Talons would be medium sized fighters.
Point defense drones would be small sized. With the drones included, you have 18 types of fighters in all.
Spoiler
broadsword.ship
wasp.ship
warthog.ship
longbow.ship
xyphos.ship
thunder.ship
drone_assault.ship
drone_borer.ship
drone_sensor.ship
drone_pd_midline.ship
dagger.ship
gladius.ship
drone_pd.ship
piranha.ship
mining_drone.ship
trident.ship
talon.ship
drone_terminator.ship
compared to the number of energy, missile, and ballistic weapons:
~/p/s/d/weapons $ ag -l "\"type\": *\"ENERGY\"" | wc
24 24 339
~/p/s/d/weapons $ ag -l "\"type\": *\"BALLISTIC\"" | wc
28 28 368
~/p/s/d/weapons $ ag -l "\"type\": *\"MISSILE\"" | wc
24 24 346
Yeah, it's not so much about there not being enough fighter variety to theoretically support that - as you point out, there is. But they were not at all designed with these categories in mind in the first place, and it doesn't feel like "making it fit" would be a smooth process.
How does this system work with multi-phase battles? Say the enemy retreats but then immediatly regroups and maneuvers to fight again - do carriers get a full (or near full) bar to spam out all their fighters again? Fighting against carrier fleets was crazy annoying when all those fighters were deployed with fresh torpedoes after you wiped them out in the previous battle...
Basically, for anything like that, they work just like weapons.
Looks great as always! Can't wait to see it in action (well, I can, but you know what I mean 
Indeed
Just as a thought, but could Converted Hangars work better as a (pseudo-)weapon? By which I mean they are installed onto hardpoints much like a weapon would be. It'd give a way to nicely add a landing pad or runway sprite, removing the "fighter hammerspace" feel by having an obvious home for them. Also would allow for more significant investment for ships with oversized mounts (looking at you Vigilance) and the option to add more than one.
That'd be troublesome under the hood, and balance-wise it seems problematic as well. A ship having X amount of whatever-size-and-type mounts that these require doesn't mean that ship was meant to have an easier time mounting fighters, right. But that would tie these things together.
Alex, the new replacement for the PD Jammer is wonderful! Thank you for changing it.
Thank
you for getting that conversation started! Much happier with this version of it.
https://gfycat.com/AmbitiousIndelibleEeve
What game is that from? And what's going on with the awfully-similar-looking "field of flares"? Kind of reminds me of flak from Wing Commander: Armada...
Made a thread over in suggestions for further discussion of the Tempest's drone & hypothetical replacement ship system, since that's a bit tangential to the blog post.
Cool, thank you! Keeping an eye on it.
Overall, I like the ideas expressed in the new changes. The devil's truly in the details, however:
1. If a Talon's worth 0, and a Broadsword is worth 8, where does that put the fighters that are actually almost vaguely worth using, like Lightnings?
I think that fighters, in general, should get re-balanced pretty heavily before they're assigned numbers. For quite some time, it's been rather obvious that most fighters simply don't have a distinct role where they're superior and distinguished enough.
Devil's always in the details
I didn't mention it because I thought it'd be kind of assumed, but all the fighter have received extensive balancing changes as part of this. That kind of major revision simply wouldn't work without a major pass or three over the base stats.
In general, the concept of Interceptors is very much realized in the breach in the current build; instead of having some pretty good hard-counter fighters that are rubbish for most other tasks, we have "interceptors" that can't intercept or take real damage vs. general-purpose fighters that don't have significant disadvantages. Thoughts on this: perhaps an "interceptor" has greatly superior speed and a good rate of turn, but cannot kite and has largely fixed-forward weapons, so that they're good for killing individual fighters and perhaps for focus-killing a Frigate, but are pretty much junk otherwise, because of PD?
Interceptors are indeed faster now (as are most/all other fighters); the Talon has Swarmers in addition to the Vulcan. The Wasp is already pretty decent in an anti-fighter role, and has the added benefit of not costing crew.
I'd also like to see a new type of Fighter that is specifically intended for scouting; this is something that's a distinctive role IRL.
I'm not sure how that'd work, given that there's no way to tell fighters to do that. Can't target empty space.
2. I'd really like to see shield-less fighters be rarer and have more distinctive reasons for existing at all, largely because of how moot this entire part of the game becomes if you have enough Tac Lasers around. This is a design relic from the early days where shield-less ships were much more common that I think should be addressed.
Most bombers have shields or can drop their payloads off anyway. Heavy fighters, well, it's their job to get shot at.
3. The biggest core-concept thing that I didn't see distinctly addressed was "will Fighters still consume Crew at a rate that makes them fundamentally un-attractive?".
This came up a couple of times here, but basically: it's capped at about 2/3rds of the carrier's crew, and is non-linear with fighter losses. Plus I'd imagine fighter-related skills would help mitigate it. Definitely something that's on my radar; don't want it to be either completely trivial or crippling.
4. I like the idea of the carrier controlling the Wings very much; I like the burst-launch idea very much. Here the details are going to matter considerably, however; if it's a generic "generation score" and it roughly corresponds to the carrier's total power... what's to stop a player from opti-maxing around the best fighters that can be burst-launched, in terms of alpha? Why bother having 6 Wings, for example, when you can just have 2 that are really good that you can regen at will?
On the converse side, how this gets balanced for the one-Wing carriers is a bit tricky. Basically, both the burst rate and the OP costs make for a weird mechanic. "Oh, I can't have a Gemini with a decent Wing, because OPs say it's not viable" doesn't really sound all that Fun; it'll tend to funnel players even more than how it is now, where a lot of the carriers don't make sense to use.
Not actually sure what you mean here! There's no real benefit to only having 2 out of 6 wings in terms of how quickly they're launched or re-launched. "Burst-launch"?
This is probably not the place for this, but... currently I'm using a script to spawn a drone wing when a specific weapon is fired. One of the weapons using the script is a drone rack, which only has 1 ammo and gets you a very disposable wing of drones (actually a fighter wing).
The question would be... since the spawned drones would not have an attached carrier to get orders from, would that mean that they would attack (a target at random?) and then flee the battle, or maybe just flee?. I'm not worried about not being able to set targets, I would even prefer it that way, but I would like for them to just be set to fight until death instead of fleeing after a while.
It *should* "just work". Fighters that were deployed old-style instead of launched from a carrier should behave mostly the same way as before, but would never be able to get replacements from carriers and would not be able to be given orders.
+1 for this, hope this update would reduce the chance of chasing a Heron across the map.
With the Heron having a "COMBAT" tag, that shouldn't be an issue, right? IIRC that's in the current release already, isn't it?
On the fence about actuially commenting this, but I figure why not.
How will this work out with fleet limits, and preformance?
After all, where as a fighter-heavy fleet now would have 10 of it's 25 slots for fighters, all the slots will hve carriers instead, each with 1-3+ flight decks, plus any flight decks the other ships have. You're adding so many entities and projectiles to the mix XD
I was personally thinking of a 25-ship fleet of dedicated carriers, with nothing but Broadswords, just to get The MYSTICAL SPACE FLARE TYPHOON.
Asking the hard-hitting questions, I see
I did do a fair bit of optimizing as part of this, but yes, an Astral with a full complement is definitely more load on the system than an Onslaught, and there's just no getting away from that. On my PC, 3 Astrals vs 3 Astrals runs at 60 fps, but only just.
The saving grace is that dedicating entirely to carriers shouldn't be particularly effective - all hammer and no anvil, so to speak.
Edit: just tested this out, and yeah, dips to about 10% idle when the fighter swarms meet in the middle for the first time, but stays at a steady 60%.
Spoiler
This doesn't sound good to me at all.
Infinite ammo for weapons. Infinite fighters. Forced "gimmicks" (the broadsword) to make it work.
I do like fighters being assigned to specific ships, but loosing that ship than also means loosing all of those fighters, even if the fighters are in space and there's other carriers that can take them on?
Fighters not costing crew is also BS. They are drones then, not fighters.
If you want to keep casualties down, you can have a chance of ejecting (that can be further increased with modules and skills) that every time a fighter is destroyed rolls to see if the pilot survived. Those that did are returned to the crew at the end of the fight.
Not to mention, the though of simply pumping out fighters ad infinitum is stupid in itself. From what magical pocketspace does the material and crew come from? Logistics and attrition loose meaning.
Why not handle it like real carriers? They Ready groups* and launch speed. You might carry 100 fighters, but you can't launch them all at once. There is a limit to how fast your carrier can prepare and launch a fighter (group).
This alone makes interceptors more viable, since they can create a window for the bombers.
*
Ready Five, also referred to as Alert Five in the film Top Gun, is a condition of high alert for aircraft crews on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, in which they are ready to launch within five minutes. Fighter aircraft are placed on the steam catapult complete with flight crew, armament, and fuel, ready to defend the carrier battle group from any unforeseen threat.
Flight crews sometimes dread being assigned Ready Five, as they can be ordered to remain there for hours on end, in addition to the high probability of being sent into combat on short notice.
My potential response was mostly covered by Gothars (and Tartiflette), but just want to make sure you didn't miss the "decoy flares" change to Broadswords, at the beginning of the reply here;
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=11293.msg191800#msg191800(Before that, I could maybe see the PD jammer being called a "gimmick", but after, very much not.)
(Why not use flux instead of a new meter? That’d be nice in theory, but would require fine-grained controls over which fighter wings get replacements, much like weapon autofire can be controlled. This, I think, is too much in terms of control complexity, especially as a carrier still has weapons to manage.)
So, I have to ask: Why is that?
Would it not be sufficient when replacing fighters on "engage" would produce hard flux, while replacing fighters on "regroup" wouldn't? Venting might toggle and lock "regroup" for a time. And a higher hard flux level would then reduce replacement speed.
While it would of course be tactically advantageous (if too stressful) to be able to control individual wings, the same is also true for the current system. And if that control is not necessary for "replacement rate", why would it be for flux?
My thinking is that flux is a highly-developed mechanic that's being interacted with in detailed ways by the player, so there's an expectation that anything that generates flux is under their control. Just an on/off toggle for all fighters would - I think - feel like it's not going to the same level of detail as all the other player-flux interactions are.
Then, there's a question of how you would balance it. The Condor's flux stats are abysmal. The Mora is a combat carrier, so its flux stats are alright, but it also needs to fire guns. The Odyssey would probably not even notice the drain from its one fighter deck. You could do some fancy calculations like a fighter bay consumes X% of the dissipation rate divided by a "base" number of bays for the ship class (so, the Odyssey's bay would consume less percentage-wise than the Gemini's) but that's quite the hidden mechanic. It would have to be explained, the numbers displayed somewhere, and it wouldn't really make much sense that the same fighter wing on a Condor takes less flux than on an Astral, say.
Basically, I'm not at all sure how it could get balanced without turning very complicated, turning some ships into flux monsters, and/or ruining the "combined arms" nature of other ships.
The advantage of using hard flux (besides not introducing a new stat) would be that a carrier could be slowed in it's fighter production just by shooting at it's shields. I feel that is a mechanic that might be needed to allow ships that are not equipped for anti-fighter combat to help against fighter heavy fleets, without the need to be able to outright disable a carrier.
The hard flux level could still be made a limiter on the replacement rate, if that proved necessary. That'd really mess up combat carriers, though.
How about disabling flight decks randomly if the hull/armor itself receives EMP damage? Reasoning as above, it would be nice if fighter production could be slowed by attacking the carrier.
Once again, combat carriers! And non-combat carriers getting shot at to the degree that their weapons etc are being disabled seems like it's a bit past the point where it makes sense to put in balancing mechanics; whoever is dealing this much damage already managed to deal with the fighters by then.
Given how low fighters' flux stats are, I am not sure shields would help non-bombers. Current Xyphos has about 1000 (worse than Gladius but beside the point), without shield, it can fire its pulse laser a few times. If it takes hits for hard flux on the shield, it loses the flux war and cannot do anything.
Just a side note here: fighters with shields have a built-in mod that makes their weapons not generate flux. Too difficult to balance otherwise.
Thinking of removing the flux bar (and replacing it w/ "shld" for fighters with shields), actually. It's not particularly interesting information for fighters.
Regarding launching successful attacks, it's a combination of speed and bombers hanging out behind their carrier, so they naturally arrive a bit later. Mods will need to be careful in designing their fighters, yes, but matching speeds properly etc is part of creating an effective carrier loadout rather than a problem.
doesn't that really limit the variety of viable loadouts? like "to improve the effectiveness of bomber X, combine with fighter Y, because their speeds work together". sounds to me like something that would have a right and several wrong ways of doing things, rather than giving interesting choices for combinations.
It's not quite that sensitive to minute speed differences, so, no
It's more of a "if you try to use Talons to tank for Piranhas, you'll soon find out that wasn't a good idea". Speed is only part of that, though - for example, a fast fighter could work out anyway if it was exceptionally tough.
And, really, there have to be bad ideas in order for other ideas to be good in comparison.
looks to me like both the loadout slots and the in-battle icons (with a little slide to the left) would have room for up to eight wings, without having to adjust any other UI sections.
There isn't actual room to the left, though - ship names/classes/designations can extend pretty far at times and infringe on that.
sidenote: i really appreciate both the indepth blog posts (including details on stuff that would be a bad idea or doesn't end up working out, i find those thought processes really interesting) and all the answers to our countless questions/suggestions/complaints! =)
It's my pleasure Appreciate all the feedback, suggestions, an, uh, complaints.I think that if you were going to have something like different size slots it'd be more like Bomber/Fighter/Drone maybe even just Fighter/Drone slots, assuming of course that drones become LPCs.
Hmm, yeah, something like that could be workable. It's a more natural division than by "size". No real reason to do at this point, but could potentially come in handy if there's a need to limit/specialize carriers like that. Right now, there aren't so many of them that this would be warranted.
