The devs have put on their roadmap a "fleet builder" concept. This will allow a player to build a series of ships as a "fleet collection" rather than spitting out individual ships turn by turn. Its a cool concept, and one that I think a large amount of the player base will enjoy. But it does have a pretty major balance impact to the game, and its worth discussing before that concept is finalized to decide how best to address the new problem.
Lets first dig in on what the issue is, and then look at some options to address it.
Understanding the Power of Ships - The Two Methods
When thinking about how "good" a ship is in your fleet, there are two principal metrics.
This is the metric of how best to build the "ultimate fleet". Your goal is to fill the logistics "slots" of a fleet with the best ships possible in the most optimum configuration for what you plan to fight. Its most important when you have time in between wars to build fleets, and your willing to trade time for long term performance.
This is how good a ship is compared to how fast you can get it into the game. This metric comes most important when you are still building up your fleets (such as a sudden war declaration you were not prepared for) or often as a war goes on and you suffer attrition from your initial fleets and need to replenish your forces. Its less about getting the absolute best performance, and more about something now is more powerful than something later.
Our discussion today will mainly focus on the second metric.
One Ship per Turn - A Key Balance Mechanic
When it comes to large ships, they tend to actually underperform on logistics cost. If I can have 1 cruiser or 6 fighters in a fleet, the 6 fighters often bring more firepower and actually soak more damage due to evasion and the overkill effect (if a fighter dies in one shot but still gets hit with 5 others, at the end of the day it soaked all of that damage).
They also tend to underperform on military cost. A cruiser might cost 150+ military, a fighter 25, so again 6 fighters for the same cost.
HOWEVER, there is a key balancing agent here, the 1 ship per turn mechanic. For my big spacedocks with a lot of military, I often can build a cruiser in 1 turn. So if my choice is generating 1 cruiser every turn.....or 1 fighter every turn....the cruiser clearly wins in this case.
So what tends to happen in games is that you get a natural mixed fleet effect due to the differing levels of spacedock production. Your best spacedocks produce capital ships, your middle docks produce frigates, and your weak docks produce fighters. This is great, by using a mixture of ships you get the most amount of ship per turn possible, which is very important when dealing with wars of attrition (which high level AIs are pretty good at).
But...the current fleet designer concept will remove this restriction. In theory a spacedock might produce 3 cruisers in 3 turns or 18 fighters in the same time period. This breaks down the mixed fleet concept, and now we return to raw power per military....what ship type gives me the best bang for the buck. And while targeting will make certain ship types useful here and there, you will still see the game ruled by the smaller ships in general based on current ship stats.
Fixing the Problem
Now that we have defined the problem, lets discuss ways to fix it.
Logistics = Capital, Time = Small
I mentioned before that right now small ships tend to win out both in military cost AND logistics performance, but they don't have to. You could lower the logistics footprint of larger ships. This means that the "ideal fleet" will actually be capital ship heavy. So now you have different priorities based on your current need. If your not at war, and looking to build the best fleet possible....go capital heavy. But if you need fleets now, or need to keep replenishing what you've lost.... than you build the more military efficient small ships.
This helps, though you still deal with problems such as frigates vs fighters or cruiser vs battleships. It still comes down to what ship will be the most optimal for what your looking for, and it will be hard to justify any other type. I don't think this alone will solve the problem but its a good start.
Splash Damage
The Anti-Matter bomb right now is the sole "splash weapon" in the game, and completely changes the dynamics of late game combat. Swarms of fighters and especially frigates, which were once very powerful.... can now get hard countered by AM ships. This forces players to either start beefing up their fighters/frigates with hp modules or shift towards fleet that are more capital heavy until the AM ships are taken out.
You could introduce other such weapons earlier in the game.....perhaps not as wide or as much damage as the AM bomb but still a splash type weapon. In this model, small ships would still be the best bang for the buck in standard performance....BUT would have a harder counter. Therefore swarms have to be used carefully, if you can avoid the splash ships....you will dominate, but take a few too many splash hits in the face and watch your entire fleet fall to ruin.
Support Modules
Adding additional support modules naturally creates a desire for a couple of capital ships with these modules surrounded by a swarm of light ships benefiting from those modules....which I would argue is the kind of mixed fleet the game wants to encourage.
Also, you could consider a support module like:
Gemini Module: The ship now fires two barrages at two different ships, each at half your weapon strength (or maybe 1/3 strength for balancing, whatever is needed).
This kind of thing allows bigger ships to become a more "anti-swarm" vessel, so it provides a way to make them more competitive at countering swarms.
Stronger Defenses
Defenses tend to be best on bigger ships, but defenses in GC4 are "weaker" than the equivalences in previous GC games. It comes down to attrition, historically defenses in GC didn't wear out quickly, they provided a constant supply of damage soak or tended to wear out slowly. Currently defenses give out pretty fast, which is one of the reasons large ships tend to get outperformed by swarms. You could consider making defenses stronger which would make larger ships more competitive as a defensive soak. Or you simply could apply this to the type, for example perhaps Battleships have +25% armor/+25% shields as a property of the ship type as an example.
Harder Supply Limits
A more stringent form of balance is some kind of supply system. Perhaps each ship consumes 1 "supply" regardless of size, and so even though a swarm is more powerful....its very supply inefficient, creating optimizations where again mixed fleets have better performance. This would require the most work as you would need to add in mechanisms for such a supply but its an option.
So those are my thoughts. There is still a good amount of time before the fleet builder concept is realized, but its good to start thinking about what adjustments should come along hand in hand with the builder concept so that we don't have to deal with a few versions of very bad ship balance when the concept is unveiled.
What do you think?
Hi Stalker0, You bring up some good points. Our team is, like you said, aiming to make mixed fleet gameplay more engaging and rewarding. As a part of that, we recognize that being able to build a series of ships in a batch allows for more efficient production, but it is not accurate to say that it will lead to a "best single ship type gets spammed" metagame. While that is certainly an approach that a player can take, they are penalized in their inherently reduced fleet performance from lack of diversity.For instance, my fleet of only dreadnoughts will always lose to a balanced fleet of the same technological capabilities and similar logistical capacity. As such, building ships in batches only has the capacity to impact efficiency of fleet production at the expense of only receiving the ships at the end of the cumulative production timer, rather than getting them one at a time.As for your point about ship batches reducing the defined roles that shipyards have based on their per-turn production capacity, you are correct that this will allow for a high-end shipyard to produce many fighters. This should prevent players from feeling like it isn't worth producing fighters to make a mixed fleet for the very same reason you described. I see this as a positive, as fleet performance in combat is not altered by this. Rather, players are encouraged to mmake balanced fleets without having to pay the opportunity cost of "1 fighter per turn."
As always, this is still in the concept phase and may change in implementation so further input can only serve to help. lmk what you think and thanks again!
Best,
RealMutter
Product Owner, Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova
@RealMutter (@mperlmuter),
Thank you for the response, its a good starting point to the debate.
The quoted line is our main point of disagreement. Its absolutely true that a dreadnought fleet will lose to a balanced fleet....but that's because dreadnoughts are not "optimal ships" in military/logistics cost.
I would argue that a fleet of fighter/frigates beat a more balanced fleet in terms of both logistics cost and military cost, and therefore players are NOT encouraged to build balanced fleets. The only reason this isn't true in play is the 1 ship per turn limit....as now in any given turn if player A can field a cruiser and some frigates and player B is only fielding an equivalent number of fighters..... player A is winning because the limitation is not military cost but rather simple turn time.
But once that limit is removed, a "swarm" of small ships at equal military cost will beat balanced fleets including capital ships. They are simply superior in terms of logistics and cost military performance (especially frigates). In order to maintain the incentive to create a "balanced fleet" as you described, additional adjustments or new mechanics are needed.
I would like to add my support for the concept of being able to construct "fleets" at shipyards to get around the issue of only being able to produce 1 ship per turn.
I would also like to add additional suggestions to improve battle logic:
That's my 2 cents worth.
Another possible solution to the "1 ship per turn" issue would be to allow core worlds to have multiple shipyards and to give the player the ability to allocate the available Military points to each shipyard. This would allow the player to build as many ships as they have shipyards and Military points.
@mperlmuter,
To put a little money where my mouth is. I thought I would show an example of what I'm talking about with some example combats.
For this mock combat, I went with a tech level that I commonly war at on Incredible. I've got 42 logistic points, cruisers, an equal amount of all the weapons, and then some upgraded armor.
Test 1: Control Test (Frigate vs Frigate)
For the control, I created a 42 logistic vs 42 logistic frigate fight with all the same stats. I used the standard "war policies" for +40% hp and +2 to all defenses.
The frigate is statted as follows:
I did the fight a few times just to ensure there wasn't some hidden value one side had over the other. All the stats looked the same, and both sides won the fight here and there, with just a few ships normally surviving. So this looks good, and now we can start the real test.
Test 2: Logistic Comparison (Cruiser/Frigate vs Frigate)
So for this test we will see how a cruiser reflects its 6 logistics. I will replace 12 logistics of frigates (aka 6) on one side with 12 logistics of cruiser (aka 2). This will fight a full logistics complement of frigates on the other side.
This is the cruiser I am using. Note that I am even giving the cruiser the benefit of the doubt here, and giving it premium weapons (after all I expect if any ships will survive it will this one, so I can afford to give them some juice). I am also not giving it any armor, as for these fights the frigates attack each other first.
The Result?
As you can see, the frigate only fleets win this pretty handedly, effectively doing twice the damage of the fleet with the cruisers in them. Adding in capital ships for logistics is a losing proposition.
Test 3: Military Comparison (Cruiser/Frigate vs Frigate)
Frigate: 102 militaryCruiser: 249 military
2 Cruisers is very close in cost to 5 of these frigates. Ok so that's a little better than our 2 to 6 ratio for logistics. So I upped the logistics a little bit, and now its 21 frigates (2,142 military) vs 16 frigates and 2 cruisers (2,130). Will this make a big difference?
Unfortunately, the frigate only fleet is still doing significantly more damage, and the balanced fleet just can't keep up.
Test 4: Military Comparison (Armored Cruiser / Frigate)
Now part of the issue previously is that the cruiser isn't getting to use its "tankiness" as its the last ship targeted. So just to see if its makes a difference lets see if a cruiser only fleet beats the frigates cost for cost. This time we will see an armored cruiser design (again with premium weapons) to see how they look.
5 of these guys cost the same as 13.5 frigates, so we will go with 13 again to give cruisers the best chance here. Lets see how it goes.
And the Result:
Its basically a coin flip. As I repeated it a few times, it just comes down to the rolls, both sides can win it. So ok cruisers aren't hopeless, with premium weapons and more logistic slots than the frigates, they can almost compete on military cost in a straight fight. I wouldn't call it a win for the cruisers since that's 35 thulium down the drain, but its better than what we have seen so far. So perhaps a targeting change could make a difference here, if frigates attacked cruisers before other frigates, it would allow the cruiser tankiness to be a factor that might be worth its inclusion.
Bonus Round: Test 1 (Armored/Cruiser vs Frigate)
Just as a quick follow-up test, I thought "well maybe the armored cruiser is just plain better than that other cruiser. So even though the cruiser is attacked last, maybe the armor will just be better and ultimately it will kill more ships, perhaps even win? So I repeated test 1 but used the armored cruiser instead of the one from earlier.
The result.
It is a bit more competitive, but ultimately still inferior to the frigate swarm (especially when the extra thulium cost is added in).
Overall
So hopefully this demonstrates my point. Cruisers are just not cost or logistically equal to their smaller cousins... even when you give them extra firepower with premium weapons. As such, all things being equal (aka no 1 ship per turn rule that favors cruiser production), I would never add in cruisers into my swarm fleet as that would just weaken me overall.
If you want to remove the 1 ship per turn rule (which I am fine with doing, I do think the community wants it), you will need to adjust the ship balance. As Test 4 shows, cruisers can do alright if they get to utilize their tankiness, and so perhaps a targeting change for frigates could help bring back that utility,
Hi Stalker0,
Thank you so much for the detailed testing and insights! We're going to take a look at the balance concerns you've brought up in further detail and I was wondering if you happened to have the game save you tested this in and if you could upload it for our own testing as well?
RealMutter/mperlmuter
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