Defence against fighter torpedos

[Yorkshire Tea]

Hi all,

Well I've muttered about this before, and thought I'd give it another go on now that v4.5's been released.

As a destroyer commander how am I supposed to defend against fighter launched torpedos? 8 inbound fighters, each launching 4 torps = dead destroyer pretty quick. Could the stock campaign/ships be modded so that:

a) Corvettes and destroyers pdbs (point defence batteries) can target fighter launched torps.
or
b) Longer range/more powerful pdbs to target fighters at 50-80 kms out?
or
c) more pdbs period.
or
d) A CAP of fighters to escort DESRONS at all times?

Or do I just suck [:D]

Also - forgive me if I've missed this, but can you still only radio contact the first 9 ships on the comms. list? How about possibly implementing radio as one of the drop down menu functions, so that any ship can be contacted?

Finally, thank you Destroyer Studios for such a wonderful game - It's a tremendous achievement for such a small team, and it's great that the game is still being actively supported and upgraded for such a considerable period of time after release! [:)]

[Yorkshire Tea]

Oh, one more thing whilst I'm thinking (ow!)

Could a "splash xx" message be added when a friendly downs an enemy. At the moment it's just distressing watching all the Force:Space death messages. [:(]

[Pheonix Starflare]

Well, as far as I understand it, SS is playing 'as designed' IE milo wanted the fighter missiles to be this dangerous. However, I agree that the DESRONs and others really need a CAP. Like, really bad. Fighters arent scrambled quite fast enough to make a CAP unneeded, and perhaps escort fighter AI needs to be tweaked so it'll try and intercept enemy fighters well beyond missile range.

[Yorkshire Tea]

Thanks for your response. I've got no problem with torps being dangerous, they should be, but I feel that it would make the game more interesting to ramp up the pdbs as it would make killing cap ships more of a challenge on either side. Alternately, how about adding an AEGIS style dedicated anti-fighter cruiser to each side? [:)] Chaff/Decoy launchers on capship's are another idea. At the moment Starshatter feels abit like playing WWII battleships but with modern fighter/bombers [:(] I'm also wondering if using a sacrificial destroyer to close on the enemy carriers and blasting off some probes would prod the friendly AI into launcing a decent sized strike against the carriers, at the moment it feels like the enemy AI automatically knows where my carrier is at the start of a mission. Is the eneny AI subject to the same sensor rules as the friendly AI?

On a more positive note, the AI seems to be much improved in 4.5 generally though - I spent almost an hour watching very vicious fighter dogfights last night. I also noted that capships seem to save their torps, close range, then try and pick off pdbs with their main beam weapons now - good tactic.

[Dirt12]

In terms of fending off fighter ASM's in a capitol ship, I had found that setting the PDBs to 'auto' then pressing shift+u to select the incoming threats worked pretty well in the prior versions except that it often times resulted in a CTD. In 4.5 the CTD has been fixed but it appears to me that the PDBs now have a real hard time hitting the ASM's. More than in the prior version.

Also, (not to divert the thread) but has anyone noticed in 4.5 that there appears to be a high frequency of fighters crashing on landing. In the early version this was a bug that was later squashed. I'm concerned it may have resurfaced in 4.5???

[Yorkshire Tea]

Well I finally finished Highland on Veteran as a destroyer commander. Two things of note, as Dirt 12 says, shift + u can target incoming harpoons, but the pdbs don't engage [:(] and of over 70 fighter sorties in the last two missions, 25% were killed by crashing into the Archon on docking (final event in the after action log of 'collision with Archon' [:(]

[altmunster]

The 'fighter crashing on landing bug' is what drove me away from being addicted to this game many months ago. i had finally made it to commodore, only to realize half the fighter pilots under my command couldn't land. [:@]
I came back to the forum with hopes that this patch had fixed that major problem. the recents posts are discouraging to say the least.

[Yorkshire Tea]

I'd be happy if landing AI craft just dissappeared 10 - 20m short of the landing bay, rather than actually entering the bay if that would fix the problem.

My observations were based on the final debrief screen. It's possible that the fighters that crashed into Archon were already severely damaged in previous dogfights, I suppose.

[altmunster]

i concur with your initial comment.