Fighters in ISG

I recently read a post by @JOM here and it had me drooling, (yes, I'm a warmonger) but more than that I love intricate combat in 4x games and strategy games in general. In light of that, I opened this thread so we can take a close look at fighters, where they are now and where they could be.


Right now what we have, is fighters that behave exactly like missiles, you "fire" them at a target and lose control over them. The fighters are then either destroyed or destroy their target, at which point they disappear, precisely like missiles. This is the primary reason why I no longer use them but the AI seems to favor them quite a lot, to its ultimate disadvantage.


MoO2 on the other hand was a bit more sophisticated, Fighters that were not destroyed did not disappear when their target was destroyed, they simply switched target and at times returned to their carrier for re-arming. Hmm, better but still not as good as it could be.


JOM went into some detail in his excellent post about fighters, explaining in brief the various roles that could traditionally be assigned to them. The question then is how can this be done and still be easy enough to use by the player.


Now fighters should be somewhat effective against ships, effective against other fighters and devastating against bombers. This would fit in quite well with ISG and be very realistic at the same time.


The solution as suggested then, of allowing manual control of fighters would allow the player the ability to assign the desired roles as she/he sees fit. Partial automation could alleviate any micro-management headaches by allowing the fighters to maneuver to target automatically. Subsequently, recall could be automatic as well, once the fighters have either completed their mission or exhausted their supply (number of turns). In this case, a group of fighters could be left in reserve to act as CAP and intercept enemy fighters.


Ultimately, fighters could be refined and expanded further in a future expansion or DLC, indeed, such an expansion could be focused just on Fighters and still be a must have addition to ISG.

 

The player already has a huge advantage with the way fighters currently work. The Ai favors them too much and they are currently inefficient.

Here are a few scenarios from actual game play.

I attack a battle station. said battle station launces fighters, almost exclusively. I pound at the battle station with direct fire and missiles. Fighters are so damn slow, they never reach my ships in time to even scratch them before the battle station is destroyed. Once the battle station goes down, the battle is over and the fighters had no effect on its course.

Obvious easy solutions? Increase speed of fighters.

Another scenario

A few of my ships, 3FFs, 3DDs and a single under-powered Cruiser, (thank you bomb racks), attack an enemy fleet consisting of 2BBs, 1CA, 2DDs, 2FFs. I have 12 SSP worth of ships, the AI has 17 SSP worth of ships. The AI fleet is destroyed to the last, I lose one DD, our tech was comparable. Almost all AI ships including Destroyers, but excepting Frigates, were loaded with fighters. All fighters targeted a single ship of mine. Before most fighters could reach my ships in numbers to do damage, their carrier vessels were destroyed, Fighters were then immediately removed from play, meaning the AI wasted numerous turns.

The remaining Fighters were removed from play once their target was destroyed, leaving the AI ships almost without offensive capabilities.

Solution? Speed up Fighters, don’t concentrate on a single target, don’t remove Fighters from play once their target is destroyed. Does an F-16 disappear once it destroys its target? No, it either selects a secondary target or returns to base for another possible sortie as needed.

I’m trying to be reasonable here and write in a diplomatic manner… but my meaning is clear, Fighters as they stand at this point in time are almost useless. As you say, if no other solution is available, then at the very least, the AI should be discouraged from favoring them so much.

Like you, I consider how the AI can handle all the tools available to it versus a human player, but this goes beyond that, the current system is severely… “lacking”. If and when the devs have time, the game would be enhanced greatly if they were to make some minor adjustments to it.

 

Hi Wodzu, good to see you!

I share your belief that fighters should at the very least behave as they did in MoO2, that system was very good. While I can only speak for myself, it is quite telling that in MoO2 I favored fighters heavily, My cruisers usually carried 2 squadrons (along with other weaponry) and my battleships carried 4. The times where I fielded Titans, the layout was either 6 squadrons of Fighters or 4 fighters and 2 Bombers. I liked building hybrid ships, they were fun, (Kind of had the feel of Earth-force Destroyers from B5).

Here I prefer a middle ground, yes, bases should have PD weaponry, they certainly did in MoO2, but it should be possible to overwhelm them just as we could back then. In either case, bases will gain some survivability once they start rotating and preserving their shields better. We should avoid making them too powerful and favoring the defense, it's tricky my friend, as in all things we need the correct balance.

Oh, that would be so nice, and yes we could gain some valuable insight... not to mention it would be fun as hell, I already have a list of those I would love to go up against head to head, and you on it!