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[Megas]

But they do need a nerf, and possibly the Atlas needs a rework of its ship system because right now, not using full bomber loadout is stupid. I get that there are "obvious" choices, but this one has no comparable options. Kind of like reaper Harbinger.

Atlas has flares.  Do you mean Astral?  Recall Device was good for fighters too, well... at least when Warthogs were stronger in 0.8.  Astral really needs carrier skills to shine.  Without them, it are okay, but not great.  Even with carrier skills, Astral is still not quite as powerful as combat specialist Paragon.

I kind of want to see a midline carrier capital with six bays and designed for interceptor and fighter spam, instead of (low-tech) Legion's carrier/warship hybrid and (high-tech) Astral's sluggish but powerful bomber spam.

[Hrothgar]

In some mods there are several midline carrier , but they're more a evolution of Legion than lower tech mass bay carriers.

I dare you now to make some usefull mining fighting fleet bro. So they need to be armed in some sort of mining weapon. I give you one ship type very important for that: Kodai Cruiser, very decent middle tier cruiser with a high-dmg-impact but mediocre vs armor mining lance.

[TaLaR]

Astral/Legion and cruiser carriers are not that hard to counter for any player-piloted direct combat ship of same size, as long as it's outfitted with handling fighters in mind. So it's not that they are inherently OP - AI is just bad at countering fighters (while using fighters is easier and comes more naturally to AI). Even in AI vs AI these fights tend to be stalemates more often than straight carrier victories.

At DE size claim of fighter OPness is more solid. AI vs AI Spark Drover wins against any DE. Player vs AI: Hammerhead and Enforcer win easily (by raw firepower and armor-bum-rushing respectively), Sunder needs to rush and accept taking some significant damage or be whittled down, Medusa needs to take nonsensical narrowly specialized anti-fighter build and barely wins after a somewhat longer fight even then.

[goduranus]

Next up, 24 Spark Drovers vs 9 Redacted fleets. Will their luck finally run out

Spoiler

[close]

Hmm apparently the AI chooses how many fleets to assist based on your fleet strength? Only 1 Redacted fleet out of the 9 present chooses to assist in battle, so I couldn't get all 9 of them into a fight at once. Might have to put some cruisers in the fleet next time so more AI enemy fleets will assist in the battle.

[Thaago]

Astral/Legion and cruiser carriers are not that hard to counter for any player-piloted direct combat ship of same size, as long as it's outfitted with handling fighters in mind. So it's not that they are inherently OP - AI is just bad at countering fighters (while using fighters is easier and comes more naturally to AI). Even in AI vs AI these fights tend to be stalemates more often than straight carrier victories.

At DE size claim of fighter OPness is more solid. AI vs AI Spark Drover wins against any DE. Player vs AI: Hammerhead and Enforcer win easily (by raw firepower and armor-bum-rushing respectively), Sunder needs to rush and accept taking some significant damage or be whittled down, Medusa needs to take nonsensical narrowly specialized anti-fighter build and barely wins after a somewhat longer fight even then.

^This. Fighters are strong, but not that strong. Its more that the AI is really, really bad at fighting against them.

[Igncom1]

+1 to AI fighter fear.

I do wish my battleships and cruisers wouldn't get frightened by enemy talons and fire their heavy weapons at them. It's just so unnecessary in my opinion for them to even worry about it as It just feels so out of character for them to really do so. Nothing worse then losing a flux battle because your BB decided to fire it's T Lances at passing fighters for some god forsaken reason!

If anything I almost feel like gunboats should ignore fighters and interceptors almost entirely, and focus on their primary roles altogether. But possibly that might just be me.

[xenoargh]

My experience with my private version of Rebal is somewhat at odds with this scenario. 

Fighters in Rebal are both faster and generally better-protected and are replaced more quickly.  Seems like they should be even worse. 

But it doesn't work out that way.  Here's why:

1.  Capitals aren't nearly as squishy as they are in Vanilla, and can be expected to take minor fighter spam without really caring a lot.  Fighters are more of a threat to Destroyers and Frigates than they are to Capitals.  Granted, a Reaper will still ruin your day, but not to nearly the extent it does in Vanilla.

2.  Weapons, being generally balanced to deliver more damage than Flux consumed, mean that the damage output of most ships isn't quite as starved and their stats prevent them from becoming Flux-Locked as quickly.

3.  Shields, being balanced around total area covered, rather than by <whatever dark magic Alex uses> generally mean that Low Tech Pirates are, while not ideal against fighters, aren't getting overwhelmed by fighter spam.  Low Tech, with generally low shield areas, takes a lot less Flux damage vs. enemies that are generally hitting from all sides, because they're not getting Flux-Locked and can dish out DPS at a superior ratio to fighters.  Granted, this means that some Fighters (the Lightning, in particular) are pretty darn powerful, but Sparks aren't that big of a deal.

4.  Some Pirate ships are just useless against anything that masses Beams.  This is a core design issue with the Hound and Cerebus and Buffalo Mk. II; it's not new news.  I've recently decided to give all of them shields, because shieldless ships are really broken as anything but a joke motif, frankly.

5.  Pirates in Rebal have better overall anti-missile coverage.

6.  Pirates in Rebal have their own Interceptors to help out.  While these are generally pretty weak, they're better than nothing.

So, with a 200-enemy Pirate swarm vs. 20 Drovers, the biggest I could find to test out on short notice without writing a custom Mission, my results were that the Pirates won pretty easily.  The biggest change was that Enforcers and Dominators are both considerably tougher nuts to crack; while they have poor shield coverage areas, they have superior frontal shielding and enough firepower to largely destroy incoming fighters on their way in, and enough speed to catch the Drovers.

Now, don't get me wrong here; the Drover is still the best mid-game Carrier in Rebal; I didn't nerf it into oblivion or anything.  It's great until we're in late midgame, when it starts being too squishy.  But it doesn't have enough speed to avoid engagements with Enforcers indefinitely, and if we're talking about a neutral situation re: Officers, an Enforcer in Rebal may or may not win that engagement, depending on the loadouts involved, but usually does, if it doesn't take Reapers or other heavy Torpedoes.

I'm not surprised that this is the result in Vanilla, but it's not that Fighters are massively OP per se; my current thoughts on this are that the issues are systemically related to weapon balance, shields, armor rankings for roles, etc.- it's not just one problem, it's many.

[Linnis]

What it feels like to me this could have been won faster and easier with a normal mixed fleet.  As someone said it is all about firepower density, fighters + conquest/paragon is the best at that. Pirates are made out of wet paper. I wanna see this setup versus one of the main factions, that would be much more interesting.

[Thaago]

Well I believe there is a post in the anti-Remnant thread showing that this composition also does extremely well (stomps) large Remnant fleets as well - which I think is a good benchmark showing that the pure spark Drover really is a very strong tactic.

But I think the success is for many of the same reasons, and more shows some weak points of the current enemy ship composition/strategic AI: trickling forces that get meatgrinder-ed, insufficient aggression/poor target selection, and poor anti-fighter defenses. In the Remnant battles, if the enemy battleships had been aggressive and had teleported straight into the Drovers... ouch. Pure ouch.

[Megas]

Drovers are much more fuel efficient than some other fleet configurations.  I can probably save a lot more fuel if I use Spark Drovers instead of several capitals plus Heron and Mora if I have spare DP left.

On the other hand, I do not think my old computer can handle that many fighters (on 500 map size) very well, especially if the enemy fleet has many fighters of their own too.  Maybe performance is better if I just play fighter heavy fleets only on the map screen and watch triangles kill each other like in an early video game.

When the most dangerous factions are wimps that can bypass colony defenses, and the strongest enemies either do not invade or must beat your battlestation and patrols to break stuff, ships that are most effective only against the colony-bypass wimps is still valuable, unlike pre-0.9.

[TaLaR]

Drovers are good and all, but spamming 20 of them is probably not that optimal deployment due to going above 10 officer constraint. Replacing some of them with Capitals until you are left with 11 ships total (including player in some ship that actually benefits from being piloted) would be a stronger composition overall.

[goduranus]

Also, the a big plus side of using carriers is that it lets you spec into Industry Skills, and other skills that normally aren't picked because using a battleship flagships means putting all points into Combat Skills. There are some cool perks down there, like faster CR recovery, 50% damage reduction from terrain, extra salvage, halving the CR threshold for malfunction, etc.

[Megas]

From the looks of the video, only six of the Drovers had officers, plus commander for the flagship.  Four more were in the backup frigates.  Many of the Drovers had no officers.  I guess he had Fighter Doctrine to boost all of the carriers, but that is uncertain.  The Drovers all appear to be pristine.

If the Spark Drovers can do that much damage unskilled, that is quite simple and effective.

[SCC]

So, how did the fight against remnant doomstack go? I'm not surprised with the result against pirates, but Remnants should prove themselves a significantly more dangerous force.

My experience with my private version of Rebal is somewhat at odds with this scenario.

And this thread is not about your rebalance.

[Kohlenstoff]

....
But I think the success is for many of the same reasons, and more shows some weak points of the current enemy ship composition/strategic AI: trickling forces that get meatgrinder-ed, insufficient aggression...

The Lack of Aggression is one of the biggest problems of the AI. To make the AI actually effective, i decided to choose only aggressive or reckless officers for small groups. In 1 Vs. 1 Fights of Paragon Vs. Radiant only these types get their ships not destroyed and they do actually win some of these duels without any help. Any other retreats too often, lowers shield too often (due distance, actually a mistake all AI has!), stays too often too far away and don't push enough pressure into the enemy (what means that the enemy can put much more pressure back).