Fighters

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Fighters

#16 Post by Geoff the Medio »

We've discussed fighters in the same context as other ship weapons, and designed things so far as though they are weapon system. Unless there's a compelling argument otherwise, fighters will be a ship weapon system, like missiles or beams. As such, whatever level of customization we have for all weapon systems, and all other ship parts as well, will likely apply to fighters for v0.4.

Most likely that means there won't be fighter design like the slots-and-parts ship design. Rather, you'll pick a particular kind of fighter bay to put in your ship, just like you'd pick a beam weapon, armour part or cloaking device: by dropping the appropriate part into a design slot.

The properties of the bay-and-fighter part would be predetermined in their ship part definition. This likely includes things like the number of fighters that can be carried by adding the part to the ship, fighter launching rate (eg. 2 per battle round), what the fighters can target (interceptors: missiles and other fighters; bombers: ships and perhaps planets), the power of fighters' attacks, fighter health and fighter speed.

However, depending how content works out, we might have refinement techs unlock ship part modifications, which would let you modify a part before / after adding it to a design to tweak it in some way - giving some adjustment to the part's stats and/or costs. This would allow a player to modify stock ship parts, including fighters, in some way to suit the player's needs more specifically than picking between a relatively small number of parts.

Adding mods to fighter ship parts would be somewhat like designing fighters, but much more limited than full ship design will be.

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Sui Generis
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Re: Fighters

#17 Post by Sui Generis »

Geoff the Medio wrote:...
Rather, you'll pick a particular kind of fighter bay to put in your ship, just like you'd pick a beam weapon, armour part or cloaking device: by dropping the appropriate part into a design slot.

The properties of the bay-and-fighter part would be predetermined in their ship part definition. This likely includes things like the number of fighters that can be carried by adding the part to the ship, fighter launching rate (eg. 2 per battle round), what the fighters can target (interceptors: missiles and other fighters; bombers: ships and perhaps planets), the power of fighters' attacks, fighter health and fighter speed.
Would this system allow the player to mix the proportion of anti-fighters (ie. interceptors) and bombers to any extent? Similarly, would it be desirable to permit the player to provide different 'fighter mods' to these different fighter craft?

For example, the player might want a fighter bay that houses mostly standard speed fighters and a few fast fighter craft as they would cover terrain faster and thus be useful as missile interceptors. Or perhaps bombers with an increased stealth modification? Such craft could be used to attempt to sneak through a defending fleet and bomb an enemy planet, or at least force the defender to divert suitable ships from the front line to help detect and hunt down the intruding bombers.

If you were to allow such mixed fighter populations in single hangers then you would either have to include a large number of potential fighter bay options to choose from, as the number of possible choices of fighter populations with all the different possible fighter mods would result in an inordinate number of different combinations to list. It would likely be simpler to generate the desired fighter design by simply setting these variables yourself, and add fighters (of desired types and with desired mods) in proportions suited to the player's intended role for the mothership. However this sounds like a ship design screen nested within a ship design screen and is contrary to our intention that fighter bays (and their populations) be considered weapons systems akin to missiles and beams.

But if you were instead to (understandably) deny such a complicating option, what method should the player use if he wishes to pack specialised bombers (or whatever) with some other fighter into the same ship? Would this require the player to simply place and install two fighter bays on the same ship and then specify one as having stealthy bombers and the other as having fast moving interceptors? (Note that I'm assuming the player has sufficiently refined the technology to be able to use these mods, and that fighter mods will indeed exist and as additive tick boxes on the weapon system mod detail window associated with the fighter bay.)

Using different fighter bays for a particular type of fighter seems like a pretty simple and attractive solution to the problem, as it would probably be more clear in the UI what fighters a mother ship is equipped with and it would more easily fit into the existing design framework that is envisaged. It would however be improved by permitting different sizes of fighter bay, or else the player might be forced to include X times as many fighters as he would have preferred, because he wishes that ship to carry X different types of fighter.

As I half suggest above, this is basically conjecture on what difficulties (and possible strategies) might arise by allowing fighters to be modded as I have described. I understand that there may be possible fighter mods that may not be implemented, as they may have no conceivable analogue for beams and missiles. Stealth in particular comes to mind here - it might be useful to make missiles harder to detect but what about SR weapons and PD? (A silencer effect perhaps? Or maybe it would be more difficult for a rival to ascertain what weapon system is actually equipped?)
It may be desirable to limit the fighter mods to those which have analogues with other weapon types.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Fighters

#18 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Sui Generis wrote:Would this system allow the player to mix the proportion of anti-fighters (ie. interceptors) and bombers to any extent?
No; adding a fighter bay part would give you a single type of fighter.
...what method should the player use if he wishes to pack specialised bombers (or whatever) with some other fighter into the same ship?
If you want more than one type of fighter on a ship, you'd need to add more than one type of fighter bay part to the ship's design.
Would this require the player to simply place and install two fighter bays on the same ship and then specify one as having stealthy bombers and the other as having fast moving interceptors?
You don't place generic fighter bays; you place a fighter bay / fighter unified part, which is different for each type of fighter available. If there are mods, you'd apply them to the part.
It would however be improved by permitting different sizes of fighter bay, or else the player might be forced to include X times as many fighters as he would have preferred, because he wishes that ship to carry X different types of fighter.
Capacity adjustments to a fighter bay (or missile launcher) parts could be a mod for those parts.
[fighter mods] may have no conceivable analogue for beams and missiles. Stealth in particular comes to mind here - it might be useful to make missiles harder to detect but what about SR weapons and PD?
Possible effects of applying a mod to a part off the top of my head include range modifiers, damage modifiers, cost modifiers, capacity (fighters or missiles) modifiers, making the part require a strategic resource to build (if such are added), making it possible to mount a part in a different (internal / external) type of design slot... More will likely come up when making content. A single mod might have both good and bad effects on its part. A mod need not be applicable to all parts.

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eleazar
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Re: Fighters

#19 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
Sui Generis wrote:..what method should the player use if he wishes to pack specialised bombers (or whatever) with some other fighter into the same ship?
If you want more than one type of fighter on a ship, you'd need to add more than one type of fighter bay part to the ship's design.
If this is the case we should have a pretty low number of different types of fighters. It would feel pretty dumb if you had to abandon squadrons of fighters/bombers because the ones that survived don't match the fighter bays of the carriers that survived. A high number of fighter/bomber types would greatly increase the chances of this happening.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Fighters

#20 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:It would feel pretty dumb if you had to abandon squadrons of fighters/bombers because the ones that survived don't match the fighter bays of the carriers that survived. A high number of fighter/bomber types would greatly increase the chances of this happening.
We could have about 4 or 5 types of interceptors and bombers (8 to 10 total types of fighters over the course of a game), with the types in a clear and simple progression within each category. This way, there should be relatively few types likely to be in use simultaneously, and thus not much problem with losses due to lacking a compatible bay for the surviving fighters.

If we have 10 types of fighters, and 6 to 8 types of beams and missiles, that's about 24 weapon parts alone. Along with all the other types of parts, that's probably more than enough, for v1.0. Probably there should be fewer types of missiles to minimize ammo-sharing issues, as with fighters.

Fighters are a type of ammo, though, so can be instantly resupplied to max capacity if a ship is in fleet supply range.

We can say that mods are part of the fighter bay, and individual fighters of a given type are easily and automatically converted to use whatever mods are applied to the bay they're launched from (or to use no mods, or to act like a modless fighter for bays that have mods applied that don't alter fighter performance). This way, a fleet could have several different mods applied to its fighter bay parts, but be able to share any available fighters between ships freely.

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IConrad
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Re: Fighters

#21 Post by IConrad »

We can say that mods are part of the fighter bay, and individual fighters of a given type are easily and automatically converted to use whatever mods are applied to the bay they're launched from (or to use no mods, or to act like a modless fighter for bays that have mods applied that don't alter fighter performance). This way, a fleet could have several different mods applied to its fighter bay parts, but be able to share any available fighters between ships freely.
May I suggest a simpler approach? Place mods on bays -- yes. But then track 'replacements' rather than individual types of fighters. Give all the various types of fighters (bombers, intercepters, recons, etc) a single logistical pool from which they draw their replenishment, and in the flavor text of that pool make it clear that it is replacement parts and new personnel that is actually being so supplied. These replacement parts could go so far as to include core fighter frames; this would then imply that the carriers are acting in a Battlestar-Galactica-esque way when outside of range and rebuilding/retooling their own fighters whenever some receive damage. This means that while a ship still /has/ their fighter complement supplied, they can use fighters outside of the supply lines. But they will eventually run out (because you run out of pilots when your pilots get shot... :) )

It also simplifies down to only remembering what types of fighters are in which fleet. Which, as we are it seems allowing our fleets to be named, should be somewhat relatively simple.

Can I again say that I truly like the idea of using recon scout 'fighters'? I've never seen that implemented in a space 4x game.

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Re: Fighters

#22 Post by tzlaine »

I think that in the spirit of KISS, fighters should be considered a type of ammo, and any fighter bay slot can contain any fighter type. I'm inclined to say the same thing about missiles, too. Otherwise, we end up with a lot of un-fun bean counting going on.

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eleazar
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Re: Fighters

#23 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:We could have about 4 or 5 types of interceptors and bombers (8 to 10 total types of fighters over the course of a game), with the types in a clear and simple progression within each category. This way, there should be relatively few types likely to be in use simultaneously, and thus not much problem with losses due to lacking a compatible bay for the surviving fighters.
To be clear, you are talking about a progression where the Level 1 Interceptor is inferior in every way to the Level 2 Interceptor, and thus once the player has the tech to make L2 Interceptors there is no reason to make L1s?
Geoff the Medio wrote:Fighters are a type of ammo, though, so can be instantly resupplied to max capacity if a ship is in fleet supply range.
A couple of posts back when i said that fighters could be designed, but would have only a few slots, i was assuming that they would be created like any other ship in a shipyard via the build queue. On reflection, i think your idea is better, we don't want to have players making X number of fighters to make up for losses and routing back carriers to shipyards to pick up new squadrons of fighters. Far better to supply carriers with fighters via our abstracted supply system.
iConrad wrote:But then track 'replacements' rather than individual types of fighters. Give all the various types of fighters (bombers, intercepters, recons, etc) a single logistical pool from which they draw their replenishment...
If i understand you properly, that is indeed the plan.

tzlaine wrote:I think that in the spirit of KISS, fighters should be considered a type of ammo, and any fighter bay slot can contain any fighter type. I'm inclined to say the same thing about missiles, too. Otherwise, we end up with a lot of un-fun bean counting going on.
I think what Geoff is suggesting, is that the type of bay determines what sort of fighter is produced. I assume a fighter would normally try to return to it's original bay (or one of the same type), but if that is impossible due to the destruction of a carrier, the fighter will enter an available bay of another type and thereby be converted to the type of it's bay. No bean-counting required.

Since missiles are sent out on a one-way trip, the situation is simpler. I don't see how bean-counting would be a problem. Missiles are part of a nebulous, indefinite "ammo resupply", until they reach the specific ships being resupplied.
Displaying what is going on with a ship that contains multiple missile types seems like a more important problem to avoid.

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Re: Fighters

#24 Post by Sui Generis »

Whilst I understand the need to KISS and the considerable workload involved in making 0.4 (in itself an incomplete version of a full game which may yet be expanded after 1.0) I think it would be sad to have to limit the possibilities of using fighters to accomplish varying objectives. I'm thinking of the various possible roles that have been mentioned for fighters, such as scouting, range-spotting, intercepting, assault, etc, as well as the different possible technologies that might be implemented to aid them: stealth, cloaking devices, sensors and the like.

It will probably be desirable (in order to simplify things) to simply disallow specific designs for scouts and just force the player to make use of normal fighter designs.

However I still think it may be possible to allow a somewhat broader range of fighter types without being likely to overcomplicate the UI. Just list the additional types with the other possibilities of fighter bay 'mods' in the ship design section.

Avoiding the problem of ditching fighters due to surviving motherships having incompatible fighter bays could be solved by simply having them converted to the compatible type, so any excess fighters that couldn't normally be recovered would be declared bombers and used to resupply an empty bomber bay. This appears to be a nice, clean, simple solution.

The only possible problem I foresee with this would be if the different types of fighters had different production costs (in the form of a more costly bay if it housed bombers for instance.)
This might conceivably be exploited by a player, who builds lots of motherships containing the weaker fighters and uses some other more expensive fighters in a battle. Assuming the expensive fighters were largely lost, the player could self-destruct the motherships of the cheap fighters and thus force them to be converted to the more expensive types in a kind of obscure arbitrage.

Of course this would only be an issue if the fleet were temporarily out of supply range, or there was a pp cost to maintaining supply, or to establishing a pool of supply (like an imperial treasury), or if the fighters were not given uniform production/resupply costs.

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Re: Fighters

#25 Post by eleazar »

Sui Generis wrote:I think it would be sad to have to limit the possibilities of using fighters to accomplish varying objectives. I'm thinking of the various possible roles that have been mentioned for fighters, such as scouting, range-spotting, intercepting, assault...
I don't see anything that would prevent fighters from being used for these objectives. The issue is how customizable fighters will be to specialize in any of these roles.


But anyway, "limiting possibilities" is an integral part of any design process. Every decision prevents FO from being dozens of other possible games.

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Re: Fighters

#26 Post by Draco »

No matter in what way fighters will be incorporated in the game, they will only make sense,
if beam weapons will have a rather short range.
I like fighters and carriers and am all happy as a little child when I play a game having those.
But in MoO2 they where just plain useless (except Assault Shuttles).
The bays where huge and a bunch of Beam weapons (taking up the same space) could
- hit every round
- hit at a very long range
- do more damage
- couldn't be shot

So in order to make fighters useful, they need something other weapon systems can't.
Some possibilities:
- Precision (directly attack specific ship systems (engines, weapons, shield gens...))
- First Strike (can attack enemy ships long before they would enter beam/missile targeting range)

Ok, great. Now my head is bursting with ideas.
(I'll post a new topic to not hijacking this one)

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Re: Fighters

#27 Post by Josh »

If the topic is fighter related, I think your allowed to post it this very much fighter related thread. I could be wrong.

Depending on the customizability of fighters on carriers, would it be beneficial in any way to just have one versatile type of fightercraft rather than fighters and bombers?

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Re: Fighters

#28 Post by Krikkitone »

Draco wrote:No matter in what way fighters will be incorporated in the game, they will only make sense,...
This is part of the design document

3 types of weapons

Long Range
Short Range
Point Defense

LR>SR>PD>LR
[Long Range Weapons can be intercepted by point defense]
So Fighters/Missiles (or any weapon that Can be intercepted) will have longer ranges than beam weapons (or any weapon that Can't be intercepted). This might only hold if they are near the same tech level, but keeps fighters/missiles useful compared to beams.

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Re: Fighters

#29 Post by Draco »

Yeah, figured that out shortly after.
Sorry for dumb post... :(

But what about:

Interceptors: PD Cannons & PD Missiles (see my Bomb Thread for what I mean)
Bombers: Missiles (normal or maybe HM)

Especially those Bombers would be quite cool,
racing (well, chuging) towards the enemy and attacking them with LR weapons way before any other.
I think about F117 or B2 with nuclear cruise missiles
(Actually this scene from ID4 comes to my mind, with the Radar Screen showing the Bomber firing its missile...)

Just a thought.

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Re: Fighters

#30 Post by Black_Dawn »

One element which has not been discussed yet in this thread yet is how the concept of 'fighters' adds to game flavor.

Even if fighters have exactly the same functionality as missiles (travel at X speed, do Y damage, are vulnerable to PD but not LR weapons), they will still add flavor to the mix. Artists can go nuts on fighter designs, making visual concepts unique to each race. Missiles are generally metallic tubes of propellant and explosives whose designs are limited by physics.

An alien race that prefers strapping pilots into a tiny, undefended ship "feels" much different from a race that lobs missiles.

There is more to it than just art however. In many sci-fi games that do have fighters, however, there is more difference between missiles and fighters than mere visual flavor. Fighters tend to be 'effect' based weapons rather than sheer damage weapons. For example, a typical missile travels to its target, explodes, and does damage. Fighters can do damage over time, sticking around and even moving on to a new target if the first is destroyed. In MOO2, there were also varieties of fighters that could take over enemy ships, act as a point defense screen or target specific ship systems.

I certainly think that missiles should be more ubiquitous than fighters, as they are a cheap, simple technology that any race with rocketry and micro-electronics would inevitably use. Fighters have certain innate advantages that would make them feasible: 1) Organic, intelligent guidance system (immune to EM disruption). 2) Persistent/reusable long-range weapon that can also provide reconnaissance. 3) Social and cultural benefits tied to the perceived bravery of fighter pilots.
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