Do Small DUCs suck?

[Q]

What are the fighter group sizes? The bug is related to fighter group size: The larger Groups will be extremely hard to hit and have a higher chance to hit the smaller Groups.

[capnq]

What do you have against DUClings? They're such cute little things...

[Nethog]

Both the Cryslonites and my fighters (Terran) were grouped in 5's. Neither the Cryslonites nor my fighters had ECM or Combat sensors, just the standard small fighter compnents, engines, and weapons as indicated in my original post below. By the way I am using SEIV v1.35. I went back and used a save game to replay the battle several times and have concluded that the fighter/fighter hit chance *does* appear to be the same for my fighters and the Cryslonites. The first time I did the battle I had a few escort class ships mixed in with my fighters (which when look almost identical in tactical mode using Terran), so I mistakingly thought that the Cryslonite fighters were hammering my fighters butts.

HOWEVER, one thing that IS clear to me is that the hit chance for small fighters at a range of 1 is still *very* low making small fighter/small fighter battles unnecessarily
tedious IMHO. The game displays "1%" for my fighters for a hit chance, however I think that the hit chance is actually a little higher. But most of the battle between the fighters is spent watching each fighter miss each other. Has anyone else experienced this or agree with this?

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Nethog

[Nitram Draw]

This is probably related to the bug in the fighters with the to hit/miss modifiers stacking.
Try removing these abilities from the hull and give them to the cockpit. See if the numbers change. Remember that ECM and Sensors won't be added unless they increase the chance above the cockpit rating, as they "should" not stack.

[This message has been edited by Nitram Draw (edited 16 May 2001).]

[Q]

Nethog I observed the same things as you and it is defenitely a major bug, which affects all combats with fighters involved.
Im your example the low hit chance is due to the difference of the offensive (= 50%) and defensive (= 80%) modifier for small fighters. And I also observed a higher hit rate than indicated (in my experience something about 10% effective hit rate when 1% is displayed). I don't know what causes this but it seems not to be the racial characteristics because it's also happening with races that have no bonus in aggressivenes or defensivenes.
I don't see that we can fix this ourselves. The proposition of Nitram Draw to transfer the combat modifiers to the cockpit is excellent, but even this will probably not eleminate all problems. So we have to wait for the next patch.

[This message has been edited by Q (edited 16 May 2001).]

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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And I also observed a higher hit rate than indicated (in my experience something about 10% effective hit rate when 1% is displayed).

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Q, that's because its a 1% chance for each weapon on the fighter group!

with 5 fighters, and 3 weapons each, 15 guns @ 1% give you a:
(0.99) ^ 15 chance of missing,
or: a 86% chance of missing with all = 14% chance to hit with any one gun.

2 weapons per fighter would give you roughly 10% chance to hit with a group of 5.

When you hit with just one or two guns, the damage should be lower than the total of all the weapon's damage Ratings. ie. 5 to 10 damage (1 or 2 hits) instead of all the weapons (15x5=75 damage)

If your fighters had 100 guns between them, at 1% each, you get a 63% chance of at least one hitting. (out of 100!!!)

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 17 May 2001).]

[Nethog]

suicide_junkie, what about the +50% to hit offenseive bonus and -80% defensive bonus for small fighters, i.e. net -30% to hit? This would make the hit chance even lower still? Or does the 1% already reflect this?

Anyway, regardless of the numbers don't you think that the hit chance should be higher when two equal sized Groups of small fighters are engaged in combat? Like I said earlier in this discussion thread it gets tedious fighting a battle between small fighters.