Is it theorycrafting, or your experience?
Because my experience says, when I was still ratting, that as soon as the fighters stop, they die like anything else. So I can’t speak of passive and repetetive. Did you even try to bomb with the fighters (from the supercarrier) and not shoot down your own light fighters, or to get them away from the elite frigates in time at the sanctum, because otherwise they will be destroyed immediately?
It’s anything but passive and repetetive.
With certainty I can say that I would be able to multibox 3-4 accounts with the guns, but not even 2 in parallel with the carriers. So it’s not that simple after all.
I think you misinterpreted my statement. I was saying that fighters were far too passive, before the Squadron mechanic was implemented. I find the way the operate and are controlled, now, to be a vast improvement over the way they were, before, in terms of taking an active role in their operation.
To that end, I also support implementing a similar mechanic for Drones, as they are still too much of a passive weapons system.
This is both from theory-crafting and my own experience.
Ok, now I get it, thanks. In fact, I misunderstood you then.
Even if i agreed with that, i worry that CCP would totally screw it up with the quality they are putting out today. In short, I don’t trust them to develop decent drone handling, so I’d rather leave it as it is instead of getting another lousy handling in the game for years.
Trust me, I worry about the implementation, as well. Which is partially why I want to iron out the kinks with the mechanic, now, before applying it to anything else.
By virtue of having living human pilots in the fighters, and the amount of structure a carrier has should make them harder to kill.
Irl, a carrier can take out just about everyone. They launch fighter jets, which blow things up. The carrier takes no damage.
The support ships are primarily for refuel, restock of equipment and weapons systems, and for search and destroy of submarines etc.
Regardless, a carrier takes more tritanium than any subcap, even up to medium size fleets. Bullets and bombs shouldn’t easily be able to get through that much metal.
That doesn’t include the amount of shield that can be leveraged with a much bigger reactor core. I assume that the shielding in this game is fixed to a certain amount of shield emitters on the hull. A carrier has enough hull to emit more shielding.
My ratting carrier has 1.7m ehp, which is a lot. However, it should probably be more, considering the actual structure.
Ewar vulnerability gives a counter to what is otherwise a very strong damage platform. When carrier fighters are slower and have worse application than a dominix’s heavy drones, then you can make an argument for buffing their ewar resistance.
There’s no need to buff their EWAR resistance. But applying EWAR to an entire squadron at a time entirely negates the whole purpose of having multiple small craft as your main weapon system, especially when they have trouble applying to anything smaller than a Battlecruiser.
My memory could be wrong, but wasn’t it done this way to try to minimize the number of calculations in capital fights?
While the infrastructure is improving all the time, if they all become individually targetable, then that’s balloons the number of individual assets to track on grid and to run calculations for each tick. So the squadron gives a graphical sense of a swarm of fighters, but the backend only has to deal with a smaller set of updates.
From a performance perspective the alternative probably wouldn’t be to split a squadron into multiple individual fighters, it would probably be collapse a squadron back to just 1 fighter, in which case they may as well just follow drone mechanics again, with hull/armor/shield again instead of size of the squadron.
Yes, that was one of the main purposes of the mechanic. As I said, I’m not sure how you’d accomplish the task of treating fighters as individual units, in terms of EWAR and damage, within the Squadron mechanic.
Yeah, I think you’ll find that at the moment, even if a reinforced node is running on the latest generation of CPU, it still won’t be far enough advanced from 2015 that CCP devs could easily go a different way, while still giving sense of fighters being in a squadron.
The number of fighters essentially replaced the shields/armour/hull mechanic as explained in the devblog:
While a squadron of fighters costs a tonne more than putting 1 fighter on the field, trying to make each one individually targetable would be difficult.
From an ewar perspective it might be possible to apply a % modifier on the effectiveness of a squadron, so that some of the squadron is still active depending on how much ewar is applied, but going to individual fighters is more likely to just result in a squadron of 1 with shield/armour/hull again.
Maybe in a few more years it will be possible, but I suspect in terms of community concensus, we’d rather be able to cram 10K-15K ships into a system for a fight, than have only 2000-3000 ships + individual fighters in large squadrons.
Having to lock and apply ewar individually to each fighter (as if you could even do that for all 27 fighters) would be a huge buff to their ewar resistance. And if I’m flying something small I’m much more wary of fighters than heavy drones.
Beacause if you make capital stronger (by a lot), you could reinforce ship like BC/BS and offer more option for roam and pvp than just: “YOLO 10 frigate gang , or 3 nano cruiser lol lol lol”
