A New Use for Strikecraft, and a Solution to Carrier Spam

Well...  While fleets of carriers only deal massive damage, I took a fleet of 40 transporters and devastated a series of planets.  My opponent was apparently waiting for me to get to his homeworld...  When I got there, I met two hundred flaks and three kols with flak burst...

As for the part about the bombers... perhaps instead of launching a squad, you could launch one "super fighter" sort of like Vader's ship.  It is still a fighter but unlike the others can go to hyperspace (but there is only one).  The same could apply here.  Those ships could have phase drives...

I dont think this is needed.  Carrier spam is annoying as hell, but nerfing SC to nothingness isnt a good idea either.

As for these small ships blowing up giant caps, think of any modern day attack aircraft or even WWII torpedo bombers.  The Yamato was sunk fairly easily by torpdedos, and any modern day carrier/ship is easy picking for a harpoon.  What keeps these aircraft at bay are fleet defenses like Aegis crusiers.  We need a better AA type of cruiser, and AA on our capital ships.  That way, a carrier fleet could strike and then run, but the SC losses would make carriers weak in long battles.

Another thing that should be added is a cost per squad.  Make this cheap, but everytime a fighter/bomber is replaced you get hit again.  Something like 10 per fighter/bomber, so a fighter squad would be 50 or so.  This way, a carrier cant win an attrition battle as easily.

i absolutely agree. another thing could be to give SC an ammo/fuel rating and once on or the other is depleted the SC has to return for refueling etc. Also, giving them a maximum range could prevent kiting etc. i mean, if a carrier jumped in at one side of a GW and deployed its SC to the other side of the GW for a prolonged battle, how would the SC return? they would all run out of fuel...

anyway, no offense to the OP but i cant say as i like those ideas. it makes sense, sure, but... besides, we dont know exactly what kind of weapons these ships carries. agreed, fighters should be useless vs frigates and larger, but bombers could be carrying anything from high explosive warheads, to nukes, to thermo-plasmic charges, to EMP's, to anti-matter bombs, or some sort of alien technology we cant imagine.

back to gameplay... good luck jumping in a fleet of slow carriers with escorts through a fortified system and then getting it to a 'trade nexus' if one even exists in that map, then destroying stuff willy nilly. all it takes is a moderately upgraded Starbase in every UCGW to at least give notice/keep you tied up until a fleet comes to mop you up.

im having this debate in another thread, TEC Sova Carrier Embargo ability is impossible to use at its full potential unless you can leave it in an enemy GW alsmot indefinitly, or unless you are in a battle.

really, the only thing i can think of to fend off SC swarms is to have Triple-A on everything imaginable, on flak frigs, on caps, on carriers, on destroyers (if i can manage to get the devs to implement it) on structures, assault cruisers and seige frigates, etc. another thing would be to let SC be destroyed by catching an unlucky laser or slug or maybe even crashing into a ship? it would be difficult to code but it would certainly discourage SC swarming

Ah see, now you're getting into the problem that much of sci-fi is stuck in. Space battles are nothing like modern ocean battles. If the Yamato had shields capable of interecepting all that damage, I don't think it would've been offed that quickly.
Yes, aircraft play a very important and integral part of modern warfare, but it space, they'd be nothing more than peashooters against titanic shielded, heavily armored beasts like capital ships. I could maybe understand four squads of bomber being able to take out say, a frigate, but capital ships?

But yes, we really do need flak on the caps and much, much better anti-SC ships.

That's true I guess, but I'm going with what is seen in-game, not conjecture. In game, the explosions caused by bombers bombing/orb hitting/beaming is minute. Even combined, they're tiny little specks on the shields. Obviously not the raw atomic power of a nuke, or the cataclysmic and hard to miss anitmatter/matter reaction.

Did you catch the idea about phase space capable bombers? Those might be able to do it.

i did, whats to stop a starbase upgraded with fighters wiping you out?

and, i you keep the current effectiveness of bombers vs structures, whats stopping me jumping a whole load of bombers into your most heavily defended worlds, wiping out your structures and whatnot, then jumping to the next planet, always one step ahead of your pursuing Carrier or Flak fleet? it seems a bit unbalanced and unnecessary...

then again, perhaps the bombers are actually targetting weaknesses in shields, weapon ports, engine intakes/exhausts, SC launch bays, etc. Also, even if it is a pea shooter, if you put the shield under enough strees at a single point, it will eventually fail...

anyway, ill be honest, i cant think of a real reason why bombers would do damage against shielded targets unless they had some SERIOUSLY heavy weaponry, especially based on what we know/can see from the game. however, we could always make up some bull about larger ships shields are callibrated to repel higher powered weapons, so smaller, slower missiles etc can get through much easier and do damage.

anyway, im just reluctant to remove a rather sizeable part of the game... id much rather change the graphics, give them some 1 kiloton nukes or super-charged particle beams or whatever, and keep them where they are. i DEFINITLY think though, that fighters need to keep an exclusively anti-SC role, and be all but useless vs anything larger than maybe a colony frigate.

and, i just remembered something, Vasari bombers use phase missile that are meant to bypass shields... so i can understand why those missiles are so powerful, but given, TEC strikecraft mounted weapons need some sort of boost

You're all forgetting that most of the weapons in-game would use antimatter as the source of their destructive force, thus all the weapons in game have the most energetic natural reaction known to give themt he power they need. Look at the basic TEC Javelin missiles: If they impact a shield the matter of the rocket itself provides the reaction, and if it strikes hull there is more than enough matter to keep a continued explosive reaction going. (Before anyone raises the argument, localised shielding should theoretically able to limit the damage to a specific area, so the damage would be capped). Then there are the antimatter powered laser beams and missiles that fly through another dimension to contend with...

The only things I can see not really making a difference would be autocannons, but I'm sure everyone knows that MORE DAKKA simply overwhelms reality to the point where they do awesome damage no matter what!

Touche, Pirate-Jack, touche. Musn't forget the DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA!

@rezonator, you may have a point about the starbases. I have hardly played Entrenchment, because pretty much immediately after I got it my graphics card died and I've been using my built in crap card since, so I'm basing these off of Vanilla Sins.
But as to the problem of crazy mad rampaging bombers, I had already proposed that they be underpowered against shielded targets, and that they would be automatically programmed to return to their carrier every x minutes to say, rearm or refuel. Thus, the bombers would be able to did piddly damage against your shielded structures.

Then again I just realized that I backed myself into a corner. With the autoreturn to base feature, it could take a sizable portion of your time to get to said destination. The bombers might have say a minute to raise hell, then they have to spirit their way back home. Hmm.

um... no? honestly, abilities use anti-matter primarily as a lore-friendly way of explaining why you cant fire your Gauss round, or use seige planet, or phase missile swarm whatever every 10 seconds, as well as creating a way to prevent ships using abilities or enabling them to use abilities for longer (i.e. AM stealing abilities, Magnetic Clouds and Suns/AM improving/increasing abilities respectively)

i mean, lets say you have a fleet in a magnetic cloud UNGW, each ship can still fire its standard weapons, but all abilities are disabled. this means that anti-matter is not used in any weapons in the game. it may be used to power the ship and engines, and, ultimately, may be the thing provides the power for the auto-cannons and lasers and missile loading systems etc, but that does not tranlate into increased firepower. its like a nuclear powered ship or submarine is no more powerful than one that is run on diesel fuel and electric batteries... (except the nuclear powered ship/sub can do a kamikaze run but...)

also, even if it was used, the only weapons that would be improved by utilising an anti-matter reaction would be missiles (i.e. just like a nuclear explosion, plus propagation effects). lasers MIGHT get a higher damage output, but i dont believe a matter/anti-matter reaction can generate a laser itself, so the power it does create still has to be channeled through a laser capacitor and so on and so forth. and im sure beam weapons, autocannons, plasma cannons, wave cannons, etc etc wont be affected by utilising an anti-matter reaction because it simply doesnt apply.

im not sure if you know how a nuclear reactor works, so if you dont, ill go through it briefly:
a nuclear reactor uses a controlled nuclear reaction to create heat (so, you fire a particle at an atom, that atom shatters and fires more particles at other atoms, creating a chain-reaction. this is controlled using a dense metal like lead so that the reaction stays within manageble levels). that heat is used to heat water until it becomes steam, which then runs through a pipe at high speeds (due to pressure) and turns a turbine (like a big windmill) which is what actually generates the electricity. the steam then runs through more pipes, eventually cooling back to water, cooling the entire system, before going back to the reactor to be heated up again and thats a nuclear reaction. it also happens to work exactly the same as a coal-burning, fuel-burning and gas-burning electricity generator, except the potential for power generation is much greater.

so, point is, a matter/anti-matter reaction is very similar, the matter comes into contact with the anti-matter, they cancel each other out and create massive amounts of energy, most commonly heat, light and radiation, follwed by some less common/useful types. so, the fact of the matter is that an anti-matter reaction has nothing to do with how much damage a laser does, aside from the amount of power there is available to channel into the weapon. just powering a laser with M/AM generated electircity does not give it the characteristics of the method in which it was generated...

the only thing i can think of is if you could create and channel anti-matter particles into a beam and fire them at a target, creating a M/AM reaction between the weapon and the target hull... however, assuming sheilds in Sins use super charged ions and protons or something similar to create the shield, i cant say how effective this weapon would be against shields... possibly entirely ineffective...

so, long story short... the only existing weapons that would be benefitted by using a M/AM reaction would be missiles, and possibly a new anti-matter beam weapon, though its effectiveness versus shields is suspect... everything else is simply inapplicable

Ermm.. Actually, the only direct byproduct of M/AM reaction is light... and lots of it...  When a proton and an antiproton impact, you get a "super photon" aka, a photino.  Now, photinos do strange things when they impact something...  They can decompose into a proton and antiproton, they can decompose into quarks, they can decompose into photons (about a thousand of them), or they can be absorbed by the target.  If they are absorbed, it yields an extreme release of heat and as electrons don't have the mass to stop them, it hits the nucleus.  Upon impact, that heat is enough to decompose small atoms (or radioactive ones).  

Essentially, you could have a laser directly created by AM... And it would be very powerful.  As for beams, good luck keeping the reaction stable long enough.  Now, AM bombs are pretty much the only explosive that works well in space (with the exception of evaporating quantum state black holes).  Conventional bombs have a fireball, but most of it is the shockwave.  The same applies to a nuke.  about 60% of the energy goes into the shockwave (with 25% in fallout, and 15% in the fireball...)  AM bombs have no fireball and no shockwave.  They just vaporize anything unlucky enough to be near them.  A paperclip could level Manhattan, an apple could end life on Earth, and a house could blow up the planet.  The point is, don't mess with the guy holding the detonator.  If used in space, a nuke could damage shields with the EMP, but that's about it. AM bombs don't have that issue.  They are an omnidirectional laser...  That said, the magnetic and electric fields would easily distort a shield and I don't think I have to explain the effects of hitting a hull...

Simply put, the reason that they are used for abilities is because of the ships reactor.  Using an ability requires massive amounts of energy and as such, that in and of itself can destabilize the AM.  Combine that with already unstable AM and you just destroyed your own ship.  For this reason, you can still use weapons.  Now, because the systems used to hold AM stationary are massive, you could only have one real AM reactor per ship.  Sure you could put it on your guns, but shooting them would blow holes in your ship.  For this reason, we have things called wires.

But back on topic...  I do like the idea of a fuel rating, but not so much the range...I think though to refuel, they shouldn't have to dock, but just be within a radius of 500 or so of their carrier...  

Speaking for Entrenchment:

carriers are pretty meh. Try spamming then in mp agaisnt a skilled opponent and see what happens.