As most of you have noticed by now something is wrong with fighter combat, possibly other units as well. I have done some testing and it turns out that a group of fighters with no shields is completely destroyed be it 1 or 100 fighters as soon as it recieves enough damage to kill just one fighter. However, if the fighters have shields the damages is applied to one fighter at the time working down to the next until all damage is applied or all fighters in that group are dead. Say you have a group of 5 shielded fighters that can individually take 40kT of damage(20 from components, 20 from shield) before being destroyed and it is fired upon by a Large Mount Meson BLaster VI (60kT of damage) you would think one fighter was destroyed and one lost it's shields, right? Wrong. Two fighters are destroyed as the second ones shields are ignored. That's bad and probably a bug or an oversight on the programmers part.
What bothers me here besides the faulty damage allocation is the fact that the remaining 20kT of damage from the Meson BLaster after destroying the first fighter is applied to the second fighter at all. We're talking a big badass shipkiller beam being pointed at a fighter. If it hits one fighter it should probably kill it (which it does) but any "leftover" damage potential should
not hit another fighter imo, but it does. This should be changed so that shipkiller beams can only target/kill one fighter/satellite/whatever imo. Point Defense Cannons is another matter as it's several small cannons designed to hit fighters and seekers, but I think they should have a value just to show how many cannons there are, how much damage each cannon can dish out and they can only hit as many targets as there are cannons. Maybe just make PDC's smaller and lower their damage accordingly. If PDC's only took up 1kT(or 5kT) of space it would be easier to fill up a ship when Large Mounts leave you with 5kT of space you can't fill.
What I also object to is that fighters have no hard to hit bonus for small size! A fighter without ECM is just as easy to hit as a big badass cruiser without ECM and that's just plain wrong imo since there is one hell of a difference in size here.
And now we come to Multi-Plex Tracking. A ship with no MPT can kill dozens of fighters as long as they are in the same group but can only target one group. The target one group only thing is ok by me, but it should only be able to target one fighter in that one group with no MPT. And MPT's should have two values of how many ships they can track. One for ships and one for fighters, the fighter one being slightly higher. PDC's should have some built in tracking capacity as well as the number of cannons, preferably it should be able to track as many objects as they have cannons but maybe not. Could be tied into your MPT level somehow. This hit all fighters in one group thing is probably a balance decision but I still don't like it. Give ships with no MPT the ability to track on ship and 2 fighters, MPT II 2S,4F, MP III 3S,6F and so on and I think it will be ok. Maybe raise the fighter track ability but that's just a balance issue.
I have not tested satellites, troops or weapons platforms but all suggested changes here apply to them as well where relevant.
I have mailed this to MM. I think that covers everything.
Fighters Severly Broken
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