Err... I don't think they are unbalanced as is. But, if other groups find that fighters are being overused, there's nothing wrong with upping the cost...

What issue?  If anything, fighters are a little weak for their cost.

Try 120 some time....
My opponent raced his fighters to a point where he more or less got my ships in a row, and then charged into one hex, adjacent to my ship. He then opened fire on my poor hull 4 corvette and killed it... the explosion provided cover... he then proceeded to fly around explosions and continue this.... using my exploding ships to provide cover, so that I only got minimal return fire on him, until the game was over.......

One of the reasons we have a house rule of no more that 3 friendly flights may occupy the same hex. (the initial ruling had been 3, period..... but he responded by putting 3 of his flights in each hex, and arguing that we couldn't initiate dogfights as there were 3 flights in the hex.....LOL)

Trust me, a swarm of fighters can be your worst nightmare.......

John

Or a volley of anime spinal mount fire, or a shockwave burst, or even a few well-positioned mines if they're foolish enough to ignore them, or unlucky enough to miss killing them all.

Anybody who's having problems with swarms of fighters needs to use more area weaponry, rather than nerfing the fighter rules.

Rich

I do think fighters are under-costed. I don't think they are worth 100pts, but the current cost is too low. The benefit of getting in damage before any efforts to fight them off is profound - the advantage conveyed in the first couple of turns of contact is hard to overcome if the fighters are able to concentrate.

The CSP idea has potential (I like it), but it forces you to have and use fighters of your own. This forces games more towards a BSG feel rather than a balanced game action feel. Hence, I think fighters are too cheap.

OR they need to lose one or more of their umpteen special abilities.

I think their SU cost is way too low. 

I designed 2 ships, both with 2 engines and a hyperdrive:
hull 5 can hold 12 fighters bays;
takes a hull 15 to hold 12 weapons that are to-hit 5+, range 12 (closest to 11), using 3 ROF and 2 PEN to get 6 effective shots, all arcs, halves shields, no range mod.  And these weapons don't get to have their damage be effective IMMEDIATELY.

Of course comparing the two might not be quite that easy, but we're just talking SU, not combat cost.

ok, let me fiddle with the spreadsheet and see what SU the fighter bays might be to be more equivalent... ...200 SU per fighter bay.

Then I calculated by hand the the SU of the weapon: 212 (using ROF of 6).  (I should have thought of this sooner  :roll: ).

Make the fighter bays larger, thus making their carriers larger, thus increasing the cost of fighters indirectly.  You should also look at making the long range option for fighters a lot costlier.  A LOT. (something near what it would cost to bring the same number of not-long-range flights with a carrier).

Hello everyone!

     I Do Not think that fighters are underpointed, although they can be tricky to play against.  Make sure all of your ships have some AA weapons.  Follow the example of wet-Navy ships since the 1930s:  Have antiaircraft guns!!  These should be 3+ to hit, Range 18,  3/1/1, with "rerolls to hit" or "range based ROF" as a special weapon ability.  Also, have Long Range Sensors on your ship for optiomal long range fire of all weapons.    And if no hostile fighters are on the board or are in range, then these "AA" weapons can fire at ships as well, including small ones.    During WW2, the US Navy had 5" guns on nearly all of its ships.  These weapons could fire @ both hostile aircraft, and hostile ships.  If all your ship has on it are Heavy Pounders such as a 3/2/2 with range-based damage, etc, it can get clobbered by fighters.   So have a variety of weapons, and have the "AA" weapons that fire out to 18!  If they fire to only range 9 or even 6, they are almost useless.  My ships have AA weapons like I described  and hostile fighters do not pose any more of a danger to my fleet, than hostile ships...

Also, to deal with having shields being halved, have your ships have a level 3 shielding and a PDS.  Fighters will penetrate no better than hostileship weapons fire.

Steven Gilchrist; former US Navy Gunnersmate, Jacksonville, Fla, USA.

I also agree to the 3/1/1 weapons for anti-fighter work.... It's the fact that they have to be a range 18 weapon with the special adds to make it really effective. if forces everyone to use high tech levels for weapons, or every ship becomes nothing but an anti-fighter ship that can be used against other capitals if they show up.
From what you said, you use the range 18 weapons until there are no fighters, and then your shorter weapons, along with the anti-fighter guns, against the other ships.... to me that smacks of the USS Missouri using the main guns to fire at Japanese zeros, and sailors armed with rifles against other ship...... along with the small guns..... and only firing the main turrets at the other ships once the fighters are dead......

The heavy high cost weapons should be carried by capital ships to fight capital ships... not as anti-fighter measures.

The fighters themselves are not overpowered, but are such that they can be easily abused, and there isn't a definite counter to keep it straight. In Star Fleet Battle, you have gatling phasers.... The range is not great, but they do fire a repeated burst, and make an excellent ant-fighter / anti-missile weapon. In addition, they can also be used against other ships, but you need to be close to be effective. 

To me, anti-fighter weapons should be your secondary banks.... not the highest cost most dangerous cannons you have.

We found that not letting fighters do hull damage balances them nicely. Bombers still can damage everything, and fighters can damage weapons engines, shields, and equipment. Armored gun batteries are now worth the points... especially on the smaller hulls, as you don't have them ignored by the fact that the fighter swarms just blow the hull to zero. 

I am not trying to do away with fighters.... I love having them out there.... but I recently saw someone building a hull 16 ship with Engines 2 and that's it. The rest of the ship was being devoted to fighter bays.... and the player pointed something out. He didn't have to "waste" points on launch bays, as the fighters start the game already onboard. He see's no reason to bother with the lauch and recovery rules, as those are optional anyways.... and he feels as long as one fighter survives, and his opponent doesn't, that he wins. He only puts the carrier on the field because we told him that he couldn't just pay the points for hyperdrive fighters and have nothing else on the board.  In a 2000 point game, he fields 33 wings of fighters (especially if we don't allow him to keep adding wings until he fills the 10% of the lesser force rule) that were listed as long range fighters.

I don't want to enforce artificial limits on fighters (er no rule stating that you can't have more than 20% fighters, ect.) Nor do I want weapons that are instant kills on fighters..... I just want to find a way to avoid having to use your biggest baddest guns on fighters instead of enemy ships.

John

For the record, if you were to build a ship with 3 hull points (because there are 6 fighters in a flight, but they take a hull hit twice as often), movement of 13 (for the 10-hex radius plus 3 for the fact that they effectively get to turn all the way around for free), six range-1, 1/1/1 weapons with Halves Shields, and Electronic Countermeasures, it would have a combat rating of 36 and take up 233 SUs.

The reason fighters are worth 50 is that I threw in a x2 multiplier for their ability to move and attack in their own phase. Even if you cranked the special modifier up to x3, that still only makes them worth 60 points.

The reason they take up 50 SUs is that they are short-ranged-- plus, most of that mass is taken up by the engines, which are computed for a hull-3 ship, but really take up much less space since we're talking about craft smaller than size 1. I can conceive of making fighter bays take up as much as 100 points, but the SU cost has nothing to do with their effectiveness on the battlefield.

You (of all people  :wink: ) forgot Anti-Fighter Batteries, since fighters attacking this ship would kill themselves when they roll a 1, like they would when attacking another figher flight.

Your hull comparison is flawed.  It's the weapons that matter.  3 Hull?  You could take out the entire "flight" with 3 hits instead of 6.

You really cannot compare a ship to a fighter flight.  Fighters are a weapon system, not an entire spacecraft.  That's why I compared a flight with a single weapon.

Fighters do not operate alone.  They have to arrive with a mothership (not counting the too-cheap long-range option).  The mothership's cost has to be added in.  But you can make a small ship have LOTS of fighters.  Way too many, IMO.  If you're basing carriers on modern, and science fiction equivalents (which are modelled after the modern concept most likely), then Starmada's carriers are way too small.  Increasing the SU cost of fighter bays increases the the size of their carriers thus indirectly increasing the CR cost per fighter flight.

Hmm.. fuzzy math?   36x2=72, not 50.  So, 36x3 = 108.   And 36 is now suspect, due to needing AFB.

This whole arguement is why I made Fighter Groups take only a single hit rather than 6.  The single hit doesn't mean all the fighters are destroyed, merely that the group is disrupted and uncoordinated.  They break off and end up back at the carrier (though they don't have to fly back)  With every 3 groups disrupted, the carrier/ mothership rolls a d6 in the end phase to see if a new group can be reorganized from the survivors...then launched at the enemy. 

It seems to work rather well in the games we used it in (though it was a slightly different system).

36% more expensive then now? That may be more accurate.
I didn't say before, but 75 feels better to me which is close.

As I said Dan, I have been there with you for years. Recent games have sent me to the dark side of this argument. Your own fighters was also my own favorite tactic, but why force it into a BSG game? Why isn't there a good (really good) non-fighter fighter counter?