Thoughts
Paul has been struggling with balancing carriers for a while. Here are my thoughts on how they could be balanced.
First off each carrier has x small ships based on the number of modules correct? These small ships should count toward the logistics cap in the fleet. Maybe not at full value but, they should count. Otherwise it's almost as if you could have a fleet with 120 logistics ships (assuming you just filled a fleet with small ships) but, in reality it may only be 20 logistics points.
Additionally I think it should be limited per hull type tiny and small ships shouldn't be able to have carrier modules by design after all how can tiny and small ships carry additional small ships here are my limit ideas...
Limits Should Be
0 - tiny and small
1 - medium
2 - large
3 - Huge or Cargo
Current What I can do
For instance in my current game I can build a carrier module on the following ship types...
1 carrier module on a tiny ship? Really how can a tiny ship carry small ships?
3 carrier modules on a small ship? Really I can stack that many hidden ships on a small ship? Doesn't seem right.
What does everyone think?
Ideas from the replies so far...
Something needs to be done with carrier modules.
Fighters should not be the best of the best.
I have exactly what we need: yet another lame idea to give carriers somewhat of a nerf.
Instead of any of the above ideas, how about this?
Fighter Pools
Instead having fighters be completely "free" and unlimited, how about a "pool" that has to be maintained? Fighters are added to the pool by being built from a shipyard and/or planet. Fighters are removed from the pool when they replenish a carrier's destroyed fighters or stock a brand new carrier with fighters. Every fighter has maintenance -- maybe have 'active' fighters (the fighters every carrier/starbase/planet/etc.) cost a lot more than 'reserve' fighters (fighters in the pool). Also, maybe make replacing destroyed fighters take a turn -- so if your carrier loses fighters in a fight, it won't instantly have them replaced for the next fight in the same game turn. To make even more a nerf, maybe require a carrier to be within the parent civilization's cultural borders to replace fighters, so carriers operating deep within enemy territory will have to move back to home turf to have their destroyed fighters replaced.
Another possible idea is to make fighters 'sub-tiny' -- maybe have half the mass cap of a 'tiny' hull. Actually, I'm not 100% sure they use a tiny hull's mass cap ... but if they do, maybe make them smaller than Tiny.
Destroyed fighters already take a few turns to replace; I've lost carrier fleets by foolishly engaging several times in succession and having only 1/4 of my fighter complement available on the last fight.
Anyway, any idea that requires the fighters to be built separately is a non-starter for the same reason small hulls are already useless in the mid to late-game: you'd waste an entire turn building one small ship.
My ideal fix would be to have fighters attached to carrier designs (using your own, or the default, small ship designs) during ship design like any other weapon module. This probably requires too much code alteration (I doubt using a ship as a module is supported now), but it would allow you to design your own fighters (fun), require you to pay for any fighters installed (fixes the free scaling issue that makes them so dominant right now), and prevents free upgrades since your fighters are a part of the ship design itself.
A more reasonable near-term fix would be to remove free scaling (i.e. calculate fighter stats based on some parameters that are saved with the carrier object and determined upon its creation--still a code change, but probably a lesser one) and scale the cost of the assault fighter module in proportion to the cost of the fighters it would deploy. You might want to experiment with a multiplier, here--since a carrier will typically produce multiple new fighters over its lifetime, an initial build cost of something like 1.5x the deployed fighters' worth might be fair.
The key "fun" feature of carriers is the inherent expendability of the fighters, so I wouldn't want to remove this or require that the fighters be constructed on their own in a shipyard. What carriers need is to cost in proportion to the power of the fighters they field, and to not receive free upgrades as time goes on.
Are you playing with a mod? I've taken my carrier group into a battle, lost half my fighters but won that battle, started another battle with the same group the same turn and all of my fighters were restored.
No mods here. I am as puzzled as you are that other people have apparently had a different experience. Maybe this was changed recently? I am running 1.03.
There may be some obscure mechanic at work that occasionally produces either result--or a bug.
I am running 1.03 as well. That is strange.
Fighter PoolsInstead having fighters be completely "free" and unlimited, how about a "pool" that has to be maintained? Fighters are added to the pool by being built from a shipyard and/or planet. Fighters are removed from the pool when they replenish a carrier's destroyed fighters or stock a brand new carrier with fighters. Every fighter has maintenance -- maybe have 'active' fighters (the fighters every carrier/starbase/planet/etc.) cost a lot more than 'reserve' fighters (fighters in the pool). Also, maybe make replacing destroyed fighters take a turn -- so if your carrier loses fighters in a fight, it won't instantly have them replaced for the next fight in the same game turn. To make even more a nerf, maybe require a carrier to be within the parent civilization's cultural borders to replace fighters, so carriers operating deep within enemy territory will have to move back to home turf to have their destroyed fighters replaced.Another possible idea is to make fighters 'sub-tiny' -- maybe have half the mass cap of a 'tiny' hull. Actually, I'm not 100% sure they use a tiny hull's mass cap ... but if they do, maybe make them smaller than Tiny.
I like this one, actually - it's kind of like making them a resource, but has the advantage of a stacking pool rather than a flat income.
I could see this working as well, however, you still have the logistics issue. I can have 17 modules on a huge hull, this means that I would have 34-51 fighters depending on the carrier module. with a logistics cap of 40 currently I can have 4 carriers with equal amount meaning I have the following...
A fleet of 4 huge ships with 136 small fighters using 40 logistics, equivalent to 448 logistics.
or make the fighters count against the cap. then you get.
A fleet of 1 huge ship with 34 fighters using 112 logistics over cap, can't add anymore ships.
One could argue they would never be able to add ships to a fleet with the carrier, however, the carrier essentially is a fleet of small ships, potentially larger than normal, and still potentially OP.
Then you make a cap on carrier modules as I suggested capping Huge hulls at 3 or 4.
You then get up to a logistics score of 46 potentially allowing you to add other ships to the carrier fleet if you can get your logistics cap up to 60. Then you possibly though have the carrier under powered being each carrier took up space preventing weapons or shields on the huge ship.
Then I argue if you count the carriers against the logistics cap you either don't count the Huge hall toward the cap or count each carrier module as "3" or "5" depending on the carrier module meaning that each ship doesn't add but, the module does and offsets some of the initial logistics cap balancing some of this out. Example as below.
1 huge ship with 4 low end carrier modules (8 small ships or 24 logistics normally) then has logistics cap of 22.
This then allows other ships to be added to fleet, offsets for the space needed for carriers still counts against the cap and doesn't make it as OP using the above option from Chibiabos. In reality it's like having a free huge hall ship in the fleet, however, wouldn't be as strong as a huge hull ship with no carrier modules being one wouldn't be able to put as many weapons/armor/engines/extras on it. This, however, does give the carriers a little extra (which I believe is the design) with out going overboard.
The problem with screwing around with logistics is GC3 has the same level as GC2 which is 58 (as far as I've been playing?) if you lower them to account for carriers you screw it up for everyone who either hasn't unlocked carriers yet or doesn't play with them? just limit the amount of modules per hull size job done!
You're going to break ship designs either way, I would suggest they put something like this into play when they break the sensor ships that way you're breaking all the ships all at once instead of breaking ships multiple times.
Lots of good ideas. Just a thought in a completely different direction..
The Ai gets the same things you do, i usually ignore carriers until i see the AI using them (don't know why .. just do). SO if the AI managed its fleets better, would things not be balanced? Poor AI fleet management is a core problem that i think and hope is being worked. As long as the AI gets the same basic things you do (#/module, auto resurrection ..) it fair and balanced.
Obvious player exploits like C modules on tiny ships is something the AI can nod do and should be fixed
Fundamentally what we are discussing is not AI balance, but weapon balance.
Regardless of how the AI uses it, right now carriers are so strong that they beat equivalent weapons and defense modules. And as the old saying goes "an obvious choice is not a choice at all".
The goal is to make carriers useful but different from other types of modules your ship can employ, so that its a strategic decision whether to use them or not.
The AI can be balanced around whatever is decided, though it should be noted that some of the ideas here "such as forcing ships to return to their borders to restock fighters" would be much harder to code than ones such as "fighters are rebuilt every X turns".
What this change would accomplish is "every large ship gets X carrier modules....plus whatever other things it can fit".
The fundamental problem still remains....anytime I can get carrier modules I will, all other weapons/defenses are "filler".
Not really, no.
It's a balance issue, but not a balance issue that gives a player an unfair advantage - it's one that kills interesting choices. Currently, running a carrier-based fleet is by far the best option regardless of your other techs. The only counter-strategy to carrier spam is carrier spam (this is also true of early-game colony spam). That's bad for the game, since it makes playing a matter of 'correct' and 'incorrect' choices, rather than various options. There should always be multiple valid strategic choices for the player to make (tall vs wide, laser vs missiles vs drivers etc); the moment you're faced with a no-brainer choice that's poor design.
Ideally, I think fighter weapons need to be a separate tech line from 'normal' weapons (so that you have to wait for the big guns while you tech for little ones, and visa versa), and there should be weapons that are specifically good for killing fighters rather than big enemy ships - AOE-type weaponry that does little damage but splashes it across multiple targets.
Yea BUt, and i hate to bring real life into the game, a carrier is king of the seas (and space in this case. Don't get me wrong, i agree with much of what has been said and suggested. Just do not want to see the Carrier nerfed into just another ship.
I have had some very good fights against AI carrier based fleets with no carriers in my fleet and won, so it is not true that they always win the day.
Not arguing that nothing should be done, just playing devils advocate
Simply fixing tactical combat might help. For some reason, no matter what, carriers never seem to get targetted until after their fighters are destroyed. If this were not the case, if Carriers were made a higher priority target than fighters for, say, Assault ships, that might help -- the tactical battle would probably still be lost (I imagine the fighters will still hang around after their carriers are destroyed in the fight) but with the carrier gone, the fighters would not be around for the next fight.
At the moment, nothing seems to prioritize carriers over their fighters, so I don't even bother equipping my carriers with any weapons of their own or defensive techs (aside from fleetwide modules that add weapons and defenses to every ship in the fleet -- because that boosts the fighters and makes them nigh-invulnerable).
What Chibiabos said...The problem is that carriers are considered support ships and are not the top target priority for any ship class. One of the first goals of tactics is to reduce the eyes and ears and voice of the opposing force. That means support ships that improve attack, defense and any other operational support for the fleet. That is what interceptor or assault ships should be going for. They should only be concerned about escorts or guardians as they fly by on the way to the real targets. One or the other of these classes should be hunting the carriers -- the real threat to your continued existence. The Battle of Midway was about sinking carriers, not shooting down other fighters.The other issue is that the fighter needs to be tiny, not small in size. A thruster, weapon and (maybe) light defenses with a shell around them to hold them together is a fighter. Tiny ships have about half the hits of a small, which makes them easier to swat -- they're supposed to be mosquitoes, not beetles.
Both of those changes would make carriers a bit less op, even if you gave them four tiny fighters compared to three small ones.
Weirdly, I've seen people complaining of precisely the inverse - ignoring the fighters and targeting the carriers, which just soak up damage as the little ships rip your fleet apart. There's a lot of contradictory information flying around about carriers right now.
I think at very least carriers need to cost a LOT more to both build and run compared to gunships. Aircraft carriers are kings of the sea IRL, but building and running one also costs an order of magnitude more than running a surface warship (this is why the Soviets preferred giant battleships despite the obvious superiority of the aircraft carrier - they certainly had the tech to build them, but couldn't afford to run supercarrier class vessels).
Okay Ultimately I think as many have said there are many good idea's this is what I think most of you seem to agree with (some exclusions.)
To me that seems to be where most points are pointing too. I personally love the ideas and I hope Paul, Brad and the rest of the Galactic Civilizations III team does too. Keep the great ideas coming
I agree with Seilore's conclusion apart from the logistics cap part and I said before the Log Cap should be nearer to 100 rather than the same as GC2 of 58 then perhaps it could be but at the moment no.
I've started out the code for a Carrier balance mod.
Changes so far:
I like a lot of the other suggested ideas, I just don't know how codable they are. You *can* theoretically have fighters with fixed tech levels quite easily by using Static blueprints, but currently modding ShipStaticBlueprintDefs.xml causes a CTD.
The code is here: https://github.com/TurielD/Carrier-Balance-Mod
I invite anyone who's interested to contribute
One thing that could be a very simple change, is that fighters dont carry your best tech weapons, but only the previous generation weapons (perhaps because you need the next tech to miniaturize them to fit on fighters). Thats a simple offensive combat nerf that could make a simple difference. The best weapons go on real ships, 2nd best on fighters.
That is not easily programmable with the current way ship designs are set up.
Hi TurielD
really like the direction of your mod. Can logistics cost be add? if so just wondering why you didn't.
Instead should be either created from a pool selected by the player.
Fighters should have their own tech tree to be researched.
hay bud
Good recap. Don't see the above 2 as being feasible or more accurately (cause SD can do anything ) attention would be better spent elsewhere imo.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
