Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Pages: 1 [2] 3

Author Topic: Carriers in 0.95  (Read 8242 times)

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #15 on: October 12, 2021, 06:02:26 PM »

Yup, that's what I was referring to as "endgame boss" in my previous post. Also agree about the hangar queen part.
I thought you meant the Tesseract brothers at the hypershunts.  Ziggurat feels more like a midgame boss.

Clarification:  Midgame in terms of quest progression, and perhaps threat level.  Not player having a fleet equal to a 150k named bounty and/or barely having enough money to build his first colony.
« Last Edit: October 12, 2021, 06:15:42 PM by Megas »
Logged

Nick XR

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 712
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #16 on: October 12, 2021, 06:16:40 PM »

I'm not the best mechanical player at combat, but carriers always seemed like a force multiplier rather than a flat force.  Specifically when you've got a combat line of brawling-with-guns capitals and adding more capitals isn't beneficial because there's not more room for ships to engage with the enemy.  This is when having a carrier or two that can send in supporting waves of fighters that don't have to worry about physical collisions can really focus firepower.

It's certainly not .91a anymore, but I do feel like the current balance rewards a heterogeneous fleet and maybe that's a really good thing?

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #17 on: October 12, 2021, 06:23:01 PM »

It's certainly not .91a anymore, but I do feel like the current balance rewards a heterogeneous fleet and maybe that's a really good thing?
I tried that.  In early game, it took too long for fighters to murder pirate ships and weaker factions' small ships.  In late-game battles, either the fighters ran out (rate at 30%) before my ships' Locusts did, or the carriers died first because they could not defend themselves from an enemy blitz.  I slowly phased out carriers once I saw this, and my fleet did better after I replaced the carriers with better ships (warships or phase ships).
Logged

Wapno

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 215
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #18 on: October 12, 2021, 09:14:57 PM »

I'm not the best mechanical player at combat, but carriers always seemed like a force multiplier rather than a flat force.  Specifically when you've got a combat line of brawling-with-guns capitals and adding more capitals isn't beneficial because there's not more room for ships to engage with the enemy.  This is when having a carrier or two that can send in supporting waves of fighters that don't have to worry about physical collisions can really focus firepower.

It's certainly not .91a anymore, but I do feel like the current balance rewards a heterogeneous fleet and maybe that's a really good thing?
In that case I rather field more escorts instead of carriers. Currently a bunch of frigates, or a destroyer/cruiser assisting my main brawler capitals brings in far more value than carriers. Escorts will flank, harass and distract the target, as well as keeping the opposing escorts from doing the same to my caps, where as fighters will mostly just die to PD.

The only carrier I find worth bothering with in the current update is my Astral, acting as a backline artillery, lobbing Hurricane MIRVs and waves of Flash bombers.
Logged

SCC

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 4112
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #19 on: October 13, 2021, 10:12:45 AM »

Carriers lost nearly all personal skills in this update (and the next one is going to axe the last one, too) and fleetwide skills have been nerfed as well. More importantly, warships' skills got better and there are buffs for officers, too, resulting in skills generally doing very little for carriers. My guess is Alex nerfed carriers at first, then remade skills, without adjusting for the changes in the overall balance, resulting in carriers being sort of "double nerfed".

SapphireSage

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 257
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #20 on: October 14, 2021, 11:11:54 AM »

Yeah, it seems like it was a combo effect of a few things, one was skills getting revamp much harder toward combat ships and less so toward personal carrier skills, and the other were carriers and fighters getting nerfed across the board.

Not only were skills more slanted toward warships and the tier 1 personal carrier skill and the Leadership 3 carrier skill at direct odds with other skills that would benefit carriers, but the fewer personal skills in general also means that the anti-fighter skill "Point Defense" (Advanced Countermeasures 3 in 0.9.1) is a much more common choice in the field than it was in 0.9.1. This combines with the lack of a skill increasing fighter survival rate makes them feel paper thin when running into a fleet with many officers as a larger number of them can now easily rip fighters to shreds with or without adequate weapons for it.

I also feel that the big across the board nerf into every aspect of fighters and carriers in the game was mostly unwarranted. Fighters act as a force multiplier via the coveted ability of being able to attack past allies. Sure, there were some stronger fighters out there, like the Thunders with their previously regular ROF ion cannons which could immediately lock down most non-360 shielded ships. However, the real easy mode strat consisted to combining two much higher performing than their competition components, the Drover and its Reserve Deployment and Sparks the tiniest, fastest, and shielded fighters sporting 5 whole Burst PD lasers in a wing (10 total for only 16 OP) or any other stronger fighter that could go in that slot like Thunders.

In 0.9.1 I wound up starting a carrier only run using an Astral, 2 Herons (Bombers), 3 Moras (Wasps), and 5 Condors (Thunders) and while I'm not the very best StarSector player out there I will say that the run, which ended prior to finding an Astral, did have trouble punching hard enough against pirate cruisers between the 2 herons' bombers that fights would wind up taking long enough for the smaller ships to start running low on CR. It was certainly not the easy ROFL-Stomps that people claimed an all carrier fleet would be, likely due to the fact that it was missing said Astral for more punch and due to the fact that I decided not to use Drovers over the much more vulnerable Condors. It also had a problem that if I had any combat ships at all on the field then all of the carriers would immediately focus all their fighters onto the one combat ship to the detriment of themselves and the battle. I wound up picking up a Falcon-P as a temporary filler and that was a big mistake as then all the Condors and Moras would send their Interceptors to hang out with the Falcon-P who was too timid to engage close enough for the escorts to matter, meanwhile the Condors would be getting destroyed by the frigates their Thunders were meant to counter.
Logged

silfidum

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 16
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #21 on: October 14, 2021, 01:58:53 PM »

Dunno, in this version any fighter that is supposed to be around target for any meaningful amount of time is unviable later in the game. Missile spam could help via clogging PD weapons and possibly segregating targets so less PD and weapon overlap, but there aren't many options with medium missile slots for pilums in vanilla roster, especially carriers.

I assume this is due to more officers with anti-fighter skills plus the removal of damage reduction from player skills so fighters end up very squishy and the increase in replacement rate buff from the new fleet wide skill simply can't keep up in any hard fight. Which eliminates the previous issue of fighter spam generating way more HP to shoot at then most AI fleets could deal with but it kinda overshoots a bit where most of fighter wings simply can't provide much utility in bigger confrontations.

IMO if this is the case then there should be some sort of middle ground where either give something to counteract the anti-fighter skill or plain remove it. Alternatively it could be somewhat viable to remove fighter targeting from non-PD weapons but this also would make attack fighters extremely dangerous to destroyers and to a smaller extent to frigates (they would be zoned out of the engagement range of the carrier at best or get insta-swarmed and killed at worst). Also most projectile based PD is very inaccurate against fighters often failing to hit them even with decent tracking, but I'm not sure what the implication of improving their accuracy may have on missile effectiveness since such weapons also have the same issue where they miss a lot of shots effectively reducing their DPS to a fraction of what is listed.

Also on a less elegant solution there could be a different approach to fighter replacement where instead of being a constant linear production of fighters there could be a bit more variance. For example a fighter could suffer a great reduction of speed or straight up stick to the carrier for X amount of time after replacement but instead the carrier could rearm them faster or straight up every fighter in wing simultaneously hence their replacement rate won't dip so precariously after consistent loss of fighters. Although I guess there could be an issue where a carrier could end up in a situation where it can indefinitely kite a target as long as it has superior speed and sufficient fighters which is tremendously tedious to deal with and play as so maybe there could be some trade offs to be made. Although carrier as it is already loose their 0-flux speed boost while sending out their fighter wings but then again it takes the target some time to get their flux to 0 after fending off fighters too. Maybe there should be a significantly better replacement rate but the carrier will generate flux so flux will be the bottleneck for replacement rate instead of the current percentage while also removing 0-flux boost so you can't effectively kite with fighters? It would be a funny interaction with safety overrides, but at least it would also make more intuitive sense for a carrier since it currently mainly provides the constant 0-flux boost while not reducing carriers range in a meaningful way.

Although I'm not entirely sure why replacement rate is a thing and what purpose it serves so I may be brainstorming against that intention with such proposals so idk.


So far my personal play in vanilla I find carriers decent up to midgame, where you are dealing with ~200k independent \ pirate bounties or comparable fleets. Most wings are a decent addition as an increase of force per space, although I find warthogs being extremely handicapped by their abysmal engagement range. I know that their speed is bad, but 2000 ER makes them almost exclusive to legion, mora and converted hangar use. Interceptors are somewhat weak, but I speculate that they can be of use on cautious or steady officer as a fleet wide PD supplement. Haven't really tried this setup out though. Bombers are a bit of a mixed bag, tbh. It might be a good idea to maybe add more missile variants that go through friendly ships since it hampers some bombers in clutch fights like khopesh and maybe perdition \ flash. Piranhas have a weird interaction with speed boosts where it gets to the target way faster then it's able to shoot its bombs so they tend to circle around the target until they are empty. Or dead. So they probably should get some sort of workaround there, maybe multiple bombs per shot in a spread pattern with slower movement acceleration of the bomber?
 
 Other then those, it's fairly OK roster to play with at that threat level. Although on higher threat it becomes way too dangerous to use any fighter with weapon range of 500 and less since there is too many weapons and missiles on the field creating no-fighter zones, and given how it can be fairly cheap on flux due to officer skill it creates a tangible disadvantage if you use such fighter wings as anything but a temproray HP screen \ escort. And at that point xyphos becomes one of the few options that can do something beside creating a quasi-threat for AI, but ironically they are best as converted hangar wing rather then being on a carrier due to the 0 escort range.
 
 Bombers also quickly become inneficient since any bombing run will most likely guarantee complete loss of all fighters be it escorts or bombers so I instead resort to gaming the replacement rate where I use heron with mining pods and two cobras or, if I feel adventurous, two trident wings so total amount of bombers is within 50% of all fighters and minimizing the replacement time per bombing run in case where all of them die.
 
 
 So far my cookie cutter late game carrier is heron with safety overrides, mining pods, 2 cobras and heavy blaster. Doesn't suffer from constant lack of 0-flux boost due to escort \ engagement spam so it can consistently stay in range of the target and the replacement rate hardly runs out unless someone manages to catch up with the carrier. Also can fend off any small ships such as frigates, which are probably the only non-SO ships that can catch up with SO heron.

Mora looks kind of nice since it has slots for pilums but no mobility system with base speed of 45 makes it a joke since it breaks off the rest of the fleet almost instantly and if the carrier can't catch up with the front line neither can fighters and especially bombers. But then again, haven't really tried to SO them so that might work. Although since you can't built in SO I'm not sure how much OP mora has and it can't have 360 shields like heron.
Logged

Plaje

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 7
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #22 on: October 14, 2021, 02:31:04 PM »

I'm not the best mechanical player at combat, but carriers always seemed like a force multiplier rather than a flat force.  Specifically when you've got a combat line of brawling-with-guns capitals and adding more capitals isn't beneficial because there's not more room for ships to engage with the enemy.  This is when having a carrier or two that can send in supporting waves of fighters that don't have to worry about physical collisions can really focus firepower.

It's certainly not .91a anymore, but I do feel like the current balance rewards a heterogeneous fleet and maybe that's a really good thing?
I see a lot of people saying this, but the problem with this idea is that the fighter skills are spaced out enough that you need to spend almost all 15 points to get them all.

When we talked about it on reddit it basically came down to this: it's anyone's opinion whether carriers should be mainfleet or support ships, but what's not an opinion is the amount of benefit gained per character skill point investment. Carriers give you less by far.
Logged

JUDGE! slowpersun

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 614
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #23 on: October 14, 2021, 03:06:12 PM »

I'm not the best mechanical player at combat, but carriers always seemed like a force multiplier rather than a flat force.  Specifically when you've got a combat line of brawling-with-guns capitals and adding more capitals isn't beneficial because there's not more room for ships to engage with the enemy.  This is when having a carrier or two that can send in supporting waves of fighters that don't have to worry about physical collisions can really focus firepower.

It's certainly not .91a anymore, but I do feel like the current balance rewards a heterogeneous fleet and maybe that's a really good thing?
I see a lot of people saying this, but the problem with this idea is that the fighter skills are spaced out enough that you need to spend almost all 15 points to get them all.

When we talked about it on reddit it basically came down to this: it's anyone's opinion whether carriers should be mainfleet or support ships, but what's not an opinion is the amount of benefit gained per character skill point investment. Carriers give you less by far.

This actually captures some of the main issue.  But kinda ignores hull mods.  Carriers dedicated hull-mods are limited to 2 hull mods in vanilla.  Count 'em.  Two.  I'm not saying more are necessary as some sort of balance (since some possible additional hull mod carrier love could really destabilize game balance), but maybe carriers should be judged less on an ability to spam out fighters/bombers as missiles.  Like adding a fuel requirement so that fighters and bombers aren't just judged based on how fast they can either swarm something or dump bombs like Slim Pickens...  ArmaA mod is really pushing the limits of what carriers and fighters can do, and kinda already has implemented what amounts to fuel via re-arming requirement.  Or maybe just a hull-mod that increase bomber damage against armor or something.

Still, since so many fewer levels now, maybe carrier skills need to be consolidated... especially since colony skills being dropped.
Logged
I wasn't always a Judge...

Linnis

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1009
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #24 on: October 14, 2021, 04:11:06 PM »

Carriers reaching a critical mass I don't think it's as much of a problem as you think. I almost solely play with 8000+ DP as i can have a 20ship deploy, 30 hangar slot fight vs thriple stacked nex invasion fleets without any slowdowns. Fighters if left alone will get shredded by a couple of captials, of you got a dozen wings killing a frigate yes they overpower that one frigate, but your captials are not getting cover or support and this situation can cause one of my captials to get taken down (yes, paragons too)

Overall, fighters seem perfect when the game is played like this, unmoded deployment fighters are Olson not worth it.

I guess one way or could be done is have carriers take up less DP, this way we solve the problem of them not bringing enough firepower without directly bugging their power.
« Last Edit: October 14, 2021, 04:12:47 PM by Linnis »
Logged

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #25 on: October 14, 2021, 04:33:53 PM »

This actually captures some of the main issue.  But kinda ignores hull mods.  Carriers dedicated hull-mods are limited to 2 hull mods in vanilla.  Count 'em.  Two.
And one of them, Recovery Shuttles, only reduces crew casualties.  Crew is generally cheap and disposable, making that hullmod minor campaign QoL at best and a waste of valuable OP at worst.  That leaves one relevant carrier hullmod left, all-important Expanded Deck Crew, which is the ITU of carriers.  Deck Crew affects replacement rate, the prime stat for carriers.  It is essential for carriers that do their primary job of using fighters.  (Brawlers or missileships with few bays do not count.)

The problem with carrier hullmods is if they are good enough, carriers will need them to do their job, and they will not have enough OP left for a viable warship-lite weapons package (if they also use good fighters like they should).  If I need to choose between a unarmed carrier that uses fighters optimally or a mediocre carrier with enough guns to defend itself, I am taking the unarmed carrier with good fighters because a carrier's job is to use fighters.
Logged

JUDGE! slowpersun

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 614
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #26 on: October 15, 2021, 12:33:53 AM »

And one of them, Recovery Shuttles, only reduces crew casualties.  Crew is generally cheap and disposable, making that hullmod minor campaign QoL at best and a waste of valuable OP at worst.  That leaves one relevant carrier hullmod left, all-important Expanded Deck Crew, which is the ITU of carriers.  Deck Crew affects replacement rate, the prime stat for carriers.  It is essential for carriers that do their primary job of using fighters.  (Brawlers or missileships with few bays do not count.)

The problem with carrier hullmods is if they are good enough, carriers will need them to do their job, and they will not have enough OP left for a viable warship-lite weapons package (if they also use good fighters like they should).  If I need to choose between a unarmed carrier that uses fighters optimally or a mediocre carrier with enough guns to defend itself, I am taking the unarmed carrier with good fighters because a carrier's job is to use fighters.

I'm assuming that Recovery shuttles hull mod was much less useless when crew experience was a thing (and it seems to be waiting in the wings to make a comeback), but for now it does seem to be much less useful.  As for running an optimal but unarmed carrier, besides the obvious solution of shaving OP by using crappier PD and weapons, I was also kinda assuming that if a few more carrier hullmods were added, Alex would prolly also fiddle with carrier OP (and/or OP cost of some of the fighters and bombers).  But for a game with a crazy amount of hullmods, with most being dedicated to weapons, shields and armor (along with the newly added phase ship hullmods in next update, may it arrive soon), the presence of only two dedicated carrier hullmods seems... odd at best, or a purposeful oversight at worst.
Logged
I wasn't always a Judge...

red_frog

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 12
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #27 on: October 15, 2021, 03:05:11 AM »

Maybe adding a new type of crew like for example fighter pilots (who can gather experience like marines) would make Recovery shuttles a viable hullmod. That way the crew losses for carriers would matter as loosing experienced fighter pilots made them less effective.
Logged

Megas

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 12118
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #28 on: October 15, 2021, 05:21:47 AM »

I'm assuming that Recovery shuttles hull mod was much less useless when crew experience was a thing (and it seems to be waiting in the wings to make a comeback), but for now it does seem to be much less useful.  As for running an optimal but unarmed carrier, besides the obvious solution of shaving OP by using crappier PD and weapons, I was also kinda assuming that if a few more carrier hullmods were added, Alex would prolly also fiddle with carrier OP (and/or OP cost of some of the fighters and bombers).  But for a game with a crazy amount of hullmods, with most being dedicated to weapons, shields and armor (along with the newly added phase ship hullmods in next update, may it arrive soon), the presence of only two dedicated carrier hullmods seems... odd at best, or a purposeful oversight at worst.
Not really for the combat junkies.  Back in pre-0.8 releases, fighting even without skills that affected crew gave plenty of xp to maintain a small to moderate surplus of elite crew late in the game.  Now what the skills did that boosts crew xp and reduced ship requirements was let player train more green crew into elites and sell them for a handsome profit (because player had far more elite crew than he needed).  In other words, crew skills translated into a money skill.  All that crew experience did was make the game harder early, with ships having max CR of 50% (green crew) and late game easier with ships having max CR of 80% (all elite crew), and clog the inventory with multiple crews, so player plays an inventory mini-game of crew management (I call crew Tetris), which I did not like.

As for carrier hullmods, I guess it seemed like a fun idea right after changing from fighters-as-ships to fighters-as-missiles.  The problem is a carrier's job is to use fighters the best it can, and doing that by getting the best fighters and Expanded Deck Crew takes OP away from a weapons package the carrier could use (and used to use when fighters were ships).  Alex wanted to make carriers more fun to pilot, but his changes ran opposite of that because now the carrier does not have the OP to support weapons (because not enough OP left for ITU and enough caps and vents, and carriers have stats of a warship one class lighter), which leaves an unarmed or minimally armed freighter that hauls fighters instead of cargo.  Do people have fun piloting a dedicated freighter with no guns in combat?  I do not think so.

Now that Alex has overnerfed carriers in 0.95, with enemies with superior officer/skill power and a more awkward and limited skill system, fighters are in their worst shape as they ever been.  About as weak as they were in 0.7x, the last releases when fighters were ships, but now player cannot control fighters beyond that of missiles.  Fighters just buzz around like Locusts or Ziggurat's motes, well... more like the old ship systems that launched drones.
Logged

SCC

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 4112
    • View Profile
Re: Carriers in 0.95
« Reply #29 on: October 15, 2021, 08:56:00 AM »

I'm assuming that Recovery shuttles hull mod was much less useless when crew experience was a thing
Not really. Training crew was decently fast and fighters were at about the same strength as they are currently. Perhaps more importantly, there weren't any carrier-specific hullmods back then.

(and it seems to be waiting in the wings to make a comeback)
Some people have wanted it back ever since it was removed and nothing has changed. Don't hold your breath on it.

As for running an optimal but unarmed carrier, besides the obvious solution of shaving OP by using crappier PD and weapons, I was also kinda assuming that if a few more carrier hullmods were added, Alex would prolly also fiddle with carrier OP (and/or OP cost of some of the fighters and bombers).  But for a game with a crazy amount of hullmods, with most being dedicated to weapons, shields and armor (along with the newly added phase ship hullmods in next update, may it arrive soon), the presence of only two dedicated carrier hullmods seems... odd at best, or a purposeful oversight at worst.
The issue with carrier loadouts is that you want to focus on what you want to do best. Carriers with all OP spent on fighters and hullmods is similar to other ships using a few weapons and having all other mounts empty or hardly used (e.g. an Eagle with no medium energy guns, Paragon with 4 Plasma Cannons and maybe 4 other guns) - they are loadouts that are focused on a few guns, because you can get more out of getting more flux and hullmods, than getting more guns that you can't afford to fire anyway. Carriers are just more exacerbated in that their best guns, fighters, also happen to be flux free and of great range, so you lose little by spending all your OP on making fighters perform as good as possible. The easiest way of making carriers play and fit more like other ships is to make fighters use the carrier's flux in some way, but I don't expect this to happen. Or fighters could be nerfed so much, they are worse than even the worst of guns, so there would be no incentive to use them instead of actual guns. This sort of happened, but instead of players choosing guns over fighters on their carriers, they choose warships over carriers in their fleets.
Pages: 1 [2] 3