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[Gothars]

Do civilian ships currently serve a game design purpose? I fear you could just as well delete all freighters/tankers/transporters from the game, give the combat ships more cargo/fuel/crew space - and literally nothing about the gameplay would change. Am I wrong? I'd like to be, cause I loving having civ ships in the game for their contribution to, well, feeling like a proper space captain! But if all they are is decoration, that's quite unsatisfying.

Spoiler

I tried to come up with ways to give them meaning for some time now. Thinking: how to make the logistics part of the game into a fun challenge? Maybe tone down the Bulk transport skill, maybe make civs more vulnerable to environmental hazards? But in the end that is all irrelevant annoyance if civs are not a part of Starsector's combat, of it's main appeal.

There were of course attempts to give them a more participatory role in combat, the hullmods Assault Package and Escort Package. But that didn't really work out, they could never shine in an active combat role, the hullmods are now removed. Just the anemic Nav Relay survives, but is more fit for back-line combatants than proper civilians.

I think the only fun part of civilian ship combat participation can and should be this: to protect them. Retrospectively, to hunt the enemy's. But, aside from the early game escape scenario, you never have to do either.

That in turn leads to ideas about special combat scenarios where civs are involved: in the campaign, ambushing and raiding the civilian part of the enemy  fleet. In combat, running your fast ships through the enemy border to get to their civs. But if these things are done to you, if your civs are forced to fight while your combat fleet is made unavailable, that seems super frustrating.

[close]

My suggestion is this:

• Encourage civs to enter the battlefield by introducing logistic support hullmods with enormous fleet stat bonuses.
  
  
• Scale the hullmod bonuses on cargo/fuel/crew space of the ship that carries them, linking them organically to civilians.
  
  
• Prevent those ships from just hiding (boring) by only applying the bonuses when they are near an objective (Nav Buoy, Sensor Array and Comms).
  
  
• (optional)  Prevent the loss of civ ships from being super frustrating by introducing a milder defeat option for them (besides disabled/destroyed) called "surrendered". At 0%  hull civilian ships don't explode, but are briefly invulnerable and signal surrender by shooting white flares all around them. If you win the engagement, your surrendered civs will have a high chance of not gaining d-mods and lose less crew and CR then disabled ships. If you lose, they will be recoverable from the battle debris field and contain their crew. (As a side effect, enemy surrendered ships increase loot when you win and so enable a less bloodthirsty pirate playstile.)

I believe these factors should make it the best tactical decision to deploy some civs, make them visible in combat and have fun defending them. While simultaneously upping the importance of combat objectives. I imagine it would also be really entertaining to hunt enemy civs behind the lines to stop their bonuses from applying. And, hopefully, this would be relatively easy to implement.






What could these logistic support hullmods look like? Here are some examples, but they are just that - examples. In the end the actual effects could be anything, as long as they make the deployment of civs/hunting of enemy civs a sound tactical decision in most combat scenarios.

Combat Logistics Hub
Scales with base cargo capacity. Gives a combat readiness bonus (1-20%) to all ships and increase peak combat readiness time of all ships by 10-100%. Only applies when adjacent to a friendly objective. You can operate up to two CLHs simultaneously, the weaker one has its effects reduced by 50%.

Rescue Operations Center
Scales with base crew capacity. Makes your disabled ships always recoverable with (+2-20%) CR, reduces crew losses of all ships by 10-90% and reduced overload duration (5-50%) of your ships. Only applies when adjacent to a friendly objective. You can operate up to two ROCs simultaneously, the weaker one has its effects reduced by 50%.

Infernium Interference Furnace
Scales with base fuel capacity. Selectively destabilizes the hyperspace bubble surrounding the battlefield, allowing your reinforcements to enter the battle from the sides. The higher the relative bonus, the farther towards the enemy your ships will enter. Reduces the enemie's ability to enter from the sides by the comparative difference of their Infernium interference. Allows re-deployment of retreated ships. Only applies when adjacent to a friendly objective. You can operate up to two IIFs simultaneously, the weaker one has its effects reduced by 50%.



Of course there already exists a hullmod that is supposed to encourage civs to enter combat, NavRelay.

"When deployed in combat, increases the nav rating of your fleet by 2/3/4/5 percent, depending on this ship's hull size." The bonus it gives is so small that it's not really worth risking the loss of a logistics ship for it, though - and were it bigger, you had better put it on a military ship.

[SCC]

Maybe tone down the Bulk transport skill, maybe make civs more vulnerable to environmental hazards?

You know, the number of civilian ships never mattered to me. I would get slower ones as my combat ships got slower. But if I needed more cargo or fuel, I just got more of them. It never made anything harder or easier.

(optional)  Prevent the loss of civ ships from being super frustrating by introducing a milder defeat option for them (besides disabled/destroyed) called "surrendered". At 0%  hull civilian ships don't explode, but are briefly invulnerable and signal surrender by shooting white flares all around them. If you win the engagement, your surrendered civs will have a high chance of not gaining d-mods and lose less crew and CR then disabled ships. If you lose, they will be recoverable from the battle debris field and contain their crew. (As a side effect, enemy surrendered ships increase loot when you win and so enable a less bloodthirsty pirate playstile.)

I think I would rather just make them instant capture points that the enemy can shepherd to his side of the battle and make it "retreat" to your fleet. Enemy ship that was escorting it goes away, you regain control of the ship. You could choose whether to try to capture the ship for loot, or to shoot it to deny the bonus.

[SafariJohn]

What I find interesting is how many civilian ships were deployed yesterday in the Discord tournament. Mainly for CH, but some were for ECM/Nav bonuses and a few (triple Prometheus) were even for tanking.

Things I think would make civilian ships more attractive in combat without special civ-only mechanics:
- better ECM mechanics (not all one way or the other)
- being more tanky/evasive
- less bad losing like:
  - ways to deescalate (like retreating, mid-combat negotiations, etc.)
  - easier retreating
  - harder to lose ships permanently
- enemies using their civ ships for CH/ECM/Nav/tanking/distraction/whatever advantage
- other deployables besides fighters like mines, missiles, and stuff
- combat hullmods that have a flat value or a scaling value depending on cargo/crew/fuel capacity

[SCC]

- being more tanky/evasive

A hullmod that grants freighters +1 armour and +4 hull for each filled cargo slot? A Tarsus would become as tanky as an Enforcer (base Enforcer, at least). An Atlas could get 16 000 hull and 2 250 armour. Onslaught-grade tanking! The downside would be that this would encourage players to keep all the metal they find and discard it only when finding something more valuable, which would quickly get tedious.

[SafariJohn]

- being more tanky/evasive

A hullmod that grants freighters +1 armour and +4 hull for each filled cargo slot? A Tarsus would become as tanky as an Enforcer (base Enforcer, at least). An Atlas could get 16 000 hull and 2 250 armour. Onslaught-grade tanking!

Neat! Don't think you can check filled cargo, though. That's a fleet-level stat.

The downside would be that this would encourage players to keep all the metal they find and discard it only when finding something more valuable, which would quickly get tedious.

I do that all the time? It's easy?

[SCC]

Neat! Don't think you can check filled cargo, though. That's a fleet-level stat.

I wonder if you could add a hidden hullmod to all ships that would set all of their cargo space to 0, grab getExcessCargoCapacitySupplyCost() (the only parameter that determines over capacity supply cost is absolute over capacity, and at 0 fleet cargo capacity all cargo is over capacity) to calculate fleet cargo capacity, then restore all the individual ships' cargo capacities. Then you grab all the cargo capacity of ships with this junk armour hullmod, add them together, then allocate the bonus proportionally to all ships with the junk armour hullmod (or biggest to smallest, or smallest to biggest, but I think I like proportional distribution better).

[xenoargh]

In general, I like this idea, and have been advocating for something like it for quite some time*.

The problems:

1. If these bonuses are nifty enough that players want them all the time, fine, now their Civvies are always deployed. This impacts DP (and game performance) obviously.
2. If these bonuses are merely, "nice to have" then players will generally avoid using them in favor of more direct-damage combat stuff... and we're right back to square one.

So, the bonuses have to be pretty darn useful. I don't think the proposed bonuses meet those criteria; they're simply not powerful enough that I'd be like, "yeah, I'm totally going to bring in the Drams for this fight".

Spoiler

In Rebal, the approach I've generally taken is that most of the Civvie stuff still sucks for combat, but has enough Armor / Flux that they're OK-ish meat-shields, especially during early game when it's more helpful to players on the low end of the power curve.

[close]

I propose:

A. Combat Engineer: a Hull Mod that allows a ship to repair Armor and Hull to nearby ships during combat, preferably by deploying a special drone with an AI that seeks out nearby ships to repair (I had one of these back in Vacuum). Needs to be fast / effective enough that we'll want to rotate damaged ships out of the line to be repaired. Ideally, drone dies, no more fixes until ship can produce a new one.

B. Synergistic Targeting Array: a Hull Mod that allows nearby ships to "share realtime targeting data", and increases their range by 5/10/15/20% depending on the largest ship giving the effect. This stacks with ECM!

C. Ammunition Supply Chain: a Hull Mod that allows ships to restore ammunition to nearby vessels, again, via a drone that can be exploded pretty easily.

D. ECM Suite: increases fleet ECM by a smallish amount (0.5/1/2/4) per deployed ship. Stacks on current Hull Mods, or is Civvie-only, and the other one with a similar effect is Mil-only and better-enough that you want to consider it.

E. Tactical Drive Disruptors: a Hull Mod that imposes a malus on enemy ship speeds in a fairly wide area of effect.

F. Fighter Replenishment: launches a drone towards nearest Carrier that has low fighter CR. Bumps it back up, with some upper limit (say, 75%).

G. Defensive Hyperwave Relay: pushes Soft Flux into any nearby ship that is Phased.

G. Defensive Analyzer: improves PD weapon performance (damage, shot speeds, or whatever) substantially (5/10/15/20) in a wide area. Makes ship able to support combat vessels trying to shoot down incoming.



I still think there should be battle types where the player or enemy must defend their civvie ships besides the Escape scenario, which is always a bit meh, as well. I'm OK with that being "frustrating", if it occasionally results in a "fun loss" where it's tricky but there's a chance that clever piloting saves the day. Let the player spend a Story Point as their Get Out Of Jail Free card if needbe.

*Years, lol. This idea's roots were in Vacuum, for goodness sakes.

[Lawrence Master-blaster]

A hullmod that grants freighters +1 armour and +4 hull for each filled cargo slot? A Tarsus would become as tanky as an Enforcer (base Enforcer, at least). An Atlas could get 16 000 hull and 2 250 armour. Onslaught-grade tanking! The downside would be that this would encourage players to keep all the metal they find and discard it only when finding something more valuable, which would quickly get tedious.

Okay, but only if the cargo is destroyed proportionally as the ship takes armor/hull damage.

[Rusty Edge]

 I love the idea of more options for support networks. Preferably they would supply bonuses that cater to certain tactics, instead of becoming a burdensome new meta, as in: solid military fleets without support networks still being viable and practical.

 How about conversion mods that cater to the likes of combat frieghters? They could sacrifice cargo space to give the ship a unique combat role.

 For instance, I find hounds and cerberus to be very useful for lighting fast strikes and harassment. I have to manage them a little ofcourse, and they have short time of practical use on the battlefield, but they rock for defeat in detail tactics.

 A combat conversion hullmod that would complement them VERY well would be a self repair feature. Narratively, the cargo bays are converted into storage for specialized parts and tools.
 Statistically, the frieghter would lose a flat 75/150/300/600 cargo space,  and increase the skeleton crew by something like 5/10/20/40, or perhaps a simple 50%.
 In combat,  hull restores at a rate of 2.5% or so per second, but only when the ship would receive the 0-flux speed bonus. This way,  the ship is not so much "tanky" as much as a very effective skirmisher, coming in for a strike before falling back to recover.

 I know this is already a feature of elite combat endurance, but no sane admiral would stick an officer in a Hound or a mule, and combat endurance only repairs up to 25% hull, so it's just not practical for hot in run, as much as pure survivability.

[Goumindong]

So i have thought about this and... i kinda like the idea. But also it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. How are these civilian ships being logistics hubs for a fleet in the middle of a battle? Why are these things not integrated into combat vessels?

I can kind of answer the first question. But only in a way that is functionally challenging to implement. Logistics ships could utilize a special fighters type to funnel supplies to ships. This gives logistics ships a reason to exist (mid combat resupply). But i cannot answer the second question with regards to general logistics capacity to any reasonable amount.

Then again neither do dedicated logistics ships either and that is kinda the problem. No active navy uses a dedicated logistics ship that stays with the fleet and hauls fuel with them*. Logistics ships exist but exist in a supply line rather than as a cache. No active shipping company sails two ships together, one to carry fuel, and one to carry cargo. Its just... bad design. No exploration vessels exist without enough fuel to get them to where they want to go and back; its bad design to not do this.

Though there are vehicles that are not designed to do direct combat things but are still functionally important to immediate combat (largely EWACS and aerial refueling)

So a reasonable construction of space ships that would exist would be

1) Haulers. Haulers carry enough fuel to make their hauls, some also trade cargo space for defensive measures.
2) Logistics Hubs. Effectively Combat Ships with only defensive capability
3) Salvage Rigs
4) Exploration/Survey Vessels
6) Exploitation Vessels (miners)
7) EWar Ships
Dedicated Combat Ships

Each one of these needs to have enough fuel capacity to get where its going on its own. A dedicated fuel ship almost by definition cannot run with the fleet. Its explicitly dead weight in your list. So lets think about these other types of ships and how we can get them into combat. Exploration/exploitation/haulers/salvage rigs are basically right out. At least in their pure terms. With the exceptions of the ones that are combat variants. And making these ships kind of combat variants also makes sense for lots of things but in the end this is kind of a crap shoot.

This leaves Ewar Ships and Logistics Hubs. Logistics Hubs would utilize fighters to funnel CR to ships that are below their CR limit. Each fighter landed or destroyed eats a certain amount of supplies after the battle is over. And each supply supplies the ship that the fighter flies to by the amount of CR that the fighter can haul in supplies to that ship. These fighters would have a low speed and toughness but a very long range. Similarly an additional AI command would need to be made that allows logistics resupply. (like a resupply point, which gives the order to fly to this location and if you're below 1/2 of your starting CR). Resupply Fighters would prioritize ships that have the resupply order and ships with the lowest CR relative to their starting CR.

Ewar ships are easier. They're big slow ships for their class with no defenses or weaponry except passive(shield/hull) that have a hull classification twice as large as their baseline size. So a frigate EWAR ship would gain ITU bonuses like it was a destroyer. And a destroyer EWAR ship would gain ITU bonuses like it was a capital. Of course since these ships have no weapons ITU isn't valuable on them. But it would give you a "cheap" way to deploy capital sized ECM, Nav Relays, and High Resolution Sensors. Adding ECM/Nav/HRS to a combat ship takes a lot of power away from it. And adding them to a civilian ships is foolish because civilian ships aren't actually big enough/cheap enough to make this make a lot of sense. You could add these to an atlas or prometheus but these ships are too big and slow to effectively defend even if you might actually want to spend 10 DP on capital sized ECM, Nav, and built in HRS.


*there is a "hub" ship that only really exists to carry supplies but this is different because it doesn't actually carry supplies as part of its general duties by hauling it with them out to sea and then distributing it. It collects supplies from shuttle ships that move supplies to the fleet. The point of the hub ship is to reduce the duration that fighting ships are disabled by resupply by having an efficient transfer system.

edit: I suppose something else you could do is make deploying "true" civilian ships deployment point free.

That is. Each "true" civilian ship gets a unique unremovable hullmod that decreases their deployment point cost to zero so long as they do not have a fighter bay/converted hangar. Combat freighters can get similarly reduced deployment costs but not to 100%. This way you can put Nav/ECM/HRS on your civilian ships and then send them into combat for free, taking the risk of having them blown up because they're easy to blow up, for the advantage of extra Nav/ECM/Vision. (this would also give players a way to add themselves with a command ship for those that wanted to take advantage of operations center without being in a combat ship)

[Aeson]

I don't want to see civilian ships in combat except in pursuit engagements or when there's no reasonable alternative to fielding them; they're generally easy kills, they're liable to get in the way if there's a reason for them to stay close to the fighting, and while you might play on max battle size with DP to spare for luxury units I don't - and even so I occasionally see noticeable input lag in larger battles, especially when large numbers of fighters are present.

[Gothars]

So, the bonuses have to be pretty darn useful. I don't think the proposed bonuses meet those criteria; they're simply not powerful enough that I'd be like, "yeah, I'm totally going to bring in the Drams for this fight".

I was going for "extremely useful in some (not too rare) situations". You'd always want a logistics hub if you have ships with under 40%CR, as it would put them over. You'd always want a Rescue Operations Center if you expect heavy losses in a fight. You'd always want a Interference Furnace if you face an opponent with many carriers/LRM ships, or with strong support civs, to get to them quickly. But you'd not necessarily want to always have all of these - if there is absolutely no choice involved that would be boring, too. But as I said, just exampels and the actual effects/strenght would be absolutely up to Alex' balancing chops.

I love the idea of more options for support networks. Preferably they would supply bonuses that cater to certain tactics, instead of becoming a burdensome new meta, as in: solid military fleets without support networks still being viable and practical.

Yeah, like that.

How about conversion mods that cater to the likes of combat frieghters? They could sacrifice cargo space to give the ship a unique combat role.

I'd like that, but it's a separate idea, isn't it? Combat freighters are already plenty visible, after all.

So i have thought about this and... i kinda like the idea. But also it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. How are these civilian ships being logistics hubs for a fleet in the middle of a battle? Why are these things not integrated into combat vessels?

You could integrate the hullmods into combat ships, they would just be far less effective in utilizing it - they scale with cargo/fuel/crew capacity, after all.

[smithney]

Fielding civ ships sounds like a playstyle niche akin to Derelict Ops to me. I do like the cargo-based combat bonus idea, but I don't think it should be encouraged as a general playstyle.

The idea that pure logistics ships could act like moving objectives has its merit. Something to make combat interesting for trader playstyles. At the same time, smuggler and pirate playstyles expecting combat to happen could invest into combat freighters, more reliable in combat if not as effective logistically.

There is still a design space opportunity to make logistics ships matter in lategame fights. Basic Prometheus has hints of this with its design, so perhaps actual dedicated high-end military logistics hulls could be introduced to ingrain these concepts into the game. As another example, I truly loved my exploration base Invictus build in my last run, and hulls like Apogee, Venture, Odyssey or the capital Mk.IIs do come with a hint of this flavor, too.

The more I think of it, perhaps some capital-sized ships should take up the logistical burden in military fleets. If logistics ships became "moving objectives", then it makes sense for combat anchors to double up on their role. For trade fleets, "moving objectives" would represent a unique combat challenge. Meanwhile, "cornerstone capitals" would rid military fleets of the mundane dead weight pure logistical ships represent, if at a premium. Exploration fleets are already taking the middle road with ships like Venture and Odyssey. I think there is quite some free design space if Alex ever picks up a similar approach.

[Drone_Fragger]

A better option in my opinion is not to make civilian ships want to be in combat (there is no reason to attempt to force specifically civilian vessels into combat), but to provide a gameplay reason for them to be in combat, such that you have a reason to give them some amount of combat power.

Best idea I can think of is something like a rock paper scissors style minigame: if your fleet gets "ambushed" (exactly what qualifies, not sure. something with sensor readings, e-burn status, etc), you have to decide how to position your forces or respond to the threat (eg, "hold back the bulk of your forces to protect your logistics support" "chase the enemy fleet to force combat" "disengage while the enemy chases a rearguard detatchment", etc style responses).

If you pick badly compared to what the enemy fleet comp is and what they decide to do, you have to do a retreat style scenario where you have a random selection of your ships available for deployment at the start (to represent your fleet being mis-positioned to the enemy, and they've attacked your logistics train), with the ability to deploy as normal once you've successfully retreated your (enforced spawn) logistics vessels off the map.

Speed and ship size could tie into this as well - Perhaps this could be a type of fleet combat only available to ships (on both sides) with a burn speed or tactical speed of a certain limit, or even by ship size (destroyers and frigates) perhaps, to ensure that you need to keep at least some smaller ships in your fleet to act as "fast response" ships for these type of emergencies.

Firstly, this gives a reason to have some amount of combat power, even if just support weapons, on your civilian ships. A phaeton isn't going to add much combat help for instance, but it might help delay the enemy advance if it's got a converted hanger with thunders in, or you've fitted a salamader missle to your dram so it can provide support fire.

Secondly, it gives reasons to take different types of freighters and fuel haulers over just "whatever is biggest". Suddenly it might be better to take 2 collosi or a bunch of tarsus's over an atlas simply to help provide fire support in a ambush situation. This also then opens a reason for more "combat freighters" to exist (and be added), if they may actually have to try and fight off a bunch of hounds and wolves. Taking mules, for instance, might be a good idea over buffalos, whereas currently early on you'd probably just take buffalos.

Lastly, it provides incentive to keep smaller ships around still in late game fleets to act as logistic defense, if that route is taken.

This could even be applied by the player as well, to allow smaller player fleets to make hit and run attacks against trade convoys and attempt to outmaneuver the defenders to force the retreat style pursuit in the same way.

[coldiceEVO]

I want a civ hull sitting on the side opens spawn and retreat point on the left or right border.