As it stands now, there is absolutely no reason (other than roleplaying) to build large or huge ships. They are beyond bad in comparison to the other hull sizes. Let's take a look:
Tiny
Your starter warships and extremely useful for stacking weapon amplifiers and other fleet bonus modules. This seems to be the current "meta" of the game.
Just spam a whole lot of them, set them to support role and bunch them together with a couple of Small or Medium hulls (as main weapon carriers) and you get something like this:
g
Small
More module slots and hitpoints than Tiny and may also take over the swarm role described above. Also, they are great for armed standard roles like survey ship, explorer etc. in the early game (needed due to the pirate, space monster and sentinel spam).
Medium
Your standard weapon platform. Enough module slots (12 with maxed miniaturization) for any task and lots of hitpoints, all for the cost of 4 logistics. Overall just great bang for the buck.
Large
15 slots for 8 logistics = 25% more slots *cough* than Medium for double the logistics requirement. Excuse me?
Huge
22 slots for 16 logistics = 83% more slots than Medium for 400% the logistics requirement. Why should anyone ever build those?
IMO, both of these should be buffed dramatically, since right now they are light years away from being a viable alternative to any of the other hull sizes, despite being endgame techs. My suggestions:
This way, both of these hulls would be useful again and fit their position in the tech tree. And they would still be far from overpowered - due to the low numbers of them in any fleet and the GC targeting system.
Some other issues that should be addressed:
Instruct the AI to always use the +20% weapon amplifiers on their ships (for Tiny, Small and Medium at least). Right now it's trivial for the player to outdamage them on any difficulty level (see pic above). Unfortunately, this probably requires a rework of many many core designs.
The whole one-per-ship module system is a mess. At the moment I can put only two carrier modules on a ship, no matter its hull. So you don't want me to build a Huge hull supercarrier filled with carrier modules, but at the same time you have no problem with me creating a Small hull with 2 carrier modules and throwing 40 of these ships into a fleet? Doesn't make sense to me at all.
Same problem with many other modules. IMO, the only modules restricted to one-per-ship should be those giving fleet-wide bonuses and the special ones (colony, constructor etc.).
Cargo hulls should also be given some love. Right now, they give 6 slots (one less than Small hulls, with maxed miniaturization) and 20 base hitpoints. I don't see their usefulness beyond the very early game. My suggestion would be to go back to the GC3 route and give them 10 slots and a base hp of 1 (which can be increased by hp modules if desired). Maybe some special modules (e. g. transport, constructor) should be restricted to Cargo hulls.
Personally, I'm a fan of this ship type. It's true that it provides a strategic advantage, but also makes it a valuable strategic target that has to be protected.
Sure, but sadly it made sensors on planets or starbases completely irrelevant.
Great feedback here, Im going through everything. At a minimum I'm looking at reducing the logistics cost on large and huge hulls and increasing resources costs on some of the amplifiers.
Well the easiest first fix is to make it where the amplifiers are not fleet wide.... I'm pretty sure the way they are written they were never supposed to be fleet wide in the first place. That's a major reason why tiny fleets are so strong, remove that and a lot of things balance back out.
Derek, how does Stardock test balance for combat. If you could separate the battle calculations from the rest of the game and just feed it a hundred scenarios, you could probably get some pretty good statistics to help inform your decisions when you make changes.
If you are open to alternative suggestions:
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that ...
- restricting certain modules to certain hull sizes and
- setting the number of allowed modules per ship to something other than one or infinite (in some cases)
... could solve those issues and make for a more interesting game.
Something like:
- weapon amplifiers: restrict them to Large and Huge hulls, unlock with Large hulls, restrict to 3 or 4 per ship (if you allowed only one per ship like now, no-one would use them)
- Probe module: Tiny (because probes) and Cargo (because freighters) only
- Colony, Constructor: Cargo only (these are kinda supposed to be fragile ships and if the player wants to add weapons and hull points they can do so)
- Transport: Cargo, Large or Huge only (in case people want to build assault carriers or something like that)
- Cargo module: Cargo and Large only (in case people want to build galleons or something like that)
- Carrier modules: Cargo, Medium, Large and Huge only (escort carriers, light carriers, medium carriers, fleet carriers), please remove number restrictions
- Sensor modules: no restriction in number on Tiny and Small hulls (= picket ships / scouts), one per ship for all other hull sizes (right now they are one per ship for all hulls)
All that would probably require some additional coding, I don't think that restricting modules to hull types is in the game now.
I'd really like to know what other people think about it.
Also:
- Large and Huge hulls should still have their module capacity increased (or their logistics cost lowered)
- the modules that increase attack and reduce hitpoints (like Prism Cage) are fine, since they do not stack
I'm pretty sure they were supposed to be fleet wide, since we had stuff like that in GC3 already (IIRC even in GC2 from when they introduced the fleet modules). It's just that those amplifiers came later in the tech tree in GC3 and were not so easy to spam.
Hey Croc411, there’s logistic cost reduction changes in the changelog for the unreleased patch that’s up (the changelog post is) and possibly connected to your thread.
Yes, they reduced logistics cost of Large / Huge hulls and changed the effect of the amplifiers to ship-only.
This should at least solve the problem of the player easily outdamaging the AI. We will have to see if Large and Huge are competitive now.
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