Fighters are now unbalanced

[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).

[murx]

Barnacle Bill - wow, great summary !

Maybe to balance fighters and capital ships better fighters should have Rules like following:

Fighters on planets have only 10% maintainance cost of the compared weight to capital ships.
Fighters on carriers have only 25% maintainance cost of the compared weight to capital ships.
Fighters in space have 50% maintainance cost of the compared weight to capital ships.

Fighters that stay five consecutive turns in space get automatically destroyed.

On the other hand fighters should get experience - at least squadrons should get experience.

Now why should fighters still be cheaper the capital class - fighters are really mass-production so repair, refit and the like is cheaper (at least as long as SE4 doesn't depict different econmy styles, right now it uses some kind of capitalism....) then the small series of capital ships. Just compare the numbers of capital ships produced during WW to the number of planes constructed. Same for the heavy tanks and smaller ones ...

murx

[wierd bob]

That was Reverend Tembo... not Temba. Get the facts straight bowb!

[Marty Ward]

The is a note in one file, the vehicle file I think, that says fighters are destroyed when they are out of supply. I have never had my fighters run out of supply but if this worked you could cause the fighter components consume supplies. You would eventually run out of supply and the fighters would have to resupply or be destroyed. This would keep them from sitting on WP's forever.

[Barnacle Bill]

quote:

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Originally posted by Marty Ward:
This would keep them from sitting on WP's forever.

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Not if you put a horde of them in a fleet with a single small, cheap Quantum Reactor-equiped ship. I do that all the time. They never have to land. The effect is kind of like a cheap carrier that can't travel interstellar. If you make the ship a transport, it can also take the show on the road as long as you have a colony in the system on either end - the fighters land at the colony, the transport loads 'em up & hauls them to a colony in another system & drops them off, the colony launches 'em and you fleet 'em up with the transport again. Of course, the fleet can't move first turn after the launch, but what do you expect for nothing?

[Barnacle Bill]

quote:

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Originally posted by wierd bob:
That was Reverend Tembo... not Temba. Get the facts straight bowb!

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Maybe I'm a Chinger spy...

[Marty Ward]

BB,
At least you would have to pay maintenance on the QR ship.
I think the way it is there will always be a way to keep them in space forever. There should be ways of making this expensive though.
One way would be to make their engines consume a lot of supplies, maybe 50 times what they do now. Then at least you would need a carrier or transport to move them into position. Making their weapons consume more supplies might cause them to run out after a particulary long or difficult fight too.
I don't even know if they are destroyed if they run out of supply, I've never had one run out. Does anyone know if this works?

[This message has been edited by Marty Ward (edited 06 May 2001).]
Another thought would be to eliminate the standard move from fighter engines. This would give them combat move and eliminate fighters flying through space by themselves. I know some people do think that suggestion is bad but I've never liked the idea of fighters cruising around the solar system by themselves.

[This message has been edited by Marty Ward (edited 06 May 2001).]

[Trachmyr]

I think fighters are just fine being the way they are, my reason:

Manuverability.... Engines on fighters are exposed to more "surface area" than the capital ships, this means they have more finite control over the direction of their thrust, allowing them to adjust their direction more profoundly in short periods of time.

Of course size plays an important part, I can't see fighters as a single 25KT fighter... that's ludicrous! A 50 MILLION pound fighter, come on... instead they probally refering to fighter squadrons (I changed the description in my game to just this)... you're talking about dozens of fighters, thus their actual size is MUCH smaller.

Finally their speed although similar, is probally generated diffrently between fighters and capital ships.... Capital Ships have slower Engines/Drives that can continuosly operate due to efficient use of fuel.... fighters are more likely to use rockets, very fast accelerating engines that burn large amounts of fuel, thus they accelerate and coast. I know the SE4 system dosen't represent this, but the SE4 system dosen't represent any realistic form of space movement (unless all the ships were equipped with an inertialess drive).

Personally, I would love to see that "combat movement" could STACK in a future patch... (give Afterburners the "one per ship" restriction), and make all fighter need 3 engines per move, but give all fighter engines 1 combat speed. Thus if you've got 9 Contra-terrene engines on a fighter + afterburners III, you'd have a combat speed of 14! but a normal move of only 4. Much better in my opinion. (Maxes would be 15 & 6 w/ quantum engines & AB3)

[murx]

I like the idea to kill the strategical move of fighters to zero and only have them combat movement.
They still could stay in space forever - but only at the point their carrier released them.
At a planet or at a carrier this would depict the fighters are 'on patrol' and just make short landings on the planet/carrier for crew shifts and resupply.
Another way could be to cut their movement to only 1 or maximal 2 spaces away from a landing point (or maybe 1/2 their maximal move) - depicting the same 'patrol' mechanism as before, but the 'main patrol' is at the location where the squadron is shown on the map.
But will be hard to programm, as the fighters should be destroyed when their 'landing base' moves away or is destroyed.
murx