Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => Development Discussions => Topic started by: SevenOfCarina on May 07, 2019, 12:57:42 PM
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I'm uncertain if Steve has already encountered this problem, or if this is something that has already been discussed, but hangars, in their present iteration, are massively overpowered.
Hangars eliminate maintenance requirements for parasites, allow for easy and rapid transfer of ordnance, fuel, and supplies, and launch and retrieve craft instantaneously. They're cheap, and absurdly efficient at what they do, with a tiny mass penalty. (Seriously, 100t of extra space is somehow enough for maintenance gantries, fabricators, crew spaces, ship-to-parasite transfer systems, and maneuvering clearance for a 1000t parasite?) And that isn't even going into the inherent superiority of parasite ships that can sacrifice endurance for performance.
Right now, carriers can uprate their capabilities by simply replacing their parasites, which is fast, cheap, and doesn't require yard time, unlike the time-consuming and expensive process that is upgrading full ships. Carriers thus have a much longer service life than other ships, which are useless once outdated. Parasites are hard to detect because of their small size, and can afford to be much faster; they can often outrange and outrun their opponents. And thanks to the increased susceptibility of box launchers that render them unviable for use in larger ships, they can outgun them too, and the sensor nerf means there simply isn't enough time to throw out enough AMMs to counter a box-launcher salvo.
It's ridiculous. Carrier-parasite is clearly the most optimum solution for anything, and it shouldn't be. I'm proposing a few rather simple changes to bring hangars and parasites back in line with the rest of the game. Effectively, hangars should be designable components with background techs, like magazines, with their costs and crew requirements correspondingly affected.
First : For their volume, hangars are entirely too efficient. It's unreasonable to expect that 100t of clearance is enough to manoeuvre a 1000t parasite, or to inspect, service, or repair it. I'm proposing a new line of techs, termed 'Hangar Overhead' that governs how much overhead a hangar needs to support a certain volume of parasites, starting from 100% overhead at TL0 and maxing out at 20% overhead.
i.e. Hangar Size = Hangar Capacity * [100 + Hangar Overhead]/100
So a 1000t capacity hangar with 50% overhead will be a 1500t component, while with the 40% overhead tech, it'll be a 1400t component. Civilian hangars will be cheaper but have twice the overhead volume of military hangars.
Second: Launching and retrieving parasites from hangars should not be instantaneous. Larger hangars will have a lower relative surface area compared to smaller hangars, so they should take longer to launch all their parasites. Larger ships should also have less space to manoeuvre, and take longer to launch. Another line of techs, similar to missile launch rate, will govern this factor.
For the sake of consistency, let us assume that this follows missile launch rate.
Launch/Retrieval Time = SQRT[Parasite Size in HS]*(Hangar Handling Modifier)*150sec/(Parasite Launch Rate)
Hangar Handling Modifier = SQRT[Hangar Size in HS]
The parasite launch rate tech line is identical to the missile launch rate tech line.
There could also be a tech that prevented parasites from being recovered while in motion till it was researched, similar to the Underway Replenishment tech line.
Third : Hangars should never completely remove maintenance requirements, and should also not be able to fully repair parasites. It makes no sense and has no basis in the real world. Even the most modern aircraft carriers could never maintain their airwing at peak operating conditions for an arbitrary amount of time, and could never properly patch-up a battle-damaged aircraft. There will invariably be some component or the other for which a spare is not on hand, or which cannot be repaired on site. What hangars should do is extend the maintenance life of parasites, modified by the size of the hangar itself. A new line of techs governs this, termed Hangar Maintenance Modifier, starting at 25% and ending at 5%, and MSP is drawn from ship stocks to maintain parasites.
Hangar Failure Rate = (Parasite Failure Rate)*(Hangar Maintenance Modifier)/(SQRT[(Hangar Size in HS)/10]
What this means is that parasites in hangars have their maintenance clock tick at a slower rate than normal, and consume MSP at this lower rate : this signifies that the hangar fabricators and maintenance facilities can service most of the parasite's systems, but some systems (i.e. precision instruments, critical machinery, etc.) cannot be manufactured on board and are consumables. Larger hangars are also better at extending parasite life, but dedicated maintenance facilities should be needed to properly maintain or repair ships.
In effect these proposed changes now provide adequate incentive to actually upgrade or replace carriers. Early game carriers will, like missile and beam ships, be crude, bulky, and pretty terrible at what they do. As technology improves, carriers will be able to hold more fighters, launch them faster, and keep them in peak condition for longer. It also provides an interesting dynamic between larger hangars that take longer to be emptied but can maintain parasites better and smaller hangars that have faster response times but aren't that good at maintaining stuff. It's also now possible to 'ambush' a carrier before it can finish deploying its complement.
This is largely just a skeletal idea with mostly placeholder values, what do you folk think?
Edit : I made a new topic so as to not interrupt the present debate on research methodologies in the suggestions thread.
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These are some pretty darn good suggestions and I do think they would work really well. I fully agree that hangars are way overpowered in relation to operating other main combat missile ships. In C# this will be even more so with the sensor model changed to favour smaller craft rather than smaller.
Another important thing I have commented a few times as well is free maintenance on parasites. Given how cheap hangars is and how expensive parasites can be the maintenance are nearly free in comparison. Without having to pay maintenance it might even be more useful to build hangar stations to place all your ships in C#, you now pay supplies for everything so it is a one time investment to build the hangar station. You can lower the supply cost considerably this way, the higher the tech level the more you will save cost in the long run.
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Steve talks in http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg101959;topicseen#msg101959 about maintenance, and I read it as ships in hangars using up supplies, but it would be good to have explicit confirmation.
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I agree that these ideas have merit. However I think it's worthwhile to state the obvious: while the carrier can enhance its capabilities by upgrading its fighters, the fighters themselves cannot be upgraded. Therefore, after a few tech bumps one is often left with a large stock of 2nd-rate and 3rd-rate fighters.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Fighters can always be used for home defense, after all, or they can simply be scrapped. However I just wanted to point out that there IS a tradeoff to a carrier's long lifespan.
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Fighters and sensor scouts generally last longer even when outdated are my experiences. Once they are too old you just scrap them and get some of the resources back and build new fighters in their place. It actually is cheaper in the long run than upgrading ships which certainly is not free either.
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I think this makes sense. A few refinements I would propose are:
1. With hangars as designable components, I would introduce a maximum parasite size, set at the time of designing the hangar. This can be as large as the designer wants (up to the size of the hangar) - after all, the Peace Moon canonically carries a parasite complement of Victory-class star destroyers. However, the larger the maximum size of individual parasite craft, the less efficient the hangar operations. This would change the hangar hull space overhead to be:
Hangar Size = Hangar Capacity * [100 + Hangar Overhead * (1 + Hangar Handling Modifier)]/100
Where:
Hangar Handling Modifier = SQRT(Maximum Parasite Size / Hangar Capacity)
and Hangar Overhead is a tech line following the previously proposed convention.
2. The initially proposed formula for launch/retrieval time of parasite craft makes the time to launch each parasite scale with the size of the queue of waiting parasites behind it, which makes limited sense. It also means that simply splitting the carrier in half (and designing each of the smaller vessels with proportional hull space allocation) would more than double your launch rate.
I would instead propose instead the following:
Launch/Retrieval Time = (1 + Hangar Handling Modifier) * 150sec / (Parasite Launch Rate)
Where:
Hangar Handling Modifier as defined above, and Parasite Launch Rate as in the original proposal.
Effectively, with these two proposals, each Hangar component would represent one launch window and corresponding staging area - so if you had three hangars each able to handle 400 ton parasites, you would be able to launch parasites at 2-point-something the rate of a single hangar, but at the cost of a higher space overhead.
3: The original proposal for parasite maintenance interacts poorly with the way the maintenance clock mechanic works. Rather than going off the parasite's internal maintenance clock, maintenance should go off the carrier's, and the carrier should be allowed to overhaul the parasite back to the point where the parasite's Annual Failure Rate matches the carrier's current AFR (if better, and it usually will be), but no further. It makes sense that the carrier cannot maintain the parasites at optimal operating capacity, but a major point of a carrier is to offload the internal engineering spaces on the parasite to the carrier.
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Designable Hangars?!?
Yes, please!
Maybe even two versions, where you can design a "general" hangar, where all the normal rules apply, and a "specialized" hangar, where you specify a Fighter class for which the hangar is designed. All other Fighter classes will take up x more space (25%?) and get less Maintainace benefits than the specialized class, but the hangar will have less overhead (80% of normal?). This would still eliminate the problem with the current hangars being cheap to upgrade by changing the fighter class. You can then choose between inefficient but upgradeable or efficient but not upgradeable.
Kinda related question: Do you guys think more designable parts than in VB would just add useless micromanagement or add more variety in ship designs?
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Designable Hangars?!?
Yes, please!
Maybe even two versions, where you can design a "general" hangar, where all the normal rules apply, and a "specialized" hangar, where you specify a Fighter class for which the hangar is designed. All other Fighter classes will take up x more space (25%?) and get less Maintainace benefits than the specialized class, but the hangar will have less overhead (80% of normal?). This would still eliminate the problem with the current hangars being cheap to upgrade by changing the fighter class. You can then choose between inefficient but upgradeable or efficient but not upgradeable.
Kinda related question: Do you guys think more designable parts than in VB would just add useless micromanagement or add more variety in ship designs?
Instead of class I think you should specify a maximum size of parasite... that would be more reasonable from an abstraction sense. Thus you can design a hangar to operate anything from 500t and below at max efficiency and anything above at lower efficiency and at say double the designed efficiency a parasite can't even dock in the hangar at all. Any hangar must then be at least twice the size of the optimal parasite to maintain.
A ship operating parasites at say 2000t should be radically different from a carrier designed to operate parasites at 500t. The amount of total hangar space is not really important because it can easily be designed so that a 2000t vessel can't ever fit in it even if it can swallow 20.000t worth if 500t and below crafts.
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To be honest this seems to entirely eliminate the usefulness of hangars, at least if done all at once. Large ships have already been substantially buffed in C#. I at least think waiting until after release to look at this sort of stuff would be a good idea.
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Having hangars built for different sizes is cool. However, people will want to have fighters, FACs, sensor ships, etc on the same carrier. A system that puts every parasite into the smallest hangar that fits would work with a simple size cap. Any additional complexity would end up requiring a UI for hangar slot assignments, which is excessive even for Aurora.
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To be honest this seems to entirely eliminate the usefulness of hangars, at least if done all at once. Large ships have already been substantially buffed in C#. I at least think waiting until after release to look at this sort of stuff would be a good idea.
To be honest I don't think Steve will do any more major changes to anything before releasing C# Aurora anymore. This would have to be something for later... I'm sure of that.
I do think that Hangars and the way they work should be due for some consideration. Hangars are a bit too abstracted and too good, they should be more of an option.
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Having hangars built for different sizes is cool. However, people will want to have fighters, FACs, sensor ships, etc on the same carrier. A system that puts every parasite into the smallest hangar that fits would work with a simple size cap. Any additional complexity would end up requiring a UI for hangar slot assignments, which is excessive even for Aurora.
What I suggested is a maximum size that is optimum for storage, launching and maintain parasites and should not be overly difficult to work with.
If you design the carrier or hangar for 1000t then you operate everything at 1000t and below at peak efficiency and anything between 1000-2000t at lower efficiency and above 2000t they simply would not be allowed to dock at all.
The higher the max docking size the more space you need for servicing, launching and storage.
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TBH, I think it makes sense to bifurcate hangars into Hangar Modules proper, which store, maintain, repair, and rearm parasites, and Launch Bays, which launch and retrieve parasites. It's simpler to parrot missiles in this regard.
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Fighters and sensor scouts generally last longer even when outdated are my experiences. Once they are too old you just scrap them and get some of the resources back and build new fighters in their place. It actually is cheaper in the long run than upgrading ships which certainly is not free either.
Whilst true I've found from experience that it is also a pretty large logistical effort to take new fighters and have the fleet training completed. You generally need additional ships away from your combat carriers to do this which ups the overheads.
Combat ships can also be upgraded incrementally with new sensors and fire controls and engines and not suffer the need for retraining and for missile ships I've found they can remain pretty effective just by swapping out the newest batch of missiles.
I think with the maintenance changes this has already equalised the system a lot.
Finally on the launch delay piece, when you are talking about days of flight time for the fighters to engage a hostile then even a few hours of time to launch really makes no difference. This only really becomes and issue for something like a warp point assault or defence where I agree that a delay would be a good mechanic to have in. I've always thought this could be done by having both a hanger component and a ship launcher component as ive also been bugged by the idea that my carrier can on one hand deal with 100 fighters and then just empty those out and doc a 5000 ton ship instead.
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Another important thing I have commented a few times as well is free maintenance on parasites. Given how cheap hangars is and how expensive parasites can be the maintenance are nearly free in comparison. Without having to pay maintenance it might even be more useful to build hangar stations to place all your ships in C#, you now pay supplies for everything so it is a one time investment to build the hangar station. You can lower the supply cost considerably this way, the higher the tech level the more you will save cost in the long run.
It is already entirely possible to build massive PDC hangars and put your entire fleet into them to avoid having to pay maintenance on them. Some players have done so and it works - except for carriers with parasites on them as those will vanish when you put the carrier(s) into a hangar. But you can circumvent that by having separate PDC Hangar for fighters. It's just exploiting the system and not really any different from playing without maintenance at all. In that sense C# is not introducing new issues, just carrying forward an existing one.
I've found from experience that it is also a pretty large logistical effort to take new fighters and have the fleet training completed. You generally need additional ships away from your combat carriers to do this which ups the overheads.
Combat ships can also be upgraded incrementally with new sensors and fire controls and engines and not suffer the need for retraining and for missile ships I've found they can remain pretty effective just by swapping out the newest batch of missiles.
Yes, exactly that. While I agree that carrier+parasite combo is very powerful, it is also micro-intensive despite extensive use of Naval Organization tab (and the improvements to that coming in C#) and not quite as omnipotent as SevenOfCarina makes them out to be in his initial post.
Don't get me wrong, these changes - or something similar - would be great to have. I just don't agree that the system as a whole is so broken that these changes are critically warranted as soon as possible.
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Fighters and sensor scouts generally last longer even when outdated are my experiences. Once they are too old you just scrap them and get some of the resources back and build new fighters in their place. It actually is cheaper in the long run than upgrading ships which certainly is not free either.
Whilst true I've found from experience that it is also a pretty large logistical effort to take new fighters and have the fleet training completed. You generally need additional ships away from your combat carriers to do this which ups the overheads.
Combat ships can also be upgraded incrementally with new sensors and fire controls and engines and not suffer the need for retraining and for missile ships I've found they can remain pretty effective just by swapping out the newest batch of missiles.
I think with the maintenance changes this has already equalised the system a lot.
Finally on the launch delay piece, when you are talking about days of flight time for the fighters to engage a hostile then even a few hours of time to launch really makes no difference. This only really becomes and issue for something like a warp point assault or defence where I agree that a delay would be a good mechanic to have in. I've always thought this could be done by having both a hanger component and a ship launcher component as ive also been bugged by the idea that my carrier can on one hand deal with 100 fighters and then just empty those out and doc a 5000 ton ship instead.
Fleet training and training of fighters will not need huge carriers... you can now just station them in a base with the fleet training. Allot easier than before. So that should not really be a super big issue.
If launching and recovering fighters make no difference then time to rearm them make no difference either... it does quite allot in combat conditions.
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Another important thing I have commented a few times as well is free maintenance on parasites. Given how cheap hangars is and how expensive parasites can be the maintenance are nearly free in comparison. Without having to pay maintenance it might even be more useful to build hangar stations to place all your ships in C#, you now pay supplies for everything so it is a one time investment to build the hangar station. You can lower the supply cost considerably this way, the higher the tech level the more you will save cost in the long run.
It is already entirely possible to build massive PDC hangars and put your entire fleet into them to avoid having to pay maintenance on them. Some players have done so and it works - except for carriers with parasites on them as those will vanish when you put the carrier(s) into a hangar. But you can circumvent that by having separate PDC Hangar for fighters. It's just exploiting the system and not really any different from playing without maintenance at all. In that sense C# is not introducing new issues, just carrying forward an existing one.
I've found from experience that it is also a pretty large logistical effort to take new fighters and have the fleet training completed. You generally need additional ships away from your combat carriers to do this which ups the overheads.
Combat ships can also be upgraded incrementally with new sensors and fire controls and engines and not suffer the need for retraining and for missile ships I've found they can remain pretty effective just by swapping out the newest batch of missiles.
Yes, exactly that. While I agree that carrier+parasite combo is very powerful, it is also micro-intensive despite extensive use of Naval Organization tab (and the improvements to that coming in C#) and not quite as omnipotent as SevenOfCarina makes them out to be in his initial post.
Don't get me wrong, these changes - or something similar - would be great to have. I just don't agree that the system as a whole is so broken that these changes are critically warranted as soon as possible.
I think this was actually what I said... you could do that in VB Aurora, not that I ever abused that but you could. It just will be even easier now when everything cost supplies instead of a specific resource. If you had too many hangars you might run out of Vendarite eventually... although PDC did not cost maintenance at all. We will not have PDC in C# but we will have ground fighter bases and I don't know if they will cost maintenance?
I never thought fighters or small crafts was especially micro intensive and I install hangars on pretty much all capital ships.
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I'm uncertain if Steve has already encountered this problem, or if this is something that has already been discussed, but hangars, in their present iteration, are massively overpowered.
Hangars eliminate maintenance requirements for parasites, allow for easy and rapid transfer of ordnance, fuel, and supplies, and launch and retrieve craft instantaneously. They're cheap, and absurdly efficient at what they do, with a tiny mass penalty. (Seriously, 100t of extra space is somehow enough for maintenance gantries, fabricators, crew spaces, ship-to-parasite transfer systems, and maneuvering clearance for a 1000t parasite?) And that isn't even going into the inherent superiority of parasite ships that can sacrifice endurance for performance.
Right now, carriers can uprate their capabilities by simply replacing their parasites, which is fast, cheap, and doesn't require yard time, unlike the time-consuming and expensive process that is upgrading full ships. Carriers thus have a much longer service life than other ships, which are useless once outdated. Parasites are hard to detect because of their small size, and can afford to be much faster; they can often outrange and outrun their opponents. And thanks to the increased susceptibility of box launchers that render them unviable for use in larger ships, they can outgun them too, and the sensor nerf means there simply isn't enough time to throw out enough AMMs to counter a box-launcher salvo.
It's ridiculous. Carrier-parasite is clearly the most optimum solution for anything, and it shouldn't be. I'm proposing a few rather simple changes to bring hangars and parasites back in line with the rest of the game. Effectively, hangars should be designable components with background techs, like magazines, with their costs and crew requirements correspondingly affected.
First : For their volume, hangars are entirely too efficient. It's unreasonable to expect that 100t of clearance is enough to manoeuvre a 1000t parasite, or to inspect, service, or repair it. I'm proposing a new line of techs, termed 'Hangar Overhead' that governs how much overhead a hangar needs to support a certain volume of parasites, starting from 100% overhead at TL0 and maxing out at 20% overhead.
i. e. Hangar Size = Hangar Capacity * [100 + Hangar Overhead]/100
So a 1000t capacity hangar with 50% overhead will be a 1500t component, while with the 40% overhead tech, it'll be a 1400t component. Civilian hangars will be cheaper but have twice the overhead volume of military hangars.
Second: Launching and retrieving parasites from hangars should not be instantaneous. Larger hangars will have a lower relative surface area compared to smaller hangars, so they should take longer to launch all their parasites. Larger ships should also have less space to manoeuvre, and take longer to launch. Another line of techs, similar to missile launch rate, will govern this factor.
For the sake of consistency, let us assume that this follows missile launch rate.
Launch/Retrieval Time = SQRT[Parasite Size in HS]*(Hangar Handling Modifier)*150sec/(Parasite Launch Rate)
Hangar Handling Modifier = SQRT[Hangar Size in HS]
The parasite launch rate tech line is identical to the missile launch rate tech line.
There could also be a tech that prevented parasites from being recovered while in motion till it was researched, similar to the Underway Replenishment tech line.
Third : Hangars should never completely remove maintenance requirements, and should also not be able to fully repair parasites. It makes no sense and has no basis in the real world. Even the most modern aircraft carriers could never maintain their airwing at peak operating conditions for an arbitrary amount of time, and could never properly patch-up a battle-damaged aircraft. There will invariably be some component or the other for which a spare is not on hand, or which cannot be repaired on site. What hangars should do is extend the maintenance life of parasites, modified by the size of the hangar itself. A new line of techs governs this, termed Hangar Maintenance Modifier, starting at 25% and ending at 5%, and MSP is drawn from ship stocks to maintain parasites.
Hangar Failure Rate = (Parasite Failure Rate)*(Hangar Maintenance Modifier)/(SQRT[(Hangar Size in HS)/10]
What this means is that parasites in hangars have their maintenance clock tick at a slower rate than normal, and consume MSP at this lower rate : this signifies that the hangar fabricators and maintenance facilities can service most of the parasite's systems, but some systems (i. e. precision instruments, critical machinery, etc. ) cannot be manufactured on board and are consumables. Larger hangars are also better at extending parasite life, but dedicated maintenance facilities should be needed to properly maintain or repair ships.
In effect these proposed changes now provide adequate incentive to actually upgrade or replace carriers. Early game carriers will, like missile and beam ships, be crude, bulky, and pretty terrible at what they do. As technology improves, carriers will be able to hold more fighters, launch them faster, and keep them in peak condition for longer. It also provides an interesting dynamic between larger hangars that take longer to be emptied but can maintain parasites better and smaller hangars that have faster response times but aren't that good at maintaining stuff. It's also now possible to 'ambush' a carrier before it can finish deploying its complement.
This is largely just a skeletal idea with mostly placeholder values, what do you folk think?
Edit : I made a new topic so as to not interrupt the present debate on research methodologies in the suggestions thread.
I think the idea is great but formula for calculating hangar size is not. It scales linearly with capacity and you get no benefit from economy of scale. If you build hangar for just one ship you need all the necessary facilities to maintain it but when it's made for two or three ships you already have most of 'fabricators' and other stuff mostly in place. Ships don't break constantly they do from time to time so to maintain 4 ships instead o 2 you don't need twice the amount of maintainance facilities. The formula should take it into account since as we all know 'BIGGER IS ALWAYS BETTER'. I currently don't have good idea for how the formula should look to implement that but it should be possible.
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For me current system is totally enough and seems to be fine. There is a lot of additional work to make carriers run to compensate. And we already have a lot of complex systems, I do not want hangars to turn into this micromanagement nightmare that makes me angry while using it.
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1) The issue with free maintenance in PDC hangars goes away in C# due to the removal of PDCs.
2) While you don't pay maintenance on ships in a hangar, you still have to pay maintenance on the hangar itself. A 1000 ton FAC will probably cost a little over 100 BP and a hangar bay large enough to hold that FAC also costs 100 BP. Then you have to build the rest of the ship that contains the hangar and pay maintenance on that as well. Looking at a few warship designs in my current campaign, the costs are 125-140 per 1000 tons. So, if anything, hangars start to look a little expensive in BP / maintenance terms.
3) I agree that hangars are probably generous in terms of size vs capacity so I probably could look at adjusting that a little.
4) I definitely don't want a system where you have to launch or land parasites a few at a time. That would get tedious really fast and I don't think it adds anything to game play.
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1) The issue with free maintenance in PDC hangars goes away in C# due to the removal of PDCs.
2) While you don't pay maintenance on ships in a hangar, you still have to pay maintenance on the hangar itself. A 1000 ton FAC will probably cost a little over 100 BP and a hangar bay large enough to hold that FAC also costs 100 BP. Then you have to build the rest of the ship that contains the hangar and pay maintenance on that as well. Looking at a few warship designs in my current campaign, the costs are 125-140 per 1000 tons. So, if anything, hangars start to look a little expensive in BP / maintenance terms.
3) I agree that hangars are probably generous in terms of size vs capacity so I probably could look at adjusting that a little.
4) I definitely don't want a system where you have to launch or land parasites a few at a time. That would get tedious really fast and I don't think it adds anything to game play.
On point two I usually see about 100-120BP per 500 tons on fighters at around magneto-plasma tech level for an interceptor or missile fighter and around 200-250BP per 500t for a sensor scout. The thing with the hangar cost is that it don't scale maintenance with technology advancement.
On point four I agree that there should not be any additional micromanagement. I would suggest just adding a cool down when they land or tries to launch similar to when you fire a weapon based on crew grade. That would not add any more micromanagement than time to reload box launchers within a hangar.
Maintenance within hangar would not have to be a complex thing either, the parasites would just eat some of the ships supplies over time. I just don't like when things are completely free, hangars are quite good as they are with being a very dynamic and flexible system.
In my opinion it would not have to be complex or add much micromanagement just scale better. I also think it would be fun to design hangars based on my needs in the same way i design missile launchers and magazines etc..
I certainly don't expect anything done at this point, but I would like to see something done to make it fun to design hangars and carriers a bit more. Especially since you rarely need to upgrade carriers aside from their engines.
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One change I'd love to see: hangars don't currently repair destroyed components on parasites. I'd love it if they did, consuming MSP from the mothership in the process, perhaps with a small surcharge for convenience (since you can, for example, repair a component in a hangar that the parasite doesn't carry enough MSP itself to repair).
I might be crazy and this actually does already work and I don't know it.
3) I agree that hangars are probably generous in terms of size vs capacity so I probably could look at adjusting that a little.
Might I suggest a tech line that reduces hangar overhead? We already have tech for hangar components (boat bay, hangar, small boat bay), so this isn't much of a stretch. Unless you intend to reduce the overall effectiveness of parasite strategies, I might recommend a tech line that starts with a worse overhead penalty than current, but ends up with a better one.
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I certainly don't expect anything done at this point, but I would like to see something done to make it fun to design hangars and carriers a bit more. Especially since you rarely need to upgrade carriers aside from their engines.
If I were looking for an interesting change to hangars, and maybe a buff to compensate for a simultaneous nerf (like increasing the overhead), I think it might be interesting if hangars' mass changed depending on if they were full or empty. Basically meaning carriers would be faster after they launched their parasite craft, in the same way tugs are faster after dropping the tractor beam.
It may not sound like a big change, but I think it could have some interesting effects on carrier design, even allowing for a sort of "battle carrier" that takes advantage of its higher speed after launching.
One change I'd love to see: hangars don't currently repair destroyed components on parasites. I'd love it if they did, consuming MSP from the mothership in the process, perhaps with a small surcharge for convenience (since you can, for example, repair a component in a hangar that the parasite doesn't carry enough MSP itself to repair).
I might be crazy and this actually does already work and I don't know it.
It already works this way.
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I certainly don't expect anything done at this point, but I would like to see something done to make it fun to design hangars and carriers a bit more. Especially since you rarely need to upgrade carriers aside from their engines.
If I were looking for an interesting change to hangars, and maybe a buff to compensate for a simultaneous nerf (like increasing the overhead), I think it might be interesting if hangars' mass changed depending on if they were full or empty. Basically meaning carriers would be faster after they launched their parasite craft, in the same way tugs are faster after dropping the tractor beam.
It may not sound like a big change, but I think it could have some interesting effects on carrier design, even allowing for a sort of "battle carrier" that takes advantage of its higher speed after launching.
That would open up a whole can of worms because then you would want the same for cargo ships, missiles magazines, fuel tanks, supply stores etc..
I would personally not be against it, but it would make things more complex and not everyone would like it I presume.
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4) I definitely don't want a system where you have to launch or land parasites a few at a time. That would get tedious really fast and I don't think it adds anything to game play.
I would want the system to be more like underway refueling, where you only have to issue one order even if the execution takes an extended (or variable) amount of time. For example, the 'Launch Parasites' order might put 100 tons per hangar bay into space every five seconds, so our hypothetical Battlestar Galactica with two hangar bays could launch two 200-ton Vipers every ten seconds. Since it carries a total of 72 Vipers, it takes six minutes to launch the full wing (plus any order delay), but only requires one order.
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4) I definitely don't want a system where you have to launch or land parasites a few at a time. That would get tedious really fast and I don't think it adds anything to game play.
I would want the system to be more like underway refueling, where you only have to issue one order even if the execution takes an extended (or variable) amount of time. For example, the 'Launch Parasites' order might put 100 tons per hangar bay into space every five seconds, so our hypothetical Battlestar Galactica with two hangar bays could launch two 200-ton Vipers every ten seconds. Since it carries a total of 72 Vipers, it takes six minutes to launch the full wing (plus any order delay), but only requires one order.
Yes that's how I thought such a system could work for delays.
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1) The issue with free maintenance in PDC hangars goes away in C# due to the removal of PDCs.
So where do ground-based fighters go now? I skimmed the changelist, but found nothing.
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1) The issue with free maintenance in PDC hangars goes away in C# due to the removal of PDCs.
So where do ground-based fighters go now? I skimmed the changelist, but found nothing.
Fighter class ships can now be maintained in the normal way, so you can just leave them in orbit.
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So you can't have armored base to put your fighter inside ?
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You can, but they have to be orbital installations.
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4) I definitely don't want a system where you have to launch or land parasites a few at a time. That would get tedious really fast and I don't think it adds anything to game play.
I would want the system to be more like underway refueling, where you only have to issue one order even if the execution takes an extended (or variable) amount of time.
I'm theoretically interested in this kind of restriction, but does it really add anything to the game? Say you can launch x00 tonnes per 5s and Aurora handles everything (squadron management, TG assignment with sensible orders, etc.) automatically with the push of a button; does that mean anything more interesting than having a few more 5s ticks in preparation for combat, aka tedium?
In the one case I can think of where it does make a big difference - being jumped by the enemy or jump-point carrier assault - it seems only to add immense frustration rather than an interesting mechanic.
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So you can't have armored base to put your fighter inside ?
Steve mentioned some time ago that he was thinking of possibly making a new ground-based facility to house fighters. Whether that could be armoured or not wasn't mentioned, and he hasn't brought it up since. So for now, plan to do this:
You can, but they have to be orbital installations.
Since commercial hangars are now a thing, it means that we get to do a decision - armoured military hangars that consume maintenance as they orbit or unarmoured commercial hangars that are free but extremely vulnerable.
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So you can't have armored base to put your fighter inside ?
Steve mentioned some time ago that he was thinking of possibly making a new ground-based facility to house fighters. Whether that could be armoured or not wasn't mentioned, and he hasn't brought it up since. So for now, plan to do this:
You can, but they have to be orbital installations.
Since commercial hangars are now a thing, it means that we get to do a decision - armoured military hangars that consume maintenance as they orbit or unarmoured commercial hangars that are free but extremely vulnerable.
I think the commercial hangers does not maintain military ships...
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4) I definitely don't want a system where you have to launch or land parasites a few at a time. That would get tedious really fast and I don't think it adds anything to game play.
I would want the system to be more like underway refueling, where you only have to issue one order even if the execution takes an extended (or variable) amount of time.
I'm theoretically interested in this kind of restriction, but does it really add anything to the game? Say you can launch x00 tonnes per 5s and Aurora handles everything (squadron management, TG assignment with sensible orders, etc.) automatically with the push of a button; does that mean anything more interesting than having a few more 5s ticks in preparation for combat, aka tedium?
In the one case I can think of where it does make a big difference - being jumped by the enemy or jump-point carrier assault - it seems only to add immense frustration rather than an interesting mechanic.
It would most likely be allot more than 5s... more likely minutes or many minutes per launch.
And this would be as meaningful and it takes time to rearm, refuel and resupply ships.
In the real world you should be glad if more than 70% of any crafts on a carrier capable ship is fit for service at any time. The logistics to launch and retrieve crafts also are pretty complex in the real world, especially of you want to avoid serious injuries and damage. In the real world there also is a huge difference on the sortie rate where you might be able to sortie like four times in a day but at a terrible drop in serviceable crafts and after a day or two the sortie rate will be down to 1-2 sorties a day per craft. The amount of sorties or things you can do in game are just not very realistic. In fact... someone that have low maintenance costs and very good logistics will have a considerable advantage in the real world because of these limitations. Many people stare blindly on hardware's optimal performance but in real life that is only one part of the picture and not always the most important one.
not saying all of this should be modelled, but in real life this is often more important to a military than anything else as long as the equipment can perform what it is meant to do.
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Launch time does make a massive difference. Large early game carriers would likely take an hour or more to empty their hangars, time during which they are massively vulnerable to ambushes and the like. With how fast missies are relatively, the time from the detection of a missile combatant to the time of missile impact is measured in minutes, this is not enough time to launch the entire fighter screen. It creates meaningful decisions : Do you launch your AMM fighters only and let the missile ship get away? Do you launch a mix of ASM and AMM fighters? Is launching an extra sensor fighter worth sacrificing an extra missile fighter? Do you keep a portion of your fighter wing constantly on patrol to ensure fast response times? Is that worth the cost in maintenance? Do you risk keeping your entire wing in the hangar to ensure optimal performance for an ambush?
Effectively, it balances out the current overwhelming superiority of parasites, not by nerfing them directly, but by imposing strategic considerations in line with what real world carriers have to deal with. I'm guessing it'll have to be counterbalanced by a slight buff to fighter, though.
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That would probably need some kind of order to maintain a constant floating patrol around the carrier, else it would be kindof horrid to keep that running manually.
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Launch time does make a massive difference. Large early game carriers would likely take an hour or more to empty their hangars, time during which they are massively vulnerable to ambushes and the like. With how fast missies are relatively, the time from the detection of a missile combatant to the time of missile impact is measured in minutes, this is not enough time to launch the entire fighter screen. It creates meaningful decisions : Do you launch your AMM fighters only and let the missile ship get away? Do you launch a mix of ASM and AMM fighters? Is launching an extra sensor fighter worth sacrificing an extra missile fighter? Do you keep a portion of your fighter wing constantly on patrol to ensure fast response times? Is that worth the cost in maintenance? Do you risk keeping your entire wing in the hangar to ensure optimal performance for an ambush?
I'm for meaningful decisions, which is why I was asking if there were any here. And you've done an admirable job pointing out a case where they might be.
This still doesn't seem to hold up much, though. Under a system where missile flight times and wing deploy times are on similar scales, you probably end up with people running a CAP doctrine (in addition to providing other defensive umbrellas). That sounds cool, but we're back to Aurora's limitations in automatic order handling and templating making deploying a carrier force a massive exercise in tedium.
... current overwhelming superiority of parasites ...
Suffice to say we seriously disagree, here, especially with the slew of changes coming in C# that massively favour larger ships.
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If you want to add depth to Carrier Fighter handling then the obvious way to do it IMHO is to open up hangar design choices based on realistic restrictions for Carrier Operations.
This means that either through alot of design parameters (when designing hangars), or through separate modules that can be designed you would add capabilities that assist with the fighter turnaround. This is done in combination with reducing the size penalty on Hangars which is currently "abstracted" to facilitate such things.
I'm talking about things like:
- Launching speed, how many Fighters that can be launched per minute ( could also have tradeoff of module size vs cooldown similar to missile launchers if done as a separate module ).
- Recovery speed, how many Fighters that can be landed per minute
- Refueling speed, how many Fighters that can be simultaneously refueled and what speed it's done at
- Rearming speed, how many Fighters that can be simultaneously rearmed and what speed it's done at
- Repairing speed, how many Fighters that can be simultaneously repaired and what speed it's done at
- Maximum size of fighters that can be handled by all the above
( if done as separate modules some kind of "free" baseline that permits very slow operations would be needed for ships with a single parasite or small utility hangars where adding all the modules to manage operations would just be messy and don't add fun gameplay )
- Armor/Damage control ( If done by designing hangars ) could add interesting depth to prevent parasites and munitions on them going boom in secondary explosions.
The goal of this would be to allow you to tailor Carriers for alot of different roles like Jump assaults ( that can launch loads of fighters super fast ), for long range standoff ( slower turnaround ), for defense (launching anti missile fighters fast) or maybe just for logistics/transportation with minimal turnaround. You could also tailor Carriers based on what kind of fighters they are meant to operate which can have design and operational impact.
Much of the tools to do this might already be mostly present given the rework to ship rearm/refuel that has been done, but it would still probably be quite a complex undertaking.
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I strongly support the idea of increasing the depth of carrier ops.
It can make a world of difference at the strategic level how capable your carrier is at keeping a large amount of strikecraft running simultaneously over an extended period of time, versus a ship that is capable of a huge surge of activity and then is out of it for a while. That basically amounts to endurance, how many attacks can your fleet weather before its exhausted and unable to keep its strikecraft going.
Tactically the speed at which you can get all of your stuff into the void quickly can make a world of difference if you are on the attack or were surprised somehow and your carrier isn't ready to go.
However I argue this should be all talk and no action (aside from perhaps trying to make provision for adding this in the future) until there is some initial version of C# playable and in peoples hands. I still believe Steve probably draws some motivation from people playing the game, or he would be a lot less interested in the community. The sooner we get there the better for everyone.
There is the saying that the last 20% takes 80% of the work, which is mainly true, so I am still exceedingly antsy personally.
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I would like to think the Cargo Handling System and it's later versions could be re-purposed to affect launch / recovery rate too.
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Steve mentioned some time ago that he was thinking of possibly making a new ground-based facility to house fighters. Whether that could be armoured or not wasn't mentioned, and he hasn't brought it up since. So for now, plan to do this:
You can, but they have to be orbital installations.
Last I heard on the subject was this:
If you have maintenance facilities, you can have fighters based at a population. If you give them a support order, they can't be targeted by normal naval combat. If you want to keep them away from ground combat as well, you can put them on support of a rear-echelon formation. Fighters in active combat can be targeted by AA units, hostile fighters equipped with AA weapons and by orbital bombardment support (more on that when I post the orbital bombardment rules).
I will make it so that fighters with the ground support order are maintained normally. The attacking force can bring in its own maintenance facilities, which will allow them to 'base' fighters on the ground.
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I think the commercial hangers does not maintain military ships...
That is correct but you can put in a small maintenance depot, just big enough to maintain the fighters, inside the hangar too and that will work - IF I've understood the new mechanics correctly.
Last I heard on the subject was this:
If you have maintenance facilities, you can have fighters based at a population. If you give them a support order, they can't be targeted by normal naval combat. If you want to keep them away from ground combat as well, you can put them on support of a rear-echelon formation. Fighters in active combat can be targeted by AA units, hostile fighters equipped with AA weapons and by orbital bombardment support (more on that when I post the orbital bombardment rules).
I will make it so that fighters with the ground support order are maintained normally. The attacking force can bring in its own maintenance facilities, which will allow them to 'base' fighters on the ground.
Ah right, I forgot that part. Yeah, for players who wish to use fighters on all/most colonies, it won't be much of a hassle to bring in a handful of maintenance facilities for the relatively small number of fighters based there. Then for the more important/critical sites where you might have way more fighters, we'll build orbital military hangar-stations that can be moved by tugs as the frontier pushes forward.
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For that matter, while I'm unsure about how large the components are, you can build a number of maintenance ships to set up maintenance depots in deep space, or service deep space stations that are for example guarding jump points.