Nilfiry

Carriers - Not So Game-breaking After All? [Images]

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Carriers - Not So Game-breaking After All? [Images]

from GalCiv3 Forums

I added direct links since the pictures were not displaying correctly for me.


Updated in Post #25 due to popular suggestions for more gameplay realistic ship designs.


The Intro

So I decided to do a test to see whether carriers are truly as over-powered as so many people claim them to be. I for one have never felt this to be the case, but I have never fought against AI designs that were comparable to my own. The only times that I struggle against carriers are during mid-game, which I define as prior to unlocking all of the weapons, defenses, and hull mastery. During mid-game, fighting against a fleet of carriers where both sides have a comparable number of same-sized ships and techs usually result in heavy losses for my side. Either I will just barely win with most of my fleet gone, or my fleet gets wiped out just after barely managing to destroy the enemy's carriers, resulting in mutual annihilation. Of course by late game, any one of my ships can easily steamroll countless fleets of carriers, but at this point, my tech is usually more advanced than the AI. This leads me to wonder how they would fair if the settings were more...comparable?

The Settings

I am testing this on an old map that was played during the late version of 1.3, upgraded to v1.41, and then resumed just for this test.

All techs have been unlocked.

I am playing with a custom faction, but no other mods or cheats are in effect (besides god mode for necessary reasons).

Since I was too lazy to start a new map to fight against myself, I am using the Altarians as my guinea pigs. In this map, I just happen to be allied with everybody else except for them.

I am using God mode to initiate the battle.

The Carriers

So I loaded up on of my end game files, created two fleets, both with endgame techs (including precursor techs), gifted the fleet to another faction, enabled god mode, and attacked each other. Keep in mind that these carriers were made to hold as many carrier modules as possible.

 

The type of test carrier that I created is as follows....

 

Carrier Specs:

Name: HCMx9 Carrier

Components:

Huge Hull (650 Capacity)

9x High Capacity Carrier Modules

6x Nightmare Torpedoes

43x Precursor Hull Reinforcement

The Bane

Universal Integrity Field

Universal Displacement Field

Total Cost: 5995.2

 

Why the torpedoes you ask? Because 9 carrier modules leaves me with about 49 capacity points remaining, which is not enough for anything significant at this point. The percentage boost from fleet support modules are insignificant since the fighters are so weak anyway--even weaker than tiny sized hulls. I could stack a few fleet support modules, but I decided to make another carrier just for that. Also, extra HP to makes the carrier more durable.

 

Name: HCMx4 Carrier

Components:

4x High Capacity Carriers

Same as above, but all fleet buff and debuff modules, as well as repair, jammers, and 3x Nightmare torpedoes.

Total Cost: 6077.1

 

To make sure that the stats of the ship did not change after trading them over, I also gifted all of my techs to the Altarians. It turns out that due to specializations and what not, the fighters automatically reconfigure to match its owner. In this case, the changes after gifting the ships are the increase in HP (due to race traits), and defense specializations. Of course, this does not really matter since I do not plan on using carriers of my own in this test. This also confirms that each carrier will produce 27 fighters.

 

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/ExhibitConfirmChanges_zpsztvgt6dj.jpg

 

The Targets

And the targets for these carriers are various ships that I built to test the waters. I will not list all of their specific design details here because I am lazy, but here are some things they all have in common...

650 Capacity (Huge Ship)

1200-ish HP (via Precursor Hull Reinforcement)

1000 - 1400 defenses (split evenly during design, meaning modifiers unaccounted)

Single Ship Support Modules Relevant to Weapon Specialization (balanced ships have all modules).

Jamming, Self-Healing, and Targeting

All other Precursor techs.

Total Costs: Around 11-14K each.

 

I also made buff and debuff ships, but it turns out they were unnecessary.

 

!!!PLEASE READ IMPORTANT NOTES!!!

Firstly, this game apparently has a cap of 64 ships per battle!! With 9 HCCMs x 14 ships, you are looking at 126 modules, and each generates 3 fighters. The total should be 378 fighters, not counting the carriers, but here, we only see 64 ships no matter what. With 14 carriers (Altarians does not have Organized+2 race trait), this should total over 14K beam attack, going off of the previous image, but nope. This means some ships were cut, with the huge ships given priority over the fighters.

 

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Confirm64Ships_zpsr0dlnbrr.jpg

 

The math checks out.

61 x 56 = 3416 Beam Atk

(61 x 70) + (3 x 240) = 4990 Missile Atk (The above picture included a ship in slot 2 with support modules)

61 x 21 = 1281 Kinetic Atk

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/ConfirmStats_zps0abh0gs5.jpg

 

And if those 64 ships loses the battle, the entire fleet is destroyed. I am not sure if this is an intentional or technical limitation (or just my computer, someone test?), but that is how things are. Essentially, this means that a fleet of well-equipped Huge Hulls will ALWAYS trump a fleet of carriers due to this limitation. I do not know if people were already away of these things, but this was news to me.

 

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Confirm64ShipsDestroyed_zpsn1yxepwt.jpg

 

Secondly, either it is my computer or it is the game, but while the viewer does not crash on me when generating so many ships in battle, it is far too choppy to be viewable on video. I plan on just showing result screens.

 

The Rounds

Despite the aforementioned discovery ensuring that carriers will never be a match for a large fleet of huge ships, let us have some fun anyway.

 

First some rules...

 

I was not consistent with picking which side to initiate the attack, so do not let the "Victory" or "Defeat" at the top distract you.

 

All of these ships exclude engines, life support, and sensors.

 

Win Conditions are as follows:

Carrier Wins if Huge Ship is destroyed.

Carriers Lose if the carrier and all fighters are destroyed

Tie if the huge ship and the Carrier are both destroyed, even if fighters remain.

 

The Conditions for Victory and Defeat are as follows

 

 

 

Round 1

1 v 1 - Carrier vs BalancedShip

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round1_zpsobl7swx5.jpg


Result: BalancedShip Wins

 

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round1Results_zpsinf6nlxn.jpg~original

 

As you would expect from the stats, the carrier had no chance. Even if the fighters could destroy the BalancedShip, with the carrier destroyed, it would be a tie anyway. Still, it was a close call for the BalancedShip. I reran this three times, and the BalancedShips's missile defenses dropped to 0 once, but no HP loss.

 

Round 2

1 v 1 - Carrier vs BeamShip

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round2_zpsvo3dp2vp.jpg

 

Result: Carrier Wins by Lanslide

 

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round2Results_zpsdvzjavkm.jpg~original

 

Maybe I focused a bit TOO much on stacking up beam atk. This is by far the poorest performing ship.

 

Round 3

1 v 1 - Carrier vs KineticShip

 

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round3_zpstmmnqzm8.jpg

 

Result: Carrier Wins

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round3Results_zpsjwd0pavd.jpg~original

 

Despite having the same defenses as the BalancedShip, this one was destroyed too. However, it performed significantly better than the beam ship. The short range of kinetic weapons was probably the main cause of this defeat, especially since it never made it to the carrier.

 

Round 4

1 v 1 - Carrier vs MissileShip

 

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round4_zpstiyiusup.jpg

 

Result: Tie

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round4Results_zpsjfnmbxtt.jpg~original

 

The missile ship actually managed to perform pretty good, especially since it destroyed the carrier early on thanks to its long range. Even if it got destroyed by the fighters afterward, this can still be considered mutual destruction since no carrier means the fighters disappear.

 

Round 5

1 v 1 - Carrier vs DefenseShip

 

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round5_zpshx2fbnzb.jpg

 

Result: Carrier Wins

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round5Results_zpsj9tiijjf.jpg~original

 

Apparently, stacking more defenses and sacrificing offense is not the answer to defeating carriers either....

 

Round 6

1 v 1 - Carrier vs KamikazeShip

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round6_zps6mlpsig6.jpg

 

Result: Tie

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round6Results_zps1p9p6lh1.jpg~original

 

As the name would imply, I built this design with the thought in mind of a fast ship that can take out the carrier before it is destroyed. Obviously, it worked and performed really well. Use the powers of the Divine Winds when you need to take out those pesky carriers fast!

 

Round 7

2 v 2 - Carriers vs BalancedShips

Result: BalancedShip wins

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round7Results_zpsphlugnfr.jpg~original

 

From the way this looks, carriers seem to be losing their touch the more ships we add on against balanced ships. 1 v 1 gave the BalancedShip more trouble, but in 2 v 2, the BalancedShips had no trouble at all.

 

Round 8

2 v 2 - Carriers vs KamikazeShips

Result: Tie

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round8Results_zpsuohn8udc.jpg~original

 

Finally! A great use for tactical engines! These ships do what they were meant to do! This design costs about 11K, but I get the idea that these ships could be build cheaper and more effectively. With these specs, they managed to take out half of the fighters before getting destroyed as well, which is unnecessary.

Also, it turns out that these ships are so fast that my computer cannot keep up, resulting in choppy graphics.

 

Round 9

2 v 2 Carriers vs MissileShips

Result: Tie

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round9Results_zpsultmfgus.jpg~original

 

Interesting enough, these MissileShips perform better two on two than one on one. They might even win if it were 3v3. I will bet that if you added some beam or kinetic weapons to speed up the rate of fire and accuracy, these ships would actually be able to win since missiles are a bit too slow.

 

Round 10

3 vs 3 - 2 Carriers + 1 Buff+Debuff Carrier vs MissileShip + BalancedShip + DebuffShip

Result: Tie

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round10Results_zpswlk18m3n.jpg~original

 

Basically, the debuffing gives the other two enough time to take out the carriers before they get destroyed. Nothing too interesting here.

 

Round 11

3 vs 3 - 2 Carriers + 1 Buff+Debuff Carrier vs  BalancedShip + DebuffShip + SupportShip (buffs)

Result: BalancedShip with Buff and Debuff Wins

 http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m59/solgrieving1/Round11Results_zpse3jhqj7c.jpg~original

 

This was actually an interesting battle because the BalancedShip was destroyed pretty early on, but not before destroying all three carriers. This pretty much left my remaining SupportShip and DebuffShip to mop up some 40+ remaining fighters. My Debuffship is essentially a heavily armed missile ship with all the fleet debuffs, and my SupportShip is a beam ship with backup missiles and all of the fleet buff modules, slightly not as well defended. The two survived without losing HP.

 

A few other combinations that I tried:

 

2 Carriers vs DefenderShip and BeamShip - Carriers Win. It was sad to watch.

2 Carriers vs 1 MissileShip - Carriers Win

2 Carriers vs 2 Kinetic - Carriers Win

2 Carriers vs 2 BeamShips - Carriers Win

2 Carriers + 1 Buff+Debuff Carrier vs DefenderShip + SupportShip (buffs) + BeamShip - Carriers Win. Even 2.4K+ defenses die instantly.

2 Carriers + 1 Buff+Debuff Carrier vs 2 BalancedShips - Carriers Win...flawlessly. Balancedships could not even get close.

2 Carriers + 1 Buff+Debuff Carrier vs MissileShip + BeamShip + KineticShip - Carriers win flawlessly. The other ships could not even get close enough to attack.

2 Carriers + 1 Buff+Debuff Carrier vs 2 BalancedShips + 1 SupportShip (buffs) - Carriers gets roflstomped.

 

I stopped at 3 v 3 because of the 64 ships limit. Adding anymore would just reduce fighters and put the carriers in a less favorable situation. At 3 v 3, the carriers are already missing out on some fighters, so technically it is slightly unfair, but oh well.

 

The Conclusions

 

1. For those warlords who love to blow up everything, carriers give you the best bang for your buck! They are extremely powerful for what they cost to build, but they are not invincible either. If they need to be nerfed, then a price/capacity increase on carrier modules would not be a bad choice.

A lot of the ships in the 1v1 rounds cost almost twice as much as the carrier that it fought. For example...

KineticShip - 11843

MissileShip - 10425

BalancedShip - 11129

 

Carrier - 5995

 

2. Balanced ships are the way to go against carriers if you are looking to win, unless the faction you are fighting against has only unlocked one type of weapon. Missiles to destroy the carriers from afar and kinetic and beams to deal with those pesky fighters. While a bit more expensive than the rest, you are almost certain to come out on top!

 

3. Missile weaponry are a carrier's weakness. Even if you cannot win, as long as your long ranged missiles take out the carriers, you can at least guarantee mutual destruction. They may need protection if you are outnumbered, though. Alternatively, building really fast ships to dive through those fighters to go straight for the carriers work too!

 

4. Playing too defensively against carriers only makes things worst. Those fighters will drain your shields instantly.

 

5. Ships that perform poorly 1 v 1 will perform even worse the more you stack, especially against carriers.

 

6. When your opponent of equal power buff/debuffs, you need to do the same!

 

7. The 64 ship limit means that stacking too many carrier modules will only work against you. Having more balanced ships seems the way to go for a carrier.

 

8. Also because of the 64 ships limit, I just realized that a fleet of custom designed 64 tiny hulls will be unbelievably devastating if you maximize capacity. These fighters only had around 50 beam and missile atk, but Tiny hulls can have over 100 atk in multiple weapon types and have better shields. You can even squeeze in a few with support modules. Hyperion Shrinker or Universal Displacement Field can reduce their size 2 logistics down to 1. OMG, I need to try this!

 

9. Kinetic weapons are crappy, as I suspected.

 

So to wrap things up, it seems to me that at the end of the day, a ship with carrier modules is still just a ship. It is far from being too OP'd or game-breaking. Its main advantage is in its swarm tactics and cost-to-power ratio, but it is not without exploitable weaknesses or ways to come out on top without spending too much. A fix for them can simply be to make the carrier modules much more expensive, or limit the quantity a ship can have to one or two.

 

So tell me what you peeps think? Am I missing some important detail here? Are these fighters not strong as they can be fore some reason (do tell me please if you know)? Still think carriers are too powerful?

 

 

82,076 views 33 replies
Reply #26 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Nilfiry, reply 25

 

One, is the obvious cost. Sure, in a 4v4 situation of ships of equal costs, the carriers win every time, but the real question is, if you can build more expensive ships, why would you not? From another point of view, an effective carrier has a price cap of about 4-5K, but just because your opponent is building carriers at 4.8K each does not mean you have to build all your ships at the same price. In real game play, this is never going to be the case either unless it was intentional or coincidental. If you can produce 8 or 10K Military Manufacturing per turn, you really have no reason not to build more expensive ships. Even though military production does roll over to the next ship, you still can only ever get one ship per shipyard per turn, so it is more effective to build as expensively as you can produce in a turn. By endgame, it is not at all difficult for a single planet to produce over 5K production alone, and ships needing 10K+ can still be produced in one turn with a group of planets. In effect, cost is no object in endgame, and researched techs is what matters in mid to late game. Even without the wheel and all of my planets set to balanced (33/33/33+50/50), my best group of planet can still churn out over 5K military per turn.


 

First of all, nice job on all this.  It's very interesting.

 

But my response to this section of your post is this: Would it not make sense in this case to build another shipyard, split your planets up and build 2 carriers per turn?  That's another question for this cost/power analysis to look at: Can 2 5K-ish carriers easily beat 1 10k-ish ship?  Can 4 beat 2? Carriers, as you've said, work better in groups.

 2v2 or h

 

Editing:  I did some informal, less-than-rigorous testing on this question, I designed end-game capital ships and carriers ships. (with all techs unlocked via console, thus less-than-rigoruos and not ideal game situations)  The capital ships were roughly twice the cost of the carriers - balanced but not particularly well-designed.  Any battle of 2(x) Carriers vs (x) capital ships resulted in clear carrier victories. (4v2 or 2v1, a 1:1 cost carrier vs. capitals) At 1v1 it's a toss-up. (probably thanks to my bad designs) 2v2 or higher heavily favors carriers.  6 capital ships can beat any number of 1/2-the-cost carriers (max 4 carriers because of ship limit - 1:3 carrier:capital cost)

Testing some mixed fleets, A fleet of 4 carriers + 2 capitals VS 6 Capitals (2:3 cost) had mixed results, usually very lopsided but not necessarily favoring one side or the other.

3carriers + 3 capitals regularly beat 6 capitals, with some losses. (3:4 cost)

I think it's acceptable for a well-built fleet to beat an unbalanced fleet, BUT this relies entirely on the ship cap.  If we are supposed to rely on this limit for balance in battles, I think we're getting balance from the wrong places.  I like the idea of 3 carriers + 3 capitals being a superior fleet for 3/4 the cost, though, since that encourages putting some effort into fleet composition.  But, like I said, the only reason this even works is because of the ship cap, otherwise carriers would be far and away the best choice.

Reply #27 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Turkwise, reply 26


Quoting Nilfiry,
reply 25

 

One, is the obvious cost. Sure, in a 4v4 situation of ships of equal costs, the carriers win every time, but the real question is, if you can build more expensive ships, why would you not? From another point of view, an effective carrier has a price cap of about 4-5K, but just because your opponent is building carriers at 4.8K each does not mean you have to build all your ships at the same price. In real game play, this is never going to be the case either unless it was intentional or coincidental. If you can produce 8 or 10K Military Manufacturing per turn, you really have no reason not to build more expensive ships. Even though military production does roll over to the next ship, you still can only ever get one ship per shipyard per turn, so it is more effective to build as expensively as you can produce in a turn. By endgame, it is not at all difficult for a single planet to produce over 5K production alone, and ships needing 10K+ can still be produced in one turn with a group of planets. In effect, cost is no object in endgame, and researched techs is what matters in mid to late game. Even without the wheel and all of my planets set to balanced (33/33/33+50/50), my best group of planet can still churn out over 5K military per turn.




 

First of all, nice job on all this.  It's very interesting.

 

But my response to this section of your post is this: Would it not make sense in this case to build another shipyard, split your planets up and build 2 carriers per turn?  That's another question for this cost/power analysis to look at: Can 2 5K-ish carriers easily beat 1 10k-ish ship?  Can 4 beat 2? Carriers, as you've said, work better in groups.

 2v2 or h

 

Editing:  I did some informal, less-than-rigorous testing on this question, I designed end-game capital ships and carriers ships. (with all techs unlocked via console, thus less-than-rigoruos and not ideal game situations)  The capital ships were roughly twice the cost of the carriers - balanced but not particularly well-designed.  Any battle of 2(x) Carriers vs (x) capital ships resulted in clear carrier victories. (4v2 or 2v1, a 1:1 cost carrier vs. capitals) At 1v1 it's a toss-up. (probably thanks to my bad designs) 2v2 or higher heavily favors carriers.  6 capital ships can beat any number of 1/2-the-cost carriers (max 4 carriers because of ship limit - 1:3 carrier:capital cost)

Testing some mixed fleets, A fleet of 4 carriers + 2 capitals VS 6 Capitals (2:3 cost) had mixed results, usually very lopsided but not necessarily favoring one side or the other.

3carriers + 3 capitals regularly beat 6 capitals, with some losses. (3:4 cost)

I think it's acceptable for a well-built fleet to beat an unbalanced fleet, BUT this relies entirely on the ship cap.  If we are supposed to rely on this limit for balance in battles, I think we're getting balance from the wrong places.  I like the idea of 3 carriers + 3 capitals being a superior fleet for 3/4 the cost, though, since that encourages putting some effort into fleet composition.  But, like I said, the only reason this even works is because of the ship cap, otherwise carriers would be far and away the best choice.

 

As I explained in the paragraph following that, quantity in this game does not beat quality, especially if your quantity just happen to be carriers.

 

Carriers need turns to replenish their fighters that gets destroyed, and for a carrier, fighters are both their shields and swords. This is also a weakness. If their fleet of fighters were heavily diminished in one battle, they would start with a serious disadvantage in a next battle. Effectively, you can wear carriers down in a battle of attrition, but the same cannot be said of regular ships. Regular ships gets instant recharge of defenses and no loss to weapon effectiveness between battles on the same turn, even if they are low on HP. The only exception to all of this is HP, but as long as your fleet of expensive ships do not take significant HP damage, they can tank any number of carriers thrown at them. Of course, you should never be sending a lone ship against a fleet of carriers. This is just bad practice on the most fundamental level. Everything works better in groups.

 

The advantage of cost here is that you may be able to assemble your fleet of carriers faster than your opponent can assemble their fleet of expensive ships; however, this is a really situational matter. If the galaxy is too large, building carriers faster may not matter due to the time spent crossing distances, or if the player going for the expensive fleet got lucky with a bunch of nicely positioned, quality planets, then that player may be able to produce expensive ships just as fast.

 

 

Star Control: Origins
Reply #28 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Nilfiry, reply 27

Carriers need turns to replenish their fighters that gets destroyed, and for a carrier, fighters are both their shields and swords. This is also a weakness. If their fleet of fighters were heavily diminished in one battle, they would start with a serious disadvantage in a next battle. Effectively, you can wear carriers down in a battle of attrition, but the same cannot be said of regular ships. Regular ships gets instant recharge of defenses and no loss to weapon effectiveness between battles on the same turn, even if they are low on HP. The only exception to all of this is HP, but as long as your fleet of expensive ships do not take significant HP damage, they can tank any number of carriers thrown at them. Of course, you should never be sending a lone ship against a fleet of carriers. This is just bad practice on the most fundamental level. Everything works better in groups. 

 

I take some issue with this. Proposing that you wear down carriers in a battle of attrition when the carriers win the first fight against superior opposition AND are half the price doesn't work. You're throwing twice the manu cost at them, losing, and then throwing the same amount again to win on the second roll of the dice... This essentially translates to 'if you're out-producing your enemy 4 to 1, then you can beat carriers'. Wearing your enemy down by attrition should work if you're sending lots of cheap units at the enemy's few expensive ones.

 

I see three basic conclusions from these tests:

 

1) Carriers are MASSIVELY overpowered for their price. Just grotesquely. And this is at end-game, when the imbalance is arguably least, and only measuring their combat potential, as opposed to their notable free, automatic defense and attack upgrades over time - which is possibly the most imbalanced thing about them.

2) The only thing that remotely balances them is the 64 ship limit, or else they would be the only option, full stop. The rate of power increase per unit for the carrier fleets is greater than it is for other ships, given that 1 v 1 they are weakest and after that it's pretty much carriers all the way. I agree with Turkwise that, if we're reliant on a hard cap to keep things balanced, they aren't actually balanced at all. We should both be capable of fielding fleets of 14 carriers and their full fighter compliment, and of defeating such a fleet without needing to resorting to carriers.

3) If the economy were actually balanced as the devs have indicated they would like it to be, carriers would become the only sane choice at an economic level. If we take 5 turns to build a 'good' warship (as Brad stated in one of the wheel threads), then it should take 3 to build a carrier that can stand up to it. And if we need a fleet of 7 of these ships to beat 4 carriers, then we're looking at you needing 35 turns of manufacturing to defeat just 12 turns worth of mine. I will have nearly 3 carrier fleets for every 1 fleet you build. And these separate fleets can operate independently, while your 1 fleet must pick a single target and try to engage it. 

 

We should also remember that this is carriers after they've been nerfed. They used to replenish fighters instantly back in 1.2, and IIRC the fighters even had filler components in 1.1. The fact that testing like this is still coming back with the carriers firmly in the lead is indicative of just how absurdly potent they were previously, when even attrition didn't really affect them. 

 

I'd concur that carrier modules should be roughly doubled in either price or mass (either would do, not both), and that there needs to be a better mechanism for dealing with smaller ships - either multi-ship targeting, or some kind of AOE weapon that can hit several ships at once. This will also help against very large fleets of very small ships, which would become economically viable if bigger ships become as expensive as they ought to be.

Reply #29 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting naselus, reply 28


Quoting Nilfiry,
reply 27

Carriers need turns to replenish their fighters that gets destroyed, and for a carrier, fighters are both their shields and swords. This is also a weakness. If their fleet of fighters were heavily diminished in one battle, they would start with a serious disadvantage in a next battle. Effectively, you can wear carriers down in a battle of attrition, but the same cannot be said of regular ships. Regular ships gets instant recharge of defenses and no loss to weapon effectiveness between battles on the same turn, even if they are low on HP. The only exception to all of this is HP, but as long as your fleet of expensive ships do not take significant HP damage, they can tank any number of carriers thrown at them. Of course, you should never be sending a lone ship against a fleet of carriers. This is just bad practice on the most fundamental level. Everything works better in groups. 




 

I take some issue with this. Proposing that you wear down carriers in a battle of attrition when the carriers win the first fight against superior opposition AND are half the price doesn't work. You're throwing twice the manu cost at them, losing, and then throwing the same amount again to win on the second roll of the dice... This essentially translates to 'if you're out-producing your enemy 4 to 1, then you can beat carriers'. Wearing your enemy down by attrition should work if you're sending lots of cheap units at the enemy's few expensive ones.

 

I see three basic conclusions from these tests:

 

1) Carriers are MASSIVELY overpowered for their price. Just grotesquely. And this is at end-game, when the imbalance is arguably least, and only measuring their combat potential, as opposed to their notable free, automatic defense and attack upgrades over time - which is possibly the most imbalanced thing about them.

2) The only thing that remotely balances them is the 64 ship limit, or else they would be the only option, full stop. The rate of power increase per unit for the carrier fleets is greater than it is for other ships, given that 1 v 1 they are weakest and after that it's pretty much carriers all the way. I agree with Turkwise that, if we're reliant on a hard cap to keep things balanced, they aren't actually balanced at all. We should both be capable of fielding fleets of 14 carriers and their full fighter compliment, and of defeating such a fleet without needing to resorting to carriers.

3) If the economy were actually balanced as the devs have indicated they would like it to be, carriers would become the only sane choice at an economic level. If we take 5 turns to build a 'good' warship (as Brad stated in one of the wheel threads), then it should take 3 to build a carrier that can stand up to it. And if we need a fleet of 7 of these ships to beat 4 carriers, then we're looking at you needing 35 turns of manufacturing to defeat just 12 turns worth of mine. I will have nearly 2 carrier fleets for every 1 fleet you build. And these separate fleets can operate independently, while your 1 fleet must pick a single target and try to engage it. 

 

We should also remember that this is carriers after they've been nerfed. They used to replenish fighters instantly back in 1.2, and IIRC the fighters even had filler components in 1.1. The fact that testing like this is still coming back with the carriers firmly in the lead is indicative of just how absurdly potent they were previously, when even attrition didn't really affect them. 

 

I'd concur that carrier modules should be roughly doubled in either price or mass (either would do, not both), and that there needs to be a better mechanism for dealing with smaller ships - either multi-ship targeting, or some kind of AOE weapon that can hit several ships at once. This will also help against very large fleets of very small ships, which would become economically viable if bigger ships become as expensive as they ought to be.

 

I was comparing the recovery nature of carriers vs regular ships to suggest that attrition battles will work on carriers and that there is a benefit to building more expensive ships to counter them. I am in no way suggesting that more powerful ships cannot win against carriers, and that you should just throw them at carriers to wear them down. Earlier experiments have already proven that more expensive ships will work, so your concern is misplaced.

 

As for your points....

 

Number 1 is countered by endgame production values. Yes, they are too powerful for their price, but this has a virtual cap. They will lose out against more expensive ships, so this benefit is more apparent mid to late game. As we approach endgame, they lose their cost benefit. I can easily field 15K cost ships in one turn at endgame in more than one ship yard. I only cap my ships around 10-11K intentionally.

 

Nothing to say about number 2, though. The hard cap is their achilles heel. It certainly does not feel right, and I would love to field hundreds of little ships myself via 15 carriers. Yes, it is a bad method of balancing. Yes, if it did not exist, carriers would probably be the way to go every time. Unfortunately, it exists, so it has to be factored into the value of having carriers, at least until the devs do something about it. To be fair this limitation is no different from the fact that ships cannot multi-target regardless of how many modules or how much atk power you have. Mechanics limitations exist. Gotta work with them. It was disappointing to find out, to be honest, but I doubt that the game could handle having hundreds of ships in the battle viewer, though.

 

For point three, I would agree with you, except you seem to did not look over the images I included. The ships used in the second experiment actually cost slightly less than the carrier used. It would be 21 vs 12, not 35 vs 12 turns. Alternatively, you could just build 4 good ships for 20 turns. Nevertheless, time needed to build things only matter when we take into account the actual setting in the galaxy. For example, if you are 500 tiles away from me, I have plenty of time to field expensive ships to deal with any number of carriers that you can build in the same amount of time due to the aforementioned nature of carriers vs regular ships. If you were like 50 tiles away, though, then that would be a problem.

 

As for the actual economy situation, we can only reevaluate the carriers after the changes have been pushed. No point to speculate and guess so early. Chances are, there may just yet be ways the devs may have not noticed. Meh.

Reply #30 from Sins Forums Top

So what you'd really do, under the current situation, is use two carriers, fill out with some dreadnoughts, and crush anyone not doing the same because you're maximizing your 64 ship cap.

Reply #31 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting psychoak, reply 30

So what you'd really do, under the current situation, is use two carriers, fill out with some dreadnoughts, and crush anyone not doing the same because you're maximizing your 64 ship cap.

 

Actually, that would probably be the best use of carriers. Fighters are excellent cannon fodder and swarms. Having a fleet of capital ships escorted by squadrons of fighters seems like basic tactics. I like to use one or two defensive carriers each with heavy defenses and equipped with about 12 fighters to protect the rest of the fleet.

Reply #32 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Nilfiry, reply 29

I was comparing the recovery nature of carriers vs regular ships to suggest that attrition battles will work on carriers and that there is a benefit to building more expensive ships to counter them. I am in no way suggesting that more powerful ships cannot win against carriers, and that you should just throw them at carriers to wear them down. Earlier experiments have already proven that more expensive ships will work, so your concern is misplaced.

 

Earlier experiments haven't. Your earlier experiments had carriers destroying the more expensive ships significantly more often than they themselves were destroyed. Carriers were only killed in under 50% of fights, while their opponents were killed in 75% of cases. So, you're spending twice as long building every ship, and you need to have 50% more of them. In fact, the weaker ships were a better option, since they still lost just as much but at least you'd have produced half-again as many of them and so could push the carriers to the ship cap more effectively.

 

Quoting Nilfiry, reply 29
Number 1 is countered by endgame production values. Yes, they are too powerful for their price, but this has a virtual cap. They will lose out against more expensive ships, so this benefit is more apparent mid to late game. As we approach endgame, they lose their cost benefit. I can easily field 15K cost ships in one turn at endgame in more than one ship yard. I only cap my ships around 10-11K intentionally.

 

This is presently true, but is not supposed to last. Even at end-game, we're not supposed to be churning out fully-decked out huge hulls in 1 turn. That was basically the point of the wheel being removed, for all the good it appears to have done in that regard.



Quoting Nilfiry, reply 29
Nothing to say about number 2, though. The hard cap is their achilles heel. It certainly does not feel right, and I would love to field hundreds of little ships myself via 15 carriers. Yes, it is a bad method of balancing. Yes, if it did not exist, carriers would probably be the way to go every time. Unfortunately, it exists, so it has to be factored into the value of having carriers, at least until the devs do something about it. To be fair this limitation is no different from the fact that ships cannot multi-target regardless of how many modules or how much atk power you have. Mechanics limitations exist. Gotta work with them. It was disappointing to find out, to be honest, but I doubt that the game could handle having hundreds of ships in the battle viewer, though.

 

The engine can handle it. Dunno if many people's computers could, mind :)

 

But yes, the arbitrary hard cap limits the number of carriers per fleet - but does not discourage stacking as many as possible in the manner psychoak indicates. This is really the only weakness they have, though, and will make having at least a couple of carriers forming the core of every fleet pretty much compulsory for competitive multiplay; I'd also suspect that gunship-carrier hybrids would be generally superior to non-hybrids.

 

Quoting Nilfiry, reply 29
For point three, I would agree with you, except you seem to did not look over the images I included. The ships used in the second experiment actually cost slightly less than the carrier used. It would be 21 vs 12, not 35 vs 12 turns. Alternatively, you could just build 4 good ships for 20 turns. Nevertheless, time needed to build things only matter when we take into account the actual setting in the galaxy. For example, if you are 500 tiles away from me, I have plenty of time to field expensive ships to deal with any number of carriers that you can build in the same amount of time due to the aforementioned nature of carriers vs regular ships. If you were like 50 tiles away, though, then that would be a problem.

 

Distance is irrelevant in a comparison of war potential tbh, as the same thing goes either way and the carrier player could just produce twice as many ships as his opponent in any given period - distance just means more waves of carriers in the air at once. It takes longer, but the result remains the same, 2X vs X. Industry wins wars, not ships.

 

Whichever way we cut it, the statistics keep coming back to carriers being about twice as powerful as other ship types.

Reply #33 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting naselus, reply 32


Quoting Nilfiry,
reply 29

I was comparing the recovery nature of carriers vs regular ships to suggest that attrition battles will work on carriers and that there is a benefit to building more expensive ships to counter them. I am in no way suggesting that more powerful ships cannot win against carriers, and that you should just throw them at carriers to wear them down. Earlier experiments have already proven that more expensive ships will work, so your concern is misplaced.



 

Earlier experiments haven't. Your earlier experiments had carriers destroying the more expensive ships significantly more often than they themselves were destroyed. Carriers were only killed in under 50% of fights, while their opponents were killed in 75% of cases. So, you're spending twice as long building every ship, and you need to have 50% more of them. In fact, the weaker ships were a better option, since they still lost just as much but at least you'd have produced half-again as many of them and so could push the carriers to the ship cap more effectively.

 

The percentages are misleading because I was trying various styles of ships to see the result. I could have used one ship style, and that would have swung the ratios differently. I do not think it would be fair to use the previous experiments as a bases for percentage of success against carriers. It is true that ship styles are affected by compatibility, however. For example, a ship maining kinetic weapons will probably never beat a missile ship due to the range advantage. By the time a kinetic ship reaches a missile ship, the kinetic would have probably suffered heavy damage. Additionally, those ships were not exactly optimized for dealing with carriers either. The second experiment showed slightly more optimized ships, and they won or tied every time under 1v1 conditions.

 

Quoting naselus, reply 32

Distance is irrelevant in a comparison of war potential tbh, as the same thing goes either way and the carrier player could just produce twice as many ships as his opponent in any given period - distance just means more waves of carriers in the air at once. It takes longer, but the result remains the same, 2X vs X. Industry wins wars, not ships.


Whichever way we cut it, the statistics keep coming back to carriers being about twice as powerful as other ship types.

Like I explained, the number of ships does not matter if they cannot destroy the opposing fleet. Why else can I use one fleet of four ships to destroy the thousand-ship army of the Godlike AI's? Industry wins, but only the industry that can produce the biggest, baddest ships. 

 

Also, I would like to amend your statement: carrier fleets being about twice as powerful as other ship fleets of equal cost.

No lie about that because in battle, a 4-5K ship will turn into about 10K if you pay attention to the value in the battle viewer. Although, once you go higher than that, the carriers do lose their advantage.