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[Jonlissla]

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.

Fighters might need some tweaking in that case, as fightercraft would become a permanent addition to the fleet. A Condor has 15 hangar space, which means he can then permanently support 5 Talons. Sure, CR would act like a resource, but there won't be any risk at all since the fighters cannot be destroyed in any way. They basically become an asset for the player that cannot be lost. Would also make frigates obsolete, although I can't say for sure because of the upcoming changes.

Edit: A interesting tweak would be that every ship with hangar space can repair fighters after combat, while carriers can so in combat instead.

[naufrago]

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.

Fighters might need some tweaking in that case, as fightercraft would become a permanent addition to the fleet. A Condor has 15 hangar space, which means he can then permanently support 5 Talons. Sure, CR would act like a resource, but there won't be any risk at all since the fighters cannot be destroyed in any way. They basically become an asset for the player that cannot be lost. Would also make frigates obsolete, although I can't say for sure because of the upcoming changes.

Edit: A interesting tweak would be that every ship with hangar space can repair fighters after combat, while carriers can so in combat instead.

Well, your "interesting tweak" would just make the problem you described worse. =p Instead of draining CR from just carriers, it would distribute the drain to 'anything with hangar space.' It would reduce the recovery time of carriers and make them even more useful, basically.

There are several ways to counter-balance the increased usefulness of fighters. Reduced hull/armor/shield efficiency, higher FP cost, higher repair costs (both supply and carrier CR), CR recovery time, being destroyed (either in whole or in part) could severely reduce the fighter's own CR... there are lots of knobs to turn to balance things. It wouldn't make frigates useless since they're generally more survivable and/or have more firepower (and they'll be significantly faster next patch), and you could make fighters recover CR more slowly than frigates. Lore reason could be that the fleet has to manufacture replacement parts for the fighters rather than provide simple maintenance, and that's a lengthy process.

Basically, CR makes this change possible.

EDIT: I didn't really address your main concern well enough. Relying on fighters too heavily could put you in a situation where you have none available to deploy or no carriers that are combat ready. That would be less likely with frigates since they recover CR more quickly and are pretty survivable. A Condor can hold 5 Talon wings, but how many times can they be repaired and replaced before CR runs out (either on the carrier or fighter wing)? How quickly should fighter and carrier CR recover? How many credits should a fighter wing cost to offset the advantages they provide? Those are fairly straightforward balance issues that can probably be solved with some experimentation and tweaking.

[Jonlissla]

Well, your "interesting tweak" would just make the problem you described worse. =p Instead of draining CR from just carriers, it would distribute the drain to 'anything with hangar space.' It would reduce the recovery time of carriers and make them even more useful, basically.

Good point, didn't think of it. Could be fixed by letting you decide if the fighter should be repaired or not so you'd have atleast some form of control over it.

There are several ways to counter-balance the increased usefulness of fighters. Reduced hull/armor/shield efficiency, higher FP cost, higher repair costs (both supply and carrier CR), CR recovery time, being destroyed (either in whole or in part) could severely reduce the fighter's own CR... there are lots of knobs to turn to balance things. It wouldn't make frigates useless since they're generally more survivable and/or have more firepower (and they'll be significantly faster next patch), and you could make fighters recover CR more slowly than frigates. Lore reason could be that the fleet has to manufacture replacement parts for the fighters rather than provide simple maintenance, and that's a lengthy process.

Hangar space could also be modified in order to give you a fighter limit of sorts, so you can't overwhelm enemies like you can do now. I like the idea now.

Would be nice to read what Alex thinks about this issue with fighters.

[naufrago]

I thought of another alternative. Each time a fighter wing is repaired or rebuilt, it could come at the cost of the fighter's CR. It also could come at the cost of the carrier's CR, but that's less important. It's about shifting the CR burden to the fighters. If a fighter wing's CR is too low and it gets destroyed, that fighter wing is lost forever (you could still have the chance to rebuild it after battle like any other destroyed ship, possibly giving a bonus to the repair chance dependent on its remaining CR when it was destroyed). If your fighter wing gets destroyed while it still has plenty of CR but you don't have a carrier, it gets rebuilt after battle at the normal rate. Other than that, it's pretty much the same as my previous suggestion.

Different fighter wings could cost more or less a % of their CR to rebuild depending on certain factors. Maybe a Warthog or Xyphos wing would burn through 30% of its CR to be rebuilt while a Talon wing would only cost 15%, just to give an idea of what I'm thinking.

I like it because there's still the risk of losing fighter wings, which was absent in my previous suggestions. It still makes fighters more potent and less risky to deploy, but you'll still want to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't take TOO much damage and risk losing them.

[Flare]

Uh, maybe I am missing something, but...how would this not make fighters completely overpowered? All you need is a carrier and a fighter wing plan and you can fill all your FP (or whatev the new system will be) with fighters at the beginning of the game.

This, or it would require a rebalance of the rest of the game. Since fighters are so easy to replace, and they're being sent in number akin to the hundreds that would fly at each other during WWII carrier battle, maybe the weapons could model reality a bit more and swat them down left and right to compensate. It would certainly make ships like capitals with their over abundance of PD a sight to behold when it takes on a fighter swarm.

[CrashToDesktop]

Fighters aren't exactly that easy to replace - some like the Broadsword tend to run out quikly in shops after some time.

Besides, in the final game, ships will probably be much harder to come by and fighters slightly easier, albiet stil hard, to find.

[Silver Silence]

I kinda like the idea of buying a "plan" for fighters which then gives you your fighter wing. As Carriers carry the tools to rebuild a 6-ship wing out of one survivor given about 100 supplies anyway, I don't see much of an issue with it. I find it really weird how you can do this (rebuilding a whole wing from a single ship), but if you lose the whole wing then it just poofs, even though you probably have the supplies to just build a new wing, crew allowing of course. Carriers seem to be small autofactories themselves, with their ability to rebuild fighters on the fly, so why not load a blueprint into these autofactories which then gives you a fighter wing? If the Carrier is lost, the blueprints are lost too, so maybe a system almost like chipping, or upgrading, or inserting-gemsblueprints-into-your-+1-Carrier-of-Doom. Only carriers have the capacity to build fighters, however any ship with hangar space can hold them. The Carrier has the blueprints, then the fleet carries the ships. If you mothball the Carrier or otherwise lose it, you don't lose any currently built fighters, but they can no longer be rebuilt. Repairs, yes. But if you lose a ship from your 4-man Talon wing, it's a 3-man wing until you get a Carrier holding the Talon blueprints to reproduce it. Otherwise, that Talon wing can be fully repaired and combat-capable, just with diminished capability from the lack of a 4th wingman.

[naufrago]

Alex quote from here: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=5982.msg95426#msg95426 (just in case you hadn't read this, since it's relevant to this thread)

I also couldn't help but notice that you mentioned something about looking into fighter mechanics... so I'm going to shamelessly *** out this thread here: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=5910.0. I quite like the idea I came up with about fighters costing CR to be repaired and, most importantly, rebuilt. To summarize my idea, a destroyed fighter wing isn't necessarily gone. As long as it has enough CR, it can be replaced. However if the fighter wing is destroyed and its CR is too low, it's permanently gone.

I dunno, I just feel like it's too easy to completely destroy fighters. And frankly, it doesn't make sense that I can have 1 Wasp remaining and have it be restored to full strength, but the moment that last Wasp is destroyed it's gone for good. With CR, though, you could make each individual fighter have a specific CR cost to rebuild/repair it. For example, reconstructing Wasps could cost 4 or 5% of its CR per fighter. Reconstructing Xyphos(es?) could cost 15% of its CR per fighter. Lots of fun stuff you can do with it.

EDIT: Lore reason could be that as long as you have one full fighter, you can use that to make copies up to whatever the DRM allows you to keep in storage. Once the last one's gone, no more copies since there's nothing to copy. How many you're allowed to have deployed at one time is also constrained by the DRM. It's a bit contrived, but it makes a bit more sense than what we have now =p

Believe it or not, that's extremely close to what I'm thinking about. Just haven't 100% settled on that as the way to go

[Gothars]

However if the fighter wing is destroyed and its CR is too low, it's permanently gone.

The problem here is that you'd constantly have to monitor your fighter's CR on the map and retreat them before they'd get permanently destroyed. Kinda annoying.

I think binding the destruction of a wing to its carrier would be a interesting, but would open another can of worms. How to associate a wing with a carrier? What happens to blueprints of fighters that are not deployed if the carrier gets destroyed?

I can't yet see a clear solution for the fighter issue. Just that they should be much harder to permanently destroy is clear.

[Silver Silence]

Well, with my idea, if the Carrier is destroyed while equipped with blueprints, then they might drop just like guns or supplies. Though, perhaps much more common considering a Carrier might only have 3-4 blueprints loaded into it's computers. I think CR should be used to instead make fighters operate with diminished capacity. It's only a 1-3 man crew flying something that's presumably the size of an F-16 or some such, probably bigger. Perhaps the CR could relate to how worn down the pilots are, thus they can't turn as well, can't shoot as well, that sort of thing. And I guess if the CR gets really low or otherwise hits rock botton, the pilots are too worn out from the rigors of combat to even fly their fighters.

Something else with my idea of using carriers with blueprints for fighters. Players could potentially head to the abandoned station, let their carrier build a fighter wing, then stash the wing. Either make it so the wing is bound to the fleet until the blueprint is removed (haven't figured out a lore-y reason for that yet), or make it so that if such tactics are used, the extra wings are not maintained by the Carrier's systems. They'll be repaired as standard, but lost fighters will be lost, until the extra wings are all gone and then the Carrier can continue working with the fighters it's meant to have normally. Can see that being a cheap way to bulk out a player's fleet temporarily, but eh, it's a sandbox game, right? You could just give your fighters a million armour and laugh at Onslaughts as they try to shoot them down. You can play how you want.

[naufrago]

However if the fighter wing is destroyed and its CR is too low, it's permanently gone.

The problem here is that you'd constantly have to monitor your fighter's CR on the map and retreat them before they'd get permanently destroyed. Kinda annoying.

I fail to see how that's a problem. Making sure your ships aren't about to be horribly murdered and telling them to gtfo is something you should be doing anyway, especially for fighters and frigates.

This actually requires less micro to keep your fighters alive. If you know how much CR your fighters started the battle with and keep track of how many times they've been rebuilt and repaired during battle (and if you forget, checking on them should be fairly simple), it's easier to know when to retreat them. You don't have to constantly watch your fighters like a hawk to make sure that at least one survives.

Currently, fighters often go from optimal condition, to being in poor condition (a state when it should be ordered to repair or retreat), to being dead in an extremely short amount of time if you're not watching them very carefully. Even then, sometimes a fighter wing will decide it can take on an Onslaught. With CR, the risk of having a fighter wing deployed increases more gradually as its CR is burned, rather than going from perfectly fine (low risk state) to suddenly jumping to an extremely risky state if it happens to lose most of its fighters by pathing a little to close to a ship with lots of PD. It gives you more time to react and tell the fighter wing to retreat.

[Gothars]

However if the fighter wing is destroyed and its CR is too low, it's permanently gone.

The problem here is that you'd constantly have to monitor your fighter's CR on the map and retreat them before they'd get permanently destroyed. Kinda annoying.

I fail to see how that's a problem. Making sure your ships aren't about to be horribly murdered and telling them to gtfo is something you should be doing anyway, especially for fighters and frigates.

This actually requires less micro to keep your fighters alive. If you know how much CR your fighters started the battle with and keep track of how many times they've been rebuilt and repaired during battle (and if you forget, checking on them should be fairly simple), it's easier to know when to retreat them. You don't have to constantly watch your fighters like a hawk to make sure that at least one survives.

Currently, fighters often go from optimal condition, to being in poor condition (a state when it should be ordered to repair or retreat), to being dead in an extremely short amount of time if you're not watching them very carefully. Even then, sometimes a fighter wing will decide it can take on an Onslaught. With CR, the risk of having a fighter wing deployed increases more gradually as its CR is burned, rather than going from perfectly fine (low risk state) to suddenly jumping to an extremely risky state if it happens to lose most of its fighters by pathing a little to close to a ship with lots of PD. It gives you more time to react and tell the fighter wing to retreat.

Damaged fighters go to a carrier for repairs on their own, there's hardly any micromanagement necessary. True, they die quite easily (and that's annoying), but that's nothing you can change with MM.
With your idea low CR becomes much more critical for a wing than the damage it suffered. Suddenly micromanagement is very necessary to keep it alive, even though, as you said, its overall survivability has increased by leaps and bounds.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that you can see CR only on the map.
Imagine you have a fighter wing engaging an superior enemy. Two things can be the case:
They have high CR and their destruction doesn't matter much.
Or they have low CR and their destruction is permanent.
Those two situations are very different (as much as a current full HP wing vs. a single surviving fighter with low HP), but they look exactly the same on the combat screen. Evil trap.


A warning system about low CR on fighters (and frigates) would be an option, or the ability to give standing orders fort 0 CR ships to retreat. Some visual effect on ships with very low CR would be quite helpful, too.

[naufrago]

Damaged fighters go to a carrier for repairs on their own, there's hardly any micromanagement necessary. True, they die quite easily (and that's annoying), but that's nothing you can change with MM.
With your idea low CR becomes much more critical for a wing than the damage it suffered. Suddenly micromanagement is very necessary to keep it alive, even though, as you said, its overall survivability has increased by leaps and bounds.

I think I'm assuming you play similarly to me, which may not be the case. Also, "micro" may have been a poor choice of words.

So, every now and then I pause and look at the map to make sure my other ships aren't doing anything dumb or getting overwhelmed. If they've started taking hull damage or it's simply too risky to have them in a certain area, I order them to another part of the map or retreat them (the "micro" I'm referring to). Other than that, I leave them to do their own thing. My micro can be summed up as "go over here so you don't die horribly."

You don't like that fighters can die quite easily, as do I, but that's something that micromanagement CAN help with; it just requires a disproportionate amount of effort compared to microing a frigate since frigates don't die as quickly and are less suicidal. Still occasionally have suicidal whims, but less than fighters. Once again, 'micro' refers to telling them to gtfo.

I think the main difference in our opinions is due to how the potential changes wouldn't affect my playstyle at all while making fighters a worthwhile investment for me, while it would make you look at the map more to use fighters optimally, I'm guessing?

With your idea low CR becomes much more critical for a wing than the damage it suffered.

...

Imagine you have a fighter wing engaging an superior enemy. Two things can be the case:
They have high CR and their destruction doesn't matter much.
Or they have low CR and their destruction is permanent.
Those two situations are very different (as much as a current full HP wing vs. a single surviving fighter with low HP), but they look exactly the same on the combat screen. Evil trap.

I agree that it makes CR more important for fighters than their health bar, but I don't see that as a problem. Here's how I envisage your scenario would play out, for me anyway-

You have a fighter wing engaging an enemy and it gets destroyed.
Case 1: The fighters have high CR. Their destruction means they will be less effective when they return (remember CR replaces crew's combat bonuses).
Case 2: The fighters have low CR. Their destruction means they're even less effective. They may have to sit out the next fight as well. Keeping them deployed risks permanent destruction.
Case 3: The fighters have basically no CR. Their destruction is permanent.

The risk gradually increases while the effectiveness gradually decreases. The key thing is Case 2. Case 2 is where you get to make a choice, the choice that you normally don't get to make currently- the choice to retreat the fighters. I think that's incredibly valuable, even if it means CR becomes more important than their health bar.

I also agree that it should be easy to tell at a glance how high a ship's CR is. I'd actually like to be able to see the status of all my deployed ships on the combat screen so I don't have to keep checking the map. Perhaps a row or two of little pictures of your ships with their armor status, each with a little bar for their flux level (no need for numbers- its enough just knowing how full the bar is) and a little bar for their hull integrity, as well as their %CR somewhere nearby. I'm imagining something along the lines of what MMORPGs use to show the status of your party members.

EDIT: If it helps, you can just check your fighter's CR anytime you read the message that they've taken off from a carrier. That seems like the simplest point to make your decision to retreat them or not ...assuming the next build goes the way I think it will.

Ooo, idea- anytime a fighter wing is destroyed or takes off from a carrier, the message that appears could contain its %CR.
Example: "Broadsword Wing (37%CR) takes off from [carrier]."

[Gothars]

Ooo, idea- anytime a fighter wing is destroyed or takes off from a carrier, the message that appears could contain its %CR.
Example: "Broadsword Wing (37%CR) takes off from [carrier]."

...that's a really good idea.

Mh, I think it was planned to introduce a more personal communication system along with the officer system, regular CR reports from both fighters and frigates seem to be a logical inclusion.
It might also be a good idea to change fighter behavior depending on CR, maybe a low CR fighter will tend to stick close to friendlies.

All in all I like it now, with a bit polish on the rough edges the principle in your suggestion seems very workable