How to trivially defeat anti-shield weapon equipped fleets

[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!