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[CapnHector]

I wouldn't mind it. The bomber being there in the first place is an act of RNG. Esports skill games like Mobas even have RNG at critical points. Probably less frustrating than fighters having good AI and hiding in your turrets' blind spots or visibly dodging.

[Megas]

Yeah, that idea was tossed around very early in development. The issue is that in introduces pure RNG to sometimes critical situations. Imagine your shields are down, a torpedo bomber is coming at you from the front, but you manage to line up a Hellbore shot just right to take it out - only for that shot to randomly pass trough the bomber, and you getting blown up in its torpedo strike.

No to THAC0!  No to direct hits randomly passing through fighters harmlessly some of the time and not others.  If a shot visibly connects cleanly, I want the fighter smashed.

[Aeson]

I agree with Megas; RNG to hit fighters doesn't sound like any fun at all.

The bomber being there in the first place is an act of RNG.

The "RNG" controlling ship/fighter movements on the battlefield is a very different sort of RNG from something like "roll 1d6; on 4+, score a hit;" most importantly, it's something that you have some ability to react to and manipulate.

[Hiruma Kai]

Every flight deck after the eight will drag down your fighter performance, even it if has no bearing on the battle.
That means no more Shepherds, no more Ventures, no more [insert civilian mod ship with flight deck], no more Converted Hangar for your logistics ships (which is probably the best survival option for them).

Same dynamic happens with logistic ships without the civilian tag due to skills like Crew Training.  I use Hounds extensively early game as my hauler of choice (mostly because I play Iron Man), or alternatively militarized subsystems + safety overrides + unstable injector Drams, but they get removed from my fleet completely once I hit 240 DP worth of non-civilian ships since they cut into bonuses for actually deployed ships.

As for counting civilian and combat ships separately, it seems, well, fiddly to me?  You could do it and some people wouldn't apply Converted Fighter Bay, but I'd eventually do that anyways for my civilian logistic ships since it's extra cargo and less crew upkeep.  It also is not going to solve how some people feel about Terminator drones on a Tempest getting the bonus.   It is also going to incentivize the use of things like Pirate Ventures with converted Hangar along side dedicated carriers for "optimal" fighter bonuses in carrier focused fleets, which may not be an intended side effect.  The fighter skills aren't the one's I'd aim to change to encourage civilian ships in combat, as you're already doing two "niche" things: fighters and civilian hull mod.  Should other skills have separate DP pools for combat and civilian ships?z

Only counting deployed flight decks would work well mechanically, but would be hard to make clear in the UI.

This seems unlikely to be implemented, for the same reason it is not implemented for skills like Tactical Drills or Flux Regulation.  It might make sense, but it'd seems weird to shift the paradigm for only carrier skills and not the more general skills.

@CrashToDesktop
Shepherds are jacks of all trades - ok combined fuel/cargo capacity, while drones allow them to have some contribution to combat while remaining reasonably safe.
A Shepherd with Converted Fighter Bays is pointless - it loses drones that made it worth deploying, at which point it's better to use more efficient pure cargo/fuel non-combat ships.

I should think Shepherds being one of the only 2 ships in the game with Salvage gantry, and the only one of the two with an innate cargo capacity and fuel capacity make Shepherds stand out more than their drones, at least from a logistics perspective.  A Shepherd with Converted Fighter bay is 150 cargo capacity, 40 fuel capacity, Salvage Gantry, Surveying Equipment, requiring only 12 crew, 3 supplies, and 1 fuel/light year.  In terms of frigate logistics ships that seems pretty good to me.  Mix with a Salvage rig, and 5 Shepherds gives 55% more salvage finds (11% more from combat).

Also, if you're using Shepherds for a necessary distraction, then don't you want those easily killed drones respawning faster?  Anyone done some survivability tests of shepherds with and without the carrier group bonus?

Not an original observation here, since people have pointed this out many times, but the current system is strange regardless of whether this change is made or not, because the carrier skills reward you for running a fleet of mostly non-carriers, since you get the most out of them that way.

I've always viewed it as getting the most out of it by having 8 or more wings.  It just so happens the a 24 wing fleet and a 8 wing fleet get the same net bonus.  8 Heron's with officers get their fighters back 25% faster with Carrier Group.   4 Drovers with officers get their fighters back 75% faster with Carrier Group.  You have no additional incentive to add more than 8 wings, but despite how people feel about it, you save the exact same amount of time on respawning fighters across the fleet either way.  Making it a smaller maximum bonus, but increasing the number of wings it applies just make the skill overall weaker and forces you to go all in on carriers.  Same thing is if it just applies to 240 DP worth of combat ships - Alex would likely drop the bonus from 50% to 20% for Carrier Group.

Wolf pack tactics is limited by your officers, as opposed to DP.  If you're not using mercenaries (or Automated Ships), your typical fleet has at most 9 or 11 frigate slots for Wolf Pack Tactics.  Given frigates tend to be DP cheap, it is hard to hit 240 DP with only officered frigates.  It's arguably balanced by the fact you are sticking an officer in an 8 DP frigate instead of a 20 DP cruiser, and the skill most likely doesn't actually apply to every ship in your fleet.

Now if people are making the argument the skill is too weak, especially given the existence of something like Elite Missile Specialization, requesting a general buff to percentage numbers or total number of wings makes a lot of sense to me.

The problem is that fighters scale badly. In the early/mid game having a carrier or two in your fleet can be quite effective. But as fights get bigger and bigger and ships get more and longer ranged guns, fighters don't have anywhere to go anymore - they have to cross longer and longer distances(because range icreases) under more and more fire. This is augmented by the fact that AI is very careful around fighters and will often hold back until most of them are destroyed.

This raises a question in my mind, why don't long range missiles have the same scaling problems?  Is it because missiles are more survivable and more likely to reach the target (i.e. Squall hit points)?  Lack of a missile replacement rate that slowly makes missiles less effective over time?  Missiles being more spammable innately, and Expanded Missile Racks + Elite Missile Specialization makes them easy to overwhelm PD while having sufficient reserves to kill each and every ship?

I feel like the biggest nerfs to fighters in the last 3 or 4 releases has been the removal of the damage reduction skills.  Being able to keep a critical mass of fighters up in the air has always been the key to their strength.  If too many get shot down, they cease being effective.  But if you can't shoot them down, they'll start wearing down ships quickly.

I wonder if elite System Expertise, among its random collection of bonuses, had a -30% damage to fighters, +30% fighter speed bonus would be too much.  That would at least put fighters closer to the same footing as Elite Missile Specialization missile boats on officered ships.

I wouldn't mind it. The bomber being there in the first place is an act of RNG. Esports skill games like Mobas even have RNG at critical points. Probably less frustrating than fighters having good AI and hiding in your turrets' blind spots or visibly dodging.

The game does have RNG in the form of shield piercing weapons and emp arcs, but for some reason this suggestion feels fundamentally different somehow to me.  I guess it's more of a punishment instead of a reward (you hit, so have some bonus ion damage versus you would have hit, but nothing happens).  I'd much rather figure out what the equivalent additional survival time is, and just make it an equivalent penalty to damage.  If you have a 50% chance for any given shot to not deal damage, just have a skill which gives -50% damage taken or so instead.

Taking a bigger step back, I do wonder what the intended balance between point defense, support fighters, and interceptors on one side, and missiles and bombers on the other, is supposed to be, as opposed to where it is right now.  As well as balance between options on the same side of that equation.

Should a ship with an officer that only has Elite Point Defense as a skill on a ship with Integrated Point defense and ITU hullmod and half their weapon mounts fitted with PD be able to stop 100% or 50% or 25% of the missiles from an equivalently DP costed ship with Expanded Missile Racks and ECCM, an officer with only Elite Missile Specialization, and half their weapon mounts filled with missiles?

What about PD ship vs bombers from a carrier?  PD fighters from carrier vs missiles?

[CapnHector]

I am still pro RNG based dodge chance (I realize I am outvoted here though, not that it's a democracy, and it's fine but I still want to argue the point). Let's reason and look at the alternatives in the hypothetical scenario where you are trying to shoot a bomber with a Hellbore.

• You could make the fighters have really small hitboxes like Gothars suggested so that the chance to dodge is based on the fighter having a very small hitbox. This makes trying to hit them with an inaccurate gun very frustrating for the player, and because guns have inbuilt inaccuracy it does not actually change the fact that the hit is determined by RNG.
• You could make the fighters have good AI, so that they avoid your gun arcs, camp in the relative blindspots of your turrets firing their guns and dodge bullets which they are fully capable of, such as in the case of this bomber we'd have it just sidestepping the Hellbore shot instead of proceeding with its attack run on its trajectory. This is likely to cause many players to rage and is not an enjoyable experience.
• You could give the fighter an equivalent damage reduction like Hiruma Kai suggested. This makes fighters seem heavily armored. For example if you gave it a 50% damage reduction, then a Broadsword could barely survive two Hellbore shots, while a Kite or Shepherd will die to them. This seems esthetically off. Also note that a 50% damage reduction will result in a 0% chance for a Hellbore shot to kill a Piranha while a 50% dodge chance will result in a 50% chance to kill.

So, my preferred solution to make fighters tougher would be the dodge chance. It would also have the mentioned upside of buffing Vulcan, Flak and PD Beams and you could tweak it to boost anti-fighter weapons.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

This raises a question in my mind, why don't long range missiles have the same scaling problems?  Is it because missiles are more survivable and more likely to reach the target (i.e. Squall hit points)?  Lack of a missile replacement rate that slowly makes missiles less effective over time?  Missiles being more spammable innately, and Expanded Missile Racks + Elite Missile Specialization makes them easy to overwhelm PD while having sufficient reserves to kill each and every ship?

The PD you use at the start of the game is a Vulcan, the PD you use at the end of the game is the Vulcan. Vulcan on a frigate has 250 range, on a capital with ITU it's 400. Missiles are not automatically targeted by other weapons so the practical difference between early and late game is minimal.

(There are dedicated medium/large PD weapons of course but they're rare even for AI ships, players almost never use them)

[TaLaR]

• You could make the fighters have really small hitboxes like Gothars suggested so that the chance to dodge is based on the fighter having a very small hitbox. This makes trying to hit them with an inaccurate gun very frustrating for the player, and because guns have inbuilt inaccuracy it does not actually change the fact that the hit is determined by RNG.
• You could make the fighters have good AI, so that they avoid your gun arcs, camp in the relative blindspots of your turrets firing their guns and dodge bullets which they are fully capable of, such as in the case of this bomber we'd have it just sidestepping the Hellbore shot instead of proceeding with its attack run on its trajectory. This is likely to cause many players to rage and is not an enjoyable experience.
• You could give the fighter an equivalent damage reduction like Hiruma Kai suggested. This makes fighters seem heavily armored. For example if you gave it a 50% damage reduction, then a Broadsword could barely survive two Hellbore shots, while a Kite or Shepherd will die to them. This seems esthetically off. Also note that a 50% damage reduction will result in a 0% chance for a Hellbore shot to kill a Piranha while a 50% dodge chance will result in a 50% chance to kill.

1) You can't aim manually at too small hitbox (if it's going to be few-pixel-sized). Entirely dependent on auto-aim and fighter AI remaining as dumb as it is now will become a necessary feature to hit at all.
2) Best option in terms of gameplay it provides, but probably too computationally intensive. This shouldn't apply to just fighters, frigates are capable of dodging quite a lot too (and currently they do not try to).
3) In a sense it's even worse than pass-through chance, because this makes a dense fighter screen the best form of defense.

One realistic option is to add a random component to fighter movements (and some extra speed, to retain same overall forward speed despite inefficiency). So that a fighter never stands still or moves in a straight line - it should always weave around a bit. And make large fighter groups spread out more, so that they never become too dense target. Ideally, this means that weapons auto-firing at fighters should also not try to hit their exact current trajectory, but add some extra spread (to avoid perfectly missing the fighter with all shots). So the key factors for hitting fighters would be projectile speed and amount/density, not accuracy per se (unless insta-hit or close to that).

Not an original observation here, since people have pointed this out many times, but the current system is strange regardless of whether this change is made or not, because the carrier skills reward you for running a fleet of mostly non-carriers, since you get the most out of them that way.

I've always viewed it as getting the most out of it by having 8 or more wings.  It just so happens the a 24 wing fleet and a 8 wing fleet get the same net bonus.  8 Heron's with officers get their fighters back 25% faster with Carrier Group.   4 Drovers with officers get their fighters back 75% faster with Carrier Group.  You have no additional incentive to add more than 8 wings, but despite how people feel about it, you save the exact same amount of time on respawning fighters across the fleet either way.  Making it a smaller maximum bonus, but increasing the number of wings it applies just make the skill overall weaker and forces you to go all in on carriers.  Same thing is if it just applies to 240 DP worth of combat ships - Alex would likely drop the bonus from 50% to 20% for Carrier Group.

Recovery bonus from Carrier Group remains same 4 virtual extra decks, true. But speed bonus from Fighter Uplink genuinely goes down.

The core issue is that with only 15 points, you want to really focus your build. And 2 skills to buff a small portion of your overall fleet that is never going to be player-piloted just doesn't sound attractive enough to me. I already have to cut more important stuff to stay within the 15 limit.

[Hiruma Kai]

You could give the fighter an equivalent damage reduction like Hiruma Kai suggested. This makes fighters seem heavily armored. For example if you gave it a 50% damage reduction, then a Broadsword could barely survive two Hellbore shots, while a Kite or Shepherd will die to them. This seems esthetically off. Also note that a 50% damage reduction will result in a 0% chance for a Hellbore shot to kill a Piranha while a 50% dodge chance will result in a 50% chance to kill.

Just so you know, it takes 2 unbonused Hellbore shots to kill a Broadsword right now.  Broadsword has 750 hull points and 100 armor.  Hellbore does 750 HE, so a Broadsword lives with about 96 HP left over.   It takes 2 Hellbore shots to kill a shielded fighter as well, one to break the shield and overload it, and one to kill the fighter hull.  -50% damage would make it it 3 unbonused Hellbore shots, but likely 2 bonuses ones.  A single Broadsword is only 25 armor short of the hull/armor of an Omen (750 hull, 125 armor).  A Warthog (750 Hull, 200 armor) is tougher than an Omen hull, so I don't understand why it'd be weird taking more than 1 shot of heavy ordinance since the heavy fighter literally is as tough (or tougher) than a high tech frigate hull.

3) In a sense it's even worse than pass-through chance, because this makes a dense fighter screen the best form of defense.

I thought the assumed problem we were trying to fix was that fighters/bombers don't work well because they die as they try to make their attack runs across the no-man's land between two combat lines late game?  Now -50% damage may be excessive, but the idea was you'd make the average lifetime of the fighter be longer by the amount needed to balance the things.

Right now, a dense fighter screen is in fact the best form of defense - for as long as the fighters last.  Which might be as little as one attack pass and then waiting 30+ seconds for the next wave.  The entire point of fighter recovery mechanics is to prevent that exact scenario from being true for too long.

Although, I'm now really curious, what is the hit points per second in terms of missiles being launched by Elite Missile Specialization Gryphon.  Hmm, just from the Large and Mediums, 675 HP per second in Squalls, and 506 HP per second in Breach Pods.  Or about 1,181 HP/second for 3 minutes straight (that's just +200% missile capacity, not even using an autoforge charge).  Compare to the hit points per second launched from a Mora or Heron.  Lets say Heron has 3 Broadsword wings, so it gets a 3 Broadswords every 10 seconds at 100% recovery, or 225 HP + 30 armor/second.  With officer and Carrier group this jumps to 393 HP + 53 armor/second at best (and drops eventually to 118 HP + 16 armor /second at 30% fighter recovery).  Now the missiles have smaller hit boxes, but do draw PD fire, and they do sometimes intersect heavier weapons fire.  I swear my HVD shots love hitting Annihilator rockets.

This comparison does again has me wondering what Alex's ideal balance between PD, missiles, and fighters, and the various skills that boost them, would be.  Any PD that's sufficient to handle a single Gryphon is going essentially be immune to two to three 20 DP carriers.

One realistic option is to add a random component to fighter movements (and some extra speed, to retain same overall forward speed despite inefficiency). So that a fighter never stands still or moves in a straight line - it should always weave around a bit. And make large fighter groups spread out more, so that they never become too dense target.

Spreading out even more means not moving directly to target.  As it is, Alex's code already has wings spread out some, and there's only some much space on the 2-D combat plane.  For example see attached image from a quick simulation test.  For a particularly large set of wings, that could mean being forced to flank.  On a battle line, flanking means flying directly towards different enemy ships which are not the target, and then turning and flying over them to the target, which is just exposing the fighters to more guns and a longer time under fire.  In practice I don't think the extra spread code would help all that much on average, at least in fleet situations. 1 on 1 flanking would obviously be advantageous against omni-shield ships.  More bobbing and weaving could help some at lower densities, but I'd need to see some playtest that spreading over an even wider line will actually help fighter survivability.

[CapnHector]

Missile HP certainly seems excessive by those calculations and of course the missiles will also have quite high damage compared to Broadswords.

Maybe missile HP could do with a nerf, or Missile Spec's boost of it, and a modest return of fighter damage reduction.

[Alex]

I think Squall missile HP is overtuned, yeah. Possibly Breach as well, though both are missiles that tend to get fired at not-overloaded ships and need some chance of getting through.

For fighters, the main balance challenge is how to make smaller groups reasonably attractive in large fights without also making massive amounts of fighters way too strong. E.G. most improvements to fighter survivability/damage/speed/etc get exponentially* better as you get more fighters on the field, so they encourage massing more and more fighters to the exclusion of all else.

How the replacement rate works is a part of this, too; but in general there's very much a tipping point where the fighters overwhelm a given enemy fleet in an uninteresting fashion. I would much rather fighters be too weak - or just situationally useful - than too strong in this particular way.


*probably not in the strict mathematical sense

[CapnHector]

I know this is not a favorite of other players apparently but the dodge mechanic possibly combined with even weakening defensive stats would address this to a degree.

Since let's say that you have a Piranha and are shooting a Hellbore at it and there is a 50% chance to dodge. Now firing at one Piranha you have a 50% chance to kill it. But if you fire at a cloud of three, then you have a 87.5% chance to kill one with your shot (and a PCL shot would kill all three if the Piranha had just a little less HP and dodge doesn't apply to AOE). This would not happen with damage reduction where 3x fighter = 3x harder to kill.

[Alex]

I get the theory of this, yeah! And in theory AoE weapons also could address this by making larger numbers of fighters easier to take down per fighter due to AoE weapons dealing more DPS. That was the original thought behind it, going waaaay back.

I don't think this checks out in practice, though - a Hellbore shot is fairly unlikely to be lined up so as to pass through a bunch of fighters. And reasonable AoE ranges just don't cover enough area to really make this work; the PCL is a notable exception; the Doom's mines are another. Massed Paladins are a maybe-third. But that's not nearly enough in general; most fleets aren't going to have any of these let alone enough.

(I'm also pretty against fighters getting a chance to avoid shots just due to "combat feel" reasons, I feel like consistency is important to maintain the feeling of power for the guns. If a Hellbore shot sometimes just does nothing, that's going to fundamentally affect how you feel about it after a while.)

[Grievous69]

Two of my most hated gameplay mechanics are weapon durability and dodge percentages (as in chance for an attack to do nothing, not dodge as an evasive move that's inputed). Any sort of dodge mechanic really doesn't feel right in this game. As Alex explained, it would be a miserable experience to see your big cannon straight up go through an enemy. There are better ways to balance things around (not that fighters need much balancing imo), than to introduce RNG.

P.S. I think dodge % is fine in turn based games, just not anything that's even remotely "action".

[CapnHector]

Nothing but respect for Alex's creative vision and if he feels like dodge isn't a good idea then it isn't. Fighters could use a slight buff though.

Just in case there is ever a need to revisit the topic though I'd note that games like Starcraft or Dota 2 have miss chance / evasion mechanics and I don't think that's really perceived as a problem or as diminishing weapons
 Probably a matter of perception or of being used to it or the player having internalized that weapons can miss despite being lined to hit/target can dodge without an animation.

[Alex]

Stuff firing uphill is still pretty frustrating in BW, even if it's a key mechanic for the game. Being real, though, it doesn't register as even one of the top 10 frustrating things in BW

But I think there's a difference in feel when it's something you're controlling directly vs not... I'm not saying it can't be made to work, it definitely can, though. And I'm sure you're right that some of it is built-in expectations. I just really want Starsector combat to feel solid and not "floaty" and little things like this here and there add up, imo!