Fighters are broken. Can we fix them?

[PvK]

Fighters seem to have some uses in the unmodded game, particularly:

* early in the research progression
* in limited resources games
* in other low-resource situations, such as peacetime when fleet maintenance costs limit ship production
* in some late-game situations, to complement drones & seekrs, especially with shields on fighters
* when taking advantage of racial techs like organic components, crystalline system-wide shield reinforcement, and/or small temporal distortion bursts

Starhawk is right that it's therefore more like Star Trek, where captial ships can easily lock on and wipe out fighters.

Mods can address this though, e.g. Proportions Mod 2 and earlier, which can result in something a bit closer to Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica fighter/ship balance. Basically, unmodded PD is too accurate, too strong, and too efficient, unless you want fighters and seekers to become nearly obsolete in the mid-to-late techs. As the author of the venerable Space Empires III "Penultimate" mod commented, it seems like advanced fighters should be fragile but hard to hit, not marginally hard to hit, and simply able to take more damage at higher tech levels. Of course, since fighters are charged little or nothing in terms of maintenance and supplies, one has to be careful to avoid making fighters way too good. Unfortunately in toning fighters down a little in Proportions Mod version 3, I seem to have accidentally over-nerfed them. (Personally, I think Proportions 2.x fighters were about right except they started out really good really early.)

PvK

[Starhawk]

Yeah fighters are mainly in my early games a fast response force used for frontier protection while my fleet maint can't afford large formations of capital ships or Orbital fortresses.

A buddy of mine designed a mega fortress that can carry I think he said 500 heavy corvettes which are about 50 kt I think.

Anyway my own carrier design can carry 100+ gunships which are all 75kt they are expensive as all get out and could not be built in an unmodded game without taking decades but I love them so far

Fighters are force multipliers if used right, if used poorly they are scrap metal and a waste of good pilots

If you really want to be inventive use a "shield fighter" like I've heard of where the entire fighter is only shields and engines and is only designed to take fire from the enemy to save capital ships from taking that fire.

[Alneyan]

I believe the problem isn't that PDC is too strong(*), but fighters are too weak, and, more specifically, have a very hard defence vs damage balance. Those fighters are also expensive (particularly to research to high levels), and logistics for are a nightmare. Since you must gather thousands of them in any serious battle, getting enough Fighter Bays to do that is going to be tough. They make a very nice defence taskforce when set at a wormhole ward, though.

* PDC has a mere 3.5 damage ratio (damage/kt), where most other weapons are around the 1.5/2 mark, and aren't restricted in their targetting. PDC cannot be mounted, unlike those other weapons, so a heavy-mounted APB XII deals exactly as much damage per kt as PDC, and is always useful. PDC does get a +70 bonus to targetting however, whereas a ship will standard training and components will only fire at 65% accuracy. I am assuming the fighters are in a fleet of their own (seems reasonable enough), but that they also have ECM III: that seems less likely, given how much research is needed for those things.

So yeah, PDC is very strong when you don't have anything else, but I think it is pretty much balanced in the middle game: it is better than the APB at taking down fighters, but it doesn't do anything against ships. Seems fair enough to me.

[Suicide Junkie]

The biggest factor that makes PDC way too strong is the autofiring.
Even if your fighters get the jump on the enemy, they will still get raped before they can start to fight back.


For good fighters, try Carrier Battles mod! (Humans only, see PBW for open games)

[narf poit chez BOOM]

That +70% PDC bonus stacks with the +65% CS, I think.

[Alneyan]

narf poit chez BOOM said:
That +70% PDC bonus stacks with the +65% CS, I think.

Yup it does, but anything over 99% isn't going to be helpful. Ships have a +55 bonus in training/components against Fighters (with best training and components), negated by the Fighters own defence bonus: +80, +70 or +60, depending on the hull used for the fighters.

[bearclaw]

Dark Nova Mod takes these things into account as well. I've reduced the range of PDC as well as added several other options for PD weapons. Fighters have also been bolstered with more sizes, more mounts (including extended ranges) and additional things to boost their speeds.

In effect, there are trade-offs from the choice of PD weapons and choice of fighters. Seems to work pretty well.

And when I use fighters, I deploy them in as small stacks as possible. 20 groups of 5 will absorb much more PD fire than 5 groups of 20 as there are 20 targets rather than only 5 targets.