Q - shielded fighters and anti-shield weapons

[jim]

Often, a stack of fighters (say 20) will be targeted by my ships non-PDC weapons in Simultaneous Movement games.

If the fighter design includes one or more shields, then shield-sapping weapons will fire at them. If a non-fighter ship no longer has shield strength, the shield weapons will switch to shoot at a target that retains shields.

The problem is that the shield hitting weapons will ALL fire at the fighter stack but w/o effect. That is, the top fighter may not have shields left, but the shield-hitting weapons cannot hit any fighters below the top fighter. The shots thus become wasted. The AI will shoot the shield hitting weapons uselessly at the fighters even if there are shielded warships in range.

Maybe this is best explained with an example. Assume I have 5 baseships each with the Talisman, 5 PDCs, 2 shield-hitters, and 8 APBs. Say I am in a battle with 10 DNs and one Carrier. The Carrier launches 20 fighter stacks at me who race ahead of the DNs.

The PDCs do modest attrition, but do not kill the fighter stack in range.

Next, all the shield hitters will expend themselves uselessly on the fighters. Then, as many APBs as necessary will shoot at the fighters, if they were in range.

Next, the DNs and the baseships fight, but the DNs have their shields untouched.

The effect is so bad that I have had to abandon using shield-hitting weapons. Telling the baseships not to fire at fighters is not likely to be a success, I would think.

So, why do the shield-hitting weapons still fire at the fighter stack after the only one they can affect has had its shield zeroed by the first hit?

[geoschmo]

This is a bug. Units don't take partial damage. Units with shields convert thier shields into structure, the shields are not tracked seperatly. Therefore, effectivly they have shields right up to the point when they are destroyed. Since shield damaging weapons don't do any damage except to shields, they should never target units I think.

You know we could fix this by modding the small shield component so it doesn't actually generate shields, but just has the structure tonnage equivalent to the shield strength. With out the actuial shield ability the shield damaging wepons would nto target the fighters I believe.

Geoschmo

[ July 29, 2002, 01:18: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[dumbluck]

You could also fix it by changing the shield killer thingymabobber (neat word, huh?) so that it cannot target units.

[oleg]

Why telling you DN not to shoot on fighters won't be a success ? PD will fire on fighters _regardless_ of ship orders. It is hard coded. True, PPB will not fire on fighters, but so won't shield depletors. True, it may require some rebalancing of your ship designs, but they will then behave much more predictable.

[Baron Munchausen]

A more interesting question is whether 'skips normal shields' or 'skips all shields' damage types have any different effect on units or if the shields are counted as part of the structure when hit by these weapons, too. If so, MM really needs to do something. At least don't count the shields when hit by these special damage types, even if you aren't counting them seperately in normal combat resolution...

[jim]

oleg -

To answer your Q, I have seen some TDM AIs throw hundreds of shielded fighters into the battle. This is especially true against non-domed Large and Huge planets. PDCs, even the highest ones, exact only minor attrition against Large fighters with 2xIII shields.

One can lose a battle quite easily by telling one's ships NOT to fire at fighters. That is why the Talisman + XII APBs are a very good all-around weapon suite. However, just one or two shield-sappers firing ahead of the APBs really makes a big difference in fleet engagements.

Thus, to do as you suggest would probably make me use Tachyon Cannons since they cannot shoot at fighters, but again I would ahve to avoid anti-shield weapons because they DO target fighters. See, with Talisman, longer range battles are generally best. However, the shield hitter has a longer range than the Tachyon weapon, and most others. So, the ship wastes anti-shield fire and then moves out of range! Thus, cannot use a Max Range weapons strategy!

The problem gets even worse with Bases, since the Multiplex is either erratic or broken for Bases. That is, one might have 10 Tachyon cannons that fussily decline to fire at choice targets because the shield-sappers ahead of them have already fired at fighters.