Fixing carrier spam

[JohnMolotov]

At the moment I think one of the biggest flaws in ship combat is the dominance of carriers. Interesting tradeoffs don't have room to breath when one strategy is overwhelmingly dominant.

Decreasing strike craft damage would help, but I think a better solution would be some simple tweaks to ship AI.

I've noticed carriers are largely effective due to the strength of carrier computers. I would make it so that carriers cannot produce strike craft while moving.

Torpedo ships meanwhile tend to clump up on a single target, which is highly ineffective when carriers spread out. Instead torpedo computers could be made to pick a random target, further differentiating it from swarm.

Obviously a direct nerf, or a cap on deployed strike craft, would also help, but I think AI changes are probably the more nuanced approach.

 

[Adaman5280]

I thought strike craft had been reduced to a joke. Didn't they make it so they only target other strike crafts now? or maybe I'm mistaken

 

[JohnMolotov]

I thought strike craft had been reduced to a joke. Didn't they make it so they only target other strike crafts now? or maybe I'm mistaken

Unless that's something yet to be released, no. I did a bunch of testing today in current patch, and found a ton of interesting balances but carrier cruisers with swarmer secondaries beat literally every other design I could think of. Even designs I created specifically to hard counter it.

 

[Ishyro]

The only issue with carrier is that after destroying a target, strikes craft will chose another random target, not looking at distance.

So to counter carriers, you need to attack from multiple sides of the system... and have more carriers than your adversary (since strike crafts target other strike crafts, you increase the odds of the enemy going back and forth between targets while doing nothing).

If you want to see this mess for yourself, send a fleet with only carriers against multiple fleets with only carriers (the asteroid hive system is great for that). It doesn't matter how much overwhelming power you have, the fight will never end because strike craft targeting is too dumb.

But this is an issue only in multiplayer games (which I don't do, so I don't even know if people exploit it or not), in single player you can go carrier only for all the game and win every battle against fleets 10 times stronger than you with almost no casualties.

 

[Nakkivene]

There's always some monoship meta. Before it was artillery battleships, before that I think it was torpedo corvettes. Carriers were considered useless for a long while. If they're good now, maybe it's because of the ability to mount missiles on non-G slots so you only have shield bypass weapons and overwhelm enemy PD?

 

[Ishyro]

maybe it's because of the ability to mount missiles on non-G slots so you only have shield bypass weapons and overwhelm enemy PD?

It's about killing the enemy without taking damage.
Carriers are busted because they have the same maneuverability than any other ships, but with unlimited range. Then there is the infinite scaling damage thing since strike craft are produced without end, but that's a just a "win more when you have already won" issue.

 

[Calvax]

There's always some monoship meta. Before it was artillery battleships, before that I think it was torpedo corvettes. Carriers were considered useless for a long while. If they're good now, maybe it's because of the ability to mount missiles on non-G slots so you only have shield bypass weapons and overwhelm enemy PD?

IMO there’s definitely too many bypass weapons which end up meaning defences are less important and some of the sci fi fantasy is thrown out the window.

 

[Thiend]

The problem with strikecraft is that currently there's actually supposed to be a counter to large ships in the game - torpedo ships.

This falls flat because additional slots for afterburners combined with obscenely high tracking and perfect accuracy on strikecraft, plus strikecraft functioning as PD too, means that frigates can't catch their targets, can't hit their targets, and can't evade their targets (this last one not helped by frigates having low evasion in the first place, but T2 strikecraft already have 90% tracking so that they literally cannot be evaded anyway, by anything).

Obviously there could be fixes to that, but its not as simple as "reduce their damage" - you could do that, but large parts of ship design and specifically weapons need a "what is the role of this" assessment. Strikecraft are a perfect counter to that which supposedly counters the ships they're hosted on, while also being perfectly good against larger ships too. It needs to lose something, but not until deciding what it SHOULD do well. Swarm missiles have the same problem (role is occupy PD, stats make them viable as the damage themselves, their intended design makes PD incapable of countering that use).

The other major victim of this is NL, which started out so strong they were similarly just always a good idea and have now been nerfed into NEVER being a good idea.

I could pontificate more, but I'm not a dev and I can't implement changes anyway. In short, they need to figure out what role stuff like this has, and then some things will inevitably be out of line with what they should not be good at.

 

[HFY]

The problem with strikecraft is that currently there's actually supposed to be a counter to large ships in the game - torpedo ships.

Missile + Carrier Cruisers can flee as fast as Frigates or Torpedo Cruisers can chase, and can hit from much longer range, so we'd need faster & more evasive Torpedo ships -- like the old TorpVettes -- to challenge carriers.

Basically a [GP] hull for Corvettes so you could do Flak + Space Torpedo, with optional Afterburner or Stealth.

 

[Ishyro]

We could maybe add a weight stat to each component, this weight would add a scaling speed reduction (that would apply on the base speed before modifiers).
This way, we can reduce the speed of some loadouts without penalizing the others.

Hangars would be one of the heaviest component, so carriers would still do tons of damage from affar, but wouldn't be able to kite all the fight.

 

[klingonadmiral]

Before it was artillery battleships, before that I think it was torpedo corvettes.

iirc, the history of the Stellaris ship meta is:

Naked Corvettes -> Tachyon Destroyers and Battleships -> Naked Corvettes -> Plasma Cruisers -> 'Pocket Knife' Cruisers (my favourite meta) -> Neutron Launcher + XL battleships -> Penetration Carriers

 

[verybad]

Maybe have Strike craft cost more trade if they're in use and cost more to replace if they're lost in 4.0?