So... fighters...

[Nokta]

Am I the only one that find a bit silly that 10 fighters can outlast a full-armed flottilla because nobody can actually hit them?

 

I entered a brawl between two factions by mistake and had to take the side of one faction. After I managed to kill all enemy ships only enemy fighters remained. Around 10 of them.

 

I had 3 ships with me and friendly faction had like 7, corvette and cruisers. We litterally stood there for 15 minutes trying to shoot 10 fighters down. They kept dodging and eventually started to mow down allied ships while keep pounding my shields into submissions.

 

In the end I had to just jump away.

 

I think fighters need to be toned down a bit, this is absurd :S

 

There's should be a diminishing return chance on the dodge, you can be a skilled pilot but 10 ships shooting all their ordnance at you should be able to hit you... eventually.

 

Playing 0.14.2

[Ravien]

After you use up their 3 free dodges per minute, they "should" only have a 30-50% chance to dodge, at least if the AI fighters behave like the patch notes say player fighters do. I haven't tried the new patch yet but what weapons were you using? I'd imagine a fast weapon would work better than a slow one to take out fighters and might actually give a reason for putting some point defense on our ships.

[Nokta]

Had 3 ship with all kinds of weapons: Plasma, Kinetic and Laser. None of them could hit anything.

 

Fun fact, I left the game and went back in and magically the fighters that were harassing one of my ships disappeared and went on harassing the allied flotilla.

 

I was in a scrapyard system and 1 hour later, after my licence expired, they were still there trying to take down those fighters without any success.

 

Once again, absurd imo.

[unbekannt1984]

Well, it's not just dodges, you still need to kill the fighter - that means: You need to use up those 3 (wasn't it up to 5?) free dodges (which make them immune to incoming damage for 1 second each), then kill their shields and hull with 50 to 70% chance to hit (for an accurate weapon).

 

The one thing that might be able to speed that up is a Pulsecannon. Those behave like low DPS Machinegun-Turrets, but have got a 70% chance to ignore shields. Downside of using those: They are weak against almost everything else, if your enemy hasn't got shields, then a normal Machinegun would work better, only exception seems to be the AI.

 

So, get a Pulsecannon with Independent-Targeting and hope that it goes for the fighters :)

 

Hmm, might be worth to start a Suggestion-Thread: "Independent-Targeting-Mode kill Pet-Spam" :P

[Nokta]

So, for those interested, Koonschi replied to my same post on the Steam forums saying that anti-fighters weapons are planned.

 

http://steamcommunity.com/app/445220/discussions/0/2765630416828962308/#c2765630416829839707

 

While I can't wait to see them in game, I still think that regular weapons should still have a chance to deal with fighters, with lower efficency ofc, but not making fighters too easy to kill or, on the other side of the spectrum, virtually invincible as they are right now.

 

It might take a little while, but you should be able to bring them down eventually especially if they have no reinforcements and their launching ship is dead.

 

[alfuken]

get a laser, they have 100% accuracy and never miss.

[klomster]

I concur, fighters are kinda wonky to face.

 

Me and a friend faced some for the first time. Sure, we've only played an afternoon and are on titanium stuff.

Doesn't matter though.

 

I end up in a system with loads of allies, about 10 or so fighters, most being a single engine after a while.

And we both have loads of beams and machine guns.

I have like 4 beams and he has like 5 mg's.

 

I manage to kill 2 with the auto-targeting function and some fancy aiming with my other weapons.

 

I think if i use rapid fire point defense weapons, i should be able to take down fighters.

I also think that 8 to 10 ships with several of said rapid fire weapons should be able to take down fighters.

And Koonchi mentioned anti-fighter weapons. I don't know what that will be, but in my world mg's are antifighter, or should be.

 

I am just happy it was roughly in the starter area, or else it seems on some posts i've read that they will rip your ship apart without you being able to do anything.

 

So right now, fighters are kinda bullshit.

looking forward to seeing them more reasonable. This is of course NPC fighters i'm talking about. Reading other posts it seems player fighters are hardly worth the hazzle.

I don't know how they are so different, but apparently they are.

[Giltone]

As far as Anti-fighter weapons, we'll probably see something similar to a CIWS/LaWS maybe varying range but with a specific bonus to hit fighters, and a detractor when hitting a non-fighter class vessel? they'll probably standard as Independent targeting. I definitely can't wait to get the integrated weapons though, really wanna back a destroyer class vessel that has an array of missile pods, and maybe a Magnet Accelerator Cannon. and as nice as the launchers turrets are, i do love the idea of a lot of missiles launching either out of the top of teh vessel or the port and starboard sides. there's just something about it that tickles my fancy.

 

EDIT: surprised the thought did not occure till after the pose, anti-fighter missiles could also be a thing.

[malakai]

Anti Fighter Missiles are a thing. Just make seeker modded Launcher Fighters. They kill hostile fighters about as fast as is possible with the current dodge mechanics.

 

There are other options for killing fighters that are viable as well, I also had good luck with tesla fighters and ,although I haven't tried them, laser fighters should also work.

 

Don't bother using independent weapons from your main ship as the turret tracking and prediction code for them isn't up to hitting a small and nimble target. Which kinda makes sense since you main ship turrets are really capital ship grade.

 

The main point here is to kill fighters you need fighters.

 

I worry that adding dedicated anti fighter weapons to the game will make fighters too weak, and everyone will start complaining about that instead.

 

I think a possible way to balance fighters is to give them a battery/fuel mechanic.

Give them 10 to 20 min of fuel.

Make dodging use up a full minutes worth(the pilot using afterburners or something).

Have them drop down to 1/4 stats and no dodging when out of fuel(emergency reserve) and maybe complete power down 10 min later.

Refueling is automatic at 2 minutes of fuel left and just requires fighters to go withing 1 km of their mothership.

 

This would mean that all those fighters left over after a battle wouldn't last forever and AI friendly ship can just wait out the fuel and take them out when they are powered down.

 

[Perq]

Given how absurdly expensive and hard to produce fighters are, their effectiveness is pretty on par :V

 

That said, I think they should be a little bit easier to destroy, but also easier to create.

[WSY]

I have been working on some testing on this in suggestions thread, albeit very slowly.

 

Fighters in great numbers become exponentially more powerfully for two reasons:

 

You can put your best weapon on them, make a blue print (with roughly 30% return) and make a blue print you can spam.

 

Second is their cool down and dodges become crazy if there are so many flying in and out of targeting range and firing arc of turrets that as they dance around turrets never get a chance to concentrate on one fighter long enough to destroy it. When it comes back into range the turrets that were firing on it are now focusing another with max chances of dodging, which will likely leave range or arc before all dodges are used and the process repeats.

 

Semi effective weapons so far are very high rate of fire non-spread pulse weapons, and guides missiles.

 

Guided missile would only ever be effective on a small number of fighters due to time to kill. It may be a guaranteed kill, but it will take long enough to not be an effective deterrent to say 30+ fighters

 

Pulse weapons I am still experiment in with.

 

I have suggested that dodge chances and cool down be server configurable.

[Ravien]

The DEVs have posted that anti-fighter weapons are in the works. Fighters *should* be harder to hit with main weapons. Hopefully we get some combination of flak, point defense lasers, point defense guns, and anti-fighter missiles.

An overhaul of the turret system would be nice as well, some way of adding point defense turrets without using up an entire turret slot would be nice. Maybe anti-fighter turrets would only take up half a turret slot or something?

[Perq]

^ Fighters should be harder to hit with low tracking speed weapons, which are mainly the big ones. Big ones that are effective against big ships due to their high damage (Your size 1 to, say, 0,5 weapons). Anti-fighters weapons should be pretty much chain-guns with high tracking speeds, or similar weapons. 0,3 size chain gun is anything but capital-class weapon, really.

 

I think adding special anti-fighter weapons that are super effective against fighters (with their current cost and difficulty to create) will effectively make fighters useless. One (or few) of those on enemies and your fighters will be dying one after another, which will make the whole thing not worth the time since they cost so much. Lets not even talk about pilots here.

I think just think making a polarized turret that you only have because once in a while someone might be crazy enough to use fighters is just bad.

 

Honestly, I think that dodge chance is not the best way of doing things. I think that they should simply get way more hp and simply be able to take some hits before they are destroyed, but no dodge chance. Pair that with ability to come back to hangar to repair (repair pace dependent on hangar/assembly size?), and you get something that is balanced and fun to play. You would be able to set how much hp they have before they try coming back, maybe even decrease their move speed/damage/whatever with decreased hp (say at 75%, 50% and 25% hp).

[LordMaddog]

I know the dev has put tons of time into fighters but he did it all wrong.

 

Fighters should be actual ships that can dock/enter mother ship.

 

Then if the combat rebalance with the energy/mass/dps trinity was implanted thees said fighters could receive energy from the mother ship.

[Perq]

^ What does changing them to be actual ships achieve?

[LordMaddog]

Fun and playability. I mean think about it! How awesome it feel to release a squad of your own costume made Xwings or tie fighters that were actual ships?

 

Fighters atm are cheap gimmicky spamming crap that don't even have collision.

 

 

[WSY]

I have to disagree, I think he is doing fine with fighters. Experimenting to see what works. As they are now, yes they def need some tweaking.

 

However they are lower impact on performance the way he has implemented them.

 

I will say however to your point, if umbilical docking is implemented, I would like to see a captain or ai type that moves like a fighter. Fighters themselves will still be there but then we could have a series of gunship like ships.

 

You could make them smaller and you would have something akin to what your wanting.

[Ravien]

You can create custom fighters so you can already have your own squad of x-wings or tie fighters.

 

The problem with making them actual ships is that would be a HUGE hit to performance. Ships have many more parts to them and all those calculations would melt most computers if you tried to have a hundred actual ships on the field at once.

[Uthael]

In FTD, you can adjust how "inaccurate" can your guns be when they fire. This means that a cannon doesn't have to be pinpoint when it fires, but instead it can have a 1° (configurable) inacuracy. Also, you can delay its fire so even if it enters the firing cone, it still has time to aim for a bit longer before it actually fires.

 

Now, let's say your weapons rotate slower the closer they are to absolute accuracy. Call it time for targeting correction. They could still fire before reaching this.

 

With these changes, fighters wouldn't even need their invulnerability. Instead, hits would be done with precision and dodges with agility. Dogfights would look much more realistic.

 

Now imagine laser beams just going haywire, trying to hit a fighter that's actively dodging. And when it turns to re-angage, it actually gets melted instead of doing loops while the beam is frying him.