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!

[Q]

The problem originally presented in this topic is not specific for fighters but is caused by the way SE IV treats damage to units:
Units are not treated as ships with individual components that can each be destroyed but as one single target that will be destroyed completely or not at all. In fact a unit is treated like a component of a ship.
I believe the amount of calculations would have been too high (at least for older computers) if each unit would be treated like a ship.

[dogscoff]

The problem originally presented in this topic is not specific for fighters but is caused by the way SE IV treats damage to units:
Units are not treated as ships with individual components that can each be destroyed but as one single target that will be destroyed completely or not at all. In fact a unit is treated like a component of a ship.
I believe the amount of calculations would have been too high (at least for older computers) if each unit would be treated like a ship.

I take your point, but it seems to me that every patch that comes out there's something else that needs fixing with fighters and no-one's completely happy about it... Like you say, it would cause a lot of problems simply becasue there's so damn many of them, but I thought it would be worth talking about =-)

[Pax]

If units only seperated their damage-to-kill points into the right kinds of categories -- one for each kind of special damage -- then you could model the *effects* of shield-depleting weapons, and the like.

Even if each Category was summed up for the whole stack (to destroy ANY fighter weapons you have to destroy them ALL ... until then, they all function at 100%).

It would be an improvement, and only a few extra numbers to track per stack of units. And then ... shield depleting or shield piercing weapons would function reasonably well against fighters, etc ... the fighter-stack's TOTAL pool of shields owuld have to be depleted to get any ONE fighter "naked to vacuum" if you will, but at least then ... the guns'd stop shooting the fighters and switch to a new target!

[TerranC]

-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.

Ships stacking?... This could lead to something like what the that species did on voyager: Link up ships to destroy a planet. Or: One ship to hold arnaments, One ship to hold armor, One ship to hold supplies and one ship designed to carry sensors and you have a fleet that works as one ship. I see more usage for all-pupose ships, but I see 5 baseships destroying homeworlds in a single shot.

-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.

I think you're thinking of drones. I don't know about fighters since I never seen them go out of supplies.

-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=-)

Launching Drones and recovering them would be more economic. Since they are units, they don't have maintenance. Now if you're talking about destroyers...

Also, ships smaller than 500KT should not be allowed to land in planets. Heavy ships are subject to heavy gravitational pull. Heavier the gravitation pull, the more the ship becomes subjective to inertia. In order to lift off from a planet, you need to have enough force (Escape velocity) to overcome inertia. Heavier the ship, the faster the escape velocity. If the ship is light enough, it should lift off without any difficulties, but a battlecruiser lands and tries to lift off:

1) lifts off gently, to account for the crew members or the fragile equipment. Force isn't enough to overcome inertia and gravity and the ship lands back down again, or worse, crashes.

2) Lifts off hard and overcomes newton's laws, but every crewmember has died, even the ones on seat belts, when their organs ruptured when they hit the walls on the back of them equal to the force of the ship lifting off or their bones shattered for the exact same thing. All fragile equipment has been destroyed since they just flung to the back.

Star trek compensates for this with technobabble, and sadly, real life problems cannot be solved by saying: the inertial dampeners are working 1000% skip.

Forgive my rant, but it did give me something to chew over.