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[BigBrainEnergy]

Originally posted this in killer of fate's thread, but I feel like we have different ideas for how to buff carriers so I figure I should make this it's own thread.

Officers having skills that boost fighters would be nice, but making skills specifically for carriers comes with its own problems. You could add carrier bonuses to every skill, but then the sum of 5-7 skill effects would make fighters much stronger than they are now and fighter balance has always been a delicate thing (not to mention support doctrine carriers would become a big headache). Plus, Alex has been tweaking the skills a lot over the last few patches and I imagine that if he wanted to do this he would have by now.

Instead I think the best approach is to attach fighter bonuses to the elite part of each skill so carriers don't end up too powerful, but it would still be interesting picking out the 1-3 effects you want for the fighters on that ship. Plus it gives the player a little more incentive to pilot carriers.


Imagine something like:

• Target analysis (elite): fighters get +100% damage to weapons and engines
• Damage control (elite): replacement rate floor is raised from 30% to 50%
• Helmsmanship (elite): fighters get +50% maneuverability
• Point defense (elite): fighters deal +50% damage against fighters and missiles
• Impact mitigation (elite): fighters take 50% reduced damage to their engines
• Field modulation (elite): fighter overload duration reduced by 50%
• Combat endurance (elite): reduces the rate at which the fighter replacement rate decreases due to fighter losses by 25%, and increases the rate at which it recovers by 25%
• Ballistic mastery (elite): fighters deal 5% additional damage with ballistic weapons
• Systems expertise (elite): fighters gain 10% top speed
• Missile specialization (elite): missiles launched from fighters get +25% hit points

• Gunnery implants (elite): fighters gain +100 range for ballistic and energy weapons
• Energy weapon mastery (elite): fighters deal 5% additional damage with energy weapons
• Ordnance expertise (elite): fighters gain 10% rate of fire for ballistic and energy weapons
• Polarized armor (elite): fighters take up to 20% reduced damage when near the carrier

*EDIT*
After reading most of the discussion, my current idea is to nuke the current bonuses from fighter uplink, and instead replace it with a hullmod that gives fighters bonuses based on the skills of the commanding officer. If you are a fan of the current bonuses, don't worry! Those will be attached to some of the skill effects, so you can still get them in addition to picking up other bonuses (such as: gunnery implants giving +100 range and increased target leading accuracy).

The limiting factor to prevent fighter spam snowballing into a mess would be simple: the total fighter bays affected by this hullmod cannot exceed 8 across the fleet. If you go over, all the effects shut off. A softcap works for carrier group because it applies to every hangar in your fleet, but for this bonus you have to deliberately place the hullmod on the ships of your choice so a hardcap would be better for its simplicity. The concept is already a bit complicated with a hullmod granting bonuses based on skills, so then also having to track how much of the full effect you're getting once you go over 8 bays would be a bit too complex for a tier 1 skill and potentially abuse-able in unforseen ways.

This does introduce the potential problem of accidentally shutting off all your bonuses if you salvage a ship that has the hullmod, but I would take a similar approach as phase anchor and not allow NPC/enemy fleets to use the hullmod at all. This also fits right in with the fact that enemy fleets do not use neural link, which is another hullmod that is dependent on a skill to work which also happens to set a nice precedent for this type of thing.


Here is a mockup of what that might look like:

hullmod version

[close]

old idea

[close]

[Shinr]

That is quite neat.

But, unfortunately, Alex believes that the players will suffer FOMO from not using ALL of the skill bonuses and that they will be force funneled into a battlecarrier playstyle at the expense of other ways of playing, which is why many, many, many suggestions like this one were rejected/ignored.

[BigBrainEnergy]

Ironic, because the current system funnels officers into being built for battle carriers if they get put into carriers at all. Not that I don't see what he's saying, but having officers skills basically have no effect on their performance as carriers doesn't feel good.

Maybe you could make it so there's a hullmod that grants fighter bonuses based on officer skills. More or less you could use the same bonuses as above, but you need a hullmod to activate them? That would help mitigate the fomo factor because it costs ordnance points to get the bonuses.

[mr. domain]

That is quite neat.

But, unfortunately, Alex believes that the players will suffer FOMO from not using ALL of the skill bonuses and that they will be force funneled into a battlecarrier playstyle at the expense of other ways of playing, which is why many, many, many suggestions like this one were rejected/ignored.

Perhaps instead of using the elite font which would emphasize the carrier bonus, the fighter bonus could instead be headed in the format of "affects: fighters". Another thing could be to tie the efficacy of carrier elite bonuses to one or both green carrier skills. E.g, the carrier bonuses for elite skills are grayed out in the skill tab initially, and one of the carrier skills gets a bonus of "100% elite carrier bonus for fighters (max bays: 8 )"

[Megas]

Maybe you could make it so there's a hullmod that grants fighter bonuses based on officer skills. More or less you could use the same bonuses as above, but you need a hullmod to activate them? That would help mitigate the fomo factor because it costs ordnance points to get the bonuses.

Carriers as battlecarriers are generally OP-starved.  Without s-mods, I have a tight OP budget that can afford few critical guns, barely enough flux stats, and ITU and maybe one more critical warship hullmod like Hardened Shields, Ballistic Rangefinder, or Neural Interface.  I do not use Expended Deck Crew (even after it got buffed back a little recently) because either I have to give up too much to be a viable battlecarrier or I use talons or pods for fighters and defeat the point of using the carrier instead of a warship.

[mr. domain]

Ironic, because the current system funnels officers into being built for battle carriers if they get put into carriers at all. Not that I don't see what he's saying, but having officers skills basically have no effect on their performance as carriers doesn't feel good.

Maybe you could make it so there's a hullmod that grants fighter bonuses based on officer skills. More or less you could use the same bonuses as above, but you need a hullmod to activate them? That would help mitigate the fomo factor because it costs ordnance points to get the bonuses.

To me it feels odd to have hullmods dependent on skills, though neural link is a counterpoint. I posted earlier that unlocking the carrier bonus could be tied to a green carrier skill (fighter uplink or carrier doctrine). An option could be to make that hullmod similar to neural link, where a green skill allows fleetwide use of the hullmod? It does seem more complex than just tying the unlock to a skill, plus Alex may want to tie the bonuses to the same fighter bay soft caps as the green skills to prevent snowballing.

Maybe you could make it so there's a hullmod that grants fighter bonuses based on officer skills. More or less you could use the same bonuses as above, but you need a hullmod to activate them? That would help mitigate the fomo factor because it costs ordnance points to get the bonuses.

Carriers as battlecarriers are generally OP-starved.  Without s-mods, I have a tight OP budget that can afford few critical guns, barely enough flux stats, and ITU and maybe one more critical warship hullmod like Hardened Shields, Ballistic Rangefinder, or Neural Interface.  I do not use Expended Deck Crew (even after it got buffed back a little recently) because either I have to give up too much to be a viable battlecarrier or I use talons or pods for fighters and defeat the point of using the carrier instead of a warship.

As a heron fan, I would prefer to keep my OP points as well

[BigBrainEnergy]

Carriers as battlecarriers are generally OP-starved.  Without s-mods, I have a tight OP budget that can afford few critical guns, barely enough flux stats, and ITU and maybe one more critical warship hullmod like Hardened Shields, Ballistic Rangefinder, or Neural Interface.  I do not use Expended Deck Crew (even after it got buffed back a little recently) because either I have to give up too much to be a viable battlecarrier or I use talons or pods for fighters and defeat the point of using the carrier instead of a warship.

This idea isn't targeted at battlecarriers in the first place, and if you don't want to spend your ordnance points you are not forced to! It's up to you if the cost is worth the bonus

[mr. domain]

Carriers as battlecarriers are generally OP-starved.  Without s-mods, I have a tight OP budget that can afford few critical guns, barely enough flux stats, and ITU and maybe one more critical warship hullmod like Hardened Shields, Ballistic Rangefinder, or Neural Interface.  I do not use Expended Deck Crew (even after it got buffed back a little recently) because either I have to give up too much to be a viable battlecarrier or I use talons or pods for fighters and defeat the point of using the carrier instead of a warship.

This idea isn't targeted at battlecarriers in the first place, and if you don't want to spend your ordnance points you are not forced to! It's up to you if the cost is worth the bonus

Fair, but Expanded Deck Carrier and especially Recovery Shuttles are already in a weird spot - I wouldn't want these to be displaced in 90% of cases by a hullmod with a vastly greater impact

[Megas]

As a heron fan, I would prefer to keep my OP points as well

Me too, Heron (without s-mods) almost has too few OP for battlecarrier use.  I have to use cheap fighters, and my flux stats are never above halfway (caps below 10, vents at about 15).  Still, it has more dissipation than Mora, but Heron needs that flux to power energy weapons.  I cannot afford Warthogs on Heron like I can on some other carriers.

But Heron is not the only one, though it is the probably the most blatant.  Gemini is another.  Two long-range guns, pilums, ITU, and some fighter; that's about it.  Astral is another that feels like it has too few OP after it gets missiles.  Mora has more leeway, but it still does not have very much, and it almost needs max vents to support two or three good light guns.  At times, I am tempted to downgrade missiles from medium to small on Mora just to get more OP.  (Heron does not even have that option.)

This idea isn't targeted at battlecarriers in the first place, and if you don't want to spend your ordnance points you are not forced to! It's up to you if the cost is worth the bonus.

If player has a lot of combat skills to power this new hullmod, it may become more than worth the bonus like original Expanded Deck Crew that gave -25% decay/+50% rate gain (i.e., too powerful not to get).

[BigBrainEnergy]

If player has a lot of combat skills to power this new hullmod, it may become more than worth the bonus like original Expanded Deck Crew that gave -25% decay/+50% rate gain (i.e., too powerful not to get).

The solution here, of course, is to lock the hullmod behind fighter uplink so you need to pick out a specific skill and pay the op (but it would no longer be restricted to just the elite skills). The bright side of this solution is that you would never even have to worry about it because you don't take leadership skills

I think the balance here could work out nicely, with the expected number of bonuses being in the realm of 5-7 and you need both a leadership skill + hullmod tax to get them. With the bonuses I went with in the original post I think this is pretty fair.

Spoiler

The nuclear option here would be to replace support doctrine with "carrier doctrine" unlocking all of these effects without needing a hullmod.

[close]

[mr. domain]

If player has a lot of combat skills to power this new hullmod, it may become more than worth the bonus like original Expanded Deck Crew that gave -25% decay/+50% rate gain (i.e., too powerful not to get).

The solution here, of course, is to lock the hullmod behind fighter uplink so you need to pick out a specific skill and pay the op (but it would no longer be restricted to just the elite skills). The bright side of this solution is that you would never even have to worry about it because you don't take leadership skills

I think the balance here could work out nicely, with the expected number of bonuses being in the realm of 5-7 and you need both a leadership skill + hullmod tax to get them. With the bonuses I went with in the original post I think this is pretty fair.

Spoiler

The nuclear option here would be to replace support doctrine with "carrier doctrine" unlocking all of these effects without needing a hullmod.

[close]

The nuclear option would be funny, but it would be even funnier to remove the officer training skill, demote best of the best into its place, and then put your new carrier skill into the capstone. It makes a degree of thematic sense - two doctrines that enhance fleet level firepower in different ways. Additionally, the carrier skill could inherit the officer training level maximum bonus, to make it the preferred "officer friendly" cap stone in contrast to the officer unfriendly support doctrine.

EDIT: Alternatively, removing officer management instead of officer training and making the new carrier capstone inherit the +2 officer cap would probably be better

EDIT 2: So my current thoughts are tier 2 leadership: Officer Training, Best of the best --> tier 3 leadership: carrier doctrine, support doctrine.

[SCC]

I think fighter buffs should be treated like buffs to ships. Just put them into various skills. Having fighter bonuses be the elite part of the skill means that the issue the current carriers have (there's like 3 skills for them) expands the choice marginally (3 skills + 1/2/3 elite picks that may or may not be the same as those 3 base skills) and may or may not be enough for them.

Carriers already sort of are pushed towards either of two extremes: Support Doctrine and/or Derelict Operations spam, or officered carriers (which are naturally limited to mostly 10). I think their competitiveness is best highlighted by how rarely carriers are mentioned in extreme compositions (vs 5 ordo or the like). Sure, fighters mayhaps don't need to be the most meta, but is their current power level enough for casual players? Looking at various examples of fleet screenshots, it appears the majority of them use 0 or 1 carriers in their fleet. If they do field carriers, they tend to be battlecarriers (Mora, Legion). Pure carriers don't seem to be popular. One of the more interesting things I saw was that even fleets with carriers don't tend to get the carrier skills.

What I would like to see is for most skills to gain fighter bonuses, whether as a part of the base skill, or as an elite. My picks would be...

Spoiler

Impact Mitigation: -50% damage received to weapons and engines (I think fighter weapons are invulnerable in the first place, but the engine part is important).
Damage Control: 50% faster weapon and engine repair (ditto).
elite Field Modulation: -50% overload duration (it's really annoying when a bomber gets overloaded and it won't fire its payload...).
elite Targeting Analysis: +100% damage dealt to weapons and engines.
Ballistic Mastery and Energy Weapons Mastery: I'm torn on these. On one hand, any fighter bonuses would encourage sticking to certain fighters, but on the other hand, maybe that's okay? I'm not sure. If I had to give fighters bonuses here, I would make them get +5% damage dealt by ballistic/energy weapons.
Tactical Drills: +5% damage.
Gunnery Implants: +10% fighter turn rate or something like that.
Flux Regulation: +10% flux capacity and dissipation (this is practically a 10% damage buff for non-bombers!).

[close]

For the rest of the skills:

Spoiler

Helmsmanship already benefits carriers enough not to warrant a fighter bonus
Combat Endurance already benefits fighters.
Point Defence already benefits fighters.
System Expertise can benefit fighters, if the carrier has a fighter-boosting system.
Missile Specialisation doesn't benefit fighters, but missiles can make a carrier useful despite or in addition to its fighters.
Coordinated Manoeuvres iirc already benefit fighters.
Wolfpack Tactics shouldn't affect fighters anyway.
Crew Training already benefits fighters.
Carrier Group already benefits fighters.
Fighter Uplink already benefits fighters... but it's a terrible skill.
Officer skills currently benefit warships more, because so do regular skills, but in this hypothetical scenario this would change.
Best of the Best and Support Doctrine don't discriminate against carriers.
Electronic Warfare affects carriers already.
Phase Coil Tuning shouldn't affect fighters anyway.
Neural Link doesn't discriminate against fighters.
I don't know if Cybernetic Augmentation benefits fighters.
Automated Ships doesn't buff any ships.
I don't know what bonuses could Ordnance Expertise and Polarised Armour get.
Hull Restoration and Derelict Operations don't discriminate against carriers.

[close]

Fighter Uplink needs a change. Fewer combat losses doesn't actually mean anything until combat ends. The target leading accuracy... I think it's a bit weird, because to me, all bonuses to target leading accuracy don't actually matter much, and it means this one doesn't matter, either. Maybe someone could pull up some example of what it actually does, because in my experience, AI target leading is always at least somewhat inaccurate for fast targets.

[Killer of Fate]

That is quite neat.

But, unfortunately, Alex believes that the players will suffer FOMO from not using ALL of the skill bonuses and that they will be force funneled into a battlecarrier playstyle at the expense of other ways of playing, which is why many, many, many suggestions like this one were rejected/ignored.

would gladly read the reasoning if you could link it. No pressure. Just wanted to see Alex respond himself. His posts are very informative about the game's design choices, obviously.

I think fighter buffs should be treated like buffs to ships. Just put them into various skills. Having fighter bonuses be the elite part of the skill means that the issue the current carriers have (there's like 3 skills for them) expands the choice marginally (3 skills + 1/2/3 elite picks that may or may not be the same as those 3 base skills) and may or may not be enough for them.

Carriers already sort of are pushed towards either of two extremes: Support Doctrine and/or Derelict Operations spam, or officered carriers (which are naturally limited to mostly 10). I think their competitiveness is best highlighted by how rarely carriers are mentioned in extreme compositions (vs 5 ordo or the like). Sure, fighters mayhaps don't need to be the most meta, but is their current power level enough for casual players? Looking at various examples of fleet screenshots, it appears the majority of them use 0 or 1 carriers in their fleet. If they do field carriers, they tend to be battlecarriers (Mora, Legion). Pure carriers don't seem to be popular. One of the more interesting things I saw was that even fleets with carriers don't tend to get the carrier skills.

What I would like to see is for most skills to gain fighter bonuses, whether as a part of the base skill, or as an elite. My picks would be...

Spoiler

Impact Mitigation: -50% damage received to weapons and engines (I think fighter weapons are invulnerable in the first place, but the engine part is important).
Damage Control: 50% faster weapon and engine repair (ditto).
elite Field Modulation: -50% overload duration (it's really annoying when a bomber gets overloaded and it won't fire its payload...).
elite Targeting Analysis: +100% damage dealt to weapons and engines.
Ballistic Mastery and Energy Weapons Mastery: I'm torn on these. On one hand, any fighter bonuses would encourage sticking to certain fighters, but on the other hand, maybe that's okay? I'm not sure. If I had to give fighters bonuses here, I would make them get +5% damage dealt by ballistic/energy weapons.
Tactical Drills: +5% damage.
Gunnery Implants: +10% fighter turn rate or something like that.
Flux Regulation: +10% flux capacity and dissipation (this is practically a 10% damage buff for non-bombers!).

[close]

For the rest of the skills:

Spoiler

Helmsmanship already benefits carriers enough not to warrant a fighter bonus
Combat Endurance already benefits fighters.
Point Defence already benefits fighters.
System Expertise can benefit fighters, if the carrier has a fighter-boosting system.
Missile Specialisation doesn't benefit fighters, but missiles can make a carrier useful despite or in addition to its fighters.
Coordinated Manoeuvres iirc already benefit fighters.
Wolfpack Tactics shouldn't affect fighters anyway.
Crew Training already benefits fighters.
Carrier Group already benefits fighters.
Fighter Uplink already benefits fighters... but it's a terrible skill.
Officer skills currently benefit warships more, because so do regular skills, but in this hypothetical scenario this would change.
Best of the Best and Support Doctrine don't discriminate against carriers.
Electronic Warfare affects carriers already.
Phase Coil Tuning shouldn't affect fighters anyway.
Neural Link doesn't discriminate against fighters.
I don't know if Cybernetic Augmentation benefits fighters.
Automated Ships doesn't buff any ships.
I don't know what bonuses could Ordnance Expertise and Polarised Armour get.
Hull Restoration and Derelict Operations don't discriminate against carriers.

[close]

Fighter Uplink needs a change. Fewer combat losses doesn't actually mean anything until combat ends. The target leading accuracy... I think it's a bit weird, because to me, all bonuses to target leading accuracy don't actually matter much, and it means this one doesn't matter, either. Maybe someone could pull up some example of what it actually does, because in my experience, AI target leading is always at least somewhat inaccurate for fast targets.

It's funny you say this, cause this entire secondary post was made, because I pretty much gave the exact same suggestion you did, with different reasoning however. I guess, it's time to make a tertiary post now.

Not all fighters use flux to fire weapons. All shielded fighters have "no flux to fire" tag that allows them to focus their flux entirely on shields for simplicity's sake. And then they are restricted by fire rate. I feel like there needs to be a skill for fighters that use flux and fighters that use shields. With the Maestro (the shield skill) affecting shielded fighters, and Ordnance Expert helping non-shielded fighters with fluxing weapons like Warthog, Thunder and Gladii.

Gunnery Optics increased turn rate sounds fun, but I feel like we need to investigate just how much targeting accuracy affects fighters in terms of aim. For eg. it could be huge for Claws, Warthogs and the mini Remnant gunships (forgot their name, I think it's Lux, but whatever).

Wolfpack Tactics actually does affect carriers. Tempest exists. But whatever, just a nitpick. Don't worry about it.

I NEED MISSILE SPECIALISATION BOMBER MISSILE HEALTH INCREASE. THE COBRAS ARE ALMOST EXTINCT. WE NEED TO SAVE THEIR PRECIOUS SPECIES...

[Alex]

Shinr is spot on, that's definitely part of my thinking. It also makes balancing battlecarriers more tricky, but that's more of an issue with dedicated fighter skills. Putting their bonuses on elite skills is an interesting idea, though, hmm.

The main balance problem with fighters is that they can snowball very hard. In theory, having capable anti-fighter AoE damage would mitigate this (you have more fighters? that's great, the effective DPS of the anti-fighter AoE just went up because it's hitting more targets) but for it to work with the actual game mechanics, the area of effect would need to be larger than what looks reasonable, and the weapons would need to be very common. Of the vanilla weapons, I think only the Devastator and the PCL fit the bill; possibly also the Paladin PD, to some extent.

And so, fleets that don't have *a lot* of these get snowballed by fighters, and minor bonuses to fighters stack up extremely quickly. A fighter being just a little tougher to destroy or doing a little more damage adds up to enemy ships being overwhelmed in a non-linear way.

So - this is why the main buffs available to fighters are fleetwide skills that are capped in their total bonus. It helps rein in this scaling, and it seems very difficult to accomplish that by giving flat fighter bonuses from officer skills - you'd likely end up with a scenario where you can stack enough of these bonuses and get past the tipping point.

And as far as the general gameplay, I think a state where fighters are a little too weak is much, much preferable compared to the state where they can snowball like this. That *is* subjective to some degree, but I feel strongly that the gameplay with fighter-spam fleets is not particularly interesting, beyond the novelty factor.

I could definitely see buffing fighters a bit, though - just, in similar ways to how it is now, with fleet-capped bonuses that are more resistant to snowballing effects. And, IMO, this largely rules out skill bonuses - although, for example, the "use a hullmod to give bonuses based on skills" idea could be used to get around that, if the calculation also involved the number of fighter bays in the fleet, somehow. Or heck, if the skill effect did. But that is also getting quite complicated; I wouldn't want to hang that onto every skill.

[Killer of Fate]

what if you tied bonuses to damage/mobility (but not max speed) and not durability/replenishment? You would be able to clear out fighters as easily as now, but they would be far more threatening if not answered to. Retaining the trait of say, fighters being able to fire more before overfluxing for Warthogs. Giving bombers more durable missiles (I mean more durable missiles already exist with Missile Specialisation). And slightly higher manoeuvrability (doesn't make them immune to point defence, so let's add this on top, just so bombers stop ramming their face into the enemy). Etc. And maybe have Maestro skill reduce overload time, cause that is just frustrating. Eh, I don't know.

Strong benefits like making shields more durable, or armour better, or recovery faster could be minimised in presence. But at the moment, it feels like fighters get so hard-countered that they become simply obsolete if any anti-fighter tools are applied. A stray Onslaught will simply delete all enemy fighters. Which, makes sense. Devas are supposed to work this way. But at least let us punch back hard once we get those disabled. [devil emote]

ps. while you're here. Can I suggest making Heron into a battlecarrier? Change universal slot to hybrid. And give it a small missile slot at the front to maybe benefit from autoloader? And then give it slightly more op so that it can roam and attack on its own along its fighters? Rather than cowardly sending them out to die en masse.

I would also love to make Astral a shielded battlecarrier, but that concept could be very difficult to execute, considering fighters are really bad at area denial against capital ships and cruisers which would be hunting down an Astral first and foremost due to its low mobility. Though considering how ridiculous bomber burst damage from behind a shielded ship could be, maybe a battlecarrier Astral that utilises its health pool to protect projectiles and bombers from being annihilated would be a really neat concept. However, with its current mobility it just sounds kinda impossible. I guess I could still do this with Cyclones and aggressive officers. But that just kinda sounds stupid, to be honest. And way too scary for a 60 dp glass cannon ship.

pps. I've edited this post like twenty million times, so I apologise, if you responded to it in its primordial state.