The splash damage should solve the problem of bombers and corvettes reaching critical mass and just being unstoppable. To compensate, they should have weaker overall damage.
I think you meant to say, "Yeah I know what I mean."
I try to maintain the charade
If only to make myself feel better...
That I am only me.
Awwwww....I love me too...
You already do.
Fixed it for you ryat.
Thank you me
I agree with sinkillr. If this change isnt implemented in the next month, MP will be dead as we know it.
Its been implemented in patch ID.10T
I haven't done comparative testing to see what stops bombers best, but corvettes did surprisingly well in a small scale test of 3 Percherons vs 14 Shrikens (first described in https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/438860/page/1/#3470696). The corvettes destroyed the bomber squads and then their carriers with only 4-5 corvettes lost (5 was in a less carefully played retest). I think both the maneuverability of the corvettes and their good gun-to-armor fit vs. bombers contributed to that outcome.
The issue has always been the critical mass and how easy it is to sustain. A critical mass for other ships, while achievable, suffer from the fact that you will lose some and when you do you have to replace them. Bombers are antimatter based so they are practically free. You kill a few and lose a big ship. You have to pay to replace the big ship but the bombers pop up for free within seconds. Maybe a critical mass of corvettes could help but it may be not enough to stop an alpha kill strike reverting the issue back to square one. A mass of bombers will steamroll anything simply because they can be replaced quickly and for free. And you could just rotate the carriers to keep a fresh supply coming.
"For free" only if you don't pursue/attack/PJI the carriers. How big a fleet are we talking about for this critical mass? I'm willing to test something reasonable (surely not 1000 fleet supply) of carriers with bombers vs. LF spam with their anti-AM research, and also test both fleets vs. a single big target. If we ignore bombers' maneuvering [or can statically approximate it by some tweak to their rate of fire], I can probably even make a scale-up test in my Python stand-and-shoot simulator, but it will take a few days for me to code all the extra stuff needed (bomber builds, AM regen & leach etc.)
50 to 75 bombers is IIRC the critical mass point for an alpha strike that can destroy a capital ship. Thats about 350 to 525 in supply. In a stand up fight vs LFs the LFs would win as bombers can't cause nearly as much damage as they can to capital ships and LFs rip open carriers. In a fluid situation where the carriers are moving and have a chance to jump out before sustaining too much damage and nail some critical cap ships in the process is the bigger issue. I wouldn't be surprised if corvettes do a better job of managing the bombers but I can still see them getting in a least one alpha strike before the carriers either pop into phase space with no damage or reinforcements come to their rescue and you've only lost bombers which are basically free.
The obvious answer is to just not field low level or fragile capital ships against a huge bomber swarm. Instead of investing in multiple capital ships you should be building fighters, corvettes and flaks in some combination, or just making bomber spam of your own. If you are building capitals then build anti-bomber capitals. "Alpha strikes" won't succeed against multiple TK pushes combined with a huge flak ball and a few guardians. The same fleet supply to sustain 80 bombers from 2-squad carriers can also field nearly 150 Flak, almost 2 flaks for every bomber squad. Good luck winning against that with your "critical mass" of bomber spam.
I'm interpreting that as at least 50 carriers loaded with bombers. I'll try at some point to see what if any counters one finds for that... if a cap is 1-2 jumps away, which seems to be the main concern here.
A quick calculation shows that [w/o weapon upgrades] a TEC bomber squad has an alpha damage of 44.4*5 = 222 damage. That times 100 gives approx. 20K alpha, which even reduced to 13K after the 0.6 multiplier of bombers vs. cap armor surely looks like would kill a cap even at max mitigation of around 65% if it the cap had 4500 or less effective total health [including what it gets from armor]. It's still rather unclear to me if the game engine manages to apply mitigation growth to that 1st second pending damage it queues/accumulates, i.e. whether 13K initial damage from X tiny ships serially raises mitigation or is all applied to the initial 15% mitigation unchanged. So the alpha of bombers might be even more powerful in the latter case.
I'm also curious what would happen to the 100 bomber squads if they passed through a flock of 200 corvettes or so, which is a nearly equivalent fleet supply. That kind of fight is obviously unmanageable with manual orders so a lot depends on the built-in ship AI/behavior. Would all the corvettes focus fire and massively overkill only a few bombers? I'm hoping something less lame would happen, but the Sins engine is known for significant disappointments when it comes to ships picking their own targets...
Update: I was actually so curious I've done a half-scale test: 100 bomber squads vs 100 corvettes (to limit lag and carpal tunnel in spawning them). The bomber squads barely took any damage on multiple passes though the corvettes' formation. Wiped out every structure in the quickstart grav well and were still at 90%. The corvettes appear to focus fire on one-two bomber squads at a time, which they massively overkill, but the rest of the bombers are unharmed. So this another epic fail for the claimed "low micro management" of this game. Surely, the micromanagement was low, but so was the effectiveness of corvettes as defense here, unlike in the small scale test where it was feasible to give them individual targeting order (vs. bomber squads, didn't thankfully had to get down to individual bomber level there). If anybody wants this recording for the 100-bombers spam it's at: http://www6.zippyshare.com/v/13788886/file.html Twice as many corvettes would have made no difference in saving those structures, although they'd probably exact more revenge thereafter.
I suspect that fighters have a similar problem countering bomber spam: all fighter squads probably focus-fire on one bomber squad and massively overkill it, while the rest of the bombers get through.
Splash damage may or may not work to fix this... The splash area would have to be huge to counter the game engine's bad targeting orders vs. bomber spam. You could say that the designers of Sins took Stanley Baldwin's words to heart ("The bomber will always get through."), but in reality it was probably "focus fire against everything seems okay" that they were actually thinking...
Have you actually tried this? Given the very bad focus fire behavior of ships vs. bomber spam in the large scale, I suspect you'll trade one bomber squad for every flak ship, and the carriers will still be alive at the end. That's assuming they want to stay and fight your battle ball, instead of wiping out every structure in the well and moving on.
Sure have tried it. 140 gardas vs 40 percheron (80 bombers) is a hilarous pubstomp. Every original bomber was dead and the flak literally were killing the new ones faster than the percheron could produce them. Only 12-13 flak died to reach that point. 14 flak were dead when all 40 carriers were totally out of antimatter and sitting ducks. The flaks don't focus fire at all, or not nearly enough to kill their firing efficiency. Now they won't insta-melt a bomber flock fast enough to prevent them from nuking some other target, but 100+ flaks definitely cause very significant losses the longer the bombers stay in their range, and the bombers themselves are more or less helpless to do anything about it. You would need some huge firepower from some other source to deal with the flak ball if you want to win any kind of sustained engagement.
Corvettes not working doesn't surprise me. They've already been seen to fail miserably even in areas where they are supposed to be good. But I should mention that your test scenario isn't very fair to the corvettes. The fleet supply to field 100 bombers (for TEC at least) is enough to instead field 200+ corvettes, not just 100. Carriers are a very expensive unit, both in fleet supply and flat resources, so they naturally will win on a 1-for-1 basis. And it should be noted that carriers are far more expensive than corvettes even on an equal-supply basis. 50 carriers costs almost twice as much metal and three times as much crystal as 233 corvettes but only 3000 less credits (a comparatively small sum when both fleets cost upwards of 40,000 in credits). When you get up to fleets that size resource cost can become more prohibitive than fleet supply. For the same resource cost, the corvette player could easily field multiple capitals with anti-strikecraft abilities *in addition to his hundreds of corvettes* with all that spare cash.
Now, stopping bomber fleets from just killing all your structures and running away is a totally different scenario from a straight up fight, but that scenario puts the enemy in a gravity well that you control. The response there would involve PJIs and starbases for starters. The SB doesn't need upgrades, just the jump destabilization would make a retreat unhealthy for the carriers. Then if you try that against Vasari it is pretty guaranteed to fail as phasic trap has no target cap. Advent can put shield mitigation onto their structures as well which is going to make it take years longer to kill them, not to mention shield restoration which can protect the structures as well, although I guess you run the risk of your Prog just being killed for its trouble.
In a test run involving a flak ball with a halcyon against a bomber fleet, the halcyon got 3-4 TK pushes to go off before dying to the bombers. With practice you could probably time it to push the max amount of bombers before they fire, I just waited for a bunch to dive into range and then pressed it. Now the halcyon did go down with a lot of bombers still alive but the important point is that they couldn't insta-gib it. If one of those is hanging around you would have problems trying to dive structures as a TK push against half your bombers will delay you exponentially. You'd have to waste a not insignificant chunk of time focusing the halcyon first.
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