I know the calculus of ship combat and planet combat, but how does a SOFA work? Do the fighters have to penetrate beams, shields, and torps, or what? Do any survive, or is it a fire-and-wave sort of thing?
Wonderful, thanks for being so informative. Good luck, Chewie - I asked this in the other thread last night and still haven't had a full answer. I thought I'd got the gist of it, but our conversation this morning in-game made me reconsider. Basically, do they go up against the planetary fighters at all and, if so, does this occur before or after the planetary beams come into play? If before, it seems like a good way to whittle down fighter defences without risking your ship. If after, you'd still need a lot of fighters to do any appreciable damage as you'd lose half your attack force prior to engaging the planetary fighter complement.
I actually still don't know the exact formulas for how it works, all I know is that a few rounds of sub orbital fighter attacks last night was what weakened planets enough to be able to capture them.
Then it would appear that either 1) SOFAs do engage planetary fighters and reduce their numbers OR 2) the players you attacked hadn't put enough energy down on the planets to support the beams and shields against more than a couple of strikes (even ramping the energy production of a newly colonized world up to 60-70%, it can take a while to build up to a decent level - I always do a couple of transfers from my ship on top).
From what I can gather your fighters initially just drain energy as the planet uses shields and beams to defend itself, and once the energy is gone you start taking out torpedos and fighters.
Beams vs. Your Fighters (1/2 max killed) Torps vs. Your Fighters (1/2 max killed) Fighters vs. Your Fighters So basically if you're hopelessly outclassed, 1/4 of your fighters will remove the same amount of their fighters. Though that is just what I've read on other boards, I haven't looked at the code itself.
This checks out. We just conducted a practice SOFA and my planet only lost energy and torpedoes, no fighter damage at all.
Hmmm actually then it doesn't check out - I thought the max beams/torps could do to fighters was kill half of them - seems like they can both kill half of the starting number, not half and then half of the half.
it appears to work: 1) torps vs fighters 2) beams vs fighter with presumably, 3) fighters vs fighters, which i'll give a try some other day as i'm bored of wasting turns. pylades has been very helpful in letting me twat one of his planets
It's my understanding that it works exactly the same as attacking with a ship. Just imagine that the ship attacking had zero beams, shields, torps, and armor, only fighters. And obviously the ship doesn't kerplode when all the fighters are gone.
