Balancing Fighters, Missiles and PDC in the late game

[PvK]

Depends on your tech level, and how much time you spend sitting around building up fighters. I think Fryon's experience in Proportions tends to be that he does a land grab and then gets bored, building up silly quantities of fighters once he reaches his maintenance limits for ships.

However I will grant that:

* Proportions makes fighters quite powerful
* Proportions fighters are powerful early in the tech tree, compared to other techs
* SE4 zero-maintenance units means that stockpiling fighters can lead to some very large and therefore powerful (particularly on defense) fighter stacks.

Later-tech Proportions stuff, and mid-tech bases and planets, can deal with fighters pretty well, though. And, fighters aren't as powerful as they are in say, real-world naval combat from World War 2 onwards.

You might want to playtest a bit to see if you think the balance is ok. If you decide you want to stay a bit closer to unmodded SE4 and Star Trek in emphasizing weapon-bearing ships over fighters, or if you just want to tweak them down, you might want to adjust the Proportions values with some or all of the following ideas:

1) Reduce the damage done by the light fighter weapons by about half, down to 1 or 2 points per weapon, and or increase their size, so they don't do much damage at all. (or, remove their ability to target anything but fighters)

2) Make fighter weapons which heavy weapons for hitting ships, unable to target fighters.

3) Remove fighter shields, or make them only about as good as fighter armor, or a little better.

4) Consider removing or reducing the structure value of fighter until they have about half the damage resistance they currently do (without shields).

5) Consider making fighter components cost more.

6) Consider making fighters start out with somewhat lower offense and defensive bonuses, but add more fighter ECM and combat sensors at higher research levels, so early fighters aren't so hard to kill, and later fighters make stockpiles of earlier fighters relatively obsolete.

PvK

[Fyron]

If you can knock out several players using those fighter hordes in the early to mid game long before they can get effective defense against them, they are too powerful.

What is so effective at taking out fighters in the later stages of the game? Certainly not those anti-fighter PDCs. You need quite a few of them to start destroying fighters in reasonable numbers. The only PD that can hit fighters with more than a 1% success rate are the Point Defense Beams, and those max out at 17 damage, so they take several shots to kill one fighter. Unless, of course, they stick 2-3 small shield generator Vs on their fighters, which means they will take 5-7 hits from PDBs before dying.

[PvK]

Ships with stacked attack bonuses from high-tech components and/or weapons with to-hit bonuses. Bases or planets (or Massive Base Ships) with Fire Control Centers that allow capital ship DF weapons to hit fighter stacks (remember losing all the fighters from your ungodly-large carrier armada in Adamant 0006 to the Xi'Chung AI homeworld?). Also, high-tech ships can have very high damage resistance from shields and armor, which fighters don't hurt very much.

It's true though that early-mid game empires should all have some defensive fighters, or they will be vulnerable to enemy fighter attack. Kind of like real warfare since World War 2, or much science fiction.

Fighters are a bit like drones, though, in that one of their main advantages is that SE4 doesn't charge any maintenance for them, so you can stockpile a practically unlimited number of them in peace time. This makes them seem cheaper than they really are, when you're not in a serious war. If you have to keep up with combat losses, then their costs and shipyard time comes into play.

PvK

[Fyron]

Probably should have brought a bit of napalm with that carrier armada... nasty Xi'Chung.

Note: I have been talking about MP use mostly here. The AI is hardly salvageable to ever provide much of a challenge to most players, unless you cheat and give them a lot of special stuff only they can use...

Also, high-tech ships can have very high damage resistance from shields and armor, which fighters don't hurt very much.

Unless the fighters are launched in stacks...

With the slow rate of research progress in Proportions, all those high-tech goodies take far too long to get to save the first couple of empires a warmonger attacks...

Also, stockpiling fighters is a snap when you can support 20 BSYs or more over your HW without breaking a sweat.

[ November 05, 2003, 03:17: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[PvK]

Fire Control Centers can be obtained by the time any large fighter Groups can be brought against another empire.

But ya, in a MP Proportions game with fighters included, trying to fight fighter-using empires without using any fighters of your own will probably be extremely hard. That's true reality and much SF, and is intentional. If you want to play more Trek-like Proportions, tweak the fighters or just turn off their tech area.

PvK

[oleg]

I like the idea of 'fire rate 2' for fighter weapons - like JLS did in AIC. First, it makes fighters fight more 'realistic': they fly over and fire on you then regroup and fly back. Something we usually see in war movies
Second, PD would now have TWO chances to shot down fighters during the raid - on the way in and out.
That alone should make PDB more usefull even without increasing the damage which would otherwise affect missiles !

[Grand Lord Vito]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
You might want to reduce the ability of fighters to be overly-powerful like in Proportions though... even those special anti-Fighter PDCs from Energy Pulse Weapons don't help much.

How I used to play proporitions was to make just carriers with fighters and a few escort scouts.

There is no need for other combat ships because a fleet of 10 or more carriers with fighters can beat everything

[Grand Lord Vito]

Originally posted by PvK:
[QB] Depends on your tech level, and how much time you spend sitting around building up fighters. I think Fryon's experience in Proportions tends to be that he does a land grab and then gets bored, building up silly quantities of fighters once he reaches his maintenance limits for ships.

However I will grant that:

* Proportions makes fighters quite powerful
* Proportions fighters are powerful early in the tech tree, compared to other techs
* SE4 zero-maintenance units means that stockpiling fighters can lead to some very large and therefore powerful (particularly on defense) fighter stacks.

What does zero-maintenance units have to do with the Fighters being out of proprortion?

Later-tech Proportions stuff, and mid-tech bases and planets, can deal with fighters pretty well, though. And, fighters aren't as powerful as they are in say, real-world naval combat from World War 2 onwards.

Not true.

1) Reduce the damage done by the light fighter weapons by about half, down to 1 or 2 points per weapon, and or increase their size, so they don't do much damage at all. (or, remove their ability to target anything but fighters)

2) Make fighter weapons which heavy weapons for hitting ships, unable to target fighters.

3) Remove fighter shields, or make them only about as good as fighter armor, or a little better.

4) Consider removing or reducing the structure value of fighter until they have about half the damage resistance they currently do (without shields).

5) Consider making fighter components cost more.

6) Consider making fighters start out with somewhat lower offense and defensive bonuses, but add more fighter ECM and combat sensors at higher research levels, so early fighters aren't so hard to kill, and later fighters make stockpiles of earlier fighters relatively obsolete.

Most of this sounds like the way fighters are now with the AIC Fighter Mod by JLS and OLEG

[ November 05, 2003, 11:07: Message edited by: Grand Lord Vito ]

[Grand Lord Vito]

Originally posted by PvK:
Fire Control Centers can be obtained by the time any large fighter Groups can be brought against another empire.

If the fire control really works the way it is discribed.
Even then it does not help much with fighters, you said earlier that the Proportions PDC has enough to hit, why even mention this?

[oleg]

Originally posted by Grand Lord Vito:

quote:

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Originally posted by PvK:
Fire Control Centers can be obtained by the time any large fighter Groups can be brought against another empire.

If the fire control really works the way it is discribed.
Even then it does not help much with fighters, you said earlier that the Proportions PDC has enough to hit, why even mention this?

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Fire control centers DO help against fighters ! extra 40% to hit gives PDC very good chance to hit. Even more, FCS plus to-hit bonuses from WP mounts makes normal weapons quite effective.