Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => General Discussion => Topic started by: liq3 on September 15, 2013, 08:06:03 AM
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So, fighters are crazy expensive supply wise... The numbers.
CR p S = Combat Readiness % per Supply (yes I realise it's backwards). Higher is better.
S p D = Supplies per Deployment. Basically the minimum amount of supplies you'll consume to restore the CR you lost by deploying. Note that things like the Onslaught can use massive (up to 1400?) supplies in repairs.
(http://i.imgur.com/PxVuLGX.jpg)
I just don't get how deploying 4 Mining Pod fighters costs 3x the supplies as deploying a Hammerhead Destroyer. The fighter squad has less total hull and armour then the destroyer... And Wasps are just insane. Nearly costs as much as an Onslaught to deploy. I'd expect that mobilizing a massive capital ship that is large enough to house over 200x the crew of the fighters would cost quite a bit more.
So yeh. Please fix this Alex. I want to use fighters in my small fleets to hunt down those low CR pirate supply crates Buffalo destroyers. :(
Edit: So I was browsing around the data files and found something real interesting. Turns out that supplies/day is multiplied by the number of fighters in the wing, while the repair%/day (CR) is not! I wonder if this is a bug or intended... It would certainly explain why fighters are so costly to deploy.
Edit2:Updated pic with all the fighters. Numbers are kinda whacky.
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Haha should see Hyperion Frigate costs.
75% CR to deploy
consumes 3 supplies a day when restoring CR.
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Well, it is a new patch after all, let the modders and the devs decide whats a 'sweet' spot between costs. But yes I do agree, the supply costs are high and that's not even counting the supplies needed to replace blown up fighter hulls/chassis.
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assuming we all have a decent knowledge of modding here, I'd recommend (what I'm playing on) dividing the supply per day by the number of fighters in the wing (so talon by 4, xyphos by 2 etc)
will upload minimod in a bit for testing if wanted
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There's another thread about this somewhere, but...
Basically, fighters are supposed to be fairly expensive to field, but a few are quite out of line. Expect a general reduction of fighter supply costs in 0.6.1a.
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Gunnyfreak - please do! I'd like to try that! (I could probably do it myself, but if you've already done it it would be very generous of you to share it)
Alex - Oops, I just asked you that question in another thread, and then came and read this one. Sorry! :)
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No worries :) The forums are always a hectic place right after a release.
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minimod up :)
http://www.mediafire.com/download/4hbebl1243pcd8p/Fighter_cost.rar (http://www.mediafire.com/download/4hbebl1243pcd8p/Fighter_cost.rar)
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Haha should see Hyperion Frigate costs.
75% CR to deploy
consumes 3 supplies a day when restoring CR.
That's actually cheap compared to the fighters. Only 15 supplies to restore that 75% CR. (i.e. same as Bombers).
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How about making every flight deck in your fleet cut the supply cost of a fighter wing by 1/2 or maybe even 3/4? Would make sense I think.
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There is already a HUGE advantage for carting around a carrier, we really don't need another one. There also needs to be some disadvantage associated with using a bunch of fighters, which the supply cost does pretty well.
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Even with the dramatically reduced fleet costs of fighter wings (except for Waps, Talons, and the notoriously overpowered Mining Drones :-X), fighters are pretty mediocre all-around combatants compared to the ships you could get for the same logistics and a lot of them aren't even very fast. I would call that a pretty significant drawback.
They also don't benefit from the giant OP bonuses in the Technology tree.
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they're fine as far as firepower goes, I think, here are a few examples
broadsword: 6DP for 6 LMG and 3 swarmer (9 small hardpoints to lasher's 7 and only 1 more DP)
Xyphos: 7DP for 2 Phase beam and 4 burst PD lasers (2m4s to tempest's 2m1s and only 1 more DP)
what fighters lack is survivability, and they can't properly bring additional firepower to bear if they can't keep near full squadrons on site, which means they need ships to tank for them or be in an overwhelming lead in numbers to be effective
They also have the advantage of not bumping into ships, which means you can keep a far tighter base of fire if needed
the bonuses thing is true though, maybe a few leadership skills (we're lacking those anyway) that increase fighter command. Maybe even a 5lvl skill perk that makes them not cost any command points... hmm.....
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So I was browsing around the data files and found something real interesting. Turns out that supplies/day is multiplied by the number of fighters in the wing, while the repair%/day (CR) is not! I wonder if this is a bug or intended... It would certainly explain why fighters are so costly to deploy.
Edit: Updated OP with all the fighters.
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Now that fighter wings aren't so easy to eliminate I've started trying out some of the less survivable types: like Warthogs. Man those things are beastly! Get 2-4 wings of those in somebody's face and they'll be having a real bad day.
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trying out the less survivable fighters eh? have you tried out the ridiculously op Thunder wing? They have a great theme song too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM Get 3-4 of them and their ion cannons will literally rip apart anything, from fighter wings to capital ships, well you need a bit more to take capitals but they are great at keeping entire ships completely offline, and they each carry a harpoon which they can reload so it basically adds infinite harpoons to your fleet :D also did i mention they are the FASTEST fighter in the game? in fact at a top speed of 225, they beat hounds, tempests and hyperions in speed as well, ( okay nothing can really be faster than a hyperion because it teleports massive distances in a flash but you get the point) frigates need modifiers just to keep up with the little beasties
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trying out the less survivable fighters eh? have you tried out the ridiculously op Thunder wing? They have a great theme song too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM Get 3-4 of them and their ion cannons will literally rip apart anything, from fighter wings to capital ships, well you need a bit more to take capitals but they are great at keeping entire ships completely offline, and they each carry a harpoon which they can reload so it basically adds infinite harpoons to your fleet :D also did i mention they are the FASTEST fighter in the game? in fact at a top speed of 225, they beat hounds, tempests and hyperions in speed as well, ( okay nothing can really be faster than a hyperion because it teleports massive distances in a flash but you get the point) frigates need modifiers just to keep up with the little beasties
Thay are apparently also the cheapest to field since the supply costs are apparently multiplied by the # of fighters in the wing... and Thunders only have 2 leading to relatively manageable costs.
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trying out the less survivable fighters eh? have you tried out the ridiculously op Thunder wing? They have a great theme song too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM Get 3-4 of them and their ion cannons will literally rip apart anything, from fighter wings to capital ships, well you need a bit more to take capitals but they are great at keeping entire ships completely offline, and they each carry a harpoon which they can reload so it basically adds infinite harpoons to your fleet :D also did i mention they are the FASTEST fighter in the game? in fact at a top speed of 225, they beat hounds, tempests and hyperions in speed as well, ( okay nothing can really be faster than a hyperion because it teleports massive distances in a flash but you get the point) frigates need modifiers just to keep up with the little beasties
Thay are apparently also the cheapest to field since the supply costs are apparently multiplied by the # of fighters in the wing... and Thunders only have 2 leading to relatively manageable costs.
I've always loved Thunders: stupid fast and fairly powerful; a little fragile, but their speed keeps them out of trouble more than, say, Warthogs. I've currently got 4 wings in my fleet; I use them as chasers.
The only expensive fighters right now are the interceptors (mainly due to their numbers, though a talon currently costs as much as a Xyphos which, considering the former is about as advanced as a dude with a machine gun with a couple bottle rockets strapped to his thighs, is a little steep) and the Tridents, which cost 2 supply each.
I modified the ship_data.csv to make supply costs more in line with their battlefield impact/tech level. Interceptors were halved in cost, Broadswords and Piranhas were slightly reduced, almost everything else saw a slight to significant increase in cost.
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This is a repost since I didn't find this thread when I wanted to post on the fighter CR/supply mechanics:
So after getting to the "endgame" a couple of times in 0.6a, I gotta say while most of the new CR/Supply/Carrier mechanics are great there's something off about fighter logistics and supply costs.
First of all one of the big problems is that fighters cost a lot of supplies - and it's based purely on wing-size which is weird as hell. Fighter types that are specifically intended to be fodder that swarms (the 6-per-wing Wasps, the 4-per-wing Mining Pods, the 4-per-wing-Talons) are more expensive, by a large margin, than elite super-high-tech fighters (2-per-wing Xyphos, 2-per-wing Tridents, etc.).
Then there's the fact that fighters tend to lose a lot more CR per deployment than other ships when they take casualties (which is the whole point of the new fighter mechanics! they are supposed to take casualties!) which drives the maintenance costs up even more.
I'm wondering if there shouldn't be some sort of benefit to carriers in general or flight decks in particular that gives you fighter wing supply/logistics discounts. Maybe even bring back the old Hangar stat on select destroyers and bigger. Something like a large decrease (50% at the least) or even a free maintenance for a wing of fighters per hangar would really help the swarming large-amount-per-wing fighters. Hell it'd be a great way to give an advantage to "true" carriers like the Condor (more hangars) compared to the combat carriers like the Venture (1 flight deck, but only a small amount of, maybe 1, hangar/s).
Plus it gives you a neat tool to bring the less-used capital ships up to spec.
If that's too radical even just a rebalance in fighter supply costs to make crap-but-swarming fighters not a gigantic waste of money would be really great. Especially the Mining Pods - I mean come on: They're supposed to be converted mining equipment, they shouldn't be more expensive than a freaking Xyphos Wing.
As an aside I wonder if we'll ever see a Phase-Fighter or Phase-Bomber wing. There's precedent with the Terminator Drone after all.
Thoughts?
Now that said, I guess we'll get reduced costs in the next patch. That's okay I suppose though a more in-depth mechanics solution would have been nice. Hell even just a fighter/carrier related skill in logistics would have been neat. "Experienced Flight Deck Supervisor" for more efficient strikecraft management?
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Hell even just a fighter/carrier related skill in logistics would have been neat.
Pretty sure fighter skills will come eventually.
As you might have gathered from the thread by now, Thunders and Gladius are cost efficient and a good investment until the fix.
Kinda unrelated, but I noticed that some fighters are pretty viable without a carrier deployed. It just changes there role from active combat to recon, initial point capture and pursuit. But since they can only lose one wing that way their CR regeneration costs are very limited. And unlike frigates they can't be really lost as long as there is a (undeployed) carrier, like the Atlas.
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As an aside I wonder if we'll ever see a Phase-Fighter or Phase-Bomber wing. There's precedent with the Terminator Drone after all.
Thoughts?
Oh god, I hate Terminator Drones. Their speed and phase make those things damn near immortal. Imagine having 4-10 of them loaded with even more firepower buzzing around and generally being untouchable. Phase ships are some of the most annoying things in the game IMHO, requiring an almost dedicated anti-phase ship loaded with beam weapons to deter them from harassing you to death. A swarm of phase fighters could probably destroy an entire fleet if they were able to be repaired and re-armed the current way fighters are.
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Well Terminator Drones are more than a little absurd - they're tiny, have a teleporter, a phase cloak, two energy weapons and a frigate can replicate them during a fight.
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An issue that's bothering me:
Currently, in addition to reflecting logistics cost of maintaining and fielding a ship, CR for fighters also pulls double duty in representing how many spare fighters a wing can have, and (with the CR recovery/day value) how fast it can manufacture those spares. This leads to silly things like Mining Pods having the second highest per-battle cost (10% CR craft -> 40% CR per wing; 5% CR recovery per day) and Thunders having the second-lowest despite their relatively high CR per craft deployed (7% CR per craft -> 14% CR for the wing; 5% CR recovery per day).
Some of this could be solved by number tweaking, but as long as CR means so many different things there are probably going to be cases where it's a problem (e.g. you can't have a fighter wing that's cheap to run but expensive to replace, or has a low number of replacements).
One idea I came up with: undestroyed fighters refund half their CR deployment cost at the end of the battle; reduced if they take armor/hull damage. This fixes the silly immersion breaker of fighters that return intact having exactly the same CR cost as those that get destroyed, and makes certain fighter wings (like the aforementioned Mining Pod) more affordable without having to change other key characteristics. It doesn't solve all the aspects of the issue I described above, though.
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An issue that's bothering me:
Currently, in addition to reflecting logistics cost of maintaining and fielding a ship, CR for fighters also pulls double duty in representing how many spare fighters a wing can have, and (with the CR recovery/day value) how fast it can manufacture those spares. This leads to silly things like Mining Pods having the second highest per-battle cost (10% CR craft -> 40% CR per wing; 5% CR recovery per day) and Thunders having the second-lowest despite their relatively high CR per craft deployed (7% CR per craft -> 14% CR for the wing; 5% CR recovery per day).
Some of this could be solved by number tweaking, but as long as CR means so many different things there are probably going to be cases where it's a problem (e.g. you can't have a fighter wing that's cheap to run but expensive to replace, or has a low number of replacements).
One idea I came up with: undestroyed fighters refund half their CR deployment cost at the end of the battle; reduced if they take armor/hull damage. This fixes the silly immersion breaker of fighters that return intact having exactly the same CR cost as those that get destroyed, and makes certain fighter wings (like the aforementioned Mining Pod) more affordable without having to change other key characteristics. It doesn't solve all the aspects of the issue I described above, though.
If I recall correctly, CR recovery rate is directly tied to repair rate, and the CR recovery cost is tied to repair cost. To make a wing that's low-maintenance and expensive to replace, give them a low supply/day and a high repair cost (or high CR/deployment for low number of replacements). As for Mining Pods, I imagine their CR values are probably a bit off in this version.
Lessened CR for intact fighters makes sense, though.
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I'd guess mining pods will get another function that justifies their cost. Which one should be obvious.
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The main problem even not fighters supply cost but their speed of CR recovery. I got 3-4% CR recovery on basic talons/broadswords per DAY. At this cost and delay they are worthless. New mechanic also kills fighter crew at amazing rate.