Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

I have some time to kill so I am working on a mod. What I want to do is make fighters and carriers more useful and more praticle for the game along the lines of what they represent to our current military.

Carriers are the center of any naval fleet. In SEIV they are not that usefull as they are easy targets and cost a bundle to make.

What I am considering doing are the following:

1. Reduce cost for fighter technology
2. Add neo standard fighters
3. Adjust fighters engines, smaller get more larger less.
5. Changing Point Defense Cannons so that they do not target Fighters.
6. Make Point Defense Cannons for Fighters that target ONLY fighters.
7. Add anti fighter missiles for use with ships.
8. Give Carriers a negative maintenance cost. (Reduce their cost)
9. Give carriers the NEVER MISS ability for their weapons.
10. Give Carriers an Engine Mount or other to boast there usefulness.

What do you think? I would think that in space combat larger ships would use long range weapons to attack other ships, while carriers would be used like they are currently, as a fighter platform. Fighters should always cause fear in the hearts of ship captains and admirals.

Fighters should be hard to kill, less they are engaged by other fighters, and they should server a more useful purpose in the game.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Why a never miss ability for carriers?

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

To give them an edge.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Agree with all except no: 8, 9, 10

Because the carrier is able to defend themself already.
Sometimes I develope fighters at turn 1, So I can use the 800kt carrier from turn 2. Believe me it makes an excellent Cruiser (large weapon mount) with fighter support in the early game.

Maybe you could lower the percentage of fighter bays needed, so you could use more normal weapons and shields etc etc.....

Inti,

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Definitely need to eliminate that silly exploit... carriers need a ship construction tech req too.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

My biggest problem with Fighters in the stock game is how the tech area is handled. The first level is incredible (you have all fighter weapons, armour, shield, the Light Cruiser and the Small Fighter for 100,000 research points. A bargain), but the results after this level are much less impressive. The same goes for the Carrier hulls; the first one is very good (on par with a Light Cruiser), but the later ones cost a lot to research and aren't nearly as good.

Another, smaller matter is to bring the fighters to the offensive. While they are deadly if you can ensure they have first strike (wormhole defence), and it is easy to deploy fighters on a particular spot, it doesn't work so well for offence. The Fighter Bay is only able to launch one fighter per combat turn, so your average Carrier will launch 20 or 30 fighters per combat turn. With fighter numbers reaching four or five figures rather easily, you would need one hundred Carriers to start having a proper launch rate (that excludes unusual situations where the standard measure to count your fighters is 10,000).

So I would say fighters aren't really that weak (unless fighting the Talisman, and even then numbers can wreak some damage), as long as you use them in numbers and have the time to mass produce them. You should expect huge losses as well, but then, so will your opponent.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

I've done something similar in my Dark Nova Mod. What I did was took the expanded sizes for fighters and carriers (as well as most other too, by the way) from Andres Lescano's Ultimate Shipsizes Mod. IIRC there are 10 fighter sizes and 12 carriers. The largest fighters, Battle Squadron-2, is 60 Kt and can pack a sizable arsenal.

Also, fighters are cheaper to research than unmodded.

As for PDC, what I did was reduce the damage done slightly and decreased their range to 3. I also added a fighter weapon mount that gives +1 range (at a increase of supplies and size). This means that fighters can actually stay out of range of PDC.

With the carriers having so many new sizes and being relatively inexpensive to research, they gain the benifit of larger weapon mounts faster than other ship sizes which provides the same benifit as a warship that I think you are looking for.

In the Dark Nova games played so far, if you arn't using fighters, then you are sunk without a massive number of standard ships.

The newest mod, Dark Nova 4 is avaliable here:
http://seiv.pbw.cc/Download/filelib/1035/DN4+Mod.zip

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

I would love to see a mod that enabled carriers and fighters to be more potent. But there must be a way to do it without a sense of "deux ex machina"

Put another way, the reason aircraft are so potent in todays world, and why we put so much effort into the Carrier strike Groups et al, is becuase the aircraft travel in a different medium than the ships. Because aircraft fly (through air) and ships steam (in water) they have fundamentally different modes of action.

Cna these different modes of action be better simulated in a SE4 mod, rather than just making "carriers never miss" or somesuch.

For example, why not make fighters hace the capacity to carry many more weapons loads and carriers able to carry more fighters and make the fighters a LOT faster. Say they start at speed 10 and ships at speed 2, or something like that. Make fighter tech a lot cheaper.

Also, I would note that carriers in our modern navy are vast monstrosities entirely devoted to supporting their airwing. Actual armament on carriers as well as defensive ability is almost zero. Carriers have jets on patrol and their escort ships to defend themselves. That's really it. It would be nice to simulate that...

That is not really possible in SE4, but on a practical

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

One option is to give fighters armor that gives them lots of hit points, so they don't die by the dozens per shot...

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

What I did in Eclipse is I added a built in combat defense and offense bonus to the fighter hulls. This is really effective if you also add bonuses and penalties to ship hulls according to their size. This way fighters will rarely be hit by large ships and it forces the opponent to use either small ships or fighters of their own to counter yours.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Agreed !!

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

This is already present in stock, other than offense bonuses for ships. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Another idea is to make Afterburners add to both combat offense and defense values. Most of the fighter's off and def bonus is from the maneuverability of the hull, and afterburners make them more maneuverable... Helps keep the fighters competitive at higher tech levels, since their ECM and Combat Sensors are much weaker, and they do not get nice things like experience bonuses...

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

This sound cool. Fighters are so useless in the game

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Try Adamant Mod. Fighters are a lot more useful there.

http://adamant.spaceempires.net/

The AI is still under development...

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

You missed the most obvious ideas for carriers!

• Give them inherent cargo ability so they can carry more fighters. Isn't that the point of a 'carrier' -- that it's designed to carry fighters? Explicit cargo modules just enhance the already intrinsic cargo storage.
  
  Give them inherent fighter launch ability. Again, isn't that what carriers are designed to do? Having at least some intrinsic ability to launch fighters lets you get a larger total launch ability, or cram more 'support' equipment into the hull while still getting a decent level of performance in the ship's main mission.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

These are all excellent suggestions, thank you.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

To me, it seems that real world fighters have 4 advantages over ships:
1) Much faster. This should be easy to implement in a mod.
2) Much harder to hit, due to: a) small size, b) speed, and c) maneuverability. This should also be easy to implement in a mod.
3) Separate units, so you have to kill them one at a time. IRL, big guns are useless agains fighters, not just because they can't track the fighters, but also because this tactic is incredibly wasteful of supplies. This could also be implemented in a mod. Ideally, the hard code would be changed to prevent any weapon from killing more than one fighter at a time. But one could simulate the effect by giving fighters and missiles a very high defensive bonus and giving PDC a partly offsetting offensive bonus. The net effect would be that regular weapons would still kill a whole lot of fighters in a group if they hit, but they would almost always miss, thus canceling out the mass-kills on the average. (So if your dreadnought had lots of shields+generators or organic armor plus it had a quantum converter, then maybe you could plan on using regular weapons as fighter defense, but otherwise this would be a sure-fire losing tactic.) A simpler solution is just to not let regular weapons target fighters at all, ever. IRL, if you have an all-battleship fleet with no APC and get attacked by a carrier group, you're dead, end of story.
4) They can get close and choose the exact target area for their weapons. In SEIV, there are no "critical hit" rules, so this translates as much higher damage for a given vehicle size. This is readily modded.

On the other hand, IRL fighters have these disadvantages:
1) Much more limited supply. This has two effects: a) They have to be transported to a battle by a carrier (or refueled enroute, with advanced tech), and b) Long battles require re-supply by the carrier, which takes time. In SEIV, we have a difficulty, because we want fighters to have a high speed (e.g., 10 just for starters so they have a battle speed of 5) but we don't want fighters zooming around systems. Part of the solution is to give them small supplies and make their weapons use small supplies. Thus, they can zoom around during a 30-turn battle but can't go more than a few sectors before running out of supplies. The other part of the solution is to make fighter weapons of three kinds:
Large size, large damage, large reload time, and medium tech weapons that can only target ships (i.e., torpedoes, anti-ship missiles);
Small size, medium damage, large reload time, high-tech weapons that can only target fighters (i.e., air-to-air missiles); and
Small size, small damage, firing every turn, small supply use, low-tech weapons (i.e., machine guns).
2) Much more fragile. Fighters should be hard to hit but easy to destroy. (Same with missiles BTW. Drones too?) Since SEIV insists on grouping fighters, you'd have to reduce the damage done by PDC also. The reason for doing this is to allow fighters to destroy each other in dogfights with their "machine guns" but not allow "machine guns" to take out a heavily armored/shielded dreadnought.
3) Their carriers are fragile, not very fast, single-use vessels. They don't have the internal structure to carry heavy guns. If you can mod in a rule that carrier hulls can only carry regular-size weapons, then that would make things more real and also help with the exploit mentioned by someone.

That's all I can think of for now. Hope this helps.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

That is easily solveable. Separate the movement and supply abilities of engines. Works great for all vehicles, not just fighters. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Divide size, cost, etc. of engines in half and remove supply abilities. Add "reactors" that are the same size as the new engines, and have those removed supply abilities. This works especially well in a QNP engine system, where there is no silly 6 engine per ship limit, as it provides even greater flexibility in vehicle design. For fighter reactors, just give them lower supply storage than the equivalent stock fighter engines would give them.

This is also fairly easy to accomplish. It requires setting the sizes of all carriers to _never_ be the same size as a warship. Then, you need to add a lot more copies of large, heavy and massive mounts, giving them ranges of minimum and maximum ship tonnage that do not include the carriers. So, you might make the Light Carrier 810 kT instead of 800 kT. Replace the stock Large Mount with 2 large mounts. One has a min size of 400 and max size 800. The second has a min size 811 and no max size. This effectively cuts off the aforementioned 810 kT Light Carrier from using the large mount.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Or, why not use armor/shield skipping damage?

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Very interesting suggestion. Really changes the nature of fighters. I think the weapons in that case would need to be range 1 only (since you are close enough to be "inside" of their shields and/or pick out "seams"). You could even combine this with a weapon that targets a specific component, like shield generators or self-destructs or bridges or PDC. So your strategy might be to have some very fast fighters with close-range weapons that disable the enemy somehow, then you bLast them with powerful stand-off weapons (from ships or "torpedoe-bomber" fighters) or maybe board them or maybe just leave them stranded. Meanwhile you defend yourself from enemy fighters with "interceptor" fighters. If the enemy fleet doesn't have good fighter defense, it will never reach you with its big guns. Of course, if the enemy has anticipated your strategy and has good fighter defense, you are doomed. Maybe your fighters should all have a secondary strategy of "kamikaze."

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Well, what I did with the modified Version of Proportions that I'm using, was to give the fighters' engines a combat movement of 6, separated from their strategy movement, so if they would move 10 strategy, which would be 5 tactical, they would get 6 more movement points in combat for a total of 11.
It looks awesome in combat, with the defending fighters launching out of a planet to intercept an incoming fleet, but it have a little side effect: since the fighters only fire before movement or after movement, when the target is halfway their total movement points, the fighters tend to move back and forth between two combat squares until they use up all the movement points, and only then fire their weapons.
It's kind of annoying, but you can think of it as dogfighting. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I liked the idea of adding to their hull defense bonus, so I will add some more of it, so the regular ships' guns can't hit them at all, while adding to the fighters weapons hit bonus, so they can still be effective against other fighters.

I also twiked the Fighter Attack strategy, so that fighters would engage other fighters first, achieving air superiority, and only then attacking the enemy capital ships, and leaving planets for Last.

-I reduced the small rockets and small torpedo components to 3 kt, so that every fighter can carry 2 guns (damage between 2 and 4) and 1 missile/torpedo component (damage between 30 and 60).
- The life support component got eliminated, since I thought it was irrevelant for a short range fighter (I don't use fighters strategically because the AI doesn't) To make it sound better, I added to the description of the Fighter cockpit that it "contains advanced targetting systems and limited life support equipment".
- Addittional hit and defense bonus to the afterburners, since their combat movements doesn't add up to the engines combat movement.
- Fighter hull price lowered to 1 mineral per kt to allow for mass production.


I also twiked the carriers a bit:
- The fighter bay component to 20 kt, so you can carry 100 fighters in the Light Carrier, and still have room for 3 shield generators and 3 PDCs.
- Fighter bays can now carry the 4 fighters it can launch, without need for cargo components.
- The Light Carrier to 820 kts, to add 1 more crew and one more life support components, since I thought a wing of 100 fighters should use quite a number of tech and maintenance personal.

And that's about it.
I liked several of the ideas in this thread, so I will probably add some of them.

One problem I have though, its that I haven't quite managed to make the AI to mass-produce the fighters.
Last weeek I put in the build file to "build at least 100", but I don't know yet if it's working. The other entries says "Build per planet", I think, but I don't know how that works exactly (20 means 2 per planet?)
Help here please. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

If AI has 10 planets under control and Planet Per Item := 50 used in construction file then it will build 2 ship/unit. With 20 planets it will build 4 ship/unit. In short: ships_to_build = total_planets/(PPI/10).

Imo, Planet Per Item entry is not very comfortable for mass unit construction, because even with 100 planets and PPI := 1 AI can build 1000 units max, which is quite small amount for such a developed empire. Gradually increasing amounts in Must Have At Least entries is better for this purpose.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

I am not really sure what you guys are talking about, I find fighters to be an unbalancing element in the game. Even in the latter stages they can more than deal with conventional vessels. The problem is you have to micromanage your economy to build, transport, and load fighters to your carriers as they are destroyed. Most players just don't excersise the control to keep it rolling.

Conventional ships are build and forget.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Add 4 PDC cannons to each larger warship. Fighters fall in droves...

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Which of course the AI does almost universally, and I can still own them everytime. Sure I lose alot of fighters, but they don't take up maintenence, so there is really no upper limit to me swarming any size fleet.

And that isn't to say conventional warships are worthless, and I use them in conjuction. However, I can always win with fighters.

But you have to be willing to manage the constuction queues of a hundred planets, manage a transport fleet to get them to the battle fleet, and keep that system safe. I am anal enough to do so, most aren't.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

I could beat the stock AIs with DUCs and Destroyers... the AI is not all that great. Try human opponents. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif http://www.pbw.cc

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Now that is something that I definetly don't have the patience for...

The bane of all such games is the time MP consumes.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

What we are trying to do is get the mod to focus more on the use of fighters and carriers than on bigger badder ships.

We have removed the PDC from use with ships, replaced it with anti - fighter missiles. (if they work), and given the PDC to the fighters. (If that will work).

CNC wanted to keep the mod basic, no major design changes that would require extensive modding of the AI. I agree, why whip a dead horse. I am sure as time goes on and the mod becomes more of reality than it currently is, QNP and other concepts will be adopted. But with QNP and seperation of engine abilities comes the daunting task of AI editing and modding. And I really don't have to mention how much of a PITA this is.

Right now we have a basic mod working. Its playable and not that much differant from stock say for some new racial triats and technologies.

Cloaking technology is now a racial trait as is gravitational technology.

I wish CNC would not have posted here about the carrier fighter issue until we had more time to work on the ideas. But what is done is done. Now we have to sift through the Posts for things that we can use.

I do ask myself this daily, why bother? I mean anything we do now is kinda pointless given the fact that in a very short time the focus will change toward SEV.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

With most games you just play one turn a day, or every other day. It does not take much time at all...

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

For just QNP, it takes only a few minutes. If you set up the QNP in the "standard" way, like it is in Pirates and Nomads Mod (ion engines have 3 standard movement, all more advanced engines have 1 more MP per level), or even if it is a bit non-standard, you can use SJ's AI Patcher and the QNP option to patch all of the AI files to make them QNP rather than stock-like propulsion. It is available on http://www.geocities.com/hohoho611ca/pirates.html . Setting up the reactors would be a bit trickier, but you can fake it by using the AI Patcher, then replacing the Standard Movement ability in the AI files with the Supply ability, or an AI tag, depending on what is used. Then, apply the AI patcher again. Voila, all the AI will now add the same number of engines and reactors to ship designs, all in a nice QNP format. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Cloaking? Erm... that sounds like it could be unbalancing... Are all forms of cloaking restricted to this racial trait? How about cloak scanners?

Probably at least a year... that is plenty of time for some PBW games to run their lives. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Also, it shouldn't be too hard to adapt mods to SE5 format, so the groundwork done now will help when making the mod for SE5... Some kind soul will probably even write a program to convert mods from SE4 format to SE5 format. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

At... I am working on some ideas for the upcoming cool game i am running...

So perhaps some IM between you and I and CNC....

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Cool. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

How that the "Must have at least" works?
Is it a total number for the empire or an amount per planet?
Example:
I want the AI to mass produce fighters, so I entered:
Planets per Item: 1
Must have at least: 100

Will the AI build 100 fighters per planet?

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Must Have At Least := xxx evaluates total number of ships/units per empire. So to realize mass fighter production do something like this:

Entry 10 Type := Fighter
Entry 10 Planet Per Item := 50
Entry 10 Must Have At Least := 100
...
Entry 20 Type := Fighter
Entry 20 Planet Per Item := 20
Entry 20 Must Have At Least := 300
...
Entry 30 Type := Fighter
Entry 30 Planet Per Item := 10
Entry 30 Must Have At Least := 700
...
Entry 40 Type := Fighter
Entry 40 Planet Per Item := 3
Entry 40 Must Have At Least := 1500

and so on http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

These numbers are approximate, modify them according to your liking.

Don't use Entry XX Must Have At Least := 5000 from start, because AI will to get caught in an endless fighter loop and won't build anything more.
Such step-by-step approach will make your construction_vehicles file bigger and require a quite a lot of planning and testing, though.

PS: this is just a suggestion, it not tested by me, so use it at your own risk http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

AT i am on at work now...

Next time your on send me a dangle...

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Patroclus was much to gentlemanly. I say "Balls!"

It's all a matter of how you use them and how many.

Re: Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.
 

Of course. The point was that they are not the most powerful thing in the game... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif