R on January 20, 2020, 06:08:42 AM
Fighter limits; limit the amount of fighters that can be deployed.
Sounds like the best option so far since it doesn't mess with play styles other than carrier spam (which would be ideal). For example; Thunders having 8k range is my saving grace early game to capture ships I normally couldn't reach in time. It is also fun having clutch moments when I catch a ship at the edge of retreat all game.

Limiting fighter amount/deployment lore/story-wise could have something to do with comms, considering the implications of organizing 50-100 fighters at once. However it could be implemented, limiting the amount of fighters that can be deployed per battle would directly fix fighter spam issues all round. If it's possible/realistic to implement.

AI problems
A targeting bonus or hullmod (like IPDAI but to destroy fighters) for cruisers and capitals akin to Advanced Countermeasures +50% damage to fighters could help these bigger ships to make a realistic dent in swarms and decrease derping.

Replacement rates
Decrease fighter replacement rate more rapidly with losses makes sense, but this would be a huge nerf to fighters all round, might make bombers more competitive or just ruin fighters for drawn out battles.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 20, 2020, 02:13:14 PM
Morrokain, we are talking around in circles. As you clearly have given this a lot of thought and time in writing, I want to pay respect to that by reply back to your post. The effects you describe as of the suggestions is part and parcel of the intention and I am perfectly fine with those effects you describe.  I am perfectly fine with reducing the initial staying power of the first wave, as a way to prevent the warding off effect of fighter-type fighters and I'll it leave with that.

Thank you for the respect you have shown. I appreciate the dialogue.  :)

That is very fair, and though I still think that AI changes would help (they are difficult but so worth it to me) I won't debate that point any further either. I have said my peace on that.

If you want to cut down on fighter spam, increase the cost of crew. When every dead fighter = 200 credits, suddenly throwing a mess of interceptors at enemy fleets doesn't look so appealing.

There are obviously points that need addressing here. Specifically, you can still spam Sparks - but these are rare and difficult to find LPCs for. Also, Talons and other low-tech fighters inevitably die en masse. Perhaps low-tech fighter pilots come with a greater chance to be recovered after a battle (because of their redundant safety features, or whatever).

This also makes crew recovery hullmods & skills very relevant. They're usually sub-optimal, since you usually just want to stack the best fighter wings/offensive skills you can.
Has anyone suggested adding deployment costs to the carrier for each mounted fighter? That would go a long way towards cutting down on massed fighter spam while still making them useful.

These fall under broad economical changes upon the campaign layer. These won't really nerf carriers' effectiveness in combat- but will add an additional "tax" to use them economically. This was tried before in pre-.8 updates where replacing fighters would cost supplies. It... doesn't work out. It just makes carriers unattractive to use in general and favors minimal warship compositions throughout the vast majority of the game until late-stage challenges force "combat supremacy" tactics instead of credit conservation. It locks you into a certain playstyle until theoretical late-game.

I think lower fighter ranges across the board would help. Carriers would be in more danger, and fewer carriers would be able to attack the same target.

4k --> 3k for all 4k fighters, and make the Thunder be special in that is has 4k range (down from 8k).
Lower fighter ranges would do it, although I think your Thunder nerf is slightly too harsh - 5K would be fine, it's a light, fragile fighter.

This does bring nearly all carriers within the station-weapon envelope, however; a not-inconsiderable nerf given that smaller carriers are already less desirable. Off the top of my head, I think that's fine; most weapons don't have 1000/1200 range, the ones that do have notable drawbacks, and destroyer carriers regularly fly right up to stations and die as it is. Another reason to make larger, tougher carriers your striking arm.

It's worth testing to see if there are any unintended problems.

This is one stat (honestly perhaps the only one) that, in my experience, is a valid balancing mechanism as a stand-alone stat nerf to fighter spam that wouldn't nerf carriers' use of weaponry or cause over-use of bombers. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean it feels good since you'd think fighters would have long range like pilums, but it does get the job done to reduce spam capability without making fighters obsolete.

Just like weapon range matters a great deal- so too does fighter (sigh, did it again) strike craft range.

In the end, why is this true, though? Because, I think at least, the carrier is more vulnerable that way. Since weaponless carriers is a concern for me on its own, it makes sense that good battle tactics should result in the elimination of carriers.

I think that should be the overall design focus.

Fighter limits; limit the amount of fighters that can be deployed.
Sounds like the best option so far since it doesn't mess with play styles other than carrier spam (which would be ideal). For example; Thunders having 8k range is my saving grace early game to capture ships I normally couldn't reach in time. It is also fun having clutch moments when I catch a ship at the edge of retreat all game.

Limiting fighter amount/deployment lore/story-wise could have something to do with comms, considering the implications of organizing 50-100 fighters at once. However it could be implemented, limiting the amount of fighters that can be deployed per battle would directly fix fighter spam issues all round. If it's possible/realistic to implement.

I don't think that is technically nor conceptually easy to design. How would you determine what carriers deploy what fighters/bombers from your overall deployment if there was an artificial limit to the number of strike craft that can be deployed and your total deployment force exceeded that number?

AI problems
A targeting bonus or hullmod (like IPDAI but to destroy fighters) for cruisers and capitals akin to Advanced Countermeasures +50% damage to fighters could help these bigger ships to make a realistic dent in swarms and decrease derping.

This could certainly help. It would also help frigates better combat fighter strike craft threats.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: bobucles on January 21, 2020, 09:37:00 AM
Hard cap limits are very difficult to do. Soft cap limits are similarly not so great. For example if each new squadron was somehow more expensive than the last, there will be a point where the costs outweigh the benefit. But it's hard to find a good mix for that. It may be good to look into mechanics that can successfully mitigate or actively punish swarm play.

For example I think the biggest trouble maker for swarms are the shielded fighters. They can easy individually regenerate endurance, and more strike craft will divide PD fire against more ships. At some point the fire gets extremely divided, and the shield regen ends up providing incredible returns. It may be worth reducing the shield regen rate dramatically, but at the same time maybe boosting the capacitors a bit. That way swarm shields have much less regen scaling and their endurance is more of a fixed quantity.

Area effect weapons in general are supremely effective against swarms of strike craft. Currently there are not many weapons that have particularly good AoE potential. For example the Devastator cannon sprays and prays across a huge portion of space, which can deal some damage to a lot of enemy craft. DOOM mines are also supremely effective, if you can aim them. More weapons of similar themes can place a huge hurt on enemy swarms in a natural way. Perhaps a weapon might chain some EMP damage that causes many craft to spin out of control. That would make them easy pickings.

The carrier fatigue system plays a huge role in the reason why fighters synergize with more fighters. Killing fighters begets killing even more fighters, as the carriers lose their ability to replenish numbers and will eventually be overwelmed. However the reverse is also true, where spamming fighters begets spamming even more fighters. A single big carrier will suffer massive fatigue if they lose 5 fighters at once, but 5 small carriers are perfectly fine with losing a single craft each. The steady trickle of singular losses will be easily recovered, and I suspect even more fighters will be built overall, compared to suffering a major loss of strike craft at once. But that'd need more testing before I'm really sure.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Schwartz on January 21, 2020, 02:52:34 PM
Re: crew nerfs. These would not work well. Sparks are among the best fighters in the game and they are crewless.

In endgame I field a number of carriers with mostly Sparks and some Dagger bombers. That's both OP efficient and crew efficient. Trying to tax fighters through OP and crew therefore hurts early game more than anything.

It is also respawn efficient because Sparks are tought little buggers with shields. Do we now make all fighters shieldless? This could actually work and is not an unreasonable change. Shield generators could be too large and unwieldy to be put on anything smaller than a frigate. But I don't see this get to the root of the problem.

What's the root of the problem? It is that with the fighters-as-weapons changeover, we saw an old system trying to fit into a new system. Fighters were not redesigned from the ground up but generally modified to fit by the same balancing formulas. As a result, I would say, currently fighters are:

- Too fast
- Too numerous
- Respawn too quickly
- Can be expensive
- OP costs increase 'fitness pressure' for carriers

I do not think they are too hard to kill.
Except for Diable Avionics..
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 21, 2020, 03:06:26 PM
Quote
Fighters were not redesigned from the ground up but generally modified to fit by the same balancing formulas.
Same with carriers.  (I suspect even the new 0.8 newcomers might have been designed with the old system in mind.)  All of those weapon mounts that used to be filled up with big guns... mostly useless because fighters became the weapons and carriers need to specialize hard to make them good.

- OP costs increase 'fitness pressure' for carriers
This is my biggest gripe with fighters.  Make armed carriers good again!  If fighters need to be weakened so that carriers can brawl in a pinch and live to tell about it, so be it.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: bobucles on January 21, 2020, 03:24:57 PM
Quote
It is also respawn efficient because Sparks are tought little buggers with shields. Do we now make all fighters shieldless? This could actually work and is not an unreasonable change. Shield generators could be too large and unwieldy to be put on anything smaller than a frigate. But I don't see this get to the root of the problem.
I don't think fighters need to be shieldless. The true power comes from the high recovery rates. For 8 OP a Spark squadron gets 250 venting worth of shield regen, the kind found on a frigate. Sparks obey the same hard flux rules as anything else but their sheer numbers and speed make them more capable of ducking away to regen any damage they take. The shield is supremely effective against HE weapons (few are anti fighter), but also has extremely high potential against all kinds of soft flux beam PD. It would take some hard data logging to figure out exactly how much damage they can really absorb, but it's pretty safe to say that Sparks can survive long term engagements in a way that other strike craft can not. Their quick shield recovery definitely factors into their durability and they'd not stack up nearly as well without it.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 21, 2020, 03:28:29 PM
Quote
It is also respawn efficient because Sparks are tought little buggers with shields. Do we now make all fighters shieldless? This could actually work and is not an unreasonable change. Shield generators could be too large and unwieldy to be put on anything smaller than a frigate. But I don't see this get to the root of the problem.
I don't think fighters need to be shieldless. The true power comes from the high recovery rates. For 8 OP a Spark squadron gets 250 venting worth of shield regen, the kind found on a frigate. Sparks obey the same hard flux rules as anything else but their sheer numbers and speed make them more capable of ducking away to regen any damage they take. The shield is supremely effective against HE weapons (few are anti fighter), but also has extremely high potential against all kinds of soft flux beam PD. It would take some hard data logging to figure out exactly how much damage they can really absorb, but it's pretty safe to say that Sparks can survive long term engagements in a way that other strike craft can not. Their quick shield recovery definitely factors into their durability and they'd not stack up nearly as well without it.

Beat me to it lol.

- Can be expensive

Do you mean to buy upfront or to operate (crew loss)?
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 21, 2020, 03:34:59 PM
- Respawn too quickly
This is why Expanded Deck Crew hullmod is very good (faster recovery and slower rate drain).  It is practically an ITU (in importance) for carriers, a must-have.  It is pricey enough that carrier (except Legion, with difficulty) cannot afford ITU on top of that and support both fighters and guns.  With Expanded Deck Crew and pricey fighters (and no ITU), carrier is incentivized to go all-in for fighters.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Schwartz on January 21, 2020, 03:39:42 PM
I mean they can be expensive to fit onto a carrier. You can pump a lot of OP into it if you're looking to have a Heron with 2 bomber wings and a Broadsword escort. The OP costs encourage a certain way to play which involves more or less spreading out the expense over all your carriers. I.e. each of them gets a Talon, a Broadsword, a Dagger. It also makes the pool of viable fighters and carrier loadouts smaller.

I'm in agreement. Shields are not primarily the problem, but they do make it worse. If you have a few dozen swarming fighters that all have shields and high speed to hop in-and-out of PD range constantly, we have 1) fighters that never really get hurt, 2) an enemy ship that wastes flux on PD and 3) nullified missile defense.

Re: Expanded Deck Crew. I don't doubt it is good. What is bothering me is that I never use it and find it unnecessary. It is perfectly possible to build a fleet of 2 Moras and 2 Drovers and just overwhelm every single engagement with high-performance fighters that never run out of steam because the more fighters you have, the less fighters you lose.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: bobucles on January 21, 2020, 03:55:35 PM
the more fighters you have, the less fighters you lose.
It's more like the slower you lose fighters, the more fighters you can afford to lose. Carrier fatigue does favor survivable squadrons far more than expendable ones. As long as the enemy lacks a critical damage rate to push replacement rates down, they're doomed. Shields take things to the next level because the more shield fighters you have, the more damage they can cover for each other and vent away, so the less fighters you lose, so your carriers never get fatigued, so any small losses are quickly replaced. One synergy is fine, but shields do create a double stacking synergy.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Daynen on January 23, 2020, 12:37:33 AM
I feel like part of the reason fighter spam gets so powerful is because point defense weapons don't.  Flak cannons and all their variants including the devastator suck, period.  They miss 90% of their rounds in my experience thanks to their HIGHLY random detonation range.  Other PD weapons have such painfully short range they can do nothing against any sort of real bombing run either.  Integrated point defense AI and some skills help with this...but beyond a point it's meaningless as well.  It's just an arms race and the fighters win.

My preferred anti-fighter weapon is the Locust.  One volley is almost guaranteed to wipe out half a dozen fighters, even more if they're unshielded.  Highly likely to clear a lot of torps and bombs on the way too.  Unfortunately they're missiles so you'll probably run dry before the carriers do...but that just means you need to get in there and get the job done before you're out of locusts.  An Atlas mkII makes a fantastic bugsprayer with extended racks and ECCM.  For 24 DP one atlas can kill a LOT of fighters very quickly...
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 23, 2020, 01:04:15 AM
I mean they can be expensive to fit onto a carrier. You can pump a lot of OP into it if you're looking to have a Heron with 2 bomber wings and a Broadsword escort. The OP costs encourage a certain way to play which involves more or less spreading out the expense over all your carriers. I.e. each of them gets a Talon, a Broadsword, a Dagger.

Ah I see. You wish this was less taxing on the carriers' weapon systems in general? Or, alternatively, are you saying you prefer the flexibility of choosing an all-OP-heavy build at the expense of weaponry, and, choosing an all-low-OP-cost strike craft build to have better carrier weapons? Each have different considerations.

It also makes the pool of viable fighters and carrier loadouts smaller.

Due to the above? If you don't mind, some detail would help there. I have some thoughts in that area based upon previous suggestions:

Give carriers two separate OP pools for fighters and for itself. Make these OP pools able to be exchanged for the other at a 2:1 ratio or something like that. So a carrier with 40/60 OP who only uses 38 OP for fighters gets 61 OP points to use for itself. The point of this would be that carriers across the board can get more OP (because they need it). At the same time, fighters can still be made weaker.
What about setting a max op per hanger bay?  Separate from the weapon, vent/cap, and hull mod general pool.  Say, 30 OP per bay for the astral, and maybe 24 OP per bay for the heron.  This will limit smaller carriers to fielding smaller fighters.  If you elect to load smaller fighters than the max bay size, shuffle the leftover hanger OP to the general OP pool at a balanced ratio, or even at a variable rate as you move more hanger OP into the general pool.  This gives a design choice to put less fighter power in return for diminishing increase in regular warship capabilities.  You can have your close combat Astral with an all mining drone loadout.

Maybe create a hull mod that adds hanger OP and allows smaller carriers to field larger wings.  Or a hull mod that removes a hanger bay in return for increasing the OP size of the remaining bays.

It'll require a bit more balancing but will add more design freedom with additional constraints on the maximums.  Not sure how to balance it against drover/sparks spam but it'll give us a few more ways to nudge it into balance.

I think these have potential to be a good solution. I'll mull it over at work today.

I've been thinking about this particular grouping of suggestions. So, weapons currently come in three forms: small, medium, large. Could fighter bays also come in the same format?

This way, small carriers can be limited in their ability to deploy higher tiered strike craft. This can be by tech level, or by overall combat performance depending upon the situation. It remains flexible that way.

This is similar to the idea of OP limitations on fighter bays by hull size.

Re: Expanded Deck Crew. I don't doubt it is good. What is bothering me is that I never use it and find it unnecessary. It is perfectly possible to build a fleet of 2 Moras and 2 Drovers and just overwhelm every single engagement with high-performance fighters that never run out of steam because the more fighters you have, the less fighters you lose.
It's more like the slower you lose fighters, the more fighters you can afford to lose. Carrier fatigue does favor survivable squadrons far more than expendable ones. As long as the enemy lacks a critical damage rate to push replacement rates down, they're doomed. Shields take things to the next level because the more shield fighters you have, the more damage they can cover for each other and vent away, so the less fighters you lose, so your carriers never get fatigued, so any small losses are quickly replaced. One synergy is fine, but shields do create a double stacking synergy.

It depends upon the numerical amount of the wing vs each wing member's total "hp". The equation, very, very roughly, is: The wing number is two craft per wing and the factored hp- considering flux, dissipation, armor, and hull- equals roughly 1000 total hp per wing member. Then, as long as the total hp- per wing member- equals 500 total hp per member of a 4-craft-wing, the replacement rate will decrease at the same rate assuming no distractions, and, also assuming the PD is focus firing each individual member at the same damage distribution of total PD damage capability... this is obviously so variable that it will be mostly impossible to calculate reliably, but, what I am saying here, is that its more that the more wing members you have, the weaker each wing member has to be to reduce replacement rate enough to prevent reinforcements, yet if stronger hp craft rely upon a fixed damage strike then get to retreat, it seems like they are stronger than they actually are. Similarly, burst anti-fighter damage like the Locust are great until they run out of ammunition, and area of effect PD can demolish swarm behavior due to reducing the number of craft below the threshold, yet remain mostly inconsequential to low member high alpha strike bombers because their AOE effect is less punishing there.

With shielded craft: once you remove most of the dissipation it can actually become a detriment to the craft due to fast overload that prevents the strike craft from attacking for a variable amount of time- determined by the hit damage to the shields at the time of overload. Less dissipation also improves beam weapons' performance since soft flux cannot be dissipated as easily and much of the pd beam mitigation is lost.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 23, 2020, 03:40:16 AM
I feel like part of the reason fighter spam gets so powerful is because point defense weapons don't.  Flak cannons and all their variants including the devastator suck, period.  They miss 90% of their rounds in my experience thanks to their HIGHLY random detonation range.  Other PD weapons have such painfully short range they can do nothing against any sort of real bombing run either.  Integrated point defense AI and some skills help with this...but beyond a point it's meaningless as well.  It's just an arms race and the fighters win.

My preferred anti-fighter weapon is the Locust.  One volley is almost guaranteed to wipe out half a dozen fighters, even more if they're unshielded.  Highly likely to clear a lot of torps and bombs on the way too.  Unfortunately they're missiles so you'll probably run dry before the carriers do...but that just means you need to get in there and get the job done before you're out of locusts.  An Atlas mkII makes a fantastic bugsprayer with extended racks and ECCM.  For 24 DP one atlas can kill a LOT of fighters very quickly...
Point defence weapons are not anti fighter weapons. PD weapons are anti-missile, many non-PD weapons are good antifighter weapons like Pulse Laser, Railgun and all the beam weapons. Against bombers, large ballistic turreted weapons do well against them.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: TaLaR on January 23, 2020, 05:44:13 AM
Yep, and best anti fighter weapons are stuff like Plasma Cannons (pass-through) or TLs (accuracy and range).

Problem is, AI doesn't see any problem with huge enemy fighter/bomber swarm approaching it. While proper course of action is usually to backpedal to covering allies and concentrate fire on the swarm before it breaks into individual fighters/or bombers get chance to unload.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Schwartz on January 23, 2020, 05:50:55 AM
To put it simply: I find the idea of this either / or decision very unappealing. I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief that a carrier is not able to field its designated ordnance without stripping itself down to bare metal. It's ugly, it makes no sense and it's an unfun decision a player has to make if he wants to optimize fleet strength and win his engagements. Alex talked about this before as 'gamers having to game' the system against their own sense of fun.

Now I'm not against fighters incurring a cost and all fighters are not the same strength, obviously. But there are no other ships in the game that are currently as OP-starved as carriers. Imagine if you were to kit out an Enforcer, but if you want it to have 4 x Annihilators, you better put Small Mortars in three of those medium slots. I'm getting mad just thinking about it. ;)

It's not strictly weapon systems that are getting taxed by this, btw. You have offense, defense and fighters. Most players will choose defense and fighters and dial back on the offense, since no one likes losing ships. Especially bigger ships. All this is not unreasonable from a balance standpoint. But if you want to have a strong fighter presence-...

I need to go on a tangent here. Fighter strength is not just determined by the raw power of the fighters. It is also determined by the relative strength of your squadrons vs. their squadrons. Since fighters are not strictly 'offensive missiles' but they also distract PD, they provide PD themselves, they work like suppression weapons in a carrier vs. carrier duel against the enemy fighter replacement rate.

...so if you want to have a strong fighter presence, numerically, you can still have that after fighters have been nerfed across the board and carriers have the spare OP to get their weapon slots and hullmods filled out.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: bobucles on January 23, 2020, 06:33:51 AM
I don't think players would mind more OP on their carriers, but I think they'd just spend those points on more powerful bombers instead.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 23, 2020, 12:10:50 PM
Problem is, AI doesn't see any problem with huge enemy fighter/bomber swarm approaching it. While proper course of action is usually to backpedal to covering allies and concentrate fire on the swarm before it breaks into individual fighters/or bombers get chance to unload.

I don't agree with this tactic the AI tries to use (in my experience it already does this). It actually hurts the ability of the ship to combat strike craft. The AI is not smart enough to perform these kinds of tactics and all this ends up doing is making most ships never pursue the carrier. I have a feeling this is because individual fighters are still mostly considered "ships" to the AI when they are not ships in function.

To use an analogy: If you are swimming out to sea and you see a wave coming, you don't swim back and combat it- because you know another wave is coming after that. Instead, you break through it and try and maintain speed to get to where you are going. Similarly, backpedaling and trying to shoot down fighters until its "all clear" not only leads to boring gameplay where your allied ships huddle together and wait out the replacement rate like a caravan in a blizzard, but it also generally doesn't even work like that. The ships are picked off one by one instead and the whole tactic becomes relatively worthless, unfortunately.

Handling strike craft using this tactic means you have to reduce wing members below the threshold where replacement rate decreases or the tactic feels bad. If you make changes that would cause this to happen more reliably and say, reduce the waiting time of lowering the replacement rate (by stat nerfs or replacement rate itself) carriers are now a "one trick pony" that can't really do anything the remainder of the fight.

With that in mind, the only duality worth noting is does the "trick" work too well or not at all. It would be really hard to make it feel good in most scenarios, so the feeling would likely look like a bell curve where either extreme feels bad.

I'd even be ok with the AI defaulting to this behavior (at the risk of some very minor babysitting) but the "eliminate" command should certainly cause AI ships to ignore fighters (and I mean completely ignore them) and push through to the carrier or die trying. That is kind of its purpose, no?

To put it simply: I find the idea of this either / or decision very unappealing. I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief that a carrier is not able to field its designated ordnance without stripping itself down to bare metal. It's ugly, it makes no sense and it's an unfun decision a player has to make if he wants to optimize fleet strength and win his engagements. Alex talked about this before as 'gamers having to game' the system against their own sense of fun.

Now I'm not against fighters incurring a cost and all fighters are not the same strength, obviously. But there are no other ships in the game that are currently as OP-starved as carriers. Imagine if you were to kit out an Enforcer, but if you want it to have 4 x Annihilators, you better put Small Mortars in three of those medium slots. I'm getting mad just thinking about it. ;)

Agreed. It certainly doesn't feel good.

It's not strictly weapon systems that are getting taxed by this, btw. You have offense, defense and fighters. Most players will choose defense and fighters and dial back on the offense, since no one likes losing ships. Especially bigger ships. All this is not unreasonable from a balance standpoint. But if you want to have a strong fighter presence-...

I need to go on a tangent here. Fighter strength is not just determined by the raw power of the fighters. It is also determined by the relative strength of your squadrons vs. their squadrons. Since fighters are not strictly 'offensive missiles' but they also distract PD, they provide PD themselves, they work like suppression weapons in a carrier vs. carrier duel against the enemy fighter replacement rate.

...so if you want to have a strong fighter presence, numerically, you can still have that after fighters have been nerfed across the board and carriers have the spare OP to get their weapon slots and hullmods filled out.

Unfortunately this still falls under the category of a "make bombers look better, make fighters look worthless" kind of change. A couple of pages back I gave some detail as to why this happens. It mostly comes down to the idea that fighters don't strictly duel each other in that way all the time- and even if they did, you are crippling their use in small numbers to reduce their effectiveness when spammed. I'm not saying in certain cases this wouldn't prove to be necessary, but conceptually you run the risk of this and its a thin line of balance.

I don't think players would mind more OP on their carriers, but I think they'd just spend those points on more powerful bombers instead.

Yes. The best way to incentivize weapons on carriers (not withstanding some of the changes suggested regarding fighter bays) is to make carriers vulnerable to attack and therefore need weapons for defense over simply boosting defense stats and relying on speed to run away from danger. If you can rely solely upon speed and shields, then carrier builds boil down to: "how many good bombers can I fit?"
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: TJJ on January 23, 2020, 12:55:24 PM
Radically simple idea.....

Dramatically reduce carrier combat speed & durability, so that they can't be used to kite & therefore need non-carriers to act as a meat shield.

By forcing mixed compositions, not only do you solve the balance issues of the 'critical mass fighter swarm', but you also create more tactically diverse, interesting and (dare I say) realistic fleets.
All without introducing any arbitrary rules or limits.

-75% combat speed might be enough.

Perhaps only apply the debuff while the carrier is actively constructing or rearming fighters.
That'd also give a lore-based reason for the behaviour "Operating the nano-fabs is enormously power hungry"
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 23, 2020, 01:01:14 PM
Radically simple idea.....

Dramatically reduce carrier combat speed & durability, so that they can't be used to kite & therefore need non-carriers to act as a meat shield.

By forcing mixed compositions, not only do you solve the balance issues of the 'critical mass fighter swarm', but you also create more tactically diverse, interesting and (dare I say) realistic fleets.
All without introducing any arbitrary rules or limits.

-75% combat speed might be enough.

Perhaps only apply the debuff while the carrier is actively constructing or rearming fighters.
That'd also give a lore-based reason for the behaviour "Operating the nano-fabs is enormously power hungry"
That would wreck warships with a bay or two on the side, like Tempest, Odyssey, or anything with Converted Hangar.  Not everything with a bay is a dedicated carrier.  (Not to mention that while game treats Legion as a dedicated carrier, it is good enough to function as a warship.)
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Thaago on January 23, 2020, 01:47:46 PM
Nothing like watching battleships cower in the center of a ring of civilian destroyers with converted hanger, because they are too scared of the piddly fighters and "destroyers" to attack.

I wish that ships would plow right through fighters as if they weren't there. I also wish that ships would ignore the 'weight' of carriers in terms of being scared. Completely ignore both for movement determining threat assessment. Running from fighters doesn't help: actually closing with carriers and shooting does!
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: bobucles on January 23, 2020, 02:40:23 PM
Some of the carrier problems can be resolved with better AI tactics. Carriers are the ultimate long range unit, so the typically cautious AI gains no benefit by staying out of range. It plays into the carrier's biggest strength.  Frigates and destroyers are also effective for flanking the main lines and hunting down carriers. Phase ships can outrun most interceptors, so they have the option of harassing carriers without much danger. I dunno if that'll resolve everything, but it will at least place more pressure on carriers than they are used to.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Daynen on January 23, 2020, 03:14:51 PM
Quote
Point defence weapons are not anti fighter weapons. PD weapons are anti-missile, many non-PD weapons are good antifighter weapons like Pulse Laser, Railgun and all the beam weapons. Against bombers, large ballistic turreted weapons do well against them.

Well the reason you equip PD weapons is to deal with ordnance that gets close, which fighters are going to bring.  You either want to shoot down their torps or blow them up directly, for which some PD is incidentally decent.  While small and midsize weapons are good at knocking out fighters, it's AREA weapons that are intuitively meant to be the answer to swarms.  You don't use a slingshot on a swarm of mosquitoes; you get the bug spray.  Fighters are fast; far faster than most frigates; ballistics can only keep up with so many.  There's plenty of room for PD weapons to also serve as fighter deterrents and I feel like flak ought to be the premier anti-air weapon.  It just feels purposely terrible, like it's TRYING not to hit its targets; I think just trimming off a wee bit of the delta of randomness on its detonation might close the gap on fighter swarms a bit without ruining everything else.

I mean think about it.  Why are swarms even a problem in the first place?  Because current defense weapons can generally only hit one at a time.  We have to rely on our offensive weaponry like autopulsers, ballistics and missiles to combat them, none of which have anything resembling reliable area damage.  Flak and its cousins wouldn't even need a damage buff or HE type, either; just a little reliability on WHERE they pop.  At the very least it would make flak weapons worth the ordnance points, whereas now they're an auto-sell for me.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 23, 2020, 03:59:34 PM
Radically simple idea.....

Dramatically reduce carrier combat speed & durability, so that they can't be used to kite & therefore need non-carriers to act as a meat shield.

By forcing mixed compositions, not only do you solve the balance issues of the 'critical mass fighter swarm', but you also create more tactically diverse, interesting and (dare I say) realistic fleets.
All without introducing any arbitrary rules or limits.

-75% combat speed might be enough.

Perhaps only apply the debuff while the carrier is actively constructing or rearming fighters.
That'd also give a lore-based reason for the behaviour "Operating the nano-fabs is enormously power hungry"

This happens to a small extent in that, iirc, the use of fighters as an attack removes the 0-flux boost similar to turning on shields.

I removed that effect specifically because it hurt warship/carrier hybrids- But! - reduced dedicated carriers' 0-flux boost amount significantly in order to make them slow alongside their typical low speed in the first place- and increased their inherent replacement rate as a result. Base replacement rate is low, so carriers still feel like carriers with the boost- while still being slow and vulnerable.

In order to help solve:

That would wreck warships with a bay or two on the side, like Tempest, Odyssey, or anything with Converted Hangar.  Not everything with a bay is a dedicated carrier.  (Not to mention that while game treats Legion as a dedicated carrier, it is good enough to function as a warship.)

Battlecarriers, on the other hand, maintain their speed and combat viability at the expense of a reduction in replacement rate.

There are lots of ways to implement this, but I feel like these represent the core concepts. I used built-in hullmods, though I get that those are sort of a "slippery slope" so should be avoided whenever possible to avoid a player having to read 8 of them with every ship they inspect.  ;)

Nothing like watching battleships cower in the center of a ring of civilian destroyers with converted hanger, because they are too scared of the piddly fighters and "destroyers" to attack.

I wish that ships would plow right through fighters as if they weren't there. I also wish that ships would ignore the 'weight' of carriers in terms of being scared. Completely ignore both for movement determining threat assessment. Running from fighters doesn't help: actually closing with carriers and shooting does!
Some of the carrier problems can be resolved with better AI tactics. Carriers are the ultimate long range unit, so the typically cautious AI gains no benefit by staying out of range. It plays into the carrier's biggest strength.  Frigates and destroyers are also effective for flanking the main lines and hunting down carriers. Phase ships can outrun most interceptors, so they have the option of harassing carriers without much danger. I dunno if that'll resolve everything, but it will at least place more pressure on carriers than they are used to.

This is how I feel too. It cuts out the problem at it's source rather than try and mitigate the flood of infinite reinforcements. The real battle lays in: Can you get through the defensive screen to make that happen? I believe it makes for a more tactically engaging fight.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Thaago on January 23, 2020, 04:26:33 PM
Quote
Point defence weapons are not anti fighter weapons. PD weapons are anti-missile, many non-PD weapons are good antifighter weapons like Pulse Laser, Railgun and all the beam weapons. Against bombers, large ballistic turreted weapons do well against them.

Well the reason you equip PD weapons is to deal with ordnance that gets close, which fighters are going to bring.  You either want to shoot down their torps or blow them up directly, for which some PD is incidentally decent.  While small and midsize weapons are good at knocking out fighters, it's AREA weapons that are intuitively meant to be the answer to swarms.  You don't use a slingshot on a swarm of mosquitoes; you get the bug spray.  Fighters are fast; far faster than most frigates; ballistics can only keep up with so many.  There's plenty of room for PD weapons to also serve as fighter deterrents and I feel like flak ought to be the premier anti-air weapon.  It just feels purposely terrible, like it's TRYING not to hit its targets; I think just trimming off a wee bit of the delta of randomness on its detonation might close the gap on fighter swarms a bit without ruining everything else.

I mean think about it.  Why are swarms even a problem in the first place?  Because current defense weapons can generally only hit one at a time.  We have to rely on our offensive weaponry like autopulsers, ballistics and missiles to combat them, none of which have anything resembling reliable area damage.  Flak and its cousins wouldn't even need a damage buff or HE type, either; just a little reliability on WHERE they pop.  At the very least it would make flak weapons worth the ordnance points, whereas now they're an auto-sell for me.

I agree with this - better flak detonation logic would greatly improve their performance without any tweaks to DPS or damage type needed. I often wonder if flak detonations are even doing full DPS, or if the things they are detonating on are outside of the full damage zone of the AoE.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: TaLaR on January 23, 2020, 08:31:29 PM
Problem is, AI doesn't see any problem with huge enemy fighter/bomber swarm approaching it. While proper course of action is usually to backpedal to covering allies and concentrate fire on the swarm before it breaks into individual fighters/or bombers get chance to unload.

I don't agree with this tactic the AI tries to use (in my experience it already does this). It actually hurts the ability of the ship to combat strike craft. The AI is not smart enough to perform these kinds of tactics and all this ends up doing is making most ships never pursue the carrier. I have a feeling this is because individual fighters are still mostly considered "ships" to the AI when they are not ships in function.

Depends on conditions.
For my fleet containing a lot of officer-ed ships with Advanced Countermeasures 3 among other things + pair of Drovers for fighter support, even the most carrier-centric AI compositions, including Nexelerin ones (still far from player Drover spam) are very much counter-able like this. Or more like enemy carries lose all fighters soon after encounter start and become easy targets.

For typical enemy fleets lacking proper weapons and officers vs player's full Drover spam, sure, rushing is the right answer (as long as they are fast enough to not get simply kited indefinitely).
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Lucky33 on January 23, 2020, 09:52:41 PM
In vanilla, true carrier spam has such low probability of happening that you can safely disregard it completely.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Schwartz on January 24, 2020, 04:40:53 AM
This skittish behavior is not just a thing when AI faces off against fighters, but it also happily dances around a single Salamander or other low-threat missiles, breaking off winning engagements and stopping chases. Generally the AI could weigh threats better. Fighter swarms are just more of a problem case compared to stray missiles.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 24, 2020, 06:20:13 AM
Quote
Point defence weapons are not anti fighter weapons. PD weapons are anti-missile, many non-PD weapons are good antifighter weapons like Pulse Laser, Railgun and all the beam weapons. Against bombers, large ballistic turreted weapons do well against them.

Well the reason you equip PD weapons is to deal with ordnance that gets close, which fighters are going to bring.  You either want to shoot down their torps or blow them up directly, for which some PD is incidentally decent.  While small and midsize weapons are good at knocking out fighters, it's AREA weapons that are intuitively meant to be the answer to swarms.  You don't use a slingshot on a swarm of mosquitoes; you get the bug spray.  Fighters are fast; far faster than most frigates; ballistics can only keep up with so many.  There's plenty of room for PD weapons to also serve as fighter deterrents and I feel like flak ought to be the premier anti-air weapon.  It just feels purposely terrible, like it's TRYING not to hit its targets; I think just trimming off a wee bit of the delta of randomness on its detonation might close the gap on fighter swarms a bit without ruining everything else.

I mean think about it.  Why are swarms even a problem in the first place?  Because current defense weapons can generally only hit one at a time.  We have to rely on our offensive weaponry like autopulsers, ballistics and missiles to combat them, none of which have anything resembling reliable area damage.  Flak and its cousins wouldn't even need a damage buff or HE type, either; just a little reliability on WHERE they pop.  At the very least it would make flak weapons worth the ordnance points, whereas now they're an auto-sell for me.
Sure, but what you wrote was
I feel like part of the reason fighter spam gets so powerful is because point defense weapons don't.  Flak cannons and all their variants including the devastator suck, period.  They miss 90% of their rounds in my experience thanks to their HIGHLY random detonation range.  Other PD weapons have such painfully short range they can do nothing against any sort of real bombing run either.  Integrated point defense AI and some skills help with this...but beyond a point it's meaningless as well.  It's just an arms race and the fighters win.
So which is it? Do you want to shoot down fighters with your PD weapons or shoot down missiles with your PD weapons? You can't say that you can't use PD weapons to shoot down fighters, and then pretend you actually meant to say they can't shoot down missiles, and then say you actually want PD weapons to serve as fighter deterrents. Non-PD weapons are prefectly fine in shooting down both bombers and fighters. It's honestly not a problem to me, so I can't see why it is a problem to you. I can fight the swarms of fighters from Luddic Church/Persean league/Tri-tachyon fleets just fine with normal weapons and PD weapons.  Flak cannons seem to work fine to me anyways. They kill missiles, and they kill swarms of missiles with their Area effect.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morbo513 on January 24, 2020, 02:48:48 PM
I don't think it's as simple as a matter of buffing PD weapons against fighters, but that would be a start.
A suggestion I previously made was to make it so fighters (except gunships perhaps) only travel in the direction they're facing - this would make PD more effective as fighters become more static targets in relative terms. If fighters want to engage a ship, they must commit to making a run which makes them very exposed to return-fire. Obviously this would necessitate changes to the AI, and the fighters would have to be able to determine when it'd be advantageous to break off an attack run, but it'd reduce the threat to a more appropriate level for non-bombers.

However the root of the problem is the degree to which fighters are a force-multiplying asset - and that carrier/fighter-centric combat is the least fun permutation of it in the game so far, especially with a lack of discrete controls over your own fighter wings. It's very easy to reach a critical mass of fighters where either you or the enemy are overwhelmed. You either build your ships to counter fighters in which case they're more likely to fail against the full-size ships in the battle because they're then out-gunned; or you ignore them and go for firepower, in which case they're more likely to fail against the full-size enemy ships because the fighters cause too much disruption. The only viable solution then is having carriers and fighters of your own to the point those of the enemy are cancelled out or outweighed.
In other words, currently the only true countermeasure to fighters, is fighters; this railroads the player into certain fleet builds at peril of taking disproportionate losses.

I wonder how having fighter losses directly impinge on the carrier's CR would affect this balance, as well as then tying the replacement rate to CR.

Another idea I had is that only bombers could build hard flux on their target. Even PD-focused ship builds can be easily outgunned and overloaded by enough fighters with kinetic weapons.

To reiterate my other suggestions:
Non-bomber weapons do severely diminished damage against non-fighters.
Any weapon (or at least PD) targeting an enemy fighter can fire over friendly ships.
Give non-PD, non-area weapons a chance to miss (ie. vertically) against fighters; but if they hit, anything beyond the weakest of weapons will easily destroy the fighter.

And if nothing else; Remove whichever bomber has Atropos torpedoes (I'm assuming they're not from a mod) - that *** epitomises the current ridiculousness of fighters. Torpedoes are severely limited for a good reason - having a constant output of them throughout the battle with no significant corresponding drawback completely breaks the balance.
Eliminate all EMP weaponry from fighters (Alternatively, severely diminish EMP damage done by fighters against full-size ships - so they can still disable enemy fighters) - again, mounted on full-size ships these weapons are fine - the one mounting it has to either out-maneuver their target or win the flux-battle to start delivering it; Fighters easily outmaneuver and surround almost every ship in the game and as such bypass these prerequisites. This applies to all the damage they deliver, and is only made worse by their omnipresence and the fact they can fire from behind/above friendly (and enemy) ships.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 28, 2020, 04:10:00 PM
Problem is, AI doesn't see any problem with huge enemy fighter/bomber swarm approaching it. While proper course of action is usually to backpedal to covering allies and concentrate fire on the swarm before it breaks into individual fighters/or bombers get chance to unload.

I don't agree with this tactic the AI tries to use (in my experience it already does this). It actually hurts the ability of the ship to combat strike craft. The AI is not smart enough to perform these kinds of tactics and all this ends up doing is making most ships never pursue the carrier. I have a feeling this is because individual fighters are still mostly considered "ships" to the AI when they are not ships in function.

Depends on conditions.
For my fleet containing a lot of officer-ed ships with Advanced Countermeasures 3 among other things + pair of Drovers for fighter support, even the most carrier-centric AI compositions, including Nexelerin ones (still far from player Drover spam) are very much counter-able like this. Or more like enemy carries lose all fighters soon after encounter start and become easy targets.

For typical enemy fleets lacking proper weapons and officers vs player's full Drover spam, sure, rushing is the right answer (as long as they are fast enough to not get simply kited indefinitely).

I do get what you are saying here and yeah that makes sense. For your specific composition and power level that tactic likely works very well. But, it is sort of because you have built your fleet around it, right?- Since fighters are strong and therefore a major threat? At least, that is the way I am thinking about it in terms of player power creep and generally better player decision making. From my perspective, the idea behind that kind of specialized fleet is that even if the AI didn't backpedal as a default the ships would be strong enough to break through the fighter waves because they have been outfitted to do that. There should be trade-offs for that specialization, too, of course, but it should be both possible and- more crucially- effective against carriers without requiring constant retreat until carriers cannot replace their wing members. That way carriers can maintain themselves as a threat all battle long without feeling overpowered. Most critically, it does something to increase the attraction of flying a carrier as the player. To me at least, flying a carrier feels far more boring than flying a warship. I'm not saying there are no decisions to be made when flying one or anything, but not enough in comparison.

This is one situation where I think the AI is never going to be able to perform as well as the player in a generalized way, and the narrowness of that specific use case as a condition of the battle is easily exploited by the player.

You, as the player, are an extremely competent Admiral that can "fill in the gaps" of AI behavior to get your allies to behave, mostly, the way you want them to. When you specialize this becomes even more effective.

The enemy AI admiral, on the other hand, cannot make such nuanced decisions in the moment to "fill in the gaps" and so you have to account for the general effect of the behavior.

*EDIT*
So which is it? Do you want to shoot down fighters with your PD weapons or shoot down missiles with your PD weapons? You can't say that you can't use PD weapons to shoot down fighters, and then pretend you actually meant to say they can't shoot down missiles, and then say you actually want PD weapons to serve as fighter deterrents. Non-PD weapons are prefectly fine in shooting down both bombers and fighters. It's honestly not a problem to me, so I can't see why it is a problem to you. I can fight the swarms of fighters from Luddic Church/Persean league/Tri-tachyon fleets just fine with normal weapons and PD weapons.  Flak cannons seem to work fine to me anyways. They kill missiles, and they kill swarms of missiles with their Area effect.

Is there a particular reason PD can't, by design, shoot down both? I mean sure I understand not wanting to mess with PD weapon damage too much to avoid rebalancing missiles, but the suggestion seemed more in line with making flak solely better against fighters without touching the effect it would have on missiles.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Harmful Mechanic on January 28, 2020, 06:02:44 PM
PD_ALSO fire logic is generally going to make for more capable anti-fighter PD weapons, since they'll automatically switch to firing at the nearest fighter. Right now, vanilla only has the Devastator using that logic.

IMO, one of the better balance levers you can pull in your very first personal balance mod is to make the heavy machine gun a PD_ALSO weapon, which... well, it doesn't do shielded fighters any favors, to put it gently. If you couple it with a modest increase in projectile speed, it makes them frankly horrifying. It's no slouch against unshielded fighters either; the sheer DPS and minimum armor penetration does a good job of chewing up most fighters.

Mod weapons have more leeway, and can implement the wholly-disgusting-yet-highly-efficacious:
Code
PD, PD_ALSO, ANTI_FTR
tag combo, which produces a PD weapon that preferentially targets fighters in all circumstances. Coupled with the right sort of short range (350-450 is a good bracket), you now have a weapon that will concentrate on shooting down enemy fighters to the exclusion of just about everything else.

One reason to be sparing with the PD_ALSO tag is that it makes your ship really good at focusing fire. Another is that it can make fighter decoy flares pretty irrelevant if it's too common; those rely on weapons with the PD tag focusing on missiles over fighters, which of course a PD_ALSO weapon won't do. So be really careful about putting it on small weapons or on more than one or two weapons... but it could certainly stand to be more common, if you want fighters to be less overwhelming.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 28, 2020, 07:47:43 PM
@Harmful Mechanic: That's really useful info, thank you, I wasn't even aware of that tag and it's various applications. :)

Already made a couple notes to try out some new things along those lines.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Daynen on January 30, 2020, 12:50:34 AM
Quote
Is there a particular reason PD can't, by design, shoot down both? I mean sure I understand not wanting to mess with PD weapon damage too much to avoid rebalancing missiles, but the suggestion seemed more in line with making flak solely better against fighters without touching the effect it would have on missiles.

This.  My point was that Swarms are only a potential problem when AOE weapons aren't up to the task.  The flak, dual flak and devastator all have the same problem of never hitting anything because of the random detonation range.  Even against missiles I find them dodgy on the best of days.  I know flak weapons are supposed to be somewhat chaotic so enemy craft can't reliably dodge them but this game's flak weapons are WAY too broad with that randomness to be a good choice against anything in my experience.  Thus we are left with generally single target weapons which, while far more accurate and reliable, only really process one threat at a time.  We have things like Locust missiles and their smaller cousins but those run out LONG before the carriers' CR does, even with expanded racks--and while you CAN fire them as a deterrent to missile swarms and even take out a few, this is a gamble at best.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Perq on January 30, 2020, 02:13:32 AM
By now most its appears clear the massed fighters strikes are very effective.  I'm not sure I think this is good for the game balance since drovers or other cheap carriers with massed fighters seems overly effective against other fleet compositions.  Increasing the effectiveness of point defense/flak or nerfing fighters would penalize smaller deployments of fighters without addressing the issue of massed fighter wings.  However, I think have simple solution that will work well to reducing the effect of massive fighter swarms without nerfing fighters and in keeping with the existing mechanics.

Add a limit to the number of active squadrons that can be deployed at once before degrading fighter performance.  Perhaps a max of 10-12? squadrons deployed at once then start applying penalties to fighter performance as the number increase.  In game lore this would be limited fighter channels for coordination.  This follows the similar mechanics in game that penalize doing the same thing to extremes.  You could even add a carrier hullmod for a new battlecruiser sized carrier that raises the max limit since you can't spam battle cruisers. 

Thoughts?

I think the problem lies with fighters being more and more effective the more you have. Setting maximum number will simply mean that "optimal" way of doing fighters is always hitting that limit.

I'm unsure what can be done to fix that, though, as it is pretty much basic that "the more you have it, the more each single unit does". V: Flaks being better, maybe? Not sure.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 30, 2020, 04:47:43 AM
I'm unsure what can be done to fix that, though, as it is pretty much basic that "the more you have it, the more each single unit does". V: Flaks being better, maybe? Not sure.
Probably revert to how fighters worked before 0.8a.  Fighters as ships, and carriers use OP for guns instead of fighters.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Igncom1 on January 30, 2020, 04:54:14 AM
I might have to give battle carriers a go at some point, just stuff em full of mining drones and then go ape on their loadouts.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Mordodrukow on January 30, 2020, 04:57:42 AM
I really dont know how to balance swarms without nerfing fighters. At least they must be nerfed in some mods, where single fighter can facetank plasma barrage.

In vanilla fighters are OK. May be you can balance them adding peak operation time penalty for carrier which replaces too much fighters... Like: minus 2 or 3 seconds per fighter. It will make them just like phase ships, loosing their CR the faster the more they spam their main ability.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 30, 2020, 05:05:44 AM
I might have to give battle carriers a go at some point, just stuff em full of mining drones and then go ape on their loadouts.
I tried warship-lite loadouts with pods or talons on dedicated carriers, but they are not as effective as minimally or unarmed carrier with good fighters.  They can work, but they are not the best.

One place for mining drones is Odyssey.  The drones are free and can tank a little, which is okay for a burn-happy Odyssey with a brawling (double plasma) loadout.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Grievous69 on January 30, 2020, 05:10:50 AM
I might have to give battle carriers a go at some point, just stuff em full of mining drones and then go ape on their loadouts.
I tried warship-lite loadouts with pods or talons on dedicated carriers, but they are not as effective as minimally or unarmed carrier with good fighters.  They can work, but they are not the best.

One place for mining drones is Odyssey.  The drones are free and can tank a little, which is okay for a burn-happy Odyssey with a brawling (double plasma) loadout.
The thing is, neither of those ships is a battlecarrier. I think only the Legion qualifies for that (maaaybe Mora) since everything else either has no firepower or too few flight decks for its size (Odyssey).
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 30, 2020, 05:21:16 AM
The thing is, neither of those ships is a battlecarrier. I think only the Legion qualifies for that (maaaybe Mora) since everything else either has no firepower or too few flight decks for its size (Odyssey).
Heron could work.  Heron outfitted for brawling could bully small ships.  Currently, Heron has no firepower because it needs to spend OP on fighters.  Before 0.8a, it did not need to spend OP on fighters.  All OP went to weapons and warship things.

Similarly, Astral was a fatter and slower Odyssey before 0.8a.  (It was a lemon, but it could fight.)  Today, it is a minimally armed or unarmed bomber platform.

Venture used to be like a low-tech Odyssey, until it was forced Mining Pods in 0.8a.  Similarly, Gemini used to be Condor+ before 0.8a like Drover does today.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Plantissue on January 30, 2020, 05:38:34 AM
*EDIT*
So which is it? Do you want to shoot down fighters with your PD weapons or shoot down missiles with your PD weapons? You can't say that you can't use PD weapons to shoot down fighters, and then pretend you actually meant to say they can't shoot down missiles, and then say you actually want PD weapons to serve as fighter deterrents. Non-PD weapons are prefectly fine in shooting down both bombers and fighters. It's honestly not a problem to me, so I can't see why it is a problem to you. I can fight the swarms of fighters from Luddic Church/Persean league/Tri-tachyon fleets just fine with normal weapons and PD weapons.  Flak cannons seem to work fine to me anyways. They kill missiles, and they kill swarms of missiles with their Area effect.

Is there a particular reason PD can't, by design, shoot down both? I mean sure I understand not wanting to mess with PD weapon damage too much to avoid rebalancing missiles, but the suggestion seemed more in line with making flak solely better against fighters without touching the effect it would have on missiles.
There's no reason why PD weapons can't shoot down both fighters and missiles. In fact they can and do so, as they operate just like non-PD weapons against fighters. For instance, a sim Dominator deals with fighters reasonably well with their PD weapons.

What I am objecting to is the nonsensical switching of arguments to suit whatever he happens to be writing. First he says that PD weapons don't anti-fighter properly, so I let him know that PD weapons are anti-missile specifically and that many non-PD weapons are good anti-fighter weapons. Then he quotes me and goes on a ramble about all sorts of things as if he is replying to me some of which contradicts his prior post. He has no reason to quote someone and talk as if he is replying to something that I did not write. If he wanted to write all that, he could had done it without quoting me.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on January 30, 2020, 10:43:21 AM
I'm unsure what can be done to fix that, though, as it is pretty much basic that "the more you have it, the more each single unit does". V: Flaks being better, maybe? Not sure.
Probably revert to how fighters worked before 0.8a.  Fighters as ships, and carriers use OP for guns instead of fighters.

While I agree with the problems regarding combat carriers, I kind of look at this as using a flamethrower instead of a scalpel. I'd rather reduce or outright remove the carrier's dependency on OP for fighters (there are various ways to do this) and preserve the current system.

The old system had a few other good points over the new one- mainly that you could give strike craft specific orders to capture points or intercept each other- but the cons outweigh the pros, imo, and I especially feel this way when I think there are easier ways to implement the stated benefits into the new system. That would be a best of both worlds situation.

(Also, fighter swarms were still an issue pre-0.8a so a reversion to that system wouldn't solve that)

I really dont know how to balance swarms without nerfing fighters. At least they must be nerfed in some mods, where single fighter can facetank plasma barrage.

In vanilla fighters are OK. May be you can balance them adding peak operation time penalty for carrier which replaces too much fighters... Like: minus 2 or 3 seconds per fighter. It will make them just like phase ships, loosing their CR the faster the more they spam their main ability.

I'd rather see replacements have a finite number (either defined in the wing data or defined in the carrier data itself, maybe defined in the wing and a modifier to that amount from the carrier?...) with mechanics to replenish them in some situations instead of mechanics or changes that will reduce the time the carrier is useful in the battle.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Megas on January 31, 2020, 12:03:55 PM
(Also, fighter swarms were still an issue pre-0.8a so a reversion to that system wouldn't solve that)
If fleet cap is still (effectively) thirty, there is no way to pack as many fighters-as-ships as twenty Drovers can with fighters-as-missiles.  I suppose a carrier fleet with pre-0.8a fighters would appear something like three carriers, twenty-something wings, and the rest support ships.  Capacity will probably be terrible because fighters have no capacity.
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Daynen on January 31, 2020, 05:25:07 PM
*EDIT*
So which is it? Do you want to shoot down fighters with your PD weapons or shoot down missiles with your PD weapons? You can't say that you can't use PD weapons to shoot down fighters, and then pretend you actually meant to say they can't shoot down missiles, and then say you actually want PD weapons to serve as fighter deterrents. Non-PD weapons are prefectly fine in shooting down both bombers and fighters. It's honestly not a problem to me, so I can't see why it is a problem to you. I can fight the swarms of fighters from Luddic Church/Persean league/Tri-tachyon fleets just fine with normal weapons and PD weapons.  Flak cannons seem to work fine to me anyways. They kill missiles, and they kill swarms of missiles with their Area effect.

Is there a particular reason PD can't, by design, shoot down both? I mean sure I understand not wanting to mess with PD weapon damage too much to avoid rebalancing missiles, but the suggestion seemed more in line with making flak solely better against fighters without touching the effect it would have on missiles.
There's no reason why PD weapons can't shoot down both fighters and missiles. In fact they can and do so, as they operate just like non-PD weapons against fighters. For instance, a sim Dominator deals with fighters reasonably well with their PD weapons.

What I am objecting to is the nonsensical switching of arguments to suit whatever he happens to be writing. First he says that PD weapons don't anti-fighter properly, so I let him know that PD weapons are anti-missile specifically and that many non-PD weapons are good anti-fighter weapons. Then he quotes me and goes on a ramble about all sorts of things as if he is replying to me some of which contradicts his prior post. He has no reason to quote someone and talk as if he is replying to something that I did not write. If he wanted to write all that, he could had done it without quoting me.

There's a difference between contradicting myself and saying you missed the point by a tiny bit less than you thought.  I appreciate that not everyone grasps every subtlety of every point I think of, though I'm puzzled that quoting you to highlight the specific phrasing I was replying to seems to...upset you?  Might want to put that goalpost down before you develop back problems...
Title: Re: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters
Post by: Morrokain on February 13, 2020, 12:50:48 PM
If fleet cap is still (effectively) thirty, there is no way to pack as many fighters-as-ships as twenty Drovers can with fighters-as-missiles.  I suppose a carrier fleet with pre-0.8a fighters would appear something like three carriers, twenty-something wings, and the rest support ships.  Capacity will probably be terrible because fighters have no capacity.

Consider that, with this system, flying carriers becomes less attractive to the player:

1) What tactical options is the player given when personally flying a carrier? At least right now there are some since you direct your own strike waves and can support allies with them, whereas in the old system you could fly any ship and still direct strike craft with equal effectiveness. Carriers were utility vessels in most regards and that didn't feel right to me.

2) Especially considering the aesthetic conundrum of strike craft flying in without being attached to any particular carrier, there were other concerns about what carriers, if any, were important considering any wing can refit at any carrier. In that sense it hurts battle tactics.

If we, instead:

A) Increase the viability of weapon loadouts on carriers by creating a separate resource pool or other balancing mechanism for flight decks. (also thereby preserving battlecarrier balancing mechanisms)

and

B) Give tactical flexibility to carriers when a player is piloting them by separating out strike craft into more precisely defined roles and also allow for more nuanced control of their directives.

-It makes that vessel archetype more attractive as a player option while (hopefully) solving your concerns. At least, that is how I am thinking about it.