Fighters fighters fighters

[bbq]

Yet another newbie question from me. Thanks for putting up with me guys.

For those of you who use carriers, how many units of fighters do you launch at a time? I always end up launching as many as I can, but the computer sometimes send them out in odd Groups. Is there any advantage of smaller squad over large ones or vice versa?

Also, I am finding that using fighters is an expensive long term tactics. If you rely on normal worships, when they suffer damage you can repair or retreat them to fight another day. But fighters don't have that option. So you launch a swarm of 200 fighters, killed several Battleships but your fighters force is now halfed because of attrition. And then there is the research you are spending on carriers and those fighter components. Also, fighters are easily countered by point defenses. If each ship you are attacking has a balanced mix of offensive weapons and point defenses (and most smart players probably see to this), you might as well leave your fighters home. Lastly, perhaps the harshest thing is that since fighters come in stacks, one big enemy ship weapon can destroy MULTIPLE fighters. Regular ships suffer from no such penalty. The only up side I see is that fighters require no maintenance (carriers do of course).

So I am finding that I tend to lean further and further toward warships that in general seem more flexible. What are your thoughts?

[Arkcon]

The fighters pool their weapons and hit points so larger Groups are better. If you think of each group as a mini-ship, you'll see you want the larger group.

But...many smaller Groups swarm around, prevent ships from moving and consume point defense fire. So there seems to be a trade off, but...

As the ships become larger, with better shields, and better point defense, and fleets get bigger, fighters Groups really begin to lose out.

But that is just against the A.I., human opponents will see right through your plans early on, build a couple of point defense dominated ships, to support their attack ships, and slice right through your carrier Groups.

[Alneyan]

The only point of launching less than the maximum is to hassle PDC, and avoid the annoying "one hit kills ten fighters" phenomenon. If you have nothing better to do, making a *lot* of fighter stacks might work, but that would be a micromanaging hell.

If you are serious about using fighters, you should research some Shielding as soon as possible, and put it on your fighters. A Mini Shield III is enough to soak up one PDC V hit, which is definitively not bad at all. I would advise against researching the bigger Carriers though, since they are very expensive to research, and a Battleship/Dreadnought will do just as well (or a Light Carrier for this matter). Bigger fighters may be useful for you, but I am not too fond of them.

However, going up to level III in Fighters gives you the Mini Combat Sensors III, which are very useful to improve the accuracy of your fighters; the enemy ships will have ship training (up to 20%, so a 20% penalty to offence and defence for your fighters), and very likely the Scattering/Stealth Armours, resulting in an additional +30% bonus to defence for the enemy ships; until destruction of these pieces of armour at any rate. The ships will have a much better ECM as well (compared to your Combat Sensors), resulting in yet another 30% penalty for your offence. And there is then a -10% penalty per square, which will at the very least be of 10%.

At the end of the day, you have a -90% chance to hit at point blank range, but fortunately have a +50% bonus built in with your fighter hulls, for a total result of 60% odds to hit. Still, if you do not put the small Combat Sensors III, your odds to hit will collapse from 60% to 30% at range 1, hence the importance of these devices. On the other hand, Small ECM III is probably not that important, since your fighters *will* get hit very, very often by PDC and its whooping accuracy bonus of +70% (thrown in the +35% edge of Combat Sensors III against Fighters ECM III, and you have a 99% to get hit by PDC at range 1).

On the same matter, you have to train your fighter fleets to avoid get any further penalty to your offence; fortunately for you, fighters are equal to ships in this regard, but you will have a tough time getting a fleet experience above 20%.

The main strength of fighters lies in their defensive power, making them perhaps the most powerful one-shot defence available to you. Put 20,000 fighters over a wormhole, and watch the sparks fly as an enemy fleet attempts to warp in (that requires you to have secured all your borders except this one wormhole obviously). It is mostly useful for smallish Empires depending on trade, remote-mining and other external income sources; if you were to produce a big fleet, you would be at the mercy of maintenance when this income collapsed, unlike units, which would remain even once you have lost most of your income.

On the other hand, if you are the most powerful Empire in the galaxy, I do not see fighters as a really needed part of your fleet. More warships should do the trick here, as your income should be rather stable. The only exception would be a very long period of peace, where massive building of units may pay off in the long run.

A Last point you may want to consider for defence: some drones filled with armour and/or shielding may work to soak up PDC fire. Make sure to change their "ship" strategies to something else than "Kamikaze", and it may help your fighters survive the PDC onslaught.


I have yet to really succeed in using fighters as an offensive weapon, since Carriers are expensive if you really need a *lot* of launching potential (and you should be able to launch as many fighters as possible in a single turn, as they lost much of their power otherwise). The only such use I can think of is during the early game, where Light Carriers double as effective warships, virtually on par with Light Cruisers. Putting some fighters from time to time may come out as a nasty surprise, especially if you have not been using any fighter for the Last thirty turns. Likewise, showing up a strong fighter component with a first offensive wave may catch an opponent unprepared.

The Last use of fighters as a hybrid weapon would be to secure a system from enemy colony ships, since they can be deployed from a newly colonised planet very quickly. Few players actually put PDC on their colony ships, so a handful of fighters can be enough to defend a wormhole in this initial stage of expansion. Most armed escorts also feature missiles rather than direct fire weaponry, and are also vulnerable to a defensive screen made up of a few fighters (or the same could happen with satellites launching seekers, though it isn't so common).

I hope I have kept rambling to a minium, and somewhat addressed your questions. As you can see, I do have the annoying tendency of getting carried away when speaking of my beloved fighters.

[TurinTurambar]

Well put Doctor Alneyan. Most of these strategies can be developed with time and experience, but your knowledge of "the numbers" makes the advice more "weighty." We in the community are fortunate to have you around so eagerly sharing your expertise.

And thank you for all your advice to me on troops a few months back. The insights paid off very well indeed.

May Your Suns Shine Forever,
Turin

[Starhawk]

Alneyan said:
The only point of launching less than the maximum is to hassle PDC, and avoid the annoying "one hit kills ten fighters" phenomenon. If you have nothing better to do, making a *lot* of fighter stacks might work, but that would be a micromanaging hell.

If you are serious about using fighters, you should research some Shielding as soon as possible, and put it on your fighters. A Mini Shield III is enough to soak up one PDC V hit, which is definitively not bad at all. I would advise against researching the bigger Carriers though, since they are very expensive to research, and a Battleship/Dreadnought will do just as well (or a Light Carrier for this matter). Bigger fighters may be useful for you, but I am not too fond of them.

However, going up to level III in Fighters gives you the Mini Combat Sensors III, which are very useful to improve the accuracy of your fighters; the enemy ships will have ship training (up to 20%, so a 20% penalty to offence and defence for your fighters), and very likely the Scattering/Stealth Armours, resulting in an additional +30% bonus to defence for the enemy ships; until destruction of these pieces of armour at any rate. The ships will have a much better ECM as well (compared to your Combat Sensors), resulting in yet another 30% penalty for your offence. And there is then a -10% penalty per square, which will at the very least be of 10%.

At the end of the day, you have a -90% chance to hit at point blank range, but fortunately have a +50% bonus built in with your fighter hulls, for a total result of 60% odds to hit. Still, if you do not put the small Combat Sensors III, your odds to hit will collapse from 60% to 30% at range 1, hence the importance of these devices. On the other hand, Small ECM III is probably not that important, since your fighters *will* get hit very, very often by PDC and its whooping accuracy bonus of +70% (thrown in the +35% edge of Combat Sensors III against Fighters ECM III, and you have a 99% to get hit by PDC at range 1).

On the same matter, you have to train your fighter fleets to avoid get any further penalty to your offence; fortunately for you, fighters are equal to ships in this regard, but you will have a tough time getting a fleet experience above 20%.

The main strength of fighters lies in their defensive power, making them perhaps the most powerful one-shot defence available to you. Put 20,000 fighters over a wormhole, and watch the sparks fly as an enemy fleet attempts to warp in (that requires you to have secured all your borders except this one wormhole obviously). It is mostly useful for smallish Empires depending on trade, remote-mining and other external income sources; if you were to produce a big fleet, you would be at the mercy of maintenance when this income collapsed, unlike units, which would remain even once you have lost most of your income.

On the other hand, if you are the most powerful Empire in the galaxy, I do not see fighters as a really needed part of your fleet. More warships should do the trick here, as your income should be rather stable. The only exception would be a very long period of peace, where massive building of units may pay off in the long run.

A Last point you may want to consider for defence: some drones filled with armour and/or shielding may work to soak up PDC fire. Make sure to change their "ship" strategies to something else than "Kamikaze", and it may help your fighters survive the PDC onslaught.


I have yet to really succeed in using fighters as an offensive weapon, since Carriers are expensive if you really need a *lot* of launching potential (and you should be able to launch as many fighters as possible in a single turn, as they lost much of their power otherwise). The only such use I can think of is during the early game, where Light Carriers double as effective warships, virtually on par with Light Cruisers. Putting some fighters from time to time may come out as a nasty surprise, especially if you have not been using any fighter for the Last thirty turns. Likewise, showing up a strong fighter component with a first offensive wave may catch an opponent unprepared.

The Last use of fighters as a hybrid weapon would be to secure a system from enemy colony ships, since they can be deployed from a newly colonised planet very quickly. Few players actually put PDC on their colony ships, so a handful of fighters can be enough to defend a wormhole in this initial stage of expansion. Most armed escorts also feature missiles rather than direct fire weaponry, and are also vulnerable to a defensive screen made up of a few fighters (or the same could happen with satellites launching seekers, though it isn't so common).

I hope I have kept rambling to a minium, and somewhat addressed your questions. As you can see, I do have the annoying tendency of getting carried away when speaking of my beloved fighters.

Wow color me impressed you are smart

Well the one thing I'd like to chime in if you folks don't mind is a strategy I use mid-late game depending on the size of my warfleet.

Well I was at peace for 10 years and obviously my military budget was not as high as it would have been in times of war (mainly because my income was getting low due to one of my trading partners rapidly losing ground in their war), I only had around 100 dreadnoughts out of a fleet of around 500 warships (most were cruisers and destroyers [dessys were fitted out as singularity torpedo boats]) but my empire was surrounded by three other empires, the largest of which had 3 times my fleet size and that empire was my prime rival for colonization and expansion and were already larger then me in planetary territories.

Needless to say the enemy "Norak" got greedy and invaded one of my outer systems with a carrier strike force, I had my nearest warships intercept them, I did win but I lost 10 of my precious few dreadnoughts and at least 4 cruisers.
The war went on for a few more turns and it was looking bad, the enemy destroyed my 3rd fleet and succeded in capturing 5 planets in the system the 3rd fleet had protected.

Well I was getting desperate for warships but they are expensive so it hit me design a cloaked strike carrier and a fighter designed to neutralize my enemies planets without sending in my precious few capital ships.

A few turns later I had 2 Fleet Carriers with cloaking devices and enough room for 96 heavy fighters each, once my new fighter squadrons were complete I cloaked my carriers and proceeded to the nearest enemy system.

I entered orbit around one of their moderately defended planet "5 weapon platforms" and launched my new BlackTiger bombers well I did lose a few too planetary fire but I succeded in destroying the entire planet using nothing but my bombers.
Well I succeeded in destroying all 3 enemy planets in that system and drew off the fleet that was attacking my outer system.

I actually did well during the war but my game crashed and was erased so I never will know if I would have won.

So basically fighters rigged for planetary bombers can serve you well if you don't have the money for a large combat warship squadron that would also suffer losses against a planetary defense system.....at least in my experience.

[Slick]

Fighters are definitely hard to use, but not impossible. Like any other weapon or strategy, they should not be used as your sole weapon or strategy. In the unmodded game, as stated numerous times, PDC and normal weapons will easily overcome fighters. Some things you can do to extend their usefulness (some redundance with Posts above):

- Hide them. Don't make their presence known to your enemy until you think it will make the most impact. If your enemies know you are using fighters, they have 2 advantages: 1) they can adjust their defenses ahead of time, and 2) they know you are spending research on fighter-related techs so you must be lacking elsewhere - and PDC is cheap to research and implement as a defense.

- When you do reveal them, numbers count. There are 3 parts to the numbers element:
---- 1) If your enemy wasn't expecting fighters, he probably has to react in some way to retrofit some of his ships and this can delay him a short time,
---- 2) Fighters are most dangerous when they can overwhelm the enemy and get in close to their targets. Size your fighter Groups according to your enemy designs. Large Groups can do massive damage when they are in close (especially the way their weapons stack and sensors apply to all in a stack) and fighters in the group are "shielded" by others in that group by the way that the stack takes damage (one at a time), but large Groups can quickly be decimated by concentrating of enemy firepower. Small stacks can overwhelm PDC and defensive fire and also cause all the remaining damage from a big gun to be lost but small Groups don't have the advantage of damage stacking, sensor applicability to the stack, and can quickly cause a traffic jam to prevent fighters in the back row from closing with the targets. So stack size should be tweaked based on enemy. A good starting number is 10, which I think is the default.
---- 3) since PDC chews up fighters and main weapons can be devestating to fighters, you can minimize this by designing fighters to travel the same speed as your fleet when attacking. This way the enemy has to choose to fire main guns at your fighters or ships. Either way, if fighters fight alongside ships, the enemy doesn't have the advantage of engaging fighters first then your ships next - effectively dividing your forces. To make this even more effective, put some missile ships into your fighter fleets. Choose the smallest, fastest-firing missiles you can, you arent' expecting to have any of these actually hit the enemy. Even the slowest missiles are faster than fighters and the objective is to overwhelm enemy PDC with missiles so that fighters have a better chance to close with the enemy. Enemy PDC will fire at the closest available target so you want your missiles to be faster than your fighters.

- If you do use fighters, take full advantage of their "unit" status. This means that you can build them at planets that don't have a spaceyard and they don't have any maintenance cost - just make sure you keep some free cargo space available. Set up your inner or distant systems to make them when the systems are fully developed and create an automated delivery service of fighters to the front. You will need lots of replacements. Small/Medium transports can be put on "repeat" orders to collect fighters in a system and dump them at a large/huge planet. Then Medium/Large transports can be put on "repeat" orders to move them to the front lines. Carriers can be constructed and then automatically be sent to a waypoint to pick up fighters on the way to the front lines too.

- Since Carriers have cargo space, they can *deviously* be given the ship type of "Troop Transport" instead of "Carrier". This has some cool effects. Your carriers will still fight and use thier fighters in combat as before. But if you have troops in the carrier cargo, they will capture planets too (set up your fleet strategy accordingly).

Hope this helps.
Slick.

[AgentZero]

The mod I play with makes fighters quite a bit more useful, since only PD weapons can hit them.
In the stock game though, I usually used them as for planetary defence. After a planet had completed its facility construction, if I didn't need it to do anything else, I'd give it repeat orders to build one turn's worth of fighters. 10-15 turns down the line, if an 'undefended' planet was attacked, the attackers usually got a pretty nasty surprise.

[Alneyan]

Well, thanks for the praises Turin Turambar, though they are likely a bit exaggerated (this was not the dedicated "praises to Alneyan" thread after all). I gather you are referring to your thread at Spaceempires.net?

And obviously, I am not exactly the most able player out there, since the Crown is not resting upon my regal head (Asmala keeps the status of King of the Hill, among other such titles).

Back to the topic of fighters, I would like to make an addendum to my previous post. If you are serious about using fighters as a major component of your fleets (either for defence or specialised offensive purposes), you might wish to consider some of the racial traits. More specifically:
- The Organic trait gives a very cheap, and powerful fighter gun for dogfights (Small Electric Ray III if memory serves, at 20 damage for 3kt, and it uses organics rather than minerals).
- The Psychic trait has another good fighter weapon, the Small Telekinetic Projector. It is weaker and more expensive than the Organic own dogfight weapon though, but better than your average Small DUC III.
- The Temporal trait offers the Small Time Distortion Burst, slightly more expensive than the DUC III, but equivalent in all other fields. However, it should deal four times the usual damage to shielding, assuming this ability works correctly on fighters against ships (I have only played Temporal once, and I have not started a war yet in this game).

Still in the Temporal trait, the Event Predicator is also supposed to work on units as well as ships, which would make this facility a great addition to a fighter fleet. If it does work, it will bestow a hefty +30% bonus to offence (at level III) in the whole system, thus increasing the otherwise mediocre accuracy of your fighters. For the Religious ones, the War Shrine has the same use, though it is only half as efficient as the Event Predicator.

From what I read on these Boards, the Crystalline facility boosting shields in a system unfortunately does not work on fighters. A few tests ran in the past (under 1.84) did not show any effect from this facility for my fighters, but I would love to be wrong on this one.

[Atrocities]

PDC's should be broken down into sub weapon Groups as they are entirely way to powerful now. They shoot down seekers, fighters, sats, mines, etc. Fighters should always be a dominant offensive and defensive force and there for Point Defense Cannons should not be able to target them. They should be Fighter vs fighter, with some being able to be hit by larger ship weapons like the APB's or PPB's.

That is my opinion.

[Ed Kolis]

PDC doesn't hit mines, at least not unless you're playing Devnull or some variant thereof...

edit: PDC, not fighters