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[Morrokain]

I mean they can be expensive to fit onto a carrier. You can pump a lot of OP into it if you're looking to have a Heron with 2 bomber wings and a Broadsword escort. The OP costs encourage a certain way to play which involves more or less spreading out the expense over all your carriers. I.e. each of them gets a Talon, a Broadsword, a Dagger.

Ah I see. You wish this was less taxing on the carriers' weapon systems in general? Or, alternatively, are you saying you prefer the flexibility of choosing an all-OP-heavy build at the expense of weaponry, and, choosing an all-low-OP-cost strike craft build to have better carrier weapons? Each have different considerations.

It also makes the pool of viable fighters and carrier loadouts smaller.

Due to the above? If you don't mind, some detail would help there. I have some thoughts in that area based upon previous suggestions:

Give carriers two separate OP pools for fighters and for itself. Make these OP pools able to be exchanged for the other at a 2:1 ratio or something like that. So a carrier with 40/60 OP who only uses 38 OP for fighters gets 61 OP points to use for itself. The point of this would be that carriers across the board can get more OP (because they need it). At the same time, fighters can still be made weaker.

What about setting a max op per hanger bay?  Separate from the weapon, vent/cap, and hull mod general pool.  Say, 30 OP per bay for the astral, and maybe 24 OP per bay for the heron.  This will limit smaller carriers to fielding smaller fighters.  If you elect to load smaller fighters than the max bay size, shuffle the leftover hanger OP to the general OP pool at a balanced ratio, or even at a variable rate as you move more hanger OP into the general pool.  This gives a design choice to put less fighter power in return for diminishing increase in regular warship capabilities.  You can have your close combat Astral with an all mining drone loadout.

Maybe create a hull mod that adds hanger OP and allows smaller carriers to field larger wings.  Or a hull mod that removes a hanger bay in return for increasing the OP size of the remaining bays.

It'll require a bit more balancing but will add more design freedom with additional constraints on the maximums.  Not sure how to balance it against drover/sparks spam but it'll give us a few more ways to nudge it into balance.

I think these have potential to be a good solution. I'll mull it over at work today.

I've been thinking about this particular grouping of suggestions. So, weapons currently come in three forms: small, medium, large. Could fighter bays also come in the same format?

This way, small carriers can be limited in their ability to deploy higher tiered strike craft. This can be by tech level, or by overall combat performance depending upon the situation. It remains flexible that way.

This is similar to the idea of OP limitations on fighter bays by hull size.

Re: Expanded Deck Crew. I don't doubt it is good. What is bothering me is that I never use it and find it unnecessary. It is perfectly possible to build a fleet of 2 Moras and 2 Drovers and just overwhelm every single engagement with high-performance fighters that never run out of steam because the more fighters you have, the less fighters you lose.

It's more like the slower you lose fighters, the more fighters you can afford to lose. Carrier fatigue does favor survivable squadrons far more than expendable ones. As long as the enemy lacks a critical damage rate to push replacement rates down, they're doomed. Shields take things to the next level because the more shield fighters you have, the more damage they can cover for each other and vent away, so the less fighters you lose, so your carriers never get fatigued, so any small losses are quickly replaced. One synergy is fine, but shields do create a double stacking synergy.

It depends upon the numerical amount of the wing vs each wing member's total "hp". The equation, very, very roughly, is: The wing number is two craft per wing and the factored hp- considering flux, dissipation, armor, and hull- equals roughly 1000 total hp per wing member. Then, as long as the total hp- per wing member- equals 500 total hp per member of a 4-craft-wing, the replacement rate will decrease at the same rate assuming no distractions, and, also assuming the PD is focus firing each individual member at the same damage distribution of total PD damage capability... this is obviously so variable that it will be mostly impossible to calculate reliably, but, what I am saying here, is that its more that the more wing members you have, the weaker each wing member has to be to reduce replacement rate enough to prevent reinforcements, yet if stronger hp craft rely upon a fixed damage strike then get to retreat, it seems like they are stronger than they actually are. Similarly, burst anti-fighter damage like the Locust are great until they run out of ammunition, and area of effect PD can demolish swarm behavior due to reducing the number of craft below the threshold, yet remain mostly inconsequential to low member high alpha strike bombers because their AOE effect is less punishing there.

With shielded craft: once you remove most of the dissipation it can actually become a detriment to the craft due to fast overload that prevents the strike craft from attacking for a variable amount of time- determined by the hit damage to the shields at the time of overload. Less dissipation also improves beam weapons' performance since soft flux cannot be dissipated as easily and much of the pd beam mitigation is lost.

[Plantissue]

I feel like part of the reason fighter spam gets so powerful is because point defense weapons don't.  Flak cannons and all their variants including the devastator suck, period.  They miss 90% of their rounds in my experience thanks to their HIGHLY random detonation range.  Other PD weapons have such painfully short range they can do nothing against any sort of real bombing run either.  Integrated point defense AI and some skills help with this...but beyond a point it's meaningless as well.  It's just an arms race and the fighters win.

My preferred anti-fighter weapon is the Locust.  One volley is almost guaranteed to wipe out half a dozen fighters, even more if they're unshielded.  Highly likely to clear a lot of torps and bombs on the way too.  Unfortunately they're missiles so you'll probably run dry before the carriers do...but that just means you need to get in there and get the job done before you're out of locusts.  An Atlas mkII makes a fantastic bugsprayer with extended racks and ECCM.  For 24 DP one atlas can kill a LOT of fighters very quickly...

Point defence weapons are not anti fighter weapons. PD weapons are anti-missile, many non-PD weapons are good antifighter weapons like Pulse Laser, Railgun and all the beam weapons. Against bombers, large ballistic turreted weapons do well against them.

[TaLaR]

Yep, and best anti fighter weapons are stuff like Plasma Cannons (pass-through) or TLs (accuracy and range).

Problem is, AI doesn't see any problem with huge enemy fighter/bomber swarm approaching it. While proper course of action is usually to backpedal to covering allies and concentrate fire on the swarm before it breaks into individual fighters/or bombers get chance to unload.

[Schwartz]

To put it simply: I find the idea of this either / or decision very unappealing. I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief that a carrier is not able to field its designated ordnance without stripping itself down to bare metal. It's ugly, it makes no sense and it's an unfun decision a player has to make if he wants to optimize fleet strength and win his engagements. Alex talked about this before as 'gamers having to game' the system against their own sense of fun.

Now I'm not against fighters incurring a cost and all fighters are not the same strength, obviously. But there are no other ships in the game that are currently as OP-starved as carriers. Imagine if you were to kit out an Enforcer, but if you want it to have 4 x Annihilators, you better put Small Mortars in three of those medium slots. I'm getting mad just thinking about it.

It's not strictly weapon systems that are getting taxed by this, btw. You have offense, defense and fighters. Most players will choose defense and fighters and dial back on the offense, since no one likes losing ships. Especially bigger ships. All this is not unreasonable from a balance standpoint. But if you want to have a strong fighter presence-...

I need to go on a tangent here. Fighter strength is not just determined by the raw power of the fighters. It is also determined by the relative strength of your squadrons vs. their squadrons. Since fighters are not strictly 'offensive missiles' but they also distract PD, they provide PD themselves, they work like suppression weapons in a carrier vs. carrier duel against the enemy fighter replacement rate.

...so if you want to have a strong fighter presence, numerically, you can still have that after fighters have been nerfed across the board and carriers have the spare OP to get their weapon slots and hullmods filled out.

[bobucles]

I don't think players would mind more OP on their carriers, but I think they'd just spend those points on more powerful bombers instead.

[Morrokain]

Problem is, AI doesn't see any problem with huge enemy fighter/bomber swarm approaching it. While proper course of action is usually to backpedal to covering allies and concentrate fire on the swarm before it breaks into individual fighters/or bombers get chance to unload.

I don't agree with this tactic the AI tries to use (in my experience it already does this). It actually hurts the ability of the ship to combat strike craft. The AI is not smart enough to perform these kinds of tactics and all this ends up doing is making most ships never pursue the carrier. I have a feeling this is because individual fighters are still mostly considered "ships" to the AI when they are not ships in function.

To use an analogy: If you are swimming out to sea and you see a wave coming, you don't swim back and combat it- because you know another wave is coming after that. Instead, you break through it and try and maintain speed to get to where you are going. Similarly, backpedaling and trying to shoot down fighters until its "all clear" not only leads to boring gameplay where your allied ships huddle together and wait out the replacement rate like a caravan in a blizzard, but it also generally doesn't even work like that. The ships are picked off one by one instead and the whole tactic becomes relatively worthless, unfortunately.

Handling strike craft using this tactic means you have to reduce wing members below the threshold where replacement rate decreases or the tactic feels bad. If you make changes that would cause this to happen more reliably and say, reduce the waiting time of lowering the replacement rate (by stat nerfs or replacement rate itself) carriers are now a "one trick pony" that can't really do anything the remainder of the fight.

With that in mind, the only duality worth noting is does the "trick" work too well or not at all. It would be really hard to make it feel good in most scenarios, so the feeling would likely look like a bell curve where either extreme feels bad.

I'd even be ok with the AI defaulting to this behavior (at the risk of some very minor babysitting) but the "eliminate" command should certainly cause AI ships to ignore fighters (and I mean completely ignore them) and push through to the carrier or die trying. That is kind of its purpose, no?

To put it simply: I find the idea of this either / or decision very unappealing. I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief that a carrier is not able to field its designated ordnance without stripping itself down to bare metal. It's ugly, it makes no sense and it's an unfun decision a player has to make if he wants to optimize fleet strength and win his engagements. Alex talked about this before as 'gamers having to game' the system against their own sense of fun.

Now I'm not against fighters incurring a cost and all fighters are not the same strength, obviously. But there are no other ships in the game that are currently as OP-starved as carriers. Imagine if you were to kit out an Enforcer, but if you want it to have 4 x Annihilators, you better put Small Mortars in three of those medium slots. I'm getting mad just thinking about it.

Agreed. It certainly doesn't feel good.

It's not strictly weapon systems that are getting taxed by this, btw. You have offense, defense and fighters. Most players will choose defense and fighters and dial back on the offense, since no one likes losing ships. Especially bigger ships. All this is not unreasonable from a balance standpoint. But if you want to have a strong fighter presence-...

I need to go on a tangent here. Fighter strength is not just determined by the raw power of the fighters. It is also determined by the relative strength of your squadrons vs. their squadrons. Since fighters are not strictly 'offensive missiles' but they also distract PD, they provide PD themselves, they work like suppression weapons in a carrier vs. carrier duel against the enemy fighter replacement rate.

...so if you want to have a strong fighter presence, numerically, you can still have that after fighters have been nerfed across the board and carriers have the spare OP to get their weapon slots and hullmods filled out.

Unfortunately this still falls under the category of a "make bombers look better, make fighters look worthless" kind of change. A couple of pages back I gave some detail as to why this happens. It mostly comes down to the idea that fighters don't strictly duel each other in that way all the time- and even if they did, you are crippling their use in small numbers to reduce their effectiveness when spammed. I'm not saying in certain cases this wouldn't prove to be necessary, but conceptually you run the risk of this and its a thin line of balance.

I don't think players would mind more OP on their carriers, but I think they'd just spend those points on more powerful bombers instead.

Yes. The best way to incentivize weapons on carriers (not withstanding some of the changes suggested regarding fighter bays) is to make carriers vulnerable to attack and therefore need weapons for defense over simply boosting defense stats and relying on speed to run away from danger. If you can rely solely upon speed and shields, then carrier builds boil down to: "how many good bombers can I fit?"

[TJJ]

Radically simple idea.....

Dramatically reduce carrier combat speed & durability, so that they can't be used to kite & therefore need non-carriers to act as a meat shield.

By forcing mixed compositions, not only do you solve the balance issues of the 'critical mass fighter swarm', but you also create more tactically diverse, interesting and (dare I say) realistic fleets.
All without introducing any arbitrary rules or limits.

-75% combat speed might be enough.

Perhaps only apply the debuff while the carrier is actively constructing or rearming fighters.
That'd also give a lore-based reason for the behaviour "Operating the nano-fabs is enormously power hungry"

[Megas]

Radically simple idea.....

Dramatically reduce carrier combat speed & durability, so that they can't be used to kite & therefore need non-carriers to act as a meat shield.

By forcing mixed compositions, not only do you solve the balance issues of the 'critical mass fighter swarm', but you also create more tactically diverse, interesting and (dare I say) realistic fleets.
All without introducing any arbitrary rules or limits.

-75% combat speed might be enough.

Perhaps only apply the debuff while the carrier is actively constructing or rearming fighters.
That'd also give a lore-based reason for the behaviour "Operating the nano-fabs is enormously power hungry"

That would wreck warships with a bay or two on the side, like Tempest, Odyssey, or anything with Converted Hangar.  Not everything with a bay is a dedicated carrier.  (Not to mention that while game treats Legion as a dedicated carrier, it is good enough to function as a warship.)

[Thaago]

Nothing like watching battleships cower in the center of a ring of civilian destroyers with converted hanger, because they are too scared of the piddly fighters and "destroyers" to attack.

I wish that ships would plow right through fighters as if they weren't there. I also wish that ships would ignore the 'weight' of carriers in terms of being scared. Completely ignore both for movement determining threat assessment. Running from fighters doesn't help: actually closing with carriers and shooting does!

[bobucles]

Some of the carrier problems can be resolved with better AI tactics. Carriers are the ultimate long range unit, so the typically cautious AI gains no benefit by staying out of range. It plays into the carrier's biggest strength.  Frigates and destroyers are also effective for flanking the main lines and hunting down carriers. Phase ships can outrun most interceptors, so they have the option of harassing carriers without much danger. I dunno if that'll resolve everything, but it will at least place more pressure on carriers than they are used to.

[Daynen]

Point defence weapons are not anti fighter weapons. PD weapons are anti-missile, many non-PD weapons are good antifighter weapons like Pulse Laser, Railgun and all the beam weapons. Against bombers, large ballistic turreted weapons do well against them.

Well the reason you equip PD weapons is to deal with ordnance that gets close, which fighters are going to bring.  You either want to shoot down their torps or blow them up directly, for which some PD is incidentally decent.  While small and midsize weapons are good at knocking out fighters, it's AREA weapons that are intuitively meant to be the answer to swarms.  You don't use a slingshot on a swarm of mosquitoes; you get the bug spray.  Fighters are fast; far faster than most frigates; ballistics can only keep up with so many.  There's plenty of room for PD weapons to also serve as fighter deterrents and I feel like flak ought to be the premier anti-air weapon.  It just feels purposely terrible, like it's TRYING not to hit its targets; I think just trimming off a wee bit of the delta of randomness on its detonation might close the gap on fighter swarms a bit without ruining everything else.

I mean think about it.  Why are swarms even a problem in the first place?  Because current defense weapons can generally only hit one at a time.  We have to rely on our offensive weaponry like autopulsers, ballistics and missiles to combat them, none of which have anything resembling reliable area damage.  Flak and its cousins wouldn't even need a damage buff or HE type, either; just a little reliability on WHERE they pop.  At the very least it would make flak weapons worth the ordnance points, whereas now they're an auto-sell for me.

[Morrokain]

Radically simple idea.....

Dramatically reduce carrier combat speed & durability, so that they can't be used to kite & therefore need non-carriers to act as a meat shield.

By forcing mixed compositions, not only do you solve the balance issues of the 'critical mass fighter swarm', but you also create more tactically diverse, interesting and (dare I say) realistic fleets.
All without introducing any arbitrary rules or limits.

-75% combat speed might be enough.

Perhaps only apply the debuff while the carrier is actively constructing or rearming fighters.
That'd also give a lore-based reason for the behaviour "Operating the nano-fabs is enormously power hungry"

This happens to a small extent in that, iirc, the use of fighters as an attack removes the 0-flux boost similar to turning on shields.

I removed that effect specifically because it hurt warship/carrier hybrids- But! - reduced dedicated carriers' 0-flux boost amount significantly in order to make them slow alongside their typical low speed in the first place- and increased their inherent replacement rate as a result. Base replacement rate is low, so carriers still feel like carriers with the boost- while still being slow and vulnerable.

In order to help solve:

That would wreck warships with a bay or two on the side, like Tempest, Odyssey, or anything with Converted Hangar.  Not everything with a bay is a dedicated carrier.  (Not to mention that while game treats Legion as a dedicated carrier, it is good enough to function as a warship.)

Battlecarriers, on the other hand, maintain their speed and combat viability at the expense of a reduction in replacement rate.

There are lots of ways to implement this, but I feel like these represent the core concepts. I used built-in hullmods, though I get that those are sort of a "slippery slope" so should be avoided whenever possible to avoid a player having to read 8 of them with every ship they inspect. 

Nothing like watching battleships cower in the center of a ring of civilian destroyers with converted hanger, because they are too scared of the piddly fighters and "destroyers" to attack.

I wish that ships would plow right through fighters as if they weren't there. I also wish that ships would ignore the 'weight' of carriers in terms of being scared. Completely ignore both for movement determining threat assessment. Running from fighters doesn't help: actually closing with carriers and shooting does!

Some of the carrier problems can be resolved with better AI tactics. Carriers are the ultimate long range unit, so the typically cautious AI gains no benefit by staying out of range. It plays into the carrier's biggest strength.  Frigates and destroyers are also effective for flanking the main lines and hunting down carriers. Phase ships can outrun most interceptors, so they have the option of harassing carriers without much danger. I dunno if that'll resolve everything, but it will at least place more pressure on carriers than they are used to.

This is how I feel too. It cuts out the problem at it's source rather than try and mitigate the flood of infinite reinforcements. The real battle lays in: Can you get through the defensive screen to make that happen? I believe it makes for a more tactically engaging fight.

[Thaago]

Point defence weapons are not anti fighter weapons. PD weapons are anti-missile, many non-PD weapons are good antifighter weapons like Pulse Laser, Railgun and all the beam weapons. Against bombers, large ballistic turreted weapons do well against them.

Well the reason you equip PD weapons is to deal with ordnance that gets close, which fighters are going to bring.  You either want to shoot down their torps or blow them up directly, for which some PD is incidentally decent.  While small and midsize weapons are good at knocking out fighters, it's AREA weapons that are intuitively meant to be the answer to swarms.  You don't use a slingshot on a swarm of mosquitoes; you get the bug spray.  Fighters are fast; far faster than most frigates; ballistics can only keep up with so many.  There's plenty of room for PD weapons to also serve as fighter deterrents and I feel like flak ought to be the premier anti-air weapon.  It just feels purposely terrible, like it's TRYING not to hit its targets; I think just trimming off a wee bit of the delta of randomness on its detonation might close the gap on fighter swarms a bit without ruining everything else.

I mean think about it.  Why are swarms even a problem in the first place?  Because current defense weapons can generally only hit one at a time.  We have to rely on our offensive weaponry like autopulsers, ballistics and missiles to combat them, none of which have anything resembling reliable area damage.  Flak and its cousins wouldn't even need a damage buff or HE type, either; just a little reliability on WHERE they pop.  At the very least it would make flak weapons worth the ordnance points, whereas now they're an auto-sell for me.

I agree with this - better flak detonation logic would greatly improve their performance without any tweaks to DPS or damage type needed. I often wonder if flak detonations are even doing full DPS, or if the things they are detonating on are outside of the full damage zone of the AoE.

[TaLaR]

Problem is, AI doesn't see any problem with huge enemy fighter/bomber swarm approaching it. While proper course of action is usually to backpedal to covering allies and concentrate fire on the swarm before it breaks into individual fighters/or bombers get chance to unload.

I don't agree with this tactic the AI tries to use (in my experience it already does this). It actually hurts the ability of the ship to combat strike craft. The AI is not smart enough to perform these kinds of tactics and all this ends up doing is making most ships never pursue the carrier. I have a feeling this is because individual fighters are still mostly considered "ships" to the AI when they are not ships in function.

Depends on conditions.
For my fleet containing a lot of officer-ed ships with Advanced Countermeasures 3 among other things + pair of Drovers for fighter support, even the most carrier-centric AI compositions, including Nexelerin ones (still far from player Drover spam) are very much counter-able like this. Or more like enemy carries lose all fighters soon after encounter start and become easy targets.

For typical enemy fleets lacking proper weapons and officers vs player's full Drover spam, sure, rushing is the right answer (as long as they are fast enough to not get simply kited indefinitely).

[Lucky33]

In vanilla, true carrier spam has such low probability of happening that you can safely disregard it completely.