Fighters and Missiles

[PirateRob]

Ok, I have two questions.

1) Fighters:
Has anyone come up with a viable fighter using strategy where fighters represent at significant threat throughout the game? OR has anyone got any good ideas for modding fighters to make them more effective main combat units?

2) Missiles.
Has anyone thought of modding in "Decoy missiles" to help saturate PD cannons? My idea is to have a low cost / low space missile component that does 1 point of damage at the same range as the various missile techs. Missile Users could load these on thier ships in the hopes that the PD cannons would target them instead of the REAL missiles.

Rob

[AeoN2]

Decoy missiles sound like a very good idea... but would have to take care not to make it too powerful, since you would always put the decoys on the ship first so they would always be targeted first (right?) ... so all decoys would be destroyed before any real missiles, which isn't very realistic...

--
AeoN2
--
Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning
and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

[AeoN2]

Maybe making a max number of decoy missile mounts that can be on a single ship...

[geoschmo]

About the only fighter strategy usefull long term is one that I have heard called the "Big Wing" strategy, although I do not remember who I heard call it that.

Basically you need the largest fighters you can build with the best shields and strongest weapons. Build them and launch them in massive Groups. 100 is optmimal if you can do pull it off. Since each group acts as one vehicle for combat purposes you will have in effect a vessel that can deliver a respectable amount of firepower with each shot. And the large size of the group and heavy shielding will allow them to withstand more than a few shots form the advanced PDC cannons and other weaponry you are likely to face.

Even with this though they are going to take heavy losses. They will do some damage going down though and allow your capital ships a few extra combat rounds to do their thing.

Geoschmo

[Q]

I think both of your questions are asking how to keep fighters and missiles valuable in the late game.
You might have a look at the QMod I posted in the Mod section: increased fighter size and increased missile damage resistence do the job quite well IMHO.

[henk brouwer]

I posted a different idea to fix figter/missile-pd balance some time ago, I'm not sure if it's possible to mod this right now though.

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...=005762#000000

[Baron Munchausen]

With a little modding fighters are quite survivable into the late game. I've added small phased shields to go with the small standard shields. Apparently 'phased' shields have no effect on units but the higher shield points are still effective. I've also increased the size/range of fighter weapons slightly. They do suffer losses unless you completely out-class your opponent(s). That's the nature of fighters. If it were like Battlestar Galactica where none of the 'good guys' get killed that would be unbalanced, too.

And fighters are supposed to operate in Groups, remember. MM has changed the default group size to 10, up from 5, but I don't think even that is large enough. I use a default group size of 20 and find Groups of 20 fighters to be fairly dangerous. Boosting that a bit higher would start to reduce flexibility because you'd have so few Groups in any given tactical situation but it might be appropriate depending on what you are up against.

[ June 17, 2002, 21:47: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
That's the nature of fighters. If it were like Battlestar Galactica where none of the 'good guys' get killed that would be unbalanced, too.

I seem to recall more than a few colonial fighters getting zapped, just never one of the main three guys. It was like the red shirts in Star Trek. If a fighter jockey you had never seen before all of a sudden had a central role in the plot at the begining of the episode, you knew he was in trouble.

Didn't happen as often as on Trek though. They didn't really have all that many fighter battles after the pilot. But when they did they usually lost a couple guys that you had never seen before IIRC.

Geoschmo

[Phoenix-D]

You have to look at fighters as more or less expendable. Like missiles that get to come back if the pilot brought his rabbit's foot

Phoenix-D

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, of course there is the 'redshirt effect' on TV shows. Someone has to die once in a while for dramatic effect. But if you think about the situation being depicted they could not afford even the occasional loss of trained pilots, so the 'real' situation being depicted there is a bunch of super-hotshots who can each bLast legions of 'stoopid' robotic attackers while not getting hit.

I would say this is completely unrealistic but the recent US combat record indicates it might not be so crazy as it sounds, given a good technological advantage. Without that technological advantage, be prepared to replace losses.