Fighters and Bombers seem to be rarely used by people with both having fairly heavy counters and being inferior to most other weapon types. I think that there should be more variants similar to how the weapons were changed and expanded before the game was released. I have a few ideas that would make them more viable without making large battleships irrelavent.

LONG RANGE BOMBER-

   The first thing would be a long range bomber that would have either higher damage or more projectiles than the normal bomber as well as being able to fire outside of base flak range.It could also have more health to help it last longer. This would encourage more long range anti-fighter solutions to be used as well as bomber protection strategies. 

STRIKE BOMBER- 

   This bomber would have a high evasion and high speed at the cost of a lower payload and low health. It could also do increased damage against smaller ships rather than large ships due to the payload being smaller with the reason being it wouldn't penetrate a carriers armor. This would encourage more fast methods of anti-fighter to need to be used based of items used.

INTERCEPTER-

   The first solution to bombers I'm presenting, these would be fast with low health and damage. Due to their speed they could quickly catch up and kill any undefended bombers reguardless of the type used. They would be weak against any anti-fighter items used such as fighters or flak. 

GUNSHIP-

   The idea behind this is to provide anti-fighter support while not losing out on some damage to the enemy ships. The gunship would have higher health and fire at many targets, but be very slow and weak against flak. They could also fire very weak missiles and provide some bonus to man power to make them more usefull in more situations rather than just to counter the enemy fighters. 

LONG RANGE FLAK-

   A solution against all slow fighters/bombers, this would replace a weapon and only be effective against fighters/bombers that are not fast or with too high of an evasion such as the intercepters. strike bombers, or any missile type. This would be much more powerfull than normal flak and reach between ships at medium range. This would encourage the creation of dedicated AA-ships to protect large ships like in real life. One buff this could get if needed is to let it do some damage to the enemy ship's manpower if they are at close range

POINT DEFENSE-

   A solution to both missiles and fast ships, point defense would be a laser weapon that attacks any incoming missile, fighters, or bombers. it would do low damage and have a fast fire rate making it a good counter to strike bombers and missiles. It would have an range between it's flotilla and the ones next to it, but do to low damage it would be ineffective against the heavy armor of long range bombers or gunships due to them having high health rather than high evasion.

These are just my ideas to expand on fighter gameplay. I think this would make the game more interesting with battles being more exiting having sub-battles between fighters in flotillas similar to the Pathfinders trailer. This could also introduce the expansion of modding with making modded fighters easier to make.

I'd rather we just got some basic balance of existing techs. The combat system is already complicated enough - it's just deeply unbalanced in afew areas.

Dragar wrote:

I'd rather we just got some basic balance of existing techs. The combat system is already complicated enough - it's just deeply unbalanced in afew areas.

I agree that existing ship weapons need some more rebalancing. I was mostly thinking of how to make fighters and bombers more important in the game than they are now.

Dezmion wrote:

Dragar wrote:

I'd rather we just got some basic balance of existing techs. The combat system is already complicated enough - it's just deeply unbalanced in afew areas.

I agree that existing ship weapons need some more rebalancing. I was mostly thinking of how to make fighters and bombers more important in the game than they are now.

I honestly think that they'll become more important with proper balancing of weapon types and tactics.  New complications won't help that (they'll make it worse!).

the way the lanes work and the fighters and bombers targeting priority should really be adjusted. if these fixes along with potentially giving Fighters another use to delay bombers or offer some different effective countermeasure maybe two missiles would be much better in my opinion then adding more variables to the system that's already not as strong as it could be.