This is space opera, not hard sci fi. The fact that ships defy Newtonian mechanics when moving around a gravity well and FTL travel is even a thing should tell you that. If you want realistic space battles I recommend Children of a Dead Earth.
Strike Craft Need Some Love, Cherryh 2.0
- Thread starter bbswfan
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
This is space opera, not hard sci fi. The fact that ships defy Newtonian mechanics when moving around a gravity well and FTL travel is even a thing should tell you that. If you want realistic space battles I recommend Children of a Dead Earth.
What would you say to giving Destroyers a hangar bow, with nothing except a single hangar slot? That would let you get strike craft into the offensive game much earlier. This is balanced and equivalent in strength according to the component equation on the wiki.
Effectively these could function like helicopter-destroyers in modern navies.
You're talking to someone who considered giving Corvettes a Small/Hangar setup.(Memories of X-Wing/Tie Fighter again, where you and the enemy alike launched from Corvettes at times.)
Last edited:
Even then you wouldn't employ fighters. You'd employ missiles with lots and lots of sub-munitions.
I mean, even today the standard aircraft carrier faces more and more questions about its use as the backbone of a naval doctrine in the age of missiles, drones, satellites and satellite-guided missiles and drones. Stealth is becoming more and more important, but you can't stealth a thing that can literally be seen from orbit and travels with a large fleet around it.
Arguing realism in a game with psychics is a waste of energy. Say it with me; genre conventions, Rule of Cool.
So what you're saying is my belief that stellaris should be battlestar Galactica space combat is correct
Actually there is. Aircraft and ships travel through different medium, air and water. The lower resistance of air gives aircraft a great advantage in acceleration and max speed. A hypthetical space fighter would be acting in the same medium as a hypothetical space battleship. The better comparison to modern navies would be a fast attack craft and a battleship but even then the common resistance of water gives the smaller craft an advantage that wouldn’t apply in the vaccum of space.
I'm disapointed in combat as a whole.
Carriers sucked big time for a very long time, they started to become ok, now they are not ok anymore.
Whats the point of 250 range if you charge towards range 100?
The real design options are really small.
How ships behave is hidden, and too important for fight. And too few option to control it.
Carriers should launch strike craft any time there is any hostile ships and have the option to stay as far away as possible at any time.
This includes moving AWAY from any targets.
How to fight: read this forum, find out which combo is powerful in this iteration of the game. Cuz there is only one way to do combat. Maybe two.
One combo fights anything, regardless what you meet.
Stations where said to be 'powerful' in this itteration. Haha. They get destroyed without doing a single cassualty.
Doomday stack was suppose to be gone. Haha. Doomday stacks are as powerful as ever. Just more difficult to move around.
Carriers sucked big time for a very long time, they started to become ok, now they are not ok anymore.
Whats the point of 250 range if you charge towards range 100?
The real design options are really small.
How ships behave is hidden, and too important for fight. And too few option to control it.
Carriers should launch strike craft any time there is any hostile ships and have the option to stay as far away as possible at any time.
This includes moving AWAY from any targets.
How to fight: read this forum, find out which combo is powerful in this iteration of the game. Cuz there is only one way to do combat. Maybe two.
One combo fights anything, regardless what you meet.
Stations where said to be 'powerful' in this itteration. Haha. They get destroyed without doing a single cassualty.
Doomday stack was suppose to be gone. Haha. Doomday stacks are as powerful as ever. Just more difficult to move around.
You know what else is unrealistic about ship propulsions in this game? That they can go faster than light. That's physically impossible.
If you want realism we should probably just do away with that too. Then you can watch your self-replication von-Neuman probes or generation ships spend 200 years travelling to the nearest couple stars and encountering no alien civilizations whatsoever.
The tech in this game runs on magic. This realism is not an overriding concern. You should choose whatever balance makes for the most interesting gameplay, and in this case that's parity between artillery ships and carriers.
The post I was responding to said that there was ”no reason” a space fighter wouldn’t make a battleship obsolete as in the case of naval warfare. I responded by pointing out that the reason aircraft made naval battleships obsolete doesn’t apply in space. You pointing out that magical physics makes my statement irrelevant doesn’t mean that the original statement is relevant. From a gameplay perspective a space fighter should be viable but it should not render any alternative build obsolete.
The one thing I've noticed is that Strike Craft in the current version is really good for a *balanced* composition.
They're high damage vs all types of targets (ignoring shields and has bonus armor damage). They have high tracking and accuracy, which means they're equivalent good vs corvette spam as capital ships. Plus they scale extremely well (since the repeatable techs give them +10% damage/atkspd instead of +5%). Basically, you want to treat them as if they were high performance M weapons (unless the opponent has heavy PD). They may not have the alpha damage of L/XL weapons, but they have a whole lot more utility and handles a large variety of enemy fleet compositions. They have much higher damage and better upgrades than missiles, and are extremely punishing when enemy fleets lack PD and your strike craft just stays in battle dealing damage as the battle drags on.
Also, Hangars use a whole lot less power than kinetic arty / neutron torp
I found it extremely helpful for my cruisers/battleships to all carry some strike craft, which cleans up enemy corvettes/destroyers handily, and is very punishing to shield-heavy fleets.
And for those who say strike craft are just glorified missiles? You have used it enough
To see these massive swarms of locusts fly through the battlespace, shattering squadrons of ships at a time like a destructive tsunami, is a glory to behold.
They're high damage vs all types of targets (ignoring shields and has bonus armor damage). They have high tracking and accuracy, which means they're equivalent good vs corvette spam as capital ships. Plus they scale extremely well (since the repeatable techs give them +10% damage/atkspd instead of +5%). Basically, you want to treat them as if they were high performance M weapons (unless the opponent has heavy PD). They may not have the alpha damage of L/XL weapons, but they have a whole lot more utility and handles a large variety of enemy fleet compositions. They have much higher damage and better upgrades than missiles, and are extremely punishing when enemy fleets lack PD and your strike craft just stays in battle dealing damage as the battle drags on.
Also, Hangars use a whole lot less power than kinetic arty / neutron torp
I found it extremely helpful for my cruisers/battleships to all carry some strike craft, which cleans up enemy corvettes/destroyers handily, and is very punishing to shield-heavy fleets.
And for those who say strike craft are just glorified missiles? You have used it enough
To see these massive swarms of locusts fly through the battlespace, shattering squadrons of ships at a time like a destructive tsunami, is a glory to behold.
The issue with BB hangars is that they either take the Bow segment, meaning no Lances for your BBs which are an incredible tool to soften up the fleet in the initial days of combat; or they take the Central Segment which will completely gut your BBs "conventional" weaponry, which are at the end of the day the bread and butter of lategame combat.
If there only was a Aft hangar module, now beautiful that would be. Would even be the most logical place for a hangar, facing away from the spinal lance and thus the enemy, allowing fighters to deploy safely.
Then the honest response is "brick shithouse Yamato's are cool, so they shouldn't be obsolete", to which the other person's response should be "TIE fighters are cool, so they shouldn't be obsolete". Then everyone takes a deep breath and agrees to discuss the best and most interesting gameplay scenario, which is one in these are both equally viable designs and signify interesting tactical choices.
Arguing realism in any capacity is a fool's errand. It simply incents everyone to dance around the real issues because they're all too proud to just admit their actual motivations.
Last edited:
So I did finally make those Small/Hangar Corvettes. Results are currently mixed with a fresh game. The thing is, Scout Wings still have to obey things like turning circles, which is about as wide as that of a standard Corvette. The result is they're not always on the target(s) dealing damage, as you'd hope.
Never used fighters. If it were up to me, then those would be the corvette counters of big ships. Big ship weapons have bad tracking. Makes sense, and OK. But they are big, and they can keep a lot fighter squads in their hangars. Make those fighters effective against small ships, and rockets, and torpedos. It makes sense, that those super small ships can't deal real punch to big ones, but they should tear corvettes apart.
Strike craft already have 100% accuracy and high tracking, ranging from 50% for Flagella and Scout Wings to 70% for Improved and Advanced Strike Craft. That's higher than anything else in the game except for Autocannons.
https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Weapon_components#Strike_craft
Their problems are more general than that; wide turning arc that reduces their effective DPS, and the bug that causes them to fly off to the side rather than at the target. Fix these problems and things are mostly ok.
I still think compressing fighters and bombers into a single strike craft set and preventing them from fighting other strike craft is streamlining the baby out with the bathwater. Dogfights are a staple of space opera. To eliminate them is just obscene. It removes the one thing that clearly distinguishes them from missiles, as well as the tactical choice between using carriers to target other large ships (bombers) or as anti-bomber and anti-missile "picket carriers" (fighters). They should at least be able to attack each other again.
Last edited:
And also, add in the ability for carriers to stay as far away from enemy as possible, and you got a nice thing going.
I would love this addition because it would give the player fighters during the only period of the game when they are semi effective, mid game before battleships take over with their extreme ranges.
That is the argument, and I will respectfully disagree that I do not use them enough. I often make missile and fighter only fleets just for fun even though I know they are less effective than normal fleets because of how cool they look, and they aren't even as cool now because they can no longer engage each other in dog fights.
Yes, fighters are effective against corvettes and destroyers, I actually point this out in the OP. It was the original point of this entire thread actually. That fighter target priority should be changed so that they act as the large carrier ship's counter to smaller vessels first and foremost, the problem is that their target priority has them target the battleships first where their damage is mostly wasted because of the huge Hull Point and Armor Point numbers all the while destroyers sit right next to them, a ship that the fighters damage could actually destroy, picking them off one by one while they swarm battleships ineffectively, and all of this not even including the bigger issue I'll address next.
Problem with the new changes, no matter how cool they look, the increase to weapon's range for L and XL weapons makes fighters completely useless in the most important phase of combat, the opening salvo phase. In a battle of equivalent fleet strength between a fighter based and artillery based fleet, Titans engage from 250, then battleships at 150, and during this time, the fighters launch but they don't fly towards the enemy fleet because their "weapon's range" is something closer to 100. By the time they hit their weapon's range, they've flown halfway across the star system in the wrong direction and by the time they turn around and start delivering their damage, a fleet that focused entirely on L and XL weapons will have destroyed half of their opponent carrier fleet meaning they have erased half the fighter damage before it has even gotten a chance to engage. In fact because of the weapon's range increases, I build point defense less than I ever have before even with the great buff to missile damage because I can simply kill most missile fleets outright late game before they enter targeting range. Just throw in a few PD destroyers into the fleet to deal with the first wave of missiles, then the missile saturation on the battlefield just gets weaker and weaker from there.
And yes, I do feel fighters are currently nothing more than glorified swarmer missiles. They do little damage, penetrate all shields, and are hard to shoot down. That's pretty much a swarmer missile, except swarmer missiles actually fly towards the enemy first and foremost instead of in random directions at combat start. . .
Agreed. The turn radius problem is a silly one. That could be fixed just by adjusting a few numbers in the RAWs. The bug where the strike craft fly off in random directions can be solved by increasing fighters "weapon's range". I for one believe that fighters should launch as soon as your fleet enters a star system with an enemy fleet. This would make it so fighters are the first thing that engages the enemy, long before the artillery gets in range. This would give them a distinct role in combat, and it would be like fighters engaging fleets "over the horizon". At the very least, fighter range should be equal to the longest artillery range in game to prevent them flying off in random directions problem. They'd still be less effective, but at least they'd get to the enemy fleet in time to do something.
As to compressing them into one strike craft, I'm more or less okay with that IF they restore the ability of fighters to shoot at other fighters again. I never really liked that they could shoot down missiles actually, but shooting other strike craft down both looks really cool in game and it's an important sci-fi staple. I truly believe that the role of strike craft can be solidified by a simple change to their target priority. With the changes to 2.0, my new fighter target priority would be this:
If fighter, than attack
No fighter, than Corvette
No Corvette, than Destroyer
No Destroyer, than Cruiser
No Cruiser, than Battleship
No Battleship, than Titan
This change assumes first that they ever fix the weapon's range and turn radius issues which knee cap fighters severely right out the carrier, but it would give fighters a distinct role that is not filled by any other ship in the fleet. They would become a fleet's main weapon against Corvette and Destroyer heavy fleets while the L and XL weapons would focus on the larger vessels.
I agree with almost all of what you've said here. Change their targeting priority to reflect their advantages, increase their targeting range to something like 200 (250 might be a big ask, given that it robs Titans of their distinctiveness), decrease turn radius and strike craft would finally function at what their stats suggest they should be good at. No need for bomber/fighter distinction as long as they re-enable dogfights; in retrospect this would kinda make destroyer-carriers fiddly, since you'd only get one slot and have to maintain two variant designs for fleet balance. An anti-large destroyer would just pack an artillery bow, rather than bombers.
On the related subject of missiles, I do not believe missiles in this current build are weak in terms of their pure stats, and comparing them to L or XL is an apples to oranges scenario. Remember that a G slot is equivalent to an M slot; an L slot is 2x G's, an XL 4x G's. And while missiles do have a slower travel time to target, they make up for this with a longer base range than any direct fire Medium weapon (second is railguns at 75, third is lasers at 60), 100% accuracy across the board, and limited retargetting.
The problem is that Cruiser design does not allow us to take advantage of these characteristics. For the Command Point cost of four torpedo Corvettes you get half as many G slots and 4x S slots firing . . . what exactly? Anything except disruptors is inefficient, and disruptors have a range of 40, forcing you to adopt a picket computer and close to range 30 to deal full damage even though you set out to deal a long range Macross Missile Massacre. Yeah, you could build a close-in torpedo Cruiser but you already have Corvettes for that and they're faster. The current design frustrates long range missile platforms, which makes missiles lackluster.
If they just reconfigured the Cruiser bow and core sections to provide 2x G slots each instead of 1x G and 2x S, missile Cruisers would be balanced with torpedo Corvettes and the problem would right itself.
On the related subject of missiles, I do not believe missiles in this current build are weak in terms of their pure stats, and comparing them to L or XL is an apples to oranges scenario. Remember that a G slot is equivalent to an M slot; an L slot is 2x G's, an XL 4x G's. And while missiles do have a slower travel time to target, they make up for this with a longer base range than any direct fire Medium weapon (second is railguns at 75, third is lasers at 60), 100% accuracy across the board, and limited retargetting.
The problem is that Cruiser design does not allow us to take advantage of these characteristics. For the Command Point cost of four torpedo Corvettes you get half as many G slots and 4x S slots firing . . . what exactly? Anything except disruptors is inefficient, and disruptors have a range of 40, forcing you to adopt a picket computer and close to range 30 to deal full damage even though you set out to deal a long range Macross Missile Massacre. Yeah, you could build a close-in torpedo Cruiser but you already have Corvettes for that and they're faster. The current design frustrates long range missile platforms, which makes missiles lackluster.
If they just reconfigured the Cruiser bow and core sections to provide 2x G slots each instead of 1x G and 2x S, missile Cruisers would be balanced with torpedo Corvettes and the problem would right itself.
Last edited:
Well technically you get 75% of the G slots because you can have the 3 G slots per Cruiser.
The other thing is that saying a G = M isn't quite true when torpedoes damage is added in which makes G = M/L depending on Missile or Torpedo which is why they have a serious balance issue in terms of hulls atm.
Honestly they should just either take the G off the corvette or punish the corvette with less utility for the G slot so 2 S utility slots if using missileboat then you lose all the talk of corvettes being insane.
As for the strikecraft I honestly think at this point best bet is to give them fighter behaviour fix the turn rates and speed and just balance as them as fighterbombers being only bombers or fighters is never gonna work
The other thing is that saying a G = M isn't quite true when torpedoes damage is added in which makes G = M/L depending on Missile or Torpedo which is why they have a serious balance issue in terms of hulls atm.
Honestly they should just either take the G off the corvette or punish the corvette with less utility for the G slot so 2 S utility slots if using missileboat then you lose all the talk of corvettes being insane.
As for the strikecraft I honestly think at this point best bet is to give them fighter behaviour fix the turn rates and speed and just balance as them as fighterbombers being only bombers or fighters is never gonna work
- 1
