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.

plutar wrote:

So replaceing fighters and bombers with beams 10x'ed your damage done and reduced losses to zero... Thanks Yertyl, doesn't get much more cut and dry than that.

He. Actually, if we assume the damage of the other ships/components was roughly similar, the damage went from 1k for the bombers and 12k for the rest to 12k for the rest and 28-12=16k for the equivalent beam slots. So yeah, in this case,replacing bombers with beams ups the damage of the slot by factor 16! I didn't save the numers for the last fight for direct comparison for fighters, and they get a bit more distorted as the damage is capped when all enemy ships are blown up, but considering how little the fighters did in the first two battles I assume it's even worse for them.

Fighting small ships is obviously not optimal for bombers, but these values are a bit insane, and nowhere close to the similar damage values to beams (for small ships) stated in the ship builder.

IceGremlin wrote:

It sounds like if Beams beat everything, the answer isn't necessarily to buff everything else, but just debuff Beams. We don't want the average damage in battles too high or there'll be no continuity between them cause one side will always die completely.

I don't think damage values are generally too high; this was a battle of 10CP of more advanced ships versus 7CP, the latter of which had the wrong (projectile) armor. It should be a decisive victory. Beams/lasers indeed feel a bit too strong currently, but IMO by perhaps 20%, not these insane 1600%, and I assume rockets will become more worthwhile once projectile flak is nerfed.

You would think fighters, particularly advanced fighters could stop some bombers? Well, you can't really explain it better than a screen shot of the outcome. One of a few

Kynrael wrote:

Looks like 70% Offense for fighters on the right. So there are only three squadrons left in defense for 6 attacking bombers. At least some of the bombers should have been destroyed, which doesn't seem to be the case.

Do you have a save of before the battle?

Does the greyed out bomber symbol not mean the bombers have been destroyed? It looks more like they were destroyed too slowly than not at all.

Hull platng is % reduction so it would show at least more than 1 damage not literally 0. 

All the ships were at 100% health at the start of combat.

Also like I mentioned the ships had no other weapons and even no defensive modules like armor. It was literally only fighters/bombers and engines and nothing else.

You can easily replicate this battle and test it yourself.

Here is a scenario where we have 6 medium slots of advanced bombers vs 6 medium slots of advanced fighters. No heroes or other weapons of any kind.

As you can see the bombers still manage to do very heavy damage before being killed by the fighters.

This shows clearly that fighters are not an effective defense vs bombers at all.

Their damage needs to be increased massively.

One slot of fighters should counter more than one slot of bombers. Otherwise there is absolutely no reason to take them.

Why waste a weapon slot for something that does 0 damage to enemy when it doesn't even protect you at all from a single enemy bomber slot and you still take massive damage.

The expected outcome of this battle should be near 0 damage done to the defender with fighters not this farce below.

Gzar wrote:

In this case tactic for fighters doesn't matter. If there are bombers present they will always prioritize hunting them over attacking no matter the tactic.

You can see they did exactly 0 damage to ships which means they were busy with bombers all battle.

Then what does the tactic do (in terms of percent of fighters on defense/offense)? I thought the whole point was that it was supposed to determine how fighters behaved?

The tactics determine the split between how many of your fighters will stay on defense and attack enemy bombers and how many will go on escort your bombers. If you have no bombers to escort however (like this case) all fighters will hunt enemy bombers no matter the tactic.

That picture would indicate that the Bombers all died after having killed 2 Carriers and 6 Fighters doing some 25K damage before the Fight ended. It seems the "zero" damage the Fighters list is simply a case of not getting to the enemy carriers (primary goal) after finally knocking out ALL of the 6 Bombers. Given the 2 Barrage Fire cards in play, that does not look at all that strange an outcome given the 3 stage battle plans issued...