Fighters are now unbalanced

[Baal]

You bring up good points Askan. Fighters should just lower the accuracy of weapons a little, not so much that it is impossible to hit a fighter with a normal weapon.

I was a little surprised when I load the new patch and I go to play a game and all of a sudden I don't have enough PD in my whole fleet to deal with 2 carrier loads of large fighters.

Of course since fighters are now coming into some sort of position to be an extreme tactical advantage maybe it's time to have some new types of point defense. Like a PD repulser beam to keep fighter Groups from swarming a ship.

That's all I got for now.

[Q]

Thank you askan and Baal. I already had the feeling I was completely alone with my judgement!

[Marty Ward]

The point askan makes about fun is the most important point, I think. Since the game takes place in the future anything is possible. If one thing dominates the gameplay so much that the fun is removed then that is a problem.
I haven't installed 1.35 yet so I don't know how the changes will affect my style of play but I've always felt that PD was too effective. It sounds like the PD effect has been reduced and I like that.
What I would like to see is a need for more fighter vs fighter combat where you have to establish space superiority before you attack fighters are able to be effective. Maybe even two types of fighters, assault and space superiority where assault the fighter can do a lot more damage to ships. It would help define fighter roles.

[Daynarr]

Well, I believe that fighters should have two strengths vs. capital ships: numbers and maneuverability.

It seems that fighters it game are just about right.

The thing with the missing main weapons is also (mostly) a beginning game issue only. During game ships will receive Combat Sensors (up to 65% in accuracy), experience (up to 100% accuracy - 50% for individual and 50% for fleet experience) and PD weapons (always at least 70% chance to hit a target). The fighters, OTOH, only get Small ECM to improve their defensiveness (up to 30% of 'to hit defense').

If you want a real life example of fighters vs. ships in combat here is a short one:
- picture a WW2 ship trying to hit a fighter with his main guns. To say that ship has 1% chance to hit that fighter would be an overstatement.

Of course, the people that don't like fighters that can dodge main weapons can just edit vehiclesize.txt file and remove their defense bonuses, but IMHO it is just like it should be.

[murx]

Uhm, the thingie with the Bismark and targeting planes is a 'bit' stretched in the means of star combat.
The Bismark used their guns in a FlaK manner - meaning they had time triggered shells that would explode after some flight hopefully at the correct estimatet hight/range of the aimed at plane. I can't think of a Meson Beam on a large mount trigger an explosion in empty space - so this option would left to 'explosive' kind of weapons.


murx

[Askan Nightbringer]

Just my Last thoughts on this subject.

Equating spaceship vs space fighter with seaborne battleship vs airborne fighters is not very correct.

Spaceships would take advantage of the same zero-g conditions that fighters would. I imagine two starships facing off in combat would be a fast and dangerous affair. The weapons on these starships would already have to be able to deal with high speed, highly manueverable (I can't really spell) craft.

Now in space empires combat an Escort moves at 3, a fighter at 4. Not much of a difference there. And as for size an escort is 200kt and a fighter is 15kt. We are not talking about X-Wings vs Star Destoyers here. Its more like my bedroom vs the rest of the house.

And an example of sci-fi where fighters don't rule is Star Trek. Its always the bigger ships, with bigger guns and bigger shields. And in Phantom Menace the bad guys would have one if the robots remembered to close the door of their spaceship. The fighters there could do nothing vs the shields of that ship.

The only real reason I want capitol ships to obliterate fighters in space empires is just the cost. Make figthers cost maintenance or something and then I don't care either way.

And one Last thing is editing the text files isn't an option when 80% of my play is via email. Ten other players get suspicious when I suggest that I'm just going to tweak with one little thing before we start.

(And I guess when I talk about the AA guns on the Bismark its really what imagine point defence to be.)

Think fun.

[Barnacle Bill]

The reasons fighters dominate Sci-Fi movies are:

1) Adventure-type movies need individual heros whose actions make a big difference. A lone fighter jock (Luke Skywalker) or two (Starbuck & Apollo) taking out the big bad guy threat to the galaxy fits the ticket. Bill the Galactic Hero and the Reverend First Class Fusetender Temba down in the bowels of a spacegoing battlewagon, replacing fuses in the shield system as the blow under enemy fire, does not. Star Trek works the way it does because Roddenberry's original concept was "Horatio Hornblower in space" - the model was naval combat in the age of sail, when by & large bigger was better. Small ships were more maneuverable, but their broadsides lacked both range & power to be a serious threat to a ship of the line. That is what "ship of the line" meant - a ship that was big enough to serve in the line of battle in a fleet engagement. The small stuff was used for scouting, patrolling remote secondary theaters, chasing pirates (who couldn't get their hands on a ship of the line), raiding enemy commerce and escorting your own merchants against enemy commerce raiders. That is mostly because ships of the line cost too much to use for every mission. This was pretty much how naval warfare worked from the advent of guns until the invention of the self-propelled torpedo (which made small nimble ships a threat to capital ships). However, in that kind of setting your heroes end up being establishment-type senior career officers, rather than farm boys in whom the force is strong or rogues who gamble & wench in between Cylon attacks

2) In the most recent large-scale naval war in history, carrier aircraft dominated and battlewagons were reduced to a secondary role. That is what is most fresh in the public's mind - that carriers have made battleships obsolete. Make different assumptions about the effectiveness of anti-aircraft defenses and this could change. For example, in the "Hammer's Slammers" stories tactical aircraft are hopeless. If armor/shielding makes battlewagons relatively invulnerable to any weapon small enough to mount on an aircraft, and automated high tech air defenses swat planes out of the sky before they can do any harm, suddenly the battlewagons make a comeback (if you also find a solution to the submarine threat, that is).

3) Moviemakers copy a successful film. Lucas is reputedly fascinated by WWII air combat, and Star Wars shows it (the Tie Fighter vs the Millenium Falcon sceen could have been ME109's vs a B-17, the Deathstar attack could have been any of the Pacific carrier battles). Star Wars made bigger $$$ than any movie up to that time. So, everybody else copied, except the Star Trek universe which already was locked into a different model.

In the end, it is a matter of how the designers want it to work, since there is no "reality" to model. I personally like a game where the battle line is at least a viable option. I'm OK with all carriers & fighters also being viable. I think having fighters sitting out in space forever "feels wrong", but I do it myself since it is advantageous If I were the designer, I'd let fighters fly off on the system map the turn they take off but make them land by the end of the turn or be lost (like in Civilization).