Somewhat inspired by the recent discussions about battleships, I figured it might be worth having a topic specifically about strikecraft and the problems there of at present.
There are a couple of observable issues with strikecraft:
*Launch/travel times mean that pure carrier battleships get significantly outclassed by one only using guns (XL slots and kinetic artillery can get off many shots long before strikecraft can be engaged)
*Don't regenerate in combat at all, so can be easily countered with minimal investment in PD.
I've been hankering for a carrier campaign recently, but with the state they're in at the moment there's no real point. So I set out to buff them a small bit to make such a campaign palatable. I opted against doing what seemed most obvious at the time (making them faster) and instead decided to buff their engagement range (which is what led me to creating this thread).
Vanilla engagement range is 130, which is 10 units greater than the best range weapon (Giga Cannon, 120). Sounds good, right?
At first I upped it to 200. I then pitted them against @GloatingSwine 's preferred battleship loadout and had no effect on the outcome. I pumped strike craft engagement up to 300, because hey, maybe the difference between 100 and 200 isn't that great. Zero change again.
Why? Because strike craft engagement range has zero effect on when combat is initiated. Combat was always being initiated at roughly the 100 unit mark in the above because that was the range of the best weaponry in either loadout. Maybe I'm a noob for thinking it would make a difference, but since I can't find any other range stats dealing with them (non-counting the individual strikecraft weapon range here) it seemed like the logical conclusion to make.
I then altered the small red laser to have a range of 300 (I'm lazy and it's top of the list, plus pure carriers have S slots
) and observed. Combat initiated much further out due to that change and the strike craft deployed, eventually reaching their targets.
After this, I did the opposite of sorts and filled out the weapon slots on the carriers with autocannons due to medium only having about 40 range. For the purpose of this particular step, I matched them against corvettes also using autocannons so the carriers would be the ones initiating combat. Oddity this time, as combat initiated before the 40 unit range of the M slot autocannons - so either the hangar modules do confer a range somewhere (which I can't find) or battleships have some default minimum engagement range. I couldn't say which at this point. For posterity sake, I also threw two of those autocannon fleets at each other and combat only initiated at "knife range" as you'd expect from the weapons loadout.
To wrap it up, I re-equipped the modded small red lasers, dropped the strikecraft engagement values back to vanilla. Once more, combat initiated at the range of the red lasers. Strikecraft also deployed but moved out to their engagement range and disappeared.
So I learned the following:
*Strikecraft engagement doesn't affect when ship combat is initiated.
*Strikecraft will always deploy at the start of combat, regardless of range.
*There doesn't seem to be a way to have hangar modules affect when combat starts but I'm not an experienced modder, so I could easily be missing a value hidden away somewhere.
tl;dr the way strikecraft work right now negates their supposed range advantage but not for the reasons you might suspect
Edit: I apologise if the post is hard to follow. I'm terrible at composing my thoughts.
There are a couple of observable issues with strikecraft:
*Launch/travel times mean that pure carrier battleships get significantly outclassed by one only using guns (XL slots and kinetic artillery can get off many shots long before strikecraft can be engaged)
*Don't regenerate in combat at all, so can be easily countered with minimal investment in PD.
I've been hankering for a carrier campaign recently, but with the state they're in at the moment there's no real point. So I set out to buff them a small bit to make such a campaign palatable. I opted against doing what seemed most obvious at the time (making them faster) and instead decided to buff their engagement range (which is what led me to creating this thread).
Vanilla engagement range is 130, which is 10 units greater than the best range weapon (Giga Cannon, 120). Sounds good, right?
At first I upped it to 200. I then pitted them against @GloatingSwine 's preferred battleship loadout and had no effect on the outcome. I pumped strike craft engagement up to 300, because hey, maybe the difference between 100 and 200 isn't that great. Zero change again.
Why? Because strike craft engagement range has zero effect on when combat is initiated. Combat was always being initiated at roughly the 100 unit mark in the above because that was the range of the best weaponry in either loadout. Maybe I'm a noob for thinking it would make a difference, but since I can't find any other range stats dealing with them (non-counting the individual strikecraft weapon range here) it seemed like the logical conclusion to make.
I then altered the small red laser to have a range of 300 (I'm lazy and it's top of the list, plus pure carriers have S slots
) and observed. Combat initiated much further out due to that change and the strike craft deployed, eventually reaching their targets.After this, I did the opposite of sorts and filled out the weapon slots on the carriers with autocannons due to medium only having about 40 range. For the purpose of this particular step, I matched them against corvettes also using autocannons so the carriers would be the ones initiating combat. Oddity this time, as combat initiated before the 40 unit range of the M slot autocannons - so either the hangar modules do confer a range somewhere (which I can't find) or battleships have some default minimum engagement range. I couldn't say which at this point. For posterity sake, I also threw two of those autocannon fleets at each other and combat only initiated at "knife range" as you'd expect from the weapons loadout.
To wrap it up, I re-equipped the modded small red lasers, dropped the strikecraft engagement values back to vanilla. Once more, combat initiated at the range of the red lasers. Strikecraft also deployed but moved out to their engagement range and disappeared.
So I learned the following:
*Strikecraft engagement doesn't affect when ship combat is initiated.
*Strikecraft will always deploy at the start of combat, regardless of range.
*There doesn't seem to be a way to have hangar modules affect when combat starts but I'm not an experienced modder, so I could easily be missing a value hidden away somewhere.
tl;dr the way strikecraft work right now negates their supposed range advantage but not for the reasons you might suspect
Edit: I apologise if the post is hard to follow. I'm terrible at composing my thoughts.
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