Topic: For those of you who think the Hydran IC is bad in SFC......

[Brezgonne]

Have a look at what the real one has along with it's REQUIRED escorts. I'll point out that the escorts can be bigger or scarrier than what's here.

[KBF-Crim]

And they call a D5E cheesy.....SHEEEEESH!

[Brezgonne]

And they call a D5E cheesy.....SHEEEEESH!

oh it's not that bad. you have to remember that the way you guys use carrier escorts is horribly horribly illegal

[Bonk]

And they call a D5E cheesy.....SHEEEEESH!

oh it's not that bad. you have to remember that the way you guys use carrier escorts is horribly horribly illegal

Pretty transparent trolling lately Brez...

I agree completely, unfortunately most players will not accept multiship fleets for players on SFC servers. Something about the fleet controls being biased for particular races, though I do not see how. So we're left with flying single ships only which makes any escort illegal by SFB standards if flown. It pretty much takes the "fleet" out of Starfleet Command. Myself, I can manage the fleet controls for any race as well as any other. But lets not get into that flamage again.

Lets start some different flamage... how about ADDs? I have never seen two ADDs take out 12 drones in two impulses in SFB however it happens regularly in SFC. Either I just had really bad luck with dice in SFB or SFC has increased an ADDs to hit from a best of 66% to 100% and increased the rate of fire to about 16 shots per impulse. I can only imagine the anti-drone crowds' whinings if ADDs were reduced to SFB standards.

[Brezgonne]

And they call a D5E cheesy.....SHEEEEESH!

oh it's not that bad. you have to remember that the way you guys use carrier escorts is horribly horribly illegal

Pretty transparent trolling lately Brez...

I don't actually know what that means anymore 

[Skaren]

Fishing for controversy I am guessing,.

Hooked,.. ,...

It has been my experience that races that have to deliver the killer blow to win do poorly with AI.  Like a bunch of War Eagles run by AI suck.  We had that a couple of campaigns back.  We used 6 ship fleets for players and the plasma races did poorly.  As a group we started reviewing the films as to what was going wrong with the Romulan battles and we noticed the war eagles who really need to correctly deliver the type R rarely did so.

At least when you have 3 ship stacks like bonk says you can sorta control em better with the fleet panel but if they are a whole extra fleet you have 0 control over, your done.

One reason we backed off stack size and now run games with only 3 ship stacks.

S

That carrier/fighter/escourt cheese, as you guys call it is pretty bad,.. we limit them severely in our games.

[Bonk]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll

P.S. I replaced your huge gif image with a monochrome dithered 8bit png (295KB->58KB) as we are painfully bandwidth starved at the moment.

[Hexx]

The three ship fleet thing is easy

-Any drone using race gets to pretty much set "fly tight formation and launch all drones when I press this one button"
Wheras Lyran (for example) get to make sure that none of the ships creates a wild weasel (otherwise the AI will drop it and your nice formation suddenly lags)
set ESG ranges to the same, set power sliders to the same, hope that one of your ships doesn't fire off phasers at long range leaving it defenceless or in need of PD from another ship, etc etc
~ Agin it's not to be said it can't be done, but ease of use is definetley on the drone users side. Oddly enough mostly drone chucling pilots that want the ability  

The escorts aren't that bad either, in SGO (and otheres) most of the drone ones have had their racks downgraded to F's
No one (to the best of my knowledge) ever really flies the Plasma escorts, the Lyran one is useless, and I assume the Hydran
one's aren't fantastic either as one rarely sees them.
-Yeah it'll hurt if it gets within range 3 of you, other than that who really cares?

[Bonk]

... make sure that none of the ships creates a wild weasel (otherwise the AI will drop it and your nice formation suddenly lags)

Yes that's one of the main tricks with fleets, never give your AIs shuttles, that way they cannot weasel.

[Brezgonne]

Fishing for controversy I am guessing,.

Hooked,.. ,...

It has been my experience that races that have to deliver the killer blow to win do poorly with AI.  Like a bunch of War Eagles run by AI suck.  We had that a couple of campaigns back.  We used 6 ship fleets for players and the plasma races did poorly.  As a group we started reviewing the films as to what was going wrong with the Romulan battles and we noticed the war eagles who really need to correctly deliver the type R rarely did so.

At least when you have 3 ship stacks like bonk says you can sorta control em better with the fleet panel but if they are a whole extra fleet you have 0 control over, your done.

One reason we backed off stack size and now run games with only 3 ship stacks.

S

That carrier/fighter/escourt cheese, as you guys call it is pretty bad,.. we limit them severely in our games.

Nah. Not looking for controversy. Just wanted to scare the Lyrans and Klingons

[Hexx]

Again it's not really scary.
If there were such a Hydran fleet t00l would be using it and,well, the problem sort of takes care of itself then.

Oh and ADD's
Haven't really played SFB so not sure how they're supposed to work, but generally if I'm flying something with AMD
I pretty much consider anything with 2 racks to be immune to any waves up to 8 drones or so.

Of course even I don't claim to be a drone expert, but for the most part you really need to saturate something to get past 2.

[762_XC]

Using the fleet interface with this game is pure torture. FORCING people to use it should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

[Bonk]

When I finally get around to running another SFB-OP server, fleets will be allowed and restricted to SFB CnC rules as far as the SFC engine will allow. Though I know t00l will not play on it, that's OK, I'll fly Hydran for him. (A BB is not technically legal acccording to SFB CnC under any conditions in SFC - the 3 ship fleet limit prevents it... though it occurs to me that the new multiship fleets possible with the OCI would allow a BB fleet that adheres to SFB CnC, just need to finish debugging SQL and create a supply/repair dock for the OCI...)

But I'd rather flame about ADDs... the uber-weapon of SFC...

EDIT: I'd think t00l could manage to get worked up over the uber-weapon known as the AMD (ADD on steroids) considering its heinous effect on fighters as well...  (now I'm trolling...  )

[Hexx]

Nah... by the time AMD cuts in his hideously cheesy stingers are in range .

Now if we could put AMD on a shuttle...

[Brezgonne]

Using the fleet interface with this game is pure torture. FORCING people to use it should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

why? Seems simple enough to me....

[FPF-DieHard]

What about "Fleet Points?"  We have them for Heavy metal and X-tech to control the population, what not expand this to fleets?  Maybe allow 1 or 2 per side at a time, define a fleet to be a Command ship and 2 Vanilla CW/NCA (or something like that). 

This seems resonable to me.

[Mog]

Using the fleet interface with this game is pure torture. FORCING people to use it should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

why? Seems simple enough to me....

Of course it would; I remember you flew Mirak, piece of piss as Hexx said.

[Hexx]

Using the fleet interface with this game is pure torture. FORCING people to use it should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

why? Seems simple enough to me....

Of course it would; I remember you flew Mirak, piece of piss as Hexx said.

<checks posts for "piece of piss">
<looks confused>
I recognize all the words but not really in that order... damn Scots

IF it was limited to (maybe) one or two teams a side I don't think it's be an issue. But as mentioned- fleet control for Lyran is probably the worst
(by far) out of all the races. I don't know if there's a solution for Romulan ship to keep them from cloaking either.
Which (for the coaliton) leaves the Klinks (on a regular basis)
And really I'm not sure they'd be that great at it until 73ish or so.

BUt really Kzin are easy (not anything against Kzinpilots, just the way it works)
Fed with 3 ships with 4 photons each + drones would be pretty good I'd think.
I'd honestly think Hydran would be good what with the hellbores, but t00l seems to disagree and I'd have to admit he knows more about them then I do.
But still they're going to be better then Lyran or Rom.
Gorn would (of course) be the same as ROm, except for no cloaking issue

So really you've got 2 Alliance races that would (imho) excel at it and two that wouldn't be bad against whatver combos the Klinks can field.

Of course it depends on what the sides are.

[762_XC]

Fleet control requires far too much micromanagement to be mainstream. It changes the game from a thinking man's tactical game into a reflex-based clickfest.

Maybe if we ran games at speed 5 it would be OK. 

[Capt_Bearslayer_XC]

I'd honestly think Hydran would be good what with the hellbores, but t00l seems to disagree and I'd have to admit he knows more about them then I do.

Controlling the fighters would be bad for most races, the worst, by far, would be Hydran.... b/c almost every ship has fighters and the AI automaticly send them all in to get slaughtered....

I am pretty familiar with the fleet panel and do like the idea of flying fleets. But others don't care for it...