Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.

[Intimidator]

Imperator Fyron said:
Definitely need to eliminate that silly exploit... carriers need a ship construction tech req too.

Agreed !!

[Fyron]

Kevin Arisa said:
What I did in Eclipse is I added a built in combat defense and offense bonus to the fighter hulls. This is really effective if you also add bonuses and penalties to ship hulls according to their size. This way fighters will rarely be hit by large ships and it forces the opponent to use either small ships or fighters of their own to counter yours.

This is already present in stock, other than offense bonuses for ships.

Another idea is to make Afterburners add to both combat offense and defense values. Most of the fighter's off and def bonus is from the maneuverability of the hull, and afterburners make them more maneuverable... Helps keep the fighters competitive at higher tech levels, since their ECM and Combat Sensors are much weaker, and they do not get nice things like experience bonuses...

[Colonel]

This sound cool. Fighters are so useless in the game

[Fyron]

Try Adamant Mod. Fighters are a lot more useful there.

http://adamant.spaceempires.net/

The AI is still under development...

[Baron Munchausen]

You missed the most obvious ideas for carriers!

• Give them inherent cargo ability so they can carry more fighters. Isn't that the point of a 'carrier' -- that it's designed to carry fighters? Explicit cargo modules just enhance the already intrinsic cargo storage.
  
  Give them inherent fighter launch ability. Again, isn't that what carriers are designed to do? Having at least some intrinsic ability to launch fighters lets you get a larger total launch ability, or cram more 'support' equipment into the hull while still getting a decent level of performance in the ship's main mission.

[CNCRaymond]

These are all excellent suggestions, thank you.

[dmm]

To me, it seems that real world fighters have 4 advantages over ships:
1) Much faster. This should be easy to implement in a mod.
2) Much harder to hit, due to: a) small size, b) speed, and c) maneuverability. This should also be easy to implement in a mod.
3) Separate units, so you have to kill them one at a time. IRL, big guns are useless agains fighters, not just because they can't track the fighters, but also because this tactic is incredibly wasteful of supplies. This could also be implemented in a mod. Ideally, the hard code would be changed to prevent any weapon from killing more than one fighter at a time. But one could simulate the effect by giving fighters and missiles a very high defensive bonus and giving PDC a partly offsetting offensive bonus. The net effect would be that regular weapons would still kill a whole lot of fighters in a group if they hit, but they would almost always miss, thus canceling out the mass-kills on the average. (So if your dreadnought had lots of shields+generators or organic armor plus it had a quantum converter, then maybe you could plan on using regular weapons as fighter defense, but otherwise this would be a sure-fire losing tactic.) A simpler solution is just to not let regular weapons target fighters at all, ever. IRL, if you have an all-battleship fleet with no APC and get attacked by a carrier group, you're dead, end of story.
4) They can get close and choose the exact target area for their weapons. In SEIV, there are no "critical hit" rules, so this translates as much higher damage for a given vehicle size. This is readily modded.

On the other hand, IRL fighters have these disadvantages:
1) Much more limited supply. This has two effects: a) They have to be transported to a battle by a carrier (or refueled enroute, with advanced tech), and b) Long battles require re-supply by the carrier, which takes time. In SEIV, we have a difficulty, because we want fighters to have a high speed (e.g., 10 just for starters so they have a battle speed of 5) but we don't want fighters zooming around systems. Part of the solution is to give them small supplies and make their weapons use small supplies. Thus, they can zoom around during a 30-turn battle but can't go more than a few sectors before running out of supplies. The other part of the solution is to make fighter weapons of three kinds:
Large size, large damage, large reload time, and medium tech weapons that can only target ships (i.e., torpedoes, anti-ship missiles);
Small size, medium damage, large reload time, high-tech weapons that can only target fighters (i.e., air-to-air missiles); and
Small size, small damage, firing every turn, small supply use, low-tech weapons (i.e., machine guns).
2) Much more fragile. Fighters should be hard to hit but easy to destroy. (Same with missiles BTW. Drones too?) Since SEIV insists on grouping fighters, you'd have to reduce the damage done by PDC also. The reason for doing this is to allow fighters to destroy each other in dogfights with their "machine guns" but not allow "machine guns" to take out a heavily armored/shielded dreadnought.
3) Their carriers are fragile, not very fast, single-use vessels. They don't have the internal structure to carry heavy guns. If you can mod in a rule that carrier hulls can only carry regular-size weapons, then that would make things more real and also help with the exploit mentioned by someone.

That's all I can think of for now. Hope this helps.

[Fyron]

In SEIV, we have a difficulty, because we want fighters to have a high speed (e.g., 10 just for starters so they have a battle speed of 5) but we don't want fighters zooming around systems.

That is easily solveable. Separate the movement and supply abilities of engines. Works great for all vehicles, not just fighters. Divide size, cost, etc. of engines in half and remove supply abilities. Add "reactors" that are the same size as the new engines, and have those removed supply abilities. This works especially well in a QNP engine system, where there is no silly 6 engine per ship limit, as it provides even greater flexibility in vehicle design. For fighter reactors, just give them lower supply storage than the equivalent stock fighter engines would give them.

3) Their carriers are fragile, not very fast, single-use vessels. They don't have the internal structure to carry heavy guns. If you can mod in a rule that carrier hulls can only carry regular-size weapons, then that would make things more real and also help with the exploit mentioned by someone.

This is also fairly easy to accomplish. It requires setting the sizes of all carriers to _never_ be the same size as a warship. Then, you need to add a lot more copies of large, heavy and massive mounts, giving them ranges of minimum and maximum ship tonnage that do not include the carriers. So, you might make the Light Carrier 810 kT instead of 800 kT. Replace the stock Large Mount with 2 large mounts. One has a min size of 400 and max size 800. The second has a min size 811 and no max size. This effectively cuts off the aforementioned 810 kT Light Carrier from using the large mount.

[Suicide Junkie]

4) They can get close and choose the exact target area for their weapons. In SEIV, there are no "critical hit" rules, so this translates as much higher damage for a given vehicle size. This is readily modded.

Or, why not use armor/shield skipping damage?

[dmm]

Suicide Junkie said:

Or, why not use armor/shield skipping damage?

Very interesting suggestion. Really changes the nature of fighters. I think the weapons in that case would need to be range 1 only (since you are close enough to be "inside" of their shields and/or pick out "seams"). You could even combine this with a weapon that targets a specific component, like shield generators or self-destructs or bridges or PDC. So your strategy might be to have some very fast fighters with close-range weapons that disable the enemy somehow, then you bLast them with powerful stand-off weapons (from ships or "torpedoe-bomber" fighters) or maybe board them or maybe just leave them stranded. Meanwhile you defend yourself from enemy fighters with "interceptor" fighters. If the enemy fleet doesn't have good fighter defense, it will never reach you with its big guns. Of course, if the enemy has anticipated your strategy and has good fighter defense, you are doomed. Maybe your fighters should all have a secondary strategy of "kamikaze."