How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

The answer use "shielded" fighters.

Alright, I've shown in an earlier thread that fighters can be tractor beams, well, now it looks like they screw up anti-shield weapons.

I had been puzzled by certain battle results (simultaneous replays) and tried some tests. It would appear that shield-equipped fighters are unaffected by anti-shield weapons. This is 1.49, so perhaps it's been fixed in Gold or Platinum, or whatever.

The problem, though, is really that the ships carrying anti-shield weapons are unaware of the inability and insist on wasting shot after shot of those type weapons on fighters, when their weapons would be quite effective on other targets.

And it can be worse than that!

If one sets a fleet on Max Range (say with Talisman), the anti-shield weapons (especially the accelerator) have a greater range than some of the anti-ship weapons. The result is that the ships get outside their anti-ship weapons range so that they can fire at fighters ineffectively with the anti-shield weapons.

It seems like the shields on the fighters act like extra structure but look like shields to shooters. This would explain why polaron beams do not work any better against shielded fighters than same power weapons, despite no phased shields for fighters.

So, as long as you can continue to send forward some "shielded" fighters, you will screw up your enemy if s/he uses anti-shield weapons. This is ESPECIALLY true if your foe does not use multiplex tracking (as erratic as it is). In the absence of multiplex, one must simply turn off fighter-targeting and hope PDC alone can do it, if one uses anti-shield weapons.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

You are right and I would even dare to call this a bug.
Why is it allowed to target a vehicle with a weapon that can do no damage at all to this vehicle??
In my opinion shield depleting weapons should only be able to target ships/bases, because what you describe with fighter is true for all units IIRC including weapon platforms.
Less dramatic but still a problem are shield skipping weapons like e.g. null space projectors, because they will do damage on units but their shield skipping effect is futile. The shields of the units are treated as normal hit points and not as shields.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

Is this true for other specialty weapons, like engines-only, weapons-only, and shield-generators-only? This could be a major problem.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">As far as I know yes. These weapons do just normal damage against units, which is of course quite low. It has been some time since I tested this and you may search the forum for this problem, but to my knowledge this never has been fixed. I think that it would be very difficult to fix unless as I proposed you allow these weapons to target only ships. That's not really a fix but it eliminates the problem.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

Over all the patches from the very beginnings of the game, I've come to the conclusion that fighters are a pain in the arse. The problem is that they are (basically) small ships, but are treated by the game as units. For SEV, or maybe a really ambitious patch, I'd like to see fighters implemented as small ships. The only difference between fighters (and therefore the only things that this change would impact) are the following:

-Fighters use different components. Easily fixed with the new mount abilities.

-Fighters stack in combat. This is the biggest balance issue. Having 200 odd fighters moving around individually would be evil, but I'd rather see that (on an enlarged combat screen) than have all these constant niggling problems and patches to do with fighters. Besides, maybe ships could be stackable again, like in SEIII.

-Fighters are destroyed when they run out of supplies. I think. This could be fixed by adding a "destroyed when out of supplies" ability, and giving it to fghters only.

-Fighters can't warp. This could be fixed by having "warp capable" as an ability for ships only, which would be a really cool thing for modders anyway.

-Fighters can be stored in cargo. I can see that this would be a nightmare for Aaron to uncode, but imagine the possibilities if there was a "can be cargo" ability for ship (ie fighter) hulls (in fact, 2 abilities- "can be cargo on ships" and "can be cargo on planets"): Then you could mod the game so that you can launch escorts from baseships and bring dreadnoughts down from orbit for to hide them from detection- hell, maybe even the game could use them as weapons platforms=-)

-Launch bays. Again, this could lead to some really cool new developments... imagine if you could use mounts to make launch bays which are only compatible with ships (fighters) of certain sizes...

Anyway, just something to chew over. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

[ August 27, 2002, 17:35: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">That would be great!

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

The problem originally presented in this topic is not specific for fighters but is caused by the way SE IV treats damage to units:
Units are not treated as ships with individual components that can each be destroyed but as one single target that will be destroyed completely or not at all. In fact a unit is treated like a component of a ship.
I believe the amount of calculations would have been too high (at least for older computers) if each unit would be treated like a ship.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I take your point, but it seems to me that every patch that comes out there's something else that needs fixing with fighters and no-one's completely happy about it... Like you say, it would cause a lot of problems simply becasue there's so damn many of them, but I thought it would be worth talking about =-)

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

If units only seperated their damage-to-kill points into the right kinds of categories -- one for each kind of special damage -- then you could model the *effects* of shield-depleting weapons, and the like.

Even if each Category was summed up for the whole stack (to destroy ANY fighter weapons you have to destroy them ALL ... until then, they all function at 100%).

It would be an improvement, and only a few extra numbers to track per stack of units. And then ... shield depleting or shield piercing weapons would function reasonably well against fighters, etc ... the fighter-stack's TOTAL pool of shields owuld have to be depleted to get any ONE fighter "naked to vacuum" if you will, but at least then ... the guns'd stop shooting the fighters and switch to a new target!

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

-Fighters stack in combat. This is the biggest balance issue. Having 200 odd fighters moving around individually would be evil, but I'd rather see that (on an enlarged combat screen) than have all these constant niggling problems and patches to do with fighters. Besides, maybe ships could be stackable again, like in SEIII.

Ships stacking?... This could lead to something like what the that species did on voyager: Link up ships to destroy a planet. Or: One ship to hold arnaments, One ship to hold armor, One ship to hold supplies and one ship designed to carry sensors and you have a fleet that works as one ship. I see more usage for all-pupose ships, but I see 5 baseships destroying homeworlds in a single shot.

-Fighters are destroyed when they run out of supplies. I think. This could be fixed by adding a "destroyed when out of supplies" ability, and giving it to fghters only.

I think you're thinking of drones. I don't know about fighters since I never seen them go out of supplies.

-Fighters can be stored in cargo. I can see that this would be a nightmare for Aaron to uncode, but imagine the possibilities if there was a "can be cargo" ability for ship (ie fighter) hulls (in fact, 2 abilities- "can be cargo on ships" and "can be cargo on planets"): Then you could mod the game so that you can launch escorts from baseships and bring dreadnoughts down from orbit for to hide them from detection- hell, maybe even the game could use them as weapons platforms=-)

Launching Drones and recovering them would be more economic. Since they are units, they don't have maintenance. Now if you're talking about destroyers...

Also, ships smaller than 500KT should not be allowed to land in planets. Heavy ships are subject to heavy gravitational pull. Heavier the gravitation pull, the more the ship becomes subjective to inertia. In order to lift off from a planet, you need to have enough force (Escape velocity) to overcome inertia. Heavier the ship, the faster the escape velocity. If the ship is light enough, it should lift off without any difficulties, but a battlecruiser lands and tries to lift off:

1) lifts off gently, to account for the crew members or the fragile equipment. Force isn't enough to overcome inertia and gravity and the ship lands back down again, or worse, crashes.

2) Lifts off hard and overcomes newton's laws, but every crewmember has died, even the ones on seat belts, when their organs ruptured when they hit the walls on the back of them equal to the force of the ship lifting off or their bones shattered for the exact same thing. All fragile equipment has been destroyed since they just flung to the back.

Star trek compensates for this with technobabble, and sadly, real life problems cannot be solved by saying: the inertial dampeners are working 1000% skip.

Forgive my rant, but it did give me something to chew over.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

1.001g's of constant acceleration upwards will kill nothing, and if you can apply that level of force to the ship in a stabel sustanable way, the ships' mass doesn't matter.

Remember, it's not the energies applied that matter to crew and cargo. It's the ACCELERATIONS imposed, a.k.a. the NET FORCES.

1.1G upward force-and-acceleration won't kill anyone. Yes, for a 1500kT Baseship, that's a BLOODY LOT of energy.

But it's still only 1.1G of force, and 1.1G of acceleration. And only an added 10% to perceived mass ...hell, elevators subject people to that, or slightly more.

People could probasbly take a fairly-lengthy period of 2G net force (which woudl be 1G net upwards speed, which would be like falling away formt he planet); I'm not a doctor of space medicine or the like, but I suspect we can tqake 2G's for a few hours, maybe a day or two, without Lasting effects. Discomfort yes, but not death, and certainly not death as a mass of hyperdense goo against the rear bulkhead.

The only catch is, the sustained output, over time, of engines that can MOVE big objects at that steady accelerative speed, wouldbe prohibitive. That is really one of the only TWO reasons (the other being ease of stability maintenance during flight) why modern space-launch vehicles use such tremendous accelerations to get into orbit fast-fast-fast: COST.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

"In order to lift off from a planet, you need to have enough force (Escape velocity) to overcome inertia. Heavier the ship, the faster the escape velocity."

Not quite. Escape velocity is the *same* for any and all objects. It's the force required to get there that differs. 600kt of ship would take quite a lot of thrust to get up.. but nothing says that thrust has to be delivered like it is now (i.e. really fast HARD rocket kick).

Put it this way. In a car, you can floor it, and reach 60mph quickly. Or you can accelerate gently and reach 60mph slowly. The percieved force is quite less the second way, but the speed is the same! The hard part is finding that point. 1.001G of thrust on an earth-mass planet would do it. The only reason we can't do something like that now is we'd run out of fuel before we hit orbit.

Phoenix-D

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

Thank you for killing my ignorance, I was taught different http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

But then, please answer me why we can't just attach 2 fuel rockets to the ISS and lift it up into space.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

I know it is a band-aid solution, but can someone tell me why it would be hard to make anti-shield weapons unable to target fighters?

As it currently is, no AI can be scripted to use anti-shield weapons w/o setting them up for this exploit. Nor can I, in moi vs AI games use shielded fighters w/o undue advantage if such could be the case.

Similarly, I cannot use anti-shield weapons because most of the AI races use at least some fighters. For all the statements that PDC is too powerful, stacks 20 - 50 double-shielded fighters do not die very easily to PDC. Since they can have CSM Vs or the parasite equivalents in their wake, it can get tough to dispose of such fighters w/o the ability of having non-PDCs begin their attrition beyond the short range of PDCs.

I like anti-shield weapons, and cannot really use them because of this BBBUUUGGGGGG!

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

"But then, please answer me why we can't just attach 2 fuel rockets to the ISS and lift it up into space."

More mass, more thrust, more fuel needed. As I said we can't do it because no matter what we do we'd run out of gas first.

Phoenix-D

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

To make "anti-shield weapons unable to target fighters", in the Component File change the below line to remove the fighters tag.
Don't forgot to change all types of Shield damaging weapons, including Tempory weapons

Weapon Target := Ships\Planets\Ftr\Sat

Anyone tested what effect 'Anti-Shield weapons' have on a Planet with a Shield on it?

[ August 28, 2002, 01:09: Message edited by: Baron Grazic ]

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I would recommend that you change it to:

Weapon Target := Ships

Otherwise you will still have problems with satellites and weapon platforms on a planet. I do not know if shield depleter work against planetary shields (massive planetary shield facility or something like that, which is a unique ancient ruins technology). But they will not work against shields of weapon platforms.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

Since I don't have Gold yet, I only did some small bit of testing on the matter of how fighters in particular accumulate damage. My tests were quite interesting however, and in hindsight the way it works is not surprising. The quick answer is shield-depleting weapons work just fine against fighters...sometimes.

Ok, the way a stack of fighters takes damage with respect to shields is only the top fighter is available to take damage. So if each fighter has 60 shields, once you've killed 60 points of shields, until the stack has at least one fighter killed, no more shields can be lost by any fighters in the stack. As soon as one or more fighters in the stack dies, a new fighter is on "top" and his shields are set to maximum.

Damage past shields works differently. The entire stack has one set of "hit points." Damage past shields is accumulated against this total. So, suppose a fighter has 60 shields and 28 structure. Hit by PDC V for 65, all 60 shields gone and the stack takes 5 damage. No fighter dead yet, because it takes 28 to kill one. Now the second PDC V hits doing 65 damage, and since the shields are down all 65 is structual. So the stack has taken 70 structual damage total, two fighters are destroyed by this hit and the shield value is rest to 60. Notice how damage was able to slip past the second fighter's shields and kill it as if it didn't have any shields at all!

As long as you can only kill 1 fighter per weapon shot, shields on fighters work fine. But shield depleting weapons cannot kill and so they can only ever drop the top fighter's shields to zero.

Again, I do not have Gold (although it shipped today!!! *cheer*) and I will rerun a more extensive set of tests once I get it to make sure everything still works in the same fashion.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

Zanthis which Version you used??
I cannot reproduce your results neither in Version 1.78 nor in Version 1.49. The shield depleter never had an effect on shielded fighters in my tests. In the combat simulator I do not see the detailed damage results you report. Only when a fighter is destroyed the shield value drops and the damage taken increases by the value of this single unit. Did you do your tests in real tactical combat??

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

Version 1.35 . Yes, I used real tactical combat. I find using strategic combat physically painful. Watching the AI control my ships causes me to suffer intense migraines. I only use it if I am extremely bored and I can be certain even the computer can win the battle for me without any damage to my fleet.

As far as shield depleting weapons, what kind are you using to hit fighters with? In 1.35, the only thing with better than 1% to hit is PDC. I think I'll mod them real quick to be shield depleting to test it for sure, but otherwise, ship-to-ship weapons never hit (although, guess I could use a talismon).

[ August 28, 2002, 18:47: Message edited by: Zanthis ]

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

v1.35 had a legendary game-killing bug with fighters (the individual attack and defense bonuses for fighters stacked when they were in a group).

You really need to upgrade to at least v1.49, if not Gold.

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I actually enjoyed 1.35 for awhile - there were some epic dog-fight battles between fighters: The only reliable way to kill fighters was to have a larger stack of fighters. I even modded some AI to build lots and lots of fighter and carriers. Battles were almost like Pacific theater in WWII !

Re: How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets
 

My Gold CD is on its way. I'm hoping to see it tomorrow...it shipped Weds via ground.

And while it is true, fighter to hit chances are all insane in 1.35, that doesn't actually change how damage is resolved. Since I'm running in tactical combat, I take note of the effects of each shot, including if it misses. I found it basically impossible to hit fighters with anything but PDC...but then again, I just modded PDC to have shield depleting damage and such.

So yes, fighters are screwed up in 1.35, but only, as far as I know, in how hard they are to hit. I didn't notice anything in the history about changes in how damage is assigned to them. May have missed it though.

Anyways, I'll rerun tests as soon as I have Gold.