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[DatonKallandor]

This easily translate into an elite fighter/bomber squadron supported by a swarm of sparks and/or various drones, it wouldn't discourage carrier only fleets.

No I mean literally have the bonus not apply to or count any flight decks with drones in them. That way the ships with built-ins that are underperforming (venture) or logistics (sheperd) don't drag down the bonus and become (even more) undesireable and ships with built-in's that are already good don't get another bonus (tempest) and as a side effect you also stop what is already the best spammable fighter wing in the game (spark) from being even better.

It's not about stopping carrier-only fleets, because why would you - it's a legitimate play style. It's about stopping carrier-only from being much better than everything else. And also from being much worse than everything else. I think that's the whole point of scaling bonuses - it makes low-flight deck count fleets better by giving them a bigger bonus, still gives high flight deck fleets a smaller bonus (and because they have many flight decks even a small bonus is still going to be good) and no-flight-deck fleets can just not get the skill if they don't need it.

[Morrokain]

I'd be okay with it being somewhat flavor based and just say any drones don't count. That happens to fix all of the vanilla issues (Venture, Shepherd, Tempest) and also is a nice kick in the teeth for the overperforming Sparks.

This easily translate into an elite fighter/bomber squadron supported by a swarm of sparks and/or various drones, it wouldn't discourage carrier only fleets.

I don't think 50% replacement rate makes the fighter/bomber squadron elite, exactly, but even a 10% bonus to sparks is good because they perform far better individually than any other fighter. Having them not get any bonus and encouraging uses of other types of fighters though them getting the bonus is a pretty reasonable trade-off, imo.

At least as far as my initial thoughts go. Nothing seems to be an outright problem by going that route, anyway.

[TaLaR]

+50% fighter replacement rate is a lot. Having a single ship exceed the limit actually feels fine to me, even good - I think it would really help sell the scale of that ship. (I.E. "wow, the Astral is such a big ship, it can't even get the full bonus", etc.) Anyway, if it ended up with, say, +30% or whatever, that's... still huge.

Also, having 'backup' ships in your fleet for a potential second fight counts against you as well.

(That's super intentional, btw.)

So, you get 3 bays worth of extra fighter replenishment as long as:
- you bring at least 6 bays total.
- avoid logistic ships and ones with built-in wings, as they would ruin the bonus by just being in fleet. Shepherd and Venture are obviously out. Buffing Tempest's replenishment is not as bad per se, but it has much shorter PPT than carriers... So it still spends more time de-buffing carriers from reserve bench than being useful.
- always deploy all carriers present in fleet (or none at all for easy fights). Player is allowed to have reserve direct combat ships, but not carriers. Weird. Then again, having only 10 officers to around primary deployment and reserves is already quite limiting, so I never have more than 1 or 2 reserve AI ships anyway.

[wei270]

Perhaps not all balance should be forced on combat performance, but also long term economic balance, in this aspect i find it interesting that while condor has the cheaper deployment cost, cr recover cost( which is the bulk of the bills), and maintenance cost, it is the drover that has the better cargo and fuel capacity.

so as an economic balance the two is also very interesting.

[Hiruma Kai]

Well, to be fair, we don't know how the other skills scale as well.  Or at least, I don't if there's been further details put somewhere.  If the skill opposite the Carrier group provides a similar CR bonus that gets split across ships (i.e. +15% CR up to 10 ships, then scaling down to +5% Cr at 30), then there is also a penalty to having reserve direct combat ships (or really, any reserve ships).  I'd need to see the all the skills before being able to make a statement about where this skill fits in.

I guess the question is, how does it stack up against say, a single ship skill from the combat tree.  In the current skill trees, the fleet wide skills all scale with the size of your fleet, while the combat skills do not.  If you want optimal power at end game, you prioritize the fleet wide bonuses from leadership and tech.  Currently, unless you're limited by cash for some reason, it is always better to have more and bigger ships in your fleet.  From an optimization view point, a +15% replacement bonus from Fighter Doctrine on a large fleet size likely beats out any single Combat skill.  Especially if its 20 fighter bays.  At 8 bays, this skill is the same as Fighter Doctrine 3 and Carrier Command 3 (a personal skill!) right now.  At 20 Bays its equivalent to the fleet wide Fighter Doctrine 3 by itself.

To be honest, +15% on 20 bays (equivalent to 10 Drovers) seems good.  More than that in your fleet, I'm kind okay with weakening it versus the current setup given how dominant fighter spamming is and the way it scales non-linearly.  Recovery also scales non-linearly.  If you have enough fighters in your wings, your recovery goes up.  If you build ships faster, you spend more time recovering replacement rate, which leads to fighters coming out faster.  There's some feedback there.

I agree it probably does lead to some unintended decision making, dumping non-combat ships with drones that never get deployed.  On the other hand, early game when you fail to escape a pirate fleet with your small exploration fleet, you'll want that bonus applying to any ships you have, to get as much of as an edge as you can get.  It'd be weird early game taking that skill, and then not having it help your shepherds which happen to be your only fighter ships at the time.  Having to stick hull mods which modify skill behavior strikes me as inelegant and non-intuitive.

Its not clear to me what is the right way to go in this situation without testing and without knowledge of all the other skill effects.

[SCC]

Drover has to be just 10% better for it to be more cost-efficient than Condor, when looking at maintenance and salaries.

cr recover cost( which is the bulk of the bills)

Due to Condor using 10% CR per deployment and 10 supplies to recover and Drover using 15% CR per deployment and 12 supplies per deployment, it takes 70 supplies to recover from 0% to 70% for Condor, but only 56 supplies for Drover. If you run out of PPT, Condor becomes more expensive per deployment after it loses 10% of CR. It's possible to get more PPT out of Condors than out of Drovers, though, by retreating and redeploying to renew PPT.
The way CR drain works is a bit counter intuitive and obscure, I hope Alex will do something with it.

[Yunru]

One thing I'm curious about is thus:
Condor vs Gemini.

[Hiruma Kai]

Drover has to be just 10% better for it to be more cost-efficient than Condor, when looking at maintenance and salaries.

cr recover cost( which is the bulk of the bills)

Due to Condor using 10% CR per deployment and 10 supplies to recover and Drover using 15% CR per deployment and 12 supplies per deployment, it takes 70 supplies to recover from 0% to 70% for Condor, but only 56 supplies for Drover. If you run out of PPT, Condor becomes more expensive per deployment after it loses 10% of CR. It's possible to get more PPT out of Condors than out of Drovers, though, by retreating and redeploying to renew PPT.
The way CR drain works is a bit counter intuitive and obscure, I hope Alex will do something with it.

But how often does that happen?  From a credit point of view, running down your fleet to 0% is a terrible idea.  If you are concerned about credits as a balancing point, you would never consider that situation, as its going to be 5-10 times worse than retreating and engaging with a fresh PPT timer.  There's also the flip side of that CR stat.  Condors are only at 50% CR on their 3rd deployment, and 40% CR on their 4th.  A Drover is 40% on their 3rd, and 25% on their 4th.

In a multi-fight situation where you're running out of PPT on your destroyers multiple times in a few days, the Condors are 20% cheaper in terms of supplies, and on the 3rd and 4th deployments at significantly higher CR.

I suppose it is non-intuitive that letting ships with better CR costs per deployment (i.e. 10% versus 15 or 20%) are actually cheaper to restore from a fully broken state.  From a deployment perspective though, if you've been deploying and retreating, a 0% CR implies you've deployed the Condor 7 times and the Drover only 5 times.  I don't see a good way to avoid that with the mechanic.

Or are you saying that enemy Condors are more expensive than Drovers to recover in terms of supplies?  That is certainly true, but in that case, we perhaps should be comparing D-mod performance of Condors and Drovers?  Certainly a 4 d-mod Condor or Drover is going to be much cheaper to run (2 or 2.4 supplies per deployment) if credits are a concern.  800 credits or 960 credits difference per deployment compared to their pristine versions.  Given their monthly running costs are something like 2300 or 2500 credits (ignoring crew losses), assuming 2 fights per month, thats cutting your running expenses by like 38% or so.

Actually, here's a semi-related question.  When hyperspace storms deal damage and reduce CR, is it proportional to the CR per deployment (i.e. a 10% CR per deployment ship takes half the CR hit from a storm that a 20% CR per deployment ship) or is it some kind of flat supply value or what?

Credit balance also needs to consider the initial cost difference.  A Black market Condor costs 43,400 credits.  A Black market Drover costs 66,400 credits.  That is a 23,000 credit difference.  Throw on some moderately expensive fighters (i.e. ~10,000 per fighter), some crew (~3000), and maybe some PD guns (~500), and now its more like 67,000 versus 90,000.  Say you've got a 400k budget, having just come back from some bounties, and you want to add some fighter wings.  You could get 4 Drovers and 400 supplies.  Or you could get 5 Condors and 650 supplies.  Assuming you can find that many of each in the markets.

One thing I'm curious about is thus:
Condor vs Gemini.

Given the way fighters scale, Condor is going to outdo Gemini significantly simply because 2 fighter bays versus 1 at 10 DP versus 9 DP.  However, if you're considering it from a purely trader perspective and getting the most cargo space while having significant protection, that is a different question.

[Alex]

Well, to be fair, we don't know how the other skills scale as well.  Or at least, I don't if there's been further details put somewhere.  If the skill opposite the Carrier group provides a similar CR bonus that gets split across ships (i.e. +15% CR up to 10 ships, then scaling down to +5% Cr at 30), then there is also a penalty to having reserve direct combat ships (or really, any reserve ships).  I'd need to see the all the skills before being able to make a statement about where this skill fits in.

(Yep, skills that affect specific kinds of ships generally scale based on what they affect. Bays for carrier skills, other things for other skills...)

[Thaago]

I've been playing around with Gemini's recently: with a fighter wing that benefits well from RD, they are good for a 'cargo ship that can help in combat'. Similar to bringing along a Mule, only fighters/missile support instead of guns.

[Alex]

Actually, here's a semi-related question.  When hyperspace storms deal damage and reduce CR, is it proportional to the CR per deployment (i.e. a 10% CR per deployment ship takes half the CR hit from a storm that a 20% CR per deployment ship) or is it some kind of flat supply value or what?

IIRC, it's based on a target supply value worth of damage it wants to deal, though it won't always be able to do that, depending on the ship that's picked.

Deliberate exclusions from counting towards and bonuses through a zero OP hullmod.

I agree it probably does lead to some unintended decision making, dumping non-combat ships with drones that never get deployed.  On the other hand, early game when you fail to escape a pirate fleet with your small exploration fleet, you'll want that bonus applying to any ships you have, to get as much of as an edge as you can get.  It'd be weird early game taking that skill, and then not having it help your shepherds which happen to be your only fighter ships at the time.  Having to stick hull mods which modify skill behavior strikes me as inelegant and non-intuitive.

Its not clear to me what is the right way to go in this situation without testing and without knowledge of all the other skill effects.

After a bit of thinking about it: yeah, a zero OP hullmod doesn't feel too elegant. That's not something I'd want to do unless it was completely unavoidable for some reason.

On the other hand, a hullmod that costs a bit of OP, removes built-in fighter bays, and gives a bonus to cargo capacity/reduces crew requirements per bay removed? That feels much cleaner. And if one of the carrier skills also unlocks it, for convenience... yeah, I think that'll work well. (Fake edit: for clarity, it only works on ships that *only* have built-in wings. Otherwise, it gets weird with needing to track LPC chips so they don't get eaten, just, no. Also, it's named "Converted Fighter Bays".)

As always, just want to say thank you to everyone for the feedback and discussion It's not a stretch to say that without the feedback here, I probably wouldn't have ended up implementing the hullmod idea, and things feel *so* much better with that in place.

[SonnaBanana]

On ships without built-in fighters, allow the CFB if no LPC's are slotted. Let us demilitarize our Geminis, please.