Insane Fighter Costs

[lendarker]

So fighters can actually die now, and do.

 

Their huge resource costs and build times as well as personnel costs are sort of making the creation of good fighters prohibitive.

 

My suggestion:

 

1. make fighters remote controlled. You still need 120 pilots to launch 10 squadrons, but pilots don't head out and don't die (same as other crew atm).

 

2. make fighters even more vulnerable/easier to hit, or make maneuverability that much more important. maybe even clamp down on the number of points available. basically, have fighters get lost more easily, more often, and in bigger numbers, especially when going up against a fleet that has lots of fast wtracking eaponry

 

3. reduce fighter build cost and time significantly. Basically, make them consumables that need to be replenished all the time, underlining the need for an assembly plant on ship.

 

4. On the beta branch, I placed a second assembly block that was smaller than the original one. Build times went up as if only the new block was counted. Either add up all assembly production values, or communicate somewhere in game that the assembly plant must be one contiguous block.

[dopp]

The last point arises because you have two separate assembly blocks, which means you can produce two fighters at a time. So the time to produce each fighter increases, but you can replenish two squadrons at once.

 

I agree with all your other points. Since this game is focused on capital ships and fleet management, carriers should be puppet masters, with swarms of expendable drones. No need to worry about losing pilots, or scouring the battlefield afterwards collecting escape pods.

 

Still, one of the funny things about guns vs fighters vs torpedoes is that the latter two scale much better than the first. Guns require turret cards, which means slots. Each slot requires increasing ship mass by 2.5 times. Gets expensive fast, and you end up with a fat whale of a ship. Then you need to farm for good turret cards, and good weapons. Good luck with that.

 

Fighters only require hanger space, and you can have 120 per ship. That's an 8-slot ship at most. The only farming is for the turrets to make the fighters. Same with torpedoes, but better because you don't need pilots. The only problem is that you can't manufacture them yet.

 

Maybe they should drop the turret controller cards and introduce a capacitor/magazine block type that sucks power and determines how many turrets you can mount.

[Kamo]

There's currently a balance bug regarding fighter production costs: fighters made from turrets are much more expensive than fighters made by equipment docks, and since custom-made turrets are better than looted turrets, fighters made from them are better and even more expensive (as in, hundreds of times more expensive than a equipment dock fighter).

 

So, balance-wise, regular dock fighters would need two minutes to build, but custom-made fighters will take three hours (which is kind of unfun :().

 

The fighter production cost should be able to be reduced while designing the fighter, decreasing the impact of stats (using a root function with 10k cost (or 20% cost, whichever is higher) as the base ?) increasing the material price. Or maybe there could be a similar option on the ship to multiply production speed and material cost, a la Mechanized Assault and eXploration.