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Author Topic: How do we balance fighter spam?  (Read 8431 times)

SonnaBanana

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #30 on: March 03, 2021, 06:54:11 AM »

Aldready posted this in suggestions

Reduce fighter replacement speed by 25% if moving.
Another 25% reduction if over 30% flux.
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Hatter

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #31 on: March 03, 2021, 09:08:36 AM »

That seems like it would impact battle-carriers (legion) more then dedicated carriers. Getting into combat is already a lose condition for dedicated carriers.
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Daynen

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #32 on: March 03, 2021, 10:09:10 AM »

Until the changes hit, may I suggest a mine strike?  Drop a mine right in the middle of a fighter swarm and enjoy your popcorn.  Bonus if they're hovering near their carrier and damage it too.
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Umbra

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #33 on: March 03, 2021, 06:16:02 PM »

Could a silly and somewhat considerable workaround be have a new resource you have lug around aka Fighter hulls (or metals get consumed on fighter replacement in battle and refunded post battle) or fighter pilots dedicated crew which aren't your run off the mill shmuck are well trained and willing to get into those beautifully dangerous fighters, have them be a somewhat rarer resource found on military stations mostly and thus creating this new issue of balancing the economy of running the carrier spam rather than nerfing it out right.

Mainly because by the end of the game most fleets you fight shouldn't feel like a chore to fight or a build is too overpowered in fact the simple reasoning that you're overpowered isn't bad per say, you successfully breaking ahead in a galactic arms race by taking advantage of a lack of anti fighter munitions in the core worlds is simply that you succeeding. Of course another option is give any weapon with point defence primary role a 1.25 dmg increase vs fighters or nerf fighter armour and hull integrity to make them slightly more glass cannony. But honestly as fighters stand you can mass a bunch of bombers and let them go ham or just spam some dumb 50 wings of broadsides build but it's for most of the play time in the game not a significant issue (purely from my experience)

Issue is no matter what gets changed you're going to upset either group A or group B, or god forbid you upset group C which didn't have a stance before because prior to the patch they didn't give it thought.
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Warnoise

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #34 on: March 04, 2021, 01:10:46 AM »

I forgot to mention that fighters tend to flank you from your unshielded side which adds more to their cancer xD

But personally the thing that needs to be addressed the most is small fighters which are barely visible which could block big projectiles.

Also the speed at which fighters respawn is pretty fast. Chasing a Heron feels like a huge chore from the sheer speed+wave after wave of fighters.

PS:Thunder is the most ridiculous of the bunch. That thing was especially designed to reduce the lifespan of players from sheer frustration
« Last Edit: March 04, 2021, 01:12:47 AM by Warnoise »
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shoi

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #35 on: March 04, 2021, 05:48:25 PM »

i will say it until im blue in the face but fighters dont need a nerf, only stacking skills and hullmods which make replacement time a non issue and the fighter death ball easier to achieve do.
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bobucles

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #36 on: March 06, 2021, 04:12:25 AM »

Fun things are fun.

Fighters do benefit from snowball syndrome. Once you have enough to overwhelm point defense, the best thing to do is stack on more fighters. The same is true of missile(pilum) spam. But there are other ways to "break" combat as well. It's more enjoyable to have a multitude of strategies that get out of control, rather than guiding players down the balanced fleet composition every time.

Megas

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #37 on: March 06, 2021, 04:44:50 AM »

It's more enjoyable to have a multitude of strategies that get out of control, rather than guiding players down the balanced fleet composition every time.
Balanced fleets stink when ships have different PPTs all over the place, and I have limited CP to retreat ships in big long endgame fights.  I do not want to retreat a steady trickle of ships because one ship runs out of PPT, then another, then another, then... oops, out of CP.
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DatonKallandor

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #38 on: March 06, 2021, 05:26:39 AM »

If you're dead set on that playstyle, a simple automatic retreat mod will make the game more fun for you (it's a mod I'd recommend to everyone anyway). But there's really no reason to align the entire game around that one playstyle.
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devurandom

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #39 on: March 06, 2021, 06:56:16 AM »

If you're dead set on that playstyle, a simple automatic retreat mod will make the game more fun for you (it's a mod I'd recommend to everyone anyway). But there's really no reason to align the entire game around that one playstyle.
I think that "using more than one type of ship" is a pretty reasonable playstyle to support. PPT is just ridiculously low. I play with double PPT, and I still have cruisers and capitals running out in large brawls. (Megas' double speed idea is good, but it makes the short PPT even more obvious, so I double PPT to maintain the same "real time" duration.)
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Megas

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #40 on: March 06, 2021, 07:32:55 AM »

PPT was okay in earlier releases.  Today, AI is generally more cowardly, fights are bigger, and skills are weaker (less speed and offense), while PPT has not changed since then.  Endgame fights are multi-round affairs if player's fleet is not at (or close to) peak power.
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Thaago

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #41 on: March 06, 2021, 10:10:16 AM »

I don't have trouble with PPT, though I do put hardened subsystems on frigates and SO ships for midgame+ fights.
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TaLaR

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #42 on: March 07, 2021, 09:12:20 AM »

Yeah, fights are just too big for frigate PPT. And you have only 10 officers that can't be swapped between ships, so you can neither get a sizeable deployment with just/mostly frigates or keep them in a fight for long time.

Frankly, if not for Afflictor being the player-piloting powerhouse it is, frigates would be almost completely irrelevant in late game.
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Helldiver

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #43 on: March 07, 2021, 05:32:47 PM »

Besides fighters already getting nerfed next patch, I feel that part of the issue is that "fighter" fighters (not bombers) can be so problematic to ships, for example dealing high shield damage with certain guns. I think that only dedicated bombers should be a real threat to bigger ships and "fighter" fighters should be reserved to intercepting/defending against other fighters or escorting their own bombers to distract PD or fight interception attempts.

(WWII battleships were also great at killing/surviving fighters, at least compared to other units. Its just that the fighters tended to concentrate force and spam. WWII capital units were however very vulnerable to submarines.)

WWII battleships were very vulnerable to torpedo bombers and more so than certain other ship classes, despite the use of torpedo belts and heavier total AA armament. No realistic amount of AA on a ship at the time prevented carrier-launched torpedo bombers from getting within dropping distance against said ship. Protecting a BB was done by disrupting bombers before reaching dropping distance, either with air cover or layering AA with smaller ships like DDs spread around the BB.
Agree to capitals being vulnerable to subs. I wish phase ships took on more of the characteristics of subs to create more of the gameplay dynamics usually seen in sub/ASW warfare in other games.

Frankly, if not for Afflictor being the player-piloting powerhouse it is, frigates would be almost completely irrelevant in late game.

I wish that smaller ships like frigates didn't have such pitiful weapon range due to not having DTC and ITU being so weak on them, as it prevents them from serving in support roles such as escorts in late game/big battles. You put PD on a frigate and tell it to escort a cruiser and it can't even hit any fighter or missile before it reaches the cruiser anyways, unless it's sitting in front and blocking the cruiser's guns which is even worse. That also contributes to fighter strength, as dedicated PD ships below cruiser size are made bad by current hullmod balance.
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Thaago

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Re: How do we balance fighter spam?
« Reply #44 on: March 07, 2021, 11:03:45 PM »

Spoiler because off topic...
Spoiler
...
WWII battleships were very vulnerable to torpedo bombers and more so than certain other ship classes, despite the use of torpedo belts and heavier total AA armament. No realistic amount of AA on a ship at the time prevented carrier-launched torpedo bombers from getting within dropping distance against said ship. Protecting a BB was done by disrupting bombers before reaching dropping distance, either with air cover or layering AA with smaller ships like DDs spread around the BB.
...

This was true at the beginning of the war: the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse was a shocking demonstration of air power, though it was later learned that most of the ships' anti-air capabilities were actually offline during the attack due to problems from condensation shorting out the radar and fire directors. Still, combined bomber and torpedo (and it was important for it to be a combined strike, as the two weapons were evaded in different ways) had been proven to be able to kill battleships.

A brief analysis: the battleships were ambushed without their early warning radar alerting them because of problems. They had no effective anti-air fire control, no proximity fuses, no air cover, and the air wing that attacked them was equivalent of the bombers force of 2 full fleet carriers. In these conditions, 8 of 49 torpedoes hit, with the Repulse dodging the first 19 fired at it. Once the ships lost their maneuverability and the aircraft deployed combined dive bomb/torpedo pincer attacks the hit rate went way up.

However there were two technological advances during the war from the allies that changed things: much better secondary battery fire control radar, and radar proximity fuses. With these, the 5' (125mm) 38cal secondaries were capable of very long range accurate fire that could splash incoming fighter and bombers squadrons. Also, over the course of the war ineffective smaller weapons were swapped out for 20mm oerlikans and 40mm boeffers (spelling on both, sorry), which were miles better than machine guns for AA. It did help that ships traveled in packs and those were the same guns used on destroyers and anti-aircraft cruisers (atlantas), but the preferred anti-air escort for the fleet carriers were battleships for the sheer number of AA guns, toughness, and operational endurance.

Japanese AA was, frankly, awful. It had little to no radar guidance, was undersized (often 25mm), and poorly mounted. But, in the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea (part of the battle of leyte gulf), the japanese battle line without air cover was attacked by 5 full fleet carriers and an escort carrier over 259 sorties. They managed to sink a super battleship and a cruiser, but were ineffective in actually stopping the force. The only reason that its not commonly remembered that mass air strikes were unable to stop a battleship force from powering through and slaughtering tens of thousands of people in transports is because of the ridiculous miracle (from the allied perspective) that was the Battle off Samar. (Where the equivalent of a couple of lashers with some condors with talons fought off an entire hegemony extermination fleet and 'won'.)

(Side note: German ship based anti-air radar was also somewhere between non-existent and awful, so while they had decent guns, they had nothing to point them, and they also didn't have radar proximity shells. Much hay is made of the Swordfish attack that crippled the Bismark, but its important to remember that visibility was bad and the Bismarck was using optical systems, there were no proximity fuses (and the wrong type of fuses to begin with), and the hit that jammed the rudder was very lucky. If the same kind of torpedo attack had been launched against a 1945 american battleship there would have been no attacking planes to survive.)

By the end of WWII, torpedo bombers were considered by the allies to be very high risk against a modern force: while they hadn't been on the receiving end themselves, american and british navies had observed first hand that new AA technologies made low and slow torpedo attacks suicidal. Even if the pilots could drop their torpedoes, they were likely to get hit on the way out. There was a lot of experimentation with high speed high altitude next generation torpedoes that could be dropped from level flight bombers outside of AA height, but that whole branch of technology became obsolete with the advent of jet fighters and guided missiles.

Wow that turned into a long post. For a run down of various wwII AA guns, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZqMqhUnVMU
The channel (Drachinifel) is a fantastic source of knowledge about ships of all periods with at this point several hundred hours of content.

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