I think this could potentially be seriously amusing.  This kills large direct combat warships almost completely, but I really enjoy carrier centric warfare regardless, so if we get some actually good tools to manage large numbers of fighters and enemy vessels then this is good to go e:(as far as I am concerned anyhow).

I'm hung up on specifics because it's easy to overlook things otherwise.
If your sensor is optimised for 250t fighters and the true quarry is 180t, the sensors don't need to be 8x as large for parity... since it loses almost half its range, it needs to be 30x as large.
In this case you'd need a 54HS sensor, which isn't even possible. Even if you have scouts that can paint compact fighters without being shot down (dubious because the same concept applies in a less extreme form), Resolution-5 fire controls would have to be 18HS each. Certainly possible... but if you want a pair as you stated earlier, that's quite huge. How big is this ship going to be?

If hunting fighters alone, a cloaking device can give a larger ship the advantage without getting the size of their quarry exactly right. Obviously, this wouldn't work for escorting an unstealthed fleet.

Of course, one missile fighter is no threat, the question is how they perform for their cost. The missile fighters are aoubt 3.6x as expensive as their ordnance, quite a bit but imo still acceptable for mass production given stealth and salvo dispersion. They don't need much locistics support (30b range, 18 months deployment time; performance is going to suffer or size is going to go up in C#) beyond spotters.
If we don't increase the range, larger bombers would be considerably cheaper for a given amount of ordnance... but would lose much of what makes the fighters attractive.

@Iranon

Not sure why you are hung up on the size of sensors (I was talking about fire-controls)... the only thing I said was that you need a sensor eight times larger and that it is possible, the sizes was clearly just examples. I also clearly said this type of ship would not be meant to target long range bombers directly.

In my opinion a larger bomber that carry more missiles per tonage is much more efficient than a smaller fighter for the purpose of long range engagements.

The precise range and engagement ranges will be moot because it will still be about which side find the others first that will have the major advantage.

There is no point in sending in fighters with large resolution fire-controlls before you localize those ships. That will be hard with a good anti-fighter screen of smallish sensor crafts/ships.

This could be the role of a Destroyer to support. They would not be deployed as one solution but as part of a combined force.

One size 8 missile on a 180t scout is a pretty small threat in general to a decent anti-missile screen, especially if the opponent knows the threat vector and you send missile with a slow second stage very large missile.
A larger bomber will be able to mount more missiles. And if you neutralize the opponents scout forces, even temporarily you can fire outside the threat range relatively easily and will not need to use a second stage missile.

When I mention you can have long range anti-fighter missiles I don't mean against long range bombers but rather to engage medium to short range fighters who most be much closer to engage your scout screen.

As I said, these destroyers would need to use AMM and interceptors to defend against long range bombers... I think this is a good balance and give you choices to work with and use more tactics than you did before.

I would allways station a few interceptors on each destroyers in addition to a few sensor scouts. Carriers would have a wide mix of fighters but would carry the fleets main bomber wings.

You also need to consider that some strategies are not allowed in RP even if they are technically viable. For example would I never allow for longer deployment small fighter craft in anything but very small numbers because it is unrealistic form a human perspective and I mostly play human campaigns. It should be extremely rare to find military ships with more the 12 month deployments, humans simply don't function that well when confined to small spaces with limited social interactions, the smaller the crew the worse it is.

@ alex_brunius:
ECM can be somewhat negated by overengineered fire controls (sensors are a harder limit than FCs because they are larger fo the same range)... but they can force a guessing game and will generally force measures costlier than themselves so still a win.
Cloaking device would work reliably, especially coupled with a cloaked sensor craft specifically made to detect small fighters instead of small scouts.
So fair points on both.

Cloaks especially face the same problem as building the destroyer like an oversized fighter though: heavy specialisation and considerable expense (both tech and build cost). I stated possible solutions to a hard reliance on small fighters myself; cheaper ones too albeit with less room for error.
The main point is having to jump through hoops and getting things exactly right to counter something basic.

In the current version, I've had tiny fighters trying to use their small footprint engaged successfully because the AI invested into surprisingly large and powerful AMM sensors. Craft designed to outrun and outrange beam threats came under fire because the target matched one of these, had superior E(C)CM, the enemy had missiles in reserve when I thought that phase of the battle was over, or simple because they didn't execute their orders flawlessly. The "nearly tactically invincible" things aren't economically appealing (e.g. "throw enough size-1 missiles at any problem until the problem blows up" or "oversized sensors + stealth + long-ranged missiles including decoy systems").
Most things have various incidental soft counters that can realistically crop up even when the opponent isn't playing optimally or using extremely tight designs. I think this is different.

@ Jorgen_CAB:
A size-1 sensor would seem quite small. If we have a 1.8HS sensor on the sensor variants, we can fit a matching fire control and a size 8 box launcher on the offensive variants, 180t on my example design (will need slightly more fuel in C# to maintain reasonable performance and enough endurance to not need a carrier, but definitely below 200t). This is actually slightly on the large side for what I had in mind; if it was possible to build non-missile engines <1HS I'd go considerably smaller.

*

Admittedly, all this assumes sensor range will remain relevant.
With the changes to missile fuel consumption, this will probably require multistage missiles for any acceptable performance... another aspect where the new system will likely require much more thorough knowledge of the mechanics to come up with something in any way functional.
But that's probably something for a different doomsaying thread

Will your missile destroyers sport size 10+ fire controls of the right resolution to have adequate range to enemy fighters?
Will your scouts/interceptors have sensors/FCs very close to the ideal resolution (1 and 5 won't do if 3 is needed)?
Will your scouts have a high percentage of sensors (which pretty much rules out performance; endurance is cheap)?
All of these need to be answered with "yes" for this to work.

Or you can just put a Cloaking Device on you Anti Fighter DDs instead ( which the fighters themself can't use since they are too small ), and use ECCM/ECM and it auto-wins the active sensor "race" of who can target it's opponent at longest range...


Your questions also work both ways btw: Will the Fighters have all of the above (Specially FCs of sufficient size and optimal resolution) to be able to target Anti-Fighter DDs of unknown tonnage at good range even if they are not using cloak?

The problem with ship size is that a fleet might have many differing scouts and ship classes so have specific sensors for specific ships will be hard to do. So of course going smaller is better but in C# Aurora your are severely limited at what range a big small resolution sensor can have you also need to consider how many research resources you will put into all your different sensor controls.

I could see a destroyer flotilla having allot of sensor scouts and interceptor craft in addition to their long range fire controls. A large ship usually only need one perhaps two fire-controls to fire at fighter crafts since they can easily alternate their targeting. These ships don't need to have active sensors to cover the fighters, they will have scouts and interceptors for that. If your fighters are carrying mainly low resolution sensors you are probably not even going to spot the destroyers before their sensor scouts spot you. If you carry high resolution sensors it depends when you activate them, if too far out trying to find a target your are likely going to be spotted since they use tremendously high EM ratings.

This is usually how my fights go in VB Aurora at mid level technology where fighters rule supreme and ships are mainly their to support them. The Destroyers are basically for anti-missile/fighter platforms with decent amount of Hangars as well. These ships will work even better in C# Aurora and be much more important, they are not about knocking out enemy capital ships even if they can do decent amount of damage at medium distance, but that should be a rare thing.

I don't see how yo would ever blindly send a fighter group in to attack a target without knowing what other forces are in the vicinity... what if what you send them at is a lone fast scout with back up ready to maul that fighter group nearby. Are your fighters equipped with fire-controls to target corvettes/fighters or regular ships?

I usually divide my fighters into Interceptors, Multi-Role and Bombers.

Interceptors are those whose role is to attack fighters/corvettes at medium to short missile distance or that can be fitted with beam weapons, but only a rare few are.

Multi-Role carry slightly larger missiles and some smaller and can engage fighters at short distance and ships at medium to long range. These are mainly good at bolster the fleets anti-scout perimeter around a fleet since they are perfectly good at attacking smaller ships and defend against enemy strike/bomber crafts and to some degree engage interceptors.

Bombers are fighters whose job it is to attack enemy ships only.

The important thing in an environment where you don't know where the enemy main forces are you will be flying blind trying your hardest to engage and destroy the enemy scouts so you can find the enemy fleet before they find you. In these type of environment and if forces are fairly even the one that spot the other firs will have a huge advantage.

And I'm talking about none AI strategies here because the AI will never come near as sophisticated as that.

What I try to say is that sending a full strike force against an unknown target can be a huge mistake in this environment. I don't doubt for a second that fighters and smaller ships will become more important in the scouting role, that is a good change. It will however not make larger ships useless.

You also don't want to over engineer your fighters in an environment where you don't have a significant tech advantage. Range and deployment time will sacrifice speed, weapons and sensors.

Yeah. Something else to keep in mind is that alot of systems like Engines, Shields, Turrets, Command bonus and Powerplants got changed scaling to favor efficiency for larger ships in C# as well, so it's hard to judge how the actual balance will end up is quite tricky before playing it.

I am not worried about my fleet. Your advice should be directed against the AI, because it will need to be competent in fighter operations (quite the challenge) or become a sitting duck. Your doctrine already works... with the proposed changes it's going to work so well it's going to be boring.

And I presume you find the current AI challenging then since you think keeping it challenging is an important consideration?

IMO the game should be focused on delivering a good balance when all empires are player controlled, and AI should be a lower priority after "best effort", to work mainly as an introduction to new players until they can start to play the game "for real" which means RP:ing all sides themself. I do know alot of veteran players also enjoy playing vs the AI, but then you are aware of their shortcomings and RP to not exploit them instead, which is a similar thing.


And getting AI to use smaller sensor scouts along threat vectors doesn't seem that challenging compared to other things it would be nice if the AI could do like better buildup strategies / ship design or coordinating ground invasions ( with the new C# ground mechanics ).