Balancing Fighters, Missiles and PDC in the late game

[PvK]

Depends on your tech level, and how much time you spend sitting around building up fighters. I think Fryon's experience in Proportions tends to be that he does a land grab and then gets bored, building up silly quantities of fighters once he reaches his maintenance limits for ships.

However I will grant that:

* Proportions makes fighters quite powerful
* Proportions fighters are powerful early in the tech tree, compared to other techs
* SE4 zero-maintenance units means that stockpiling fighters can lead to some very large and therefore powerful (particularly on defense) fighter stacks.

Later-tech Proportions stuff, and mid-tech bases and planets, can deal with fighters pretty well, though. And, fighters aren't as powerful as they are in say, real-world naval combat from World War 2 onwards.

You might want to playtest a bit to see if you think the balance is ok. If you decide you want to stay a bit closer to unmodded SE4 and Star Trek in emphasizing weapon-bearing ships over fighters, or if you just want to tweak them down, you might want to adjust the Proportions values with some or all of the following ideas:

1) Reduce the damage done by the light fighter weapons by about half, down to 1 or 2 points per weapon, and or increase their size, so they don't do much damage at all. (or, remove their ability to target anything but fighters)

2) Make fighter weapons which heavy weapons for hitting ships, unable to target fighters.

3) Remove fighter shields, or make them only about as good as fighter armor, or a little better.

4) Consider removing or reducing the structure value of fighter until they have about half the damage resistance they currently do (without shields).

5) Consider making fighter components cost more.

6) Consider making fighters start out with somewhat lower offense and defensive bonuses, but add more fighter ECM and combat sensors at higher research levels, so early fighters aren't so hard to kill, and later fighters make stockpiles of earlier fighters relatively obsolete.

PvK