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[Gwyvern]

Hey so when talking amongst my peers it seems the general consensus is that late game, frigates and even destroyers don't really see much usage, as fleets shift toward more and more capital ships as they become available.

I personally try to avoid this actively as I find all or even mostly capital fleets to be boring, but I think there are several legitimate reasons for this trend.

-Capital ships, while carrying hefty up-front cost, are actually more efficient per-ton than smaller ships.

-Late game economics makes the entry fee to using capitals negligible, and while generally slower, capitals carry more guns, more armor, more hull, and more fighters per supply/month than any other class of ship in the
game, in fact, the same can be said for cruisers compared to destroyers/frigates, and destroyers compared to frigates.

- Capital ships can last far longer in combat than anything else.

- The CR and PPT mechanics work together to make sure that battles keep moving, and don't grind to a standstill where smaller, lighter ships endlessly poke at larger ones for hours on end, unable to be countered until the larger ship dies. For obvious reasons, this is good, but it also has led to a situation to where deploying frigates and destroyers to large battles makes little sense as they will usually start running out of PPT long before the capital ships have even reached their mid-game

What I'm proposing doesn't exactly address everything that makes smaller ships a questionable choice late game, but I do think it will help one of the bigger bullet points.

Allow smaller ships to receive an in-combat bonus to PPT when they are supporting larger ships

Similar to how PPT doesn't tick down if there are insufficient enemies nearby, implement some sort of system by which PPT will tick down slower if there are sufficient allies of a greater hull size nearby.

I really don't know the specifics of how this would be set up, but I can at least imagine it probably shouldn't apply if you're running an all-frigates fleet or are flying one destroyer in a frigate swarm, basically the overarcing goal would be to encourage mixed fleets consisting of both large and small ships that the player can fit for whatever roll they think they would best serve, instead of the current reality whereby frigates and destroyers are mostly relegated to chasing down smaller, fleeing fleets because in large battles they are outgunned on all fronts, have no staying power, and are generally more expensive to operate in large numbers in the long-term compared to bigger hull sizes.

Also just a pre-emptive clarification: PPT affecting hull-mods aren't a solution because by necessity they will require OP and thus make any build weaker. While larger ships don't need to spend OP on just remaining viable and can instead only take such hullmods if their specific build benefits from it. They also arguably don't do enough for frigates in particular to really matter.

[SafariJohn]

I like this idea. Now how to actually do it...

[Alex]

Hmm. So this is interesting, but I think there are a couple of things working against that.

One is that PPT is an important limiting factor for SO and phase ships. Anything that substantially increases it is likely to make those completely out of control power-wise.

The other is that PPT is one of many factors that make frigates less desirable as battles scale up. One could make an argument that *specialist* frigates have a hard time keeping up PPT-wise and could use a longevity buff, but other frigates just lose effectiveness before PPT is an issue.

Also, larger battles generally gravitating towards larger ships is good for performance - lots of small ships are more intensive than similar firepower on fewer larger ships - so, well. It's definitely something to consider; balance changes that make large numbers of frigates desirable in larger battles would have a large impact on performance.

[TaLaR]

PPT is not the only reason for frigates (outside of player-piloted elites) being unviable lategame - other ones are fleet size limitation and officers count.
There was a proposal to let officers command up to several ships depending on size (like 4 frigates - 2 DE - single Capital, or any mix of sizes that sums to 4)

[MesoTroniK]

Part of the problem is that say a 40 logistics cap ship is *far* more powerful than two cruisers for a similar cost to run!

Bold suggestion... Maybe capships should be *far* more expensive to run? Where even a humble battlecruiser would be like 60, and battleships and capital carriers 70 to 80? It would also fit lore better, how capships are supposedly a rather large investment where right now they are actually *** easy to spam.

Making them around 50% more expensive to keep in a fleet would make smaller ships more viable in general, and also directly make doing capship spam fleets in the late game where so many players run virtually nothing but them much harder to do, while not requiring any fancy new mechanics either... Though not saying such new mechanics should not be considered.

[Gwyvern]

There *are* numerous reasons that frigates aren't too viable late game, and to some extent even destroyers, and on rare occasions cruisers aren't even immune. I just think PPT is one of the bigger ones, And yeah Alex makes some very solid points on how if not properly considered this could lead to some builds being broken, but overall the goal is to encourage mixed fleet comps, consisting of capitals, cruisers, destroyers, and frigates for certain roles, not to open the gate for frigate swarm tactics in late game, as that is just as one-dimensional as all-capital fleets.

[SafariJohn]

One is that PPT is an important limiting factor for SO and phase ships. Anything that substantially increases it is likely to make those completely out of control power-wise.

Then exclude SO ships, and exclude phase ships while phased. That would make it a moderate nerf for them.


Here's my take, assuming frigates lasting (up to) as long as capitals is a reasonable goal to start with:

Ships lose less peak time per second when near larger ships that have more peak time than them. 2/3 of a second per second for one size up, 1/2 for two sizes, 1/3 for three sizes.


As mentioned, officers, firepower concentration, and other factors already make larger ships superior, so I don't think allowing frigates and destroyers to last as long as larger classes would be an overbearing change.

[MesoTroniK]

I am being clear, I am not saying new mechanics should not be considered... I just have no idea how they should work.

But what I am saying is the jump between cruisers and capships is *far* larger than between destroyers and cruisers, and frigates and destroyers. I am not just counting combat power, but also cost to run as well. The smaller classes can often trade favorably in combat using the two of the size down can take the one size up rule. But capships? Throw that out the window and can munch fleets for the cost of two cruisers (and so many players run *nothing* but capship spam fleets as well)... It is broken, so at the least making them less trivial to run would go a decent way to correcting the issue but yea more should at least be considered as well.

[Dark.Revenant]

I'd suggest positive design, like making mixing in smaller ships with a larger fleet have some profound inherent value beyond just being cheaper.  The fact that they can capture points quickly isn't really enough for this, since the bonuses are not always large enough to deal with the micromanagement of keeping a forward force of frigates alive.

I think the closest thing to a solution that has been said so far is allowing officers to affect bonuses upon smaller ships.  If an officer of sufficient level is in charge of a capital ship, he might be able to extend his benefits to a cruiser, or a pair of destroyers, or three frigates.  If all of your ships are capital ships, you won't receive the maximum possible benefit from your officers; at a bare minimum, you'd need to pair each capital ship with a cruiser.

Note that due to the implied overall power increase larger ships offer to the fleet with these mechanics, each tier up should be more expensive to compensate.  It would improve the progression curve of the build-up-your-fleet portion of the game, I feel.

Edit: ANOTHER POINT: Cruisers span recovery costs of 15-30, not even counting the Doom, and are the most diverse class of ship in the game.  Capital ships need not have as many total ships to offer, but they should span a similar breadth.  40-80 recovery cost would not be an out-of-place range for them.

[Gwyvern]

I'd suggest positive design, like making mixing in smaller ships with a larger fleet have some profound inherent value beyond just being cheaper.  The fact that they can capture points quickly isn't really enough for this, since the bonuses are not always large enough to deal with the micromanagement of keeping a forward force of frigates alive.

I think the closest thing to a solution that has been said so far is allowing officers to affect bonuses upon smaller ships.  If an officer of sufficient level is in charge of a capital ship, he might be able to extend his benefits to a cruiser, or a pair of destroyers, or three frigates.  If all of your ships are capital ships, you won't receive the maximum possible benefit from your officers; at a bare minimum, you'd need to pair each capital ship with a cruiser.

Note that due to the implied overall power increase larger ships offer to the fleet with these mechanics, each tier up should be more expensive to compensate.  It would improve the progression curve of the build-up-your-fleet portion of the game, I feel.

I replied to this before it was edited stating I liked the idea and pointing out some missing pieces of it but then you filled in the missing pieces, this idea is great but I'm still not certain it would totally fix the problems, as frigates still have far too little staying power in large fights.

But with such changes? maybe they wont need it.

[Astraltor]

as it stands frigates just camp the zone where
1. the capitals guns can't reach them
2. the frigate performance is affected by enemy prsence
3. the frigate can't reach the capital

so they just kinda float around until CR hits zero and either retreat or die

outranged, out gunned, out tanked, out system'd even, 10 frigates to a capital

of course you can stick SO on a frigate and hope they get in range in which case they'll just
1. die
2. take massive damage
3. live and now they're down 1/2 their PPT for a single attack run where they flung maybe 500 damage
4. oh you put missiles on the frigate? better hope the whole volley of 1 or 5 missiles doesn't get caught by shields/PD

the AI also isn't smart enough to actively utilize flanking, which is what multiple ships are good for. exploiting blind spots and weak points in enemy ships/formations. which, in larger battles, are easier to cover (i.e., multiple ships parallel helps nullify aft aft blind spot)

What would I like to see?

1. Smarter "tactical" commands/AI when utilizing multiple ships, like "Surround" or similar to a "Harass" (for lack of a better name)(maintain outside of enemy ship range/weapon arcs). This would make utilizing multiple ships much more effective than the current "2 or 3 ships park infront of the enemy" behaviour.

2. Ships being less afraid of being in enemy weapon range, particularly when they have the speed to strafe out of fire, as speedy frigates tend to do.

Neither of these explcitly affect any class of ships, but I think affect asymmetric combat as a whole.

I like the points about economics, too. It's cheaper on maintenance, crew, fuel, equipment, just about everything to run larger ships.

I do think some of the player management costs of refitting many ships will go away with 0.9, but i'd also like to see an even faster Autofit (a "default retrofit"? auto autofit?)

[Alex]

I'm kind of partial to the idea of raising cap ship deployment cost - it would really make sense as far as overall power. One problem, though, is if it goes up that much it'll be difficult to deploy much more than a cap ship in a lot of fights. Considering that the minimum battle size is 150, 80 is more than half to begin with.

Hmm. It might make sense to increase the maintenance and so on cost of cap ships, though, so while it's not a direct cost-to-deploy, that might be an even more powerful incentive not to have too many of them around.

Perhaps worth noting that combat capital ships have comparatively higher crew requirements relative to their deployment cost, so with crew salaries in play, they already *will* cost more to maintain in 0.9a.

[SafariJohn]

Hmm. It might make sense to increase the maintenance and so on cost of cap ships, though, so while it's not a direct cost-to-deploy, that might be an even more powerful incentive not to have too many of them around.

I am pretty sure that is what they are suggesting. I think it sounds good too.

[Alex]

Ah - for some reason I assumed MesoTroniK was talking about deployment cost rather than monthly maintenance. Re-reading, I'm not 100% sure.

[MesoTroniK]

I honestly was suggesting both, but I see what you mean now that you mention it Alex and you came to a good conclusion on your own.

But I still think what Dr was saying should be considered as well.