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[Karmashock]

I second this idea. I don't think fighters should consume fleet points. Rather given ships should provide hanger space and the fighters should consume that instead.

I actually don't know why we have fleet points at all. I understand why they don't want you to spawn 1000 cruisers at once but I don't see why I can't have 1000 cruisers in the fleet.

You could have ships that are very heavy in point defense in case the enemy has a lot of fighters or others that are better at chasing down enemy frigates. Where as some ships are slow but well suited for dealing with enemy capital ships. It's hard to customize your load out when there are some battles that give you a larger fleet cap then there are fleet points for unless of course you want to start paying a huge supply penalty.

I don't know. Maybe have two classifications in the fleet. You could have the active and the auxiliary fleet and they would be linked but the auxiliaries would not be allowed to enter a given battle for the first sixty seconds or even the first couple minutes. After that, you could add them. That way the primary fleet contains ships that you know you're going to want in the fight where as the auxiliaries could be larger and more flexible.

[BillyRueben]

I second this idea. I don't think fighters should consume fleet points. Rather given ships should provide hanger space and the fighters should consume that instead.

I actually don't know why we have fleet points at all. I understand why they don't want you to spawn 1000 cruisers at once but I don't see why I can't have 1000 cruisers in the fleet.

Both of those suggestions would make the game entirely too easy.

I don't know. Maybe have two classifications in the fleet. You could have the active and the auxiliary fleet and they would be linked but the auxiliaries would not be allowed to enter a given battle for the first sixty seconds or even the first couple minutes. After that, you could add them. That way the primary fleet contains ships that you know you're going to want in the fight where as the auxiliaries could be larger and more flexible.

That is already how it works. You can only deploy so many ships from your fleet at once, so you only spawn the ships you need immediately, until you capture some of the control points on the map, then you can spawn your more specialized ships.

[Dreyven]

I second this idea. I don't think fighters should consume fleet points. Rather given ships should provide hanger space and the fighters should consume that instead.

But that would make carriers way too strong..
it would give you the carrier and the fighters for the FP of the carrier

yes, you could increase the FP of all carriers by the amount of hangar space they have
but this would make attack ships that just happen to have a flight deck and hangar space too expensive to just use as attack ships

also you would need to define (pre battle) what carrier has which fighters and you could only bring them into battle via the carrier...

and unlaunched fighters would get destroyed if the carrier get's destroyed

[StahnAileron]

and unlaunched fighters would get destroyed if the carrier get's destroyed

This happens anywa now. If you happen to kill a flight-decked vessel while it has fighters docked, the fighter die with it. Personally, I find that makes sense.

I'd rolled the idea of making fighters "weapons" for carriers to "mount" in my head for a little while now:

Carrier-capable vessels would have 2 stats: Launch bays and Hangar Space. Launch Bays would be how many wings they can "equip". Hangar Space would be the max FP cost of fighter they could handle. Also, a carrier-capable vessel would have it FP cost adjusted depending on the fighter complement it's carrying. So for example:

Astral has 50 Hangar Space (in-game accuarte right now.) For the sake of this idea, let's say we give it 6 Launch Bays (x2 the flight deck number for convenience). So now I can up to 6 wings worth 50 FP in total. Do I outfit it high tech wings, reducing my max wing count (granted, in this example, the worst case is a max of 5 out of the 6 wings available) or a bunch of lower tech wings to have a full complement and a lower total FP cost to bring the carrier out? (With the Astral current in-games stats, 22FP would be a bit high for my idea, so I'd lower it to like 15 just for the Astral itself, then add fighter FP cost on top. The Astral itself is a fire support vessel alone.)

Anyway, I gave this idea a lot of thought and honestly, it doesn't work. Not without completely overhauling the current Carrier/Fighter system. That's why I never bothered to mention it here, in fact. It would complicate the system more than it is now while adding more work and revision to the system at the same time. I mean, MAYBE if you change the fighter FP cost to OP costs instead would my idea kinda work. Seriously, though, I'd rather see the game in complete form before I start complaining about gameplay mechanics. (I'll readily complain about UI issues though ^_~) I'm willing to wait and see the devs' plans and vision for the game first before trying to shoehorn any ideas I have at them. I mean, not all the gameplay mechanics have been implemented yet, so it's not like we're seeing the whole picture now anyway, right?

[NikolaiLev]

Fighters are ridiculously useful and powerful as they are, so there has to be much care taken not to buff them.  This idea would seem fine, but honestly I can't think of any way this would work out.

One thing we could do is make it so you NEED to have "launch bays" in order to field fighters at all.  That is, ala the poster above, fighters are like weapons with OP costs instead of FP costs.  This would result in a nerf to fighters, which honestly might not be so bad.  You couldn't just throw in fighter squadrons alongside your armed to the teeth line of cruisers to cover your weaknesses.

Flight decks would still prohibit the amount of fighters you can repair and rearm in the field.  Launch bays merely dictate what you can bring into the battle at all.  You now MUST have a carrier to field fighters.

This is a huge change to gameplay balance though.  I think this should be saved only if it's decided fighters are too much of a problem.  You can field a single carrier ship and supply a huge swath of fighters and bombers, do we want that to happen?  If not, this idea ought to be considered.

[Mattk50]

any idea that fixes the problems with fighters being weird needs to let fighters operate in fleets and on the battlefield without a carrier on the field, this is what the devs really wanted to maintain.

Here you can read the reasoning for the current fighter system and the thought that went into it. It seems like the reasoning for the odd and somewhat wonky way fighters work right now is to give carriers something to do, as, if fighters didn't need carriers on the field there would be no reason for them at all, but they want to maintain the whole "able to deploy without a carrier" thing.

Then theres the thing about multiple flight decks, it really is somewhat pointless to have more than 1 flight deck on the field right now, so if we could knock that out too that would be optimal.



I'd reduce hangar capacity on most things that aren't carriers, maybe even reduce some of the carriers. the amount of extra hangars even the most fighter heavy fleet ends up with is way over the top, so it does sort of invalidate the idea of dedicated carriers to a degree. Next i'd say that carriers cant regenerate lost ships even with extra supplies, and say that landing a fighter on a carrier frees up fleet points, allowing you to deploy another fighter as soon as you land one for re-arming/repairing. i'd also make the time it takes to redeploy fighters much longer

You'd still be able to deploy fighters from off screen if you didn't have a ship with a flight deck (or if you didnt deploy your fight deck ship), this makes the flight deck benefit a place to rearm and repair to a degree but a place to launch fighters in the middle of combat, first of all. The flgiht deck would probably also have to be given a much longer re-arm time to justify having multiple flight decks



Another possibility (could be an alternative or both used together) that would really amplify the power of having more than 1 flight deck is the possibility that each fighter wing would get a spare number of fighters based on how many flight decks were on the field. lets say, you have a single odyssey. Each one of your wasp wings would be able to return and relaunch up to 6 individual fighters, while multiple flight decks would be able to launch up to 12, or even 18. If this is implemented i would make it so that if the wing is destroyed it doesn't actually count as destroyed until you launch all the spares, as one of the wonky things is that the whole fighter wing would be lost forever if you didn't get half a drone back. the justification could just be that the fleet point cost has a lot to do with interlinking of ship communications, systems, and data or something, which would explain why you cant just have all the wings that are in storage with spare pilots on the field. its just the FP system in a way.



One other thing is that i dont think crew losses are taken into account mid-battle for fighters. If fighters are being sent out then flying back and rebuilding themselves, it should be noted that each time it does that you'd be losing lots of crew. right now it just seems like it calculates it based on the health of the wing at the end of the battle, which of course doesnt make sense because you can just repair before the battle ends and not lose any crew.

[Karmashock]

Both of those suggestions would make the game entirely too easy.

Only if you didn't make the enemy tougher.   

No one ever thinks about things constructively. It's always "that sucks" but never why or "you could make that better if you did this thing"... Come on.

Lets say for the sake of argument that we gave people more ships to play with in a given engagement or change the load out as described. Don't you think you could have the enemy throw more ships at you or more complex enemy configurations?



If you change ANYTHING it upsets balance. ANYTHING. When you argue against things that change balance you're really saying "you changed something." I know. I just changed it. But we can rebalance it with that change.

Just play a little devil's advocate with the idea.   

[BillyRueben]

Both of those suggestions would make the game entirely too easy.

No one ever thinks about things constructively. It's always "that sucks" but never why or "you could make that better if you did this thing"... Come on.

Bad ideas can't always be salvaged. If fighters didn't cost any FP and only took up hanger space, you would either have fleets made up of entirely carriers and fighters, or entirely out of everything else.

If there was no fleet point limitation at all, it would be WAY too easy for a player to amass an untouchable fleet.

There is no fix for these ideas. They are bad. Sorry.

[KDR_11k]

My issue with carriers is that a high number of flight decks doesn't seem useful right now, the one deck of a Venture class can repair a bunch of wings in sequence since the process doesn't take long and the wings spend most of their time in actual combat so I haven't felt a need to get something like an Astral. Maybe if you field the carrier and spend the rest of your deployment FP on fighters you could need more decks but that would leave you with little flexibility if the enemy fields ships that aren't really vulnerable to fighters. As it is I'd rather bring something like a Venture or Odyssey than an Astral.

[Karmashock]

From what I've seen all ships larger then frigates have hanger space they just don't have the ability to repair ships in the middle of combat.

So... not sure what you're talking about.  

Work harder to salvage the idea. Seriously, imagine for a moment that this was happening. Period. It was happening and you couldn't stop it.

You have problems with it? How would you fix it under standing that it would be in the game?


You're not even taking the idea seriously before rejecting it.

[PCCL]

lemme take a shot at it:

What if a carrier's FP cost increases depending on what fighters you taking?
example:
Example Class Light Carrier costs 10 FP to deploy, when carrying a talon wing it costs about 13 points to deploy (about because it can be adjusted for balance) and when carrying 3 talon wings it costs about 19 points (again can be adjusted for balance)

How about if a carrier can only launch so many depending on the FP you have? maybe another value for fighters:
example:
Example Class Light Carrier costs 10 FP and carries 30 FP of fighters, when you have 20 FP you can only deploy 10 FP of those fighters with the carrier on field

example2:
Example Class Light Carrier has 30 HP (hangar point) when full, your fleet has 100 FP when full. Thus if you have 33 FP at the beginning of the battle, the carrier can deploy the same ratio (i e: 10) of fighters, if you have 50 you can deploy 15, 66 for 20 etc. etc.

hope the above was clear as I am severely sleep deprived right now

EDIT: maybe just nerf other ships' hangar capacity and wait as the problem solves itself when multi-system is implemented and less and less happen in one system... carriers would be necessary then...

Also... imo it's not a good idea to tell others to work harder right before assuming they didn't take the idea seriously (which they have the right to without so much as a glance from anyone else) and accusing them of it...

[KDR_11k]

Perhaps for every flight deck you bring you're allowed to bring one free fighter squadron (that would fit into the hangar of the ships with the flight decks). Maybe some strong coupling between the carriers and the free fighters so that those carriers are weak points and if you use a junk carrier to get a hightech fighter for free you risk losing the fighter if the carrier is assassinated. Maybe the free fighters could be stationed on the carrier and stay close to it to represent the carrier, not the fleet admiral, being in command of the things. So if the carrier is lost the fighters retreat automatically. The fighters could even get boosted stats by saying they operate in some sort of short range mode that burns through consumables faster because they can afford to, being so close to their carrier.

[BillyRueben]

Still, some of my biggest problems with fighters being "attached" to carriers are:
A. What if I don't want to field any carriers or ships with hanger bays? For example, if I wanted to field a few Thunders to capture points really early, I don't want to spend the FP to bring my carrier in to the mix when I don't even expect the Thunder wings to get in to any heavy combat to begin with.

B. Carriers are already big targets of opportunity (except for maybe the Venture). In reality you would launch all of your fighters out of your ships before combat so that you didn't have all of your eggs in one basket. Why give the enemy the chance to knock out a carrier and all of its fighter compliment in one explosion?

As for the worthless multiple flight decks, couldn't having multiple flight decks lower the amount of supplies it takes to repair a fighter wing? Or, you could just double the repair rate of fighters to begin with.

[KDR_11k]

I meant that in addition to the normal fighter mechanics, not as a replacement.

[PCCL]

Still, some of my biggest problems with fighters being "attached" to carriers are:
A. What if I don't want to field any carriers or ships with hanger bays? For example, if I wanted to field a few Thunders to capture points really early, I don't want to spend the FP to bring my carrier in to the mix when I don't even expect the Thunder wings to get in to any heavy combat to begin with.

B. Carriers are already big targets of opportunity (except for maybe the Venture). In reality you would launch all of your fighters out of your ships before combat so that you didn't have all of your eggs in one basket. Why give the enemy the chance to knock out a carrier and all of its fighter compliment in one explosion?

As for the worthless multiple flight decks, couldn't having multiple flight decks lower the amount of supplies it takes to repair a fighter wing? Or, you could just double the repair rate of fighters to begin with.

A: How about fighters can only hang out on the battlefield for so long without going to carriers for refuel? so ur thunders can cap the points and stay there, but when they go bingo fuel (only consume fuel when moving ofc) they have to go back or risk getting stranded (basically permanent flameout, maybe still recoverable but useless for the rest of the battle). This can come in two varieties:

1, status quo mechanics with the fuel system to increase carrier usage
2, carriers have attached squadrons that they service, unattached ones have to go off-map before fuel runs out.


B: IMO carriers really aren't, especially compared to how they are IRL... I could really do with a bit more valuable carriers...