quote:
Originally posted by Elwood Bluze:
Alright, so I'm playing against the earth alliance, among others, and the EA has over 900 fighters! He has no more ships than anybody else but he's kicking their butt.
No, I propose that each fighter has to pay some minimal upkeep. A percentage of it's build cost each turn would be fair, don't you think?
When you think about it logically, everything in the game that can move under its' own power has to pay support costs. I don't think fighters should get a free ride.
I agree completely.
Most folks seriously under-rate fighters. But if you make all your colonies build them, pretty soon you have a few hundred defending each system. There isn't really any need to build carriers until you go on the offense. Just ship the fighters in whatever transport you have available to a planet in another system. Transfer them to the planet. Then, the planet can launch 1000 per turn.
I have determined that point defense cannons are pretty worthless against fighters if you play tactical. Just englobe the ship with the point defense and keep attacking it until the PD Cannons are destroyed. I doubt this is how it works. But with my tons and tons of fighters, it's hard to keep track of when the PD cannons fire. They *HAVE* to be firing even if neither my fighters or the ship with the PD cannons move. But sometimes it sure does seem they aren't firing.
IMHO, PD cannons just don't cut it against the numbers of fighters I'm building. No, until the AI acquires the (very hard to implement) ability to dynamically react to the types of ships you are building and start mass producing higher tech fighters to combat my fighters, using fighters is going to be one sure way of beating the AI.