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Posted by: LuuBluum
« on: January 16, 2025, 10:49:50 AM »

Quote from: Andrew on January 16, 2025, 02:51:45 AM
There needs to be a reason why a 500 ton fighter is invisible from orbit but an infantry man with a carbine can be seen,  One of those two should be harder to spot than the other.
#
edit:  You could add the tonnage of fighters to the detected ground unit number, and make them as vulnerable as any other ground unit to random bombardment. Which means pretty hard and expensive to kill also likely to wreck the planet and any industry
I mean, you're not able to shoot at an infantry fighter from orbit, either. You can just shoot blindly at the planet and hope you hit something, or have FFD on the ground and use them as support. I'm not suggesting anything different.

Just that right now, you can target those fighters directly since they're like any other ship in orbit of a planet.
Posted by: Andrew
« on: January 16, 2025, 02:51:45 AM »

There needs to be a reason why a 500 ton fighter is invisible from orbit but an infantry man with a carbine can be seen,  One of those two should be harder to spot than the other.
#
edit:  You could add the tonnage of fighters to the detected ground unit number, and make them as vulnerable as any other ground unit to random bombardment. Which means pretty hard and expensive to kill also likely to wreck the planet and any industry
Posted by: LuuBluum
« on: January 15, 2025, 02:45:05 PM »

Also worth noting that having it so that fighters being unable to be directly fired upon when stationed on a planet (since, as per game mechanics, ships under 500 tons disregard the gravity constraints of other trans-Newtonian craft and can land on system bodies) has an extra benefit: it makes it so that you can't bypass an enemy system as easily by simply neutralizing its present navy. What I mean by this is that, unless I'm mistaken, presently with how the game works if you destroy all enemy crafts in a system that you can then proceed onward to other systems without dealing with any colonies of theirs still present.

However, if you can't directly fire on fighters present on a planet, then it's possible that any colony could have potentially innumerable fighters (and build even more) that they can deploy against any enemy forces and then retreat back to the host planet where they have both the benefit of STO fire covering their retreat, and not being able to be targeted effectively at a range by guns that outrange the STO weapons.

In other words, it makes it so that a sufficiently-reinforced colony with plenty of fighters and STOs can force a threat to need to mount a full-scale planetary invasion of that colony (or otherwise destroy it) strictly in order to continue their broader invasion of an empire unimpeded. That is to say, colonies gain a greater capacity for system-wide deterrence in the event of a full-scale war rather than simply being able to defend themselves.
Posted by: LuuBluum
« on: December 12, 2024, 04:50:25 PM »

Fair enough. For me, I just want a system that is practical and useful enough to justify using, and isn't like pulling teeth to use. What that looks like is ultimately up to Steve.

Honestly it's like... the only "sore point" of the game remaining. Wrap that one up with everything else already discussed, and the game is perfect.
Posted by: Andrew
« on: December 12, 2024, 04:50:38 AM »

Quote from: LuuBluum on December 11, 2024, 08:54:02 PM
The issue is that it makes ground support fighters meaningless for defense if your whole fleet of them are wiped out before ever being used. That's the current state of affairs.
I am absolutely fine with support fighters not existing , or if they do exist only being any use to the attacker. So there was no issue with my suggestion. Just others may disagree which is normal
Posted by: Bluebreaker
« on: December 11, 2024, 11:22:23 PM »

Personaly I would prefer if ground fighters were just a ground unit that can operate from carriers in orbit
Posted by: LuuBluum
« on: December 11, 2024, 08:54:02 PM »

Quote from: Andrew on December 11, 2024, 04:34:30 PM
Quote from: LuuBluum on December 11, 2024, 03:16:30 PM

The main thing is that there needs to be a place for fighters to stay on the planet. Otherwise when attempting to leave a particular ground support order, they're back in space and able to be shot at by an invading navy.

Otherwise they're just useless defensively, if you lose control over orbital space. Can't reload or refuel without getting shot down.
This is not something I think is needed. I thnk it quite realistic that aircraft cannot survive in an envirtonment with ships in orbit engaging with light speed weapons, this is an impossible environment for aircraft to operate in unless they can take a hit from a warships weapons , in which case they are not aircraft but large blocks of metal , even a Blackburn Buccanner could not take a hit from a big gun.
I find aircraft being useful against ground based lasers dubious but there is no hiding from space based lasers
The issue is that it makes ground support fighters meaningless for defense if your whole fleet of them are wiped out before ever being used. That's the current state of affairs.
Posted by: Andrew
« on: December 11, 2024, 04:47:13 PM »

You can do more camouflage on the ground than in the air, and also a tank is probably better armoured than an Aircraft. I would also be happy with orbital fire against ground units actually being useful rather than a waste of time
Posted by: alex_brunius
« on: December 11, 2024, 04:36:34 PM »

Quote from: Andrew on December 11, 2024, 04:34:30 PM
This is not something I think is needed. I thnk it quite realistic that aircraft cannot survive in an envirtonment with ships in orbit engaging with light speed weapons, this is an impossible environment for aircraft to operate in unless they can take a hit from a warships weapons , in which case they are not aircraft but large blocks of metal , even a Blackburn Buccanner could not take a hit from a big gun.
I find aircraft being useful against ground based lasers dubious but there is no hiding from space based lasers
It's not really reasonable that an aircraft that sits on the ground is easy to hit but the tank next to it is almost impossible to hit, so if you want consistent rules then anything near the ground of similar size needs to be at least equally difficult to hit.
Posted by: Andrew
« on: December 11, 2024, 04:34:30 PM »

Quote from: LuuBluum on December 11, 2024, 03:16:30 PM

The main thing is that there needs to be a place for fighters to stay on the planet. Otherwise when attempting to leave a particular ground support order, they're back in space and able to be shot at by an invading navy.

Otherwise they're just useless defensively, if you lose control over orbital space. Can't reload or refuel without getting shot down.
This is not something I think is needed. I thnk it quite realistic that aircraft cannot survive in an envirtonment with ships in orbit engaging with light speed weapons, this is an impossible environment for aircraft to operate in unless they can take a hit from a warships weapons , in which case they are not aircraft but large blocks of metal , even a Blackburn Buccanner could not take a hit from a big gun.
I find aircraft being useful against ground based lasers dubious but there is no hiding from space based lasers
Posted by: LuuBluum
« on: December 11, 2024, 03:16:30 PM »

Quote from: Steve Walmsley on December 11, 2024, 04:13:20 AM
In terms of defence, fighters can already make use of ground-based maintenance facilities.
The main thing is that there needs to be a place for fighters to stay on the planet. Otherwise when attempting to leave a particular ground support order, they're back in space and able to be shot at by an invading navy.

Otherwise they're just useless defensively, if you lose control over orbital space. Can't reload or refuel without getting shot down.
Posted by: alex_brunius
« on: December 11, 2024, 07:59:34 AM »

Quote from: Steve Walmsley on December 11, 2024, 04:13:20 AM
I agree that the simple solution to ground support management is to automate it. Orbital warships and ground fighters automatically respond to formations with forward fire direction units, maybe with some priority system by formation type. Also agree I probably need to remove ground support pods and use existing weapons, but perhaps with some weapons being more useful than others, or the player can design 'cluster bombs' maybe - a multi-warhead missile with no engine. That also makes it far easier to get the AI to use ground support. Anyway, I will give it some thought.

I still would need to rebalance AA and orbital support needs to be more effective in general, but not so much it becomes dominant.

My suggestion for balancing is to try and ensure the biggest benefit from orbital support is as some sort of force multiplier.

That means don't make the main contribution from them direct damage, but instead increasing damage (or more likely hitchance) of supported ground units up to a certain %boost that motivates the cost and tonnage of including FFD. That way you will automatically have a balancing where if you add too much orbital support you reach the support % cap and just get the damage (which can stay similar to now, fairly lackluster but still a few enemy units destroyed).

The tricky part then becomes how do you make it so that:
- This cannot be abused by either a single FFD unit in a 50000ton ground unit giving full %bonus, or having 50% of tonnage in a unit be FFD and giving say a +500% combat bonus?
- This bonus is shown in the combat log and the calculation is clear so you get good feedback when it's useful to add more or not.
- There is some UI feedback how the mechanics works when your designing units with FFD and seeing how much of the max bonus current FFD/orbital support assigned fulfills.

Another type of force multiplier is negative penalties for the opposing side that are targeted by orbital bombardment during ongoing combat.
Posted by: Ghostly
« on: December 11, 2024, 06:17:25 AM »

Quote from: Steve Walmsley on December 11, 2024, 04:13:20 AM
In terms of defence, fighters can already make use of ground-based maintenance facilities. They just can't reload as quickly. Maybe the solution is a new 'Airbase' installation, that allows reloading a certain tonnage of fighters on the surface at hangar speeds (which could only be used by fighters due to 500-ton restriction on planets), without the overhead of managing fighters in hangars

It's not merely about maintaining fighters around a planet, it's about being able to station them on the ground, utilizing the atmosphere for cover so even if the battle in space is lost, surviving fighters could still contribute to the battle on the ground without being taken apart by the enemy fleet. The key difference here is that any fighers thusly deployed can continue to rest and resupply on the ground without entering orbit to do so where they will be instantly destroyed. That's the only way I can think of to allow actual defensive use of GSFs and allow the player, who is far more often on the offense than on the defense, to fight against them.

I'm suggesting some sort of a secondary Maintenance Capability pool provided by the new Airbases for fighters only, that can be selected as a target for Fighter Factories or fighter-manufacturing shipyards, can't be exceeded (excess fighters overflow into space), treats them as parasites (full maintenance/resupply/etc, can't be acquired as a contact or targeted, every destroyed Airbase results in the loss of a percentage of total fighters) and can either launch them into space as a fleet or into the atmosphere for a ground support mission of the owner's choosing.

The possible case for possibly making this new Airbase a GU is that there's already a precedent of certain GUs (STOs) having a separate contact associated with them, and I'm fairly sure having one for Airbases would make sense as targeting enemy airfields is a staple of modern warfare, although this might also be entirely counterproductive unless they're exceedingly difficult to destroy from orbit, as that would nullify ground defense fighters as a threat in the face of enemy space supremacy.
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: December 11, 2024, 04:13:20 AM »

I agree that the simple solution to ground support management is to automate it. Orbital warships and ground fighters automatically respond to formations with forward fire direction units, maybe with some priority system by formation type. Also agree I probably need to remove ground support pods and use existing weapons, but perhaps with some weapons being more useful than others, or the player can design 'cluster bombs' maybe - a multi-warhead missile with no engine. That also makes it far easier to get the AI to use ground support. Anyway, I will give it some thought.

I still would need to rebalance AA and orbital support needs to be more effective in general, but not so much it becomes dominant.

In terms of defence, fighters can already make use of ground-based maintenance facilities. They just can't reload as quickly. Maybe the solution is a new 'Airbase' installation, that allows reloading a certain tonnage of fighters on the surface at hangar speeds (which could only be used by fighters due to 500-ton restriction on planets), without the overhead of managing fighters in hangars
Posted by: Ghostly
« on: December 11, 2024, 02:54:40 AM »

I see nothing fundamentally wrong with having ground support fighters be actual ships, not abstract ground units. Sure, the system has some deep flaws currently, but with enough balance changes it would be far more preferrable to adding five whole new classes of GUs, of which I'd say we have plenty already. Not to mention that having fighters that are built from player-designed components and are atmospheric-capable in the lore (and can be build in ground-based Fighter Factories) coexist with "ground-support fighters" that are actually GUs, require no component design and are built in Ground Force Training Facilities would feel very, very weird.

That being said, here are some problems I can see with the current GSF and orbital bombardment support systems and some possible solutions:

  • Both are remarkably weak and cost-inefficient. No surprise firing a ship-based weapon just once per combat phase is underwhelming when one can afford dozens if not hundreds of similarly capable weapons on the ground for the same BP cost. For example, at Inertial Confinement fusion, my destroyer escorts fire 196 10cm railgun shots at 5200 BP for ~26BP/shot, and railgun fighters cost me 51 BP/shot. That's 10/20 damage, while it costs PW infantry 0.15 BP for a 15/15 shot, and 0.24 BP for CAP infantry to fire 6 such shots.

    I would propose making supporting ships and fighters fire more than once per ground phase, perhaps in 1-hour increments or maybe 8 times at once (rolling for maintenance 8 times in a row) at the conclusion of each ground phase. In case of GSFs, I'm not sure if they should take ground AA fire each time and some testing would be required to determine that, as my limited testing of Search & Destroy GSFs against an NPR homeworld has revealed that 3-4 fighters get destroyed each increment no matter whether their top speed is 20kkm/s, ~1kkm/s or 1km/s, so I suspect the AA system is bugged in other ways.

    I would also consider altering the space->ground damage formula to perhaps double the ground damage instead of 20xSQRT, which would give an additional buff to all orbital support besides GSFs and also take care of ridiculous moments like mid-game light infantry armor-tanking 10cm Rods from God. If this is feared as too big a nerf to STOs I used to dismiss their armor/HP too, but recently I found myself in a few battles where I needed to close range to defeat them because firing 1 damage shots would leave enough survivors for my fleet to run out of MSP, perhaps their cost formula could be altered so the build/research price of putting armor on them would scale with their size and not with the cost of their weapons, as is logical.

    These changes combined should not bring ship support to parity with ground units in cost efficiency, as that would make GUs obsolete, but it should at least become somewhat competitive and possibly a decisive factor in ground engagements.

  • Both are a tremendous pain to set up. Nothing in the ground combat system requires as many clicks as assigning orbital/fighter support. There's already a weighted average probable damage system in place for assigning ship FCs to targets when a Fire at Will button is clicked, so this could be solved with a similar Support at Will option on the Ground Forces screen if a population with available orbital support is selected, perhaps with an additional weight for FFD units in Frontline Attack formations.

  • Fighters cannot be used defensively. Perhaps this is where PDCs can make a comeback of sorts. A planetary hangar with built-in maintenance capacity for its contents only, either as a building that drains MSP minerals or as a bulky GU with high wealth upkeep and is exposed as a separate contact when fighters within take flight or land, would alleviate this issue, provide exciting possibilities for space defense both by the player and by NPRs, take care of the micro associated with repairing and resupplying defender's GSFs and make perfect sense logically.

  • On the attacker's side, taking care of the aforementioned micro would be as simple as allowing carriers with fighters to provide orbital support without launching the fighters first. This would simulate the fighters' abilitiy to repair, refuel and resupply between sorties without player intervention, with every fighter in need of repairs counting as having missed a sortie.

  • Finally, I'm a bit opposed to GSFs being a unique class of fighters with no other fighter type being able to perform their role. This is partially addressed with missile fighters being able to mount fighter pods at 1/3 the size efficiency, but I would also suggest making ground support orders available to regular beam fighters, as even with my proposed double space->ground damage buff they wouldn't be as efficient as specialized GSFs (a 50t railgun fires a single 10/20 (proposed 20/40) shot while a bombardment pod of the same size fires 3 26/65 shots at my tech and 3 14/35 shots at Composite Armor tech which would correspond to some very early fighters indeed). This way GSFs would not be a unique fighter class, but rather a specialized one to be deployed when the situation truly demands it.