Fighters or Chaff hangers?

resoundingenvoy

For context. This is chaff.

Ask a star-fleet fighter pilot his academy motto, he will respond: Set course for the neared fireball, Maximum warp!

Ask a klingon defense force fighter pilot his academy motto, he will respond: Today is the day I die.

Ask a romulan star empire fight pilot his academy motto, he will not respond. He's dead.

Just on general principle that it's a game there should be anti-fighter weapons and tactics. Currently though? Carriers are lots of fun, but there are more weapons and abilities that excel at making fighter so much high speed debris then there are that don't. All of which cycle faster then a carrier can cycle it's pets. (The most obvious of these is the bio-neural warhead.)

A carrier without fighters is just a gloried, cripple cruiser or science ship.

STO fighter pilots are the only thing I know of that have a higher fatality rate then red shirts.

---

Would fighters getting a innate defensive buff (they are tiny targets) be a bad thing?

doffingcomrade

I am not really sure what this apparently undirected rant is trying to say. Carriers are fine. Some are better than others. Your experience seems weighted towards the crappy ones. Are you a Fed?

hunterkiller64

doffingcomrade wrote: »

I am not really sure what this apparently undirected rant is trying to say. Carriers are fine. Some are better than others. Your experience seems weighted towards the crappy ones. Are you a Fed?

i a part-time fed now and i still love my armatage and jem carriers i dont think they know how 2 use a carrier properly lol i just h8 the kdf carrier

adverbero

I can kind of see where your coming from, As somebody who tends to use a FaW enabled cruiser, and has used KDF fighters, I know how fast they drop in combat, almost to a useless degree ( BoPs are my prefered pets now anyways)

I think the Catian fighters do okay for themselves , but then they are stealthed i think?


It would be nice if the fighters had a mask energy field ability or some kind of evasive stealth you could activate when the enemy activates an AoE power

hasukurobi

adverbero wrote: »

I can kind of see where your coming from, As somebody who tends to use a FaW enabled cruiser, and has used KDF fighters, I know how fast they drop in combat, almost to a useless degree ( BoPs are my prefered pets now anyways)

I think the Catian fighters do okay for themselves , but then they are stealthed i think?


It would be nice if the fighters had a mask energy field ability or some kind of evasive stealth you could activate when the enemy activates an AoE power

Eh... The Problem is that the Stalkers are nearly useless as damage dealers and only minorly good at shield stripping. They are best used as a sort of odd anti-Aux fighter.

However, there is a LOT of AoE coming out of the Voth in particular and they make utter mince meat out of any "fighters" and most "shuttles". Unless you are using frigates (mostly impossible for Feds) then you may as well not even bother launching them.

noroblad

There seems to be a minor bug that when a ship dies, it still exists as a target just long enough that pets stay near it and get blown up. Fighters are fast and agile, there is no reason they should get blown away every time, but there you have it, its a bug or design flaw somewhere. They are also ai flawed and get too close to those aceton emitters.

That said, carrier pets can spam out as fast as the pets die under normal conditions. In an aoe heavy fight, they are going to die --- and that makes sense. Large explosions are hard on tiny craft with weak shields and hulls and stuff. Between a deck officer (probably wasted space under most conditions, but its available) and aux power, the time to spew out the weakest fighters (the ones that die every time their target does) is very low. I could see an issue with a low aux power setting.... you might want to carry a battery for those situations.

The higher end pets do seem to survive better (elite versions) and the better quality (1 pet per ) are tougher still. In some situations, you may want to consider 4 tough pets instead of 12 weak ones...

I am not sure about the fed & the frigate types... are none of the rep pets or starbase pets frigates usable for fed? I thought (but never looked closely) that the rep tholians etc would be usable by anyone, just as the rep swarmers seem to work on any type of carrier. Or are the swarmers special that way?

momaw

I cannot help but wonder how many carrier commanders realize that their Aux power heavily influences their fighter launch cooldown, and that Flight Deck Officers can potentially get your launch time down to a paltry 10 seconds.

If you're going to use a carrier, use it as a carrier.

resoundingenvoy

momaw wrote: »

I cannot help but wonder how many carrier commanders realize that their Aux power heavily influences their fighter launch cooldown, and that Flight Deck Officers can potentially get your launch time down to a paltry 10 seconds.

If you're going to use a carrier, use it as a carrier.

Ok, with the flight deck officer? Capping off auxiliary power might get you 10 of 30 seconds knocked off.

Not really that helpful though.

• FAW has a 30 second recharge.
• Bio-neural warhead has a 1minuet recharge. (Which means your fighter will have just enough time to get off four or five shots before the warhead's point defense turns them into chaff.)
• Gravity well has has a 1minuet recharge.
• Scatter volley has a 30second recharge. edit: Opps, that 30 seconds, not 60.
• Torpedo spread 30second recharge.
• Tricobolt torpedo 30second recharge.
• Photonic Shock wave 45second recharge. (Though that one needs something like charged participial burst first to clear fighters with it nerfed.)
• Tractor Beam Repulser 45second recharge.
• Tyken's Rift is going to really hurt fighters if it doesn't kill them. 1minuet recharged.

That's not even reaching into NPC abilities, reputation unlocks, or universal consoles. In PvP your going to be facing at least two of those in a given match. In PvE? Meh, that's not so bad outside the Voth. Not many NPCs have even some of those abilities.

Not really my point though. Launch timers would have to be 5-10 seconds to keep fighter wings going with even one of those floating around. Carriers without fighters are just cruisers or science ship with the penalty they took to have hangers, except now they can't use their hangers.

Edit: Ok, The bio-neural warhead is not a standard ability. But seeing that one is flooded into No Win Scenario, I'll bring it up anyway. :P

momaw

resoundingenvoy wrote: »

Ok, with the flight deck officer? Capping off auxiliary power might get you 10 of 30 seconds knocked off.

You're a theory-crafter.

If you had actually tried this out, you would know that
1.) The wiki is badly out of date, and that FDO's now subtract X seconds not Y percent.

2.) You can have 3 of them on duty and they stack.

3.) Carriers, because they have 2 hangar bays and the FDO cooldown reduction applies on each launch, get twice the benefit.

With twin hangars and multiple FDOs, you can stagger your launches to get a wing out about every 5 seconds.

In PvP

And your second mistake is thinking that this game is actually designed for PVP.

resoundingenvoy

momaw wrote: »

You're a theory-crafter.

If you had actually tried this out, you would know that
1.) The wiki is badly out of date, and that FDO's now subtract X seconds not Y percent.

Nope, didn't know that when you checked my source. As I recall with a purple, and maxed aux on my Atrox, the stalkers launch time was something like 17-22 seconds. The extra aux power made a difference I could count on one hand.

3.) Carriers, because they have 2 hangar bays and the FDO cooldown reduction applies on each launch, get twice the benefit.

With twin hangars and multiple FDOs, you can stagger your launches to get a wing out about every 5 seconds.

Actually, no, i haven't applied that concept to the flick deck DOffs. Something I'd like to avoid anyway. That is helpful, but I'm still going to stick by my complaint. That's a awful lot of min/maxing to work around a flaw. :P

Nothing wrong with maximizing a benefit. Something is wrong with having to min/max something to get it to work at all.

(Yes, I know PvP is a nasty after though the devs have been threaten to fix for years now, but will not touch.)

momaw

I don't really see it as a flaw. If you're running a cruiser, doffs to reduce EPTx cooldown and Technicians amplify your power greatly. If you're running a gunboat, doffs to reduce CRF and attack patten cooldowns amplify your power greatly. There exist duty officers that elevate some styles of gameplay and some ship features from "useful" to "core mechanics of a build".

For carriers, that happens to be FDO's. If you actually work at maintaining a fighter presence this game allows you to field pets so quickly that it would make Homeworld's mothership jealous. On the other hand, if you're not actually building your carrier around maintaining a fighter presence then I don't think you can really complain about them being not very useful yeah?

*shrug*

resoundingenvoy

:P

I consider if a flaw because it's not a option, it's a mandate. The difference being: YOU WILL do this, or you WILL NOT have fighters. -AND- You can do this and still function, but maybe not as well.

Edit: Another way to put it would be there is no trade offs to be made. It's a binary do this and function, or don't and fail.

Edit2: It's the whole reason, as I recall, the only make or break difference between ships is their bridge officer slots. No one ship is more then 50-70% difference in stats then another (outside the boff setup) is because the devs made it that way to make officer choices the deciding factor in the game.

killdozer9211

Too many people in the community hear the word "fighters" and go into some kind of trippy vietnam-esque flashback to the first time they watched star wars to ever allow this game to develop any real, consequential pet mechanic like other other games. Sorry OP, the game's for picards and kirks only.

resoundingenvoy

Naysayer. :P

If they removed carrier from the game tomorrow? Well ... I could deal with that after a fashion.

Until then, I am in good conscience going to ask they fix the flaws in the system they insist on keeping.