Fighter feedback

[Two]

After thoroughly testing the new fighter updates I must say that I very much like most of the changes. Before fighters were basically useless except for mining, now they not only are useful, they are also fun and fairly balanced.

 

The biggest plus for me is the fact that I can turn weapons into fighters. That not only allows me to tailor my fighters according to my needs, I am also happy if I find a new, powerful weapon despite the fact that my ship (in my case) doesn't use weapons at all.

 

 

Creating a fighter at a station is pretty much straight forward and easy to understand, however the attributes of a fighter are somewhat confusing.

- Size: there is no reason why you ever would not want to have this at 1. This makes it kind of a required attribute. I feel like size should be determined on other factors, like combining multiple weapons or increasing DPS.

 

- Durability: This feels completely useless to me. Either a fighter does not get hit at all, or the 150 pts of durability won't make a difference either. I would rather have this stat give fighters additional evasion, like 2% per point.

 

- Movability: I have absolutely no clue what this stat does.

 

- Speed: This is one of the most important factors for fighters, as they have to be able to keep up with enemy ships, therefore it is required to max this at all cost. It feels kinda silly that there is a stat that you absolutely must max to make the fighter viable. I'd rather like to see fighters with a higher base speed (like 300 m/s) and have this stat go up to 1000 m/s, so you can put in a few points for the required ~500 m/s, or even more if you want really fast fighters for other but combat reasons.

I also noticed that fighters do not return at their max speed, but at roughly half the speed, which leads to certain issues when trying to withdraw from combat.

 

I don't think linking the amount of points to the weapon rarity is a good thing. Weapon damage already determines fighter damage, the additional points just make white fighters even more useless. I'd rather see roughly the same amount of points for all rarities (like 20 +1 per rarity), but more balanced stats that actually make me ponder how I should distribute the points.

 

 

Building fighters works fine, however I really don't like the way it is done. Sacrificing a fighter to get a blueprint is ok, but why do I have to lock an entire squad to a fighter forever? Also why do my blueprints get destroyed with my ship? This essentially forces me to create up to 5 empty squads for the only purpose of having them produce fighters. And then I cannot produce just one, I always have to pay for the next one even if I don't even want to build it. The whole concept really feels like a placeholder.

 

If I had to design production I would do it in the following way:

- The first row of the fighter window is the production window with up to 5 slots for blueprints.

- Dragging a fighter to any of these slots will create a new blueprint in the player's special blueprint inventory (which is kinda like a second inventory that survives death and additionally allows to delete unwanted blueprints).

- Clicking on a production slot opens the blueprint inventory and allows me to choose any blueprint for production, including those that are already used elsewhere.

- Below the production slot is a button that displays the amount of fighter to produce remaining, with a + and - button right and left from it to change that value. Clicking the center button will start/pause production, which will run until the desired amount is produced.

- The production percentage is displayed by a circular overlay on top of the blueprint.

- Once a fighter is produced, it is put in the squad with an equal fighter in the first slot, or - if none was found - a new squad is created with that fighter in the first slot. Aside from that I can manually create new squads or delete current, empty ones and drag/drop fighters as usual.

- The icon for a squad is the icon of the fighter in the first slot (or the current one if empty) in both the production window and the game overlay.

 

 

The time it takes to produce fighters is atm extremely high. While I agree that there has to be a trade-off vs regular weapons, having to wait ~10 in-game hours till an equivalent to 10 weapons have been produced for a ship is imo way too high. I would cut the time in half, which would still make the loss of a fighter painful, but not catastrophic as it is right now.

 

 

Getting fighters to attack is rather tedious. I wish I had a keybind for "attack", "salvage/repair", "guard" and "return" that commands all fighters at once. I think ctrl-a for attack, ctrl-s for salvage/repair, ctrl-d for defend and ctr-r for return would do fine.

 

Additionally I'd like fighters on attack to proceed to the next target of the same faction as the last attacker once they destroyed an enemy. Also defending fighters should stick to their current target and not switch every few seconds, as that greatly reduces the damage thanks to shield regeneration. I'd also wish that defending other targets would be possible, like alliance ships or friendly NPC units.

 

 

Fighters are basically invincible with the current evasion system except in really tough fights. While this feels a bit odd, I think it is also fair considering the time it takes to create a new one, and the fact that turrets are never destroyed at all.

 

 

I noticed that if you die you are immediately put into a fighter as your new ship. While this feels cool it also allows you to fly back to your ship, loot your belongings and - if you have the time - even create a salvage ship to pick up your remains, which feels like an unfair advantage over ships that do not use fighters.

 

 

There is currently no incentive to use white rarity fighters over epic rarity fighters. While the white ones get created faster, they are also significantly less useful, and once you have a few fighters ready, the time spent waiting becomes almost irrelevant, since at one point you will have those fighters. The otherwise not very useful size attribute could be used here by making higher rarity fighters also bigger.

[Pede D]

~As of Fighter Update III

 

The things I'm noticing the most (Other than not having fighter keybinds) are the balance issues. Either fighters do far too much damage, or get hard capped, essentially preventing any carrier from ever needing to be bigger than an 8 slot (where you reach max fighter capacity). I Think fighter damage should be buffed (probably closer to actual turret damage) and have fighters take up more hangar space. This would mean to max out fighters you'd have to max out your hull size, similar to the way you'd max out dps in a gunboat configuration, but the dps wouldn't necessarily change so much as be spread over fewer squadrons. This would also make it simpler when having to fight carrier style ships, as they'd have less fighters you'd have to kill, instead of the current default of 120 at slot size 8.

[Kamo]

Fighters are completely overpowered in Naonite, Titanium and Iron regions, where they still appear during faction wars :-\. I once needed to come with no less than seven flak corvettes with four chainguns each to have a chance that once in a while two corvettes would focus a fighter and actually overcome its capacity to dodge.

Still waiting for Iron/Titanium hangars. For the moment I modified the equipment dock script to sell 50 more of whatever module when it's a TCS (turret slots increase) so I could field the flak without losing oodles of modules :P.

[Kamo]

Critical bug encountered: Fighter Factories cannot use their assembly productions to build fighters (I'd really have believed the opposite, since it's what they're supposed to do).

Lost a valuable turret to it so I'm going to lose hours to craft another  :(.

[DivineEvil]

That's ironic. Pretty much the same as with Turret Factories - storing turret components in their storage seems to be the perfect idea... until they start to sell them in every direction, and there's nothing you can do about it.

[Kamo]

Nevermind, found out about the issue. The seemingly-graphical glitch near the "gear" production symbol is in fact a checkbox.

Toggling it enables/disables production  ::).

[Wanderer]

That's ironic. Pretty much the same as with Turret Factories - storing turret components in their storage seems to be the perfect idea... until they start to sell them in every direction, and there's nothing you can do about it.

 

Cant you order stations not to buy or sell goods?

[Kamo]

Alas, not those stations.

 

It seems my scavenger ship with a squad of salvage fighters is doing good. Did they fix the "stuck in wreckage" bug ?!

[Kamo]

There's also a nasty bug: the dreaded "Invalid fighter stats.", that usually happens when I try to make a fighter out of a Common rarity turret.

It's pretty bad for my low-production salvagers and war salvagers, as I'm obliged to use uncommon or rares who yield fighters with bigger production effort values :(.