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[intrinsic_parity]

Preface:
I decided to make a new thread to avoid excessive derailment of this thread: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=19094.0
I'll just summarize the discussion as well as I can rather than quoting everything because there is a bit too much to quote.

Basically, there was the claim that after the recent carrier rework (version 0.8 I think), carriers are less fun to fly because they can't brawl as effectively/can't equip enough weapons to brawl without sacrificing fighter power, and so the carrier mechanics should be reverted to improve the carrier piloting experience. (Megas, please correct me if I am misrepresenting your opinion and I will edit this). I also brought up the point that skills were different pre 0.8 and they allowed for a lot more combat power on all player controlled ships making the player experience of piloting carriers quite different, regardless of the carrier changes.

I agree that carriers are not particularly fun to control personally at the moment, but I think that it should be corrected by improving the experience of controlling carriers/fighters, rather than just getting rid of the interesting tactical and strategic implications of the new fighter mechanics and revering to the old 'fighters as weak frigates and carriers as weak warships' system. I think it's ok if carriers are more suited to AI control/a bit less mechanically demanding to fly, as long as there are engaging things to do while piloting them (this doesn't have to be brawling necessarily).

If the fun part of piloting carriers is just brawling, then carriers will always be less fun to pilot than warships (they have to be weaker to be balanced since they provide additional utility), and people who enjoy brawling will never fly them. Making them marginally better at brawling will not make them viable playerships without making them unbalanced. Imo, carrier piloting should focus on the fighters rather than the ship (i.e. commander focused role rather than pilot). There should be more things to do to occupy the pilots attention IMO. The astral demonstrates that having more actions to take improves the piloting experience. It's more interesting to pilot the astral than other carriers because you are managing the ship system cool down. I think if fighters really are meant to represent a large portion of the ships capability, they should occupy a large portion of the pilots attention as well. Some suggestions and ideas:

- letting the player separately target their weapons/fighters
- more orders involving fighters:
      - fighter escorts on friendly ships (this might be possible already)
      - order fighter intercepts on enemy bombers/fighters
      - order fighters to control space
      - coordinated strikes between different carriers (maybe rolled up in the existing way point commands)
- carriers given some form of CP buff as flagship (like built in operations center or something) allowing the player to take a more commander focused role while piloting
- Additional interactions with the replacement mechanics:
      - active abilities (toggle able or cool downs) to buff fighter damage/speed/range at the cost of replacement rate
      - spend flux to increase replacement rate temporarily
      - immediate fighter replacement at the cost of a large amount of replacement rate
      - retract all fighters (with a significant deployment time) to recover replacement rate faster

I realize that these suggestions range from simple things that fit within existing mechanics to entirely new mechanics requiring new AI, but I'm just trying to get some discussion going about ways to make piloting carriers more engaging within the existing carrier system (that I think adds a lot to the combat overall).

[Morrokain]

Thanks for separating out the threads! 

Putting my response here:

@ Morrokain:
The point of me piloting a carrier that can brawl is it can smash stuff personally when either there is an opportunity (either big guy is distracted or your carrier is the big guy).  Not unlike piloting Legion or any warship with Converted Hangar.  Basically, I want my flagship carrier to be The Battlestar (trope).  Today, only Legion can do this.  Before v0.8, anything with flight decks except Condor worked.

Given the way fighters worked before, it was useful for the carrier to be near or at the front lines, to minimize flight time to and from the carrier.

Piloting a carrier before v0.8 was more fun because I could brawl one thing while fighters attack something else (or pile on my target if it is a strong one).  Today, aside from Legion, if I use fighters, my ship is unarmed and I need to run for dear life like Spathi.  If I use guns and pods, then my carrier is mediocre at both guns and fighters and I am better off with a real warship.  With Legion today, I can brawl big stuff while fighters seek-and-destroy the cowardly AI that outruns my ship.  All carriers should be like Legion, or able to be the battlestar, which they were before v0.8a, except for Condor.

As for fighter-as-ships being a step back, I would disagree.  If anything, doing so is taking steps forward after several steps were taken back since v0.8a.  Carriers are less fun to pilot today because I cannot arm them up and brawl without destroying the point of using a carrier.  In other words, unable to be a battlestar.  Also, taking carrier skills (which is important) means my flagship is locked to Drover, Mora, Heron, and Astral for the whole game - yuck.

P.S.  I forgot to mention that without high Leadership, I had no fleet!  (That required Leadership/Fleet Logistics, which I did not touch until after level 40, well after endgame.  Combat and Technology were much more fun.)  If I wanted a carrier and some fighters, that was my entire fleet, or most of it!

Oh don't get me wrong, I am certainly for a battlecarrier style being viable. I love the idea of a battlestar or star destroyer being viable within the carrier role in Starsector.

Details:

Spoiler

It's not that all carriers can do this and dedicated carriers don't exist but more that weapon mounts are being utilized either for PD, light threat deterrence, brawling or some mix and match in between depending upon what is required by that point in the game and the supporting fleet composition. The intent of the current system is to provide these kinds of meaningful choices when making a build. The oversight of this system is that it values wings and weapons the same - when a carrier always wants more/better wings as opposed to weapons - at least in most situations. Even then, fringe situations to the contrary certainly exist in a large scale battle.

By using the same resource it is certainly possible to obtain this kind of balance, but it is admittedly a seriously complex balance equation that can be somewhat simplified by separate resource pools (and therefore separate balancing mechanisms) that can limit - in a good way- the types of builds that are possible on individual carriers so that the balance equation doesn't always focus upon the optimal more/better wings strategy - which for carriers with less mounts/flux stats are the obvious strength and necessity when making a build. Combat range of the carriers is a separate consideration. Even in the old system, having carriers close to combat wasn't necessarily optimal unless they could defend themselves. It could easily backfire.

To have closer - more battlecarrier-like carriers all you would have to do in the current system, for instance, is reduce each wing's engagement range. Same effect - no system revert.

[close]

TLDR: My point is that such a thing can be accomplished without losing the additional benefits of controlling wings manually while flying a carrier and retaining the ability to link wings to individual carriers (which is very important because it creates tactical considerations that are otherwise diluted). So in that sense, reverting is a step backwards and not forwards.

[rokenx2]

i honestly like the current system (though i wish improvised fighter bay was a flat cost across the board and not a creeping higher cost making it overly expensive to add to a capital ship)

my biggest issue with carriers is as i stated in the earlier thread that theirs only a few really good fighters and a ton of sub par fighters that i only use to experiment or for the cool factor than actual usefulness .... what about.... balancing a lot of the fighter wings and making the size of the wings a bit more dependent on the size of the ship or making a slider allowing more OP to be spent on a wing to add more fighters in said wing (within reason) i think this could be neat i suppose id like to see fighters across the board be weaker but more plentiful myself personally i think fighters add a cool... chaotic fast pace to the battles that are quite fun

[Gothars]

It might be interesting if you could aim your flight decks like a weapon, to dynamically set a rally point relative to your ship. You aim somwhere, your fighters gather there. Then "firing" the flight decks makes you fighters engage your current target from that rally point.
That way you could hit enemy weak spots very precisely with bombers, or assault enemy bomber rally points with interceptors.

[Megas]

@ intrinsic_parity: You get the general idea.

It is true that skills were much stronger before v0.8.  I think that level of power is either better or more fun than today, or at least better suited for arcade-like shmup play.  (Combat today is sluggish without doubling combat game speed.)  If ships and weapons were not so hard to replace back then, I would have preferred the higher power level - and AI aggressiveness (no cowardly AI that wants to stall all day) - of those previous releases.  With those skills, ships generally had enough OP to fill all mounts, and they could support high-end weapons.  Also, min-maxing dissipation was not so critical when the boosted base stats were higher and venting may have been faster.  Plus, the playership had the vent spam exploit, which made several high-powered loadouts possible.

Currently, fighters are simply an automated homing LRM system that does not need the fire button pushed to be used.  Current fighters are too similar to missiles, except they regenerate and missiles generally do not.  Player cannot order fighters directly to capture points or rally.  Instead, they either seek-and-destroy or hover around the mothership like Gradius "options".

As for improving controlling experience, let player order fighters like he used to, like capture points.  Maybe let fighters roam anywhere, except the escort ones (pods and Xyphos).  We have less control over fighters than before too, and fleet composition can affect AI default use of fighters.  It is annoying that if I use one warship and the rest carriers, most fighters buzz around my flagship unless I waste a ton of CP ordering strikes.  If I use a carrier instead for the full carrier fleet, the fighters seem to seek-and-destroy targets of opportunity on their own.

I had no problem with fighters being weak frigates, at least during that time because of ship rarity.  Fighters were disposable (because they could not be killed permanently if a carrier was in the fleet), while every thing else not found in Open Market was rare.  Also, fighters had unlimited PPT.  Frigates had PPT, but almost everything else did not... at first.  Fighters were weak without skills, but before 0.7a most other ships did not get skills, only minor powerups from the player's fleetwide skills.  Only when after officers came did the power difference from skills became too great for unskilled fighters and, by extension, carriers to keep up.

Brawling alone is not all that I want on carriers.  Part of the reason to use carriers is more efficient action economy.  I may want my carrier to brawl one target while fighters deal with another distant target (especially an enemy faster than my carrier) or do some other order like escort another ship.  Or... my AI carrier gets rushed by two enemy frigates or one Enforcer while the fighters are busy elsewhere (like intercepting enemy fighters) and needs to defend itself without getting carved up like an undefended Buffalo or Atlas would.  Basically, carriers doing what Battlestar Galactica would do in a fight against Cylons.

Currently, all fighters and no guns means that if an enemy, no matter how small, reaches the carrier, I need to move the carrier now or it dies.  Also, if I pilot such a carrier, I am practically sitting twiddling my thumbs waiting (or running away from everything) until the ticking time bomb missiles, er... fighters kill everything.  On the other hand, if I get guns instead of good fighters, then my fighters are weaker and can no longer kill everything, defeating the point of the carrier.

[Morrokain]

It might be interesting if you could aim your flight decks like a weapon, to dynamically set a rally point relative to your ship. You aim somwhere, your fighters gather there. Then "firing" the flight decks makes you fighters engage your current target from that rally point.
That way you could hit enemy weak spots very precisely with bombers, or assault enemy bomber rally points with interceptors.

I like the overall idea. I think carriers will be more fun to fly if they have some additional nuances like those. Thinking along those lines:

As far as the tactical map, maybe the waypoint system could accommodate this as well somehow for AI carriers?

Spitball example: Set a waypoint, then assign the waypoint as either "Interceptor/Bomber Rally Point" (so two options - Fighters are assigned to bomber rally points because 3 options seems a little too excessive/confusing?) then assign carriers to the waypoint and they will send their wings there.

Then a general Strike Order without those carriers assigned will cause any carriers assigned to Bomber waypoints to send their wings against that target (and any other targets with that order assigned) and rally reinforcements through their waypoints?

It sort of creates an ability to set up a bomber "ambush" from all sides - albeit it at the cost of a lot of CP. I don't think having extra things to use CP on is a bad thing though as it isn't strictly necessary. Just an option.

[FooF]

Just a thought:

Piloting carriers is "dull" because there's not enough to do, IMO. The carrier itself hangs back, fighters do their thing and you stay out of trouble. Playing as a carrier should be a fundamentally different experience than playing as a warship.

I think there simply needs to be more choices than "Engage" and "Regroup." Back in the Freespace 2 days, you could tell your allied wings to "Disable Engines" or "Disable Comms" etc. Sometimes you just had a "Destroy" order or more importantly "Protect Target." There were only a few choices but they gave you a little granularity when it came to using the AI to do things.

Where it would become a unique experience is some kind of "Carrier Command" hullmod that gives the player the ability to control all carriers' fighters. To the degree that you don't want the player playing from the tactical map and issuing orders at all times, all carriers in the battlespace would be on numerical hotkeys and have the commands likewise hotkeyed. In addition, "All Carriers" could be hotkeyed. So a few button presses does what you need to do. The goal here is to not make this a UI nightmare, though some UI elements (namely the carriers in question) would have to be displayed unobtrusively down the left or right side of the screen. Perhaps issuing flight orders would have a small cooldown so you can't spam them.

[SafariJohn]

There are actually 4 command choices for fighters: Regroup, Engage (target enemy), Protect (target ally), and Free Roam (no target).

The problem IMO is with targeting. If you change targets, like to check how an enemy is doing, your fighters instantly redirect to your new target. Screws with bomber runs and makes Protect and Free Roam pretty useless in practice.

I would like fighters to stay on their given mission until ordered to regroup. If their Engage/Protect target dies they should switch to Free Roam.

[Histidine]

Carrier combat is boring in part because fighters are much less responsive than guns/missiles. Guns fire the moment you click on the target or almost immediately after, whereas fighters can take a few seconds just to line up for their run.

Half-baked idea I had for RTS-like ship controls to give the player more control when piloting a carrier:

• Since fighters are pseudo-weapons, they should have their own weapon groups.
• It should be possible to select multiple fighter weapon groups (and normal weapon groups, really, but that's off topic right now) at once.
• When the currently selected weapon group(s) include fighters, clicking on an enemy ship orders the selected fighters to engage that target. Click on friendly ship to escort it. Click on empty space to fighter sweep in that direction, with each wing engaging targets at its discretion. Click on self or press Z to recall.
  
  • This allows a single carrier to engage or cover multiple targets at once, and while also targeting a different thing for its own weapons.
• Zero-flux boost is lost if any wings have an order that isn't recall/protect self.
  

There's also a limitation in commanding carriers/fighters (not that it was any better with the old carrier model) in that ships can't have multiple/queued commands at once. e.g. you can't tell a carrier "fighter strike this target, while moving to this flanking position". You also can't issue a "fighter cover" order on a friendly ship or a point in space.

[Morrokain]

Random thought:

AI tactics aside, one of the themes that has come up in this thread is how to make personally flying a carrier more dynamic or interesting. Therefore, speaking in regards to Megas' comment on capturing points again, what if only the player could capture points using his/her wings? It would be a distinct benefit of flying a carrier personally and also make flagship carrier builds have more considerations to make in the sense that they would have more potential target archetypes to deal with when assaulting a capture point as opposed to a standard warship strike.

I have no idea how possible this would be to implement from a technical standpoint, though, considering the current system is obscured. In that regard, it could or could not be worth it depending upon a lot of unknown variables.

Just throwing the idea out into the pot! Good discussion overall.

[Megas]

Carriers are not bad because I cannot push buttons to use fighters.  In anything, powers that are passive or not requiring button pushing to use is a plus.  (Many think no button pushing or passive is boring.)  What I dislike like is 1) fighters behaving more like missiles than fighters and 2) no weapons on carriers means I must run away from battle while fighters do things.  All fighters do is seek-and-destroy (or hover around the mothership if they cannot roam).

Right now, carrier is like that ship in a shmup with a long-range homing missile power-up that happens to have the fire button glued down for constant firing.

[Schwartz]

Carrier combat in the older version had the advantage that you could use the tactical map to command fighters. We are stuck with the ship targeting mode, which seems like an odd marriage. It is used for autofiring weapons, but for fighters it becomes awkward. Why target a friendly to set fighters to protect it? This makes your autofiring guns unable to prioritize enemies. Why make the autofiring target *always* the fighter target? Maybe you just want to flux-lock the big bad cruiser in front of you while fighters/bombers take out a Drover off screen. Yes, I know you can target Drover and still do it. But assume your carrier is surrounded while you do this. Priority targets are important.

It's a heavy limit on gameplay. But it ties into current fighter mechanics of being quick & nimble / massive swarms / disposable. I feel if we dialed down on those attributes, fighters could get their classic orders back and it would be a big improvement all around. Some middle ground between the new and the old system.

Also, you could add to the OP the idea that carriers get (more or less) separate pools for fighter and carrier loadouts.

[Megas]

Carrier combat in the older version had the advantage that you could use the tactical map to command fighters. We are stuck with the ship targeting mode, which seems like an odd marriage. It is used for autofiring weapons, but for fighters it becomes awkward. Why target a friendly to set fighters to protect it? This makes your autofiring guns unable to prioritize enemies. Why make the autofiring target *always* the fighter target? Maybe you just want to flux-lock the big bad cruiser in front of you while fighters/bombers take out a Drover off screen. Yes, I know you can target Drover and still do it. But assume your carrier is surrounded while you do this. Priority targets are important.

YES!  Targeting my ally for fighter escort is a non-option.