In a game where you can control massive battlecruisers with blistering amounts of firepower and tons of armor and shields, I'm wondering how, or whether it is even possible, to make fighter class ships fun and rewarding to play.

I'm working once again on my own personal TC-type thing, not really planned to be released ever, though if anything actually does come of my puttering, I most certainly will release it for other people to enjoy. But right now, I'm trying to figure out how I want to see the gameplay balance end up before sticking in all manner of cool outfits and guns and seeing what comes of it.

The battleships/carriers I definitely want to see have more survivability and firepower than they did in the original Nova scenario, as it seemed all too easy to burn down even the heaviest of ships in a matter of a few seconds in even a medium vessel. However, I also want to have all classes of ship (capital, gunboat, and fighter) to be viable and enjoyable options. In stock Nova, the lack of survivability of heavier vessels combined with the superior maneuverability of medium vessels made medium vessels generally a more effective choice. However, fighters even in the stock Nova scenario, though having a slight maneuverability advantage over the medium ships, did not have the firepower to do nearly so much damage. I fear that if I increase the staying power and firepower of capital ships, fighter-types run the risk of being worthless as player ships, hardly able to dent larger ships on their own except with short range and limited ammo bomb-type weapons.

Now I don't necessarily have a problem with killing a large capital ship in a fighter being a major achievement. However, since small fast ships are fun to play, I also don't want it to feel like you're missing out on glory and riches by sticking with a smaller craft. I'm just not entirely sure how to do that. I plan on making different mission strings for capital ship captains and fighter captains, but I want them to be substantively different rather than just have the space battles in the fighter type string be easier. I think having missions that focus more on hit and run type attacks would be a start, but I don't think the player should get to miss out on epic space battles either. And it would also be nice to have rewarding things to do while not on any particular story mission that would require a fast ship and not a hulking battleship type. So I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas on how to accomplish this?

Fighters have disadvantages:
Not much outfit space
Less shields and armor

Fighters have advantages:
Really fast
Harder to hit
Recharge quickly

Playing a fighter pilot would be made most fun if you can outrun or outmaneuver missiles (turn faster so they overshoot). Make your missiles very hard-hitting, so they'll take out your fighter with two or three shots. Maybe a slower torpedo will blow you up in one. Did you ever play the original EV? I think the fighters there were quite fun.

Since you have limited outfit space, consider a set of fighter-only outfits that take a small space and make a proportional improvement for a fighter-class ship. Think about how people might want to play a fighter. Cargo upgrade for blockade runners. Shield upgrade for strafers. Armor upgrade for missile gunships. Stuff like that. Speed and maneuvering upgrades are always nice.

In terms of weapons, I again think of the original EV. Javelin rockets were great for fighters. They were cheap, effective, didn't take up any space beyond the launchers, and fired quite fast. Consider the space bomb concept too. Make a run at the big battleship you're trying to take out, drop your load, it drifts right into your target while you blast off in another direction so their huge turrets don't take you out. If you're going to be killing other fighters or smaller ships, a load of a few missiles is always nice, and lots of decent forward-facing guns.

I think the key for making fighters fun is providing lots of options and making the player not just come up with a single outfit set-up that will work in all cases, often what happens for players in Nova. When the US Navy sends a cruiser somewhere, the cruiser has a large number of shells, an armament of cruise missiles, and so on. Same armament, no matter the mission, because a cruiser has lots of space for a wide variety of weapons. When the US Navy launches an F/A-18 from the deck of a carrier, there's only a certain number of hardpoints on the wings, so they select a munitions load for the sortie. Some AA missiles for enemy fighters, a couple of AG missiles for the SAM site near the target, and exactly the size laser-guided bombs needed to demolish the target. Use this philosophy when you design missions for a fighter pilot. Missions may have various levels of challenge involved, that makes it fun, but part of that challenge is in deciding what you should put on your ship.

Just remember to keep the disadvantages and advantages straight. Give a high recharge speed on those shields for a fighter and keep them low for a capital ship. You can wear down a larger ship that way and survive the odd mistake in a fighter.

Really fast acceleration on the fighters. Not to mention speed. Missiles should be able to dodged (like mrxak said) with a little skill, and they should be specially suited for very specific roles.

something i always thought would be fun is to make the fighters and destroyer's proportional in size to each other. (this would mean that the destroyers would be HUGE.) and give them blind spots, so you can sneak up on it without it being able to shoot at you.

and smiley faced wrapping paper.

You could avoid having any really heavy guns available, and thus force battles to be primarily about fighters, ala Babylon 5. Take out the enemy's fighters, and he has no option except to retreat or surrender.

If Nova's point-defense worked properly---I've seen no evidence that it's all that good---then you could have capships which are unable to hit each other because ECM and interceptors take out most incoming warheads, ala Honor Harrington. In that case, fighters would be a necessity to provide fire from multiple angles.

If you made all weapons homing weapons (and supposedly unguided weapons with a very low turn rate), you could probably do something like that. PD only really works if you set it up so it can kill a projectile before hitting the enemy ship- so a lot of weak projectiles would probably work the best.

For things like turrets, you can use subs to make them into 'homing' weapons.

Guided weapons can still be target by PD even if their turn rate is 0, so that's not a problem. As for the effectiveness of PD weapons, I've found that most work fine, but that PD beams are very unreliable.

There's a slight imbalance (IMO) in stock Nova PD because of the low durability of missiles. This causes the PD weapons to have very low damage, which makes them next-to-worthless against fighters, but this could easily be changed in a TC by increasing missile durability.

Well it's based on spaceships and space battles that I've been doodling in my notebooks since elementary school so a large part of the ships and strategy is worked out already. Warships, while they posses some large weaponry, they primarily are armed with fighters and short ranged turrets to defend against said fighters. Well, one side's largest battleship is designed as a weapons platform with guns big enough to take out enemy carriers before they can launch fighters, but that's more for the intimidation factor than a cost-efficient military tactic. Fighters are also necessary on pretty much all capital ships to defend against smaller, cheaper, and more maneuverable missile destroyers armed with long range and very high speed anti-ship missiles that are difficult to target with point defense. Bomber type fighters will probably be the most threatening weapon in a ship's arsenal to other capital versus other capital ships since they can unload a large amount of weaponry, and then fly back to their carrier for more ammunition.

The problem is that the player themselves can't fly back to their carrier for more ammunition, which makes it a bit more difficult, I think. I don't really want to make capital ships, with their massive power reserves, have lower absolute recharge rates for their shields, since I can't think of a good reason for that to be the case. However, I think that making short range shield piercing weapons available to the player would be the way to go here, allowing them to chip away at enemy capital ships as long as they can avoid the fire. Also I do want to put in some ships, fighters especially, that have "reactive shields" with lower shield capacity but much higher recharge rates.

I also wanted to think up some ideas for some missions that would be specifically suited for small fast ships, like mrxak mentioned, blockade running seems a good role for fighter ships. Definitely a fun role that there wasn't enough of in the Nova scenario with the exception of a couple of mission strings. I think I'd definitely want some randomly available missions that involve smuggling (possibly while being pursued by rival factions) and delivering weapons/equipment to besieged outposts.

With the more storyline missions, it would be cool to give the player a wing of fighters under their control, mission based escorts, to give them a little more firepower in large battle situations. I also was thinking of maybe having a pursuit type mission where you had to dodge some escorts and catch an enemy before they fled through a certain number of systems. I'm not entirely sure how to accomplish that with Nova's mission system though. I think it might make a good change of pace though.

The player can't fly back to their carrier, but by using a system related to Qaanol's abilities plug, the player could reload in-flight.

I've described this before (mostly).
You have a player-friendly capship or two for the heavy firepower. Those ships have fighter bays, which will allow the friendly AI fighters to reload/etc.

For the player to reload/rearm, you have a mission running which does nothing. However, when the player aborts the mission (chooses to abort it from the quick mission briefing menu), it gives the player a marines outfit, and triggers two missions, which warps in a disabled, govt-less ship with very strong armor (even though it jumps in disabled). This ship has a crew of 1. The player can board this "supply ship" for fuel and ammo. The other mission warps in an invisible ship with armor/shields of 0, and a deathdelay of whatever you want (some large value). The ship goal of this mission will be to protect the ship. This mission acts as a "timer" for how long the player has to board the supply ship before losing the marines outfit. When this ship explodes, the mission fails, and it will remove the marines outfit from the player.

Mission 1: (already running). Does nothing, can be aborted, triggers S002 S003 G001 onAbort.
Mission 2: makes a SupplyShip jump in as an auxShip. Mission auto-aborts.
Mission 3: makes a timerShip jump in. ShipGoal is to protect the ship. onFail remove outfit 001, S001.

Outfit 1: marines outfit. 100% capturing chance boost.

SupplyShip: no movement capabilities, 32767 armor, jumps in disabled, no shields or anything else.

timerShip: invisible, 0 armor/shields, deathdelay 300 or so (300= about 10 seconds)

I like the idea, especially given Nova's feature of only letting the player plunder ammo for which they have weapons. I do, however, foresee a problem: mission ships cannot be boarded unless that is part of the objective, in which case you don't get the boarding screen, just mission texts/bits. You could, perhaps, make the mission objective to board the ship and grant outfit xxx on ShipDone, but that would require multiple missions (one for each type of launcher the player has).

That's why its an auxship, not a mission ship.
I "borrowed" the idea from FS2.

And here I spent all this time thinking both aux and mission ships followed the same boarding rules.

I have another question though: why include the marine outfit? Your capture odds are in no way related to your chance of successfully plundering ammo/energy/cargo/credits (a.k.a. not tripping the self-destruct). All capture odds affect are, well, capture odds. Plus, you don't want the player actually capturing the ship, do you? Just plunder it?

Unless I'm terribly mistaken again. :rolleyes:

I can make AI fighters actually dodge missiles.

That'd be a neat trick. Considering that, from my testing, to make long range missiles accurate enough to hit capital ships at long range, you also make them accurate enough to devastate fighter squadrons at medium range in the hands of the player.

@qaanol, on Jan 17 2008, 04:17 AM, said in Making Fighters Fun:

I can make AI fighters actually dodge missiles.

That's what makes Qaanol Qaanol; he always tells you of these wonderful things he can make the AI do, but leaves us to our own devices to figure out how.

I had thought of making fighters automatically avoid missiles by rendering their sprite too large and sticking the ship itself in a corner. So say the ship's 20x20 pixels, render at 100x100 and stick the actual ship in the upper-right 20x20. Assuming that missiles seek out the center of the sprite, they should usually miss the ships. Of course then your target boxes are totally screwed up.

Anybody else have ideas? Pretty sure he didn't modify the AI scripts, so what else could you do to make fighters dodge? I couldn't figure it out for Anathema, and as a result ended up having to give all Exile ships a 50% chance to jam everything and mark "turns away when jammed" on all missiles.

I suppose you could also just give missiles negative turning, then they'll dodge the fighters!

Also maybe you could equip fighters with a non-damaging weapon with a one frame lifespan, small blast radius, 360 degree, and relatively significant knockback that submunitions into a reasonably long range dummy projectile so that the AI will actually use it. Or even better just use one of the negative inaccuracy values and make sure the weapon doesn't start from the center of the ship so that the ship only "dodges" from side to side. Might really screw with the AI's accuracy though if it even works. And you'd get weird things happening when fighters fly over each other. But then again, fighters "bumping" could be a neat effect.

@keldor-sarn, on Jan 17 2008, 04:34 AM, said in Making Fighters Fun:

Also maybe you could equip fighters with a non-damaging weapon with a one frame lifespan, small blast radius, 360 degree, and relatively significant knockback that submunitions into a reasonably long range dummy projectile so that the AI will actually use it. Or even better just use one of the negative inaccuracy values and make sure the weapon doesn't start from the center of the ship so that the ship only "dodges" from side to side. Might really screw with the AI's accuracy though if it even works. And you'd get weird things happening when fighters fly over each other. But then again, fighters "bumping" could be a neat effect.

That would work well to blow fighters away from each other. Woud it work for missiles though? And it would have to be fuel-draining for the player or else it would be too powerful.

the "Repulsor Field"
could work. I've made it once to test it out, mine also ionized, and it protected my unarmed freighter from a horde of fighters for a fair bit of time. Certainly long enough to jump.

I think he meant a weapon with high recoil, so firing it would push the ship back.

Well the point would be so the fighter would knock itself back and forth on an erratic flight path so missiles would have to turn more to track it. I'm not sure if recoil would work, though, since in my experience that only seems to push the ship backward. It would have to be impact from the "weapon" itself.

With respect to the original question, I strongly recommend checking out EVO. EVO has effective fighters, but it's a serious accomplishment to take out, say, a Voinian Cruiser in a UE fighter (I've done it, it took a long time and it was pretty dodgy business, but it was fun). Fighters fare best in dogfights, but if you're in a heavy ship and you don't have a screen of fighters, then the opposing fighters will quickly tear you a new one - that is, a group of fighters can seriously hurt a heavy ship even using the rather stupid AI.

What EVO doesn't have is many "mid-size" ships. There's the Freight-Courier, which is pretty slow, and then there's a few alien ships (the Arada and Lazira, primarily) which are decent but don't have the room to make taking down capships a breeze and don't have the speed that fightercraft do. In other words, the mid-size ships are actually balanced by having features of both fighters and heavy ships while not being as good at either as actual fighters or heavy ships are.