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[Schwartz]

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.

[Plantissue]

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.

[Morbo513]

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.

[Morrokain]

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.

[Harmful Mechanic]

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.

[Morrokain]

@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.

[Daynen]

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.

[Perq]

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.

[Megas]

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.

[Igncom1]

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.

[Mordodrukow]

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.

[Megas]

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.

[Grievous69]

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).

[Megas]

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.

[Plantissue]

*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.