First I have to apologize for this turn's missile strikes not working again. Long story short I messed up trying to close a loophole in the code that was opened when we had to disable the AI. The diplomat code was part of the AI and after it was disabled players found they could repeatedly missile strike installations on a planet where they or their ally had a diplomat and then build the installations back and get paid again for building them. This was not how it was programmed to work. Once someone attacked the planet all payments were stopped. But I wanted to make sure that an ally didn't inadvertently missile strike a planet where you had a diplomat working for you sending your diplomatic level to zero. Taking some of the code out of the AI and installing it to run separately has caused some problems. But after working on it again after this run I should have all the code working for the next run. But I will run it through quite a few more tests just to make sure I covered all the situations.
Second thing. When fixing a message in the fighter strike routines I found a very old error in the code. Ever wonder why fighters attacking a fleet suffered so little while dishing out a tremendous amount of damage virtually wiping out the fleet every time. The code multiplied the fighters damage to the fleet while dividing the fleets firepower damage to the fighters. That's a very simple explanation of the outcome. A little more on this is that the original programmer used the same subroutine for fighter vs cap as fighter vs fleet. Fighter vs cap worked fine or as fine as I can tell but when a fleet was the defender several lines of code made a errant calculation. I went back to code from 1990 and it's in there as well so it's not something new. Been around a long time. And maybe someone changed it on purpose. Always a possibility I suppose although it strikes me as more of an error than a plan.
There was also some other calculations when fighters entered stellar clouds that weren't being figured into the strikes. When you get the message that you fighters are spreading out and down to visual search, the number of fighters that actually find the enemy fleet should not be the entire strike force. The number of fighters that missed the enemy fleet was calculated but never applied meaning all the fighters found the enemy fleet in a stellar cloud every time. None ever failed to find the enemy fleet. This is code I wrote when Randy bought the game back as a way of trying to stop what largely became a total annihilation of enemy fleets by fighter Strikes. I was working on at least trying to reduce it in stellar clouds. I don't remember why this number was not applied or if it was at one time why it was removed. However I did add this back in the code this turn along with the missing message about how many fighters are returning from a strike on an enemy fleet that really was my reason for looking at this code in the first place.
So what does this mean? Best I can put forward right now is that fighters will take more damage from fleet firepower and probably not dish out as much and/or fewer will strike enemy fleets in stellar clouds. Should keep your battle fleets from being annihilated by a fighter strike while only knocking down 10 or 20 fighters. Also your fleets in stellar clouds should be somewhat harder to find and likely will not attract the entire strike force even if they are found.
The code for the fighters is being corrected and should be added before next turn. I have to test it a lot before then just to make sure I don't miss anything which is always hard to do on code you didn't write yourself.