Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

I have not had the opportunity to try this yet but does anyone know if Gold/1.67 has cured the stacking effect for fighter weaponry?

I was hoping that emissive armour would become more effective if fighter weaponry no longer stacked (would also make some of the high damage, long reload fighter weaponry morer relevant)

Any beta testers know the answer?

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

I'm pretty sure fighter weapons still all shoot separately for to-hit determination, but their total damage is applied against emissive armor once per fighter group, I believe.

PvK

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Is this still true?

CombatSquirrel

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

Yes. As of v1.82, fighter stacks still stack damage.

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

This fighter stacked damage being applied as one lump sum against the emissive effect has been commented on (and complained about) for years. Is there some explanation or rationalization for why this effect remains?

I mean, of course, apart from the fact that MM isn't a hapless slave to my frivilous demands that is...

Does it serve some little understood function, or simulate some effect that I can't fathom?

CombatSquirrel

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">But it is easy to mod the effectiveness of EA 1, to say just 5 points, and it would beautifully simulate the ineffectiveness of the smaller weapon fire of fighters against full-size system travelling warships. Or, what I am trying to do, set a moderate EA level for Capital Ships to make them truly fearsome and difficult to deal with without Capital Ships of your own.

This works great for everything, except that a hefty stack of fighters can chew into a Capital Ship more effectively than a slew of destroyers.

CombatSquirrel

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

Fighters are so totally inept in mid to late game as it is, making them not stack would make them totally irrelevant. I see what you are saying in theory CS, but in practice the effectiveness of PDC and regular weapons against fighters totally makes up for any on paper advantage the damage stacking should give them. A large stack of fighters against one or two capital ships possibly, but against a fleet, even a small fleet, of capital ships is going to not live long enough to do any significant damage. Maybe it's not realistic, or maybe it is, but it's more of a game play thing really. Trying to keep fighters viable later in the game so that the end game doesn't become more vanilla than it already is.

I have been thinking about posibilities throguh game setup or a mod that will permit a game that is geared more towards the capital ships. To have ship to ship combat be more one on one, or just a handful of big ships. Where one capital ship unsupported, or maybe just a couple, basically is responsible for an entire system. But to do it would make them very suceptable to fighter stacks. What I was thinking is in such a mod you could eliminate the fighters ability to move about stragecially, only allow them combat movement. So they would have to be supported by carriers, or stationed on planets.

Geoschmo

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Geo,

Since I haven't really made it to the endgame stage yet, can you tell me in what way point-defense becomes so effective that it nullifies the fighter advantage? Does it get more shots, or a longer range?

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

I'm going the other way. AoW will make fighters very important, in all stages of the game.

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">In Proportions, fighters are very hard to kill even in late game (well unless you have Religious Talisman VI (takes forever to research). They can be nasty even against big fleet.

It is easy to mod "combat only" fighters - reduce allowed number of engines and increase afterburners bonus.

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

[quote]Originally posted by sachmo:

Quote:

Geo, Since I haven't really made it to the endgame stage yet, can you tell me in what way point-defense becomes so effective that it nullifies the fighter advantage? Does it get more shots, or a longer range?

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">They get longer range and more damage per shot at the higher tech levels. They always fire once per turn, only take 20KT of space and are relativly cheap to buy as weapons go, and they are cheap to research. And they get to fire as soon as the fighter or missle moves into range, instead of letting the fighter get off a shot first. Add to this that regular direct fire weapons can target fighters, and do much higher damage.

There is no hard and fast rule about when the fighters become non-viable. But unless the enemy is using a LOT of fighters, like hundreds per combat, you can get away with just including a 2 or 3 PDC on your capital ships. And even if they are using hundreds, throwing one or two all PDC ships in the fleet takes care of that.

Fighters are good for some things. They are very good early, and very good for defense in less critical areas. They will keep your enemy honest and not allow them to wipe out a bunch of colonies in your rear with a couple of light raiders. But against the strength of your enemies frontline warships late in the game they serve at best a supporting role. If they do well by themselves your enemy isn't all that good and not much of a threat anyway.

Geoschmo

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">No, but it probably does share, though I haven't tested that.

That is, launch 99 fighters without EA, followed by 1 fighter with EA, into the same group, and probably the 99 will all benefit from the EA on the Last fighter.

PvK

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

Well, without it stacking, 90% of fighter weapons would be completely useless against EA level 1...

As it is now, fighters can hurt ships, and Emissive armor is still useful in many situations.

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

How about emissive armor on fighters, will that stack too?

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

I thought EA didn't work on units.

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

I thought it did, as of 1.78.

(Edit: said 1.87 but meant 1.78...)

[ November 21, 2002, 19:40: Message edited by: PvK ]

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

PvK, do you get special beta updates? 1.87? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

No, I was sleepy and transposed numbers. I mean't 1.78. The latest beta I have is 1.82. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I also see what you are saying, Geo, and in SEIV standard I agree that it is a largely irrelevant point. But the fact remains that you can make considered adjustments to PD damage, size, accuracy, cost, difficulty to research. You can make choices in the defensive (or offensive) bonuses of manueverable fighters, and lumbering Capitol Ships. You can limit weapons, design special mounts... you have a staggering host of variables at your command to poke and tweak to adjust most any parameter.

You could design a ship that is 20% resistant to the toughest weapon mountable on a Cruiser. You could, if you wanted to, make it invulnerable to an infinite number of Cruisers, or design it so that the average Cruiser will inflict 10 points on its armor per combat turn. One thing you cannot do, however, is make a standard ship's hull able to bounce fighter weapons like peas off a brick wall. Even if those weapons only do 2 points of damage each, enough 25 kT fighters and your vessel will take full damage from every single one of them beyond the threshold.

The possibility to model a particular genre, or design and implement a particular "cosmic slant" is my absolute favorite aspect of SEIV. The ability to totally remodel the basics of design or combat is a real treat for me. I know that many, many participants on this board have more knowledge and experience than me, so I enter the debate to learn.

I just don't see the stacking of damage by units ignoring considerations of the individual effects of each combat hit as a feature. I perceive it as a limitation... maybe a necessary limitation. Clever design can incorporate and enhance a feature. Clever design is required to contain and diminish the effects of a limitation.

CombatSquirrel

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

It would be wonderful to have our cake and eat it too--i.e., Fighters (like drones) don't stack, but they can share a sector in the combat map (like SE3 ships). (For that matter, I'd like to see ships stack, too, up to a reasonable limit.) PDC could only hit one at a time, but fighter weapons would be somewhat limited by EA.

This would encourage wider use of higher damage/higher reload fighter weapons. Alternately, fighters wouldn't cause much damage until capital ships or bombers stripped the EA away.

I guess one alternate modding route to this is to give each fighter hull a shield generation ability of 10-30 pts (maybe goes up by fighter level?) It would limit the ability of PDC to destroy several fighters at once, but large and heavy mount capital weapons would still be able to kill them en masse. Still leaves some problems, but maybe better than nothing.

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

Krsq: two sides for the solution. The good: it would once and for all remove the PDC power because then one could easily swarm the target with hundreds of fighters. If each of those is a single target it will take infinity to kill all of them by the PDC. Thats the good one.
The bad side is two-fold. First it would make tactical combat watching (i always do that in SP - launch the combat in Tactical and turn it to full auto) a real pain. Second is that a single Emmisive armor would render all but Anti-Matter Torpedo, Kamikaze Warhead, Rocket Pods, Shard Cannon and Graviton beam(point blank) absolutely useless.Torpedoes would do 5 damage each; warhead would do 50 damage but the fighter would be destroyed; rocket pods would do as much as 70 damage but its a one-shot and it is not an option for multi-target combat; Graviton would do 10 damage and only on point-blank range. Shard cannon would rule the day for the Skip Armor ability though.
Now Emmisive Armor is a humble 20kT meaning that even a tiny escort or frigate could be virtually immune to most fighter weapons.

This is not an option. OTOH if the Emmisive armor resistance was reduced to 10 damage resistance it would be more interesting. Still, weapons that gain a lot of use such as PPB & Meson and APB on max range would be useless. Thats a solution, though. Mesons are weak against capital ships anyway. PPB on fighters is stupid IMO.

This raises a question - do multiple emmisive armors on a ship stack their bonuses?
Meaning: i have 4 emmisive armors, thats 30*4=120 damage resistance. Does that mean that if the ship is hit with a Quantum Torpedo (100 damage) it would take no damage? Or would it destroy the first one and do 20 resisted damage to the second one? (100dmg - 30res1 - 50arm1) = 20 damage leftover from the first shot. Those would be resisted by the second armor.
How exactly does it work then?

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

They aren't stackable (but having more than one emissive could still be useful - a back up incase the first one is destroyed) so you don't have to worry about trying to attack someone who is immune to 300 points damage.

I'd favor the unstacking of the fighter damage personally. It may seem that this will make ships with emissive armor "immune" to fighters, but everything is modable! You could easily make the Emissive Armor much bigger than 20kT for example, and now only large ships can use it. Or significantly reduce the capacity of emissive armor to match the fighter weapons damages (this is my pref. solution)...

ie. if most level 1 fighter (direct fire) weapons do 3-7 damage, then make level 1 emissive block 6 damage. Some fighter weapons can do damage, but most don't.

ie. if most level 2 fighter weapons do 6-12 damage, then make level 2 emissive block 10 damage.

Etc.

As to special weapons like the one-timer rocket pods or the kamikaze warheads are in a league of their own.

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

As far as I know (see my post in the topic "emissive armor on units" from August this year http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...006819#000003) the emissive armor ability does not work at all on fighters (and probably on all units).
The reason is that SE IV treats an unit in combat damage calculation as one entity and does not take into consideration the individual components of the unit.

[ November 22, 2002, 10:08: Message edited by: Q ]

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

By reducing the emissive ability to 10 or 20 points, then it makes it useless against standard weapons. This forces the design question of "What is emissive armor supposed to protect against?" There doesn't seem to be a happy medium between blocking fighter weapons and blocking low damage standard weapons.

I agree that unstacking fighter damage would make most fighter weapons useless against capital ships, to a point. Unstacking fighters would allow them to survive longer, though, until heavy fighter weapons or capital ships could destroy the emissive armor. Then, the fighters would be able to damage the ship. I see this as somewhat realistic; I have trouble visualizing a single-person vehicle causing major damage to a 800kt battleship, without some heavy weapons breaching the defenses first.

I agree that it would be a pain to watch tactical combat. It would even be a pain to control tactical combat. Maybe (don't hurt me for saying this) fighters could be computer controlled. (Of course, there would have to be a toggle for that for all us option freaks. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif )

This goes off into another topic, but it might be nice to be able to turn computer control on and off for individual ships in combat.

[Edit: fikseeng tipohz]

[ November 22, 2002, 14:35: Message edited by: Krsqk ]

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

As long as the fighters are allowed to share the same square, and move as a single unit, it shouldn't complicate the viewing of tactical combat even if the damage is calculated separatly. The issue is whether their damage should stack, not whether the images of the units shold stack I think.

I would be in favor of fighter damage not stacking with some additional changes. If the capital ships could not take out Groups of fighters at once. If damage from the fighters is being calculated separatly, then damage to the fighters should be as well.

Then some clearer delineation between fighter weapons should be made. There would be the fighter mounted anti ship weapons that are capable of doing lots of damage, but only fire once. And the smaller weapons, ion weapons or whatever that cannot hurt a ship very much, but are used against other fighters.

With all the changes together you have a situation more parallel to what we have today. With your attack fighters with powerful antiship weapons being supported by persuit fighters that have lost of anti fighter weapons. And the capital ships would be advised to have carriers and fighter escort. Not just to rely on PDC and main guns.

Perhaps ship direct fire weapons should not be able to target fighters. Require them to have PDC or escort carriers. Afterall, a battleships main guns today are no use against a fighter. They can't be targeted that quickly.

Geoschmo

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

I think the issue with viewing was that it would take quite a while to watch each individual fighter move and fire. The concern with unstacking fighter damage while not unstacking fighters is that ships could be invulnerable to damage from fighters, while fighters could still be bLasted by the dozens with a single standard ship weapon.

Perhaps the solution is to restrict standard weapons from hitting fighters. PDC would still be deadly against fighters, though, and could shred light and medium fighters.

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

If standard weapons are allowed to continue hitting fighters, at least making each shot hit only one fighter and discarding the excess instead of applying to to other fighters in the group would help.

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

What I am visualizing is allowing fighters to move and fire as a unit, but simply calculate damage from each unit as it is determined to hit or miss. EA of the target would count in this damage calculation. It would not have to slow down the visual effects of combat at all. Perhaps it would increase processor time slightly, but that would be the only noticeable effect.

In my "cosmic slant", Capital Ships all have mounts that multiply damage of weapon components (along with increased supply costs, size required, etc.), but substantially decreased chance to hit offensively. This makes the weapons of Capital Ships fearsome, and effective against planets and other vehicles of their class (which, because of their size have defensive penalties that match the offensive penalties of their class mounts), but give smaller warships (picture the Millenium Falcon) a chance to survive by simply turning tail and running. This also makes it near impossible for standard weapons mounted on Capital Ships to effectively target swarming Fighter Craft (defensive bonus for fighter size + offensive penalty from Capital Ship weapons). PD weapons, and specific anti-fighter weapons can pick off few a turn, but the massive Capital Weapons, engine requirements (thanx QNP, or mQNP), and space consumming Capital armor leave little room for much of those.

Capital Ship's very high armor points and EA effects give small Groups of warships little chance to significantly damage them (at least without using weapons that make them ineffective against ships of their own class), and make them almost entirely impervious to Fighter Craft. These Capital Ships use Fighter Craft themselves to deal with other non-Capital warships. EA is limited to Capital Armor only, and tops out at 20 points. The largest single shot Fighter Weapon does 25 points, so at best a huge fighter mass might be able to substantially weaken a Capital Ship's armor, maybe even get in few small internal hits, but nothing more by themselves.

These Capital Ships are tremendously expensive to produce and maintain, and the loss of 3 or 4 of them should have a decisive effect on an empire, but they would be a force to be feared.

Now, I can mod everything to make this particular vision playable, except for the oddity of stacking Fighter damage. Even the fact that units do not gain benefit of shield regeneration, or OA regeneration, or repair components, or get blown away in Groups by potent PD or standard weapon fire isn't really in conflict with this worldview.

I guess its just become a pet peeve... maybe I should just start creating 200 kt Fighters with standard ship weapons. Those would be fun in a stack.

CombatSquirrel

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Yes!!! Bring back swarm tactics! Bring on the area of effect weapons! Rock Paper Scissors!!!

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

Now how about this. Fighters would have a Anti-Armor torpedoe weapon that does about 50 damage and shoots every second turn, and damages armor only.
This would have to be in the standard game though or fighters would be useless there.
And dont tell me i can mod it, i know that.

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

Actually you can't mod it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif There's no way to make a weapon that damages only armor.

Phoenix-D

Re: Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking
 

then make them skip it.
How does that sound?
Make the weaker that crystal shards...

EDIT: already seems a bad idea to me... This is a no solution question http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

[ November 23, 2002, 06:11: Message edited by: Taera ]