The only change we made to fighters is to decide that they cannot do Hull damage. Bombers can do hull damage, and kamikaze fighters can do 1 hull damage, and that is it. We haven't had major balance issues since then......

I'll admit that a lot of people probably wouldn't like this solution, but in the games we have been running, we decided that fighter class weapons just weren't up to the task on pounding through the hulls of capital ships..... although we do use one exception to that, and that is the equivalent of a rule already in the game, and that is if you come up with damage that is impossible, then you get one hull damage instead. (Hit a location where all the engines, equipment, weapons, are already destroyed.......  you get a hull point instead)

So fighters CAN take down a capital ship, but it is not easy, and it is time consuming...... Which makes the concept of a fleet operation much more desirable..... it avoids the over concentration of one specific combat function. And it also allows things like Armored Gun batteries and redundant shields  to carry a bigger effect...... I've seen ships with those items destroyed because they got the hull damage to destroy them via a fighter attack... and the special equipment didn't get a chance to be effective.

John

Cost is relative.
We have already had discussions of 8,000 point fleets, and one of my friends wants to do a huge battle with 20,000 points to a side. He is envisioning a major fleet action on par with the Battle of Endor in Star Wars (what would the Death Star's final cost be, anyways?) or like the Battle of Wolf 359 in Star Trek.... (where the Federation Fleet was decimated by the Borg). I am not sure I am up to a battle this huge, but the possibility exists for it. At that point, CSP wings are a really small amount of the total points.

Personally, we are still experimenting with a house rule that states that fighters cannot do Hull Damage. They are still deadly, in that they can cripple a ship..... but you don't see swarms of fighters mowing down capital ships every turn.

I do have a question, though...... If I was to stack 3 wings of fighters in one hex (another house rule....) how would you handle dogfighting (which, by the way, is the only way to use the CSP.... as long as the opponent is in 6 hexes, you can go for the intercept, and as long as enter the hex, you can call a dogfight... no reason to roll the d6 to intercept.) 

As I understand it, only one flight from each side can dogfight, so either the other two wings can continue on, or as this is the fighter phase, move to either side, in adjacent hexes,  and attack the CSP wing. With the exception of dog-fighting, no unit can fire on another unit in the same hex. I see this limiting the CSP, because if your opponent uses it, his fighters are then tied to his capital ships, and you can swarm, and if he doesn't then you should declare all of your wings as CSP and go for as many intercepts as possible...... pushing for dogfights.

I am not sure if I am seeing it correctly... but it seems to take away some of the use of the fighters and limits your fighters that are flying CAP over a ship from "breaking to attack" if an enemy ship was to jump in and start an attack.....

It would also appear to let a cloaked ship just sort of waltz up to your ship, decloak and attack, as the CSP ships wouldn't be able to do much to it.

John

The only change I might make would be to have the option of re-assigning fighters set to CSP to attack, if no longer needed to guard other ships......

I would have it as a declared action on one turn, but not taking affect until the next turn......

On Turn 3, I realize that I need to send a fighter flight out to attack a ship.... so I declare that I am releasing a flight from CSP, before the end of the turn... that flight can no longer intercept, and on turn 4 is treated as a normal fighter flight as regards to movement during the fighter phase, ect.

John

I don't know enough about computers to make it work, but I would be game to try....

John

Ok, my bad... I must have misread something somewhere.....LOL

Either that, or I am just getting old and senile.

John

I'm not saying that it doesn't work... it just isn't something I would think to use.... but then again, I like the idea of ship out ther fighting for a bit, even the escorts... I have never been fond of the one hit one kill method of play.

I love seeing capital ships taking hit after hit, and continuing on.... victory should be something earned. The quick kill attack ships like your friend uses just don't appeal to me. However, they are not wrong, just different.....

Great thing about Starmada, it is flexible enough to provide for multiple playing styles

John

The battleship didn't have a PDS....
and everything that missed was 2's and 3's..... except for the 2 ones
Remember that fighters hit on a 4+ which means that on average, 50% of the rolls hit.

both of us were slightly shocked... but it still didn't help that 9 wings of fighters still gives a possible total of 54 dice to hit, against half shields....

We were looking for ways to counter large fighter swarms, as one of our other friends is looking towards designing fleets that are nothing but massed fighters......

We could re-do that battle, and see how it goes...
Then again, I once fired 12 weapons off of one ship 3/1/1 and needed a 5+ (4+ weapon at long range) and out of 36 die, the highest thing I rolled was a 3......

I either have good luck with dice (about a 3rd of the time) or totally dismal luck (the rest of the time)

Or you can have fun with the flight of fighters last week that all rolled ones vs. AFB and died......

I don't know..... maybe make a fleet of the ships that kept attacking the house for Starmada????

John

Understood.

I don't like ramming.... for that matter, I consider my ships to be actually crewed by beings who want to survive the engagement.... casualties are rarely happy, even when their side wins. And my ships tend to have as good a defense as I can put on them.....

However, kamikaze attacks are still a valid tactic, if only for the terror value. Look at World War 2.......  Our navy personal were terrified of kamikaze attacks on their ships.

The in game consequence is more pronounced because of the fighter rules.

Fighters act within their own phase, before any weapon fire. Fighters can be considered a range 11 (10 movement plus the weapon range of 1) weapon that is  4+ 6/1/1 that gets the abilities; halves shields, and the special ability of first strike. When ramming, they are range 10 expendible weapons with 2+ 6/1/3 and halves shields and first strike. And you get this for the cost of 50 SU points.

When fighters are used as initially conceived, they are not only balanced but work well within the system. However, they are open to abuse, and when abused it is dramatic.  I recently had a game with a friend where I built 3 carriers with 12 wings of fighters each. I didn't worry about launch bays, as we can start the game with all fighters on the board, and outside of the fighter bays, some defensive weaponry, shields, PDS, and armor.... they had no other added equipment. I had a couple of light support ships as well, and that was it.

My fleet had a total of just over 2400 points.
My opponent had a fleet that was about 3500 points, but only had about 6 wings of fighters.....

In the end, I won. I was able to mass attack his capital ships with swarm tactics, and basically do so much damage during the fighter phase that whatever ship I attacked was either dead, or so badly hurt as to be a non-entity.  The first ship I hit was his command battleship that had an 18 hull.
I lost a grand total of 3 fighters out of one wing on the way in (one to a spinal mount hit from that ship), and I had attacked with 9 wings of fighters on that ship (the 3 fighters lost were from these wings, there were other losses against the other ships). Of the remaining 51 fighters, I hit with 38 of them. Two of the fighters rolled ones, and died via flying into each other's line of fire (AFB on the ship), thereby improving the gene pool of my species through elimination of the stupid. Of the 38 that hit, 25 managed to roll a 3 or better and avoid the shield (ship had a shield of 4, and for some reason, he didn't use a PDS which would have stopped a further 9 hits.)

The ship took 17 hull damage, lost all of the weapons in the A bank, and only had one weapon in B that survived. All of the engines, and special equipment that could be hit, was hit... leaving a ship with no movement, and only one weapon that had a range of 6 and was 2/1/1. 

Meanwhile, his 6 wings were engaged in furious dogfights with 6 of my wings, and 2 of his other cruisers had gone up in blazes of glory to massed fighter attacks....... Unfortunately for my opponent, they never got the chance to fire back, and the AFB were slightly less than effective because it relied on my rolling ones.........

Finally, during the capital ship phase, he fired at the threat that he could reach, the fighters, and managed to take down 14 of them.  My two escorts got within range of his battleship, and finished it off.

Stopping the battle, we re-assessed the situation.. I had lost a total of 27 fighters out of 180 (we are ignoring the dogfights at the moment)

He had lost his battleship that cost 1108, and two cruisers that were worth just over 400 each...... At the rate the battle was going, this would have been over in another 2 - 3 turns.

The dogfights were fairly even, and if left alone, would have ended in mutual destruction, or as close to that as didn't matter. However, I was getting ready to re-assign any wings that had lost fighters to the dogfights to support them.

When we ran a second battle, though, we tried something a bit different.
AFB, of course, got to fire, and we decided to use one of the statements from the Starlancer computer game, as well as from the Freespace games.

We decided that fighters could not do hull damage. They could shoot off weapons, damage engines or shield generators, but that they didn't hurt hulls. In addition, drones are explosive guided torpedoes designed to destroy a ships hull... a fighter has only mass and impact, so kamikaze fighters still rolled 3 dice, but only got 1 hull damage total for a ram. The dice were used to determine what mounted equipment that the fighter pilot aimed at and hit. So a kamikaze fighter might hit a shield, a weapon, and something special, but could not score more than 1 hull of damage per fighter.

This battle turned out a lot different.... At the end of 6 turns, 2 of the carriers were destroyed, and my fleet was starting to retreat. The armored gun batteries on my opponents escort ships was my worst nightmare....  During the first battle, I merely destroyed his hull, and could ignore the fact that he had armored gun batteries.. now, I actually had to destroy the equipment.  One of my escorts was taken in one shot from the battleship's spinal mount, and the other was a hurting unit.

All in all, the second battle was very good in that my oponents fleet was half again as big as mine in point cost, and I learned exactly what that meant. However, I did leave him one major repair bill......LOL

I crippled his battleship, and pummeled the daylights out of everything else, but as I couldn't destroy his hull, it allowed his damage control teams a chance to repair enough to keep the battle going. His armored gun batteries meant that his Hull 7 escorts lived through the fighter waves, and were able to return damage and in general, keep me tied up with them.

One of his hull 9 cruisers got up on my escorts, and then got hammered severely....... during the fighter phase, 3 wings of fighters gave him a good work over, and damaged the shield generators down to 1.... and then my escorts were able to open on it.

All in all, I like the fact that although the fighters didn't do hull damage, they still had first strike, and could halve the shields of my opponents.
The only thing I hadn't tried yet was the use of bombers.... those I would leave with the ability to do hull damage.

We even got to use the roll maneuver for the first time in any game.... one of his escorts did it to bring some more weapons to bear and killed my carrier.....

Anyways... probably not the best place to make this post, but it was inter-related with this and several other threads.

John