Fighter Spam

[vader95]

So is there anyway fighters could be approached differently?  I understand fighters play a huge role in Star Wars but in regards to the Sins engine and especially in the late game these mostly unseen little guys eat up the bulk of the CPU.  I understand its a Sins engine limitation but I was curious if the fighters could be simulated in a way that doesn't require the engine to keep track all these little guys because in the end these fighters are really just numbers on a spreadsheet that move faster and do less damage then their larger ship counterparts.  I was thinking you could still produce fighters like normal but instead of three actuall fighters popping out their damage or buff is just applied to their host ship.

Just thinking out loud and it's just frustrating that if you want to experience a mostly stutter free late game session you have to limit yourself to 1vs1 matches on small/medium maps.  I also turn off some features to help to like turning off trade ships and so on. 

[Corey]

Not really. Fighters do a lot more than just add a few DPS to your capital ships, especially considering how important they are to certain factions, so simply removing them in favour of some heavier turbolasers or something would throw everything off.

There are a few other things we're doing to limit lag going forward, and I've never had problems with 5-6 player maps on normal fleet sizes, but no, removing fighters entirely isn't a solution we'll be pursuing.

[fredthefaillord]

Would it be possible to change spreadsheet values and models to reflect pairs or trios of fighters working together, rather than simulating each fighter individually?  That would reduce the CPU load, without reducing the number of fighters visible.  Fighters move as a squadron anyway, so changing a squadron to have maybe 3 units of 3 fighters each (just an example) might have potential for both visual design and performance

[Slornie]

Pretty sure Ascendancy already uses small squadrons - down to two or three fighters representing the entire squadron (with the stats adjusted accordingly) - so I don't know how much further that could be taken.

[tlmiller]

I wanna say I've heard Corey mention that before as well.

[fredthefaillord]

down to two or three fighters representing the entire squadron

Just checked, and yeah, that it what you do, sorry!  I think I may have just confused this with another SW mod for sins, and never bothered to check starfighter specifics beyond where they were attacking