An important question to hardcore SEIV strategists

[AgentZero]

Sounds interesting... Personally, I play with a mod that does the opposite. Fighters can target capitol ships, but cap ships can't target fighters except with PDCs. Of course, only Rocket Pods & a couple energy weapons can be used against cap ships, and the PDC tech tree is a bit bigger, but it works out quite nicely. I figure, in the navies of the world today, a carrier is scarier than a battleship, so I've tweaked things to reflect that in SE4 as well.

[Arkcon]

Yes, that's come up once before. Either SciFi is "WWII fighter pilots in space" - example, Star Wars deathstar destroyed by one well placed shot, or it's "ships of the line faceing off" a la Honor Harrington books or Star Trek's "yes space is 3 dimensional, but let's line up and shoot each other in the same plane anyway"

The great thing about SE4 is you don't have to pick just one. The standard game has some balance in this regard. A few ships with high level PDC can pretty much defeat any size carrier fleet. But earlier in the game, fighters can take out medium sized ships.

'Course with a mod, you can make either of the two sets of conditions outlined above apply, as you like it.

[Starhawk]

Well for races like the Terrenesi for example (reason I keep using them as an example is because they are going to one of "3" races in the Alpha release of the game) use light fighters as their main source of point defense against fighters while their PDTs are used mainly for missile intercept duty.
See what I was going for was so that (some races) Capital ship fleets would still need at least a squadron of intercept fighters to guard them from enemy bombers and fighters.

THEN you've got races like the swarmers (later release) who will have huge carriers and large numbers of (cheap but effective) fighters but their largest combat warship is a destroyer.


So you would have a large number of tactical doctrines available to you.

Oh and the "ship of the wall facing off" makes sense for the HH universe

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Actually, DW did base Honerverse ship combat on wooden cannon ships.