Q - shielded fighters and anti-shield weapons

[oleg]

Why telling you DN not to shoot on fighters won't be a success ? PD will fire on fighters _regardless_ of ship orders. It is hard coded. True, PPB will not fire on fighters, but so won't shield depletors. True, it may require some rebalancing of your ship designs, but they will then behave much more predictable.

[Baron Munchausen]

A more interesting question is whether 'skips normal shields' or 'skips all shields' damage types have any different effect on units or if the shields are counted as part of the structure when hit by these weapons, too. If so, MM really needs to do something. At least don't count the shields when hit by these special damage types, even if you aren't counting them seperately in normal combat resolution...

[jim]

oleg -

To answer your Q, I have seen some TDM AIs throw hundreds of shielded fighters into the battle. This is especially true against non-domed Large and Huge planets. PDCs, even the highest ones, exact only minor attrition against Large fighters with 2xIII shields.

One can lose a battle quite easily by telling one's ships NOT to fire at fighters. That is why the Talisman + XII APBs are a very good all-around weapon suite. However, just one or two shield-sappers firing ahead of the APBs really makes a big difference in fleet engagements.

Thus, to do as you suggest would probably make me use Tachyon Cannons since they cannot shoot at fighters, but again I would ahve to avoid anti-shield weapons because they DO target fighters. See, with Talisman, longer range battles are generally best. However, the shield hitter has a longer range than the Tachyon weapon, and most others. So, the ship wastes anti-shield fire and then moves out of range! Thus, cannot use a Max Range weapons strategy!

The problem gets even worse with Bases, since the Multiplex is either erratic or broken for Bases. That is, one might have 10 Tachyon cannons that fussily decline to fire at choice targets because the shield-sappers ahead of them have already fired at fighters.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
You know we could fix this by modding the small shield component so it doesn't actually generate shields, but just has the structure tonnage equivalent to the shield strength. With out the actuial shield ability the shield damaging wepons would nto target the fighters I believe.

This would also lead to entire stacks of fighters being destroyed by single massive mount anti-proton beam hits. The shields of one fighter are removed, then that fighter is destroyed, and any remaining damage is lost. Without shields, this behaviour does not happen, and all damage transfers to all other fighters.

This was changed in one of the very early patches.

[dumbluck]

So mod the shield sapper so that it can't target fighters. Problem solved! Better yet, have MM change it, so that it's standard!