I don't know if anyone has mentioned this or not but I would love to see a capital ship able to launch and recover fighter ship designs for use in battle. If i put the same number of engines on my fleet ships, I have found that I have to leave the fighters on planets cuz they slow down the entire fleet.
Well I did see that this was addressed in another post.
I could see Carriers introduced as a way to extend the operating range of little ships - instead of having to have your 10 sectors worth of life support units on every ship, you could instead have a single ship with lots of life support modules that also has 'hangar bays' which would allow your fleet to ignore the life support limits (or average the carrier and supported ships life support range in some fashion) on X of your ships below size Y (possibly up to X 'ship points', where Tiny costs A ship points, Small costs B ship points, etc, potentially with a maximum size per hangar bay/cargo module/whatever you want to call it), as well as allowing you to ignore the speed limits for those ships that fit into the hangar (which would also allow a similar module that doesn't allow you to ignore the speed limit of the little ships, which would fall into a 'fleet tender' style role). Or they could introduce a more complicated support module where each ship can carry so many supplies or so much fuel, and various types of hangar bays or other support modules allow you to extend the fleet range.
I tend to disagree with the premise that smaller ships should be deadlier, depending on implementation - I absolutely do not want to see a return to the module size scaling of GCII, not when there was no reasonable explanation for it. If weapon A does X damage no matter what ship it's on, and the game doesn't model ammunition restrictions in any way, there's absolutely no reason for weapon A to take up more space on larger hulls than on smaller hulls. Defenses I'm a bit more okay with size scaling - it makes sense that the armor plating on a battleship takes more space than the armor plating on a fighter, and it makes sense that it might take larger shield generators or more chaff dispensers to adequately protect a cruiser than a corvette; same goes for life support and engines. But weapons? My Death Ray takes less space on a fighter than on a Battleship despite there being no apparent difference due to the ship type mounting it? If my fighter Death Rays were weaker than my Battleship Death Rays, I could understand it, but not when they're functionally identical. I would tend to say that smaller ships should be more focused on firepower than survivability, and that the game mechanics should allow you to swarm big ships which aren't designed to deal with little ships in such a way as to give the little ships an advantage (overkill on big guns with long cooldowns, targeting difficulties of some kind, blind spots in fields of fire, something), but at the cost of making the little ships relatively fragile. GCII gave weapons perfect accuracy, and additionally gave big ships the defense and health advantage over swarms of little ships, and when it started allowing ships to target multiple units in any given round it took away the overkill factor which helped swarms survive.
I think it's a very good idea to have some weapons of such a size that they cannot be mounted on smaller vessels, as long as these weapons aren't made impractical due to it being better to mount 5 Fighter Laser Cannons in the place of 1 Cruiser Hypervelocity Gun or some such situation (I wouldn't mind that there might be scenarios in which that might be the better option, but I would want them to be special case scenarios - i.e. when creating an Anti-Fighter Cruiser instead of your standard Heavy Cruiser).
About a Zillion threads ......
Stardock are well aware of the issue - to say the least. At present their answer is no Carriers.
it is logical for Galciv to not having carriers. Because there is no need for it.
Battleriders, Battlecarriers and Battleships.
For 7 years the GC2 forums were haunted by Carrier threads. Lets not subject the GC3 forums to the same treatment.
The logical extension of that statement then is that we really only have need for 1 ship type. I'm for carriers because I think it would add flavor and fun to the game. Not because I think a space fleet HAS to have fighters.
If you want fighters in a game, the question that needs to be answered is WHY?
What can fighters do that the run of the mill starship can't?
In modern day combat, fighters can extend a ship's reach deep into land. Sure, cruise missiles can also do this, but fighters have a great degree of flexibility, whereas a cruise missile is single minded once it is launched.
To extend this analogy to GalCiv, perhaps fighters can assist in ground assaults as well as in space combat?
What else could fighters do, that makes them unique and able to fulfill specific functions that starships can't?
My experience so far with Gal Civ III is that bigger is better, due to logistics limitations. Perhaps fighters don't count against logistics caps? Do they provide a comparable amount of firepower, etc. versus the system slots they replace? What makes a fighter better than just another laser cannon?
Perhaps fighters make excellent scouting platforms, so ships that carry fighter squadrons can increase their sensor range (combat space patrols).
Perhaps fighters can perform 'long range strikes' versus ships in an adjacent square/hex, thus increasing the 'reaction range' of ships and starbases. Sure, the fighters will be on their own (no big guns to back them up), but depending on how powerful their weapons are they can still cripple/destroy targets that have weak enough defenses for the fighters to contend with.
If 'Stealth' designs were introduced into GalCiv, where you have to be MUCH closer to a ship before you see it on the galactic map, perhaps fighters on CSPs will spot a stealth design a little further away than just a ship on it's own.
In modern day combat, offense is much more powerful than defense. This is why one lone F-18 with shipkiller missiles can threaten a squadron of enemy ships, and stand a good chance of sinking one or more of them. Hence, why aircraft are so important in the current military regime. Ships have their own roles to fulfill, of course - fighters aren't very good at transporting a division of troops. Sure, transport aircraft can do this, but transport ships can carry a good amount of armor, supplies and such, at a cheaper cost.
BTW, I would not be very supportive of the current state of military affairs in GalCiv. Ships should be powerful, fighters not so much. Fighters, if introduced, should augment ships in combat, not overshadow them.
So again, if fighters are introduced, which would be easy to do, they need to fulfill roles that they are uniquely suited for, that ships aren't doing already.
As long as fighters and carrier fighting can be autoresolved, I think they'd be an excellent addition to the GalCiv universe. A carrier might be relatively weak compared to a full blown battleship and it would cost significantly more, but it would have its niche for harassment and attrition.
There are other ways to go about this, but a carrier would be a loophole to the logistics limit. Perhaps in the mid game when economy is starting to recover, but logistics tech is low, it might be a good temporary ship to have at your disposal.
That being said, it's better to bend our wills to the game than to try to make it bend to ours. Whatever Stardock comes up with will work just fine.
I am going to go in a weird direction, because I like the idea, but at the same time can see the issues that Stardock would be facing with implementation. (Addition data on the carrier ship, do the ships carried get destroyed, do they add to the fight... Not to mention just making the managment of the fighters easier...)
What about a portion of the research tree where you research fighter tech (With of course different kinds of weapon/armor whatever... Like pure defensive that buzz around the ship and can take out incoming missiles, or kamikaze fighters that act like mass drivers.), and you basically add those to your ship while building it like any other ship component. Since the components put on the ship translate to some form of animation in the 3d battle thing, this could give you the fighter carrier while not adding a bunch of extra management.
(Like I am not interested in fighter micro-management, but having ones I can add to my ship, I would likely use them in my builds. This could also be a bit unique as the more damage your ship has taken, the less effective your fighters may become.)
+1
This is exactly it. I do not want my ships pigeon holed into specific classes( this is not sins of a solar empire 2). Now obviously a fighter component will only be able to fit on certain size hulls, But if i want to create a large ship with missile weapons , laser defense and a couple fighters( because that is just what i need to counteract those goddamn hippy Torians ), then that is what i should be able to make.
But a dedicated carrier should still be more powerful. So maybe the research branch will have different large modules to increase their fighters weapons,shields,repair and/or rebuild rates. But which are only really size and cost effective when your ship has over a certain amount of fighters. So if your ship only has 2 or 3 fighters, a weapon module would cause your ship to do a lot more damage than one of the modules that would upgrade your fighters. Though if your ship has 20 fighters it would be a different story.
It would be interesting if you can customize your own fighters on a tiny hull in the ship builder. It would also be useful to be able to install different fighter modules that lets you have fewer fighters, but fighters built on a hull a size larger. That way we can customize our ships to counter whatever the hell those bloody torians are doing.
Yes, because there was only 1 type of ship in previous Galactic Civilization series. What you need is approach the enemy and let the stat count.There was no another choice / tactical choice / whatever it is. Look at them, you can't find any ship with AOE weapon, any ship with doomsday weapon, you won't see any ship that can do long range attack (a ship that can strike at the range of more than 1 grid), etc. What you need was approach the enemy with your ship, hit it then let the comp decide the outcome (well, you can see the movie of both side shoot each other, but that's it. You need only a type of ship that capable to overpower the enemy in that kind of ship battle situation. So Galactic Civilization 2 has only 1 type of ship.
The only variation is that there was transport ship that load troops. That' make a situation a bit different as it can put your planet in dangerous situation.
Perhaps a similar, and useful, mechanic could be a ship module that provided either a range extension, or acted as a life support source, but for a limited number of ships (probably using the logistics rating). This all assumes mechanics similar to GalCiv2, of course.
Without knowing how the combat mechanics work, it's really hard to say how fighters would fit in. I mean in Galciv 2, they wouldn't. Functionally they'd just be a fourth type of gun.
Right now, I think fighters would be neat as a kind of interceptor. Put a hangar on a big ship and design some very small ships to go in it. Those small ships can launch from the carrier and create a zone of control where no enemy ships can come through without being attacked.
Might be something for an expansion idea, I bet there's already quite a lot on the plate as it is.
Agreed on GC2 ... and its disappointing. Not that it needed fighters, but all weapons having perfect aim (providing you get past target's defense) and unlimited range, no accounting for variations in accuracy, range, or defensive dodging ... yeah, fighters just wouldn't shine. Whether they're a possibility in GC3 depends on whether combat is as simplified as it had been in GC2 in terms of no account for accuracy, range, dodging volleys, etc.
If they make carriers work in battle, and have a role, it would be wonderfull. If they can't they won't implement it. Easy as that. It would be cool, but only if they fit in of course.
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