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).
Depends on the series The original BG (let's call it "BG1" - late 70s, immediately after Star Wars in 1977 -- gosh I'm old) established the canon that a single Cylon raider (or maybe it was a specialized bomber), firing one broadside, could crack a (5km-long) battlestar in half. That's how the fleet lost 11 battlestars in the ambush within minutes. I always thought that was a bit hokey or overpowered. (Historically, one torpedo bomber, dropping one torpedo, could easily one-hit kill a destroyer, and ~3 torpedo hits probably would capsize a battleship. Still, I don't think a BG1 Cylon raider could carry enough reaction mass, even converting mc^2 to E, to shear a battlestar in half like that. Colonial Vipers had no similar ability to kill Cylon basestars.)
In the recent SyFy(?) remake (let's call it "BG2") with a female Starbuck, the space battles are just Beyond Awesome, featuring some of the most mesmerizing usage of advanced CG. Search YouTube for the highlight reel of all of BG2's space combats. It is far, far more sophisticated than Return of the Jedi's trivial puny dogfights. The scale of distances between Galactica and the Cylon basestars is dozens or a hundred times Galactica's own length (so, a few km?). Dozens of Vipers vs. a hundred+ Cylon raiders launch in formation, or weave in dogfights, and the camera's perspective is far enough away that each tiny dot of a Viper needs 5-20 seconds to traverse the height of your monitor's extent -- so the camera can remain stationary while you see entire formations wheeling and evolving. Missile salvos consist of hundreds of separate missile tracks. There might be point-defense, but you'd hardly notice them amongst the 500 other objects moving and shooting. There was nothing like it on air, nor (I think) in any game up to then. Anyways, I think the new BG2 vipers never killed any basestars, although it's possible that they gang-swarmed a few. (Pegasus still blows up like a martyr.)
GC3's Combat Viewer, while a good game sub-engine, will surely not approach the sheer magnitude of a BG2 space duel. Even that snazzy Nitrous engine demo from a few months ago is only roughly equal to following around a single BG2 Viper, whereas BG2 showed 60-vs-90+ dogfights weaving amongst the refugee fleet.
I like the above ideas a lot. I haven't had a chance to use any carriers (plagued with turnhang bug) but while I love Star Wars, I wouldn't want personal fightercraft to be the end-all of galactic warfare either.
I think someone else mentioned an AOE weapon - I'd like to second that notion. It seems consistent with historic warfare situations; the enemy gets bigger, you build a bigger gun. The enemy gets quicker and you scrap together some littler guns to put on a swivel-mount. Besides the convenient symbol of Underdog VS Unstoppable Empire, it also represents an established methodology in warfare.
For the turrets, I guess you could start them off as having a manufacturing cost but take up very little space on a Large or higher craft. Alternatively, just lop them in with some alternate Point Defense modules, since that's relatively what they are to begin with.
As a finishing thought, it's always a shame in gaming to see LIMIT: ONE PER UNIT as a solution. Making the hangars inconveniently pricey is a better solution because at least it isn't the developer barking over a megaphone: "We'll tell you how to enjoy this!"
I like the above ideas a lot. I haven't had a chance to use any carriers (plagued with turnhang bug) but while I love Star Wars, I wouldn't want personal fightercraft to be the end-all of galactic warfare either.I think someone else mentioned an AOE weapon - I'd like to second that notion. It seems consistent with historic warfare situations; the enemy gets bigger, you build a bigger gun. The enemy gets quicker and you scrap together some littler guns to put on a swivel-mount. Besides the convenient symbol of Underdog VS Unstoppable Empire, it also represents an established methodology in warfare.For the turrets, I guess you could start them off as having a manufacturing cost but take up very little space on a Large or higher craft. Alternatively, just lop them in with some alternate Point Defense modules, since that's relatively what they are to begin with.As a finishing thought, it's always a shame in gaming to see LIMIT: ONE PER UNIT as a solution. Making the hangars inconveniently pricey is a better solution because at least it isn't the developer barking over a megaphone: "We'll tell you how to enjoy this!"
Haha love the star wars reference!
I stated the idea of aoe flak. I do agree it shouldnt take up much space. However its effectiveness drops corresponding to larger hull sizes. 0/15/30/45/60% reduction of damage to avoid spamming aoe. These guns would be in all damage types
Beam ,longe range pulse very little aoe
Missiles, medium range moderate aoe
Kinetic, short range large aoe
I also dont want them so small that if another ship with all regular weapons vs a ship with flak/regular weapons that flak comes out on Top.
I also would limit flak to medium or higher hulls only.
The production increase im fine with as long as its not over board.
Thanks a million for agreeing with not nerf hammering the carrier count. Its the first thing they have added that has me really excited about battle! Everything else is bland witch is why i posted ideas of passive hull bonuses, specialty hulls, and flak counters. This was a breath of fresh air in a very stale ship selection.
Perhaps it would help if we redefined "fighter" to a ship type smaller than Tiny. Think of tiny hulls as big bombers compared to single or twin seated fighters. The new fighters would not be able to move away from the area/hex of their carrier. The fighter could only mount one weapon and it would be a "fighter" version of the normal weapon, with significantly reduced range and damage (perhaps only a 1/3 or at most 1/2 of the normal weapons). Defensive systems might only work against fighter weapons, so any hit by a regular weapon would be a kill. Perhaps fighters are harder to hit due to very small size and tactical speed, but not because they have mounted the same sized defense as a Tiny hull. In short, Fighters would be different from Tiny hulled strike craft: fighters would have special rules, Tiny hull craft would use normal rules.
While I still think the large and huge hull capacities are probably too small, I think using Tiny for fighters is too large. Let fighters be a special class of ship with their own rules. Then we can still have a lot of fighters, but they are not so overwhelming. A squadron of fighters might be very deadly to a medium hull, but without help or several squadrons, it would take many rounds for a squadron to destroy a large or huge hull ship--death by a thousand cuts. And that gives time for the cruiser or battleship to defend itself, perhaps with a new AA weapon. I hope fighters will still be a threat, but just not so overwhelming, unless their numbers are truly--well, overwhelming!
Just another idea for consideration.
First, add ant-fighter weapons. Second, allow fighters to be tasked with killing other fighters OR tasked with delivering a single large kinetic round (no reloads) from short range.
I don't have a problem with carriers being good. But they should have a role in a fleet, rather than be the fleet. When a carrier has the potential to be 5x as good as a same-sized non-carrier ship, that's a problem.
Carrier modules should probably be larger. A carrier should indeed be more logistically efficient than a fleet of tiny fighters, but not so much that it's overwhelming. Modules should perhaps be increased in size to where only large and huge ships can have them. Perhaps ships should also be limited, possibly even to one module.
As has been noted, 3 tiny fighters = 6 logistics. 1 Huge ship = 10 logistics. 5 tiny fighters = 10 logistics by themselves. If a huge ship could have ONE carrier module and pack on some other equipment, I would think that would be plenty powerful but it would have a more limited role in a fleet - and that's a good thing. It's a much simpler and easily balanced solution than adding area weapons or some kind of anti-fighter and trying to balance that.
It would also add 12 flavors of boring having a carrier with only 5 ships. If they were going to take a seriously simple route I'd rather them just nerf the range/damage by 30-50%, 3 logistics per bay, and add the manufacturing cost of the fighter to the carrier. When a fighter is destroyed you either buy it or fly it to a shipyard/starbase where it has to sit till it's rebuilt.
5 fighters lol what a joke that would be. I'd learn to mod just to fix what a broken boring carrier that would be. Not to be critical of you but just from my perspective it seems like a waste of something that could be much more awesome but not overpowered.
It's the larger picture that bothers me. I've made a collaborative case in this thread that would not only bring carriers in line but provide much more interesting content than there is now.
-Such as passive hull bonuses based on size in tech tree with 4 tiers. so to make a carrier effective you would need to research all of the tiny techs as well as the huge to make an effective carrier. Also making tiny ships not as potent against larger hulls due to absorption.(shouldn't be hard to implement and would change the battle dynamics)
- Specialty hulls that are more powerful. It would require the resources and research but properly fitted could be a match if fitted properly. Especially with the proper support modules that won't be able to be attached to fighters. Like the dreadnought idea I posted with bonus range.
-Multiple ship targeting really is a must. IT is really nonsense to me to see a huge hull with 30 laser that it can only fire at 1 ship at a time. If a huge hull could fire at 5 targets with range over fighters 1 dreadnought in a sniper set up with beams, its innate range, and a module could snipe 15 fighters before they even came into range. Not to mention this would go a LONG way into making the battle viewer that much more awesome seeing huge hulls hitting multiple targets. I stated above that tiny and small could only target 1 ship.
- Adding modules that help with dealing with the little buggers.
- Aoe flak was an exotic idea but I don't believe it's farfetched. it could just be high damage but does lower damage the larger the hull size. Even without aoe you could add implement this type of weapon I went into detail in a previous post.
Of course everything would need some tweaking. I do agree absolutely that carriers shouldn't be a win all. I want to be able to go well crap he has tons of carriers which variety of counters would I like to use.
Ships with multiple weapons should definitely be able to target more than one ship.
One of the problems, in my opinion, is that tiny ships are still too strong. They're not fighters, they're actually more like light cruisers, power-wise.
Good ideas ITT. I feel like it shouldn't be using tiny ships, it should be using some hypothetical drone / fighter class vessel that is smaller than tiny. The in-universe justification for this is pretty obvious, ships must be a sufficient size to take any hyperdrive at all, and fighters represent non-FTL capable ships. Even the smallest ship would be larger than this since hyper-drives are not trivially sized, and would presumably require significant power-generation capabilities.
And replacing them would have a cost, both financial and an opportunity cost as you need to return to your territory to replenish. The "Hanger as a proportion of ship" idea is good, perhaps at most a huge hull could have two and a large hull could have one. If miniaturisation tech is already improving fighters there's no point having it increase total number of fighters too.
In the WWII analogy, which I think has some relevance, the major difficulty with fighters was NOT replacing them. The problem was replacing the pilots. The Japanese in the Marianas Turkey Shoot were outmatched because most or their experienced pilots had been lost. The loss of four Japanese fleet carriers at Midway was bad, but the loss of the pilots was irretrievable.
Therefore, experience for fighters as an important piece of attack/defense value (abstracting the pilots). So carrier returns to base but the replacement fighters aren't as good. A carrier with inexperienced fighters is not as fearsome, by far.
Just a thought.
They may be overpowered but the are fun. One option I was thinking of is that if they lose fighters they should either have to go back to a shipyard and fortify it to rebuild them or have to have an option to rebuild the fighters, similar to that of the upgrade function to rebuild the fighter. Another option would be to have a factory module on board of the ship that would specifically be used to rebuild fighters. This would be a higher tech level.
I do agree that there should be defenses against fighters, perhaps a point defense that can be modified to also shoot at fighters and also cause it to increase in volume.
I don't think it should directly affect logistics. Maybe there should be a separate fighter logistic that needs to be researched once you have carriers. This could be controlled by a module on ships in a fleet for command and control. A fleet could only launch fighters based off of the amount of command and control modules in a fleet.
Just a question for you history buffs, what was the primary function of the planes on a carrier?
Reconnaissance, interception of enemy aircraft, striking enemy warships, striking ground targets. Carrier based aircraft are often multirole and capable of bombing missions as well as interception / dogfighting.
I don't disagree with this, but I would put a little different emphasis.
The primary role of carriers in WW2 in the Pacific was to sink enemy carriers. At Midway, once the 4 large fleet carriers of Nagumo's task force was sunk, the rest of the fleet, a large force of battleships, cruisers, troop carriers, etc. was forced to withdraw. [One might ask, what was the primary role of battleships in WW2? Shore bombardment, not counter fleet action.] To put it another way, carriers were used to gain air superiority where land based aircraft were not a decisive factor. Carriers tended to stay away from land based air strips unless they already had decisive superiority, or they could achieve surprise. The attack on Pearl harbor was a huge failure for the Japanese because the American carriers were not in port, which directly led to the possibility of the American Navy stopping the Japanese carrier fleet in the Coral Sea action and shortly thereafter crushing it at Midway. Other roles have use, of course, but to my mind this was the decisive role. If one side had carriers and the other not, it was game over. Not unlike what the OP is complaining about.
Of course that doesn't mean they ought to be dominant in a space game as well! As has been said, space is a common medium, whereas carriers provided air power in an ocean setting.
+1
I'm absolute in favor for this.
Remember: even a tiny hull is still a starships hull - a ship with FTL capability, designed for long-term deployment, a larger crew than any fighter would need and so on. A fighter is much more short-ranged, its missions takes hours or a few days instead of months (meaning smaller life support systems). So it can (and should be much smaller).
In view of production, I propose to have a entry in a star docks production list like "fighter squadron" which costs about as much as a tiny ship. Then we'd need a way to move a number of squads to a carrier according to its capacity. Losses have to be replaced, but instead of moving the carrier back and forth (because he'd be the only type of ship to do that since we don't have to refill missiles or other types of ammo), i'd propose a new type of cargo module where to put a number of squadrons into, and deliver the fighters to the carrier.It's quite a logistic task of course...
My fear about this whole fighter issue is that all this requires a whole new way to handle this in comparison to the "normal" way ships are handled in GC3 so I#m not sure what efforts stardock wants to put into this...
At the latest dev stream, they showed quite nice how overpowered fighters are atm.
@ 23 min
From WWI on to the start of WWII, carriers began as a way to get short-ranged air assets out to sea for reconnaissance. Of course it wasn't long before the idea of using planes to strike at ships was developed - for which you need accurate reconnaissance and a large enough number of planes, but as Taranto and the strikes against Bismarck showed, even a few aircraft can do the trick against an unwary opponent.
The Japanese, always looking for ways to offset US and British numbers of warships, between the world wars developed the ability to strike from carriers at a distance. After Pearl Harbor, US advocates of airpower came to the fore as there were no longer enough battleships (or fuel for them) to fight the war in conventional surface-warfare terms. With the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse, the harrying of the ABDA command and Guadalcanal (not to mention Norway, Malta and the hunt for the Bismarck) it became obvious that no ship could long survive in daylight if the enemy had air superiority and enough strike aircraft.
Early tactics were all built around finding the enemy first and striking first: defenses were thought to be incapable of stopping a determined strike. Early carrier actions (Coral Sea, Midway) bear this out; the side that got the first strike on target usually won. The US put a lot of effort into building many carriers (with many aircraft) but also pushed for radar air warning and tracking, radar-fused AA shells, better fighters and lots - and lots - of AA guns. I don't have much information on the Japanese Navy (other than to say they plastered their ships with lots of light AA guns) but it can fairly be said that their fleet air arm (ships, aircraft, pilots etc.) never recovered from Midway.
By 1944 the USN could confidently stand on the tactical defensive and smash incoming strikes with fighter-planes and AA guns, then unleash their own against an uncovered target (Battle of the Philippine Sea, also called the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot). Japan then lost the ability to strike or to defend her ships from strikes. Even the biggest warships will go down if you hit them enough (Musashi - estimated 19 torpedo and 17 bomb hits, Yamato - at least 11 torpedos and six bombs).
Anti-aircraft defense is the same at land or at sea. You need a means of locating and tracking the incoming strikes, you need fighters and you need anti-aircraft guns. If GC3 is going to have carriers, we need AA weapons and the ability to use fighters for strike or defense. I would personally like to have to recover and re-arm fighters after they expend ordinance, but that's not essential. AA weapons are a must, and using fighters against fighters only makes sense.
Interesting that you bring up ww2 since the average aircraft capacity was around 70 aircraft. There were larger carriers that could hold over 100 but logistically it was to much of a nightmare. Also to have that capacity made the carriers to slow and unmanueverable. My point is if ww2 carriers could field 70 craft then 20ish isnt that much to ask for.
Id prefer my previous post as an overarching fix. I did come up with one simpler. For each fighter you have out of the carrier it cost 1-2 logistics points. If you only have 20 logistics then only 5-10 fighters may be out at one time. Also when a fighter dies freeing up logistics it will deploy another fighter until it runs out. That way when i go to mod to ill just up logistics for everything and the people who want a carrier with a puny 5 aircraft are happy as well.
Based on my testing, I think making fighter craft use logistics would make carriers severely underpowered. A huge ship specifically designed to fight carriers can deal with 10 fighters easily enough. 2 huge carriers w/10 fighters each wouldn't stand a chance against 4 huge ships with good jamming and targeting and an array of weapons.
I also discovered my previous suggestion of 1 module per craft is pathetic and wimpy. I still think something needs to change, whether it be a new "fighter" size smaller than tiny, multi-targeting, changes to modules or some combination thereof.
Agreed Turkish. They got to multitargeting but for medium hulls or higher. At the very least for the sake of the battle viewer.
How come the carrier fighters only use lasers? I do like the carriers but they completely dominate everything right now. I also like the idea to increase the hull size of the larger ships, should be more difference in the sizes of the ships. Currenly ship battles are too short for me. I have gotten comfortable with the ship combat in Sins. Starbases need more hitpoints too. 80 points for a fully upgraded military starbase? lol.
I think stardock is on to something though with this battle system. Nerf the fighters power (decrease their power vs larger ships), keep the current number of fighters. I agree that we need anti-fighter tech.
The strikecraft in sins always annoyed me. I had to zoom in 1000% to see them. Its like trying to track a fly. I like to see them. I think the fighter size still isnt properly scaled but I like it. I have been mulling on this for a while.
It seems a lot of people would like to adjust fighters. An interesting temporary fix could be 75%evasion for fighters but a 50% reduction in range and damage for perhaps more of a brawl instead of popping everything like a child with bubble wrap. I definitely want to keep the oh sheet moment of seeing a carrier.
Also I havent thought of this but when stardock adds strategies to the ai it could greatly change this overpowered tune of carriers. Though I sure adjustments will still be needed.
Increasing the effectiveness of defenses would also make battles longer and more interesting and balance the larger ships that have the room to stack up defenses against fighters and other small ships.
This in general. Especially now that defenses decay. if a base laser does 2 damage. a base shield should be 20 shield. so that it takes a few shots to wear it down. This would let ships use thrusters and move around. If people don't want to watch they can always skip the end, but I'd love to watch a 30 min epic battle with all my ships flying about. (at least once)
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