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General Discussion / Re: How do we make small ships useful?
« on: September 11, 2020, 10:16:44 AM »Third solution: make Frigates even more disposable with a soft-cap on total fleet size that treats them as considerably-cheaper resources, so that players and AI fleets can just have a heck of a lot more of them. This kind of fits with the "garbage ball" fleet concept and with the feel of the Starsector universe; a capital ship should feel really big, bad and ugly, but fleets should not be composed of multiple capital ships, but should mainly be little stuff. The AI already does this a lot more than it actually should, but it'd be nice if players had to do the same. There are various ways to approach this; one of them is to simply make paying for Frigates much much cheaper per month vs. heavier stuff, another would be to use the not-yet-seen new mechanics for fleet size, etc.
I've been thinking along these lines too. If a fleet had caps of, say, 10 slots for any ships, 5 for cruiser or smaller, 5 for destroyer or smaller, 10 for frigates only, and 5 more for noncombat (civ-hull salvage, tug, freighter, tanker, or recon), there would be an incentive to keep and use frigates throughout the game, and a lot more fleet variety. Frigates should also cost a bit less to purchase and operate, IMO, considering their squishyness.
Additionally, it would help if you could go over the fleet size limit but anything over the limit would be mothballed, or if you could decommission/abandon ships from the salvage menu, since otherwise you can't recover enemy ships after combat. I like to go into combat with at most 25 ships in case I get lucky with recovering enemy ships... if you have 30, you don't get to recover anything. And at 29, you don't get any selection, just some random ship which is usually a Hound. So to keep my fleet size at or below 25, what do I cut? Frigates. And I don't recover them, either, since that would put me over 25.
The biggest problem with frigates in an unrestricted fleet is PPT since in a big battle, no matter how cheap or powerful you make frigates, they will not last to the end. Thus they either need as much PPT as big boats (which would not make sense in small battles) or they need to not compete for limited fleet space with big boats.
When it comes to ordering frigates around, I installed an "Automatic Orders" mod, because it retreats any ships that are at 10% of their PPT automatically, which I want, because I sometimes (ab)use redeploying. Some would call this cheating (because I don't have to choose between controlling my flagship and paying attention to what's happening on the tactical map), but if I had to either replace dead frigates or remember to retreat them (and spend more time in tactical map so as not to lose the order window), I would just stop using frigates altogether after some point.
I find that very useful as well... in particular, I like to send in a couple of LP Lashers at the beginning and it's annoying to manually retreat them every single battle of any size. Even just finding them is hard since there's no way to select them without searching around the map, and you can doubleclick one to mass-select them, but then you can't retreat them anymore. "Retreat when out of missiles" is also super-useful, particularly for Kites.
I'll try to run it in admin mode and report back, but I'm not sure I'll be able to do so.