Before I started my last game, I decided to fight with nothing but carriers (if I could put off war for that long). After playing, I've since determined that carriers are really over powered.How they work: You research the carrier tech. You design a ship that uses a carrier module. You build the ship. You then send the ship into combat.Before battle, each carrier module will spawn 5 tiny hulled ships to fight in battle. At this time, they are the tiny hulled laser ships (so you might get 5 sniper M3). I haven't found any way to tell these carriers to use a different kind of ship (such as missiles). These ships are spawned at no cost to you. You don't need to build them or pay for them. If you lose some in battle, it might be a few turns before they are replaced, but they will be replaced (at no cost).----Unfortunately, this had lead to some problems: In my testing, I've found that they seem to be much more useful than big ships. You get more bang per buck, logistics wise, when using these carrier modules. 5 tiny hulls are equal to 10 logistic points. These fighters are fully equipped for combat. Not only that, but if there is room left over, the carrier ship can carry weapons and other ship parts as well. Further more, you are not limited to just 1 carrier module per ship. You can place as many as you have room to stuff them on. You can design ships with a ridiculous number of fighters. I have with late game research, using ship capacity and carrier miniaturization techs, got the space needed to get 7 carrier modules on 1 huge ship (which amounts to 35 fighters, equivalent to 70 logistics points), and got the spaced needed to put 1 carrier module on a tiny hull (sacrifice 1 ship to get 5 more). This blows logistics way out of the water. 40 logistics points is close to upper limit, but 70 because of 1 ship?Another observation is that the fighters are quite disposable. If you lose some, they will eventually be replaced (at no cost to you). You don't need to worry about longevity of the fighters. You don't need to worry about being put out of commission for the same duration as a normal ship is after being damaged. I'm not sure how long it takes, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were 5 to 10 turns. A much larger and tougher ship could be out of commission for 50 to 100 turns. Plus if survivability is not a factor, then you can focus on weapons and less on defense (though defense does help). The only defense you need to worry about is to kill the enemy before they can bring harm to the carriers, the fighters are the defense.Finally, these fighters uses the latest and greatest in technology. They are kept up to date automatically. There is no need to worry about upgrading your ships, or moving them some place safe to upgrade. Their greatest weapon doesn't need upgrading. This means that you could research all the techs you need to design a good carrier ship, and then build them and send them out while you research the weapons needed to design good fighters (which the carrier doesn't need to be good at). In the last war of my game, I was taking out strong ships using my oldest carrier design. I even had a small hull be equipped with 1 carrier module and it successfully killed some large hulls (it had some great fighters).
I am surprised at this, 7 is alot. Thanks for being the first to say this.
I haven't gotten carriers yet, but it would be nice if I could designate a specific design to use, though the auto upgrading was great thinking by the devs.
Would be nice is there was a limit of 1-2 and techs could increase the model amount. Or one module limit and a ten fight limit at max?
So with cost sand size tweaks it should be fine.
It would be a pita if you had to pay every time a fighter died and it took forever, like you did you wait a age, research it, design it, build it, send it out, its a accomplishment that is deserving of its bonuses. So one turn per fighter sounds good to me at least.
Thanks for the feedback, love it.
Your welcome.I know its a lot. According to my math, with 4 huge hulls, you could get 140 fighters! That is 280 logistics worth of fighters on a 40 logistics diet. These numbers were generated with late game techs, but a fraction of that is still a big deal. Unless this gets nerfed, or we get AoE weapons, I don't plan on using anything else. I don't know if a 4 huge hull could compete with such an opposition.
All techs unlocked, 1 huge carrier vs. one huge ship. I gave it every weapon type and reload boosters so it could shoot down as many fighters as possible...
...it couldn't get even one shot fired.
It was an impressive attack though.
Oddly, carriers in the real world did the same thing to battleships.
While I am sure some kind of limitation should be imposed on these carriers from the sounds of it (most logically by imposing some kind of financial cost to replacing lost fighters which can only be done within your zone of control) and I freely admit I have no knowledge of how combat actually works but it sounds like a combination of capital ships not being able to split fire between targets along with weapons not being balanced against defences properly as the fighters seem to be doing way too much damage to the huge dreadnought type ships but I also feel a carrier plus fighters should be able to take down a big ship, which is why the big ship should have escorts of smaller vessels to dog fight and that the best fix beyond the seemingly required balance between of damage ratio's should be that the large ship will target the carrier with its big guns while escorts keep fighters off it, there by making it more effective to mix big ships with carriers than to simply have a fleet of carriers as the big ships will cripple the carriers far faster than the tiny vessels should be able to.
Obviously this is pure conjecture but I commented elsewhere the damage to defence to hit point ratio seems well off currently as vessels are going down way to fast in my eyes especially larger ships.
@ Turkwise*Whistles* Wow. Those were the results that I feared. I knew that I was being generous when I said I don't know if huge hulls could compete...In GalCiv 2, I have said many times that larger hulls can stack HP and defenses in such a way to make them tougher nuts to crack than a large number of smaller hulls. Not only that, but larger ships also have an advantage in cracking tough nuts that small ships don't have. With smaller ships, you would need many times the firepower to overwhelm larger ship defenses and deal damage. Well, that carrier definitely has that right there (and then some). Not only that, but the battleship doesn't have the firepower to kill all opposing ships in the first round even if they all rolled zero for defense. I know who I would bet my money on.Yeah, carriers did make things real difficult for the battleship (and other heavy vessels). If the devs decide to make carriers the thing that made battleships obsolete, then I'll adapt. For now, I'm assuming that how one sided things are is because of a mistake.
I know that its possible to give a component a ahipmovescsp multiplier. Would giving carrier modules say., a -50% shipmovescap(I'm not sure how they stack, but know min is 1/turn) help offset them with the resulting slowness/need for engines?
typingonphone
. I too have not reached carriers yet (other ND life so far)
So from the sound of it, here are some things which could help balance carriers:
* Carrier modules increase the logistics cost of a ship by 5 (the same as 5 tiny fighters benefiting from a Hyperion Logistics System)
* Carrier modules cost over 300 production each (since they come with 5 fully built fighters)
* Replacing fighters is similar to upgrading - it costs money, and leaves the ship idle for a few turns. It can also only be done in your territory.
Also, with regard to selecting fighters, you could get a prompt like the "load colony ship" prompt when a carrier is built, that lets you select which Tiny ship the carrier will use. The prompt for replacing fighters could also let you choose which fighters to replace them with.
So noted. Good test! The most likely cause is that the numbers simply aren't balanced yet. Remember that planetary invasions, AI valuing its own ships way too cheaply, and (apparently) 0.70 influence are similarly out-of-tune. (Also, Combat Viewer II will add more detail, which likely would have changed carrier math regardless.)
In modern Earth tech, carriers do absolutely rule a radius slightly less than their planes' round-trip ranges (although we don't know how modern ship missiles, or next-gen railguns, will change this). Future-fiction has conjectured that the same holds true, c.f. Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars -- probably because it keeps the spotlight of relevance on individual pilots, which is great for cinematics and heroic storytelling. (Lucas deliberately modeled snub fighter dogfighting on his childhood memories of WW2 movies, so that's a deliberate coincidence chosen for storytelling, not an objective extrapolation based on tech.) Some other SF franchises adopted the bridge-of-ship as the heroic subset, and they tend to de-emphasize individual fighters. A few combined both, e.g. Galactica and Robotech (and the Japanese movie version of Space Battleship Yamato).
Two lessons emerged from carrier duels:
You must now test carriers vs. carriers
I kinda sorta did test carriers vs carriers at one point (not intentionally at first). One of my planets had culture flipped (damn culture bug) when I had a fleet of carriers orbiting it. The planet got to keep those carriers. I had a similar fleet nearby, so I attacked. I wiped them all out as I had better fighters. But the carriers got close enough to the fighting that they could have been targeted in the fight (but it seems that they were targeted last). Also the fighters didn't wipe each other out in the first round. It took many turns before it was over. The carriers were targeted last. They may have had some weapons left over when I designed them, but the defenses (and everything else) were left unchanged. I wasn't trying to stuff as many carrier modules on my ships as I could at that point.
Sounds like an early beta balancing issue.
I suspect that carriers are powerful enough to the point where you could downgrade it to 1 fighter per module and it would still be competitive.
I think that this was a mistake. Carriers should be competitive for sure, but I doubt that they intended for carriers to gain total supremacy over all other means of combat. It would be like strike craft in Sins gaining superiority over all else. Granted bomber spam is alarmingly close to that at times, but high end capital ships were still needed.
If more ship had it that would be cool. Ships launching fighters and capital ships fighting in epic battles.
I had some time to think things over. Not only are the fighters a deadly source of offense, but they are also a powerful source of defense. The fighters get shot at before the carriers do, and they have the potential to kill the enemy units before the enemies get a chance to fire upon the carriers. By the time the carriers themselves arrive, the battle is probably over.They're also better than normal defenses and hit points. Defenses has a risk of not blocking all damage but it is the fighter that will suffer the damage not the carrier. The hit points the fighters lose are hit points that the carrier does not lose. Further more, any fighters lost are quickly recovered, and any damaged fighters are replaced, so the hit points on fighter is better because they are recovered much quicker.
The main problem with drawing an analogy between naval carriers and space carriers is that space carriers occupy the same medium that space fighters do. That is, an Aircraft Carrier is an ocean-going vessel that launches aircraft. A space carrier is a space-going vessel that launches spacecraft. There have been some pretty serious treatments on the subject, I generally recommend this page from the blog Rocketpunk Manifesto.
It's not even clear if space carriers are, as a concept, viable, even in pretty contrived SF settings, much less that they would dominate space combat the same way that carriers dominated combat on Earth between WWII and the present day (as you note, this could just be a flash in the pan on the historical stage as new technology obsoletes old notions of combat). Obviously, this is a video game in a SF setting that is designed around providing a balanced gameplay experience, so real life does not intrude on it much or at all. These ships should, in game terms, be a viable technological development, but should not automatically invalidate other types of combat.
Hmm... Maybe if we went with drones instead of fighters, we could down size the ships that the carriers spawn. Less hit points, less room for weapons and defenses, make them faster...I have noticed that these is room set aside on the tech trees for cloaking technology. Maybe cloaking technology should be the bane of carriers. If you don't know if the enemy is coming, then you can't deploy fighters before the battle begins. The carriers would then have to survive assault while deploying fighters after the enemy decloaks and starts attacking. Odds of survival might be increased if the carriers hold back on carrier modules and leave room aside for normal weapons and defenses, or if part of the fleet are battleships. I considered for a moment that maybe this would create a new problem of cloaked carriers, but I realized that if cloaked carriers start deploying fighters, then they are not cloaked any more and the opposing carriers would likely not be far behind in launching their own fighters.
What gave aircraft their superiority was, as ThoseDeafMutes said, that aircraft operate in a different medium. They use gasoline internal-combustion engines instead of external-combustion steam, and they can (have to) move faster in air than a ship can in water.
What we need is a tech for an anti-aircraft gun.
Drones seem more plausible from a tech POV, but IMO using them also takes away a serious amount of coolness.
I agree--we need a tech for some type of anti-fighter weapon that is designed to split fire. And/or make the beam weapons on fighters less effective vs. shields on large ships, or make the shields more effective vs. the fighter weapons. All balance issues. I hope they keep fighters & carriers a real threat, but not so dominant that nothing else need be built. I am hoping there will be game reasons for players to want to have a balanced fleet composed of different units, each to counter or strike in a way that is special to that unit. Then part of the fun is finding that great mix that is effective in many situations. If all you need are carriers and their fighters to win battles, then battles will be less exciting to me.
Please DO NOT lower fighter counts in a lazy bulldung way to do balance! I absolutely love having large number of fighters! I am tired of all these games with carriers that have at the most 8 ships! I love how it is at the moment but I agree it's overpowered and needs adjusting.
There are several problems / fixes
- Fighters should not have the range they have! thats a big part of the problem there.
- There is no aoe flak counter! A specific weapon to counter tiny
Damage done based on hull size the larger the ship the less effective the damage.
tiny full damage
small -15%
medium -20%
large -30%
immense -50%
- With the addition of flak being powerful I'd add a armor type to defend against this damage type. Flak armor would also take up weapon space which would be needed as flak being a hard counter would decimate a fighter otherwise.
- Though you have larger hulls, the benefit is minimal due to the fact that all ships can use all weapons as long as it fits. They should really look into creating unique weapons for each hull size.
- Ships should have passive bonuses based on hull size and research into refining the Hull size
tiny 10/20/30/40% evasion
Small 7/14/21/30% evasion
medium 5/10/15/20% evasion, 2/4/7/10% damage absorption
large 7/14/21/30% damage absorption,
immense 10/20/30/40% damage absorption
-Also in the engineering tech tree the ability to research specialized hulls underneath the generic sizes that fit multiple roles. these special hulls would require mined resources to create such as the antimatter or creating new ones in mining fields.
Paladin Offensive modules take more space while defensive modules take less
Tier 1 20% offensive modules -10% defensive modules
Tier 2 20% offensive modules -20% defensive modules
Tier 3 20% offensive modules -25% defensive modules
Dreadnought
Tier 1 10% range -30% damage
Tier 2 20% range -25% damage
Tier 3 30% range -20% damage
Ironclad (immense only) penalty to movement in and out of combat. bonus hitpoints
Tier 1 -10 movement +30 hitpoints
Tier 2 -9 movement +50 hitpoints
Tier 3 -8 movement +70 hitpoints
-Also could add support modules that affect the effectiveness of fighters somehow!
Obviously the numbers could be adjusted and so forth, but the general point is everything else needs spruced up and features added! I feel a collaboration of these would truly diversify the game without punishing people who absolutely love the carriers in the game!
I certainly don't want carriers to be a win all. I do want a diversified fleet of warships that could take a fleet of carriers if they are properly equipped to do so.
TLDR buff everything else, tweak fighters, add counters. Don't mess with there number count >
Carriers are definitely overpowered.
However, I do not think they are broken. My simple suggestion for "fixing" them.
Require the player to build the tiny fighters at a starport and then load them onto the carrier. The player would then be required to pay for the fighters. they would then be required to upgrade them and manage them.
The Devs wanted to make the carriers as easy to use as possible. but lets be honest, most of us LIKE the fleet mechanics portion of the game. having to actually replace lost fighters and manage the fleets may make it a bit more balanced.Or we could be like how StarCraft manages carriers... the carrier could build the craft.. but the player still has to build them and pay the building fee.
I apologize for not being eloquent with my post!
I'd be ok with the fix temporarily but not as a permanent fix. I really love having a lot of fighters! The underlying issue for me is that there are no other unique ships that you can build to counter carriers. So it will still be kind of a race to get carriers still.
If you gave passive bonuses to hulls that you could research in a tree such as I posted
It would add a lot more character to the ship hulls, Increase the amount of interesting tech to research, and make other builds viable against a character so it doesn't instagib other fleets.
Then you could add different specialty hulls you could research to fit different type of roles like the examples I made paladin, dreadnought, etc. A paladin with tons of armor mods and support mods to debuff. Fitting dreadughts with beams to snipe them with the bonus range. This would further increase the counters to carriers.
Also the other problem is target acquisition from what I have noticed no matter how many guns are on a ship it will fire them all at one ship wasting a lot of that damage! This is worse to me than not carrying production over on planets! Cap ships in sins of the solar empire could shoot at more than one ship no reason not to do it here. so example
tiny 1 target
small 1 target
medium 2 targets
large 3 targets
immense 4 targets
Also make ships smart in the sense of if they know a enemy will need to be focused fire they will. But if a dreadnaught with 400 beams at say 4 different fighters at 10hp would instagib 4 fighters before they got close. maybe 8 before it even takes damage with bonus to range.
Also the possibility of support module increasing the amount of targets ships could fire upon to further flavor the fleets. Also to increase range, add defensive regen for shields, point defense, and armor, damage mitigation, etc!
I've always loved carriers and this is one of the first games I've ever played where there awesome and really fun to design. I've never been passionate about battle in other gal civs. To me it has always been bland in gal civs and an inconvenience. With carriers though it has really added some awesome flavor to the mix. I don't want stardock to beat the carrier with a nerf stick in a lazy way to balance.
I truly believe if you diversify by adding hulls with a passive bonus, specialized hulls, target acquisition, and a variety of support modules you could design different type of fleets to smash carrier fleets! Not only that but make the whole system much more interesting as a whole.
Galactic civilization has a real freeing mentality to it. They don't restrict and limit the player usually and I want that mentality to flow into combat!
Carriers for me was the first huge step in adding uniqueness and vigor to a boring combat system.
Instead of oh geeze blah overpowered make them BORING AND COST 23980423487 MILLION only one fighter cause I can't think of anything blah! I want people to instead go ok well I can design a sniper fleet to kill carriers or a tank fleet to outlast the buggers with support modules or whatever!
Of course I'm sure if a designer sees my ideas would roll his eyes at the amount of work. I do think they have the talent to do so. I know they don't want to regurgitate the same boring combat system with a pretty battleviewer and not add viable depth to the battle system.
I don't mean to be critical of your fixes in a harsh way but I've seen way to many games take an awesome concept and grind it into dust.
I've noticed that this community from what I've read has been pretty awesome and open minded. I know a lot of you all are very intelligent with some great ideas and critiques. So I'd love to hear your feedback!
I agree that we could really use some more differences in the hull types/ sizes. Since fighters are Tiny with a capacity of 27 and Huge has only a capacity of 165, you can see there is not a huge amount of difference between them as their hull names would indicate. Huge capacity is only 6 times larger than Tiny. Think of the difference in a real world modern fighter and its supercarrier. The supercarrier is not just 6 times the size of the fighter.
So I suggest our "fighters" are too large or our huge hulls are far to small, in capacity. If huge hulls were a lot bigger, there would be more room for more defensive systems and weapons. With some specialized anti-fighter weapons (which might just be allowing it to split its fire and shoot at several fighters at once), the large ships could last longer against the fighters.
The fighters in Battlestar Galactica never took out a huge cyclon ship, did they? Capital ships fought it out with nuke missiles and some type of heavy beam weapons. I also seem to recall some AA guns shooting up the fighters as they got close.
Another idea to consider to add to the mix would be "capital missiles" that the big battleships and cruisers (large and huge hulls) could fire at the carriers. Change the rule that requires the big boys to focus on the fighters with all of the their weapons, and let them shoot these capital missiles at the carriers--missiles that have a very long range and come into play early in the fight.
Do all of the above, and perhaps the fighters would still kill the battleship. But they would take heavy losses and their carrier may be destroyed or heavily damaged by the capital missiles (or some other new weapon that can strike early and at great range and do a lot of damage).
Please do keep carriers and fighters in the game. And I agree, don't shrink the number of fighters. Instead look at the other suggestions to better balance it some fighters are a great option, but one with some weaknesses as well as strengths. And give the large and huge hulls their due: either increase their hull capacity or find some other way so these so-called fighters, which are probably more like gunboats, are not 1/6th as powerful as a battleship.
Again, I think the hull capacities are out of line. And there need to be some differences between the really small and the large ships. But the carrier and fighter option is cool and deserves to stay, just find a good way to make it fun to build other ship and fleet combos that are as effective/ competitive as the carriers and their strike craft. My 2 cents.
Prioritized weaponry is an interesting Idea based of your idea of capital missiles.
I also agree that hulls do seem out of proportion I hadn't given that much thought but looking at it your definitely right.
Additional hull space would help the battleship but it would also allow for more fighter bays so I think more needs to be done.
thats why I posted the idea of passive hull bonuses and specialty ships that we could research to counter so there is more variety to what we can decide to build instead of a rush to the OMEGA AWESOMENESS ship that pwns all.
AA would be neat. I thought about the flak and maybe each damage type could have there own version of flak. I'd want it to not be effective against the larger ships at all which I specified more specifically in the above post.
Also thank you for agreeing to keep the number of fighters Casorian! good post.
One thing that jumped out from the description is that the game seems to be double-counting miniaturization for fighters. You can fit more into a tiny hull over time because the components get smaller. However, the tiny hulls themselves don't get smaller, so there is no particular reason why you should be able to fit more of them on a ship.
As it stands, if miniaturization says doubles the capacity of the ship, the effective capacity of a carrier design will quadruple, since it will be able to carry double the number of fighters, and each fighter will be able to carry double the number of weapons.
So carrier modules should probably represent a constant fraction of a given hull size. Like 1/4 of a huge hull. That way you don't get crazy outcomes like fitting five tiny ship hulls into a tiny ship hull.
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