How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets

[jim]

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.

[Q]

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.

[Krsqk]

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

[Q]

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

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.

[dogscoff]

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.

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

[Spoo]

-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=-)

That would be great!