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).
There are lots of great ideas in this thread. Perhaps a good choice is the already-mentioned idea about making fighters be part of the carrier system so that tiny hulled ships are either eliminated or are considered bigger than fighters. In other words, introduce fighter and bomber classes as carrier bays while eliminating tiny-hulled units. Fighters and bombers could then be built in squadrons and then visually represented as such in the battle viewer and strategic map. I'm picturing a squadron of fighters flying around the carrier while on the strategic map - that would look way cool, not to mention the battle viewer.
It occurs to me that part of the issue might simply be that carriers get their fighters out too rapidly. Having 5 extra ships per hangar bay on the battlefield from the very beginning of the battle might be too much of a good thing; perhaps it would be better if there were only one or two fighters per hangar bay on the field at the start of the battle, with an additional fighter launching from each bay every X rounds up to whatever the end limit on fighters happens to be, or if fighters have a flight time limit in battle rounds - perhaps they need to return to refuel and, if non-laser fighters are added, rearm every Y rounds and require Z rounds in order to do so. One further option would be to combine both limitations - hangar bays can only launch/land 1 fighter per X rounds, and fighters need to land every Y rounds and spend Z rounds rearming and refueling.
My thoughts:
Carriers should have unique carrier fighter and bomber modules. These small ships would be separate and different from designed tiny hull craft. The fighters would attack tiny, small, and medium hulled ships with the bombers attacking large and huge.
Large and huge ships would have poor defense against these fast, small ships "their ships are evading our turbo lasers!", and would rely on small craft to protect them.
Large and Huge ships should engage in long range combat against other large and huge ships using a special class of capital ship weapon that would only fit on those hulls.
Large and huge ships should stay in the back at the edges of the "arena" for these engagements.
The relative size of ships should be altered, large and huge should be really large and huge. Like in the image below.
I think the problem really gets back to the fact weapons have no real size....I.E. the point Defense anti fighter batteries would never really be used at another capital ship.
That was always something that bothered me about almost all space empire sims. They never build their capital ships correctly. Real capital ships have large scale weapons and small scale weapons. The large bore guns are for ship to ship fighting and the small scale stuff is for PD. And it is a desperate captain that tries to swat fighters with capital weapons or carriers with PD.
I know it would never happen but I would love to see hull sizes come with space dedicated to the different classification of weapon sizes.
An example would be on a large hull you get enough room to slap on 6 large caliber guns or torp launchers, and then separately space dedicated for 10 PD batteries.
Personally, I am opposed to such as it would tend to make everyone's elite battleship more like the elite battleships fielded by everyone else, regardless of the situation in which they find themselves, and prevents them from adapting the elite battleship to perform better in their specific situation. If you and I are at war with one another and your battle fleets consist primarily of battleships backed up with light carrier support while my fleets consist primarily of carriers backed up by light battleship support, you and I have very different requirements for our battleships. Mine need to be able to take a pounding and hold the line against your battleships, and can probably drop much of the PD and secondary armament, which are intended for use against target types that my strike craft should perform well against, whereas your battleships have the advantage of numerical superiority over mine and could therefore afford to sacrifice some of their heavy armament in favor of a heavier PD armament and perhaps a stronger secondary battery. If all battleships have 100 space dedicated to the main battery, 50 space dedicated to the secondary battey, and 20 space dedicated to the PD armament, and the game does not permit you to change the armament based on the situation, then it's probably forcing both of us into using suboptimal and very similar designs for our situations despite having to face very different types of opposition.
Beyond that, it makes all the battleships very similar to one another simply because the only way to change the balance of the armament is to waste design space. Now, maybe spending only 80 space on the main battery instead of the 100 space allocated can be argued to be a good decision because it keeps the costs down or makes the ship faster or more maneuverable in a fight, but it is still likely to be objectively worse than a ship that made the same decision about the armament but had the freedom to fit in an extra set of shield generators or another hyperdrive or another maneuvering array or more range boosters in the space freed up by the reduced main armament. Maybe you'll never come across a situation where you want to trade 20 space worth of main battery armament for an extra hyperdrive and 10 extra space of PD weapons, but none of use can know that now, and artificially constraining how the ship's capacity can be used makes anyone who happens to have a reason to adapt the vessel to a nonstandard or unsupported configuration S.O.L.
I'd agree with this assessment.
A better comparison between fighters and large ships might be a battleship in naval combat vs a small corvette or fast attack craft.
Regardless, the consensus seems to be that fighters are too powerful and it is a source of balance problems.
I'm still holding out for AA armament and a limitation on fighter/strike craft attack and defense values. For a fighter to have a force 45 beam and shield when my plasma-armed medium ships run 60 attack and 80 defense is just... ridiculous.
Just got to the stage of the game where I could deploy carriers (built on a large hull with 2 carrier modules). Blew the Yor away... defeated 11 large ships (in 2 fleets) in the same turn with 1 carrier/3 mediums and took NO DAMAGE except that I lost 2 or 3 fighters. That makes conquering the galaxy just a tedious exercise.
As a stopgap, make fighters use a kinetic weapon - and only let them fire it once until they are recovered and relaunched (for which the carrier should stay well back, not sail boldly into the middle of the board).
What I would like to see is a larger disparity between fighters and capital ships. The tiny and smalls hulls are fighters and everything bigger is capital. Fighters should only be effective when they are in a squadron. And they should be more of an annoyance than a real threat to larger ships. Because of that not only would the fighting capability from small to medium hull be big, but the costs and build times should be big as well so squadron buildings would be easier.
I would also like to see two sub-weapon types for each of the weapon types. For instance when you research kinetic weapons you would get both the big caliber guns as well as point defense guns. The big guns would suffer penalties when firing on fighter hulls and the point defense would suffer penalties when firing on capital ships. That way you can still balance out if you want AA heavy ships or ships geared for capital ship to capital ship combat. Fighters could be rendered useless if a fleet is designed to counter them. The fighter hulls would have access to both sub-weapon types as well. Fighters with the bigger guns would be bombers used against capital ships and giving them the smaller point defense type guns would make them fighter interceptors. And as I said earlier fighters should only be effective against capital ships when in large numbers, so a couple of fighters wouldn't do anything more than scratch the hull of a battleship.
I don't like the idea of carrier's fighters being different than tiny hulls. I would like to be able to build fighters squadrons without needing carriers. Other universe example would be in Star Wars when the rebels attack the first Death Star with nothing but fighters. And more specifically in Babylon 5 when the Narn send a fighter squadron to investigate the loss of a colony. But like I said building only one small hull fighter wouldn't be useful when going up against a medium hull capital ship because to the purposed gap between small and medium hulls.
Sword of the Stars and a few other games did have weapon sizes. The larger ones were terrible at tracking smaller ships (save for beams), but the small weapons were needed for PD.
Anti fighter tech.Module reduces overall damage against larger targets, but increases damage vs smaller targets. (or just has a high or low base damage, that is gradually decreased or increased based on ship size).Flak would be even cooler of course.
The start of real fleet combat and strategies
...it couldn't get even one shot fired. It was an impressive attack though.
That's your problem right there. Carriers are not over powered, they're misunderstood. What you're attempting to do is fight a swarm of angry wasps with a bat. You'll be lucky to hit anything before they sting you to death. What you need to be doing is once enemy Carriers are on the field, accompanying all large vessels with fighter screens. Ensure these fighters have high tactical speed so that they can reach the swarm before they reach your ship. Also, ensure you have (for now) Good shielding and weapon ranges trained as far as possible so your larger ship can engage the enemy Carrier at long distance.
What would be nice is if Carrier research was linked to weapons research so you unlock the weapon-specific Carrier bay. So, for example, you have to train Carriers and Missiles if you want your Fighters to be using Missiles.
I'd still want weapon sizes - smaller ones are good vs fighters and bigger ones have bonuses against larger hulls.
I have seen a phenomenon repeatedly in games in which one thing or another was considered vastly overpowered. Then, people figured out how to counter. Then all of a sudden people screamed that they needed a boost!
I think the best approach is about what SD is doing. Give people lots of choices about how to build stuff, and then let them duke it out in real pvp type battles. And then see what the situation really is, rather than what I imagine it would be or what might happen in a somewhat artificial staged test.
Oops, I have just been notified that my 2c worth is now only 1.5c. Apparently it was in Euros. Dang strong dollar....
I love the carriers. They are awesome. Most of the time the capital ships never get a shot off. The fighters wipe out everything.
W#hen the AI learns to build carriers a major part of the problem will go away. Maybe they can be toned down a bit but I like what they do and I want them to keep doing it, for me and for the AI.
A carrier story... I built a 2 module carrier on a constructor frame and defeated four 3 ship fleets without taking a hit. Yeah, they are too strong when the AI doesn't have them too. The balance hasn't looked that bad in the dev streams where both side are equal.
Some amazing ideas in here in deed. I would say that adding new weapon modules (that work only against fighters) give you option of defeating carriers without need to overdo entire weapon system. I mean changing weapons to small and big means a lot of work. Weapons scaled to size of ship, even more work. From other games we know that "balance" is as elusive as "fun" aspect. I feel it is far easier and much less time consuming to give players simply an option to bring something that is designed to kill those carriers/fighters than change the way weapons and their damage works.
Flak cannon/AA defense as mentioned before is obviously good choice as it is easy to design and only balancing needed to do is how much effective they are against fighters as they do nothing to other types of ships. You created superior carrier fleet? Well I brought superior flak fleet. Other way around, you have superior flak fleet, well too bad I just changed to capital ships and your flaks and useless. One counters the other. If you create a mixed fleet I will have to make a mixed fleet that counters yours...if I have resources and tech for it. If you go for small and large weapons, you will have hard time balancing ship size to weapon size, damage output, armor, shielding and on and on till your head explodes
Other ideas for anti-fighter modules are:
- Bubble gun - fires a small gravity anomaly/black hole/drastic time slowing bubble that holds fighter craft in place so it gets easy shot by everything else (capital and fighter ships alike)
- "Auras" - Small/Large area around ship or /Entire battlefield gets surrounded by speed slowing/shield disabling/shield lowering/weapons disabling/weapons damage lowering effect. I would recommend to make these modules cost a lot of ship space, so small sized ships are out of question.
- Weapon priority adjustment - Gives one type of weapon class (laser/missiles/kinetic) bonus against fighters (aiming, firing speeed etc.) but that weapon type cant fire against normal ships. You could of course plant all 3 types of weapon adjustment modules on your ship turning it into aa ship only.
- Weapon effect adjustment - Chain laser (jumps to other targets), Aoe missiles and shotgun like kinetic weapons. Compared to all others these would bring the most balance issues.
Nearly every space opera TV show or movie has usually represented the larger military ships as fighter carriers, BSG, SAAB, etc.
Playing around with the firepower and deployment of fighters is always okay. The idea that a fighter can carry a doom ray as powerful as a Dreadnought is a little silly.
However, if we are going to continue to enjoy the carriers, (certainly the greatest combat innovation in GCIII), it has to be drilled into the AI that a carrier module should be stuck on every ship large enough to hold one. If they can be made to fit tiny and small, that needs to be fixed.
There are no counters at this point though - except for other fighters.
The thing is, the tactical combat in this game is not as complex as say, SOTS, where there are dedicated weapons sizes, and dedicated PD systems that are quite lethal to fighters.
I personally would like to see a lot more weapons sizes and weapons types with various tradeoffs between the choices of weapons. There seems to be a step in that direction with GC3, but it's not to the point where I would consider it an immersive experience.
Ideally we'd have a situation where fighters are useful and where fighters are not as powerful.
The end result might look like a tradeoff between say, carriers in Sins and battleships in Sins, where the battleships had considerably more firepower and armor in return for less capacity. If ships have abilities, again, the carrier was more fighter/support oriented versus that battleships which were more combat oriented (think Kortul).
Essentially, fighters can be powerful, but can be countered. Same with battleships. Nothing is so dominant as to overshadow everything else.
I'd rather that they simply limit them to 1 module per large ship and 2 for huge ships.
THAT is a good idea. Easily implemented too.
Rather than go for a quick fix or simple nerf, I would rather that the combat mechanics and ship designer receive a decent overhaul to address not only carriers, but other issues with the game, such as target overkill, the economic bias to larger hulls, and various exploits like sensor barges, dreadnoughts that can move a 100 hexes per turn, etc.
TURRETS
One of the things I would like to see introduced is the concept of a TURRET MODULE. So you have to equip ships with turrets: either a small number of big turrets, or many small turrets, and possibly massive turrets costing so much mass they couldn't fit on the smaller hulls. Then you could select a weapon type for each turret, with the range, damage, accuracy, re-fire rate etc linked to the type of turret. This would also address the overkill problem where a ship can only fire at 1 target at a time. Now each turret can select a target depending on it's size/profile/ship role.
This way you can equip larger ships with tiny turrets specialised for AA duty. This gives the designer the power to design either a Yamato or an Aegis type ship, and creates the concept of "capital missiles", "flak cannons", etc all in one package.
BRANCHING TECH TREES FOR HULLS
Also, I would have liked to see more hull types, differentiated not just by size, but by specialisation ....
- spinal hulls, for support modules, bonus for sensors, hangar bays, troop transports, range, and other support modules etc, but penalty to armor and turrets.
- shell hulls, which have great armor, bonus to armor and turrets, but penalises support modules.
So you would two tech trees, one for support hulls and one for armored hulls. The trees could then have techs for upgrading of fighters, different turret types, etc.
ECONOMIC PENALTY
While ideally you should build fighters into a pool that the carrier has to draw from, this is possibly going to be too much of a pain. Carriers could just be more expensive than battleships in terms of maintenance. I don't mind fighters being auto-upgraded, repaired, rebuilt, but this should be exposed to the interface, i.e., if you click a carrier, you should see that it has 4 fighters, can repair/rebuild/refit one at a time, which will take X number of ticks. This way, a player would KNOW what is going on, without having to micro-manage it, and if you advance in tech, it would mean that there is a certain lag before you see the better fighters, as it takes time for the carriers to refit them one at a time.
DIMINISHING RETURNS
Movement points should be penalised for larger hulls or more mass, as surely 1 ion engine on a battleship shouldn't give it the same speed as 1 ion engine on a tiny hull? Sensors should get significant diminishing returns on being stacked. To attack should require at least 1 movement point, but should consume several movement points. So while ships with lots of movement points might be able to attack 2 or 3 times a turn, no ship should be able to attack 50 times a turn because it has over 100 movement points.
Wow, didnt realize the carrier OP debate has been going on since January. Amazing no changes. I guess stardock doesnt think so.....
SD has already made some changes, but its a tough problem to solve without changing how carriers operate, which requires more code.
how did you get it to focus on only lasers? Mine have proportionately even damage for each weapon type depending on tech
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