Twelve Colonies Comments Thread

[Migi]

Having used long ranged fighter myself, firepower per ton is not the real limitation. Their MSP and speed is the real factor since they can do their damage over an arbitrarily long amount of time for no cost since they are intended to kite the opponent at no to little risk. You won't want to risk them in enemy effective range unless you really have no other choice. Very good for finishing off stragglers with no long range or lower tech opponents at no risk.

A more efficient use of tonnage might let you carry more MSP per weapon, but mainly I was thinking Steve could reduce the number of Cobras to pack in more Vipers or scouts.

[nakorkren]

Steve, I noticed that you are not using any armor on your Vipers or Cobras. Why is that? Obviously it depends on the weapons of your opponents, but it seems like at least 2 or 3 layers of armor would provide significantly better survivability and be a fairly low mass investment/speed reduction. Do you feel that if they do get hit, they're already toast? Not a criticism, just a question, since I haven't used fighters much.

(Question is addressed to Steve since these are his designs, but anyone with fighter experience should feel free to weigh in)

[Droll]

Steve, I noticed that you are not using any armor on your Vipers or Cobras. Why is that? Obviously it depends on the weapons of your opponents, but it seems like at least 2 or 3 layers of armor would provide significantly better survivability and be a fairly low mass investment/speed reduction. Do you feel that if they do get hit, they're already toast? Not a criticism, just a question, since I haven't used fighters much.

(Question is addressed to Steve since these are his designs, but anyone with fighter experience should feel free to weigh in)

Shock damage mechanics ignore armor and view fighters quite unfavourably due to their small size, so armor doesn't do as well as one might hope.
Then there's the fact that space is always at a premium for fighters so often there literally is no space to place armor.

In the case of fighters speed is armor, though I personally try at least 2 layers of armor to help against AMMs and some amount of gauss.

[kilo]

Steve, I noticed that you are not using any armor on your Vipers or Cobras. Why is that? Obviously it depends on the weapons of your opponents, but it seems like at least 2 or 3 layers of armor would provide significantly better survivability and be a fairly low mass investment/speed reduction. Do you feel that if they do get hit, they're already toast? Not a criticism, just a question, since I haven't used fighters much.

(Question is addressed to Steve since these are his designs, but anyone with fighter experience should feel free to weigh in)

Shock damage mechanics ignore armor and view fighters quite unfavourably due to their small size, so armor doesn't do as well as one might hope.
Then there's the fact that space is always at a premium for fighters so often there literally is no space to place armor.

In the case of fighters speed is armor, though I personally try at least 2 layers of armor to help against AMMs and some amount of gauss.

This is technically true, but not completely relevant. Shock damage can occur when the armor damage caused by the impact is larger than the displacement of the ship in kilotons. If it is lower, there is no shock damage. This means every hit upon a fighter or FAC has the chance to cause shock damage, no matter the weapon. And here comes the BUT:
Shock damage is equal to 1/5th of the armor damage. If the damage is not divisible by 5, there is a chance for 1 additional point of shock damage, which is equivalent to dmg/5. This means for the Viper with exactly 1 HTK, that it gets killed by a non penetrating 1 damage hit in 20% of the cases and all of the time if the weapon causes 2 points of damage and is not a carronade or missile. If it had 2 layers of armor. there would be a 60% chance to survive such a hit.

Edit 1: I am dumb. Feel free to quote it. I have to fix this post, as it ignored the chance for shock damage.

Edit 2: The chance for shock damage to happen is about damage*16.7% for a 300 ton vessel like the Viper mk1. This means the chance of a kill by a non penetrating 1 damage hit is 0.167*0.20 about 3.3%.
A 2 damage laser hit remains a kill, as it reduces the internal HTK of the fighter to 0. A second layer of armor would stop the shot and the chance of catastrophic shock damage would be 0.33*0.40, which is about 13%.
This means the second layer of armor increases the survivability against low damage beams significantly. A weapon with 6 points of damage kills the fighter all of the time though, as the chance of causing 1 point of shock damage is 100%

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Steve, I noticed that you are not using any armor on your Vipers or Cobras. Why is that? Obviously it depends on the weapons of your opponents, but it seems like at least 2 or 3 layers of armor would provide significantly better survivability and be a fairly low mass investment/speed reduction. Do you feel that if they do get hit, they're already toast? Not a criticism, just a question, since I haven't used fighters much.

(Question is addressed to Steve since these are his designs, but anyone with fighter experience should feel free to weigh in)

For the Viper, adding a single layer of armour would add 22 tons to a 300-ton fighter. That is the same as the combined fuel, maintenance and sensors. Space is at such a premium on fighters that armour isn't really the best use of that space. I would rather have more speed, range or weapon capability. Also, the main restriction on attacking fighters is the number of available fire controls so they tend to be over-killed anyway.

[El Pip]

As the enemy AIs in this game are all coping perfectly well without missiles, do you think we could get this as an option in V2.0? We can't all be as lucky as Steve in what the AI picks and a game with AMM spam just sounds wonderful.

[xenoscepter]

Steve, I noticed that you are not using any armor on your Vipers or Cobras. Why is that? Obviously it depends on the weapons of your opponents, but it seems like at least 2 or 3 layers of armor would provide significantly better survivability and be a fairly low mass investment/speed reduction. Do you feel that if they do get hit, they're already toast? Not a criticism, just a question, since I haven't used fighters much.

(Question is addressed to Steve since these are his designs, but anyone with fighter experience should feel free to weigh in)

 --- I seldom, if ever, use more than three layers of armor on a fighter. And even then, I rarely ever use armor at all. For fighters, speed is a very good defense; a very, very good defense indeed. Tonnage is at the highest premium for fighters, second only to FACs and I'd almost always want more range or guns instead of armor. I have one exception, found on the forums often under the name Valkyrie-Class Interceptor, although I have more than a few flavors of it for varying tech levels. They are, to wit, 250 ton craft with 3 layers of armor and a trackingless twin-turret Gauss Cannon on a big, boosted engine. 3 layers of armor gives you quite the edge against enemy beam fighters and low-caliber beam weapons of most sorts... to say nothing of a typical AMM or even dedicated Anti-Fighter Missile. I've used them to great effect in more than one campaign and they tend to be fairly survivable for fighters.

 --- Speed is life for fighters, simple as. Shields... well they're good if you just need to survive one hit. And that's about it.

[nuclearslurpee]

Finally we have some ground combat action aaaand it's over. As this was certainly not combat with a peer-level enemy, I am sure the Colonial Marines will not let this go to their heads and instill a false sense of superiority ahead of an assured peer-level conflict to occur sooner or later.

Steve, I'm curious - now that you've built up quite a lot of forces (22x regiments with 3-4x battalions each ~= 100ish formations by now) on the 5,000-ton base formation size basis, how are you finding the situation in terms of leadership with the 2.0 changes to generation? Do you have enough generals colonels for your forces or is the formation size still too small for leader generation to keep up?

I note that the Cerberus aliens have apparently still been designated as "neutral", while we can all admire the tasteful green color of the radar contacts this may be perhaps a tad optimistic of the Colonial admiralty, but who am I to judge?   

The heroic Viper pilots had obliterated almost double their own tonnage in less than a minute in a battle against a higher tech opponent while losing only twenty-eight fighters, approximately twelve percent of their number. In comparison, the cost of the missiles that damaged a single Conqueror earlier in the battle was equal to ten Viper MK IIs.

This should provide some interesting food for thought in that sub-thread discussion about the relative merits of beam vs. missile fighters. Even if you add in the tonnage of the carriers, which suggests that the Vipers effectively "only" destroyed tonnage equal to their own fleet, it is still an impressive victory. I do wonder though what the impact of losing so many skilled crew and commanders might be in the long term.

Regarding the Pericles situation, given the rather thinly-stretched dispositions of the Colonial Fleet it is probably best to try and coexist with Remus so long as they are not complaining too much about the Colonial presence in Pericles. It should not be difficult to persuade them to stay out of Leonis since the Colonial presence there is substantial, and there is nothing worth their time in the intervening systems. The wild card here is whether Remus will agree to such a peaceful co-existence...

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I just realised that in the second attack on Cerberus, I forgot to setup the fire controls on four of the six the Battlestars, so the missile defence against the AMMs was mostly the railgun fighters. It looks I might be going back sooner than I thought

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Steve, I'm curious - now that you've built up quite a lot of forces (22x regiments with 3-4x battalions each ~= 100ish formations by now) on the 5,000-ton base formation size basis, how are you finding the situation in terms of leadership with the 2.0 changes to generation? Do you have enough generals colonels for your forces or is the formation size still too small for leader generation to keep up?

I note that the Cerberus aliens have apparently still been designated as "neutral", while we can all admire the tasteful green color of the radar contacts this may be perhaps a tad optimistic of the Colonial admiralty, but who am I to judge?   

The heroic Viper pilots had obliterated almost double their own tonnage in less than a minute in a battle against a higher tech opponent while losing only twenty-eight fighters, approximately twelve percent of their number. In comparison, the cost of the missiles that damaged a single Conqueror earlier in the battle was equal to ten Viper MK IIs.

This should provide some interesting food for thought in that sub-thread discussion about the relative merits of beam vs. missile fighters. Even if you add in the tonnage of the carriers, which suggests that the Vipers effectively "only" destroyed tonnage equal to their own fleet, it is still an impressive victory. I do wonder though what the impact of losing so many skilled crew and commanders might be in the long term.

Regarding the Pericles situation, given the rather thinly-stretched dispositions of the Colonial Fleet it is probably best to try and coexist with Remus so long as they are not complaining too much about the Colonial presence in Pericles. It should not be difficult to persuade them to stay out of Leonis since the Colonial presence there is substantial, and there is nothing worth their time in the intervening systems. The wild card here is whether Remus will agree to such a peaceful co-existence...

I currently have 198 rank 1 army commanders but only 28 rank 2. This matches very well with the current 27 regiments, 100+ battalions and sundry other forces such as engineers and geo survey. Even the most recently produced battalions have commanders.

The neutral status was an oversight, which I corrected later - fortunately they weren't firing missiles at me

On the missile vs beam, this campaign is definitely not changing my mind so far. The railgun fighters are proving effective on both offence and defence, at least when used en masse.

Agree on Remus - I think I can live with them unless they popup somewhere else.

[Bremen]

This should provide some interesting food for thought in that sub-thread discussion about the relative merits of beam vs. missile fighters. Even if you add in the tonnage of the carriers, which suggests that the Vipers effectively "only" destroyed tonnage equal to their own fleet, it is still an impressive victory. I do wonder though what the impact of losing so many skilled crew and commanders might be in the long term.

I said in that thread that I was curious to see how they'd perform in a major fleet fight, and I will have to admit they greatly exceeded my expectations. I wouldn't measure fighters ton per ton against capital ships either, though in my case it's because they're usually more expensive per ton due to how the game calculates engine costs, but even considering that it was still a really impressive victory for the fighters.

I normally regard beam fighters as more ancillary combatants, suitable for picking off small detachments of heavier warships or maybe a mostly missile based fleet that's out of ammo, but not really effective for a straight up fight against a comparable force of capital ships unsupported. This may be a sign I've been underestimating them.

[Garfunkel]

Are those enemy FACs with box launchers!? 

[kilo]

I have a question about fire control modus when engaging fighter spam. How do you automate target changes in such a situation? You want 1 fire control system per target and switch them whenever some fighter kicks the bucket. It is either extremely tedious or you use 'fire at will' which concentrates the fire at the target on the top. 

[Droll]

I have a question about fire control modus when engaging fighter spam. How do you automate target changes in such a situation? You want 1 fire control system per target and switch them whenever some fighter kicks the bucket. It is either extremely tedious or you use 'fire at will' which concentrates the fire at the target on the top.

Isn't fire at will random targeting? I don't think its supposed to focus fire.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Are those enemy FACs with box launchers!? 

Yes. Did you also note the 17,500 ton base launching salvos of 76 missiles at four minute intervals?