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[Sproginator]

The answer, gentlemen, is Ship Parts, not just supplies, Ship Parts. Extremely rare and expensive parts to he that are undamaged. You use these alongside supplies and crew as an added debuff to build these fighters

[PCCL]

I've been for diversity of supplies for a long time. There should be no reason to use the same thing that repair your ships to feed your crew or load your missile bays. I think that would only happen after there's more industry and thus more commodity items though.

[Decer304]

Its a good concept, you should be able to build fighters on the go, but at extra cost though. This would encourage to only build in urgent situations, such as if you are going to get attacked. I also think that idle fighters should be stored in ships when they are flying and only deployed in combat.

[Aethelric]

I think there is already a pretty obvious way to limit the amount of fighters produced: hangar decks.  I'd like to see this change coupled with more hangar deck capacity for most carriers (and, well, more and larger carriers).

Obviously, spamming an infinite amount of fighters would be a balance problem.  Placing hard limits and making in-combat production inefficient and sub-optimal would be great: perhaps you need to purchase a "blueprint" (roughly equivalent to the usual cost of fighters minus the cost in supplies and modified by an industry/trade skill) for each run of fighters. So, for instance, if you have three Broadsword blueprints in your inventory and four hangar decks in your fleet, you can still only produce three on the fly.  Higher level Industry skills might mitigate the limits, timeframe or costs.

[naufrago]

What would stop you from maxing out your FP with fighters directly next to a station where you can buy supplies?


And that's just one thing, I also don't like the idea that a battle is decided simply by "who brought the most supplies". Nothing more boring than two carriers slowly burning trough their supplies, and the player can just watch. Sorry Wyvern, I really don't think this leads in the right direction.

Well, if fighter production were linked to combat readiness as well as supplies, you'd only be able to produce so many fighters til the CR of your carrier runs out. Solves the problem of being able to immediately fill your fleet with fighters.

EDIT: Even if you can fill your fleet with fighters, is it really a problem if fighters are more widely used? If enemy fleets have the same access to fighters that the player does, what's the problem? Fighters could become a more prevalent, disposable kind of ship type. Quick and easy to replace with reasonable firepower, but weaker than the alternatives (like frigates and destroyers).

EDIT2: The initial cost of buying fighters would have to go up, but they'd become very useful if they were nice and disposable. Might be against the spirit of the game if they're too disposable, but that can be balanced using CR.

[Nooblies]

Agreed, having to buy a "licence" in order to create or field each fighter squadron would be an interesting way of getting around the whole spamming fighters for no appreciable cost thing. For instance, if you went to a station, instead of buying each individual talon wing, you might buy a licence for a single wing. After that you'd be free to create and field that single talon wing, but wouldn't be allowed to field more than the single squadron due to the DRM and its "install limit" of just the single wing. You'd still be free to rebuild the talon wing on carriers in or out of combat (aside from the cost in supplies and/or CR), but would only be able to have as many fighter/bomber wings as you have the licences to own.

This would also mean that fighters would be better in terms of actually surviving battles, as one of my biggest gripes at the moment is that fighters can very easily fly into situations that they can't readily get out of (getting a little close to an astral or onslaught) and get completely destroyed. It would also somewhat balance the survivability of the fighters in the long term, as losing both fighters in a two fighter squad wouldn't be a massive money sink, and hence they would be more attractive to use in fleets. As it is currently, I find the two fighter wings far too fragile and easily destroyed to really rely on or invest in, as the reduced wing size makes them far more likely to suffer total losses, rather than having a single fighter escape and make it back to a carrier as is what happens much more often with talons and even broadswords.

[JT]

I still think the licence thing is too big of a handwave to click for me. I could see software with copy limits, but I could just as easily see the top 10% of the cracking community being able to unprotect that software and render it moot. Intangible limits are not limits in a realistic universe (e.g., do speed limit signs enforce the speed limit?) -- there needs to be an added level of physical scarcity to have any real restrictions in a digital society.

It would raise an entire atmospheric in-universe subculture if the majority of buyers do buy licence-locked schematics and you'd have to talk to illegal contacts (and risk corporate police busting you during the meets) to buy the cracked stuff, but there would still need to be a supply cost to limit the cracked stuff from breaking game balance, especially to counterbalance the most obvious benefit of the unlocked stuff ("if it's going to consume supplies one way or another, why should I care if I can only build 100 Talons from my copy? I'm never going to use that many activations" -- which sounds a lot like even modern DRM-ambivalence arguments actually ;-)).

To be honest I'm not sure why this stuff needs to be explained at all -- you should just be able to have any amount of squadrons up to the limit of your fleet points, with a substantial supply cost to rebuild each fighter (like, on the order of enough supplies to represent 20% of the original credit cost of the fighter), and leave the autofactory and licence and DRM stuff to the theorists and bring the actual gameplay as "that's just how it works". I figure the need to acquire the schematic print to be able to build the fighter is a given, granting you unlimited access to build that fighter from then on. No schematic means no building fighters, just 'you get what you paid for' -- and no replacements for lost fighters when the fighters return for refit.

[Sarducar_Dun]

I like Nooblies' idea, as bad for lore as it may be it seems to be the best suggestion to balance gameplay and that's the priority here no?

[Aethelric]

I still think the licence thing is too big of a handwave to click for me. I could see software with copy limits, but I could just as easily see the top 10% of the cracking community being able to unprotect that software and render it moot. Intangible limits are not limits in a realistic universe (e.g., do speed limit signs enforce the speed limit?) -- there needs to be an added level of physical scarcity to have any real restrictions in a digital society.

Cracking could be a high-level industry skill.

You seem more familiar with the DRM in place on video games and casual software than that available for hardware and serious enterprise software (which is significantly more substantial, and in many cases more costly to overcome than to deal with)  Obviously, illegal use should be possible in the universe, but it's conceivable that a level of protection technology exists that has thus far rather strongly limited illegal copying. The best consumer-directed example would be vinyl records: while bootlegging was possible, the amount of production and use/sales you'd need to pull off before you actually saved money would be substantial if your goal was a product of equivalent value.

[Luftwaffle]

Maybe to balance things out, you could have the newly constructed fighters have weaker and weaker armaments as you go?

Let's say we're in the later stages of a large battle, and most fighter squadrons have been destroyed once or twice. The carrier constructing all of those fighters is going to run out of machine guns, swarmer launchers, armor plates, shield emitters, and even ammo for those fighters. Launched fighters become decreasingly effective, with less armor, less ammunition, and possibly missing weapons. So you get diminishing returns for the cost it takes to rebuild destroyed fighter wings.

[DeMatt]

To be honest, I don't really see the benefit either... but how about this:

The schematic for the fighter squadron only includes fighter-specific stuff, like hull, engines, cockpit, shields, and so forth.  The weapons have to be supplied.  So rather than "ship parts", if you wanted to build a squadron of e.g. Broadswords, you'd have to have six Light Machine Guns and three Swarmer SRMs in your holds - in addition to a certain amount of Supplies.  Repairing a damaged squadron does not demand weapons - we'll handwave that as "he manages to limp back to base".

Admittedly, this just shifts the parts burden from common Supplies to uncommon weaponry.

[Jonlissla]

Admittedly, this just shifts the parts burden from common Supplies to uncommon weaponry.

Not to mention that it would also be time consuming, restricting and not that fun at all.

The problem as I see it with fighters is that they perform admirably against low level threats, but have difficulty fighting larger vessels and end up being destroyed 90% of these engagements. Lower the FP/credit cost on them all would only make early fights easier, and allow you to snowball pretty heavily. Even a Eagle would have a few problems with a group of 8 Talon squads.

Buffing them via stats wouldn't help either, because that would make frigates redundant.

Personally, I'd be interested in a whole new mechanic regarding fighters and carriers. A interesting example here is Star Wars: Empire at War. This great game had a different feature for Empire players; they couldn't build fightercraft at all, instead, all ships aside from corvettes had a set of fighter wings attached to them, which were then deployed when the battle started and fully repaired and replenished at the end. Their fighters were generally weaker to compensate. This mechanic could be used here, although tweaked a bit. A carrier, depending on their number of hangar bays and hangar space, could carry a set amount of fighercraft. If destroyed in battle they would be repaired and "respawned" at the carrier at a higher supply cost. You will be able to customize and assign what ships the carrier will hold, and it would be dependant on the hangar space. Let's say a Condor has 5 in HS, and Talons cost 2, and Warthogs 4. It would then be able to hold 2 Talon squads to use in combat or 1 Warthog squad.

Of course, this doesn't solve the potential issue of carriers being too vital for fightercraft.

[Gothars]

The problem as I see it with fighters is that they perform admirably against low level threats, but have difficulty fighting larger vessels and end up being destroyed 90% of these engagements.

True, and I think the solution is to be found either in fighter AI (actively avoiding "fighter butchers" unless ordered otherwise)  or the the command UI (with an avoid command).
Alex once tried an avoid command and was not happy with it, but I never understood that since it seems to work fine when fighters return to refit.

[naufrago]

I've been doing a little more thinking about this. So, infinitely producing fighters is probably a bad idea since it would introduce certain balance and economy problems. But as long as you possess a wing of fighters, it would make sense that they could be rebuilt as long as you have supplies and a carrier with enough CR to do so. Really, I think repairing and replacing fighters at the cost of CR and supplies is the way to go. It just makes sense and makes supplies (and supply lines in future builds) more important without making fighters so costly and risky to use.

In the event that a fighter wing is destroyed and you don't have a carrier with enough CR to produce a new wing, I feel that it shouldn't be permanently lost- it would just be grey'd out and undeployable until you can rebuild it.

The way it seems to work now, the fighter wings with more fighters per wing become more desirable because they're more likely to make it back to a carrier and/or survive battles. The optimal way to use fighters seems to be to send them out en masse to minimize the chance that any one wing takes the brunt of the damage. Making repairing and replacing fighters cost carrier CR and allowing carriers to rebuild destroyed fighter wings would encourage using fighters in a less stacked way. They would be more useful in larger engagements without having to devote your fleet composition to using them. Fighter wings with only two fighters per wing wouldn't be more risky to deploy than a wing of Wasps. All in all, it would make fighters more generally useful.

I just feel like it solves several of the issues I have with fighters without introducing any significant ones of its own (although if it does, I'd like to hear them).


EDIT: I feel like I should explain more why being able to replace fighters with CR is a good way of handling this. It throttles how quickly you can replace fighters and fighter wings, it makes sense from a 'realism' perspective, and it isn't prohibitively expensive.

The main costs are the supplies (which admittedly are quite cheap) and the time spent replenishing CR. It doesn't remove the cost of getting fighters (and they could even stand to be more expensive if this change goes through, in credit cost to buy them and possibly supply cost to repair them), but it does remove the credit cost of having to constantly replace lost fighter wings and returning to stations to get some more. More importantly, some fighters are extremely difficult to find, so you run the risk of not being able to replace them at all. For other ships that's fine, but since fighters are so fragile and disposable (and frankly, giving them the survivability stats of a frigate is a bit weird), it makes sense that they should be more easily replaceable.

[MidnightSun]

I like your idea, naufrago. Simple mechanic from an intuitive point-of-view, discourages tactless "Zerg-ing" of fighters to steamroll opponents, and in the case of closely matched fighter/carrier-based fleets, more advanced (and presumably more CR-robust and better-supplied) carriers have a good advantage.