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[Pwest]

I'm having an issue in the late game, the battles have become a bit, stale. I'm thinking it has something to do with fleet composition - 90% of my battles have become large blobs of capitals hitting each other, forming a line and the side with more capitals slowly picking off the other side.

Fleets with more diverse compositions just don't have the same hitting power as a fleet with a large number of capitals and few small ships - meaning there's a pretty big disincentive not to play them, which is unfortunate - I think having diverse fleets makes the combat more fun.

I just had two quick ideas on something that would (hopeful) be relatively easy to implement. I think it's important to focus on using overall fleet composition to fix the issue, avoiding re-balancing ships themselves to de-prioritize capitals, as I think the actual combat balance is in a good spot overall:

• Buffs/Debuffs based on fleet composition - as one potential example, if you don't have enough small craft in the fleet, the larger craft may have reduced point-defense capability, and take increased damage from small / medium weapons. The rationale being that without small craft to harass the enemy small craft, they are more effective in taking on capitals. The more buffs/debuffs added like this, the more diverse fleets we could see - i.e. fleets with very few energy/projectile weapons relative to missiles see large buffs to missile range - "coordinated fire" you just better hope you don't run out of ammo!
• Fleet Limits - If the above change is made, it may make sense to limit total fleet size by some combination of ordinance points & # of ships.

This next part may be unpopular, so I wanted to call it out separate from the above. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing a reduction in the number of number of ships in a fleet across the board. Once i get above a dozen combat ships or so, in addition to getting harder to manage, each individual ship feels less, "powerful" or "unique" in combat. Additionally, this happens, in my opinion,  very early in the game. By mid-game, getting ships is trivial, and once you've amassed a few capitals, you can be pretty hard to stop on the battlefield against 95% of threats (stopped logistically is another question!). I also think the 3-4 ship battles are the most difficult, fun, and intense - a bad overload will lose you the battle instead of just one ship. It's a shame these kind of fights disappear so quickly in the game.

I Would love to see an option to drastically reduce fleet sizes, make capital ships truly rare behemoths of the battlefield, and increase ship costs / economic factors appropriately. I'm thinking:

• early game is played with 1-3 frigates
• mid game 2-4 frigates, 1 destroyer, 0-1 cruiser
• Late game 3-5 frigates, 2 destroyers, 1-2 cruiser, 1 Capita
• "Super Fleet" 6-7 frigates, 4-5 destroyers, 3 cruiser, 2 Capitals

.

Additionally, if scaling down overall fleet size, size of the battlemap should probably be looked at.

I think this would serve to make ships feel more meaningful, customization more powerful, as well as diversify battles a bit - you'll be fighting individual ships and less lines of artillery slugging it out.

I do recognize reducing total fleet size would be a large change to add to the (already pretty balanced / stable) game and difficult to implement & keep balanced as an optional feature. I don't think it's as feasible as the first point I called out around buffs/debuffs so I wanted to separate them out a bit. I think they both would work together to fix the issue of cap-heavy fleet composition, but one is definitely more feasible than the other.

[Alex]

Just want to say that we're roughly on the same page! Or at least in the same chapter

If you look at the blog post about the upcoming skill changes, I think it'll help a lot with that - there are both higher specialization bonuses, and higher bonuses for smaller fleets. In addition, I'm also doing some things to scale down enemy fleets, so it's not so much a "wall of capital ships" in the endgame as it can be now.

[Pwest]

Awesome, that all looks fantastic. I'm doing a new game now, seeing how far I can make it using destroyers & below, looking forward to doing a similar play through when those changes go live!

[Plantissue]

In the age of battleships, despite the massive amounts of escort ships, battles were lines of capital ships, with cruisers and smaller considered suicidal for actual combat. Ironically, people seem to have the ahistorical concept of this pyramid of successively more ships per smaller for whatever reason.