It seems that every time I start a campaign intending to heavily use fighters, I run into two problems that prevents me from enjoying doing so. This is true of any fight, but it’s a different order of magnitude when using fighters.
First, and more trivially, they leave a lot of debris. It’s a pain cleaning up wrecks and lifepods after a fight. I feel a moral obligation to clean up the lifepods, and a “tidiness” obligation to clean up the wrecks.
Second, and most impactfully, when a fighter within a fleet gets damaged and can’t move, it’s supposed to be automatically ejected from the fleet. This happens… sometimes. In a big fight I frequently find myself with fighter fleets that suddenly have 1km/s top speed, and I have to go figure out why. Sometimes there’s a fighter with a damaged engine that wasn’t auto-removed from the fleet. Sometimes all fighters still in the fleet are fine, but the top speed wasn’t reset once the damaged fighter was kicked out, and I have to move them all into a new fleet to get it to reset the top speed.
This second issue in particular is micro intensive and really kills the joy I’d like to have in fighter battles. Is anyone else having this issue, and are there known work-arounds or mitigations?
For the wrecks, just have a salvager ship in a fleet with a cargo ship, the salvage will auto go into the cargo ship even if the salvager ship does not even have a cargo hold. Then give it the standing order to auto-salvage wrecks, but be warned, they will head out of system if you know of wrecks elsewhere in the galaxy so you may want to tick the Ignore Standing Orders box when the system is clear.
There is also a standing order you can use the Lifepods [ MV: Rescue Lifepod (S) ]. Seeing as the Lifepods have around 15 days before they expire you can simply wait until the end of battle and then just have 1 fast fighter have that standing order and zip about before using the landing back on the Carrier.
As for the fighter macro, my Fighters and FACs tend to focus on speed and fire range. So they don’t tend to take much fire. And almost zero when they are simply backing up a 5k Frig (or larger ship) with a shield and the Fighters/FACs have their sensors off.
This campaign I haven’t even done any Fighters or FACs apart from 500t boarding craft. Even have a shipyard for them that I upgraded to 4 slipways that has never been used lol. (In year 0064 right now)
Found instead of using 5 FACs or 10 Fighters, a 5k Frig with a single 1000t shield and Particle Beam 240km was enough against the raiders. If shield went low then it had the speed to pull back and recharge it. My 10k DD with 3x Particle Lance 240km and single 1000t shield drills right through them now though. No other alien contact so far though.
EDIT: O’h and my Frigs and DD both live inside carriers so only have 1 month deployments.
I reported this as a bug a few years ago on the old forum. My recollection (going from fuzzy memory here) was that either Steve wasn’t seeing the same issue or thought he fixed it. Before reporting it again, I wanted to see if anyone else was seeing this happen, or if it’s something unique to the way I’m managing my fleet, designing my ships, or… something?
It’s possible it’s just a display issue? I just had a carrier fleet’s speed go to 1km/s when a subfleet returned and docked with the carrier. As soon as I ordered the carrier fleet to move, the next 5s increment it was back at the right speed. I didn’t thinking to check if it lost a movement tick when that happened, which would be an issue for a fighter fleet trying to close. Will try to look closer next time.
I remember such bug in the older version of Aurora. Check what version of the game you’re running?
As others said, Salvaging can be automated easily. I do that often, when battlefield is no longer contested. As for rescuing the pods, I once created a CSAR (combat search and rescue) small craft and it was fast and small enough to use immediately during combat. Felt quite realistic.
