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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Fighter bay sizes and/or types.  (Read 3600 times)

Grievous69

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Re: Fighter bay sizes and/or types.
« Reply #30 on: May 14, 2020, 05:28:55 AM »

I've already shared my thoughts on a similar subject so I'm just going to repeat myself. Fighters are too strong currently so carriers have little choice in build customization, just get best fighters and hullmods for them, maybe some PD and that's it, every non battlecarrier is the same. Some were arguing that the whole point of carriers is, well, carrying fighters and having a small number of weapons. But why do they even have weapon mounts then? Just give them some built-in PD and there ya go. Obviously that would be pretty boring, and it's almost the way it is right now. I have no idea if different bay sizes would help with this, but I'd try anything that has a chance of making carriers less one dimensional.

Also whoever called Odyssey a battlecarrier is on some weird substances, 45 DP for 2 bays, cmon.
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Megas

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Re: Fighter bay sizes and/or types.
« Reply #31 on: May 14, 2020, 06:17:51 AM »

@ Grievous69:  Totally agreed.  Weapon mounts on older carriers are an artifact from when fighters were ships and carriers spent OP on guns.  Even on the newer carriers, I suspect Alex either expected the old gameplay to apply or fiercely adhered to his guidelines (he considers mounts bonus OP, even if empty mounts make ships look dumb).  I want OP for guns be a good choice again.

Best fighters cost at least 8 OP.  (Wasps are occasionally useful.)  While fighters have a huge range of OP cost, it can be significantly narrowed if the pirate-tier junk and the overpriced (Dagger clone) Tridents were cut out.

Drover, no guns at all.
Heron, dual flak cannon only.  I tried classic blaster or HVD loadouts, but they were sub-optimal.
Mora, token cheap ballistics (vulcans and light mortars), maybe 2 OP Hammers or Reapers.
Astral, five heavy burst lasers or less.
Legion, outfitted like Dominator with fighters.  Something that can brawl!
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Mordodrukow

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Re: Fighter bay sizes and/or types.
« Reply #32 on: May 14, 2020, 06:42:31 AM »

How about making fighters spam less viable? May be fighter collisions, bigger flak splash etc. Then if a fleet has several carriers, it could be better to fit some wings and some weapons instead of 100% wing loadout.
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Megas

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Re: Fighter bay sizes and/or types.
« Reply #33 on: May 14, 2020, 06:57:01 AM »

Another thing:  In the first 0.8a release, Talons were 0 OP, and their Swarmers always fired two Swarmers per shot (no recharge).  May have had a bit more armor or hull too.  Carrier skills were stronger too.  They were as powerful as 8 OP fighters at the time, and that was great.  I could outfit carriers with guns and 0 OP Talons and they worked well.  Too bad most other fighters at that release looked underpowered compared to them.  (Why pay 8 OP for a fighter when Talons could do the same job for free.)  Of course, that release had Sparks with two burst lasers instead of one (and the current one is still very strong), and Lux fired IR pulse lasers twice as fast, and Warthogs had less range (but were overpowered, just not as much as Remnant fighters).

Now that I need to pay OP for good fighters, I do not bother with guns on dedicated carriers (except Legion).
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Shad

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Re: Fighter bay sizes and/or types.
« Reply #34 on: May 14, 2020, 10:24:31 AM »

Re: fighter bay size.

I personally don't like the pre 0.8 fighters for reasons explained on this thread before. But I do see the point of the limitations of the current system.

However, I feel that adding fighter bay sizes will complicate things without fully resolving the problems. So I feel it would be better to go and take the idea to its logical conclusion:

  • Merge all fighter bays into a combined deck size and let players build their CAG on a per fighter basis. This will remove the unnecessary binary choices. So a ship which previously had a limited choice of 2 wings can now chooose and pick and mix their deck with half a 6-10 ffighters.
  • Make different fighters cost different amounts of deck size. Low level drones - size 1. Fighters - 2. Heavy fighters and long range interceptors - 3. Light bombers - 4-5. Torpedo bombers - 5-7.
  • This will make it possible to add more variety and better balance to wings. Currently if we want a cheap ship with a few drones, we must use built-ins or built in CH, since otherwise a free fighter bay is OP. But with having consolidated deck size, you can just make the ship have a small size deck is simpy will not be able to fit bombers. Or on the opposite end, if we want to emphasise that the Astral is geared for bomber straikes without giving it the ability to make super large fighter wings, we can gie it a built in that reduces bomber cost.
  • Hull mods could be developped beyond the current CH. CH could come in several varieties, from cheap drone bays which should come with minimal penalties to full-blown flight decks.
  • This will give more options for building fighter wings. Right now if I want a support fighter, I need to dedicate af full wing to it, which is not always worth it on a player ship. So having the ability to make a wing of say 6 fighters, 1 support and 2 close range interceptors would be nice.
  • Let build their wings by assigning planes to weapons groups 6-7-8-9-0. And obviously the ability to engage/recall individual wings.
  • Also add an order to wings to "hide" inside the ship, protected from enemy fire.
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bobucles

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Re: Fighter bay sizes and/or types.
« Reply #35 on: May 14, 2020, 03:23:27 PM »

I don't know about making half a dozen sizes of strike craft. Frankly the only issues with fighter craft come from one or two types, *coughsparkscough*. The rest works fine.
There aren't many strike craft to choose from, so it doesn't really make sense to have much more than 2 size types. If there was a "light" and "heavy" craft type, then all it means is a carrier can't go full ham on one craft type. They'd go all in on two.

intrinsic_parity

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Re: Fighter bay sizes and/or types.
« Reply #36 on: May 14, 2020, 06:32:00 PM »

My drovers usually have ballistic PD and maybe 2 sabots or just empty missile mounts. My herons almost always have a graviton and some PD. 1000 range beams are more to help the carrier AI stay away from enemies, but I think they also contribute fairly well when you have other ships (eagles and falcons) who also have beams. I don't have trouble fitting those weapons, and I usually fill probably half of the mounts. My astrals are the most bare bones because I like to fit tridents on them, usually some burst PD and a graviton (again for AI range management). Astral is definitely the worst offender for having way too many mounts and not enough OP because it wants all the best bombers. Ships that use sparks or other cheap interceptors are generally fine on OP IMO.

I think if multiply types of fighters were implemented and carriers restricted to certain types of fighters, there would have to be new fighters and carriers to fill out those roles and fighters/carriers in general would have to be rebalanced. The whole point of something like that (to me) is to allow for more diversity of fighters and carriers at the expense of having less diversity in load outs. It's like taking the choice from the loadout design to the ship purchase with the idea being that you can make sure the ship choice is an interesting decision because you have more constraints to work with. Alternatively you can find some other way of making the load out choice more interesting (adding flux cost to fighters etc). In any case, the choice right now isn't interesting and I'm not convinced that the choice in the load out can be made interesting with only OP cot and number of bays as balancing levers.
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