The balance reductions in Dust income from the Target locked update makes it increasingly diffucult to build and maintain a fleet. At the very least the dust income from "Pulvis Production" should increase from 2 per population to at least 5.

I feel like I have a great idea here.  See what you guys think.  

So, I personally feel the first stage attack ships are too strong, a HP boost is coming, great, that is a balance issue being addressed.  But my idea comes in the fighter damage and bomber damage to different sized hulls.

Make fighter/bomber damage uniform accross all hull sizes at the carriar lvl.   Making them deadly to all ships.  

However, make so the smaller ships, deal extra damage to fighters/bombers  the med ships, do regular damage, and the large ships do weak damage.  Kind of like multigun corvettes in HW for those who remember that game.  Small ships can rundown move defend well against the smallest (F+B)

It works in theory the opposite the game has it now.   Big ships are slow bulky can't target fast moving objects, IE F+B so they get a penalty against them, although they can HAVE them.

Give the small ships a buff against fighters+bombers, have them do extra damage to F+B

Medium ships get a HP buff, which increases longevity usefulness ECT, they get the job of taking on your opponents big ships.

Carriar's same concept, HP buff, ect.  

Nerf damage on attack ships against medium ships, say 10%, med ships get 10% damage reduction against large ships, large ships strongest vs smaller ships, but weakest against F+B, small ships strongest against F+B, but weakest against large ships.  

That, if I am saying this correctly, would correlate to a fleet that needs almost everything in the game to function at the highest level.  

Anyway, just a thought that crossed my mind, I may bump this thought to general to see what people think.  

IDK Just a thought.  

That way, small hulls would counter fighters and bombers. 

Medium hulls would allow fighters and bombers, and also allow glass cannons with a proper protector/gaurdian situation.

Large hulls would very useful, as a launch for both heavy weapons and fighters and bombers, while being vunerable to the hunters of the medium size ships.  

So Carriar countered by Hunter, Attack counter by hunter/gaurdian/carriar,  F+B countered by Attack, Carriar countered by medium sized gun boat, or F+B.   Gaurdian countered by Hunter type.   Excuse the use of sophon ship sizes, they are just the first to pop in my head.

cheers guys.

Hey everyone,

We have just released a preview build for Patch 1.0.53! If you want to give it a try, please follow these instructions:

• Right click on the game in your Steam Library
• Select Properties
• Select the Betas tab
• Select the preview(1.0.53) build in the drop down list
• Click OK
• Give us your feedback after playing!

[BALANCE]

• Switched Bombers 2 to Adamantian Alloys on Stage 4 of Military Quadrant
• Moved Fighters 2 from Army Cap tech to Structured Antimatter on Stage 4 of Military Quadrant
• Moved Bombers 1 from Army Cap tech and bundled it with Fighter 1
• Added a modifier on Fighters so they only deal 25% of their DPS against Ships
• Squadrons now take into account Bait modules when choosing targets
• Hero Ships are now targeted with less priority by Fighters & Bombers

[AI]

• Fixed a major issue on AI reflexion based on outdated information with regards to its colonies and lost colonies

[FIXES]

• Fixed quest reward evaluation failing when MaxTurn was not defined
• Fixed an issue where AI could reduce significantly the FPS in the late game
• Fixed quests being broken by simplified encounter battles among AI
• Fixed an issue where Figthers sometimes targeted destroyed Fighters and Bombers
• Trajectories now allow squadrons to slow down into turns for more realistic motion

[MAC COMPATIBILITY]

• Added intel iris pro 6200 to hologram compatibility list
• Added fixed hologram shaders: now correctly applies the hologram compatibility mode when entering -compat, allowing players to avoid the issue

NOTE for Mac users: If the -compat command line fixes your issue, please make sure you add your player.log in this thread so we can add the card to our list and fix the cause for all owners of the card, not just mask the symptom for you!

Why did you move the advanced strikecraft to T4? There is little reason to research normal versions when advanced are just a bit ahead.

Now it's the opposite problem with fighters being useless and bombers being extremely strong.

Before it was normal bombers vs advanced fighters which made it hopeless because a single fighter squadron could stop multiple bombers.

But now it's advanced bombers vs advanced fighters. The scaling is weird. Normal versions it's 25 fighter DPS vs 225 bomber HP which makes the fighters somewhat effective at killing bombers. But advanced is 33 DPS vs 375 HP which makes fighters significantly less effective at killing bombers. Why?

It feels like you need to have almost 1 fighter squadron per enemy bomber to counter them effectively before they do too much damage.

Even then most will get through and do at least one bombing run which will deal some damage before you kill them. So the side with bombers will always deal some damage. So in engagement of 100% bombers vs 100% fighters the bomber side actually wins because they still deal damage and the fighters kill the bombers but are useless vs ships so they deal less damage than the bombers dealt to their side.

What if you have 50% bombers 50% fighters? That will surely beat 100% bombers right? Well no.

What will happen is your fighters will get split and some will go escorting your bombers even though there are no enemy fighters to protect the bombers from. So there will not be enough fighters on the defense and you're pretty much limited to only defensive battle tactics which is a significant disadvantage.  Overall you'll have only 1 fighter per 3 enemy bombers or so which is not nearly enough to effectively stop them. Meanwhile you only have half the bombers the enemy has on the offense which will overall make the damage you deal very similar or still less if you don't use defensive tactic.

So it turns out that best counter to 100% bombers is also 100% bombers and you just bringing more bombers. It saves you research slot on fighters and means you can use any tactic not only defensive ones. So now advanced fighters are underperforming and advanced bombers are overperforming.

Other way is bringing a ton of beams and armor and only (enhanced) small hulls. Bombers only deal 50% to small ships and armor is many times more effective than shields (even despite bombers 50% armor penetration). The beams will easily outdps the bombers and you'll win that easily. 

So there is no real reason to use bombers because they get countered super hard by enhanced small ships which can easily keep up with (or outperform) medium hulls and only become obsoleted by carrier class and enhanced-medium hulls at which point bombers deal 200% damage to big ships so it's 100% advanced bombers and 0% advanced fighters because they can't kill the bombers fast enough before they deal their 200% damage. Even a single run means you're behind on damage vs just going 100% bombers too.

Bombers cost more industry but at the late stage of the game the industry cost is barely relevant and your ship production is only limited by amount of strategic resources you have. 

Since the fighters now are purely anti-bomber module you need to make sure that one slot of fighters will effectively counter (much) more than one slot of bombers. Otherwise the module is just not effective at it's designed role. Fighter (especially advanced fighter) damage needs to be increased significantly so they really absolutely massacre bombers since that is the only thing they do so they need to be really fucking good at it to be worth the slot.

I think the minor races placement seends looking at.They seem to be far to clumped in the same area in my games.

Influence speeding up outpost colonies dont work in the last 2 builds.