Emissive Armour/Fighter Stacking

[Taera]

Krsq: two sides for the solution. The good: it would once and for all remove the PDC power because then one could easily swarm the target with hundreds of fighters. If each of those is a single target it will take infinity to kill all of them by the PDC. Thats the good one.
The bad side is two-fold. First it would make tactical combat watching (i always do that in SP - launch the combat in Tactical and turn it to full auto) a real pain. Second is that a single Emmisive armor would render all but Anti-Matter Torpedo, Kamikaze Warhead, Rocket Pods, Shard Cannon and Graviton beam(point blank) absolutely useless.Torpedoes would do 5 damage each; warhead would do 50 damage but the fighter would be destroyed; rocket pods would do as much as 70 damage but its a one-shot and it is not an option for multi-target combat; Graviton would do 10 damage and only on point-blank range. Shard cannon would rule the day for the Skip Armor ability though.
Now Emmisive Armor is a humble 20kT meaning that even a tiny escort or frigate could be virtually immune to most fighter weapons.

This is not an option. OTOH if the Emmisive armor resistance was reduced to 10 damage resistance it would be more interesting. Still, weapons that gain a lot of use such as PPB & Meson and APB on max range would be useless. Thats a solution, though. Mesons are weak against capital ships anyway. PPB on fighters is stupid IMO.

This raises a question - do multiple emmisive armors on a ship stack their bonuses?
Meaning: i have 4 emmisive armors, thats 30*4=120 damage resistance. Does that mean that if the ship is hit with a Quantum Torpedo (100 damage) it would take no damage? Or would it destroy the first one and do 20 resisted damage to the second one? (100dmg - 30res1 - 50arm1) = 20 damage leftover from the first shot. Those would be resisted by the second armor.
How exactly does it work then?

[jimbob]

They aren't stackable (but having more than one emissive could still be useful - a back up incase the first one is destroyed) so you don't have to worry about trying to attack someone who is immune to 300 points damage.

I'd favor the unstacking of the fighter damage personally. It may seem that this will make ships with emissive armor "immune" to fighters, but everything is modable! You could easily make the Emissive Armor much bigger than 20kT for example, and now only large ships can use it. Or significantly reduce the capacity of emissive armor to match the fighter weapons damages (this is my pref. solution)...

ie. if most level 1 fighter (direct fire) weapons do 3-7 damage, then make level 1 emissive block 6 damage. Some fighter weapons can do damage, but most don't.

ie. if most level 2 fighter weapons do 6-12 damage, then make level 2 emissive block 10 damage.

Etc.

As to special weapons like the one-timer rocket pods or the kamikaze warheads are in a league of their own.

[Q]

As far as I know (see my post in the topic "emissive armor on units" from August this year http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...006819#000003) the emissive armor ability does not work at all on fighters (and probably on all units).
The reason is that SE IV treats an unit in combat damage calculation as one entity and does not take into consideration the individual components of the unit.

[ November 22, 2002, 10:08: Message edited by: Q ]

[Krsqk]

By reducing the emissive ability to 10 or 20 points, then it makes it useless against standard weapons. This forces the design question of "What is emissive armor supposed to protect against?" There doesn't seem to be a happy medium between blocking fighter weapons and blocking low damage standard weapons.

I agree that unstacking fighter damage would make most fighter weapons useless against capital ships, to a point. Unstacking fighters would allow them to survive longer, though, until heavy fighter weapons or capital ships could destroy the emissive armor. Then, the fighters would be able to damage the ship. I see this as somewhat realistic; I have trouble visualizing a single-person vehicle causing major damage to a 800kt battleship, without some heavy weapons breaching the defenses first.

I agree that it would be a pain to watch tactical combat. It would even be a pain to control tactical combat. Maybe (don't hurt me for saying this) fighters could be computer controlled. (Of course, there would have to be a toggle for that for all us option freaks. )

This goes off into another topic, but it might be nice to be able to turn computer control on and off for individual ships in combat.

[Edit: fikseeng tipohz]

[ November 22, 2002, 14:35: Message edited by: Krsqk ]

[geoschmo]

As long as the fighters are allowed to share the same square, and move as a single unit, it shouldn't complicate the viewing of tactical combat even if the damage is calculated separatly. The issue is whether their damage should stack, not whether the images of the units shold stack I think.

I would be in favor of fighter damage not stacking with some additional changes. If the capital ships could not take out Groups of fighters at once. If damage from the fighters is being calculated separatly, then damage to the fighters should be as well.

Then some clearer delineation between fighter weapons should be made. There would be the fighter mounted anti ship weapons that are capable of doing lots of damage, but only fire once. And the smaller weapons, ion weapons or whatever that cannot hurt a ship very much, but are used against other fighters.

With all the changes together you have a situation more parallel to what we have today. With your attack fighters with powerful antiship weapons being supported by persuit fighters that have lost of anti fighter weapons. And the capital ships would be advised to have carriers and fighter escort. Not just to rely on PDC and main guns.

Perhaps ship direct fire weapons should not be able to target fighters. Require them to have PDC or escort carriers. Afterall, a battleships main guns today are no use against a fighter. They can't be targeted that quickly.

Geoschmo

[Krsqk]

I think the issue with viewing was that it would take quite a while to watch each individual fighter move and fire. The concern with unstacking fighter damage while not unstacking fighters is that ships could be invulnerable to damage from fighters, while fighters could still be bLasted by the dozens with a single standard ship weapon.

Perhaps the solution is to restrict standard weapons from hitting fighters. PDC would still be deadly against fighters, though, and could shred light and medium fighters.

[geoschmo]

If standard weapons are allowed to continue hitting fighters, at least making each shot hit only one fighter and discarding the excess instead of applying to to other fighters in the group would help.

[CombatSquirrel]

What I am visualizing is allowing fighters to move and fire as a unit, but simply calculate damage from each unit as it is determined to hit or miss. EA of the target would count in this damage calculation. It would not have to slow down the visual effects of combat at all. Perhaps it would increase processor time slightly, but that would be the only noticeable effect.

In my "cosmic slant", Capital Ships all have mounts that multiply damage of weapon components (along with increased supply costs, size required, etc.), but substantially decreased chance to hit offensively. This makes the weapons of Capital Ships fearsome, and effective against planets and other vehicles of their class (which, because of their size have defensive penalties that match the offensive penalties of their class mounts), but give smaller warships (picture the Millenium Falcon) a chance to survive by simply turning tail and running. This also makes it near impossible for standard weapons mounted on Capital Ships to effectively target swarming Fighter Craft (defensive bonus for fighter size + offensive penalty from Capital Ship weapons). PD weapons, and specific anti-fighter weapons can pick off few a turn, but the massive Capital Weapons, engine requirements (thanx QNP, or mQNP), and space consumming Capital armor leave little room for much of those.

Capital Ship's very high armor points and EA effects give small Groups of warships little chance to significantly damage them (at least without using weapons that make them ineffective against ships of their own class), and make them almost entirely impervious to Fighter Craft. These Capital Ships use Fighter Craft themselves to deal with other non-Capital warships. EA is limited to Capital Armor only, and tops out at 20 points. The largest single shot Fighter Weapon does 25 points, so at best a huge fighter mass might be able to substantially weaken a Capital Ship's armor, maybe even get in few small internal hits, but nothing more by themselves.

These Capital Ships are tremendously expensive to produce and maintain, and the loss of 3 or 4 of them should have a decisive effect on an empire, but they would be a force to be feared.

Now, I can mod everything to make this particular vision playable, except for the oddity of stacking Fighter damage. Even the fact that units do not gain benefit of shield regeneration, or OA regeneration, or repair components, or get blown away in Groups by potent PD or standard weapon fire isn't really in conflict with this worldview.

I guess its just become a pet peeve... maybe I should just start creating 200 kt Fighters with standard ship weapons. Those would be fun in a stack.

CombatSquirrel

[Wardad]

Originally posted by CombatSquirrel:
What I am visualizing is allowing fighters to move and fire as a unit, but simply calculate damage from each unit as it is determined to hit or miss.....
CombatSquirrel

Yes!!! Bring back swarm tactics! Bring on the area of effect weapons! Rock Paper Scissors!!!

[Taera]

Now how about this. Fighters would have a Anti-Armor torpedoe weapon that does about 50 damage and shoots every second turn, and damages armor only.
This would have to be in the standard game though or fighters would be useless there.
And dont tell me i can mod it, i know that.