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[Camael]

Okay so first of all... whow. Finally. Anyone remembers me posting for two years we need fighters to be a weapon class, not a ship class? Yes? No? I don't care. Finalllllllyyyyyyy.
I love it. Solves so many issues. Finally I can steal those pesky fighters as salvage! Finally no more slowing down a fleet because fighters can't be sped up (and the as many wings as flight decks and they won't count for speed mechanic somehow went to Narnia when I wasn't patching...). Finally not every carrier replacing every wing at will (which was weird. An Astral being able to churn out several types of fighter... okay. But all those mini-carriers, mostly modded, I know, how on earth do they keep parts around for 12 different fighter wings?)

Now there is only one thing I don't understand. I like the idea of a hangar-meter, but it's an additional set of features. Why not just do it via CR? Make every replacement cost a small percentage of CR on the carrier, the more expensive the individual fighter, the more it should cost.
Reason for that: Fighters should remain a finite resource, not just a limited one. Think of the new Battlestations coming up. With only the meter You could sit in Your corner after swiping the mobile defenses and just keep sending wave after wave for a really long time. Even if they only did minimal damage, that would be a major advantage, then combine the final couple of waves with an actual assault of Your big ships just called in.   Also it might make sense in that combination, assuming Stations would have more or less infinite CR, they could be churning out actually endless waves of defensive fighters, unlike a siege fleet. Also, would stations get a hullmod that improves fighter engagement range as well? Given their more or less endless supplies that might make sense (just pour in the good fuel en masse...) not the pirate moonshine...
Also, small carriers could become a real nuisance. They could be made rather fast and maneuverable and piloted well, they'd just wear down direct fire ships of a similar size.
I think CR cost should be a factor, maybe not the only one, but it really would make sense. What is CR? The availability of combat supplies easy to reach during battle, and resistance to the continued strain on the crew and systems. Losing fighters won't make the pilots and flight deck officers go all jubilant, the machines screwing together prefab engines and chassis will eventually take a toll if used at ultra-fast mode continuously and yeah... the parts will run out.
Also this would reflect that those fighters... they cost something. Those parts don't grow on hydroponics-stalks. So CR cost = supply cost later on.

This brings me to my second point. Missiles. Missiles are the weapon of choice for modern warfare... why? Because they are the perfect weapon, end of discussion. Versatile, long range, little to no danger for the user,  - their only drawback is their cost, which is why they are fielded today where there is more than enough money, productivity and resources available to just build them en masse. So I find it funny, lore-wise and gameplay-wise, that carriers are capable of churning out endless amounts of fighters, while all ships, even dedicated missile carriers, are limited to whatever they can stuff into their racks at the start of combat. Some missiles have been revamped to have a low fire rate but infinite ammo, okay, but that ammo seems to just spawn as well. If we are talking hangar-meter, why not missile-meter? Why not CR drain for missiles as well? In combat, they would be awesome as they should be, but You'd have to think about using them a lot... it will drain Your ships CR, which will cost You dearly after combat (more time needed to restock, also supplies are costly...) - and the weakening of the ship during combat could be explained via the abstraction of CR and supplies. So if Your wolf can fire off lots and lots of missiles, probably they ripped out the spa-section to make room for more... missiles. And the crew suffers from it.
I say, endless fighters? Give me endless missiles. And make both drain CR to make them less endless.

Posted here instead of suggestions, as I don't know if I am alone with my opinion or actually missing some points. Always been a bit wobbly on balancing-issues, have a weird playstyle. So....






(edit: after reading several complaints now on here, and as this is related to new features just wanted to also say... darn, I don't care how long it takes. This game is awesome, and it actually is done right. Even the place-holder mechanics are more thought out and balanced than in most other games, so it is allowed to take its time. And meanwhile, it is already a game well worth it's 15 bucks, or 10 when I bought it. It's easy to sink hours and hours and hours into this without getting bored, and it's somehow never frustrating (unless there is a savegame-corrupting crash...). This game has over years been my personal holiday at home and probably prevented more office-massacres than any shrink or prescription ever could have. I would not complain about the current game for that price, much less with the option of it constantly expanding without getting rushed.)

[heskey30]

Well I'm not sure what Alex thought on the matter, but I think the reason fighters should be unlimited and missiles limited is because that's what makes them interesting. Missiles, compared to guns, are very powerful but have limited use. That's what makes them different, and those two things balance each other - take away the limited use and you have to take away the power and then they'd just be a reskin of something else.
Its kind of the same with fighters. They are weak ships that don't really die. If they ran out they'd have to be made stronger and then what would separate them from normal ships? Though there are probably other reasons here - the most interesting thing about fighting carriers is assassinating them before they wear down your fleet. Making the optimal strategy just picking off all the fighters would make things boring.

[Megas]

I would not want fighters drain CR from my carrier.  That is not unlike original Gryphon blowing all of its spells, er... CR spamming missile forge to refill Reapers and nuking everyone very quickly, then be useless until it can be repaired at base.

With carriers mounting fighters like weapons, fighters will be like missiles.  If I want missiles, but get sick of Salamanders and Pilums, Converted Hangar and a wing of fighters might be an alternative for some ships.

[Tartiflette]

[...]Missiles are the weapon of choice for modern warfare.[...]

With the recent progress in CIWS defenses, some tactician are starting to think that missiles might actually be rendered obsolete in a few years. We might see a complete technological loop with the return of WWII style battleships armed with massive railguns; so it is not surprising to me that missiles are not the only "perfect" weapon in the game. (and if Children of a dead Earth taught me anything, it's that in space any missile problem can be solved from afar with a simple application of nuclear blast in close proximity)

But I do get your concern about unlimited fighters when missiles are not. In Scy I had a Cruiser that could either be a carrier producing fighters or a missile boat with a built-in unlimited launcher. I though it made more sense. But I'd rather see limited fighters than unlimited missiles.

[Camael]

I don't want missiles and fighters to be nerfed, rather the opposite. I just think it would be an interesting and more plausible challenge to make the use of missiles and fighters an economic choice, not a tactical choice. So, add supply cost. SS is a single player campaign game. Trade-offs between firepower and budget make sense, that is the entire purpose of CR - to balance high powered but expensive to maintain and use ships against rustbuckets that would probably be able to fly and shoot their autocannons if ignored for six months and using tables and seats from the cantina to weld shut leaks in the hull...

Hm. I would really love to see modern battleships, actually. Always found it a bummer how naval warfare turned out to be hide-and seek with pay to win these days. But I kind of doubt missiles will become obsolete, it will be another arms race I guess (multi-stage, high-speed MIRV with EM-shielded autonomous targeting system is not impossible to develop, try to stop that... at all?). But maybe direct fire weapons will become cost-effective again. Huehue. Then again, with what's going on in the world right now, maybe I don't want to see the next generations of real life weapon development at all. Thermobaric weapons... fokk.)

[borgrel]

@cameal:
read Peter F. Hamilton, all of his sci fi is based on real mathematics (Hawking M.Sink, Thermal Induction Pulse rifles, antimatter battle drones, kinetic warheads, etc) then u'll have a good idea what future weapons could be.

[Serenitis]

I would like all missiles to behave as Piliums currently do; have a set 'maximum' load and a steady rate at which new missiles are loaded and made ready to fire.

The very first thing I do every time I update is go through the tables and add some numbers in the regen column for all the missiles, and the game plays a hell of a lot quicker/smoother when you can just fling missiles about. It is lots more fun because missiles are fun to use, but having them limited essentially removes them from the game as the only vanilla missiles I consider worth
the OP are Pilum and Salamander, and even then that leaves a huge gap for strike roles which are better filled by more guns than something that vanishes after a single use.
(I don't use torpeodes much, as good as they are, because I can't aim for ---t.)
Also, regen missiles actually makes Squall and Locust actually usable. And regen prox. charges go from pointless to priority targets.

Another factor is that now you're facing a constant stream of ordnance, you can no longer wait until the enemy runs out of ammo before attacking properly, and now you're much more reliant on PD to keep you alive long enough to kill whatever is throwing stuff at you.
No more gamey meta ammocount circus (something which has bugged me for ages), you are forced to either engage or run.

I also go through the tables and add regen to all the drones and flare launchers because that's fair. (PD drones should deffo regenerate anyway.)

unpopularopinion.txt

[Gothars]

Now there is only one thing I don't understand. I like the idea of a hangar-meter, but it's an additional set of features. Why not just do it via CR? Make every replacement cost a small percentage of CR on the carrier, the more expensive the individual fighter, the more it should cost.

I asked the same thing, here's Alex' reply:

(Why not use flux instead of a new meter? That’d be nice in theory, but would require fine-grained controls over which fighter wings get replacements, much like weapon autofire can be controlled. This, I think, is too much in terms of control complexity, especially as a carrier still has weapons to manage.)

So, I have to ask: Why is that?

Would it not be sufficient when replacing fighters on "engage" would produce hard flux, while replacing fighters on "regroup" wouldn't? Venting might toggle and lock "regroup" for a time. And a higher hard flux level would then reduce replacement speed.  
While it would of course be tactically advantageous (if too stressful) to be able to control individual wings, the same is also true for the current system. And if that control is not necessary for "replacement rate", why would it be for flux?

My thinking is that flux is a highly-developed mechanic that's being interacted with in detailed ways by the player, so there's an expectation that anything that generates flux is under their control. Just an on/off toggle for all fighters would - I think - feel like it's not going to the same level of detail as all the other player-flux interactions are.

Then, there's a question of how you would balance it. The Condor's flux stats are abysmal. The Mora is a combat carrier, so its flux stats are alright, but it also needs to fire guns. The Odyssey would probably not even notice the drain from its one fighter deck. You could do some fancy calculations like a fighter bay consumes X% of the dissipation rate divided by a "base" number of bays for the ship class (so, the Odyssey's bay would consume less percentage-wise than the Gemini's) but that's quite the hidden mechanic. It would have to be explained, the numbers displayed somewhere, and it wouldn't really make much sense that the same fighter wing on a Condor takes less flux than on an Astral, say.

Basically, I'm not at all sure how it could get balanced without turning very complicated, turning some ships into flux monsters, and/or ruining the "combined arms" nature of other ships.

The advantage of using hard flux (besides not introducing a new stat) would be that a carrier could be slowed in it's fighter production just by shooting at it's shields. I feel that is a mechanic that might be needed to allow ships that are not equipped for anti-fighter combat to help against fighter heavy fleets, without the need to be able to outright disable a carrier.

The hard flux level could still be made a limiter on the replacement rate, if that proved necessary. That'd really mess up combat carriers, though.

[Wyvern]

I would like all missiles to behave as Piliums currently do; have a set 'maximum' load and a steady rate at which new missiles are loaded and made ready to fire.

I've seriously considered doing something like this, especially for kinetic damage missiles.  HE missiles - especially torpedos - are kinda okay-ish as a limited resource, because the armor of your target is also a limited resource.  But limited kinetic damage missiles?  Ugh.  The sabot only works in this model because it's actually pretty effective anti-armor as well (as we saw when sabots briefly fired a spray of kinetic damage instead of a single bolt).

[Alex]

Just on a conceptual level, neither missiles nor fighters are generally produced during combat, with exceptions like the Gryphon's ship system. That one clearly does go all "grey goo" on some feedstock.

For fighters, the carriers are preparing and launching replacements already stowed in the bays. Reaching a CR level of 0, for carriers, also signifies that they're out of these replacements.

For missiles, the ones that regenerate ammo do so by loading missiles from secured magazines within the ship. Missiles that don't do this don't have that capacity, for whatever reason - probably to do with it being too dangerous during a battle situation, and the missile not being designed for it.

unpopularopinion.txt

Hmm. Personally, I've been using missiles on my loadouts pretty consistently, and they're often integral, so I'm not sure that's necessary from purely a balance perspective. And if base OP on ships go up a bit, that might make them even more appealing.

Far be it from me to tell you what's fun, though - I'm happy you're able to tweak things to your liking

I've seriously considered doing something like this, especially for kinetic damage missiles.  HE missiles - especially torpedos - are kinda okay-ish as a limited resource, because the armor of your target is also a limited resource.  But limited kinetic damage missiles?  Ugh.  The sabot only works in this model because it's actually pretty effective anti-armor as well (as we saw when sabots briefly fired a spray of kinetic damage instead of a single bolt).

Yeah, kinetic missiles are kind of a special case, in the same way kinetic beams or energy ballistics etc are. As you say, though, the Sabots are in a decent place now, while the Squall got some adjustments (better missile accuracy, mainly) that make it an excellent support weapon, since it can't be avoided by flickering shields.

[Schwartz]

The problem with the Squall is that it's a plink-plink kind of missile that never feels too threatening, whether you let it hit shields or armour. The Sabot, as it was said, threatens both because burst damage rules supreme and overload is such a powerful mechanic. The AI will have a relatively easy time handling Squalls, while the best defense against Sabot is more cerebral and has to do with positioning, rushing, backing off and evading instead of just a question of "do I keep shields on or off?"

No, missiles are still very powerful. In the early game and against overwhelming odds, 'killers' like Harpoons and especially Sabots have enough alpha punch to even the odds. Later in the game, these can be more and more replaced by sustainable and high-ammo alternatives for longer engagements, but even here I would rank Annihilators as the top dogs and Pilums as just about passable - and Sabots and Harpoons still as good choices.

The AI has learned to use missiles fairly well. Indication of which is that I die to them a lot and expletives are hurled. It's very rare that you can just outlast a steady stream of missiles until ammo runs out; they will instead pile them on when you're flux-locked, venting or otherwise in trouble. All missile weapons are first and foremost strike weapons. The regen suggestion makes them something else, something more similar to the other two categories. Do we really need that?

Oh, and another point re. Squall is that they do stray from the strike mechanic. If you made them be fired in groups instead of one every number of ticks, that would certainly help to make them more interesting (and cooler looking).

[DatonKallandor]

The AI has learned to use missiles fairly well. Indication of which is that I die to them a lot and expletives are hurled. It's very rare that you can just outlast a steady stream of missiles until ammo runs out; they will instead pile them on when you're flux-locked, venting or otherwise in trouble. All missile weapons are first and foremost strike weapons. The regen suggestion makes them something else, something more similar to the other two categories. Do we really need that?

Having made and tried that myself - yes we do really need that (not to mention that regenerating missiles are still subject to a layer of defense entirely unqiue to them, keeping them very distinct). The game plays substantially better with slowly regenerating missiles with meaningful fire rate limits and clips (which also happens to make the missile spec far less variable). But the base game will remain with extremely binary strike missiles that's been made clear.

[Alex]

The problem with the Squall is that it's a plink-plink kind of missile that never feels too threatening, whether you let it hit shields or armour.

It's something that shines when combined with something else, especially after tweaks to make it hit much more reliably. By itself, you're right, not very threatening. A stream of Squalls coming in alongside a bombing run, though? Or when you're already engaged with another ship? The burst has a longer-than-usual-duration because it's meant to open up a window of opportunity for something else.

[Dark.Revenant]

Missiles are currently like super moves in fighting games - they're a limited resource that give you a burst of power and/or versatility.  The purpose of such a weapon is to break a stalemate, beat the odds, or do something your ship wouldn't be able to accomplish otherwise.  They give you an edge right when you need it.

However, in fighting games, you start from no meter and then build it up during a fight.  In Starsector, it's the opposite; you start with a full stock and then use it up.  After using your stock, it doesn't come back.

The flaw of this is that when two opponents have both used all of their missiles, they're no longer an option to break the stalemate.  Instead, it can end up being rather unfun as the two ships slowly plink away at each other until one eventually runs out of CR or takes enough damage to die.  Alternative mechanics like Burn Drive or having fleet-scale combat alleviate this, but the problem eventually comes around on the macro scale as well - when both fleets have used up all of their missiles, then it's a different kind of battle.

You cannot solve this by adding regeneration to missiles.

At the very least, missile weapons would have to be redesigned around short bursts of activity followed by a long cooldown period.  The ubiquitous Harpoon, for instance, might still be a three-shot weapon, but all three would fire in one burst.  The damage would be lower, to compensate.  After this, a long period of cooldown - after which, a new stock of three is loaded and ready to go.  I think it's worth a mod to experiment with this type of design, but it really does constitute a near-total rework of every missile system to go about a change of this magnitude.

[Wyvern]

You cannot solve this by adding regeneration to missiles.

At the very least, missile weapons would have to be redesigned around short bursts of activity followed by a long cooldown period.  The ubiquitous Harpoon, for instance, might still be a three-shot weapon, but all three would fire in one burst.  The damage would be lower, to compensate.  After this, a long period of cooldown - after which, a new stock of three is loaded and ready to go.  I think it's worth a mod to experiment with this type of design, but it really does constitute a near-total rework of every missile system to go about a change of this magnitude.

I don't see how this necessarily follows?  Why can't this be solved by ammunition regeneration?  Why would adding regeneration require making the harpoon fire three at a time?  Please explain!