An important question to hardcore SEIV strategists

[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.

[Suicide Junkie]

I like the idea of something like:
Ship-based PDCs are ineffective (1-5% accuracy) to nonexistent.
Ships can perhaps use some small anti-fighter missiles, but as missiles they tend to all fire at one stack, making for a lot of overkill and not much stopping power.

Fighters can target other fighters fine.
Bomber designs could carry limited anti-ship missiles at the expense of engines and defenses. Vulnerable to regular fighters.

[deccan]

Suicide Junkie said:
Fighters can target other fighters fine.
Bomber designs could carry limited anti-ship missiles at the expense of engines and defenses. Vulnerable to regular fighters.

Didn't AIC have this stuff? Dedicated anti-fighter fighters or dedicated anti-ship fighters but no all rounder fighter. Whatever happened to it? It was a Version of Proportions optimized for SP.

[Ed Kolis]

SJ, your quote reminds me of something right out of the MOO2 manual that had me confused for years before I figured it out:

"Ships can bomb planets directly, but other ships only indirectly, via bombers."

OK, I was wondering, what KIND of ships can bomb planets directly, given that some other (unspecified and nonexistent as far as I could tell from playing the game) kind of ships can bomb planets only indirectly via bombers... then after SO long I finally figured out that "other ships" was part of the OBJECT of the sentence, not the SUBJECT...

[Suicide Junkie]

Ed Kolis said:"Ships can bomb planets directly, but other ships only indirectly, via bombers."

OK, I was wondering, what KIND of ships can bomb planets directly, given that some other (unspecified and nonexistent as far as I could tell from playing the game) kind of ships can bomb planets only indirectly via bombers... then after SO long I finally figured out that "other ships" was part of the OBJECT of the sentence, not the SUBJECT...

So; Ships can bomb planets...
Fighters can bomb ships...
But ships can't bomb other ships?

[Fyron]

Suicide Junkie said:
So; Ships can bomb planets...
Fighters can bomb ships...
But ships can't bomb other ships?

They can shoot torpedoes, missiles, and beams at them. Bombs would be redundant.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Nope. Torpedoes are self-propelled, missiles are self-propelled and self-guided and beams are focused energy. Bombs are in free-fall. Clearly not redundant, they just don't make sense for ships.

[Aiken]

Launch bombs using the catapults. They are pretty effective in vacuum thus make sense.