I think if you design fighters too much about being a hard counter to one specific other weapon (bombers), you will run into the same problem that missiles and slugs currently have, i.e. everyone builds no missiles and one slug weapon in case the opponent is stupid enough to bring missiles, mostly eliminating both from optimal strategies.

I would welcome it if instead the idea of fighters as (soft) counters for small ships, and bombers for large, was expanded. Up damage values so that both are the best weapon against fleets consisting purely of the smallest/largest ship type, and still OK versus mixed. Taking beams and medium ships as a baseline, I feel like bombers should have a slightly better DPS (32 vs 26?), and fighters a slightly worse (20?). Fighters could be the overall (slightly) best weapon against small ships ( like 30 DPS compared to beams 26 maybe?), but do little versus large ones (10?) while bombers completely kill 6CP ships without sufficient fighter escort. This way, fighters could be used specifically to punish players that lag behind in ship hull research, while later making the size of your fighter screen an interesting gamble for carriers. I would also drastically reduce the ability of slugs to counter bombers/fighters -- these ATM effectively eliminate the need for fighters.

Fighters could still counter 1-2 enemy bomber swarms, or one enemy fighter swarm as an escort, but IMO they would overall feel better, and less like a gamble, if they had some general usefulness instead of being a very hard counter to a very specific thing.

Fighters are still ineffective vs bombers in the new patch.

It's also funny how shields still absorb damage even though bombers have 90% shield penetration.

It's even worse than before because now fighters will actually go on the attack (30-70%) if you use any tactic other than even though they have no penetration and do little damage to opponent ships. They do so even if there are no bombers to escort.

Also even if you do have bombers and send escort fighters to cover your bombers they will still not do their job at covering them because the enemy fighters will kill your bombers before your fighters kill their fighters.

Overall fighters are just useless in all situations and can never do their job properly.

Also note shield absorption despite bombers having 90% penetration. It's just normal T4 white shields.

OK, we will look into this. Thanks for bringing this up.

Edit: We've added the efficiency against Ship size in the squadron feedback; do you feel like the Fighters are good against small ships?

Can't answer that because we didn't test that aspect, this was intended to find out if they were effective agains't bombers (the intuitive thought) and they are not.

Not sure how else to explain this behavior.  There is no stalling mechanism and they need time to get to targets.

The small ship swarm is not viable as a hunters damage and hp boost was enough of a change.

I think the balance swung the opposite way a bit.

I would hate your mondays :(

Actually plutar, when we were having our engagements I noticed you had small ships and deliberately stacked some fighters to deal with them. I would conjecture, although I haven't tested it directly, that the fighters are indeed useful vs. small ships. The results vs. expectation have been consistent when I used them in this fashion.

Also, did anyone test what happens if you have fighters and bombers vs. just fighters? I recall in Sins there were some targeting discrepancies where just fighters would lose to fighters/bombers bc the only-fighters would default to targeting the bombers, while the fighters w/ bombers go straight to the fighters.

Kynrael wrote:

OK, we will look into this. Thanks for bringing this up.

Edit: We've added the efficiency against Ship size in the squadron feedback; do you feel like the Fighters are good against small ships?

Is a weapon that only works against small ships that deals 10 dps with almost no penetration and has a big delay before it starts dealing damage good when you have a weapon workign against all ships that deals 26 dps with good penetration literally on the same tech?

I actually wish we could set weapon priorities on weapons modules in the ship designer.  Such as if you have multiple fighter wings, you could set priorities in the designer saying this fighter wing focus on enemy bomber interception and this wing focus on allied bomber escort.  Set these bombers to focus on capitol bombing runs etc.  I know it'll never happen, but it would give us a way of focusing our attack wings into the desired behavior we're looking for.  Right now it's a bit of a mess because everthing just does things in a way that feels random and chaotic.  As a result, I never really feel like I'm getting the results I'm looking for with fighter/bomber builds.  It would be nice to do this with weapon modules as well, but fighter/bombers is where I think this mechanic would provide the most benefit.

That is a awesome idea. However probably out of scope but plus one to that Valh

Yeah, both bombers and fighters currently are just a bit...sad. In my last battle, 3 carriers with 1 bomber squad and 1 fighter squad each did a whopping...1k damage. Two beam weapons on the hero ship did 3.7k. And that's not even them all being slaughtered by slugs, they also spent most of their time idling around the carrier ships without actually attacking. If they immediately started flying towards the enemy ships during the "weapons ready" phase, I think it would already help their viability a lot.

Same battle, but reloaded and replaced just the bombers with beam weapons. Note that in theory their damage should be almost identical, 100*50% vs 52. Effectively, the damage value more than doubles(!). I also watched the behaviour of the fighters -- two squadrons/four fighters started attacking the same ship in the top flotilla, meaning that the mid fighter unit spent a quarter of the battle just to reach its target. The bottom flotilla fighter unit did absolutely nothing. I assume all fighter squadrons chose the same target in the top flotilla regardless of their own, leading to the bot squadron being unable to reach it? Something seems to still be a bit buggy here :-)

EDIT: Replacing both fighters and bombers with beams turns the thing into a decisive victory, no ships lost.