Make bombers viable! (Balancing, and buffing small ships a bit)

[Ckeeze]

So everyone has encountered this problem:
-You have 10 or even more bomberdrones, the enemy has one big ship. and the you can do nothing couse the enourmus shield and dps advantage the big ships get makes bombers impossible to win any battle...

How could we resolve this? I have some simple ideas, shine only needs to add ONE new system/subsystem block! wich is some form of torpedoes or bombs.
They would be either a system combo for missiles or a new weapon block.
What properties shall they have?
the goal is that They should be viable only IN small ships and only AGAINST big ships!
-Shield ignoring or penetration: The bombs/torpedoes should penetrate shields! Shields are the biggest advantages the capital ships hold against fighters.
-The bigger they are the slower they became! This makes that large ships couldn't use effectively torpedoes, only small torpedoes will be fast enough to hit any moving object.
-They shouldn't be seakers! Something that can penetrate shield is quite an OP weapon, there should be no option to make them homing, this also incrises the skillcelling to the game, becouse fine aim and prediction will be requered to land a good shot.
-They should have a dmg celling, the slowing effect isn't enough necesarily, they would still be OP as hell against stations, and thus make station less affective. well the slowness would help the point deffense take care of them.
-They should do moderate explosive dmg. they shouldn't be insanely good, the goal is to make 4-5 bombers able to fight against a battleship if the battleship doesn't have a support fleet.

I haven't read any suggestions yet, I may mentioned someone's ideas therefore i won't claim these as mine. feel free to repost this wherever you want. I just want this idea to be promoted and implemented in some form. Feel free to make further suggestions, how this could be balanced even better.

 

[Deserea]

A.) They can if built right, they already have an advantage over larger ships. I *fear* ships of smaller mass in my "titan" especially some of the PVP ones ive been using in the NPC factions.
B.) 4-5 bombers from my understanding from talking to pvp players can have very little problems taking on a ship of much greater mass.
C.) Torpedoes are something you can already make with Warheads. Warheads need to be overhauled so they are effective by default without extensive modifications to their configuration instead of adding in a completely new system. They also already ignore shields.

 

[kulbolen]

this already works, theres tons of examples of people gangbanging a ship 20x their size

 

[Brokengauge]

What mass fighters are you thinking of? 200? Or 2k? Cuz I could make a 2k fighter that's effective (and I'm not even a PvP kind of guy).

Im with Deserea, Overhaul warheads would be the best thing to do. They would offer the same advantages as real life torpedos, as well as their liabilities. You don't want to still have them on board once your shields drop!

 

[sayerulz]

Not again..................

 

[Nauvran]

Not again..................

what an amazingly helpfull comment

 

[sayerulz]

what an amazingly helpfull comment

For an amazingly relevant and original thread such as this, I use only the best.

 

[Az14el]

Niet

'Small' drones are truly garbage at some things, but dunking big shields & armor very quickly is not one of those things. They're pretty freaking good at that actually.

Obviously your combined fleet needs a decent fraction of your targets mass (30% is usually the rule of thumb for competetive drones), and your target can't be faster than and/or outrange them or they're obviously going to be destroyed.

If you want your drones to be buffed there's probably a lot of things you can do about it yourself before considering it a game problem :p

btw your suggestion is pretty much warhead torpedos/ramming, ignores shields/low impact per hit/more effective the larger their target/extremely dangerous to mount on any expensive vessel. Only they actually can be guided by bobby AI. They're not widely used because they're just not that great in direct combat. I prefer to just deliver a shitload of individual torps at once but can't deny how hard these ones can hit MK VI Torpedo System
Try mounting a few on a jammable (or even better, cloakable) small ship and loosing them on something big if you wanna test, still not good compared to actual weapons, but if its the only hit you can get in...

 

[Kelpaz]

Through combat testing, I've noticed that fighters/drones are terrible at unit cohesion aka sticking together and moving around the targets.
In combat smaller ships have a terrible tendency to slowly spread apart until they are in the surrounding sectors.

Other horrible strategies include strafing extremely slowly, going into missile range making and not using all their weapons.
The worst of all is when they change targets and let's their past target recover.

In conclusion what needs to be improved is the combat AI.

 

[kulbolen]

Through combat testing, I've noticed that fighters/drones are terrible at unit cohesion aka sticking together and moving around the targets.
In combat smaller ships have a terrible tendency to slowly spread apart until they are in the surrounding sectors.

Other horrible strategies include strafing extremely slowly, going into missile range making and not using all their weapons.
The worst of all is when they change targets and let's their past target recover.

In conclusion what needs to be improved is the combat AI.

ai really needs to be worked on, but most of these issues can be solved by the builder/operator.

 

[MeRobo]

The bigger they are the slower they became! This makes that large ships couldn't use effectively torpedoes, only small torpedoes will be fast enough to hit any moving object.

So what would stop me from putting 200 5 block torpedos on a large ship instead of one 1000 block torpedo?
Or loads of small torpedo turrets?

 

[kulbolen]

So what would stop me from putting 200 5 block torpedos on a large ship instead of one 1000 block torpedo?
Or loads of small torpedo turrets?

the game engine.

 

[sayerulz]

the game engine.

It would be back to the dark days of server-killing waffleboards, but now it's missiles instead of cannons so the lag would be ten times worse.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

(Dons flame retardant suit... picks up fire extinguisher...) Fix the AI. Balance the weapons. Buff the warheads.

That is all...