Is there a point fo fighters and bombers?

[Balm]

I've put about 20 hours into Disharmony and so far fighters and bombers have been 100% useless to me, and a non-factor in fleet battles. I even went Hissho and used all of their fighter/bomber bonuses (why they got these, I dont know. It sucks.) to try and make effective fleets.

They aren't effective.Yes, I mount 'battle' type fighters and bombers to test this. By the time fighters/bombers make it to their target, their home ships have already been slaughtered by beams or missles. Their damage is low and they don't contribute all that much to invasions. It's still better to just boat a bunch of 1 type of weapon and max your effective hitpoints vs. whatever you are fighting. Fighter/bomber bays are too heavy and too expensive for what they add to a fleet.

Also, fighters and bombers are too far up in the tech tree. It just adds to their totally useless nature.

Am I the only one who feels this way? Am I doing it wrong? What do you think?

[Balm]

Also, could someone explain to me why a dreadnaught fighter/bomber module weighs x as much as a corvette fighter module, yet has the same number of fighters that do the same amount of damage? If the weight stayed low it might be interesting.

[Cerramir]

I rarely use them myself. They were designed to be a new element of battle and invasion along w/ troops. You use the fighters n bombers to weaken em then send in the troops. It's arguably faster than loading up a ship full of invasion modules and waiting the 10 turns but it's definitely more destructive. I'd prefer to keep the buildings intact and i DEFINITELY want to keep the population. What a pain to have to repopulate the whole system again.

I seem to recall that fighters and bombers were getting changed in the next update. More lethal.

[Dorok]

Some previous update tune down fighters because they was too strong.

The new invade system is offering quite different invade options but it requires more organization and more management. The system bombing associated to planes is powerful tactically but it's just an option not the only and best option.

For the space fights well they do damages but is it significant, I don't know. Myself I like use the CP 1 ship with 2 special module slots, it's the best CP/plane rate. Two of them brings 4 planes and use only 2 CP.

I'm still exploring, I feel it's interesting until enemy is using AA but for now I have no evidence that it brings anything more than diversity in a fleet. I also never tried the ultimate planes, for now I finished the game before.

For the turns argument it's arguable because it's not only a turn arguing it's a number of ships involved arguing. All in all with the classical invade mode if you do 2 invading in parallel and the systems really worth it, then you need invest at least two big fleet and protect them.

The bombing+invading can allow chain series of invading with multiple small invade fleet and let you concentrate on space battle fleet. The bombing building destruction is very damaging but also it can be used for a destructive purpose only, not for invading. Population bombing is a bit more coherent and there's ways to repopulate rather fast. Morover the time to invade 5 or 10 systems can be a lot faster.

In general I also prefer setup strategy using the classical invading, mainly because it requires less management, but the bombing with new invading is an interesting option. I bet in one game it will allow me hurry up to not lost a game.

[JErosion]

it can depend on your faction, ive had a lot of success using fighters and bombers with the Harmony, since their teir two ships get a massive weight bonus on the moduals, and since they are 1 command point ships, and it leaves plenty of room for standard depense and a few weapons a fleet of 12 of those little buggers, with two fighter wings set to "battle" can shred your opponents fleets. I know setting them to "Balanced" gives you diversity, but the penelties aren't worth it and I find it better to just load teir 4 and 5 ships with seige weapons and skip using bombers, If you can wait out the seige(min of 10 turns with a high seige rating), instead of using bombers and fighters, or even landing troops, you can walk away with more of a population and infrastructure on a planet entact, those newly conquered systems can be a pain to do anything with

[[FHW] Jack]

I use also many fighters and bombers but only when i play a faction that have bonuses like the harmony.

Greetings
Desiderius

[Dorok]

I'm almost sure that the patch several days ago made important changes in the system of fighters/bombers/bombing/troops/quick invade. So the comments I made seems now obsolete, trying to figure in my current play what are the rules around bombing.

[Dorok]

Ok so at least I got the bomb system button activated, first time since the last patch several days ago.

I took profit of this situation to make some experiment because I was totally lost on how enable the system bombing button.

The first point is the bombing button is activated by analyzing fleet independently. You need one fleet in the system with:
- At least one bomb module (perhaps the ship having it should have at least one plane).
- The planes has a classical invading power (not used for system bombing) and another invade power you can check with the tooltip only in blueprint view. This second invade power is computed for the fleet and must reach a number to enable the bombing button.
- This invade power isn't influenced by the classical invade power (bonus or current calssical power seems has no effect.
- The planes specialized in combat hasn't any of this invade power.
- Planes in a ship in the fleet are used to compute this invade power even if the ship has no bomb module (but the fleet where is the ship should have at least one bomb module, perhaps more).
- Troops has an invade power but this one isn't used to compute the fleet invade power to activate the bombing button.
- The invade power computed is purely the sum of those mentioned in the tooltips. I made various combination with planes specialized in invading or planes for combats and invading, with fighters or bombers, and it had no special effect only the sum in the fleet was important, for the case I tried at 2850 the bombing button wasn't activated and at 2900 it was activated.
- If that invade power in a system is spread on multiple fleet it's not working as well, it seems there's a bug about spiting fleet and when the bombing button is activated. But I won't detail the bug, if you stick on concentrating on a fleet it will work like that.

Well it's still very rough edges because you have to compute this sum yourself. And it's worse than that because you can check the numbers only though the blueprint and if it is replaced by a new version you can't even check it and need remind what planes you used.

Some example of this invade power for the first level planes :
- Fighter specialized in invade : 250
- Fighter for both combat and invade : 150
- Bomber specialized in invade : 400
- Bomber for both combat and invade : 200
- Any plane for combat only : 0

Not sure there's any link because I haven't multiply the test cases enough but for mention, the system was in enemy territory and had a classical defense of 6113, and I need the special invade power in one fleet of 2900.

The quick invading button is much more clear because it is based on any fleet and any ship in the system:
- You need at least one troop in the ships in the system to have it activated and one troop is enough.
- The chance to succeed is based on the sum of special invade power of all fleet and ship in the system, from troops and planes, so logically combat only planes seems has no effect.
- There's a brutal increase by steps, I haven't made many tests but it's still at 0 then 5% at a step, then quick rise to 50% and then 80% and 100%.
- As for system bombing it's the special invade power and just the number, tests are rough but seems work simply.

It's a bit difficult to build such quick invade by using only fighters for combat+invade and soldiers troops but those first level troops and that type of troop make no collateral damages neither for population nor for building. And just one troop is needed for a quick invade, you can bring a new ship with one troop for a next invade.

Seems clearly a potential OP path there with quick invade chained and not even with paying a population or building price. In fact that's was I was trying but get confused with the bombing mechanism. :-)

[Stabby McStabStab]

Yeah they're pretty useless. I do like using the fighter camera in battle though!

[Dorok]

Well useless I wouldn't say that, I just invaded a system in one click, one turn, no population kill, no building destroyed, 30 building taken, 20 population taken, one troop unit lost. Another troop module already arrived moving to next system and repeat another system at next turn. That one had 6000+ defense. But already more planes came and the fleets are ready to get something even bigger.

Planes and quick invade are OP! :-)

[Dorok]

And to complete the post with details, I quote that the system right after invade has 3010 AA defense, alas a number you can see only when you own the system.

When I was doing precise tests with that system I quoted that to have the bombing button activated I was needing a plane invade attack of 2900 and it wasn't working with 2850. But at that time I had one resource giving 4% invade bonus and 96% of 3010 is 2889.6 that could explain the 2900 invade attack required for enabling bombing.

It's interesting because a monopoly of this resource would provide 40% invade attack bonus and probably would lower a lot the requirement for bombing.

I haven't made precise calculation for getting a quick invade of 100% but it's possible that this resource could help too in that area.

[JErosion]

Bombers when set to invasion will destroy infrastructure(improvments) on the system and that can lower the defenses rating which can mean less time for take over if you dont have a high amount of seige on your ships, same goes for the Bombs both infrastructure and Anti-Personel, but the catch is it doesn't say which improvements are killed, it is randomly selected and since population also effects the defense rating you can use a combination of both to soften the target so your seige ships can take them easier, and just because you have troops on your ships doesn't mean a 100% success.

Ive had ships arrive a a system and start to seige troops where given a 5% chance of immediatly taking the system, but after a few turns of the seige, and a "Bombing" that number rose to 100%

[Dorok]

Yes a destructive approach is easier by using bombing first. In fact the turn you are trying quick invade you should not have perform any action with any ship and fleet in the system. Even a ship arriving in the system disable quick invade.

There's a bug and the game let the quick invade button enabled but if you use it when you already did something in the system during the turn, the quick invade will do nothing, no invade report, never an invade even with 100% but you'll have lost all your troops. So when you arrive in an unoccupied system it's a perfect time to trigger a bombing if you aim a destructive approach.

It's also efficient to use smaller fleet from bombing only to prepare for another fleet making the invading.

Try the population bombing to keep building is more satisfying but certainly a lot slower once AI start build stuff increasing AA.

For the quick invade without any collateral damages, it's efficient but it requires a lot of organization and building big fleet. Moreover as the game has currently a bug by letting you select an older plane model but it's fake the interface is here but do nothing, once you have research better planes you don't have access anymore to such planes for invading without collateral damages. Anyway that approach is probably a sort of exploit not fully realized by dev/designers and I think it will be removed in a later patch.

All in all it's very destructive but perfect if you are in hurry. In my current game it will certainly avoid me a defeat. I had to crush first the opponents in space area but then it's very fast to knock down a whole big empire threatening a lightning fast economic victory. I wonder how the gameplay would be if AI was using bombing and quick invade.

[JErosion]

then again it can depend on your faction your playing, if playing Harmony i dont mind waiting the 10 turns to take a system, since i can field endless planet crushing fleets without the dust upkeep, other races you have to move quickly since a large fleets can put you in the red

[Cerramir]

I created "carrier" dreadnoughts to see how they fared in battle and to try an experiment for the Slapping the Mosquitos achievement (someone gave a suggestion along these lines although it didn't work). They were created just for space battles.

Essentially, i created Dreadnought-class (4 cmd) ships w/ one battle oriented fighter squadron and one battle oriented bomber squadron each. Extra tonnage, repair module, and as much of the 3 defenses i could get for the rest of the points. No hero. No invasion modules. Zero weaponry. At the time i could only create fleets of up to 16 cmd points so my fleets had 4 dreadnoughts each, obviously. That's still alot of squadrons flying around tho. They actually turned into space dust everything of equal point size. Nothing got close to damaging my ships in that game (success may vary :b). A ran across a few big mixed fleets of bigger point size that actually retreated away from my carrier fleets that i thought would give my boys trouble. Losing weaponry and keeping your defenses high enough might give your squadrons free reign in battle to pick off enemy ships until the AI can figure out a strategy or catches up technologically. Playing like this as the Hissho.... O.O

[Flopsy_the_rabbit]

Thats interesting, I tried making a carrier type ship but it wasn't very effective. Maybe I'll give it another go