FIghter missile pods, too powerful?

[JDL]

at highest they have 100 damage. they never miss and with heavy fighters w/ 2 shield 3's each you can make a mess. To say nothing of the early on swarms of the small fighters you can field. you can overwhelm all but the most dedicated aegis pdc ships and kill his fleet and still have some left over.

THoughts?

[Arralen]

Weapons are still a mess as far as play-balance is concerned.
But MM is working on this (and new weapons, maybe), so doing a "general" mod to fix this will only be good 'til the next patch ...

A.

[Q]

I do not think they are to powerful. First the range is short, so the attacking fighters will be exposed to the point defense weapons before the can use their missile pods. Second if the enemy is not killed by the first attack amd there are no other weapons besides the missile pods, the fighters will be slaughtered in the remaining combat turn. That's what I observed quite frequentely. Third they can only target ships and planets. Against other fighters or satellites this could mean obliteration. My personal preference for fighter weapons is therefore either incinerator beam or meson bLaster.

[Alpha Kodiak]

I think of fighters with missile pods as strike aircraft that need escorts. I usually build two fighter types, one with missile pods and one with some sort of guns. The missile launchers can get a big punch in against ships, while those with guns can engage other fighters as well as finish off surviving ships.

I don't think that they are unbalanced. Remember what one fighter with an Excocet missile did in the Faulklands war?

[Triumvir Emphy]

I think the fact that the british used aluminium for their super structure caused the problem, not the exocet, it just started the fire. (aluminium is hard to put out once it starts burning). A similar strike on current ships wouldn't nearly cause that much damage.

[Alpha Kodiak]

quote:

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Originally posted by Triumvir Emphy:
I think the fact that the british used aluminium for their super structure caused the problem, not the exocet, it just started the fire. (aluminium is hard to put out once it starts burning). A similar strike on current ships wouldn't nearly cause that much damage.

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Good point, but it was still one missile from one fighter. If it wasn't intercepted it would do significant damage to any ship, even if it didn't sink it. A squadron of attack planes, if not destroyed by defensive fire first, would wreck havoc on any fleet. My point was merely that the fact that fighters using missiles can do substantial damage to ships in SEIV is not out of line.

As far as balance is concerned, think about how much research it takes to get even small fighters carrying missile pod IIIs.

Construction 1: 50000
Fighters 1: 100000
Small weapons 3: can't remember, but significant
Missiles 3: again, can't remember (at work) but quite significant

To get heavy fighters costs a LOT more in research.

For all that research, it is not out of line to get a one shot per combat value that is quite large.