Likely Bug re: Carriers

Not a bug. Assault Carrier modules are nearly twice the size of Guardian/Interceptor modules, which is why the ships are weaker (you can either add more of them to compensate, or you can better arm the Carrier). Further, only Tiny ships will be designated Guardians and Interceptors by the game. Ships larger than Tiny with similar loadouts will turn into Escorts and Assaults, respectively. Only ships larger than Tiny can be Assaults.

Naturally, you can change this yourself, but based on the rules the game is assigned, Assault carriers are certainly supposed to have Small ships and not Tiny.

Personally, I think the main factor in how powerful Carriers are is how defenses work, plus the fact that ships never focus fire except by accident. Every point of defense absorbs one shot from that weapon class, regardless of that weapon's level. Because of this, defenses will be reduced faster if more guns are shooting at it.

What do carriers do? They add more ships to the fight. What happens when there's dozens of ships in a fight? Every ship picks a different target. When the enemy fleet has 3 ships in it, and yours has 20, the enemy's fire is going to scatter, and yours is going to focus.

I bet you anything, if the combat AI focus-fired, everyone's problems with carriers would be instantly solved.

Fair enough! In that case my only remaining issues are that:

             a ) It seems counter-intuitive that the better fighters come first in the tech tree; I have to spend more time researching worse ships?

             b ) The balance seems off, to me. Assault modules are only about 50% larger than Interceptor/Guardian modules. So I can have 9 tiny fighters (135 mass) or 6 small Assault fighters (140 mass), and the difference in firepower/survivability between small and tiny is (or seems to be) far more than 50% better.

But I could just be looking at it all wrong. It's been known to happen.

Quoting Sansloi37, reply 2

Fair enough! In that case my only remaining issues are that:

             a ) It seems counter-intuitive that the better fighters come first in the tech tree; I have to spend more time researching worse ships?

             b ) The balance seems off, to me. Assault modules are only about 50% larger than Interceptor/Guardian modules. So I can have 9 tiny fighters (135 mass) or 6 small Assault fighters (140 mass), and the difference in firepower/survivability between small and tiny is (or seems to be) far more than 50% better.

But I could just be looking at it all wrong. It's been known to happen.

The reasoning here is that you could put the smaller modules on Medium ships without sacrificing their armaments. Assault Carrier modules almost require a ship to be dedicated to being a carrier until you reach Huge hulls. But yes, Tiny ships are fragile as hell, and don't have enough space for many defenses, so they tend to get massacred unless your miniaturization is ridiculously good.

I was thinking about this issue.

For me the problem is in the weapon systems. In an effort to balance weapon systems we've run into a balancing problem.

Kinetic weapons should scale based on the size of the ship. A rail gun mounted on a single seat fighter should have no chance of damaging a large battleship.

Beam weapons should do damage, but the damage should be lower but consistent.

The only real way for a fighter to do damage, should be via missiles. 

Missiles should be almost entirely ineffective for large capital size ships. These are projectiles that should be very easy to knock down. 

The way I see it.

Missiles - Specialized tiny/small ship weapon systems, highly counterable.

Point Defense - the most effective specialized defensive system. 

Beams - jack of all trades, useful for everyone at any time.

Shields - see above.

Kinetic - the most brutal raw damaging weapon systems, most effective on capital ships.

Armor - should have a flat defensive bonus vs everything. Takes 50% damage from missiles, takes 150% damage from beams, takes 100% damage from kinetic.

I just don't see how a tiny one seat fighter can mount a railgun large enough to actually damage a ship 100x larger. Missiles on the other hand, that is a high yield low size weapon that if delivered makes a big boom.

The last line of the carrier upgrades are absolutely amazing. Those fighters in that last tier module have all three weapon and defense types based on your empires current tech. 

Got 3rd tier of all weapons? Each fighter in that module (5) will have all three 3rd tier weapons!

Also keep in mind that ships labeled as 'assault' will bypass escorts and guardians to focus fire on Carriers and Support ships. This is important to know. I figured if you want to kill carriers you have to design your own medium 'assault types. I would add one or more thrusters, a bit more armor and focus one or two weapon types. These ships will RACE past all the other ships focus firing on Carriers.

Also

If you do this you will see the AI use your ship designs. After 1 or 2 new games YOUR own Carrier killers will make it to your game against you.. be prepared.  The AI will use your  designs but it takes time to get them cycled in. During Beta I found the Drengin using my prized personal proto missile designs against me. Shocking and very fun at the same time. 

actually that last carrier upgrade works the same way as the first carrier module, the only difference is that you get 5 fighters instead of 3, but both modules spawn the same assault fighters with all 3 weapon and all 3 defense module types (not sure if they use all if you don't have enough hull size % increases and/or weapon/defense size reduction% techs). in the campaign, i lost some of the weaker excort ships of the crusader, so i built a few "assault carriers" (large hull, one baseline assault fighter bay, some defense systems + engines). the 5 fighters from the crusader and the fighter squads from my own carriers all had exactly the same weapon/defense stats.

the intermediate tech (guardian/interceptor drones) seems weaker compared to the baseline assault fighter module. sure, it's like 40% smaller, but i'm not convinced that 5-6 drones are on par with (let alone better than) 3 assault fighters.

maybe they should be swapped - the weaker drones as the early tech, then the 3 per module assault fighters as the mid tier and finally the improved 5 assault fighters module?

I think that the fighers should be nerfed heavily.

1) Tiny fighters are basically air superiority type, IMO they should use beams or kinetic weapons.

2) Assault fighters are bombers, they should use missiles. 

Carriers are totally unbalanced at the moment and the fighters having all 3 weapon systems is why.

Nah, Lets not call for nerfs. Lets call for an AI that can build ships to counter carriers. Its fun to make assault fighters. Fun is what its all about. Rather than NERF stuff, lets figure out how to take the existing and get the AI to use and counter it. That would provide MORE fun! 

Ideally you want a carrier along with some guardians, some Assaults and a couple of Capitals. This is exactly what I do I put in a guardian for the carrier and the command/support-ECM ship I use in my fleets. The Guardians will stay behind and intercept any assaults to protect the fragile in back ships. 

So you think the current system where fighters are the most powerful and effective weapon systems in the game is ok?

Carriers should be supplemental, not the end all be all. Assault fighters will still be fun, but they will follow a more realistic approach. They fly in, and drop off anti-ship torpedo's. Rather than just open up with the most advanced and damaging weapon systems from all three classification of weapon with no regard to hull size and capacity.

with the current weapon balance, changing their weapons to missiles only is hardly going to "nerf" them. missiles are the strongest weapons now. if you remove the weak kinetics and ok-ish beams and add more missiles, they will just become even better

overall, i think carriers are a bit too strong. i don't really understand why those assault ships have to be free of charge. they basically spawn out of thin air each battle and they just respawn for free the next time even if you somehow lost all of them in the previous battle. why do they have to be free? it would hardly break carriers if you had to buy new fighters when they get killed (not necessarily hard-build them, but maybe charge some gold directly or indirectly via MUCH higher maintenance cost of the carrier modules)

they could also add smaller sized AA gun versions of the main weaponry to the game that deal bonus damage vs. small/tiny ships and reduced damage vs. large ships. and auto-designed (that's what the AI uses, right?) larger ships would pick up some "flak" type guns that make them good at shooting down fighters.

My point is we are talking about a single player game. Rather than looking to nerf things why not have ideas to counter the currently strong abilities of carriers? 

I know carriers are OP. We discussed it at length right after they came in Beta. Still I would call for discussion of counters before we call for nerfs. 

So if they never changed Carriers, what would you change to counter them?

What if we gave a module that only Assaults or capitals can equip called 'chain guns' or AAA? It would be the only weapon with a very short range that can do say 3 dmg in a 360 field around the ship at a high rate of fire but it has a very short range..

The assault carrier modules have drones not fighters whereas the higher carrier modules only have fighters.

I have spent some more time looking at the actual game files, and tweaking and testing various entries. A few notes:

1) Assault Fighters (first and last carrier modules) are coded to have (at least) one of every type of weapon and defense. Also, every Race Assault Fighter class definition (as noted earlier) is coded as Tiny.

2) Drone fighters will have lots of beams, some shields, and thrusters. That's all that they are allowed to have.

3) Guardian Fighters get Kinetics, Armor, and maybe shields/point defenses (if they fit).

Seeing this, it really makes me think that the intent was to start out with a general all-around fighter, then you could specialize depending on your own weapon focus (beams or kinetics). I do wonder why there is no bomber-class, which would allow missile heavy players the ability to specialize their fighters too. Too powerful maybe?

I'd really like to hear from the developers if the Small/Tiny issue is intended.

Regardless, I have now modded my own game so that all fighters are tiny, Assaults prefer missiles, and the High Capacity carriers no longer add fighters, they multiply whatever other carrier modules you have (so high capacity works for drones and guardians, not just assaults). So far fighters are still pretty powerful, but not as insane as they were!

Edit: Part of my point that I forgot to make, is that the differences between fighter types are not just hull size; weapon type and defense load-out significantly affects their effectiveness.

What is your issue with nerfs? Contraction of abilities that are broken is better than just adding numbers to everything else to make it equal. This isn't an MMO, there is no PvE measuring stick. I'd rather say "Mmmm Assault fighters are kind of broken strong at the moment, I think I'd rather change JUST assault fighters, than change EVERYTHING ELSE to bring the assault fighters in line!".

Would you mind uploading your modded files somewhere? I'd like to put it into my own growing mod ;p

Here ya go Osbot, it is ready to drop into your mod folder. I changed 4 files, 2 of which are optional (they mod ship repair rates); the readme explains.

http://www.filedropper.com/carriermod

Thanks

This needs to be revisited in the game itself by the development team.    

I agree with the OP and Osbot that it's completely unbalanced.  While it's a single player game, balance is still important.  At the moment Assault Fighters are the most powerful force in the game by a light year.  Some stronger counters would work as well ... but there aren't any ... except to build them as well.

Any chance of a link that doesn't require a sign-in for the downloader? e.g. drop box.

What was the second file modified?

Once changed, does it work for a game in progress or only for new games?

Filedropper doesn't require a sign-in; not sure why that particular link is no longer working, but it wouldn't work with the latest patches anyway.

The files I had modified were:

• ShipBlueprintDefs.xml - changing Assault fighters to tiny and adjusting their load-out so missiles were preferred over beam/kinetics.
• ShipComponentDefs.xml - adjusted Assault Carrier Module cost/mass to be in line with drone/guardian modules; changed how High Capacity modules work so that instead of effectively replacing the earlier Assault module, they instead apply a multiplicative bonus to any/all of the three fighter modules (i.e., they increased capacity by 67% so the 3-fighter capacity modules would each provide 3 x 1.67 = 5 fighters). I made High Cap modules one per ship, and if you could stack say 4 regular modules with it you would end up with 20 fighters total.

I had also included two other modded files:

• ShipHullStatDefs.xml - added an amount of healing to each hull size based on overall base hitpoints, so they would each repair the same % of HP per turn, so instead of a Huge hull taking hundreds of turns to repair it would take at most about 25.
• ShipyardDefs.xml - changed the bonus to repair provided by shipyards from a small flat bonus of 3 HP per turn, to a 4X of whatever the ship's base repair was.

I have since tweaked things a bit more, including making starbases ship repair bonus a multiplier as well, with Military starbases having a higher repair bonus than others.

The problem with uploading mods at the moment is that every new patch (and every update to each patch) tends to break all of my mods.

If you want to know what specific changes to the .xml I have made so that you can mod it yourself, let me know.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: All .xml mods only affect new games started after the mod was added/changed.

Thanks for that.  Looks like I now have a second game on Suicidal when I'm quitting the game just because one of the AI's is building Carriers with ridiculously OP small assault fighters.  The only counter is Carriers and as no other AI is building them, they won the game the moment they started building them (even though they were clearly going down at the time).  Obviously I can start building them myself but it makes the game rather one dimensional i.e. everyone should rush to this OTT exploit.  

Clearly they are part of the game. Why put nerfs in a 'single player' game. Its NOT an exploit if the AI is doing. Furthermore the CEO of Stardock uses them in his game.

The counter to a Carrier is an Alpha strike ship behind a tanking ship. Or a Carrier with many weapons on it as well.

The problem is balance and variety in strategy.

Carriers become the one and only strategy, everything else is strictly inferior.  I might as well as scrap every other military ship design or research approach at that point in the game.

Putting an Alpha strike ship behind a tanking ship is not a counter, you'll still get hammered, I've tested it.

Frankly just using Carriers every game (because you have no choice if the AI does) is boring.  I enjoy Gal Civ 3 and don't want it to be boring.  If it's not going to be changed, I would rather Mod it.  As for Brad, he also said "I tend to fix exploits that are too tempting to ignore".  This most certainly fits that category, although if you are playing lower difficulties you probably won't perceive it that way, since many inferior strategies can still win.

I highly doubt Galactic Carriers was the design intent.  Gal Civ would also be inferior to it's strongest competitor, Distant Worlds, where I can play with a wide range of fundamentally different weapons and with Mods they are balanced well enough that every weapon offers a viable in-game strategy.  There are exploits still but nothing so out of balance it makes everything else a waste of time.

Let's not confuse defensiveness about the game with obvious balance issues.  The game has just been released, of course it has some balance issues, no problem.  But let's be a little more objective please.

Here is an in-game screenshot.  It's a little over 100 turns into the third Campaign.  Each Drengin Suicidal AI Assault Fighter has almost 200 attack so the Carrier in total puts out 1200 attack.  

The Terran fleet is one of mine.  A couple of turns previously, when facing the same sized ship design from the Drengin, it had about 100 attack and I won that engagement without loosing a hit point.  As soon as it switches to Carriers, my entire fleet is lost.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f6si5up1hd1u2ej/Screenshot%202015-06-07%2010.28.05.png?dl=0

To me, it is not a matter of "nerfing" them because they are an exploit. Rather I would prefer that they be rebalanced to be more of an equally valid option. I personally LOVE the idea of carriers, of rolling up and unleashing dozens of fighters. But if I do that in an unmodded game, I will just demolish the AI (and vice versa if the AI builds them and I don't)- they are simply too powerful, especially the small-hull Assault Fighters. And I don't want my battleships to get an inferiority complex.

But that's the great thing about GalCiv: we can mod the balance on our own to fit our own preferences, regardless of the "official" balance put out by Stardock. I have spent a lot of time over the past few weeks adjusting how carriers work in my game, experimenting with a bunch of different ideas. I'm still not completely satisfied yet, but I'm getting there.

Right now (in my version) I have huge carriers with 18 to 24 tiny fighters with custom load-outs, and against an AI at comparable tech they are powerful, but not overpowering. And, more importantly, it is fun without completely destroying the other ship options.