Making Carriers and Fighters more usefull.

[CNCRaymond]

I have some time to kill so I am working on a mod. What I want to do is make fighters and carriers more useful and more praticle for the game along the lines of what they represent to our current military.

Carriers are the center of any naval fleet. In SEIV they are not that usefull as they are easy targets and cost a bundle to make.

What I am considering doing are the following:

1. Reduce cost for fighter technology
2. Add neo standard fighters
3. Adjust fighters engines, smaller get more larger less.
5. Changing Point Defense Cannons so that they do not target Fighters.
6. Make Point Defense Cannons for Fighters that target ONLY fighters.
7. Add anti fighter missiles for use with ships.
8. Give Carriers a negative maintenance cost. (Reduce their cost)
9. Give carriers the NEVER MISS ability for their weapons.
10. Give Carriers an Engine Mount or other to boast there usefulness.

What do you think? I would think that in space combat larger ships would use long range weapons to attack other ships, while carriers would be used like they are currently, as a fighter platform. Fighters should always cause fear in the hearts of ship captains and admirals.

Fighters should be hard to kill, less they are engaged by other fighters, and they should server a more useful purpose in the game.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Why a never miss ability for carriers?

[CNCRaymond]

To give them an edge.

[Intimidator]

Agree with all except no: 8, 9, 10

Because the carrier is able to defend themself already.
Sometimes I develope fighters at turn 1, So I can use the 800kt carrier from turn 2. Believe me it makes an excellent Cruiser (large weapon mount) with fighter support in the early game.

Maybe you could lower the percentage of fighter bays needed, so you could use more normal weapons and shields etc etc.....

Inti,

[Fyron]

Definitely need to eliminate that silly exploit... carriers need a ship construction tech req too.

[Alneyan]

My biggest problem with Fighters in the stock game is how the tech area is handled. The first level is incredible (you have all fighter weapons, armour, shield, the Light Cruiser and the Small Fighter for 100,000 research points. A bargain), but the results after this level are much less impressive. The same goes for the Carrier hulls; the first one is very good (on par with a Light Cruiser), but the later ones cost a lot to research and aren't nearly as good.

Another, smaller matter is to bring the fighters to the offensive. While they are deadly if you can ensure they have first strike (wormhole defence), and it is easy to deploy fighters on a particular spot, it doesn't work so well for offence. The Fighter Bay is only able to launch one fighter per combat turn, so your average Carrier will launch 20 or 30 fighters per combat turn. With fighter numbers reaching four or five figures rather easily, you would need one hundred Carriers to start having a proper launch rate (that excludes unusual situations where the standard measure to count your fighters is 10,000).

So I would say fighters aren't really that weak (unless fighting the Talisman, and even then numbers can wreak some damage), as long as you use them in numbers and have the time to mass produce them. You should expect huge losses as well, but then, so will your opponent.

[bearclaw]

I've done something similar in my Dark Nova Mod. What I did was took the expanded sizes for fighters and carriers (as well as most other too, by the way) from Andres Lescano's Ultimate Shipsizes Mod. IIRC there are 10 fighter sizes and 12 carriers. The largest fighters, Battle Squadron-2, is 60 Kt and can pack a sizable arsenal.

Also, fighters are cheaper to research than unmodded.

As for PDC, what I did was reduce the damage done slightly and decreased their range to 3. I also added a fighter weapon mount that gives +1 range (at a increase of supplies and size). This means that fighters can actually stay out of range of PDC.

With the carriers having so many new sizes and being relatively inexpensive to research, they gain the benifit of larger weapon mounts faster than other ship sizes which provides the same benifit as a warship that I think you are looking for.

In the Dark Nova games played so far, if you arn't using fighters, then you are sunk without a massive number of standard ships.

The newest mod, Dark Nova 4 is avaliable here:
http://seiv.pbw.cc/Download/filelib/1035/DN4+Mod.zip

[AMF]

I would love to see a mod that enabled carriers and fighters to be more potent. But there must be a way to do it without a sense of "deux ex machina"

Put another way, the reason aircraft are so potent in todays world, and why we put so much effort into the Carrier strike Groups et al, is becuase the aircraft travel in a different medium than the ships. Because aircraft fly (through air) and ships steam (in water) they have fundamentally different modes of action.

Cna these different modes of action be better simulated in a SE4 mod, rather than just making "carriers never miss" or somesuch.

For example, why not make fighters hace the capacity to carry many more weapons loads and carriers able to carry more fighters and make the fighters a LOT faster. Say they start at speed 10 and ships at speed 2, or something like that. Make fighter tech a lot cheaper.

Also, I would note that carriers in our modern navy are vast monstrosities entirely devoted to supporting their airwing. Actual armament on carriers as well as defensive ability is almost zero. Carriers have jets on patrol and their escort ships to defend themselves. That's really it. It would be nice to simulate that...

That is not really possible in SE4, but on a practical

[Fyron]

One option is to give fighters armor that gives them lots of hit points, so they don't die by the dozens per shot...

[Kevin Arisa]

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.