I remember many people complaining about carriers being very op in the past. What is the current state of carrier balance? And do you have any control over the actual fighters themselves? Can you customize them? I haven't build any carriers before.
They are less so than before, mainly because they don't replace lost fighters immediately, it now takes 3 turns. Apart from that they still have the same big advantages as before since the fighters don't cost anything to build or upgrade and way combat is designed so ships can't multi-target.
You can't control fighters or any other ships in combat.
You can't redesign fighters in game. The only way to do so is to mod the XML files.
Is there any reason to use large ships instead of carriers?
EDIT: Bonus question: Is there any reason to not just use the same type of ship in your whole fleet?
You can use tiny ships as buffers, because an unlimited amount of damage will be blocked by a single point of defense. A few assault fighters in front of your battleships might eat 1-3 rounds of fire for little cost while your own ships smash the opposing fleet. However, because carriers are a thing you don't ever need to build tiny ships - just equip a few carrier modules. So... not really. There is almost no situation where the largest ships are not the more effective force. The economics are a different story.
That sounds very lame. Then what is even the point of ship roles? Do you even need other ship types after you have built carriers? Combat sounds very half-baked.
Properly outfitting ships and giving them good roles WILL improve your fleet performance, and you can easily obliterate carrier fleets if you are intelligent about it.
I should also note that in a 1v1, a battleship type will ALWAYS beat a carrier with the same tech available. Carriers only become strong in very large fleet sizes where they can be defended by battleships, get stacked fleet bonuses to fighters, or simply max out logistics with ubercarriers.
Price for Price, Carriers are OP'd in groups of three with optimal build, but if turns to build is not a problem for you, then Huge hulls are still better. The main reason for this is that there exists a hard cap of 64 ships per battle. Any excess does not contribute toward the results of battle. Furthermore, since fighters do not respawn every battle, carriers are more susceptible to battles of attrition.
Of course, against the AI, none of this matters since you can steamroll the AI with any decently built fleet.
Got any proof of that exelsis?
Because that didn't use to be the case, and other than the non immediate respawn and reduction of fighter numbers changes from the release of the game I have no knowledge on what other changes have been made, that would make that the case... Have there been other changes? Have any been actually mentioned in patch notes?
Proof of what? That single battleships are better? That should be pretty obvious upon making one of each in the designer. If that isn't enough for you, cheatmode a 1v1 fight together. Battleship always wins. Then cheat a 5v5 - carriers always win. At least the first fight, anyway.
There you go this was a video of a maxed battleship vs carrier not long after the release of the game, it's unbelievably outclassed... have you done that test you suggested recently so have proof/evidence are actually sure of it?
There was a guy on these forums not that long ago who it turned out hadn't even played the game and was claiming carriers weren't overpowered...
Carriers are generally better.
Nilfiry did some testing about a month ago which showed carriers killing their opponents in 75% of battles and their opposition only defeating the carriers 50% of the time (i.e., carriers outright lost 25% of the time and battleships outright lost 50% of the time, with some battles where both sides were wiped out). Carriers are also significantly cheaper than battleships, which means that the battle of attrition argument doesn't really fly; you can build more carriers, who will survive battles more often, and who will obsolete much more slowly. Battleships only become a reasonable investment if you're able to produce them in the same number of turns as the carriers, but will still lose a war of attrition because you're losing more of them, so you'd have been better going with carriers anyway.
The only real reason to build anything other than carriers is the 64 ship limit on tactical combat, which means once your fleet gets close to that limit you should switch to adding battleships instead. A hybrid strategy (i.e., every ship as 1-2 carrier modules and the rest missiles) is probably the best approach really, since you can fill the logistics cap with ships, get about 60 ships into the combat, and still have a lot of heavy firepower on top.
I wonder why there even is a 64 ship limit, with all the talk about the game running on a 4th-gen game-engine, that should technically be able to handle more.
Supreme Commander can handle thousands of units, while calculating collisions on a 32-bit engine on a single core, while GalCiv3 can't handle more than 128 ships without collisions on a 64-bit engine on all cores available?
The only thing I can think of is that calculating battle results wouldn't be instantaneous anymore with more ships but I wouldn't mind it having a progress-bar for immense battles.
I am unsurprised that a carrier from a faction with extra miniturization beat a poorly designed battleship from a faction with health reduction stats from before fighters were reduced by 1/3.
Maybe the developers never expected people to be able to field so many ships at once? That or maybe the limitation was unintentional. With all of the work that they have been putting into trying to fix the economy and diplomatic issues, this might not see any changes for a while.
At least while fleet size is being capped, those that do not want to spam carriers can still find worth in building other things, especially if you can get Military productions over 10K across 5 planets.
I suspect it's unintended - since the logistics cap would ensure that fleets were always smaller than 64 ships, it was likely thought 64 would be a 'safe' integer size to pick that would be more than enough.
is there a way to disable carriers? after reading this discussing, carriers are still a gamebreaker. I dont need tons of decissions in a very cool tool to customize hulls, when carriers are the only true decision. that is dumb, they should nerf the moduls to balance carriers
Why do you need to disable carriers when the AI will never make them effectively? You could always refrain from building them yourself.
bump
using AI ship tweaks
I started using carriers ONLY because I downloaded Battlestar Galactica ship model. And thought ohhh I'll make it a Carrier.
I get 15 Assault fighters on it, and yes, they are bad boys.
The problem comes when you come up agaisnt Carriers...
Carriers vs Carriers.. Assault fighter vs Assault fighrer..
Drengin have fleets full of carriers... I think I need some Guardians :Z|
Your answer to can you remove carriers you should be able ti remark this out in html in modding. I just don't know how to do this.
I have rarely run up against carriers (from the AI) and never built one, always figured they were useless.
The problem with small ships is by the time I can build Huge ships I can often build them in one(maybe 2) rounds.Where as a small ship takes 1 round. So while by the numbers a fleet of small ships (100+ capacity) easily crushes larger ships. Especially with Logistics reduction. When you get a small for 2 logistics, you can put a crazy amount of firepower on that one x30. It's the build time that kills them. I can put out one huge ship with a lot of fire power in 1 round or I can put out 30 ships with even more firepower in 30 rounds.
make a huge hull carrier
you will get alot more firepower than the huge hull dreadnaught from 15 assault fighters in the carrier
Carriers are highly efficient in terms of mass/logistics. You can invest 90 mass (i.e. 1 large ship) into getting 3 small assault ships, which can use 150 mass on their own (or use 7 logistics to get 9). This is before any boni. With boni you can do stuff like getting a huge hull with 5 modules, i.e. you generate 15 assault fighters (45 logistics) from a 10 logistics ship. Or in terms of mass: invest 337.5 mass (assuming you took the 25% support bonus after interstellar travel) and gain 15x50x(1+capacity boni). Assuming the capacity noi add up to 1 (with thalan I usually end up with 1.5, without hyperion shrinker), you get 1500 mass out of 337.5 mass.
The thing they changed a while ago, is that fighters do not instantly repair/replace between battles. Which is very reasonable.
Another aspect is, that large ships do a lot of overkill damage to small ships, e.g. your 300 beam damage capital ship shoots a 50 hp, 8 shield point fighter twice to kill it, when it could kill a 150 shield 300 hp ship in two shots instead.
@cajee
With AI Tweaks it is a very different story, because there is nothing, that stops assaults from just focussing down all support ships (carriers). In the normal balance you add a couple of escorts to your fleet, which have nothing but defense on them. they will stay with the carriers and be attacked by everything before the carriers.
The other thing that they changed a while ago is that fighters no longer benefit directly from hull capacity bonuses, as the fighter blueprints no longer have FillerComponentType components defined. They do, of course, benefit indirectly as you'll be able to fit more carrier components onto the carrier.
This.
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