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[intrinsic_parity]

There's been a lot of discussion for a while about how to balance fighters, and there's been some discussion about trying to tweak fighter wing ranges to balance them, but I was thinking what if carrier hulls had an intrinsic fighter range multiplier so that different hulls would have different fighter ranges with the same LPCs. It could scale with hull size (.75/1/1.5/2) which might help reign in strategies involving spamming smaller carriers. I think you would also pair it with reductions in base fighter range, although I suppose you could play with the multiplier values to get the same effect. 

Some of my theory-crafting ideas about the consequences:
- smaller carriers might get pushed towards escort/support roles since they have less range, and they hopefully would be worse at general damage dealing
- there could be some interesting new niches for fighters with ranges that match one another, particularly fighters with longer range designed to escort/support bombers vs. fighters with short range designed to deal damage/support ships.
- there would be room for individual carriers to have increased or decreased ranges. A 'brawling' carrier might have a lower range multiplier so that fighters stay near the mothership and help it, while a support carrier could have an increased range multiplier
- there could be some hullmods for fighter range modification as well to add more customizability, although that could maybe undo the goal of making smaller hulls worse for spam

I feel like it adds a much needed balance lever for carriers, and maybe makes carrier spam a bit worse without straight up nerfing fighters across the board. There would almost certainly be some rebalancing of ships necessary to make all the carrier hulls at different sizes effective, but I think it would be really interesting.

[Megas]

Make fighters ships again (yes, wishful thinking, I know), instead of turning them more and more into melee weapons like nearly every weapon in Starsector (and encouraging carriers to be unarmed with empty mounts in the process).

There needs to be more (viable) long-range combat, not less.

I expect (most) fighters to fly around and shoot at targets far away, not hover around and act like Gradius options of hovering next to the mothership.

As for carrier spam, aside from Drover-and-Sparks combo, it is only a problem when the fleet is skilled.  Unskilled is not too overpowering.  We will have smaller max map size and more limited skills, not to mention heavily weakened Expanded Deck Crew.  Also, Drover will cost 15 DP, which (along with 400 map size) reduce Drover spam.  Plus, the systems on Drover and Astral are getting weakened.

As for OP, the dedicated carriers I care about are Drover, Mora, Heron, and Astral.  The rest are cheap junk (Condor) or hybrid ships.  (Modern Odyssey does not need decks when it is a suicide brawler with Plasma Burn.)  There are not enough ships to fiddle with range mods, and even there were, it would probably be annoying remembering or comparing yet another stat to juggle my fleet with.

[Helldiver]

There needs to be more (viable) long-range combat, not less.

This. Fighters are supposed to project power far form the carrier - that's the whole identity of carriers and fighters. Reducing range isn't the right way to go about nerfing fighters; replacement rate, resilience to PD/anti-fighter weapons and the ease with which you can deploy so many carriers are the biggest issue that can be attacked (and how AI deals with fighters too!).

[intrinsic_parity]

The whole point of the suggestion is that it's NOT a blanket range reduction, so I'm not sure why everyone is talking about it like it is. Some carriers would/could have longer range, and some would have shorter range. They could easily have longer range than current carriers if that were desirable. The idea is just to make range a variable that can be used to balance carriers independently of wings. This would hopefully add some interesting variety which is lacking at the moment IMO.

Also, do people really like the gameplay of slowly grinding down a carriers replacement rate while it kites 4000u away and then killing the mostly defenseless carrier? To me that is pretty boring: killing the fighters is not exciting, chasing/killing a weak ship after your exhaust its fighters is boring, dying to a swarm of fighters isn't fun, and killing things as a carrier by pressing R is uninteresting. For me, I have carriers in my fleet to defend me from enemy fighters, but I want to actually fight with warships and engage with all the interesting flux/combat mechanics and systems. Extreme ranges just gets rid of most of the interesting parts of combat for me.

I think fighters can (and should) have a lot of other roles besides just 'fly all over and kill everything'. For instance, by definition interceptors are designed to fight off enemy aircraft, not attack enemy ground forces/ships. They might also escort the bombers that do attack ground forces. IMO, bombers should be the primary way that carriers attack other ships from long range. Fighters should be good at killing bombers and some small ships but not good generalist damage dealers. Interceptors should be primarily aimed at killing other fighters and thus are entirely defensive in nature. Some of that might be more an AI suggestion though.

As for OP, the dedicated carriers I care about are Drover, Mora, Heron, and Astral.  The rest are cheap junk (Condor) or hybrid ships.  (Modern Odyssey does not need decks when it is a suicide brawler with Plasma Burn.)  There are not enough ships to fiddle with range mods, and even there were, it would probably be annoying remembering or comparing yet another stat to juggle my fleet with.

I think the point that there is a small selection of carriers is evidence that there aren't enough ways for carriers to differentiate themselves currently. Adding more ways of differentiating carriers means you can add more carriers to the game without them stepping on each others toes, so the causality is sort of the opposite of what you're implying (a lack of carriers is symptom of a lack of a balancing mechanisms, not a reason to have fewer balancing mechanisms). More carriers can be added if there are more ways to have significantly different carriers.

I expect (most) fighters to fly around and shoot at targets far away, not hover around and act like Gradius options of hovering next to the mothership.

I'm not suggesting that they're restricted to just hover around the mothership like PD drones, I'm saying fighters should coordinate to attack the targets their carriers are directly engaging (rather than random targets on the other side of the map) which makes much more sense to me, and I think it would alleviate some of the tendency towards carriers endlessly running/kiting. If the carriers fighters (which should represent a significant portion of its offensive capability) are all 4000u away, it is obviously going to be weak and have to run away and kite, but if those fighters are all around supporting it, it can coordinate its guns with them. It hopefully would also reduce the tendency for fighters to excessively concentrate fire in an unbalanced way without making the fighters or carriers weaker.

[Harmful Mechanic]

I think this would be interesting to try out as a set of built-in hullmods, which is probably the correct way to do it; just write 'em up and produce a small balance mod. Probably take an evening, if you don't bother compiling your scripts.

2x fighter range is too long at the high end (16000 range on Thunders is broken - 12000 might be too, so consider capping your range increases); I'd go for a progression more like 0.75/1/1.25/1.5, and make three, then drop them on ships I thought needed a buff or a nerf and see what kind of feedback I got. The Astral almost certainly needs a little more range at 1.25x, but the full 1.5x seems excessive (not sure there's anything that does need a 1.5x fighter range buff, but it's worth trying out unlike 2x); reducing Drover range to 0.75x is a no-brainer. But it's hard to think of too many vanilla hulls that would need tweaking.

I'd also consider separate fighter and bomber range reductions; many of the issues with fighter range are issues with how far away a carrier can launch a bomber strike, which could be a good place to modify certain hulls.

[Morrokain]

I think this would be interesting to try out as a set of built-in hullmods, which is probably the correct way to do it; just write 'em up and produce a small balance mod.

Test mod

I already had this sort of thing lying around. So I went ahead and took the time to do this. (I didn't cap the range though.)

The description for each carrier gives the range value and, as an added test element, strike craft ranges have been globally reduced by 25% for vanilla wings except the borer. Carrier ranges are set to 75% base range for a destroyer carrier, 100% range for hybrids like the Odyssey and Venture, 125% base range for cruisers, and 150% base range for capitals. Pirate and LP conversions are at 100% base range iirc.

[DatonKallandor]

I think if a range modifier was needed (and I don't think it's the solution), basing it on ship speed would be more appropriate than hull size. Fast carriers should be short ranged, because chasing them is annoying. Slow carriers needs to be long ranged, because they can't get away once caught.

[Morrokain]

I think if a range modifier was needed (and I don't think it's the solution), basing it on ship speed would be more appropriate than hull size. Fast carriers should be short ranged, because chasing them is annoying. Slow carriers needs to be long ranged, because they can't get away once caught.

Probably yeah. The test mod was something I threw together in less than an hour as a baseline example to test the original suggestion. I definitely didn't put a ton of thought into it. Adding changes such as what ships get what range modifier is easy, so I can make changes along those lines if anyone wants to test out how it feels. Just throw out specifics and I'll change things.

*EDIT* Hah annnd I completely forgot I had set all the vanilla wing's OP to 0 to make it easier to test things in my TC... Corrected that in the test mod DL.

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From here below "fighters" = "all strike craft" just for clarity.

My take on fighter mechanics is still the same: defensive AI + replacement rate mechanic + fast carriers = boring gameplay.

The thing is, there aren't a whole lot of good solutions either, imo. Some that have been suggested before that I remember:

1. Fighter losses generate hard or soft flux for the carrier. (Terrible for hybrid ships and further reinforces the concept of weaponless carriers.)
2. Fighter replacements are limited. (Carriers become missile ships without an autoforge. They no longer have any staying power in a battle, and its still boring to kill all the fighters first.)
3. Buff anti-fighter weapons or nerf fighters. (Could certainly work but at what point do carriers become something the player avoids? We've had past updates where they were pretty useless and spam is an edge case not the standard.)
4. Go back to fighter losses costing supplies. (Campaign drawbacks generally don't work well to balance combat without a lot of other moving parts involved.)
5. Large radius AOE anti-fighter weapons that specialize in eliminating concentrated spam. (Probably the best suggestion imo, but NPC fleets would have to actually have some equipped and yet not enough that once again carriers aren't used.)
6. Various ways of limiting how much an LPC (so essentially the Spark) can be equipped on any one individual carrier - especially small ones like the Drover. (Definitely an interesting idea but what would the details be? What are the cons?)
7. Separate out OP cost of equipping wings to a different resource pool and balance carriers around this. (Variant of 6. that also addresses weaponless carriers. Removes build dynamic of player choosing weapon upgrades at the cost of wing upgrades.)
8. Let replacement rate go all the way to 0%. (Same drawback as 2.)

 - So range is a natural balance lever to try. I agree that some sort of additional balance lever is likely needed. Another one that comes to mind that is moddable would be to vary the rate at which the replacement rate decreases from carrier to carrier.

[intrinsic_parity]

I'm kinda curious, can the initial or maximum replacement rate be modified as well? Carriers with initially fast replacements that fall off vs carriers with slower but steady replacements would be an interesting comparison.

[Retry]

This idea seems interesting.  I think it likely won't make a ton of difference in terms of balance, but I like it conceptually.

I guess you could cap range gains, but... is it really necessary?  As it is, I can count the situations where I could have effectively use >4k range fighters on one hand.  8k fighter range means as much as 16k fighter range to me, which means as much as 1,000,000 range to me: an arbitrarily large number which means I won't have to worry about the prey outrunning my sphere of influence.

7. Separate out OP cost of equipping wings to a different resource pool and balance carriers around this. (Variant of 6. that also addresses weaponless carriers. Removes build dynamic of player choosing weapon upgrades at the cost of wing upgrades.)

Not necessarily.  Another resource pool could allow for a set of hullmods that interact with it.
Ex: Spending OP on a hullmod that (somewhat inefficiently) adds to the Fighter resource pool, or a hullmod that does the opposite (salvages from fighter resource pool to give the ship OP)
Hullmods that add one hangar spot but don't increase the overall fighter resource pool (or even reduces the fighter resource pool), or hullmods that cannibalize a hangar spot in order to increase the fighter resource pool.
etc.

[Morrokain]

I'm kinda curious, can the initial or maximum replacement rate be modified as well? Carriers with initially fast replacements that fall off vs carriers with slower but steady replacements would be an interesting comparison.

The API does not currently support that, no. At least not to my knowledge. The only thing you can do is modify replacement times - and that will also cause the rate to increase/decrease faster as well iirc.

I guess you could cap range gains, but... is it really necessary?  As it is, I can count the situations where I could have effectively use >4k range fighters on one hand.  8k fighter range means as much as 16k fighter range to me, which means as much as 1,000,000 range to me: an arbitrarily large number which means I won't have to worry about the prey outrunning my sphere of influence.

In the test mod as it stands the largest range is 9000 for Thunder on carriers with the max range bonus. So only 1000 more than current vanilla. I think the issue with a very large attack range isn't the carrier or wing's threat to the player but actually finding the carrier - which could get very tedious/annoying if the range is too high and the captain personality is cautious/timid - so the carrier is hugging the edge of the map.

7. Separate out OP cost of equipping wings to a different resource pool and balance carriers around this. (Variant of 6. that also addresses weaponless carriers. Removes build dynamic of player choosing weapon upgrades at the cost of wing upgrades.)

Not necessarily.  Another resource pool could allow for a set of hullmods that interact with it.
Ex: Spending OP on a hullmod that (somewhat inefficiently) adds to the Fighter resource pool, or a hullmod that does the opposite (salvages from resource pool to give OP)
Hullmods that add one hangar spot but don't increase the overall fighter resource pool (or even reduces the fighter resource pool), or hullmods that cannibalize a hangar spot in order to increase the fighter resource pool.
etc.

That's an interesting point I hadn't considered. My concern would be that it would become too mandatory depending on the build - and then end up becoming a resource sink one way or the other. I think it could work, but since its impossible to test it's hard to say.

[Linnis]

Also, do people really like the gameplay of slowly grinding down a carriers replacement rate while it kites 4000u away and then killing the mostly defenseless carrier? To me that is pretty boring: killing the fighters is not exciting, chasing/killing a weak ship after your exhaust its fighters is boring, dying to a swarm of fighters isn't fun, and killing things as a carrier by pressing R is uninteresting. For me, I have carriers in my fleet to defend me from enemy fighters, but I want to actually fight with warships and engage with all the interesting flux/combat mechanics and systems. Extreme ranges just gets rid of most of the interesting parts of combat for me.

I think fighters can (and should) have a lot of other roles besides just 'fly all over and kill everything'. For instance, by definition interceptors are designed to fight off enemy aircraft, not attack enemy ground forces/ships. They might also escort the bombers that do attack ground forces. IMO, bombers should be the primary way that carriers attack other ships from long range. Fighters should be good at killing bombers and some small ships but not good generalist damage dealers. Interceptors should be primarily aimed at killing other fighters and thus are entirely defensive in nature. Some of that might be more an AI suggestion though.

I think both of the problem of carriers fighting at range shouldn't be a problem of leashing fighters to an arbitrary range. For new players or veterans the feeling is simply too vague and not intuitive. For example the current weapon ranges make total sense as they are all based on zoom and screen size. Having fighters leashed like this honestly will feel really cheeky and game-y.

In your second paragraphs you hit the nail on the head. With high end bombers and some other fighters you essentially can kill any ship from a long range. Thus wouldn't the simple solution to seriously limit ALL fighter and bomber's ability to damage armor? This also will not only fix the problem, but also make sense in an thematic way. Like in most space-opera lore fighters are simply there to disable and harass, while bombers that can destroy ships are often depicted just as slow as the larger ships.

Having fighters being leashed also feel horrible gameplay wise. Like the current integration AI will often fly towards the target, then turn around half way, eating all the damage and not doing much.

[Serenitis]

carriers fighting at range shouldn't be a problem of leashing fighters to an arbitrary range.

One possible way of getting around this would be to discard the idea of fighters having a set range, and instead give each one a "flight time" limit.

When a fighter wing launches it starts a countdown, and when that reaches zero, any surviving fighters drop whatever they're doing and return to the carrier.
This would act as both a range cap, and force all fighter types to periodically return to thier carriers. (Essentially PPT but simpler.)
There would also be some minor element of balance in that attacking at longer ranges reduces the time the fighters can attack the target.

Possibly would need to either slow down or stop any timers for fighter wings set to "regroup" to prevent loops of waiting for wings to become available before setting to engage. Maybe.
Even if a carrier has a number of wings set to regroup and moves to attack enemies directly with a group of non-docking fighters, that's at least a soft encouragement to actually arm the carrier somewhat. And any fighters that get shot down will still need to be replaced, so I'm not sure if stopping timers to "regroup" would actually be a problem.

Who knows? Maybe this is just overcomplicating things...

[SafariJohn]

The first Empire Earth had a mechanic like that. Each aircraft had a flight time - when the timer ran out it returned to its airbase. If a bomber dropped its bombs the timer dropped to 0. If you told the aircraft to return the timer dropped to 0.

Doesn't seem like a terrible idea for Starsector. Would let carriers finally call their fighter wings in for repairs.

[pairedeciseaux]

The idea is interesting.

I'd apply a permanent 0.25 fighter range multiplier for Drover in order to "balance" the broken carrier speed... or maybe I'd just nerf the carrier speed? 

Joking aside, I'm not sure it does actually address THE problem. Ok ok, first thing first: I do not claim understanding THE problem nor providing any solution.

I thought there was a consensus on this: one of the main problems WRT fighters is the very high fighter concentration a fleet can have, providing an overwhelming concentration of firepower. Right? In other words the first issue is a scale issue: too much fighters in a fleet = hard to counter force ... with, uhhh, nice fireworks but not so nice gameplay.

My understanding is that some new mechanics (soft caps, ship and fighter performance reduction, ...) are introduced in the next version to reduce the scale of battles in general, the amount of capitals in fleet and in battle, and specifically reduce the scale of fighter presence. I'm not sure about the details. Is that a fact, or have I dreamed the whole thing? If these changes have the desired effects, some more "balancing" could still prove useful, but I'm afraid in the mean time we can only wait and see.

Basically what I'm saying is: in the next version battles will have a smaller scale, so some of the scaling issues we have now shall diminish or disappear, including the firepower provided by fighters.