Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.

[CNCRaymond]

To give them an edge.

[Intimidator]

Agree with all except no: 8, 9, 10

Because the carrier is able to defend themself already.
Sometimes I develope fighters at turn 1, So I can use the 800kt carrier from turn 2. Believe me it makes an excellent Cruiser (large weapon mount) with fighter support in the early game.

Maybe you could lower the percentage of fighter bays needed, so you could use more normal weapons and shields etc etc.....

Inti,

[Fyron]

Definitely need to eliminate that silly exploit... carriers need a ship construction tech req too.

[Intimidator]

Imperator Fyron said:
Definitely need to eliminate that silly exploit... carriers need a ship construction tech req too.

Agreed !!

[Alneyan]

My biggest problem with Fighters in the stock game is how the tech area is handled. The first level is incredible (you have all fighter weapons, armour, shield, the Light Cruiser and the Small Fighter for 100,000 research points. A bargain), but the results after this level are much less impressive. The same goes for the Carrier hulls; the first one is very good (on par with a Light Cruiser), but the later ones cost a lot to research and aren't nearly as good.

Another, smaller matter is to bring the fighters to the offensive. While they are deadly if you can ensure they have first strike (wormhole defence), and it is easy to deploy fighters on a particular spot, it doesn't work so well for offence. The Fighter Bay is only able to launch one fighter per combat turn, so your average Carrier will launch 20 or 30 fighters per combat turn. With fighter numbers reaching four or five figures rather easily, you would need one hundred Carriers to start having a proper launch rate (that excludes unusual situations where the standard measure to count your fighters is 10,000).

So I would say fighters aren't really that weak (unless fighting the Talisman, and even then numbers can wreak some damage), as long as you use them in numbers and have the time to mass produce them. You should expect huge losses as well, but then, so will your opponent.

[bearclaw]

I've done something similar in my Dark Nova Mod. What I did was took the expanded sizes for fighters and carriers (as well as most other too, by the way) from Andres Lescano's Ultimate Shipsizes Mod. IIRC there are 10 fighter sizes and 12 carriers. The largest fighters, Battle Squadron-2, is 60 Kt and can pack a sizable arsenal.

Also, fighters are cheaper to research than unmodded.

As for PDC, what I did was reduce the damage done slightly and decreased their range to 3. I also added a fighter weapon mount that gives +1 range (at a increase of supplies and size). This means that fighters can actually stay out of range of PDC.

With the carriers having so many new sizes and being relatively inexpensive to research, they gain the benifit of larger weapon mounts faster than other ship sizes which provides the same benifit as a warship that I think you are looking for.

In the Dark Nova games played so far, if you arn't using fighters, then you are sunk without a massive number of standard ships.

The newest mod, Dark Nova 4 is avaliable here:
http://seiv.pbw.cc/Download/filelib/1035/DN4+Mod.zip