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[Plantissue]

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.

[Megas]

@ 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.

[Morrokain]

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*

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.

[Lucky33]

@ 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.

[DatonKallandor]

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.

[Brokenmind]

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.

[DatonKallandor]

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?

[Igncom1]

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!

[Plantissue]

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.

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.

[Morrokain]

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.

[DatonKallandor]

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.

[Rasip]

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.

[isyourmojofly]

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.

[Thaago]

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).

[Harmful Mechanic]

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.