Hello everyone, what are space battles or wargames without fighters, right? In this video we are showcasing how we are dealing with fighter squadrons.
There are 3 Alliance cruisers, with basic rapid fire batteries (no upgrades), under attack by 6 squadrons of USF fighters.
The squadrons were launched by 6 carriers positioned at a long safe distance. Each time a squadron is launched, an icon shows up on the top left corner of the GUI. Clicking on that icon, the fighter squadron can be selected, and ordered as any other ship in the game.
The fighters can be ordered to dock on its carrier, or the carrier ordered to recall the fighters.
Fighter squadrons are quite powerful if the targeted ships are not equipped with rapid fire cannons. Without these defense guns, ships will be sitting ducks against fighters. Large ships are simply too slow to be able to escape the maneuverability of individual fighters.
A good way to disable a large capital ship is to order several fighter squadrons to target the life support system of the enemy ship. Once the life support is disabled, the crew of the targeted ship will be neutralized, making the ship easy to board.
Each fighter squadron in this video has 16 fighters, so for 6 fighter squadrons there's a total of 96 fighters in this attack.
On another subject, what do you guys think of having the health bars over the ships? Do you like it like this, or would you prefer to have them off, and only showing up when the mouse is over a ship? Check out the video, and share your thoughts.
I'd prefer it if hull and shields showed their status by their visual appearance. If different kinds of damage were used to specify the amount of damage taken -i.e. burn marks for anything between 100 and 75%, large cracks for anything between 75 and 50%, holes and sparks flying around for anything between 50 and 25% and fire and smoke for anything below 25%- then the general status of your ship would be clear, even without seeing the health bar all the time.
Same goes for shields, of course. Flucutations within the shields, static or the shield blinking in and out could make for a good indicator as how much damage they took, making it easy to determine which ships should be withdrawn or protected first. If you're still interested in the exact amount of hitpoints your ship has left you can still highlight it with your mouse.
You could have a simple button to toggle showing health bars on mouseover only or constantly, like Homeworld's "Tactical overlay density" button, or something similar.
very ncie, love the shield effect,