I think so, I've seen someone mention something about it (maybe even in this thread?) but I couldn't find the right syntax for it.. so I kinda just don't know how

Quoting naselus,

reply 51

Quoting a0152570,

reply 50

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.

 

 

Splitting off the techs would take like 20 minutes tbh.

Technically true, but coming up with a special fighter tech tree with its own weapon system and scaling would take a hell of a lot more time than that to balance. Linking the current in-game assets to it alone would take that long, going through each race's individual tech tree.

Actually that reminds me: could someone whip up an interface to move techs (and their associated parts) around, visually? It's honestly a huge pain to change a tech and its dependencies in the current xml format.

This depends on whether the ship type selection is automatic, or if the designer selects it. Carrier modules are added to Value which tends to make them support ships. If you pick Escort, Capital or something else, it will make a difference. The default, in most cases seems to be support. (At least in my games. Individual mileage may vary.)

Duh? 

You even gave me karma for it (reply #9 in this thread)

I believe the syntax in my reply is correct.

A single tiny ship normally cost 2 logistics, so a module that gives you 2 of them for just 2 logistics point is rather cheap.

PS:

Do not try to make ships go below a 2 logistics cost, because then when the Hyperion Logistics system becomes active you will get nasty crashes and hangs. This is probably the reason SD has made the HLS no longer stack-able, because if there would be a ship with logistics cost of zero then the calculation of how many ships you can fit in a fleet will result in a divide by zero.

I thought the HLS was still stackable, if by stackable you mean improves with adjacency bonuses, but instead of continuing to reduce logistics costs (which is what the base building does), the levelling bonus increases your logistics cap?

i totally agree with this and firmly believe this is a great way to counter the fighter swarm.

Don't know if any of you have played twilight imperium3 the boardgame but their solution to fighter swarms overpowering fleets are 'destroyer' units, roughly equivalent to a small class ship whose specialty is anti fighter barrage a kinda first strike capability against fighters, while being relatively weak vs other larger class ships.

dont know how you would implement in galciv but I think this would be a great way forward, and adding more tactical thought to fleet makeup 

I always liked the idea of designing our own fighters, however, Stardock, said no to that almost right away.  I hope they reconsider that or at least some of the above suggestions as right now it's kind of silly having small ships with 3 carrier modules flying around carrying 6-9 extra ships.

Flying to a starbase to rebuild fighters? No!

Increasing maintenance and logistics cost. Exactly where the cost should be reflected. The total cost of ownership on a carrier should be like

1.5X Base cost of same size of vessel

2.5X Base maintenance rate

Logistics Cost should also be higher but not quite as much, Say 2X Base logistics cost for same sized vessel.

Personally while I love the way carriers work now. I do feel that all the 'fighters' should be the 'tiny drone' types (and call them all fighters). The small size is simply too powerful for how many you get vrs the logistics cost. 

I would like to see all the carrier modules be the tiny blueprint, with buffs and numbers going up as tech progresses. Also I think carriers with only tiny should be available as soon as you research medium hulls but that is just me. This would give the human player a (greater) challenge if the Ai had access to them earlier. 

The problem with some of these "fixes" is that, while they may correct the OP nature of carriers, they also undermine the concept.

Forget about our lets-pretend space planes for a moment, think about how a carrier module differs from a beam module. With a beam module, it does a bunch of damage and, this not being Gratuitous Space Battles, it carries on doing that damage until you completely kill the ship its on. Carrier-fighters, by contrast, do a bunch of damage and then progressively less damage during the course of the battle as each fighter gets shot down (in theory at least). They even continue doing damage if their mothership is destroyed first. On the other hand, carrier-fighters magically repair to max hp at the end of each battle (unlike the ship a regular beam weapon is mounted on).

Now the obvious nerf is this last one: just don't let carrier auto-repair at the end of each fight. Unfortunately, this means you don't get to enjoy the carrier-ness so much: one battle, and it's over. As Semipiratical says, it reduces the fun-factor:

Part of the problem is that (in my experience at least) carrier-fighters don't get shot down easily. This is for a combination of reasons I think we should correct:

• Firstly, a great swarm of fighters blasts everything else out of space before it gets a shot off in return;
• Secondly, they don't get shot, because of a combination of not being targeted and being missed;
• Finally, if they do get shot they survive anyway 

So a carrier fleet looks like a very powerful long-range beam weapon that blasts away at the other side. That's not good. In fact, it means carriers are not merely OP, they're not functioning as designed. Carriers are supposed to enter battle as a big glass hammer that quickly gets much weaker over the course of the battle - but the battle isn't lasting long enough for this to happen. First we need to make battles involving carriers work as designed in principle;once that is done, only then start tweaking the numbers for balance.

What does a "good" outcome look like? This is what I'm aiming for: a large swarm of fighters launches at an enemy fleet. The fighters are both very weak and have super-short range weapons, so they're in great peril as they approach the enemy fleet. If the enemy fleet is well prepared, they pick off incoming fighters with low-powered rapid fire from stand-off range, obliterating the fighter swarm; they then close for conventional battle against fundamentally weak carrier motherships. On the other hand, if the enemy fleet is poorly prepared, their slow firing missiles and capital-beam weapons are wasted killing a handful of small fighters, and when the fighter swarm reaches weapons range the enemy is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of incoming fire.

Note that this means I don't want to reduce the number of fighters in the sky (that makes carriers less carrier-like): if anything, I want to increase them.

So what do we need to implement to make carrier battles work that way? 

• Firstly, guardian ships should target carrier fighters as their #1 priority. Which will give guardians some reason to exist.
• Secondly, drop the weapons range of carrier-fighters right down. I mean, really low. That will give the other side an opportunity to take out incoming fighters before they get a chance to deliver their payload.
• Thirdly, drop the hp of carrier fighters right down too. A capital-ship weapon hitting a fighter should be a one-shot kill unless you've got shield/armour/point defense, and they shouldn't be big enough to have much of that.
• Finally, we might need some specific anti-fighter tech. I'm thinking something like "Anti-Fighter defense: Increase rate of fire of beam weapons by 200% but reduce accuracy by 50% and damage by 75%". Let's give the player a chance to use a different anti-fighter tactic too; you could also try "Ack-ack fire: Increase rate of fire of kinetic by 100% but reduce both accuracy and range by 50%, and damage by 90%".

With a bit of luck, all the above will mean that carriers are now underpowered, because a fleet with reasonable anti-fighter tech can shoot the incoming fighters all down before they arrive. To balance, increase the number of fighters per carrier module so that large carrier fleets overwhelm the rate-of-fire of traditional fleets.

Strategy-map level changes: hit-points for fighter wings

I wouldn't object to tweaking the "magic auto-repair" of carriers a bit, so that carrier fleets on extended campaigns gradually start to run out of fighters. This would need some experimentation: ideally, I'd say that each carrier had on board a pool of three times as many fighters as it could launch in one battle: magic auto-repairs come from this pool (which gets depleted by fighter deaths); let this pool refill by 10% per turn (not per battle) or 25% per turn while docked at a friendly planet/station.

This is essentially hit points for fighter wings. Thus each carrier has as 3x as many "fighter hp" as it has fighters. It loses one hp per fighter killed. It regenerates 10% of its hp per turn. At the start of each battle, it launches as many fighters as its modules allow, or only as many as it has fighter hp if that is currently lower.

For drone carriers: all the above, only more so. So even more drone fighters per module, a larger pool of drones on board, and a faster pool replenishment rate. But smaller damage output per drone, and no shields/armour/point defense.