role needed for star fighters

Undecided.

Corvettes are already a "dead end" path. On Large+ maps, they are not worthwhile researching.

However, on Small & Tiny maps, they are very useful. They can blitz an adjacent opponent without too much trouble.

A second problem is, increasing the sensor range on a Starfighter will cause it to interfere with the role of a Scout.

Another suggestion: Keep Starfighters "as is" ("are"?). Improve Corvettes with +1 speed, concurrent with their role as a raider.

~SDC~

Both of those ships need some rethinking, the only reason I ever build either is for an early game boost of my military power rating so the AI stays off my back.

star fighters are great as hunters in the game going after transports, freighters and missiles. Very useful, very cheap, very fast.

paul.

~SDC~

I got some good use out of Star Fighters in a recent game. I've been successfully playing using an economic style game for some weeks now and I decided to experiment with a fast build-up & aggressive military style and see how that worked. In other words, I decided to mimic the Drengin style of play. Game info: gigantic gal, rare habitable planets, all AI=genius, version 1.03A. After scouting around for awhile, I found some good planets and found I was next to the Yor and the Arceans. By the time I ran into them, I had already started producing Star Fighters. I immediately started eliminating the Yor's Colony ships (and Constructors when they started showing up) and proceeded to research towards Transports. The harassment was working so good that the Yor eventually sued for peace, which I ignored, unfortunately. By the time I had Transports built and positioned for planet conquest, I had quite a few Star Fighters. I used them to take out the Defenders that both civs were using for planet defense and managed to take two planets (one each from the Yor and Arceans) and almost had another planet when I ran out of Transports. Worked pretty good.

The mistake I made is I didn't retrench after these victories: I continued to push for more planets. By the time my next wave of Transports arrived, both civs had Battle Axes and were starting to field Corvettes. I was out-gunned and I had a terrible economy as I had to sacrifice this to focus on military research and production.

My point is that with the 1.03x changes, the Star Fighters have some additional uses in the very early game beyond just harassment duties.

I concur with Code Monkey, but this comes from a player who rarely ever tries to flex military muscles. The only games I win at higher AI Intelligence is by avoiding wars.

Scouts have sensor range of 5 and much greater travel range than the star fighter, so giving the star fighter a sensor range of 4 wouldn't really hurt the scout at all.

I'm just looking for some excuse to make star fighters after I have corvettes. Currently there is no reason to because they both have 1 maintenance and the star fighter doesn't have ANY trait that is better than a corvette.

To Interstellar
Hm from my point of view this is good - you either researching dead-end technology and get corvettes or don't do it.

~SDC~

I think there are other ships that are also either dead-end or can be bypassed, yet they all continue to have a use throughout the game. Just the fact they technology is dead-end is not a reason to justify underpaying the crews.

The 'obsolete' and dead-end ships can still be useful later in the game because:

1) They're cheaper on maintenance.

2) You can use them to knock off weaker enemies, allowing your newer/bigger ships to focus on the tougher ones thus increasing efficiency.

3) They amass some good experience and thus are often more powerful than the newer ships coming out of the shipyards with no experience.

This is true for virtually all the ships except the star fighter. Star fighters don't live long enough to gain a lot of experience, plus they have nothing to offer after corvettes because corvettes are too cheap to produce & maintain for the position they hold in the game.

Maybe if 2 maintenance is too expensive, then give them a couple more hit points to justify the increase.

I just like having a diverse military. I rarely scrap old ships except for star fighters and those obsolete models which haven't gained any experience and are unlikely to collect experience in the future. Then I scrap them. Other than that, I like to keep them all. I wish I could keep my star fighters too but there just is no place for them. They're not even worth the 1bc/mo maintenance right now, because of the corvettes being underpaid.

I never reseach corvettes. Starfighters are just as good for keeping your military rating up, so there is no incentive to climb the dead end corvette branch. If I get into a real war early I want to go up the defense branch to get defenders and battleaxes, not corvettes. I really think it's corvettes that need some boosting, not starfighters.

Take a few hit points off Starfighters and give them +1 or +2 movement over Corvettes instead. That'll keep the useful even till end game.

The limited variety of useful ships in GalCiv is something that can be improved on for sure. Part of this problem stems from the structure of the tech tree as the ship techs are often too close together. The time it took to reach Overlord from Battleships was less than 2 years in my last game. While the initial tech spacing and that between Dreadnoughts and Rangers is pretty good, the Battleship to Dreadnought and Ranger to Avatar and Overlord gap is just too small. Free tech trading between the AIs doesn't help the situation either.

The other problem is the huge difference in ship power as you upgrade from one type to another. The only three units that remain viable throughout the game for me are Rangers (anomalies), Anti-Matter Missiles (big punch, low maintenance), and Excaliburs. While the other ships have their uses, I seldom create more than a dozen of them (total) in any game since they are quickly obsolete, and this is with me always pursuing military conquest too.

I play on gigantic maps, so the extra resources that can be invested into research may be skewing the results here. In that respect, a research cost multiplier based on map size could help alleviate the problem, or perhaps a user enabled "tech stagnation" option like the one in SMAC might work too.

I rather think Corvettes need boosting. I build Star Fighters. I never ever build Corvettes. Ever. I focus my research points elsewhere. Maybe if you didn't have to research TWO dead-end techs, it would be nice. I would love it if Photons were a prerequisite to Battleships. That would make the research worthwhile.

moodgiesanta: Good point, there's quite a few ships that use photons as their weapons but don't require photon technology, so I think there's a missing dependancy somewhere.

Starfighters = SUX royally. It's really only good for making the AI waste its money.