Balancing Fighters, Missiles and PDC in the late game

[oleg]

Originally posted by Ed Kolis:

quote:

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Originally posted by PvK:
* Light Missile Systems fire seekers up to about four times faster per kT than Cap missiles.

Of course, since PDC fires every round, it can still kill the light missiles as easily as it kills the regular missiles - it's just doing it every turn instead of waiting two turns in between shots Perhaps if PDC only fired every other round...

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LMS and CSM operate as separate stacks and PD damage does not transfer from one to another. Thus, if PDC fires on LMS, it is out of use for that round and CSM can reach the ship. It really helps to have one LMS on almost evry ship to distract PDC from fighters and CSM.

[PvK]

LMS I think also gets to be smaller than a PDC, and not all PDC will be in range to hit all the seekers. Moreover, fly just a few fighters around, and they tend to attract the PDC, meaning the ships need SDC, which only has range 1, etc.

Anyway, in my experience, I think it works pretty well, although of course there could be tweaks made, depending on how you want things to balance out.

PvK

[Chronon]

Thanks Oleg and PvK for your advice about using light missiles. PvK, may I take some of your ideas from Proportions and transplant them into Civilizations Mod (my working title)? In other words, may I steal them from you?

[PvK]

Yes, certainly!

PvK

[Fyron]

You might want to reduce the ability of fighters to be overly-powerful like in Proportions though... even those special anti-Fighter PDCs from Energy Pulse Weapons don't help much.

[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

[Fyron]

If you can knock out several players using those fighter hordes in the early to mid game long before they can get effective defense against them, they are too powerful.

What is so effective at taking out fighters in the later stages of the game? Certainly not those anti-fighter PDCs. You need quite a few of them to start destroying fighters in reasonable numbers. The only PD that can hit fighters with more than a 1% success rate are the Point Defense Beams, and those max out at 17 damage, so they take several shots to kill one fighter. Unless, of course, they stick 2-3 small shield generator Vs on their fighters, which means they will take 5-7 hits from PDBs before dying.