Please direct all feedback to this thread.

Before anyone comments about the state of Fighters on the test server, please read this document to familiarize yourself with the intentions of these changes. You will notice that some of these goals are not realized yet, and that is because all of the required changes have not been made yet. Please bear with me as I get these things ironed out.

V2 of Fighter Rebalance:

Fighter Changes are on the Test server, please get on and test your setups and give feedback. I'll be reading this thread and the #fleet_commander Discord channel closely to see how the changes affect people. Something to keep in mind is that these changes now allow for Freighters to use Fighters in a meaningful way.

Here's a basic rundown of what has changed from the Live server:

• Fighters and Fighter Bays have rarities. These Rarities determine how many slots they take, for Fighters, and how many fighters can be controlled/how strong the bonuses are on the fighter bay. They also determine how much time elapses between each fighter launch.
• Fighters now have a DPS tag, this is the amount of damage you can expect a fighter to do before it gets any external bonuses (If it is firing at the target 100% of the time).
• Fighters now take up hull space, but the Fighter Generators take up only 10 hull space. Most fighters are no longer neurobound or ship bound, and can be freely transferred.
• All Fighters now last for 60 seconds, and take significantly less electricity.
• No matter the tech level, Freighter bays have 4 slots and Capital bays have 9 slots. These slot values can be modified by the rarity of the launcher.
• Advanced Flight Controller no longer has +Evasion, instead Evasion is an aura gained from a deployed fighter. (For now, Death of First Born's have this aura). Fighters with aura's are offensively weaker than fighters without aura's.
• Flight Controller now grants player launched fighters 15% Damage per rank.
• Fighters are immune to transference weapons.
• Fighters themselves are now visually smaller, and in the future they will not display a nameplate.
• Fighters have significantly improved defenses across the board, making them noticeably more resilient.
• Your bots will no longer benefit from the Flight Controller Sub Skill. This means your bots will no longer represent the majority of your fighter damage output.

Here are specific changes to fighters since the last time the test server was updated.

• Removed the Fighter Only aura's that players equipped on their ships.
• Multiple fighters have Fighter Only Aura's on them, they state so in their description. These fighters are: Qokuji'qii, Death of First Born Fighter, Space Blue Delta Fighter, Cerberus Fighter, Paxian Peacemaker Fighter, Border Collie Light Fighter
• Vulcanites are now common, doing less damage and taking less energy.
• Twisted Launcher added to Prejudice.
• All built in launchers are now ship bound instead of sticky, you may use other launchers on your ship if you prefer. This means that the launchers will take up space though.
• Stormcloud Fighters no longer launch 3 separate mini fighters.
• Made changes to Stormcloud, Cerberus, Zebu Master, Rahntiayu, Lelih'ayu, and Twisted Striker.
• Made the Vaziayu Alien Nest Drone tankier, and made it's fighters do an appropriate amount of damage.
• Made the Kalthi Commander super item "Commander Armada" Uncommon and rebalanced the fighters launched.
• Solarian Fighter Bay is no longer AI only. (misc.xml, fighterbays.xml)
• Fighter Speed Booster lasts gives 100% thrust in addition to the 100% speed. All fighters have an out of combat speed booster.

V1 of Fighter Rebalance:

On the Test Server are several changes, these changes are at various stages and thus should be interpreted differently. The changes are as follows:

Fighter bays, fighter generators, and fighters have all been drastically changed. The gist of these changes are as follows:

• Fighters are no longer 0 size, and are no longer shipbound.
• Fighters no longer take massive amounts of electricity to launch, and all fighters last for 60 seconds.
• Fighter bays now scale up to significantly higher total fighters controlled. Both Freighters and Capital ships can now field far more fighters than before. Fighter bays are also significantly larger.
• Fighters now take up slots based on their rarity. Higher rarity fighters take up more slots, and do more damage. They are also, simultaneously, more electricity hungry.
• Flight Controller now also gives 15% more damage (per level) to fighters launched from a player ship AND no longer affects your bots in any way, shape, or form. The description has NOT been changed, but your bots will no longer benefit from this skill at all.
• Adv. Flight Controller no longer gives 70% evasion to your fighters, this is because you now have an aura to provide evasion to your fighters. Adv. Flight Controller still gives extra slots to the player and their bots.
• There are multiple Fighter Only auras available for purchase in the Fleet Shipyard in Lyceum, please test them out.
• The changes to fighters to make them recallable by using the Fighter bay itself, and the change to make them automatically reappear in destroyed form in your hull have not been made yet. Keep this in mind when testing them.
• Fighters in general have been significantly improved in regards to survivability, with many fighters getting resistance and shield bank buffs.

This list is not exhaustive, there may be things I have forgotten to include.

looks like we're back to C1 fighters now ayy





1.6b for each generator


overall, my fighter DPS seems to have improved compared to live (about 40k on live vs 60k on test). pretty nice i guess.

most of the fighters seem to take up 2 slots each now. i currently have a total of 24 fighter slots on my ship.

the main thing that bothered me though was how large the fighters/fighter bays were. my Coronae Launch Pods were at 340 size, and most of the fighters were around 20~30. i can barely fit more than 4 sets of fighters (assuming 12 per type), which kind of limits my choice of fighters to field.
one of the things i enjoyed while being FC was having about 1~2k hull space to spare for loot on a UZ run or several DG clears. i'm worried these changes will affect that and force people to pick between having more fighter options, or sticking to 1 or 2 fighter types for more spare hull. it's also worth considering the fact that all fighters currently have a size of 0 on the live server. maybe tone down the size of fighter/fighters a little?

In response to Zerendalus: I'm carrying 3 full sets of fighters in my ship, and I've still got plenty of hull space. I think being able to carry 3 sets is good enough, or divide up between the sets depending on what you want to carry.

-------------------------------------------------------
- The variations in fighters are awesome. It feels like there's meaning and uniqueness to picking a fighter now. Panther Kittens are awesome. And nothing seems to feel overpowered or broken.
- DOFBs still are high(est?) DPS for t20, so players using them won't feel like they've been wronged. This is good.
- Allocating more size to fighter bays instead of fighters themselves was a really good idea for two reasons: 1) I can still carry a few sets of fighters and still have room for loot or DGing on my main ship and 2) I, personally, can still fit fighters into my bots (PBFs and EFBC) if I make some sacrifices on other weapons/solar panels/capacitors

For Mastodon using fighter bots, FCs will almost exclusively want to stick with choosing between fighter-only auras

For hybrid PBF bots, here are my findings:
- Using the generic apply-to-all aura is best if
1) all ships are alive
2) the PBFs are not launching fighters at the time
3) in a squad run with other players (obviously)
4) The fighters launched aren't going to get quickly popped by a boss without proper care

- Using a fighter only aura is best if
1) 1 or more of my bots are dead. This tips the current DPS output towards fighters, making it imperative that the moment a bot dies, I switch auras to a fighter one right away. This can happen pretty often with how weak shield/resists are on PBFs
2) The opponent does splash damage any AoE damage. Evasion is going to be very useful here.
3) There are 2 or more FCs in the fight. The stacking effect of 2 fighter-only auras on each other's fighters is going to considerably affect battle focus on fighters, regardless of PBFs or Mastodons

All in all, there's a lot more *dynamic* and *interesting* things going on with fighters. They don't feel cookie cutter anymore at all, and instead it feels like there is uniqueness between them. There's more intricacy to using fighters both on main ship and on bots, in a good way. And I feel this will be the best iteration of fighters

Downloaded beta client but cant login to test, it appears up though.

As of right now, Test is up.

What is the reasoning behind Flight Controller not applying to bots anymore?

I tested pretty much every t16+ fighter and the results were ehh at best. To start with, the goaldps tag doesn't seem to be working. Cosmos have about 2x listed dps as wasps, but while testing cosmos did nearly 6 times as much. Qokujis have about the same listed dps as cosmos, but they do nearly twice as much as cosmos (~12x as much as wasps, a single qokuji can about match the dps of all wasps).

Most fighters are also complete garbage. Wasps get about 8k dps for all slots used. Honey strikers are at about 15k. Zarks are somewhere near 20k. Peacemakers don't have a reason to exist as they have the general requirements of a very high end fighter but don't have the dps to back it up. Stormclouds take 25k energy to launch but literally cannot do anything as they have 0 goal dps. Killer wasps are somehow even worse than regular wasps.

Others are insanely op compared to these fighters. Cosmos are at about 48k dps for a full flight of them. Qokujis are at about 80k. Lices are also up there as are suqqas. (dofbs/panther kittens are somewhere in the middle).
In other words, "Fighters now take up slots based on their rarity. Higher rarity fighters take up more slots, and do more damage. They are also, simultaneously, more electricity hungry." is not at all true. The highest dps fighter I seen is t19, followed maybe by a t17 and a t15 (suqqa and lice) with only one t22 as a contender (cosmo).

Fighter bays also makes no sense. Twisted Honey (the "top" fc ship") has one of the worst fighter bays. Vazi fighter bay is better than sahvika fighter bay, which feels backwards (one is a random drop, the other is a rare boss drop).

Inbuilt fighters cannot be removed.

As it is currently, little will change except that fighter boat bots now have missiles and abuse qokujis instead of dofbs. If qokujis are nerfed to be inline with the other fighters, then the auras are useless as the amount of damage gained by weapon bots greatly exceeds the marginal amount of damage gained by fighters.


If I remember correctly, part of the goal of this fighter rebalance was to shift the power of fighters to the mainship. This has not occured and instead for most fighters, bot fighters have been severely weakened, but so too has mainship fighters if the outliers (cosmos/qokujis) are ignored. The one thing that has succeeded is that fighters are now much more tanky if and only if the +resist and +shield regen fighter aura is on. If this aura is not on, fighters die approximately as fast as they did before, or faster as it appears the tankier fighters got a shield nerf and most fighters will still die in a few/one hits, especially since evasion is not a given.

The one thing I can see happening with the auras is some weird cheese strategy involving two FCs, one with the evasion aura and one with the resist aura and an engi's protection drone. Other than that, auraed hybrid/weapon pbfs and mastodons seem superior (once again ignoring qokuji) to somewhat buffed fighters if there is only one FC. I suppose it is also possible for two FCs to work together for both the resist and a bot aura.

Because the stronger fighters are on bots, the weaker I need to make them when used by a player. I wanted to encourage players to launch fighters from their main ship to get the most oomph from them, and allowing the bots fighters to be stronger creates a situation where a player launching fighters is relatively unnecessary. The entire point of doing that change is to make it so that Fighters become something the player themselves takes ownership of, rather than delegating them to their bots.

Thank you for your feedback.

Twisted honey's bay gives +19% resists and +10% speed. This is worse than +30% damage and +10% speed of vazi as from what I seen with the (semi-brief) testing I did, the +19% resist does not meet any breakpoints. Fighters from the twisted honey still are almost as prone to being killed off as fighters from any other ship. For higher end content, fighters are either immortal thanks to the resist aura or they get oneshot either way. For lower end content where fighters don't die (ex. UZ), it is strictly worse.

The reason why I argued that the power wasn't transferred to the main ship was because I made two separate assumptions. If qokuji stays as it is, FC will be nearly unchanged except that dofbs are replaced with qokujis and missiles (no real power transfer as fighter boats are still just as powerful). If all the top end outliers, from cosmos to qokujis are nerfed, then there isn't a power transfer as fighters suddenly become extremely unimpactful. Excluding cosmos and above, the best fighters I tested do about 25-30k dps which is something like 1/5th-1/7th of my fleet's dps with their dedicated damage aura.

I suppose it's fine if there are more fighters similar to cosmo's power level, but besides the bugged parasite fighters I haven't seen any. Cosmos are simply much more powerful, both from their dps and their inherent tankiness, than any other fighter I ran into excluding any fighter with a parasite/fire.

Another more minor complaints I have are that 1. fighters seemed to get slower and lose range, making them feel kind of bad to use especially due to the shorter duration. It feels weird that the mainship can outrun almost all of them. 2. there is a lack of non-exotic damage type fighters at higher techs. Let me bludgeon the enemies with inaccurate fighters with energy pulse guns/mags or zap them with laser type lasers.


From discord: stormclouds are broken because of their 0 dps. Vulcanites should take 1 slot as there is no reasonable way to launch them at their tech level.

Well, previously, bots got 50% Flight Controller, meaning their fighters were half as good as the player's. So I've personally never delegated fighters solely to bots, instead I put them on bots as a means of extending my own abilities.

To me, it feels like bots not getting 50% of flight controller skill feels inconsistent. I'd rather see both players and bots launching fighters, not an exclusivity. If you're concerned about the FC never launching fighters or leaving it mostly to bots instead, then I'd rather investigate other ideas to strongly incentivize and encourage players to launch fighters themselves.

One idea I had would be bots not launching their fighters unless their owner does so, though that would probably require some coding. Another might be delegating some bigger stat differences between fighter bays per tech level, instead.

It's just fun to have fighters coming out of every ship in your fleet, and it's not fun to feel like you're not helping yourself by not doing that fun thing. And if bot fighters are coming out without any of the +shield/resist stats (never mind the +damage) that the owner has, then they're just going to die and be a pointless expenditure, thus invalidating what was a fun aspect of bots and also removing part of the customizability aspect that makes bots fun such as picking what fighters to put on what bots and how many of each, especially now that the fighters bots launch can be chosen piecemeal again. (Bots would just launch as many of one type of Prefab fighter as they could, whereas now you can put on a set amount of a certain type of fighter and it will launch them all again)

There's fun to be had in fleet micromanagement, and that's an aspect I'd hate to see dis-incentivized, but at the same time I do understand the concerns of players just leaving fighter launching to their bots alone.


I'd like to note, in C1 there were higher tech fighters that had fighter-only auras, meaning that while your bots may launch fighters, they'd strongly benefit from +damage or +RoF or +shield or +resist auras that the fighters your main ship would launch, thus there being a strong incentive to launch fighters from the main ship. I'm not saying this was the best solution, but it is something to note when thinking of these sort of ideas.

Summary results of this change:

1) FCs fighters still useless in group fights since no way people are going to give up traditional aura for teammates just to keep fighters alive from fighter-only aura;
2) Solo FCs who are established like me and can shell out for expensive direct damage slaves see little DPS change except the change of repairing fighters with wildly nonsensical DPS variation at the moment.
3) Less established FCs see a nerf due to fighter boats being not as useful.
4) REALLY SHITTY FCs see a buff! Those FCs who couldnt make even crappy fighter boats before or who couldn't afford slaves at all actually get a lot more EZ DPS through their main ship fighters. huh?
5) Neut blast nerf why????
6) I cant tell the effect repair will have yet. But FC fighters typically die a lot more than drones and given how much of a pain it is to "leave combat" due to the clunky mechanics behind that, it is a bit concerning. It feels like we will be forced into the defensive aura against anything even moderately tough, which again screws over direct damage slaves and teammates.
7) If you use the new fighter auras this means your direct damage slaves are crap. Thus relatively shield monkeys, gunners, and zerkers now have better slaves than FCs :/ This is an odd unintended change....
8 ) 2 and 3 slot fighters? Again why? Why increase fighter slot substantially then just have all the fighters use more slots, keeping raw fighters launched almost the same. Added complexity for no reason. And also again, three-slots???? Another odd unnecessary change. Just keep them at 1 and 2 slot or 2 and 4 and adjust dps accordingly for those slots.

There is SOOOO much changing here, so many things that have the potential to break or become super unbalanced later (I can already foresee a multi FC squad doing some crazy shit with aura multiplications), and so much work on the part of Hober, but for what? I am not getting it? Just to make sure lower end fighter boats arent too good? Which is a concept I agree with actually but that could've been addressed in a much simpler way.

Here is what I like about these changes though:

1) A way to manage stats on fighters on the fly to adjust to the situation, like engis do with drone controllers, was long overdue. I just don't think it should force you to screw over your teammates out of an aura to do so.
2) Having fewer fighters to carry around but making them more useful and specialized is a good goal I think. Due to the wild DPS variations I'm not sure that has happened, but the goal is still sound.
3) Having fighter based progression is a step in the right direction with stats on things like fighter bays. Though as PSS mentioned again they seem a bit nonsensical right now.
4) AFK FCs getting a nerf. This is also fine from my perspetive.

************

More thoughts:

Overall this seems like a lot of work on the part of Hober and a lot of churn and change for, well, I can't tell what the goal was really...

I sense from the earlier write-ups that Hober and other's felt some imbalance with how fighters were, specifically fighter boats and how easy they felt it was to make high dps which I agree with btw. So I hear you there and that could've been addressed by making certain fighter items more progression based, but this feels like demolishing and rebuilding a whole house because the toilet didn't work.

As PSS mentioned above all the dps stats are whack so it's very hard to know what is intended and what is not but from what I gather Hober's intent was:

1) Main ship DPS through fighters = high;
2) Fighter boats = nerf;
3) Fighters overall made more "interactive" and "fun" through new auras and repairing?

One of the most unfun parts about FC was our role in group fights. Our aura was very helpful yes but our role felt useless and boring. Having fighters not be a healing liability to the team and not insta-die from boss AOE could've helped this. And you did that with the new auras, but at the cost of not being able to use the traditional auras. No way in hell am I going to use a fighter only aura in a team fight and screw my teammates out of hundreds of thousands of DPS just to keep my fighters alive. Hence one of the biggest issues wasn't really fixed. We are still relegated to an aura-whore role in group fights since choosing between buffing all your teammates damage by 40% or keeping your fighters alive isn't really a choice in boss fights.

If you just solo I don't see how these changes do much. The main ship DPS from fighters was more than negated from the DPS loss from fighter boats. Yet if you use non-fighter direct damage slaves you cant give them your aura buff if you use the new fighter auras. Hence you are relegated to using the old auras so your slaves aren't crap, and essentially there is no change here then for main ship DPS and just new "features" like repair that seem like a hassle.

It feels like the buff to main ship DPS from fighters is sort of a surrender and white flag on long-standing problems with slaves such as their behavior and how easy they die when charging into a fight. I don't know what to make of this but feels like a step backward and its odd that shield monkeys, gunners, and zerks now have better direct damage slaves than FCs....

The main people feeling this change are less established FCs without decent direct damage slaves and/or FCs who solo without slaves at all. This latter group is a very niche odd group that frankly I do not feel needs considerations. That's like balancing around Shield Monkeys who don't use trans.... Why???

Lastly, why did you nerf neut blast? Hardly anyone used it and its high DPS was more than balanced with it's huge size and ridiculously high energy usage. This just felt like a kick in the nuts for those of us who actually went through the painful process of making some.

Oh I didnt see this earlier. Oh jeezus please no. This change right here means that all other auras are completely useless and mean that fighters are even more useless in group fights. They ALREADY DIED SO EASILY WITH 70% evasion, now you are taking that away and giving it back only through a specialized aura? You might as well just remove all other fighter auras then. They will mean nothing then since you will be forced into the evasion aura unless you want them to die like paper..... Please do not enact this change, its a huge step backwards. Keep the evasion on Adv. Flight Controller there is no reason for this change. It does nothing but make fighters even more of a liability, hassle, and waste of time.

Fighters being TOO tanky was never a problem.....

I haven't been able to test them in actual combat yet, since their gear and some other features aren't available on test YET... I'm very pleased with the way they feel mechanic-wise (barring the bot fighter thing I mentioned above), so DreadLordNaf could have a point pending the outcome of those changes.