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[Mondaymonkey]

That was probably already suggested, but didn't find.

In the SS we have three different types of weapons in a three sizes. That intended limitation creates variety of roles to a different shiphulls, and we probably all agreed it is good©.

Fighter bays, on the other hand are completely the same, only limitation on installing LPC is OP. And that creates monsters, carrying wings, they logically shouldn't, with no weapons at all.

That is completely have sense, that bigger fighters need a bigger bays, and specialized wings are suited for specialized bays. Like bomber bays has to be focused on fast reload, while interceptor bay will most likely focused on replacement. An it is not about adjustments, those things would most probably be built-in-hull. Also, using a bigger bay for "small" LPC should mean increasing in a wing size.

That isn't easy thing to implement and even harder to balance. But it might be a way to get rid of some shame, like fighter spam.

[Megas]

I want putting guns on carriers be a good option again like when fighters were ships instead of missiles.  Currently, most of my dedicated carriers are either unarmed or have some PD beams.  I miss being able to send Heron elsewhere and have it bully small ships that come to it with a heavy blaster, or Gemini with long-range ballistics.

Most of the good fighters are already a wing of two or three, aside from Sparx (5) and Cobra (1).

Fighters need to be cheaper.  Anything that costs 10 DP or less is free.  The likes of Mining Pods and Talons are the equivalent of (D) mod ships for pirates to use.

Or maybe ships have half the bays (similar to number of bays ships used to have in early versions), but all fighters are free.  Converted Hangar is either gone, or limited to capitals.

[intrinsic_parity]

I completely agree with the problem you've identified: carrier balance is currently off because the only balance lever for fighters is OP cost and the only balance lever for carriers is number of bays. The effect of this is that a lot of strong fighters cost a very large amount of OP and carriers frequently just drop all their weapons to fit those fighters.

I generally like the solution but I agree it could be very difficult to balance. I also think it could be too limiting to have certain ships restricted just certain classes of fighters. It might kill a lot of load out diversity.

I suggested something a little while ago in a very similar vein: give fighters a flux upkeep cost when deployed https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=18454.0. I think it attempts to solve the same problem in a different way. Perhaps there could be a hybrid solution where bays modify the flux cost of fighters so some carriers could have better bays that support stronger fighters (by reducing the flux upkeep), but there are not hard constraints on what fighters can be used on what ships.

[Thaago]

I want putting guns on carriers be a good option again like when fighters were ships instead of missiles.  Currently, most of my dedicated carriers are either unarmed or have some PD beams.  I miss being able to send Heron elsewhere and have it bully small ships that come to it with a heavy blaster, or Gemini with long-range ballistics.

Most of the good fighters are already a wing of two or three, aside from Sparx (5) and Cobra (1).

Fighters need to be cheaper.  Anything that costs 10 DP or less is free.  The likes of Mining Pods and Talons are the equivalent of (D) mod ships for pirates to use.

Or maybe ships have half the bays (similar to number of bays ships used to have in early versions), but all fighters are free.  Converted Hangar is either gone, or limited to capitals.

I don't agree with this at all. The OP system for fighters gives a tradeoff between ship power and fighter power: there is absolutely nothing stopping a player from building a Heron for example that uses a Heavy Blaster. Consider: 2x Broadsword, 1x Claw, Heavy Blaster, 2x lrpd in semi-rear, 3x pd in front and rear (1 empty mount), 5 caps, 22 vents, ITU.

That is a no skill build which (with player piloting because the AI refuses to attack because of the CARRIER tag, but thats a separate issue), will happily as a 20 DP cruiser kill all of the sim variant cruisers or any pair of destroyers. Its fighters give anti-shield and lockdown, with sufficient power to kill smaller craft, but it needs to close with the heavy blaster to break armor. It can punish destroyers that come too close the the HB.

Because of the tough fighters, flares, and shorter replacement times, this build doesn't need expanded deck crew and is much less vulnerable to interdiction than bomber builds.

Or I can load it up with Longbows and Daggers with expanded decks and turn it into a strike ship, maybe with some missiles in the universal for fast kills. Then it can project killing firepower, but is vulnerable up close. In a 1v1 duel/situation, despite being much more popular/recommended as a Heron build, it is significantly worse against heavy cruisers as it lacks the lockdown/constant anti-shield pressure. Its much better when other ships are providing those roles however, because it can then get the quick kills.

To me its much more interesting to need to choose between these various options, rather than putting the best of absolutely everything in every slot, which I find boring from a strategy perspective.

Also: Fighters aren't missiles. They aren't even particularly similar to missiles. Missiles are on demand high impact weapons that provide exceptional damage spikes, but have low ammo. Fighters are longer ranged, and either provide constant pressure (gun fighters) or waves of damage. Because the player can't particularly control the timing of the waves of damage, they are sometimes negated entirely by enemy defenses, and sometimes score devastating hits.

[Schwartz]

Yes, tying fighters to carrier OP is problematic insofar as that a lot of carriers seem OP starved currently. Give them more OP to be capable combat ships and you open up the can of worms that is making them even stronger fighter platforms.

However, differently sized hangars for various fighter classes is, IMO, lame. It makes no sense because all fighters/bombers/etc are comparable in size.

I mentioned it before in the other suggestion thread, but why not give carriers two separate OP pools for fighters and for its own ship loadout. Make these two pools either separate or allow an exchange rate between the two at a 50% loss. Something like that.

This would allow the Condor to still manage to field a Trident bomber wing, for example by leaving the other hangar empty and shuffling some ship OP over to fighter OP. This kind of flexibility is cool to me.

[intrinsic_parity]

I don't really think weapon based carrier builds are all that viable on dedicated carriers like the heron though. The real issue with gun based carrier builds is that carriers have bad flux stats to balance out fighters extra damage meaning they are weaker defensively than comparable ships even though they can put out a similar amount of damage (a consequence of the offense/defense coupling of flux mechanics). The result is that they need to play very safe to not die in a fleet (the AI is overly safe because carriers would die frequently if it was not). An AI HB heron (playing aggressively) would flux out and die most of the time in my experience. There's an illusion of choice but in my experience, carriers that fully commit to fighter based builds will much more safely and consistently contribute to battles.

I think in order for gun-based carriers to really be good, they would need better flux stats to survive on the front line. That's sort of why I like the idea of fighters costing flux in some way. That allows for the choice between spending flux on weapons or fighters or defenses.

I really just want to see more interesting build choices. For balancing weapons on ships, there's mount size/type/number, flux cost and OP cost to create variety. With carriers/fighters there is just OP cost and number of bays, and I think that is not enough.

[Megas]

@ Thaago:  The ship power/fighter tradeoff is a raw deal for ship power.  If player needs to gimp fighters too much to make ship power work, that defeats the point of using a carrier, and player should use a warship instead.  Player did not need to make that kind of tradeoff before 0.8a when fighters were ships.  (Of course, that meant fewer ships to haul stuff.)  Carriers generally have inferior stats to begin with, not unlike Gryphon.  No need for carriers to be gimped further because they do not have OP to buy anything else after fighters.

I used similar blaster loadouts, with three or four burst PD instead.  They functioned, but not as well as others.

Also: Fighters aren't missiles. They aren't even particularly similar to missiles. Missiles are on demand high impact weapons that provide exceptional damage spikes, but have low ammo. Fighters are longer ranged, and either provide constant pressure (gun fighters) or waves of damage. Because the player can't particularly control the timing of the waves of damage, they are sometimes negated entirely by enemy defenses, and sometimes score devastating hits.

Not all missiles are strike weapons like Harpoons or Reapers.  Some are simply no-flux assault weapons.

Also, bombers can be just as much high-impact as missiles because some of them launch missiles.

Fighters work close enough to missiles, but are often better because they regenerate and kill things.

Yes, tying fighters to carrier OP is problematic insofar as that a lot of carriers seem OP starved currently. Give them more OP to be capable combat ships and you open up the can of worms that is making them even stronger fighter platforms.

Simply adding more OP means they get spent on better fighters and/or defensive hullmods.

This is why I suggested making fighters free.  Most non-bombers cost 8-10 OP and most bombers cost 12-15 OP.  Mining Pods and Talons can be considered inferior tech meant for civilians or pirates, while Daggers can be reduced to two per wing and effectively cost 12 OP.  Trident, either remove it or buff its stats and reduce it to one fighter like Cobra.

I don't really think weapon based carrier builds are all that viable on dedicated carriers like the heron though.

Mostly agree.  (It was not always like this.)  The only ship that can get away with mixing brawling and carrying is Legion.

P.S.  For gun-based loadouts to work, they need to spend their OP on guns, flux, and hullmods as warships do like they used to before 0.8a.  Since fighters used fleet slots/Logistics instead of OP back then, carriers did just that.  Today, carriers need too much OP for fighters, and there is not enough left to properly support guns.  Also, get rid of Expanded Deck Crew or change it so that it is not ITU-level must-have.  Carriers main job is to manage fighters, but it should have some firepower to brawl in a pinch.

[intrinsic_parity]

Heron has destroyer grade flux stats. Even if you fully commit to upgrading stats and weapons, it will be weak for a cruiser. Carriers are designed that way. It just doesn't make sense to use gun based carriers. They just become bad warships with a bit of fighter damage instead of good carriers. Battle carriers like legion and odyssey can work better because their stats are nearly warships stats and the fighters are more supplemental.

Also, all my attempts to make a brawling legion load out for the AI have failed because the AI will not use the weapons and will instead sit in the back (even with aggressive officers). My guess is that it would work fine as a player ship, but I don't like the piloting style so I don't pilot one. In general, I think the player can make aggressive carrier load outs work because they can manage the risk associated with the worse stats, but the ship is still worse and the player would be better off piloting a true warship.

I think making fighters cost 0 OP would completely eliminate diversity of fighter load outs. You just always pick the best ones, there's literally no reason not to. We need more balance dimensions, not less. I think making fighters compete directly with weapons for flux, rather than nerfing the carriers flux stats in anticipation of the fighters would be the way to go, but it could also be a lot of trouble to balance.

[Megas]

Even if you fully commit to upgrading stats and weapons, it will be weak for a cruiser. Carriers are designed that way.

All the more reason for fighters not to use the same OP as everything else.  Heron also has fewer mounts.  Right now, dedicated carriers have enough for fighters and little else (or at least not enough to properly support guns).  So instead of Heron having destroyer-like firepower plus fighters, it has less than frigate firepower, if any, just fighters.

Legion is useful when player wants to brawl big ships while the fighters seek-and-destroy cowardly small ships that player has no chance of catching them until they get cornered or run out of PPT/CR.

I think making fighters cost 0 OP would completely eliminate diversity of fighter load outs. You just always pick the best ones, there's literally no reason not to. We need more balance dimensions, not less. I think making fighters compete directly with weapons for flux, rather than nerfing the carriers flux stats in anticipation of the fighters would be the way to go, but it could also be a lot of trouble to balance.

I highly doubt it will kill diversity, aside from fewer Mining Pods and Talons which are sub-optimal to begin with.  Not very many fighters are worth outside from the narrow OP range band.  The outliers are either underpowered junk fit for the poor (i.e., pirates, players without blueprints) or high-end stuff that can be converted to the typical 8-10 or 12-15.  (e.g., two Daggers instead of three.)  In case of the non-bombers worth more than 10, Warthogs are underpowered (too slow to shoot up even cruisers), and Xyphos is highly specialized.

[Wyvern]

If you really want to make it sensible to put more guns on your dedicated carriers, the way to do this is to give an OP discount to the guns, not the fighters.

I don't like that idea - it feels wrong for a carrier to get a discount there when a warship doesn't - but it's what I can come up with that has the desired effect.

[FooF]

This seems like a solution in search of a problem.

If you want some granularity with fighters/bombers, I guess you could pay "per fighter" rather than per wing. You want a Trident bomber but can't afford the OP cost? Reduce the wing size to one and it costs 13 OP. Want more guns on your carrier but still want to use fighters? Reduce the wing size and save some OP. Number of hangars wouldn't have to change but the player could have some choice as to whether or not they want to have full wings.

Likewise, change Expanded Hangers so that instead of increasing replacement rate, you can increase wing size (at more OP cost, of course). The hullmod itself would be low OP (crew requirements stay the same) but you'd have to pay extra OP for adding an additional fighters to wings. Likewise, it would tank the replacement rate. Think of it as Safety Overrides for Carriers...

(Note, I'm not actually in favor of this idea!)

[SCC]

The reason why carriers are often used with expensive fighters and token defences is that fighter bays have no size limitations. If a Shrike had mounts that could accept weapons of any size, would it use IR Lasers, or Autopules Lasers? It means fighters have the biggest OP spread of all weapons. Small weapons start at 2 and stop at 9, mediums have the span of 7-15, larges are 18 to 30, and fighters are on the spectrum from 0 to 28 OP.
Making non-combat into combat carriers, like Thaago said, works only for some ships (Condor and Drover wouldn't be able to brawl like a Heron) and is much more risky prospect for AI carriers, since they may not necessarily think about supporting themselves with fighters, sending them to fight distant, irrelevant targets instead. And there's always the issue of fighters always being a functionally flux-free weaponry, thus very rarely being a wrong way to go.

[Megas]

Tridents are worth the most at 24 OP.  Daggers at 18 OP.  At the other end, Pods at 0, Talons at 2, Wasps at 5, everything else is from 8 to 15.  Low-end generally stinks, and Tridents are too expensive to replicate Daggers, so (me at least) it is mostly 8-10 if I want non-bombers or 10-18 if I want bombers.  Bays are generally an 8 to 15 OP tax, with occasional exceptions.

In the pre-0.8a skill days, anything except Condor could be made into a capable, if not necessarily top-tier combatant, although that one release with infinite Fast Missile Racks and Salamanders made Condor stronger than Gemini.  Back then, it was Condor, Gemini, Heron, Venture, Odyssey, and Astral.  (Astral was just a worse Odyssey with more decks).

Drover could be built to fight, but given its other features (speed and good shields), it is better suited at min-maxing speed and defense and running away while fighters kill stuff.

Combat carriers that can brawl were nice for AI in that they could be sent to rally at a point, and it would kill a frigate or two trying to take over that point or trying to close in for the kill.

[Igncom1]

At least missile wise carriers are as capable as most other ships. A missile wave from a Mora or even a drover is still quite powerful, if only temporarily. Paired with actual bombers, they are basically all artillery ships when compared to normal gunboats.

Loadout wise most of the carriers have poor numbers of mounts for guns. Barring makeshift carriers who are littlemore then mobile hangers anyway. Drovers have a couple of smalls but I never feel comfortable leaving them without at least some MGs. Herons have one medium universal but that's only comparable fire-power to what some frigates possess anyway, even with a HVD it struggles to do anything on it's own. Mora's have a bunch of smalls, outside of the medium missiles, so I have had some limited success in making it have the fire-power of a frigate with a railgun or two. Astral's have a bunch of medium energy slots, outside of it's two large missile mounts, but even then it struggles like most hightech ships with using energy weapons that makes the Astral struggle to use more then basic graviton beams and fighting at the level of a destroyer.

The Legion and Odyssey are battlecarriers and battlecruisers both in a way. With the Legion being more of a carrier and the Odyssey more of a cruiser. I'd feel like it's unfair to compare them to the others as they are what we wish all carriers were like. Or at least if we had some smaller battlecarriers to contrast the mobile hanger style of the current ones.

Shepherds, Condors, Geminis, Colossus Mk.IIIs, and the hot mess that is the Prometheus Mk.II are all various forms of "It has a hanger bay, technically" and I feel like they are the extreme side of mobile hanger style where having a hanger bay of some sort was all they really needed to be.

In short I feel like we have, or should have, two competing styles of carrier. Battlecarriers which are proper gunboats with decent and proper hanger capacity, not like a ship with a converted hanger bay. And Mobile Hangers which are as the name implies are largely defenceless carrier ships designed to bring their strikecraft to battle reliably and then play only a support role in battle after they have been deployed.

Ships like the Drover in my opinion, are perfect as they are because they shouldn't be able to defend themselves reliably. As for others and outside of missile artillery, I guess we need to decide if they are one or the other? Should a Heron be a battlecarrier, or just a mobile hanger?

[Morrokain]

Yes, tying fighters to carrier OP is problematic insofar as that a lot of carriers seem OP starved currently. Give them more OP to be capable combat ships and you open up the can of worms that is making them even stronger fighter platforms.

However, differently sized hangars for various fighter classes is, IMO, lame. It makes no sense because all fighters/bombers/etc are comparable in size.

I mentioned it before in the other suggestion thread, but why not give carriers two separate OP pools for fighters and for its own ship loadout. Make these two pools either separate or allow an exchange rate between the two at a 50% loss. Something like that.

This would allow the Condor to still manage to field a Trident bomber wing, for example by leaving the other hangar empty and shuffling some ship OP over to fighter OP. This kind of flexibility is cool to me.

I like this suggestion as a whole in that it preserves build complexity. Depending upon dev constraints, there are a couple of ways I could theorize to go about solving the overall problem as well that would require some additional work but provide some interesting gameplay(build making) in return:

In comparison, weapons have tiers of strength per mount size (in which there are sub tiers based upon weapon quality/rarity) that, though they too scale with OP, they are also balanced through accessibility in the form of mount sizes (as categories) which vary from ship to ship and as a whole increase in accessibility with ship size (and remain a balance lever as such). A mount can fit a size lesser, for instance, to reduce OP but still make use of the slot. Yet, if the slot is categorized as a mixed type (hybrid/synergy/composite/universal), no lesser downgrade is allowed- because mixed slot types are a benefit overall in flexibility and build power in my mind.

For strike craft, the only balancing mechanism is OP. That makes the "fighter bay" slot's value a set number in comparison based upon the overall "item" quality/rarity of what can fit in that slot. Balancing is based solely upon the number of bays vs the opportunity cost of what is available and the OP pool of the carrier. Weapons almost never compete, and hullmods are secondary to "strike craft quality" which is solely determined by OP (there is a little more nuance there, of course, but this is a generalization of the mechanic).

Since the highest efficiency per "strike" (and therefore the highest efficiency small scale and when maxing efficiency late game) comes from the highest OP, players feel inclined to mass those wings exclusively on the bays they have available. There is no limiting factor other than -OP available per bay- since weapons won't be a competing factor in the first place. Weapons will inherently have shorter range and be hindered by flux costs and so reduce the overall defenses of the carrier. Defensive upgrades are therefore attractive to give the carrier "kite-ability" and thereby remain alive if something catches up to them.

Small-medium-large as the definitions could definitely work but might be unclear as a way of describing role/power (I suggested this at one time, but some good counter-points have been brought up on this thread)

Maybe give an additional balance lever to strike craft through "bay types" based upon AI roles (and therefore mirror weapon sizes in balance and give strike craft multiple strength tiers within their respective niches) since this mostly seems to be the OP balance anyway? Since there is Interceptor, Fighter, and Bomber currently available as AI types, this can give concise balancing options and allow for more strike craft versatility in builds. It does increase the complexity of variant balance when regarding ships with bays and what type to give them, but at least an example is already present to streamline the balance mechanisms.

Another solution could be to give the bay types a tech definition to limit different strike craft tech types to the carriers' tech type and of course allow exceptions to that rule in ship definitions. That wouldn't necessarily solve the problem of bombers generally being superior as a strike craft choice- as they inherently have to cost a higher OP since they have a stronger overall strike impact by definition- but would be a start to make bay slots more in line with weapon slots.

All of that being said, flexibility and exceptions to the rule are great. So, maybe give the option of using story points to upgrade a bay slot to the next tier? Idk, that might be even harder to balance, but I like the overall idea and flavor of it at least.