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I was curious if anyone designs their own fighters and what loadout they pick.

I'm in the year 2840 and have Advanced Star Fighters and a variety of weapons, however the AI continually puts rail guns on both my attack fighters and medium bombers. I have tried to switch out the weapons but a pair of simple rail gun generates the most damage. My empire is Mortalen.

Any ideas? Put something like missiles or long range weapons on the bombers so they can 'stand off'? Or tech to some level where fighter-sized torpedoes become available?

put missles or torps(depends what better atm) on your Bombers, if fired they absorb much point defense and hold so your bombers longer alive.

Don't put a fuel cell on fighters, the reactor have enough fuel to last an entire battle. In fact I have modded them out of my games as they just confuse the AI when they build fighter crafts.

Otherwise... Torpedoes for Bombers and whatever the best fighter "intercept" weapon I have on the Fighters.

Hi,

I am a bit late to the party, but hopefully not too late.
When I looked into this, my theory was: Fighter vs Fighter weapons should be the ones with high dps. They don't do that much damage, but their overall damage is high. This works very nice against ships with low damage reduction. Against ships with higher damage reductions, these wouldn't do a dent.
On Fighter vs ship you want as much damage per hit as possible to get trough damage reduction.
In theory bombers would work against capital ships but suck against fighters and vice versa.
In practice BOTH categories are topped by Blaster Cannon (or a name similar to that. It's the tech on the top.). ( Such a shame. An awesome system where you have great differentiation and logic in FvF and FvS squandered by one all-powerful all-winner super weapon. (((
So my advice. Build only the blaster cannon version.

RANT:
For me personally, this is the single biggest letdown of the game. I love fighters, I love the combat system in this game, but I can't use the proper weapon because it sucks in comparison to the blaster on steroids. IMO that blaster should be a bombard weapon. I believe it even has that category suggested. If you look closely, you can see two fighter weapon categories. One is seemingly intended against fighters and has high dps with low per-hit values and the other has low rate of fire, but high damage per hit.
For my sanity I concluded this as a bug or oversight, not a design choice.

From what I seen so far, bombers are meant to be high alpha strike strikecraft. The problem is, the only weapon type that qualify for that is energy torpedoes. All other standof weapons have low damage and low DPS thus the autodesign will use whatever has the highest DPS in your weapon of choice. In this case, it will be railguns.

I tried to mod a railgun with half the fire rate, but double the damage (so, same DPS)

It still picked the lower damage weapon instead of the higher damage one... All other stats the same.

The fundamentals of the autodesign algorithm are totally borked. All else being equal, higher alpha, same DPS should always be picked over lower alpha, same DPS, but that basic functionality is not existent.

While I usually like to fiddle with ship designs, I found that it is rather useless to do so for fighters and bombers. There isn't much we can tweak there. Early game they are starved for power and switching the fuel tank for another generator may help (while increasing cost and maintenance), but once we get out of the fission era swapping weapons is pretty much all we can do. And from what I seen, there are few weapons that really matters, the rest lack punch or DPS to be worthwhile.

Maybe a new balance pass would help there? Also, some non weapon device to fine tune thoses fighters?

You dont need fuel tanks (or energy collectors) on fighters and bombers , no idea why they still here. all you need is a command center and 2 reactors