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[woodsmoke]

This may be an edge case but it was frustrating enough I'd like to understand why it happened if it's "working as intended."

I'm running a relatively small wolfpack fleet; medusa flagship, 2 each hammerheads and enforcers, a sniper/suppression sunder, tempest and two lashers - all with aggressive officers. I also have two herons, each with three spark wings, for the explicit purpose of countering enemy fighters. Had just jumped into the fringe of a system with pirate activity and set about taking on the four fleets present. I was obviously heavily outnumbered but, between loadouts, officer skills and S mods I should have been able to take them without too much difficulty - I've won similar fights several times in the past. This time, however, once the enemy fleets had my own backed up against the edge of the map, allowing me to concentrate my firepower to full effect, my carriers simply hung out behind the warships, hoarding their interceptors rather than deploying them against enemy fighters, leading to my warships being overloaded and destroyed.

As I said, I've fought and won battles like this several times in the past and have never seen my carriers just sit uselessly in the back lines, refusing to deploy their interceptors while the rest of my fleet gets overwhelmed. I can't fathom what the hell went wrong this time. Is it something to do with the default behavior for non-officer ships? The fact we had our backs to the wall? I'd swear I've been in that kind of situation before and my carriers/fighters never derped out like that. Has anyone else encountered something like this before? Possibly a bug?

[BCS]

Something similar actually happened to me too recently when I was fighting the bounty Omega fleet. When it was all but over several Omega fighters started harassing one of my Herons, also with three Sparks, and they would simply not engage even though there was about ten of them total.

Maybe it's something Spark-specific? Hard for me to say because I generally don't watch carriers in combat.

[woodsmoke]

I think I may have figured out the problem, at least in my case. I tried the battle again, keeping my fleet moving 'round the map this time to avoid being backed into a corner. I was doing pretty well for a while but, sure enough, my herons simply stopped deploying fighters again. Mousing over 'em I saw they'd gotten down to 30% replacement rate, at which point they seem to simply sit on their available fighters unless explicitly ordered to engage an enemy target. Looks like I'm just going to have to burn away as soon as I jump through the gate and take the pirate fleets out piecemeal. Which is frustrating. I know I could win that battle if my carriers would just keep doing the thing for which I explicitly have them in my fleet.

I suppose that's part of the larger problem with carriers right now - I know they were nerfed pretty hard in 0.95 due to carriers themselves being adjusted and the way the skill system shook out skewing things even more against 'em but, until now, I haven't really run up against that. I've read fighters are all but useless against a properly outfitted capital (or even cruiser) but they remain the bane of my existence in smaller hulls.

[Thaago]

One thing you may want to look at is the replacement time*wing size of the fighter wing. The replacement rate will tick down while the wing is rebuilding (I think it remains steady with only 1 loss for wing sizes of 3 or more but don't quote me on that), which leads to slower rebuild rate, which leads to more tickdown... etc in a downward spiral. The most common cause of the spiral is a total wing wipe: even if the wings are doing fine in general, if they run into something nasty (onslaught PD, a Doom, a few Omens, etc) then the wing is going to get wiped.

For Sparks, they have a 50 second total rebuild time (10*5), which is quite long (and doubly so because sparks are not very tough!). For reference, Talons, Gladii, Khopesh are 20 seconds, Broadswords, Thunders, Warthogs, Wasp are 30 seconds, Claws are 40 seconds, Daggers 45. These are the base amounts, but the actual time taken is non-linear (quadratic I think? Something like that) and strongly dependent on player skill choices/CR levels of the carrier. So in terms of how much "stress" the fighters put on the carrier bays that slows them down, Sparks are some of the worst fighters! If you want similar anti-fighter/defensive performance, I highly recommend 2 wings Wasp + 1 wing Gladii: much faster replacement time, similar top speed, has kinetic damage, flares, and lays down mines.

In terms of overall fighter balance from skills: replacement rate for non-monofleet (IE a limited number of decks) carriers was strongly buffed (75% to rate and -10% to replacement time from CR, unsure of exact stacking order). Top speed buffs also increased, though by a lesser amount (40% max at present). The fighter damage booster skill was removed, though 10% from CR remains.

[woodsmoke]

If you want similar anti-fighter/defensive performance, I highly recommend 2 wings Wasp + 1 wing Gladii: much faster replacement time, similar top speed, has kinetic damage, flares, and lays down mines.

I may have to look into that. I'm not terribly bothered about the kinetic damage - as stated, the only reason I even have fighters in my fleet is to counter enemy fighters and outfitting my herons with sparks seemed like the most simple, straightforward means of doing so.

I hesitate to say the game is worse off for the inclusion of fighters, as I can see the appeal, but the way they've been implemented is simply maddening to me. They're generally not powerful enough to be a force unto themselves but I can't simply ignore them lest they create an opening in my defenses for enemy warships to exploit. Point defense on smaller hulls (frigates and destroyers, mostly) is often only moderately effective against them, having been originally designed to counter enemy missiles, and the fact they ignore collision altogether is, frankly, stupid. If there were an option to simply remove them from the game I'd have to think really hard to come up with a reason why I shouldn't always play with that particular box checked.

[Thaago]

In terms of being a force unto themselves - they really like being given orders to make them more effective.

In particular, putting complementary carriers into a control group, positioning them, and ordering them to strike as a unit can be an extremely effective way to deal with enemies. When I did a pure hegemony "themed" run I ran into the problem of not having any frigates that could compete with high end frigates... but a few condors with Thunders in control group 1 let me simply press 1, right click on an enemy frigate away from too many allies, and watch 585 speed fighters blaze across up to 8k units of space and rapidly destroy the enemy. Rinse and repeat! One nice interaction is that once the fighter strike order goes away (by the frigate dying), the carriers will resume their last given command, which is often a rally point behind my lines.

Interceptor carriers can also be ordered to escort friendlies - they will fly there at top speed and engage what is around them. I've used this to help save ships that overextend or are losing duels: a quick disposable swarm to cover it and let it get out goes a long way! That order I need to cancel manually if things work out, so it takes a bit of micro.

In terms of bombers it can be a bit trickier as bombers have that wave timing going on: ordering multiple bomber carriers to strike might result in piecemeal waves because the bombers were already on the way back/reloading from some other strike. Having bombers be of the same tech/speed helps, as does having bomber carriers be a bit farther behind the lines, though that cuts into both replacement rate and cycle time so its a bit of a double edged sword (bombers really like getting their speed boosted!).

[BCS]

For Sparks, they have a 50 second total rebuild time (10*5), which is quite long (and doubly so because sparks are not very tough!)

Sparks are toughest interceptors by quite a large margin.

So in terms of how much "stress" the fighters put on the carrier bays that slows them down, Sparks are some of the worst fighters! If you want similar anti-fighter/defensive performance, I highly recommend 2 wings Wasp + 1 wing Gladii: much faster replacement time, similar top speed, has kinetic damage, flares, and lays down mines.

If all you want is to deny enemy fighters, all you need is Wasps, and not even that many of them(two would be enough unless you're facing an all-out TT carrier spam fleet) I use Sparks because of their universal nature, they are like heavy fighters in that aspect but actually get to where they're needed in a reasonable amount of time. Plus, no crew losses, I admit I am biased towards that.

[BigBrainEnergy]

One thing you may want to look at is the replacement time*wing size of the fighter wing. The replacement rate will tick down while the wing is rebuilding (I think it remains steady with only 1 loss for wing sizes of 3 or more but don't quote me on that), which leads to slower rebuild rate, which leads to more tickdown... etc in a downward spiral. The most common cause of the spiral is a total wing wipe: even if the wings are doing fine in general, if they run into something nasty (onslaught PD, a Doom, a few Omens, etc) then the wing is going to get wiped.

This is something I've wondered about. Is the downward spiral intentional? It seems to me that precious few fighters replace fast enough to avoid an immediate downward spiral on first contact. A few more if you take carrier group, but still many remain useless. Lux heavy fighters are cool and all, but their replacement rate hits the floor in no time no matter what you do with them. Wouldn't it make more sense if the drain on replacement rate was the same per fighter lost rather than per second? So even if a ship is at 50% replacement rate each fighter may take twice as long to replace but drains replacement rate at half the rate so overall it's the same.

There's just an insurmountable gap in usefulness between fighters that can stay ahead of the curve for any decent amount of time, and those that can't.

[Serenitis]

Not entirely certain, but it feels like the nature of fighters is at odds with the "intended" way to use them implied by the skills.

Fighters are scaling weapons - Mediocre in small numbers, but get significantly better as you add more and more. (Beams are also scaling for example.)
For fighters, quantity is always the better driver of performance than quality. Simply because replacements for losses, and thus downtime is spread out over many carriers lessening its effect. Multiple carriers can screen each other and trade roles. And each individual fighter loss is basically irrelevant since you have so many to start with, plus only 1 of your many carriers will get its rate dinged for any given loss.
The downward spiral takes so much to start that you almost never see it.

Meanwhile the skills are trying to soft encourage you to use small numbers, but buff them up to compensate. Which doesn't (seem to) work.
Not only are losses more expensive since you have only a small number of fighters to start with, but they're also more common as you don't have the weight of numbers to distract weapons or rotate wings in/out.
And on top of that you only have 1 or 2 carriers total which are absorbing all the replacement losses, and getting floored by it every time their fighters get ruined. Which happens more because they're the only fighters, spiral spiral etc etc.
Not to mention with a limited number of wings you have significantly less variety of wings, so can't benefit as much from interaction/synergy between them.

I tried to use the skills as "advertised" and stay within the limits to get the maximum boosts, but it was incredibly disappointing as fighter performance was frustratingly lacklustre.
I went back to treating fighters the same way as I did pre-skill, and ignoring any limits. And performance went back to what I expected.

Are the skills bad/useless?
No, I don't think they are. A buff is a buff, no matter its size.
But I think they might be creating an expectation that cannot be fulfilled due to the underlying mechanics of fighters and carriers themselves.

tl;dr - If you want to use fighters, use a lot of them. Do not try to min-max the skill thresholds, just add more fighters.

[Linnis]

Fighters are also excellent escorts for friagtes that are built to assault larger ships. A player so-lasher and a couple of escort wings of fighters can bounce between destoryers and cruiser kills faster than anything else in the vanilla game. Aside from maybe an hyperion exploting domain's lack of rear shields.

Once you hit larger batlle sizes, carriers becomes a must have aswell.

Fighters require the most amount of game knowledge to use correctly. So give it some time...

[Thaago]

For Sparks, they have a 50 second total rebuild time (10*5), which is quite long (and doubly so because sparks are not very tough!)

Sparks are toughest interceptors by quite a large margin.

Yes and no! In terms of per wing HP: 300 hull, 20 armor, 150 shield; total wing 'hp' ~2350, with low armor damage mitigation. 'hp/sec' regen from a deck: 47, but only if the deck stays at 100%, which as is the topic of this thread, sparks are terrible at thanks to their 50 second wing rebuild time.

Gladii: 500 hull, 75 armor; total wing 'hp' 1150 with much higher armor protection. 'hp/sec' regen from a deck: 57.5, and this is reduced much less thanks to only having a 20 second wing rebuild time.

How much of a difference does the armor makes depends on weapon. One of the more extreme examples is the vulcan (though lmg's will be worse): they have 6.25 damage for purposes of armor damage reduction, and 125 dps vs armor if all shots are hitting (which they won't but hey, lets just say they do to get numbers). The vulcan is pegged to minimum armor damage vs a Gladii until the armor hits 35, around 2.1 seconds. Damage starts to increase then and it takes less than a second to chew through the last 35 armor; call it .9 seconds as a guestimate for a total of 3 seconds. Spark armor takes about half a second for a vulcan to chew through (probably less, but lets round to .5).

In the HP calculations above the armor was counted 1:1, but as the above example shows for some weapons it can count as a lot more. The top 40 armor of the gladii is counting as ~1050 frag damage: its going to be a lot less vs heavier weapons. So... without a lot more detailed calculations its hard to know how much to 'weight' that armor, especially as it is so dependent on what the fighters are flying against!

In terms of hull damage, Sparks will have 1 residual armor vs 3.75 for Gladii. For again the vulcan, this makes the DPS of the weapon 431 vs Spark, 312 for Gladii. So .7 seconds for a Spark, 1.6 seconds for a Gladii. Shields is easy: 125 DPS vs 150 hp gives 1.2 seconds for the spark and 0 for the shieldless gladii.

In total, an estimate of a perfect accuracy vulcan (hah! doesn't exist) vs the fighters: ~2.4 sec/Spark, ~4.6 sec/Gladii. Total wing time: 12 sec for Sparks, 9.2 sec for Gladii. Damage vs repair ratio: 12/50=.24 for Sparks (discounting the quadratic effects which punish Sparks hard), 9.2/20 = .46 (higher is better).

So what does this actually mean? For this very narrow case of a low damage/shot frag weapon, a fresh Spark wing is about 30% tougher than a Gladii wing, but when it comes to pressure over time (IE extended battles, waves of fighters, etc) the Gladii is more than twice as tough as the Spark! The quadratic effects of wing replenishment are really hard to calculate as they depend strongly on real battle conditions and skills, but in the OP's case of the rate sitting at 30%, its quite possible that a Gladii would be replenishing 'effective hp' 6 times faster. Again, the vulcan is a common weapon but many others are going to have vastly different numbers: kinetics will yield much better numbers for the gladii; HE will yield better numbers for the Spark; larger shot size frag will favor the Spark (as the Gladii will lose more of its armor effectiveness).

Other things ignored in the above: The Gladii flares and the impact that will have on helping other wings survive; the regenerating shield of the Spark for taking non-concentrated bits of chip damage; Sparks overloading from a big hit reducing their DPS to 0.

So.... yeah! Thats a whole wall of text because armor and fighter mechanics are complicated. But basically: Sparks have a good amount of up front HP. They have a poor HP recovery rate because their rebuild time and rebuild/wing is so long. Their overall toughness is not nearly as high as it looks 'on paper' vs more heavily armored fighters.

In terms of heavier fighters, Broadswords at 750/100, 10 sec rebuild, and Warthogs at 750/200, 10 second rebuild, are way way tougher than both! They have their own downsides of course.

[woodsmoke]

tl;dr - If you want to use fighters, use a lot of them. Do not try to min-max the skill thresholds, just add more fighters.

This is half of my problem with fighters. Generally speaking, they're not really a major concern... until they are. And the line between the two is essentially a simple question of "does the enemy fleet have enough of them?"

I didn't run with fighters at all for the first while I was playing with this character because I hadn't played since 0.7.2a and I remembered being able to essentially ignore them. This led to numerous instances of my Hammerhead being set upon by a single broadsword wing who fluxed me out, I overloaded and enemy warships finished me off. I didn't even realize what was happening the first time or two, I just knew I was suddenly and inexplicably incapacitated then dead.

I tried to find ways to deal with enemy fighters without adding carriers to my fleet and came up with absolute bupkis. As I said above, PD on smaller hulls is only moderately effective against enemy fighters, particularly the more heavily armored low-tech and midline fighters used by pirates and Pathers, so I ultimately had to just throw in the towel and get fighters of my own. Which is the other half of my problem with fighters: they're not optional, at least if you're running a wolfpack fleet without larger hulls. If the enemy has fighters you have to have fighters to counter them, otherwise they'll just swarm over your ships, overloading and disabling everything while their warships pound you to space dust.

The fact I'm spending a not-insignificant percentage of my DP every battle (and supplies afterward) on comparatively expensive carriers I don't actually want in my fleet just so I can engage the enemy directly without flux-maxing bull[stuff] pixies swarming in to screw up my day is... not fun. I've learned to deal with it for the most part but, again, if I had the option to simply remove fighters from the game I'd probably do so, never look back and be happier for it.

[BCS]

too much to quote

As far as Starsector is concerned there are only four Interceptors in the game - Sparks, Wasps, Talons and Borers. So yeah, toughest by far.

If you want to extend the definition to "any fighter with speed of 300 or more is an Interceptor" then you are also looking at the Gladius and Thunder but their weapons are generally unsuited for the role - Burst PD Laser has close to 100% hit rate against, well, everything(enemy fighters, missiles, proximity mines, frigates, etc.) while (dual) light machine guns certainly do not. This gets especially bad when it comes to the Thunders which are frankly speaking too fast for their own guns even when shooting at stationary targets.

[Wyvern]

I tried to find ways to deal with enemy fighters without adding carriers to my fleet and came up with absolute bupkis.

So, as always, your mileage may vary, but I've had good luck with the following points:

1: Have some officers with the point defense skill. While I usually take this for extra range on PD weapons, it does also boost damage against fighters by a lot.

2: Don't expect your PD weapons to shoot down fighters. The vast majority of PD weapons are designed as anti-missile, and will do poorly against tougher, armored targets; additionally, unless you have IPDAI, even the good-against-fighters PD weapons (like burst PD lasers) will waste their damage attacking flares. Instead, you want things like light assault guns, phase lances, and swarmer missiles; even railguns will do in a pinch. Proximity Charge Launchers are particularly good at anti-fighter duty, and are at least vaguely okay-ish as a general source of HE damage.
2b: I generally don't want ships specialized in anti-fighter duty (though, okay, Omens are decent); instead, I want every ship in my fleet to have at least a little bit of anti-fighter capability.

3: Learn which fighters are dangerous to your flagship, and prioritize them when appropriate. If, for example, I'm flying a Sunder - I'm absolutely going to turn and fire its main gun on incoming broadsword or gladius fighters.

[Thaago]

+1 to Wyvern's points. Typically the best way to kill fighters is not directly around a ship getting swarmed (though something like an onslaught will just do that and evaporate them as they have the mounts to spam tons of cheap close range weapons), but as they are traveling towards their target with multiple ships contributing a medium amount to pick off wings as they come.

Omens can be specialized into nasty anti-fighter ships as there is a synergy between the PD skill and also System Expertise: 50% DPS increase from PD, 50% increase in DPS from the system activation that is multiplicative instead of additive with other damage boosts because its a rate, and 50% range increase that can arc over allies! This means that the Omen can be safely away from fire and still zapping fighters. Shades can do the same thing, though they have the upside/downside of being phase craft, so they have much greater strike/kill potential as compared to Omens and can phase through fire, but  die to chip damage that an Omen would vent if it gets out of danger. Using an officer on a small craft does push towards going down the leadership branch for more officers and/or Support Doctrine, and using phase pushes for tech as well.