Bombers & Fighters: Balance Discussion

You've got to be kidding. Bombers and fighters are a staple in my games.

Actually... thinking it over for a second... I use a lot of strikecraft, but I never use the cruiser-grade carrier ships. For me offensive strikecraft come from capital ships, defensive ones from hangar bases.

So I guess my experience is that the actual bombers and fighters are powerful, but the cruiser-carriers are a liability. Hangar bases make a prime defensive position, hard for humans to outmaneuver, strong enough to hold while a fleet counterattacks (well, if you make the correct mix with repair bases they last, not otherwise). The same applies to AI and pirate attacks but doubled. Capital-ship strikecraft make pretty good shock attackers. Fast enough to cross a system and engage defenses or harass vulnerable units and expendable so that I can safely pick off fixed defenses without permanently weakening the attack fleet.

You're using 10 bombers but what kind of fleet are you up against? That is a VERY small number of bombers. If you get closer to 30 or 40, you will see the power of bombers - that being that they can 1-shot (or nearly so) any ship. Get 80 or so and they can even 1-shot capital ships (although that's going overboard a bit).

Their refire rate is very slow but their damage is very high. You must gain a critical mass of them and use them to spike targets out. This is much more advantageous in a fleet with other kinds of ships where it's your DPS ships vs. their DPS ships, but you're destroying their DPS quickly with bomber spikes.

Give this a try and see what you think.

I don't usually push the strikecraft as heavily as that .

It makes sense though, when a game has paper-rock-scissors balancing it usually will break down if you bring enough "rocks". Hmm. Maybe strikecraft are more like scissors... never mind.

Heh. You're not supposed to setup a fleet of just carrier-cruisers. Capital ships with strikecraft have other uses, which is why you can have them like that. But here's, IMO, a decent setup. A veteran can correct me.

You have some capital ships(Of your choice), heavy cruisers to get in close, and entangle, LRMs for damage, and then your carrier cruisers farther back with their fighter/bomber complement away from everyone.

It's like a 3 line setup.

HCs and Battleships/Dreadnaughts

LRMs and the support ships and support capitals

Carrier-Cruisers on the edge of the gravity well.



If they go to hit your cruisers, they have to cross all this territory being hit by the strikecraft and LRMs, and the cruisers can jump out at any point. You don't have a purely carrier craft fleet. Just like any other spam...It gets demolished by any reasonable fleet.

Sykonaut has it right.

Rule #1: Put carrier cruisers in their own fleet. Do NOT mix them into your main attack fleet.

Carriers in a mixed fleet will drive their unarmed selves like wedges up against the enemy battle line, getting in your way and getting shot to pieces.

I make them their own separate little fleet, with a few repair/guardian/flak type ships for close support, and put them on hold orders. They stay nicely out of harms way at the edge of the system, ready to jump out at a moment's notice.

There's also nothing better at guarding a sun's grav well than carrier groups.

Ships move SO slow near the sun that it's just painful to contemplate, and since they have to move around the sun itself, you can forget intercepting anything. Strikecraft, however, zoom around just fine, taking out those little enemy raiding/scouting parties while they flounder in the heavy gravity.

Yeah. You can't forget about the movement reduction that takes place when you're moving out in a gravity well, so that's even more time they're being hit, and more time for you to run.

You can also use your fighters to take out their fighters, or atleast delay them, since you shouldn't be having an only bomber fleet. Depending on the stage in the game, I generally go all fighters early on, and then eventually it's closer to a 1:1 scenario.

I bias somewhat towards fighters, but I start from 1:1 and skew towards fighters as I build up.

Strike crafts ,in the long term, may deal a smaller amount of damage but they can draw fisrt blood. I use bombers to criple important capital ships and structures such as repair platforms and phasae gates. Flaks are not that good at intecepting the first strike of bombers if your engaement route is well planned. Although it is common to suffer heavy losses afterwards but they have done their job and are expendable anyway. Fightes are used to intercept the enemy bombers and fighters.

However, in 1.03 their targetting priority is sort of reducing their effectiveness, so i have made some sugestion here WWW Link

TBH, I think as the game goes on, you should be building more bombers. You have little use for bombers early on, so go 100% fighters to kill the frigs that will be encountered.

Bombers/fighters are awesome, I don't know what game you're playing. Their strength is in their "Alpha" damage.

Because they do huge damage in a single pass, but don't do another pass for awhile, they block the effects of shield mitigation. They fly in, do HOLYWTFOMG damage to a ship while it's still at 15% shield mitigation... Shield mitigation skyrockets, then goes down, down down...and then they strike again. 4-5 fighter squads (depending on race, upgrades, etc.) can instantly wipe an LRM. THAT is powerful.

Can someone provide a recorded game that uses fighters and bombers to win? I understand it's just a part of the fleet and all but if you're saying that in muliplayer games bombers and fighters can play a major role in victory I'd love to see a recorded game.

And I'm not sure how to record but this is an option no? Maybe I can just make a custom game that starts 2 sides right next to each other with huge fleets with an even point balance and see how that works...

In my experience building bomber bases for defense or fielding carriers, or cruiser carriers is all just a liability as the same points spent elsewhere will get you more kills, do more damage per second, and last longer. I've played a lot of games where I've tried to include bombers and fighters into my fleets and they just don't get the job done.

And talking about numbers like 30 or 40 bombers isn't realistic. Even with fully upgraded carriers you're hosting 6 squadrons per ship and that is between 5 and 8 fully upgraded carriers which if you're able to field that your enemy can field some other insane fleet and in multiplayer games I've played it's maybe 6 cap ships fighting in all, sometimes more but most are not level 6.

The realistic number of bombers/fighters that I've seen fielded is 10-15 and they get killed, my fleet just runs over them, or if I'm fielding them, I'm running around in fear hoping my ships will kill 1 or 2 enemies before I run.

Tumbler, it IS realistic, and it is a used strategy to have that many strikecraft. Late game, it's not unfeasible to have 80 Carrier Cruisers, and then you count in strikecraft from capitals.

And you can still be packing quite a mix of other ships too. And often, in big games with people who play together, you can have someone go full carrier-cruisers and carriers, with someone else having the full combat ships like HCs and all that.

The "Alpha Strike"(who coined that term?) is so deadly because the strikecraft rev up in <5 seconds and strike for what would be a hellish amount when converted to DPS from the start of the engagement, while ships spend more time to close range before they fire their first shot and settle into the normal DPS calculation of damage/cool-down. After the initial pass, strikecraft also settle into the attack/cool-down pattern, making a pass every 12(Fighters) to 13.5(Bombers) seconds, which is why they look so weak when they aren't.

40 Vasari Bombers with Level 2 NME Warheads are enough to assassinate any capital ship except for maybe a teched-up high-level Radiance or Kol. 10 or more of those shots will just ignore mitigation and punch through shielding while the other ~30 will tear apart the shields and then proceed to smash what's left of the hull.

In fact, when you count a capital ship's strike craft as part of it's firepower, you may see that they end up MUCH stronger than they are with their direct-fire weapons. A Level 1 Kortul does 47.3 DPS on it's own with 29.5 Pulse Beam + 12 Wave + 5.8 Phase Missile. But a Level 1 Antorak does 51 DPS with 12 Pulse Beam + 12 Wave + 10 Phase Missile + 17 Bomber Squadron(Phase Missile). The Bomber Squadron does more damage than any one of the Antorak Marauder's own weapons.

@Tumbler,

See the "Carrier Battle Groups" and "The best race for a carrier fleet" threads. Cruiser carriers cost only 8 supply points, while Heavy Cruisers cost 10(12 for Vasari). Sure, if you go in there with a whopping 'swarm' of 10 squads and fly your carriers right into the middle of the mess without proper support ships or kiting tactics, you're going to lose the engagement.

2 Antorak + 1 Skirantra + ~45 Lasuraks + ~10 Stilakus + ~25 Ravastras + ~10 Assailants could be quite formidable against an equivalent sized band of Kodiaks, Gardas, and Hoshikos with Kol/Marza capital ships tagging along, or an Advent equivalent of the same(Destras, Defense, Guardians, Radiances/Progenitors).

It won't necessarily be cheap, though.

yeah I dont know who thinks fighters/bombers suck, but fighters in hangars absolutley kick arse on defense. I especially love taking 10 fighters and from the empire tree, picking an enemy frigate and commanding it to die. Works fantastic. You just cant run around with 1-3. it's like running around with 1-3 LRMs.

I will try to get a replay up.

Keep in mind you don't need to -overwhelm- his flak frigs...Flak frigs take a surprising amount of time to actually kill strike craft, especially since they will only be in range for a couple seconds. The strike craft come in, fire a volley, and then get out of range again.

Not to mention their mobility allows you to dance around the battlefield striking whatever targets you please, saying out of range of his flak frigs. Oh, did I mention that you can simply dock them to keep them safe while your light frigs dispatch the flaks?


The power of strike craft is in their alpha damage...As stated before, they only actually need to be in range for a second to do their damage...it also almost negates shield mitigation.

They also are continually replaced throughout the fight.



One thing that may be causing you troubles is that usually, strike craft should be targeting a different ship than your frigs/cruisers/capships. One of their primary advantages is that their alpha damage reduces the effects of shield mitigation. Use that to your advantage and hit a target that is at 15% mitigation...

I don't think anyone so far has suggested using strikecraft in multiplayer. I would advise to do this only in late-mid to late game if you were to even go for them in the first place. Strikecraft are really decimated by flaks, which are low tech, fairly cheap, and tough to kill. Even without upgrades, flaks just tear through bombers making them (in my opinion) not really worth it until later in a long game where you have abilities that increase their usefulness and support ships to disable flak.

That said, if you are in a stalemate situation, splitting your fleet to do harrassment is usually a good tactic. And in this situation, you can have a large-ish fleet of bombers to jump in, destroy infrastructure, and jump out.

His flaks only get in range of your strike craft if you LET them, and they are pretty easy to kill with medium frigs.

I get cruiser carriers early on and never regret it.

I don't have a conclusive proof, but it looks like the term was probably created during the Vietnam war. It certainly seems to have entered the wider language from the specialist jargon of air force bombing planners then, but I can't rule out an earlier origin during the second world war without making a much more serious investigation.

That is an excellent point and should probably be made in the thread discussing the strikecraft targeting AI as well.

Except when I'm racing to prevent enemy capships from escaping I will usually have the strikecraft handling fixed defenses and the rest of the attack fleet fighting the defending fleet (siege craft excepted).

I personally enjoy having bombers and fighters in my fleet because for small cruisers and frigates they work out great but i see your point. The bombers are all around good and i always keep them with my capital ships and i rarely keep fighters stationed on my capitla ships but that's just me.

Lol, I LOVE bombers and fighters to kill retreating forces.

See their capships trying to pull out? Yeah, not anymore, with 40 strikecraft groups ripping through them. This is extra effective, because not only are the strikecraft much faster, but this means that your fleet doesn't need to give chase, and can continue the fight, without letting the cap go.

As I don't use LRMs, fighters are my priciple long range attack force. I find them to be more useful than the sedentary LRMs and cost nothing to replace if they are destroyed. My Kols/HC/Cobalts handle the heavies while my flak and fighters deal with everything else.

Bombers and fighters move nice and quickly, faster than any other ship type in the game. It makes them great for chasing down fleeing enemies or sneaky frigates. The "alpha strike" damage has already been mentioned, and that's good. So long as you can keep your carriers out of the fight (keep them in their own group outside of the gravity well good for quickly fleeing), a carrier can effectively attack without being attacked in return - flak frigates might take out your bombers or fighters, but your carriers are still effectively unscratched. Additionally, carriers are the only type of ship that can effectively change themselves to counter their enemies - in the early game, when frigates in abundance are the norm, carriers should be mostly (if not solely) transporting fighters. As the game progresses, you can scuttle your fighter squadrons and start loading up on bombers to counter cruisers. Suppose you get surprised by an enemy fleet that's much stronger on frigates or cruisers than you expected - you can retreat from your attack back to a friendly system, scuttle your excess fighter or bomber squadrons, and then create the type of strike craft that best suits the situation. That's pretty darn flexible.

Can someone go into detail about what exactly a carrier or cruiser carrier can counter that is equally valuable?

The way I see it every credit,metal,crystal point you spend will be spent by the opposing force on something.

So if you buy a Carrier that is 3k, 400metal, 250 Crystal and put 2 fighter wings on it, what can that safely take out worth that same amount?

I wish there was a way to setup custom battles and just fight it out and see who wins because I think it'd be obvious where balance issues are an issue.

My feeling is that a force worth approx the same as a carrier or all frigates would kill a carrier for sure. And the carrier with fighters is supposed to counter these things?! If it can't do that what is the point of spending the points?

Can you make your forces attack their own team? So maybe I could Have the carrier and fighters attack a whole fleet of frigates and vice versa and see how comes out on top.

Tumbler, there's the problem. You seem to be, excuse me if this comes out rude, stuck on the idea of a carrier fleet.

If a 50 carriers face the same amount of supply and resources in a pure kodiak fleet, sure, they'd probably get whooped. That's not the point. The point is that when you use them, you use them IN CONJUCTION with something else. They're backed up by forces.
Here's some points in here.

-Extremely flexible. Can used fighters to kill frigates, or keep hangar defenses at bay. Or bombers to attack structures. Turrets can't hit bombers or fighters, so got a planet full of repair bays and turrets? Guess what? Doesn't matter. You've got 60 bombers, and they don't take shit from anybody.

-Can retreat easily if used right. They don't need to be up in the battle. They hang back at the edge of the gravity well, and can retreat moments notice.

-Can make new squadrons whenever.

-Fairly cheap.

-Great for chasing down fleeing foes, so your fleet can focus on other things

-Alpha Strike, so shield mitigation is effectively canceled out.

-Early research.


I'm sure there are other points that can be used, but the main thing is, you don't have a purely carrier fleet, it's just asking for trouble. You used them as part of a team, for great effect.