Suggestion: Give carrier cap ships more strikecrafts

I suppose it could be looked at, but you already end up with quite a few squads on capital ship carriers and they're not by any means completely defenseless without them like the cruiser carriers are.  Plus, they get abilities that augment their strikecraft already that cruisers don't get.

I have tried a modded capital ship with over 10 strike craft squadrons. As advent. Do you know how long it takes to fill out a single carrier? Forever!

What I would like to see is it worth having super carriers.  Having say 10 sqauds sounds good but how easy is it to destroy a cap ship? 

If we could fix the focus fire cap ship problem, and then bring the strike craft numbers on the light carries back down again. Next we up the sqaud count for carriers.  If this could happen would finally have a capitalship that makes the statement that the real world carriers do. 

I would love to see a "real" carrier task force in this game. Nothing compares to the real thing.  3 super carriers escorted by who  knows how many guide missle cruisers.

So for sins that would be something like 3 super carriers, 20 HC, 20........

I got an even better idea what if we take the light carrier out of the picture all togather.  So now only capital ships can have stike craft, but with the 1-3 squad limit in place.  And the carrier class cap ships can acutlly act like a carrier, with say 12 sqauds at max level.

Modded ships can be built almost any way that you would like. But i have noticed, at least to my own mind, that some are not balanced. Yes, a small increase of say 2 to 4 to start and a maz of 12 sounds reasonable for a capital. It boosta the overall performance by perhaps only a reasonable percentage.

Just a thought but a balancing measure might be to slightly lower the shielding of the fighters/bombers. So that there are more strike craft in the air at a time and for short battles, but for longer battles the fighters would have to be replentished more often, perhaps just like in real life. This way the ships aren't invulnerable,    no matter how enticing that idea is. And it maintains a balance in the gameplay without skewing thing too much from the other races or from the other ships.

After all, the frigate is there for a reason. It is less expensive, yet offers strike craft ability. Usually just the thing in the beginning of the game for me, when i have a mothership, to cruisers for guard and a strike craft ship to even out my beginning fleet. Usually i dont count scouts as i build 3 or 4 and then send them out to explore, so they really are not a contributing part of the fleet.

-teal

p.s    There are lots of people in the modding community, and someone may put together a modded strikecraft mod for you. I can try it myself but it may take a few days to complete and test out right. 

Okie, its done. However i am uploading it to the Stardock Sins Mods Site, it will take 5 days to get cleared. But I will be loading it up there as soon as i finish this email. Anyway, I left the strike craft number per group intact, and i left their hulls and armor intact. I did take the frigates to 6 craft for the carriers. so they will start out with a little more than the Capital Carriers, but the Capital Carriers will go from 4 to start with to 1.2 for each new level, which at 10 levels should put the player with a max of about 16 strike craft groups. This is for the Tec, and the Advent and the Vasari, so which ever race you prefer the changes for the strike craft number are there. 

Only thing is waiting, I'm sorry, i know its a pain, but it will be there. I have tested it and it works fine, and now only have to load the zip file to the Mods Site. Have fun!! 

-Teal

Don't get me wrong, the friget is wonderful but I can have 3 of them for one capital carrier.  Even with out weapons thats still 3 ships to take down vs one.  I think the capital carriers are just don't hold enoght extra to make them worth it. 

Since its supposed to be a carrier and its so much larger then a friget it should start out with more sqauds then a friget. Lets say for example 4 then moves up over time. 

So now the trade off for 1 ship that everyone is gunning for vs 3 is a good trade off.

I know i'm probably not the only one who has been on an actual real life carrier before, but i have.

they. are. huge.

they can carry over 50 fighter/bombers at a time. i think that in the game the cap should at least be close to that because otherwise it's just not worth the money on the capital ship carrier. instead i can just get 3 frigats, as mentioned above.

I can't say I have been on a carrier but I have seen pictures of that exercise they do in the pacific every year.  And I am impressed by that.

Well... carrier capitals have a maximum of 6 squadrons... so here's how the individual strike craft count looks like if a carrier used only one type of strike craft:

TEC:
6 fighters/squadron x6 = 36 fighters
5 bombers/squadron x6 = 30 bombers

Advent:
12 (9+3 due to Adept Drone Anima) fighters/squadron x6 = 72 fighters
10 (7+3 due to Adept Drone Anima) bombers/squadron x6 = 60 bombers

Note that Anima Tempest adds 30 more strike craft into the mix temporarily, so the ratio of fighters to bombers in the added strike craft is equal to the ratio of the number of fighter squadrons to bomber squadrons (by extension, a Halcyon could briefly host 102 fighters at once... slightly more than 11 Aeria Drone Hosts with fighter squadrons).

Vasari:
4 fighters/squadron x6 = 24 fighters
3 bombers/squadron x6 = 18 bombers

Scramble Bombers can add another squadron of bombers to the mix.

In short, carrier cruisers have more strike craft per fleet point until carrier capitals start gaining levels, squadrons, and abilities which for the most part are centred around the strike craft they host and/or those around them.

I will agree that is a pretty decent break down. With this figures, it sounds like they more closly match a modern day carrier.

However, at the lowest of levels a capital carrier should still have more strike craft then the friget.  So I would say 4 sqauds start and then work our way up to 10. 

I've suggested it before that Capital ships could have a fixed amount of squadrons that does not increase with cap levels. The ship growing physically bigger makes little sense and a carrier cap having less squadrons than a Drone Host is just embarassing.

Capitals could have a fixed amount of 0-6 squadrons depending on the ship and their other weaponry could be adjusted accordingly. Or rather the effectiveness of the strikecraft could scale like the ships weapons as the pilots also gain experience.

Okay now that sounds like a good idea. 

I never really thought that the ships got bigger, but more along the lines that they were able to get more pilots and planes as the crew better proves their worth to the empire.....

  Yes... i agree... but the abilities also make the capital very very worthwhile...    And the levels that they get that strengthen them. 

-Teal

Hmmmm.... just a thought that occurred to me in reading over the posts again. What would everyone think of ships, say specifically the capital ships that were, how should i say this... designable?  I mean, not full blown you know redesign by the user, but lets say you have a carrier, okie?  Now in this theoretical new version of the game, we get to decide "what kind of carrier it is"  Like is it a fighter/bomber carrier and we strip the abilities to the bone?  Or do we half and half it? Or do we get say... helicopters?  I mean the space equivalent would be what?  small transports that carry small arms weapons and personnel? I mean, we don't have people in the game yet, right? It would be nice to have people. I dont mean you know like characters, (But at some point that would be very very nice) but NPC's you know. Like the little marines in HW that used to go in and board craft or enemy ships. All they have to be is very small silouhettes (spelling?) Anyway, i'm getting away from the KIND of carrier. Maybe fighter/bomber, maybe Helio, maybe Missiles? Maybe Personnel, or Mines? Or ... hmmmm.... anyway i thought it might be interesting if we could like choose between these like listed options to load when we created the carrier.

The same could go for the other capitals as well, to list options for their builds. The list doesn't have to be exhaustive, maybe 3 or 4 of what the devs think are the best or a good range from one kind of craft to another.

The battleship and the colonyship and the support ships could also use this for different "types", In effect perhaps some could be more aggressive, and some more supportive, some could be a mix.

Anyway... just a thought.

Perhaps i can play around in the abilities and the ships and see if i can make up some different kinds. But it will be just a hacked mod, and not the real thing.    But it is worth a try. 

Take care and keep modding!!

-Teal

In my personal mod, the most powerful Cap Ship, starts with 0 and by lvl ten has six (usually for me 3 fighters and 3 bombers for me). Now I have done it this way because with 1.096 strikecraft have become a bit more important it seems, I think having 12 strikecraft by max lvl is a bit much to be honest, I always thought that Carriers needed to have more, but I was more along the lines of 6-8 at max lvl.

hmm  problem in increasing cap ships starting fighters lies in balances, you'll get 3 fighter squadrons per capital ship... atleast all capital ships "but the carrier"  will need some serious antifighter guns to make it even again (otherwise everyone starts with carriers)

good idea.. but like i just said...  other cap ships need some serious anti-fighter capability, whilst the carriers should get it minimum, .. #1 for increasing fighter popularity,  and #2 to show bombers arent all-pawning.. i see people using bombers to kil fleets composed out of 100% lrf... .... wtf?, thats like intenionally losing

Good point I did not think of that.  Installing flak guns on caps sounds like a good idea.  They would not be as effect as say flak frigets but enoght so that they can assist in your strike craft in protecting your cap.

It would be nice to see a "protect" and an "attack" mode for the fighters/bombers. I wonder if that can be achieved with the "Range"setting in the manage folder?

I will have to go look.

I would like to take this oppertunity to ask that someone improves the fighter AI to include the following:

No two fighter squads will attack the same bomber squad unless the fighter squads outnumber the bomber squads.

Im sick of seeing 40 fighter squads streak towards one of 40 bomber squad and unleashing a flurry of missiles capable of taking out a cap ship's shields on a single bomber.