Fighter and point defense relationships.

[WSY]

Hello hello,

Random person from the Internet here to suggest another couple ideas to the several hundreds already suggested, because we all know devs go to sleep at night looking forward to more every morning!!!!  :o

 

Kidding aside, I have some "hopefully" realistic suggestions that hope are in line with what the engine can already do, and I have some less realistic ones, because, why not. Also you will find I am fairly passionate about a good medium of balance, gameplay, and visuals.  Also sorry for grammatical errors, doing this on the phone for lunch.

 

Ok, so for the most realistic:

 

Fighters are incredibly powerful, as well as they should be given their exuberant cost (I love fighters). I  also love the Dodge mechanic but I feel like it does not scale properly with numbers.

 

What I mean is that as the fighter flies in and out of range, you really have to focus everything on that one fighter to take him down, this gets much much worse when numbers increase and you involve ai ships or auto fire turrets that will switch targets (range, fire arc) and result in fighters always having dodges available.

 

I had a trinium level ship, came back to beginner area to help friend and then, myself, had a hard time taking down system invasion iron area fighters. Now I don't have a ship with all big guns, I have a dozen scatter fire chain gun turrets as well. Which of course use to just slaughter fighters.  After a few minutes of focusing on one...just one I had to give up. When I fire, the front of my ship looks like a six barreled automatic shot gun firing tracer rounds; it is a big wall of glowing pew pew, but still nothing went down.

 

I think it would be a good idea to make it so dodge chances and associated cool down are server configurable, this would allow us to experiment to find  a happy medium with guns we have. (Maybe you have this and I completely missed it)

 

Now onto weapons.

I think honestly all the mechanics are in place, but I think a really good point defense weapon are the zero spread rapid fire burst and overheating chain guns. They look like modern day AA fire, and / or the point defense fire from Earth ships in Stargate. A group of ships with a couple of these going off with arcs chasing fighters would be oh so sexy.

 

From a mechanic perspective, these guns could have a higher percentage accuracy, maybe even over a hundred, or accuracy bonus against fighters, or not affected by the accuracy debuff against fighters, however you would want to do that. The overheating mechanic would then play a part as well, helping fighters use up their dodges but not guarantee a kill since it couldn't keep firing. You would need other similar turrets, or this would give your regular guns/laser a chance at killing the fighter.

 

You could also make it super low damage vs the fighter and simply have it as an effective system for forcing fighters to use up their dodges. On the other hand these guns would not much damage vs other larger vessels either way. You could also make a pulse weapon version for players who have an aversion to bullets or a later game rapid fire rail gun version (ala Stargate)

 

This could also be done with a point defense laser, (faster tracking, no accuracy debuff vs fighters) and also overheat quickly. You could then choose the route of super low damage so they use up the fighters dodge chances or make em more effective so they also do some damage, so if more than one focuses on same fighter or it is out of Dodge chances, it may take fatal damage. Really it would be just like the chain gun point defense mechanically, just different projectile type.

 

Another suggestion, more difficult I'm sure  to implement is a variation of a flack weapon. You could use bolters turret model and projectiles, but the max range would be like 3 k or so, then have a variation in projectile time to live within that 3k. When projectile hits or dies from ttl expiration, it could have a small AOE damage, such as .5 or .25, this does zero damage to cap ships, but hurts fighters. This kind of gun while largely ineffective against a lone fighter thanks to the randomized time to live on the shell, would be extremely effective against overwhelming swarms. Trade off being it would have to be a fairly thick swarm and one turret doesn't do enough damage, but would force fighters to use up dodge chances so other guns can hit them.

 

Anyhow just some quick suggestions.

 

Hit me up if you want more details and or ideas. I think the above could still allow fighters to be really effective, but allow ai and players a counter giving them some chances, while also making some good looking space battles.  This would force someone such as myself to say oh look, blobs of flack, let's hit him with the longer range  stuff from my ship and then send in the fighters. Even if someone has a mix, they are giving up big ship pew pew for point defense capability, and I feel would help  strike a balance of  effectiveness against a large group of fighters vs other large ships. I also feel like the relationship will scale fairly well as ship sizes and fighter number and turret number available to ships involved increase.

[Charless]

I completely agree with you, point defense needs to be in game

[WSY]

Well I was playing with research and have a nearly 1k dps chaingun at iron...lol....I am going to experiment a bit against fighters. As people get better with research etc, maybe there is already an answer to fighters and they just seem that strong....I will report my findings in a few days.

[Charless]

I just made a suggestion for fleet mechanics, and one of the things I talk about is using chain gun armed corvettes and adding settings to have them target fighters.

[RodentVentura]

Perhaps a system module could work out too. One that adds turret rotation speed for a specific type of turret, with the chance of adding bonus chance to hit with fighters.

 

 

In my opinion this would.

A. Help with fighters being too OP

B. Keep older weapons relevant for longer through bonuses.

C. Make dedicated point defense ships a legitimate option for large scale fleet combat, making them a priority to destroy before launching fighters.

 

Since it's a system slot, you'd really have to think about using it, since there are many more things that you could use in that slot. Do I take shields? Or do I beef up my fighter defense capabilities?

[narhiril]

Good stuff all around, especially like that turret rotation speed upgrade.

 

One thing I would add that I would like to see is fighters getting a bonus to hit other fighters (maybe only with specific weapons like the chaingun), allowing fast and lightly armed interceptors to be a viable counter to heavy bombers.  This would also incentivize squadron diversity on carriers, as you'd want something out there protecting your heavy hitters.  This, of course, would require additional fighter commands.

[WSY]

+1 to all.

 

I like the upgrade, really awesome. I think honestly both turret and upgrade options should be available, this allows the player to tweak how they want.

 

I curious what you think about the cost to the upgrade be either a percentage of power or even shields. This way if players create trash mob point defense ships, there is a strong cost to making all upgrades on it oriented to point defense. .65 gw is minor when you get to the point where fighters become a concern.

 

Or if they want to have an all chaingun or pulse weapon ship, it keeps them from stacking more than so many of those upgrades to be virtually immune to fighters. Thoughts?  It may just not be necessary as RodentVentura stated it does take up a upgrade slot to begin with and maybe that is enough of a cost.

 

Fighter vs fighter combat.

Oh Yes, absolutely yes!!

 

For bonus fighter born weapons vs fighters, what about chaingun and pulse weapons?

 

The fighters could be set to prioritize fighters based on having those weapons,  then target other ships as normal. Unless of course you give the attack command. Players would need to know to leave their interceptor/CAP fighter squadrons in defense mode.

 

 

[WSY]

Quick update:

 

High rate of fire.oulse weapons seem to work fairly well. Haven't had a chance to test against a good sized group, but against 3-5 3 rapid fire pulse weapons took care of them fairly quick.

[Ravien]

+1 to the idea of point defense chainguns, lasers/pulse, and flak! I love the system idea too.

[WSY]

I haven't had a chance to engage a large fleet of fighters to do some good tests against a large ball of npc fighters. I am still tracking this.

 

I will say however that I find the rapid fire pulse weapons (10+ rounds per sec) are fairly effective against a small number of fighters.

 

Part of my problem with getting to test leads into another suggestion:

 

We need more enemies with fighters. I am in xanion and a little ogonite and I only ever see fighters in factional warfare and even then not much.

 

 

[WSY]

Ok so apparently I went about this the wrong way.

 

So if the fighters are attacking you, the higher rate of fire pulse weapons are "ok", but still not nearly as effective.as I thought.

 

Ironically enough, it was my plasma weapons  ???

 

Looks like the projectiles have a bigger hit box (I could be wrong) and thus do a little better at hitting them/activating their dodge.

 

I had 18 rps pulse weapons and they just we're not doing enough effective hits. I also had 2k dps rapid fire 12+ rps chainguns and they were not very effective either, and they do enough damage if they hit they would have killed. They (chain and pulse weapons) just seem a small bit behind on tracking and not adequately predicting the flight path of fighters.

 

Keep in my everything I am using is auto targeting except for guided missile launchers.

 

I will say I have 4 guided missile launchers and a volley of three from each launcher will track, follow and kill a fighter in about 10 seconds. If you manually re-target and fire volleys, it is at least somewhat effective, but time to kill is too long and this method requires serious micro management for taking out larger groups of fighters.

 

It will be taking a break next few days, but when I return I am going to try auto-targeting missile launchers, and also a larger group of auto-target plasma to confirm if they are more effective.

 

Would be nice to have a auto-target only fighters option though for turret groups.

 

 

 

[WSY]

Ok so I was able to do some decent anti-fighter testing last night.

 

1. With the exception of guided missiles, weapons will not hit fighters engaging a ship separate from themselves due to transverse velocity, and I mean they won't hit hardly ever. I am talking 8x 98% accuracy 18 round per second pulse weapons firing at one fighter. Along with 6 2k dps 12+ round per second chain guns.  The fighter never had to do it's dodge, and the guns we're always behind on the tracking. This problem is also present on laser weapons. This occurs on a 6 core 3ghz server with 32gb ram sitting 6 ft away from my machine that is the client.

 

2. Chances of hits are much higher if fighter is actively engaging what is shooting at it. This is due to the whole transverse velocity being lower; the fighter flying straight at me, or away after an attack run actually uses up it's dodges and can be destroyed. Albeit at a still fairly disappointing rate, but not near impossibility such as in point 1.

 

1 and 2 we're testing with all weapons with auto-target. This includes rapid fire chain and pulse weapons, rail guns, lasers, and multi-shot variants of these weapons.

 

3. When I am flying a fighter, I get hit fairly often and I see the fighter auto-dodge.  This was against single  xsotan with fairly low rate of fire chain guns.

 

4. Fighters seems to be the best way to get rid of fighters probably due to closer proximity and transverse velocity being lower due to chasing. There are some caviots. Your higher rate of fire fighters will perform better than slower rof fighters. I was in a system with a faction war with 29 baddies and 7 good guys and the green had almost completely wiped out the 29 ships worth of fighters by the time I arrived with at least a dozen allied Tesla fighters still remaining after completely wiping out all the opposition. The enemy had much slower cannon or chain gun fighters. They just didn't have a chance against the Tesla fighters.

 

I took one of my 12+ rps 2k dps chainguns made some fighters and they too ripped opposition fighters apart with no loss. However this still took a uncomfortable while. This of course leads to my next point.

 

5. After flying a fighter, I realize the dodge they perform lasts several seconds. If this is the case, this means ace (leveled) piloted fighters with a 1 minute reset on dodge count, can spend almost half of that minute in dodging. This gives you a super limited window with which to actually hit them before it resets. Especially since then it's a base 30% chance to hit.

 

6. Engaging fighters with your ship is just a bad idea in general. Especially since about the only time you see enemy fighters is when you are engaging in a faction warfare battle and you hit allied ships more than you do enemy fighters. Even with guided missiles, they spin/circle around the enemy fighter until they hit. If in that time the enemy fighter gets too close to an enemy ship, your missiles start hitting that instead and you lose rep.

 

I have some suggestions to help counter some of this, but I will post in another thread as it will be a comprehensive suggestions thread.

 

In the meantime I will perform some more testing and may begin to look at some game files to see what can be done to experiment with "feel" of fighters, as I love them, just need to be able kill em at a reasonable rate  ;D