Reduced Bomber HP + increased build time - viable answer to Bomber Spam?

To me the problem isn't really how hard it is to kill the bombers, or even how long they repspawn. Its just no matter how many flak and fighters you have, they can only shoot at 1 bomber at a time, and when you get to the huge late game bomber spams, that means only a handful of bombers can be destroyed before they launch their first pass. Unfortunately this is often enough to kill or cripple a capitalships. Over time its quite possible to wear down bomber swarms, but just due to the nature of how targeting works, they'll likely have killed many high value targets, and can just retreat, regenerate the bombers and do it again.

Your idea could help, anything will really, but I'd rather have more stopping power for the swarms of bombers we see late game, and the only real answer is some sort of small AoE damage on flak or fighters. That way if you have 600 bombers all grouped together, with enough flak/fighter escorts, you could destroy all or most of them before they attack your caps/titan. This would encourage sending in bombers in waves, not a single ball of doom, which is the main problem with strikecraft IMO.

Wow, didn't realize targeting overkilled so bad on strikecraft.  If any incoming shots at a strikecraft beyond those needed to kill it were automatically redirected to the next one in the group that would help - but that would probably require engine tinkering, and would definitely break saves.

Bombers are fine. They're not that difficult to counter as long as you have scouted properly and are prepared. Your nerfs would make them completely useless or far too easily countered at earlier stages of the game. Kol Flak burst is not intended to counter late game bomber spam. Choose your fights wisely. Capitals in general should avoid those fights unless they are high level enough and backed up properly (repair bays, guardians, flak, certain abilities, phasic trap, etc.). You can always jump a capital out of the well and bombers/carriers are terrible at chasing.

Really? One time in Diplomacy I had lost all of my planets save 1 desert world, where I had build up a fully upgraded starbase and other defense, with a fleet of 100 Advent drone hosts with 300 bombers. I was playing against ZombiesRus and despite the wealth of the rest of the map, there was nothing he could do against that kind of force, as he couldn't get to my carriers without being either meteor stormed or telekenetic pushed. I eventually gave up but I'm not sure what he could have done to get out of that position.

I agree with Ekko...bombers are not OP, people spam bombers because of the nature of titans and caps...

The biggest problem is that bombers is the only counter to high level titans and caps other than your own high level titan and caps, and that is why bomber spam is so common....it actually would be really bad if bombers became any weaker than they currently....

I am sorry, but you appearantly havent faced a true bomber spam yet.

Bomber grant extreme firepower at extreme range on a single target.... which makes them so murderous.

Even a midsized carrier fleet generates enough firepower to pulverise a level 10 capship in 2 passes. Against firepower of that magnitude, no guardian or repair bay is going to help you. Phasis trap is quite useful, I agree about that. Sadly, it is owned by the Vasari giving them not only by far the best bombers but also the best strike craft defense.

The problem that makes bomber spam so good is that due to the tremendous firepower, they are good against anything. They may have poor damage multipliers against several things, but when a single pass does easily 10000 damage points, that is of no consequence.

IMHO fighers just need a good buff.... so that if you have 100 figher wings and they have 100 bomber wings, you actually kill the bombers in a reasonable amount of time. And withr reasonable I mean before they nuke your titan and caps.

Bombers, by nature, are always going to be threats to larger ships.  That's actually how they are supposed to be... the whole point behind them, even.  The problem, I think, with this game is that their true counters, fighters, are not able to deal with them quickly enough.

The first problem I see is in the way fighters engage their targets.  They make a run at it and then fly by... and keep going for a good distance.  At the least, a fighter engaging other fighters or bombers should not behave this way.  On the initial pass, they should almost immediately attempt to turn to reacquire their target and then ride its @$$ until it's destroyed.

The second problem, which kind of ties in with the first, is the fighter's rate of fire.  And someone correct me if I'm wrong, but looking at the .entity files it looks like they have 10s RoFs??  Really?  They should have this greatly reduced and have the damage reduced so the DPS remains the same.  This will provide for less overkill and allow the fighter to quickly switch targets and re-engage when its target is destroyed.

Third, and perhaps more importantly than the above points, the one thing that most all fighters have in just about any fighter game I've ever played, is missiles of their own.  An idea would be to give fighters, and possibly even some anti-strikecraft frigates, missiles that target only strikecraft.  Long RoF, but high initial damage.  In all honesty, a fighter should be fully capable of destroying an enemy bomber on the first pass.  As is, it takes what? 4... 5 passes for 1v1?

Finally is the delay between target reacquisition.  When one target is destroyed, fighters will delay for a moment or two before acquiring a new target.  I actually see this with Frigates/Cruisers, too, although much longer of a delay.  But that's a different topic and I realize this may be an engine limitation or may be caused by game lag.

I have personally witnessed my ships changing target even before their current one was destroyed, because they had already fired the weapons that would have destroyed it a second later, so I don't know

It is definitely a lag issue.  I am guessing the engine has a lower priority for target selection than other things when the CPU is being fully utilized.

It seems like fighters kill bombers reallly really slowly, like doing 1-3% at a time to a squad... I think they need to counter them a lot harder and bombers would be fine.

Issue isn't so much fighters sucking against bombers as it is that fighters are very easy to kill....they are extremely vulnerable to flak and more vulnerable to anti-SC abiliies....

When you start to get to the 200+ squadron count, caps become like toilet paper...but, if it wasn't easy to wipe high level caps, then someone who didn't already have a high level assortment of caps (and presumably titan) would be totally screwed and have zero options for winning...

I do agree there is a problem, but I think the problem is much more fundamental than the power of bomber spam or the difficulty in countering it....a particular problem is that bomber spam is the only viable fleet most cases in the late game...

I actually agree here, the main reason its such a problem now is that carriers are the only frigates you can build that won't necessarily feed an enemy titan. I remember when Rebellion was first announced many players made it clear we didn't want bombers to be a counter to them like capitalships. To that end titans seem to have been given antistrikecraft guns and more resistance to bomber attacks, but that merely increases the threshold of bombers you need to have; critical mass is still good on titans. Further, bombers happen to be the main counter to what in theory should be the next best things to defeat a titan with, capitalships and heavy cruisers.

In my own mod I intend to try giving titans mild AoE antistrikecraft damage, so that eventaully they'll wear out close together bomber swarms if the titan is at full health. Something else will of course need to be buffed against them to take their place, but its just an experiment to see what it will take to make bombers not be the only option late game.

I think making carriers a lot less beefy would help too... I mean really, what's the purpose in them being so tough to take down? I'm not saying they should get 1 shotted by anything, but their unlimited range in combination with their great durability doesn't help balancing any.

Looking through the entity files more in depth and then the gameplaycontants file to figure out how armor works... holy crap they made things more complex than they had to be.  I do not envy the job of who ever it is that tries balancing this game....

Welp, guess I'll have to kind of stand down from my earlier comment.  If I'm reading everything correctly... fighters deal double damage vers bombers (antilight weapons vers light armor), while flak frigates deal 133% damage vers fighters and only 75% damage vers bombers (antiverylight weapons).

And antimedium weapons deal more damage against virtually all armor types than antiheavy? 

That would be Yarlen. Give the poor soul some slack.

Yup. That was why long range unit spam was so good against everything but carriers for most of Sins' history. Corvettes counter them hard now though, so its not as bad as it was before Rebellion.

Oh, definitely.  I give props to whoever is brave enough to tackle such a... task.  But I honestly think that SD/IC in general could've done better in the first place if they didn't try jumbling everything so bad....

But, to get back on topic....

I don't know if it'd have significant impact, but it certainly could help.  I know at least against the AI (I know... not the same as MP) there have been a couple times I've jumped into a well to find their whole fleet gathering for a jump back at me.  If the light carriers weren't so hard to kill, they might actually go down from being secondary targets....

I'm just not sure if nerfing bombers directly is the right way to go.

Could reducing the 'mass' or in effect the 'turn radius' of fighters improve their ability to counter bombers without unbalancing the rest of the game?

I realize it's been almost a full month since the last post in this thread, but I've been thinking on this topic.

Really, it seems to me like the only effective counter to Bomber spam is Fighter spam.  So, it seems more than bombers are just one of the only viable tactics in game, but rather one of the best (thinking in reference to Sel's last line in reply 12).

I mean, really, if you take two fleets and comprise each as being "spam" of one thing (not necessarily the same thing between the two), it really seems the bombers come out on top in the vast majority of the match ups.

In all honesty, a spam fleet of anything should generally lose against a good mix fleet... otherwise having a mix fleet is virtually pointless, unless of course that spam will lose to virtually everything else.  Bombers don't seem to have that issue.

I wonder if any of the following ideas (or a mix there of) would help some with bringing bombers back in line?

1. Increase fleet supply cost of Light Carriers
• Results in less carriers being able to be fielded and thus less possible strike craft
• Less targets to chase down and destroy
2. Add more anti-SC weapons to the fleet
• Dedicated anti-SC frigate should still remain the best at dealing with SC (other than fighters vs bombers), so others should have less weapons/lower DPS
• Should only be incorporated on combat oriented ships (as they are combat)
• Should be mostly bomber (anti-light) orientated as to not kill fighters even faster
3. Decrease decay time for strike craft without a home base
• In all honesty, the decay seems a bit artificial to me, would be better if they required the home base for refuel/rearm, but I think that would require more engine work.