Bombers need to be fixed/ fighter craft

from Sins Forums
Bombers seem slightly over powered ... if you have enough of them say 20+ squadrons you can take out anything in 1 attack run... and well they need a better counter ...

regular fighters seem to ignore bombers ... and well some thing should be added to base defense options that can counter a swarm of bombers.

just my 2 cents

(I know massing any type of unit can be deadly but since fighter craft seem to never take damage and are extremely fast they become unstoppable when massed)

Regards
-Dance Commander
3,542 views 12 replies
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
i will agree, fighter / bomber fighting does seem a bit unbalanced still...
CursorFX - Customize your Windows cursor
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
If they dogged them and the bombers evaded instead of ignoring them it would work out much better. Flak would just kill them, and fighters would be the true defense that slowed their progress down.

They really die rather fast already, it's just the fighters take one swipe at them on the way in, they get a couple shots before the fighters get back around for a second shot, so they've already killed something really big before more than maybe one bomber per fighter wing has been killed. If they could tie them up instead of following them around, bombers would be a freebee as long as you had a fighter wing for each of them, it needs to be somewhere in the middle.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

regular fighters seem to ignore bombers
End of quote

I am positive this was fixed as of beta 4. As for the rest of it, we are still tuning bomber and flak frigate damage. One possibility is to give flak frigates an area of effect attack.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Why not give fighters a *chance* of intercepting/striking bombers, or giving bombers a *chance* to be distracted by pursuing/incoming fighters?

The more variety the better.

If in 1000 fights Fighter X always takes precisely 3.655 seconds to destroy Bomber Y, thats unfortunate. I remember in Descent: Freespace my missiles were sometimes evaded, my gunnery sometimes didn`t pay off.

Use number calculations as a base, but allow unusual things to happen... keep players on their toes.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
The fighter vs bomber issue was fixed to a point, but from what i have seen if a fighter is attacking something else. Like a ship, or structure when no bombers are present (at least until they respawn). They don't switch targeting back to the bombers until after what they targeted is destroyed. If bombers are present when fighters launch they do generally go after them 1st.

A group of 5, or 6 flak frigs in close formation (if you can call it a formation) will wipe even large numbers of bomber wings off the map. However the bombers do get that alpha strike off before they are vaporized. Ironically the bombers were targeting my flak frigates. After a few respawns i had no flaks left, and had to rely on my Kol's flak bursts, and Dunov's magnetize.
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
One possibility is to give flak frigates an area of effect attack.
End of quote

not to be blunt, but that should have been a given...
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
I actually played a game just recently - I decided that I would go 100% bombers and that's it. I focused on nothing bot Sova carriers and the research to get me more of them (cap ship upgrades, missile strength upgrades) and I threw in bomber hangars for defense and the occasional Carrier Corvette if I had a few spare bucks.

I was thoroughly tromping over all the enemy fleets for quite a while. Maybe 45 minutes of gameplay. I owned about 10 planets which was more than my fair share, but the AI started catching on.

Soon every fleet that warped into my worlds had a heavy compliment of fighter squadrons.

The battle that did me in? Two AI fleets attacked at the same time, with about 9 fighter squadrons and a few flak frigates. My 25 bomber squadrons all seemed destroyed within a few minutes and my sova carriers were left with their onboard guns to take out the onslaught of enemy ships.

They failed miserably.

Suddenly, within the space of about 5 minutes, I went from steamrolling the map to having not a single ship to my name. playing the bomber game seems cheap and easy but it is SO easy to take them out I was actually going to consider asking for an increase in bomber HP or something.
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
can I just say that the biggest annoyance atm , is that if you have fighters in your battle , bandboxing big ships to attack bigships becomes cumbersome

because you will accidently select some of the fighters , and they will start attacking bigships.

Offcourse rapid clicking can solve this. Id rather not resort to that.
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
can I just say that the biggest annoyance atm , is that if you have fighters in your battle , bandboxing big ships to attack bigships becomes cumbersome
End of quote


Tried using the empire tree instead?
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top


Tried using the empire tree instead?
End of quote


A lot of people are still adapting to that option -- especially since it only really became viable, IMO, since you added the selection based version. I'm learning, slowly, but it is a slow process.
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
Kryo the empire tree is nice, but it shouldnt be the only way to go about it, IMO fighters should be automatically dissabled from band-box selection (not bombers) as if you want to select all of your fighters, you just have to altclick them.