Morrokain, I apologise if you feel like I am being antagonistic. Perhaps "inelegant" isn't the exact right word, but I did try to use words like complicated, simplier, to easier to understand afterwards to explain what I meant. If for example, you view fighter weapons as too powerful, instead of have fighter weapons do half damage, causing a visual discreptancy for what is occuring on the battle, why not simply half the number of weapons on that fighter, or change a dual light machine gun into a single machine gun, or halve it's rate of fire as with some pre existing missile weapons, would that not keep the visual feedback and have the exact same aim? After doing that, if for some reason you want these fighter weapons to do just as much damage to other fighter type fighters, you can half their HP/shield. Sure fighters will die faster against weapons on ships, but that's also ties into that some people also view some fighters as being tough, so it stands as a suggestion on its own. Afterall, in the end pilums didn't get "solved" by hard to communicate visual discreptancies or with a change in AI programming, but by lowering their HP.
Anyways, all this belies that the most dangerous anti-frigate fighter isn't any of these fighters like spark or thunder or talon spam , but is the Longbow and Dagger. Of course that is somewhat balanced out that it costs much more OP than just about every other fighter.
Thank you my friend.
And thank you for the details of your concerns. That helps a lot for me to try and help solve them.
Sure fighters will die faster against weapons on ships, but that's also ties into that some people also view some fighters as being tough, so it stands as a suggestion on its own.
Consider two things:
1) The AI changes I'm advocating will mean fighters/interceptors are often not actually fighting the ship- they are protecting bombers or engaging other bombers elsewhere. That alone reduces their anti-ship threat even to frigates. But that certainly is not enough.
2) If fighters are too tough, I get that simply weakening defensive stats would help, but:
causing a visual discreptancy for what is occuring on the battle
If this is your primary concern with built in fighter weapons causing less damage (they would have (Fighter) after them or a completely new name to prevent confusion with warship weapons), then I have a potential solution that seems to convey the message viscerally that is also not very dev intensive. I'll get to that in a second.
Firstly though, I think the immediate objection to implementing separate, weaker weapon statistics for built in fighter weapons is conveying this information to the player when planning builds in the refit screen or trying to gather tactical info when examining an enemy fleet. Iirc, I think Alex plans to let fighter weapons be visible in the UI so that the stat details can be seen when planning builds, etc. Would that help?
But, for the idea of viscerally intuitive combat learning, all you have to do to convey that is reduce bullet size by 50% (It's a bit of extra work because you would copy paste the projectile files of each fighter weapon from their counterparts' projectile files, modify their size stats or reduce the size of their bullet sprites, and link them back to the fighter variant of the weapon.) This lets the player know in an intuitive way that "ok, fighters use weaker weapons than warships and basically can't do much to them as a result"- yet: That is only ok as long as fighters and interceptors focus upon their proper targets- bombers and assault craft. If not, they become virtually useless and mass bombers will become the only viable strategy.
why not simply half the number of weapons on that fighter, or change a dual light machine gun into a single machine gun, or halve it's rate of fire as with some pre existing missile weapons, would that not keep the visual feedback and have the exact same aim?
I'm not sure this will be enough to reduce the effectiveness of mass fighter spam. Maybe, but conceptually it does nothing to really solve the complexity of that problem. Yes, it might be enough if both that nerf occurs and their is also a reduction in defense stats, but if the AI changes are not also added into the equation, it will only translate to: Never use fighters unless they have flares to cover bombers.
I don't think that's what we want. That reduces all the variety of that strike craft role to a single ship system. That would be a shame, imo.
On the other hand, limited ammo, or:
Well. You can also remove flux dissipation on fighters. Like, entirely. No dissipation - no staying power. Fighters are forced to return for recharging.
Really the same thing but a different way of implementing it- that would help in the concern quoted below when combining it with the concept of slow and vulnerable carriers that can only defend against minor swarm threats through their assault weaponry or defend against enemy strike craft with their PD- and even then not indefinitely. Battlecarriers can go "toe-to-toe" with a hullsize lower or a lighter variant of the same warship role (by hullsize). This, again, helps to solve the problem of:
The other half is that most bombers and many fighters are a practically limitless supply of dangerous missiles, that would otherwise be severely limited as regular ship-weapons for the same OP.
So, why does all of this extra effort and detail matter? Back to:
Sure fighters will die faster against weapons on ships
Are you familiar with the "butterfly effect"? This kind of effect in game design terms represents that concept. We have already discussed this, actually, in Swartz' concern that increasing PD effectiveness will nerf missiles and cause only more and more cascading changes to get the balance back into equilibrium. I'll give a concrete example from my own lessons of trying this idea out in order to better explain my thought process.
Scenario:
The enemy carrier is screened by two destroyers and I have two destroyers available for my defensive screen as well. I have a superior advantage in fighters, while my enemy has only a single fighter wing and has then dedicated the rest of their focus to bombers. The engagement begins:
If fighters are just weak to ships in general as far as defense is concerned, then the clash in the center when the two waves meet is irrelevant according to the current system. Let's say each carrier has 4 bays. 1 Fighter:3 Bombers vs 2 Fighters:2 Bombers.
The fighters take potshots and minor losses as they pass each other and obviously the 2:1 ratio means that my fighters probably fare better in the exchange. Does that matter, however, when they meet the two destroyers guns and get obliterated? Now my two bomber wings get through the destroyers, but- my enemy had
three bomber wings. Let's say that, again, when passing by each other, my fighter advantage reduced one bomber wing by half (That's not even guaranteed considering the variance of distance between the two forces. If my fighters happened to meet the bombers at the enemy destroyers, for instance, they would have no effect whatsoever and would be a complete waste of OP- buildwise.) Even still in the case that does not happen, my enemy has the "bomber advantage" in the end and likely does more damage to me- even though I tried to better specialize in "anti-bomber" tactics at the expense of less strike capability. It completely kills fighters' viability to simply nerf them like that. More complexity is likely a requirement in this case to solve the important nuances- but that doesn't mean it has to be unintuitive or even necessarily a massive dev effort not withstanding the unknowns.
I want to be clear, however, that this
concept doesn't mean stat changes aren't warranted in specific cases, such as:
Anyways, all this belies that the most dangerous anti-frigate fighter isn't any of these fighters like spark or thunder or talon spam , but is the Longbow and Dagger.
I can't speak to that. Those are fixed damage strike craft, conceptually, so adjustments there are not the focus of my concerns. You may be valid there. What I am debating is that stat changes in and of themselves won't be enough to solve the underlying problem when considering the above complications.
Afterall, in the end pilums didn't get "solved" by hard to communicate visual discreptancies or with a change in AI programming, but by lowering their HP.
See, I don't think they were "solved" at all- at least not in the concept of mass spam. I think their mass spam was nerfed by HP reductions at the expense of their overall viability compared to other missiles. Their only competitive edge at this point is a much larger ammunition storage and regeneration of that ammunition for increased staying power. See the comparisons?
You can't leverage that balancing mechanism against fighters because they all regenerate.
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Topic: Balancing fighter swarms with out nerfing fighters (Read 21693 times)