I think if a range modifier was needed (and I don't think it's the solution), basing it on ship speed would be more appropriate than hull size. Fast carriers should be short ranged, because chasing them is annoying. Slow carriers needs to be long ranged, because they can't get away once caught.
Probably yeah. The test mod was something I threw together in less than an hour as a baseline example to test the original suggestion. I definitely didn't put a ton of thought into it. Adding changes such as what ships get what range modifier is easy, so I can make changes along those lines if anyone wants to test out how it feels. Just throw out specifics and I'll change things.
*EDIT* Hah annnd I completely forgot I had set all the vanilla wing's OP to 0 to make it easier to test things in my TC... Corrected that in the test mod DL.
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From here below "fighters" = "all strike craft" just for clarity.
My take on fighter mechanics is still the same: defensive AI + replacement rate mechanic + fast carriers = boring gameplay.
The thing is, there aren't a whole lot of good solutions either, imo. Some that have been suggested before that I remember:
1. Fighter losses generate hard or soft flux for the carrier. (Terrible for hybrid ships and further reinforces the concept of weaponless carriers.)
2. Fighter replacements are limited. (Carriers become missile ships without an autoforge. They no longer have any staying power in a battle, and its still boring to kill all the fighters first.)
3. Buff anti-fighter weapons or nerf fighters. (Could certainly work but at what point do carriers become something the player avoids? We've had past updates where they were pretty useless and spam is an edge case not the standard.)
4. Go back to fighter losses costing supplies. (Campaign drawbacks generally don't work well to balance combat without a lot of other moving parts involved.)
5. Large radius AOE anti-fighter weapons that specialize in eliminating concentrated spam. (Probably the best suggestion imo, but NPC fleets would have to actually have some equipped and yet not enough that once again carriers aren't used.)
6. Various ways of limiting how much an LPC (so essentially the Spark) can be equipped on any one individual carrier - especially small ones like the Drover. (Definitely an interesting idea but what would the details be? What are the cons?)
7. Separate out OP cost of equipping wings to a different resource pool and balance carriers around this. (Variant of 6. that also addresses weaponless carriers. Removes build dynamic of player choosing weapon upgrades at the cost of wing upgrades.)
8. Let replacement rate go all the way to 0%. (Same drawback as 2.)
- So range is a natural balance lever to try. I agree that some sort of additional balance lever is likely needed. Another one that comes to mind that is moddable would be to vary the rate at which the replacement rate decreases from carrier to carrier.