[grumbler]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
First off, keep in mind that gameplay and balance ALWAYS outweigh canonical issues by far.

All of this analysis was done when Val set up the weapons, you know. He did not just pick random numbers out of the blue.

Ah. I thought he did the numbers from the B5 Wars books. If all the analysis was done, can you point me to it and save me some time?

Even so, I don't see how "gameplay issues" and "balance" relate to the "fighter missile weapons are not canon" issue.

They would come from the fighters, of course. You did not think a fighter can only carry one missile, did you? Real fighter jets carry lots of missiles on them, not just one. There is no reason space fighters would only be able to carry one missile.

Uhm, how do modern jet fighters reload, again? I mean, I understand why a fighter in the game can carry more than one missile. I just don't understand how they can be out of missiles for 15 turns and then have missiles again. The issue isn't multiple missiles, it is reloading.

I think you are reading the bonus to hit line wrong. All weapons lose 10% accuracy at each range. The ones with bonuses just get a bonus to hit, not a different scale of accuracy loss.

Sorry, I was talking about damage rate degradation over range but wasn't clear on that. I didn't figure in accuracy loss as it is consistent between all the weapons, and so does not differentiate between them.

Do not underestimate the effects of weapon stacking. It is the stacking of lots of PDC fire in unmodded SE4 that makes the PDCs overwhelm missiles and fighters, not their high damage rates.[/QB]

I am not sure how this relates to my point about the Particle BLaster. The Particle BLaster is huge in size but not in effect. In fact, it is distinctly inferior in all but range to the Paired Particle Beam which becomes available with the exact same research.

I just ran a series of simulations seeing how many of each type of heavy fighter (one with two PPB, one with one PB) it would take to knock out a level 10 Centauri battleship (equipped the same way in both runs, with one Heavy Array as the anti-fighter weapon) half the time.

For the PPB, it was between 20 and 25 (I didn't try for granularity greater than that) and for the PB it was between 40 and 45. That tells me the PB isn't worth it, which is what i suspected from the numbers. So, it should either be improved or scrapped, as it is a weapon people should not buy.

As a side note, I ran the same test using EA fighters, one with fighters having 6 Unipulse cannons, and one with the same fighters having 6 Fighter missiles (both weapons being the same size, it was the same hull otherwise). It took 20 fighters with unipulse cannons to take out the BB half the time. The test with fighter missiles I gave up on after they lost 100% of the time when they had 150 fighters! However, a fighter with 3 of each weapon required only 15 fighters to defeat the BB half the time, so the mix of weapons appears to be best - giving a significant advantage in ship-ship action to those races having both seekers and DF weapons.

When I ran a BB escorted by 10 fighters on each side, the mixed-weapon-equipped fighters still seemed to hold a slight edge (but how much wasn't clear, as I din't run the full 100 reps in any of these tests).

So, what can I say? I am trying to help here, and maybe stimulate some interest. I have concluded from my analysis that including fighter-mounted seekers does not appear to improve gameplay or balance (probably the opposite) and it isn't canon to boot, so at least future mods might want to seriously consider scrapping them. If analysis was done that indicates otherwise, I would love to see it.