[PvK]

Fighters seem to have some uses in the unmodded game, particularly:

* early in the research progression
* in limited resources games
* in other low-resource situations, such as peacetime when fleet maintenance costs limit ship production
* in some late-game situations, to complement drones & seekrs, especially with shields on fighters
* when taking advantage of racial techs like organic components, crystalline system-wide shield reinforcement, and/or small temporal distortion bursts

Starhawk is right that it's therefore more like Star Trek, where captial ships can easily lock on and wipe out fighters.

Mods can address this though, e.g. Proportions Mod 2 and earlier, which can result in something a bit closer to Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica fighter/ship balance. Basically, unmodded PD is too accurate, too strong, and too efficient, unless you want fighters and seekers to become nearly obsolete in the mid-to-late techs. As the author of the venerable Space Empires III "Penultimate" mod commented, it seems like advanced fighters should be fragile but hard to hit, not marginally hard to hit, and simply able to take more damage at higher tech levels. Of course, since fighters are charged little or nothing in terms of maintenance and supplies, one has to be careful to avoid making fighters way too good. Unfortunately in toning fighters down a little in Proportions Mod version 3, I seem to have accidentally over-nerfed them. (Personally, I think Proportions 2.x fighters were about right except they started out really good really early.)

PvK