Small craft suggestion

[nerezzar]

Right now, Small craft feel a little on the weak side. And they don't even guzzle fuel like it's water yet. (pun intended)

In order to fix both the "take 4 rounds to attack once" bad feeling and also the damage per round, I'd like to suggest the following:

Have the 4 turn attack plan change into a 5 turn attack plan: launch, engage, bomb, bomb, retreat.
That will probably have to be balanced, especially with bombers' damage.
The debuffs could only applied on the first instance of damage each run, making them slightly more reliant.

On the down side, this will mean that small craft are exposed to auto cannons one more turn. This could also maybe be balancing enough once small craft actually are targetable again.
This would also further make auto cannons more interesting. If you want that.

You could also only apply this change to e.g. interdictors as those probably are the ships that are better suited for longer engagements.

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Second suggestion: Have small craft hit chance scale with debuffs and/or destroyed modules and/or ship size.

I had an interdictor miss a 300 Hull sword Battlecruiser with 15 debuffs and that felt wrong as hell. I understand that there are defensive measures to mitigate ship size, but for real, the ship was a huge as fk burning wreck EMPed into nothingness. My blind Grandma would have hit that.

If you had it scale with ship size that would be a small buff for small ships as those have slight problems right now, in my experience (especially for newer players who don't know how to maximize skill pools as efficiently)

[Kawaii Five-O]

So we'd talked about this on Discord, and while I do agree with the sentiment shown by the OP, I would go about different ways to fix this.

As mentioned on the channel, I am of the opinion that strike crafts are wildly cost-ineffective and take too long to do what they're supposed to, both crippling flaws that severely limit their desirability. To go in slightly more detail...

[Cost-ineffectiveness]
Not only launch bays are expensive pieces of tech, aircraft must also be bought/replaced and crew trained/geared; all of this comes at an expense of considerable sums (a single M8000 bay costs 600k, more than enough to buy and deck out an entire Palace Interceptor), slots that may be better put to use with bigger and nastier weapons or modules, and crew slots that may be filled by members who actually contribute to the ship's pools.

[Slow response time]
Having to wait 2 full turns bfore your craft actually do anything is extremely frustrating and leaves them too exposed.
Strike craft talents ARE good, to be sure, but are they good enough to justify having them sit around, doing nothing much, until they actually reach their target and attack on their 3rd turn? Not really, no, not when it's two full turns in which the enemy could just pop them out of the sky or, God forbid, cancel their flight path with Knock from the Void, making all the time and talents and RPs spent so far worthless.

So how would I suggest going about to fix this?
Here are two possibilities.

[Buff the planes and attack runs]
If you're really going to bleed me dry for those attack runs and have them be so slow and counter-prone, then the damage they can potentially inflict (and I don't mean strictly hull damage, debuffs are part of it) has to be a lot more significant - significant enough that you actually feel compelled to divert part of or your full firepower to stop.
If they are really meant to be so slow, the payoff must be proportional to the investment - and doubling the effect of the current attack runs and the damage they deal while they're at it could go a good way towards making them the looming threat they're supposed to be.

[Halve the downtime and launch costs]
Alternatively, if you want to play up the supportive role of these crafts, just slash their downtime - an attack run could simply last 2 turns instead of 4, with the first one covering both launch and reach and the second striking and retreating.
This way there's still enough time for the craft to be downed (turn 1 and turn 2, until they despawn), but their threat level escalates considerably as, say, a bomber left ignored could firebomb your ship for -25 Crew/Comp/Morale damage per turn, which is really nasty.

If I had to pick one, I'd probably go with the second solution as it makes things generally more dynamic and encourages the use of strike crafts more than battle-ending damage does - whatever the case, I await your opinions on this, devs.

[tarquelne]

I share the opinion that small craft should get a boost ... to the point where doubling the number of attack turns strikes me as reasonable.

I do like the default of 4+ turns of flight time, though, because it help set them apart from weapons.

What if small craft anti-ship attacks were balanced around a hit chance of 100%, lowered only by Talents and auto cannons or defenses that specifically target small craft?

My thinking is that this would provide small craft with a clear “pro” and further differentiate them from weapons.

[fallen]

Thanks for all the feedback! We'll definitely keep working to improve.