Author Topic: KriegsMeister's Conglomeration of Ideas for Fighters, FAC's, Ships, and Stations  (Read 7782 times)

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Offline alex_brunius

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You could maybe make it so that commercial type ships require wealth instead of MSP for the purposes of maintenance if for some reason you or the playerbase feels like having any ship stay up for "free" is too much. That would prevent the micromanagement nightmare while also adding a cost to having a massive merchant marine / making wealth matter consistently throughout the entire length of the campaign.

It is possible, as I do that for ground units outside combat, but I would have to adjust wealth to account for it and I like the way wealth works now. Also, a lot of 'commercial' ship functions match planet-based functions so charging maintenance on one but not the other would cause some balance issues. In summary, it works very well now so I don't to mess with it for minimal gameplay benefit.

That's a good point. Any wealth maintenance for commercial ships could therefor be connected only to their engines ( so engineless platforms for terraforming/mining/harvesting cost no wealth to maintain ). That way consistency can be kept. It could work as an additional perk of making efficient engines which isn't super useful IMO currently assuming wealth maintenance cost for commercial ships is connected to engine efficiency or fuel consumption in some way.

This could also be an interesting thing to have if you want to add more details to civilian shipping companies down the line ( as it could be used to model their running costs and help them determine when ships are unprofitable and should be scrapped ).


I think there is room to add more engaging things to spend wealth on, some of those we are exploring in our ongoing community rp game and so far it's possible to add alot of extra wealth mechanics and players will simply adapt with building a higher % financial centers so in practice I think it looks like it works so far :)

« Last Edit: February 21, 2022, 06:27:39 AM by alex_brunius »
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Ok, the reason why you are confused is because i havent been able to explain my idea in a good way. Part of that is my limited english. So i will try my best here.

The concept im trying to put is: We already have pods that has to be put in a fighter in order to use a auto-cannon, light bombardment and it can also be used to put a missile in it.

The reason that only fighters can use pods is not a mechanical restriction. It is because only fighters can take part in ground combat and all the pods are for ground combat. You could put the pods on a large warship but there is no point as it wouldn't be able to use them, ergo the restriction to fighters only to avoid confusion.

You can't restrict a ship-to-ship weapon in the same way. Any size warship can use a box launcher for example.
 

Offline nakorkren

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Given the relative weakness of beam fighters (vs missile fighters, larger ships), I would love to see them buffed a little. Rejiggering the cost of high-performance engines certainly could help by reducing the build cost/time.

Another approach would be to make each engine produce a small, flat amount of power based on reactor tech. If balanced appropriately, this would enable small ships with limited power requirements (i.e. fighters which typically only have one small weapon) to skip having dedicated powerplants, saving a bit of hull space and BP. This wouldn't materially impact game balance outside of fighters, as that amount of power wouldn't mean much to larger ships, which would still require dedicated powerplants.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Given the relative weakness of beam fighters (vs missile fighters, larger ships), I would love to see them buffed a little. Rejiggering the cost of high-performance engines certainly could help by reducing the build cost/time.

Another approach would be to make each engine produce a small, flat amount of power based on reactor tech. If balanced appropriately, this would enable small ships with limited power requirements (i.e. fighters which typically only have one small weapon) to skip having dedicated powerplants, saving a bit of hull space and BP. This wouldn't materially impact game balance outside of fighters, as that amount of power wouldn't mean much to larger ships, which would still require dedicated powerplants.

There seems to be an assumption that missile fighters are better than beam fighters. That might be true in a one-off battle, but I'm definitely not convinced that is true in a campaign situation and Aurora balance is all about campaigns, not individual battles. They can also perform better than the same tonnage of ships, depending on the armament of the ships.
 

Offline Platys51

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There seems to be an assumption that missile fighters are better than beam fighters. That might be true in a one-off battle, but I'm definitely not convinced that is true in a campaign situation and Aurora balance is all about campaigns, not individual battles. They can also perform better than the same tonnage of ships, depending on the armament of the ships.
To be honest, currently, I would say that beam fighters are not very good compared to missile ones. Mainly based on cost. For beam fighters to engage they either need the cover of a fleet or they take heavy losses each fight. Missile fighters can be smaller, much cheaper, longer range/deployment, and survive easier.

Beam fighters maybe are better than same tonnage of ships from certain view, but every hit usually costs a fighter, they drain ungodly amounts of fuel, cant be easily trained and you need to build carrier that usually offsets any potential benefit in the efficiency department.

I like using fighters, but to call beam fighters in their current form efficient... I wouldn't exactly...
 

Offline Bremen

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Given the relative weakness of beam fighters (vs missile fighters, larger ships), I would love to see them buffed a little. Rejiggering the cost of high-performance engines certainly could help by reducing the build cost/time.

Another approach would be to make each engine produce a small, flat amount of power based on reactor tech. If balanced appropriately, this would enable small ships with limited power requirements (i.e. fighters which typically only have one small weapon) to skip having dedicated powerplants, saving a bit of hull space and BP. This wouldn't materially impact game balance outside of fighters, as that amount of power wouldn't mean much to larger ships, which would still require dedicated powerplants.

There seems to be an assumption that missile fighters are better than beam fighters. That might be true in a one-off battle, but I'm definitely not convinced that is true in a campaign situation and Aurora balance is all about campaigns, not individual battles. They can also perform better than the same tonnage of ships, depending on the armament of the ships.

I actually wonder about that. It's true of capital ships to a degree, because missile combat tends to use up your missiles fast, but while missile fighters expend ammo, beam fighters expend themselves. Sure in a campaign you can build more, but you can also build more missiles. And you can stockpile missiles for no cost but stockpiled fighters cost maintenance. Meanwhile it's very rare for missile fighters to take any losses at all.

Your test game so far shows just how high fighter losses can be when engaging even with an advantage. And so far they've been lucky enough not to run into an AI AMM ship, which can absolutely devastate beam fighters. It'll be interesting how well they handle the logistics of an extended campaign.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2022, 10:42:21 AM by Bremen »
 
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Offline Droll

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Given the relative weakness of beam fighters (vs missile fighters, larger ships), I would love to see them buffed a little. Rejiggering the cost of high-performance engines certainly could help by reducing the build cost/time.

Another approach would be to make each engine produce a small, flat amount of power based on reactor tech. If balanced appropriately, this would enable small ships with limited power requirements (i.e. fighters which typically only have one small weapon) to skip having dedicated powerplants, saving a bit of hull space and BP. This wouldn't materially impact game balance outside of fighters, as that amount of power wouldn't mean much to larger ships, which would still require dedicated powerplants.

There seems to be an assumption that missile fighters are better than beam fighters. That might be true in a one-off battle, but I'm definitely not convinced that is true in a campaign situation and Aurora balance is all about campaigns, not individual battles. They can also perform better than the same tonnage of ships, depending on the armament of the ships.

I actually wonder about that. It's true of capital ships to a degree, because missile combat tends to use up your missiles fast, but while missile fighters expend ammo, beam fighters expend themselves. Sure in a campaign you can build more, but you can also build more missiles. And you can stockpile missiles for no cost but stockpiled fighters cost maintenance. Meanwhile it's very rare for missile fighters to take any losses at all.

Your test game so far shows just how high fighter losses can be when engaging even with an advantage. And so far they've been lucky enough not to run into an AI AMM ship, which can absolutely devastate beam fighters. It'll be interesting how well they handle the logistics of an extended campaign.

Yeah a beam fighter is often going to cost multiple missiles fired (relatively) safely from a missile fighter. So I'm not convinced entirely on the overall strategic superiority of beamy bois.

However I also don't really have an answer to that problem without arbitrarily adding fighter-only systems which would go everything aurora currently stands for. Back when meson fighters were a thing you beam fighters were quite powerful to the point where they could be a bit broken. But perhaps the meson needs to be revisited (just in general, not just for fighters) and make it not so underwhelming.

An idea: I think if you want to keep the % to ignore armor setting you could add a tech-line for mesons that can increase their damage beyond 1. You roll the chance to ignore armor like usual but whenever the roll fails, the meson loses 1 damage (deals it to the armor) and keeps rolling until it either it reaches the internals or runs out of damage to roll with. You would still keep the overall damage number of mesons really small compared to equivalent weapons but now they'd have a better go at achieving their gimmick of ignoring armor even on heavily armored ships.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Everyone seemed focused on a purely offensive comparison between beam and missile fighters. A fast fighter with a high tracking speed and fast-firing guns is ideal for point defence. Missile fighters have no defensive capability.

 

Offline Platys51

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Yeah a beam fighter is often going to cost multiple missiles fired (relatively) safely from a missile fighter. So I'm not convinced entirely on the overall strategic superiority of beamy bois.

However I also don't really have an answer to that problem without arbitrarily adding fighter-only systems which would go everything aurora currently stands for. Back when meson fighters were a thing you beam fighters were quite powerful to the point where they could be a bit broken. But perhaps the meson needs to be revisited (just in general, not just for fighters) and make it not so underwhelming.

An idea: I think if you want to keep the % to ignore armor setting you could add a tech-line for mesons that can increase their damage beyond 1. You roll the chance to ignore armor like usual but whenever the roll fails, the meson loses 1 damage (deals it to the armor) and keeps rolling until it either it reaches the internals or runs out of damage to roll with. You would still keep the overall damage number of mesons really small compared to equivalent weapons but now they'd have a better go at achieving their gimmick of ignoring armor even on heavily armored ships.
Add evasion stat to ships. Calculated from speed and tonnage modified so its negligible to large warships, but another layer of protection for fighters and facs?
 
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Offline gpt3

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On the grand strategy level, beam fighters and FACs do have a niche as cheap PPV units that could plausibly contribute to system defense (unlike ammo-less box launcher satellites). A decent illustration of that doctrine can be found in this fiction blog post: https://eldraeverse.com/2012/03/25/what-the-ship-is-this/

Quote
We were interested to see that a number of “corvette” – i.e. sub-frigate – classes of warship have emerged since our last edition, especially since the role of the frigate is already extremely limited, due to the limitations of its available mass and volume on its capacities, to wolf-pack deployments for light anti-piracy control, scouting, minor system pickets, and civilian system-security functions.

...

This is to say that the corvette appears to be designed for ease of maintenance in the low-technology field first, survivability – such as is possible at this scale – second, and warfighting ability third.

In the light of these unusual features, and of its emergence after the case of Sarine v. Galactic Volumetric Registry, the true purpose of the corvette becomes clear.  They are a political ship class, not a military one.  In other words, they are not intended to put up a practical system defense; rather, they are intended to permit a single-system polity which does not wish to bear the expense of a viable star nation’s naval establishment to claim system sovereignty – by virtue of policing their own space – using a few corvettes at a fraction of the expense of actual warships.

I'm pretty excited to see how such "political ships" will fare against the new spoilers.
 

Offline Platys51

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Everyone seemed focused on a purely offensive comparison between beam and missile fighters. A fast fighter with a high tracking speed and fast-firing guns is ideal for point defence. Missile fighters have no defensive capability.
Because this function is strictly inferior to turret of same size...
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Everyone seemed focused on a purely offensive comparison between beam and missile fighters. A fast fighter with a high tracking speed and fast-firing guns is ideal for point defence. Missile fighters have no defensive capability.
Because this function is strictly inferior to turret of same size...

And how does that turret perform on long-range anti-shipping strikes?
 
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Offline nuclearslurpee

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Your test game so far shows just how high fighter losses can be when engaging even with an advantage. And so far they've been lucky enough not to run into an AI AMM ship, which can absolutely devastate beam fighters. It'll be interesting how well they handle the logistics of an extended campaign.

I keep seeing people say this and I find it hard to believe, unless people are using their fighters in a suboptimal manner.

Considering typical ion-age technology, NPR AMMs at ion tech fly at perhaps 56,000 km/s (using a missile calculator; currently I think it is closer to 48,000, but I expect this to go up now that NPRs can research fuel efficiency techs). Beam fighter designs vary a lot, but a typical 500-ton, 4-shot 10cm railgun fighter can easily achieve 10,000 km/s or greater speed. Let's slightly underestimate this and say our fighters fly at 1/6 AMM speed, knowing that we can improve on this pretty easily. Then a 500-ton railgun fighter will on average shoot down 2/3 of a missile in final fire mode, or every 750 tons of railgun fighters can account for one missile on average.

Typical NPR AMM cruiser designs tend to be in the range of ~20 AMMs per volley and ~15,000 tons displacement, which is about matched by the same tonnage of railgun fighters - and again, we can do better than this without too much difficulty.

The question of course is whether this works out in a fleet context. Nominally, every ton of beam fighters must be matched by about another ton of carrier, as a practical rule of thumb (I think this is true in Steve's BSG campaign for instance), so in theory a fleet of pure AMM ships will outmatch a fleet of beam fighters plus their attendant carriers at equal net tonnages. In practice, there are a couple of caveats here, for one no NPR fleet is composed solely of AMM ships as this would be silly, for another the carrier fleet can take advantage of significant BP efficiencies such as using low-boost engines - plus, since components like hangar bays remain constant in build cost they become relatively more efficient as tech level advances.

As far as missile vs beam fighters in the general case, I think it is hard to draw a line between tactical and strategic effectiveness. If you use missile fighters, you have to replace the missiles fired and ship them to the front, but if you use beam fighters you will likely have to replace lost fighters and ship those to the front. Fighters do cost more than missiles, but you will only lose some fighters whereas you lose every missile you fire whether or not it kills anything. I'm not sure which is likely to be cheaper, but I suspect it will depend on the opponent and how effectively they can defend against both types of fighters. It also matters a lot if you are fighting NPRs or other player races, as in the latter case every tactic has a counter-tactic whereas the NPRs are usually predictable and exploitable.


But perhaps the meson needs to be revisited (just in general, not just for fighters) and make it not so underwhelming.

I actually played around with this a bit in my modded DB, and you can make mesons decently more effective just by improving the rate at which the armor attenuation tech improves. I'm not currently using that change as frankly the calculated efficiency of the mesons frightened me off, but I think I will try it in a 2.0 campaign to see what it is like in practice.


Everyone seemed focused on a purely offensive comparison between beam and missile fighters. A fast fighter with a high tracking speed and fast-firing guns is ideal for point defence. Missile fighters have no defensive capability.
Because this function is strictly inferior to turret of same size...

This is untrue. Turreted Gauss does become strictly the best beam PD at high tech levels (ROF 6, 8) but this requires a substantial research investment over the good ol' 10cm railgun method, which on large ships is about equally effective when compared to Gauss ROF 4 and is often "good enough" compared against higher-ROF Gauss cannons if you want to save on research costs for a long period of campaign time.

Compared to ship-based railguns, fighters can achieve similar or even greater efficiency because they can fly as fast as a turret can track. A 6-HS Gauss single turret with 4x racial tracking speed is nominally 440 tons and still needs a fire control, so is about comparable to a 500-ton railgun fighter with 3x EP modifier which can reach 3.5x to 4x racial tracking by engine boosting alone. The railgun fighters of course have the added strategic advantages that come with being fighters including - if needed - superior offensive capabilities to Gauss turrets.

As Steve has been saying, the strategic flexibility of beam fighters while still performing decently in multiple roles is the big advantage they have over any other more-specialized weapons.
 
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Offline nakorkren

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Since this is morphing in a discussion on the usefulness of fighters generally.... How does ECM/ECCM play into this? The benefit of larger ships and the weakness of smaller ships, which is amplified with fighters, is the "infrastructure" that goes with having a working ship becomes a larger part of your overall tonnage. A bridge is a good example, although we dodge that with fighters since they're sub-1000 tons. ECM/ECCM becomes more important at higher tech levels, since it impacts ability to hit or be hit, but even the reduced size ECM or ECCM is 50 tons, or 10% of the size of a max-size fighter. Will fighters still be viable at higher tech levels with the handicap that they'll have to start committing a minimum of 10% of their mass to ECM or ECM (or 20% to both)?

Although now that I think about it, having a reduced-size ECCM on a fighter might substantially improve survivability vs AMMs, which I assume rarely include ECM.

I'm partly asking because the one time I've tried fighters it was at a relatively high level of tech (e.g. I was using level 3 ECM/ECCM in most of my ships but none in my fighters), and my fighters got shredded. It's possibly I just wasn't employing them effectively, though.
 

Offline xenoscepter

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Since this is morphing in a discussion on the usefulness of fighters generally.... How does ECM/ECCM play into this? The benefit of larger ships and the weakness of smaller ships, which is amplified with fighters, is the "infrastructure" that goes with having a working ship becomes a larger part of your overall tonnage. A bridge is a good example, although we dodge that with fighters since they're sub-1000 tons. ECM/ECCM becomes more important at higher tech levels, since it impacts ability to hit or be hit, but even the reduced size ECM or ECCM is 50 tons, or 10% of the size of a max-size fighter. Will fighters still be viable at higher tech levels with the handicap that they'll have to start committing a minimum of 10% of their mass to ECM or ECM (or 20% to both)?

Although now that I think about it, having a reduced-size ECCM on a fighter might substantially improve survivability vs AMMs, which I assume rarely include ECM.

I'm partly asking because the one time I've tried fighters it was at a relatively high level of tech (e.g. I was using level 3 ECM/ECCM in most of my ships but none in my fighters), and my fighters got shredded. It's possibly I just wasn't employing them effectively, though.

 --- There is another... The Small Craft ECM / ECCM modules are a mere 25 tons, though not quite as good as a Compact version.