SugarAddict fucked around with this message at 09:08 on May 7, 2016

I wish it were possible to send a custom-message back to answer the Klackon’s concerns. Something like “Don’t worry, we got this!”. I guess ominous silence has to do it instead.

Apart from rebuilding our entire fleet since we can’t retrofit, that is.

OK, by now you’re probably confused as hell. Where did all those fighters come from? When we designed our own carriers, we didn’t put down space for reserve fighters, the designs are rather straightforward: If you put down 19 fighters, 19 fighters will launch at the start of a fight.

The fighters will then fly towards their target and shoot at it until either every fighter or every enemy is dead. After some time, the fighter-status of the carriers will change back to “refueling” even though none of the fighters will ever come back. They will either stay in space or die.

After some more time passes, the full complement of fighters will be available for launch again. If whatever the task force is targeting at the time still lives, the new fighters will immediately launch and join the surviving fighters (if there are any). Even if not, this means a constant flood of new fighters periodically attacking the poor victim.

Yes that’s right: Carrier-ships don’t use ammunition or reserve fighters or crap like that, instead they have their own factory and military academy to spit out a never ending torrent of new fighter squadrons! For the entire fight, a carrier will launch its full complement of fighters again and again until the carrier is dead or the combat ends.

In comparison, missile ships need additional space for ammunition, or you literally will only get one salvo.

In vanilla this was not only OP, but more like Mega-OP because there is something I hadn’t gotten time for explaining yet. Shield recharge.

Let’s go back in time for 12+ years to the day I started playing the game for the first time. For over a year back then I didn’t even knew shields could recharge. Vanilla MO3 uses basically Star Trek rules for shields: Shields can absorb some punishment, but after some point the captain of a ship will yell “Shields at 0%” and consoles will start to explode, redshirts will fly through the sky. That kind of thing.

The shields have a recharge-rate hardcoded into them, but the vanilla-recharge rate is ludicrously low. On lower-tier shields you’ll never even notice them, because massive firepower will tear them down in seconds and no ship will live long enough to generate more than a couple points back.

This makes fighter-spam even worse, since even fleets strong enough to normally survive a fighter-strike will go down when the carriers magically spawn a second fighter group. In vanilla I mostly stopped building non-carriers after a certain point. I even comically abused the old low recharges by putting 1-2 of my strongest missile launchers on every single ship I build.

The result of this was something like this: At the start of the fight, my task forces launched a ludicrously large missile salvo and some fighters. The enemy launched missiles and fighters, but while those super-OP toys battered down my shields, my missile salvo did the same with even numerical superior fleets. Then my fighters and normal weapons wiped them out. No tactic, no strategy, just 1. Missiles + Fighters and 2. Death.

The AI could never replicate this since the vanilla AI typically tried to mix it up. Ultima Orion helped the AI out by forcing them to use overspecialized, basically immobilized carrier and missile designs. Since the AI is notoriously bad at ship positioning, wasting space on system engines for carriers is just an additional handicap and the modders decided to instead give the AI designs favoring massive overwhelming firepower.

They also upped the shield re-charge rate of all shields massively, which is the reason why our fleet didn’t immediately die after the second fighter group attacked us. In vanilla, the fight would have ended right then and there.

The AI normally profits more from shields not immediately caving in after the first hit, so this isn’t an unfair change to our advantage. It only ends badly for the AI if it is stupid enough to send ships without any shields whatsoever.

The real true reason for this change is culture-based, however: In Perry Rhodan, shields don’t just go down a few arbitrary percents after getting hit by a weapon, like in Star Trek. Instead you either need weapons strong or strange enough to pierce/bypass them, or they need to be overwhelmed by tons of weapons concentrating on a single shield until it finally goes down. In some cases, entire fleets need to concentrate their fire on a single ship. In really bad cases, entire fleets need to concentrate fire on a small point of the shield-sphere of a single ship to break through. This is called Punktbeschuss(Point Bombardment).

The high shield re-charge in Ultima Orion simulates this shield behavior: A shield-type tends to have a recharge rate tailored to recharge it from zero multiple times over the course of a single real-time combat.

You could argue this makes ships helpless if they can’t even do enough damage to negate the constantly recharging shields, but to be honest if you’re lagging behind that much, you were never going to win anyway.

Libluini fucked around with this message at 23:04 on May 17, 2016