Carrier Battles Mod
 

Main Idea:
- Fighters and their carriers will be of key importance.

Key Planned Features:
- Ship-based PD will be limited to missiles only.
This will drastically improve fighter survival without completely neutering PD.
- Fighter components and hulls will be set up to encourage specialization into bombers, interceptors and space-superiority (fighter-vs-fighter) fighters.
- Ship-to-Ship weaponry will be generally nerfed to encourage fighter use even more.

Other Planned Features:
- Semi-QNP system, including both bonus move and hull-scaled standard move.
- Ship weapons based mostly around missiles. Anti-ship, anti-fighter, anti-missile, mixed use, various warheads, etc.
- Direct-fire weapons limited to range 2-4 or so.
- Leaky shields & armor.
- Prototyping Hull tech - Hulls above your current tech level will be available, but cost more to build the more advanced they are. (Allows pricey super flagships)
- GritEcon style troops (long ground combats, mix of large and small troops required for success, tough to glass planets)

-----

Suggestions and comments welcome.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Interesting idea...For a total mod, might make and intersting game...different.

Ideas: ships weapons, could be very short ranged, and low powered, or can't affect some form of shielding, or weak versus shielding or armor, or very inaccurate at longer ranges, alot of supply usage...?

I like the prototyping hull tech idea...

Will all ships just be fighter transports, or will there be stuff like small (escort-frigate) torpedo boats, escort ships (destroyer-light cruiser), for Point Defense...?

Are you going to use Drones, Weapons Platforms, Satellites, and Mines of any type?

Kana

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Tried this before and no one was interested. Worked for weeks on the mod. Posted and it was not even downloaded ONCE. Not once. Really made me wonder why I spent so much time on it. Good luck.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Wha? I thought you never posted it...

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I posted the mod. It was posted for a good three weeks before I wrote it off.

Too many mods. I am not surprised that no one was interested in it. It was only a beta. I might still have a copy if around.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

SJ if you pull this off, can I use it in the New Age Mod? (Formerly the Conquest mod.) If I choose to revive it.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Id like to play a mod like that. Keep the capital ship weapons the same just none of them can lock onto the fast agile fighters! Maybe slow down Cap ships even more in the combat map so if you want to be sure to take out an enemy fleet youd have to use the fighters to do so....man i love this game!

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

This sounds good - I have one question so far: would the QNP for it result in very fast fighters and slow capital/carrier ships?

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Atrocities:
Sure. I'm getting a lot of stuff from my other mods already, and my regular policy holds here too.

Emperor/Alarikf:
I'm thinking fast fighters in combat, with little to no strategic move. Perhaps one speed outside of combat at best.
Ships can be fairly slow all around, but they'll actually have decent strategic move.

Combat move is always at least (strategic move)/2, so the carriers can't be made superslow in combat. It'll have to be a relative thing, with carriers running 2 or 3 in combat and 4-6 outside, while fighters go 0-1 outside and 4-6 in combat.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I think it would be cool to see CVs going 3-6, but fighters going 10-20 - that would be more akin to the dynamic we see today, wherein fighters are so powerful in part because they operate in an entirely different medium, and are, compared to naval vessels, exponentially faster...meaning they can zoom up, unload ordnance, zoom back, reload and do it again...

fun!

But, just my two cents, of course...

Thanks,


Alarik

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

But the combat map is only 50 squares wide, and in practice there is no reloading except between combats. The scale has to be kept down to match that.

Anti-ship fighter missiles will probably be the only single-shot fighter weapon, with guns firing rapidly and anti-fighter missiles going every few turns to allow the previous shot to hit and new targets to be chosen.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

More varied missiles? Have you considered turning missiles into drones? I've been working on a mod I call the "RC Mod" (RC is for Radio Control, as in RC cars, RC airplanes, etc.) in which all the missiles are removed and a ton of new, smaller drone hulls and warheads take their place... just never got around to filling in all the rest of the wonky damage type warheads and removing the seeker launchers http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

A total drones thing wouldn't work too well for this mod, unfortunately.
A key reason to switch to missiles is their natural tendency towards overkill with no re-targetting.

A swarm of drones would keep killing and killing, while with missiles the first two or three in the volley will kill, and the rest will fizzle with no target to hit.
Its that built-in diminishing returns on the volume of ordnance fired that I'm going for.

Now, that's not to say some super-missile drones wouldn't be handy... I'll have to see how it fits later.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Just recently I was wishing for a mod like this. Off and on people ask for a good fighter-based race, but you do need a good mod to make fighters more effective in SE4.

This has come up before. Consider Star Trek, with its using a "ships of the line" model, where ships line up, even though space is 3-D, and slug it out. That's how SE4 is run. Now, Battle Star Galactica, Star Wars, and Babylon 5 favor the fighters model -- its like watching a WWII in the Pacific movie, except in space. And that's always more fun to watch.

Some things I'd like to see:
- Give the biggest ships a weapon they can use against each other. Not too powerful, since armor and shields are leaky, but good range. Give it a high cost, make it big so only one fits on a decent battleship, and give it a long reload time. I'm envisioning something like the Incinerator Beam, but with a reload of 3 turns (or more, 5 or 6). Let a lucky shot turn the tide for someone, or maybe it will be a big waste, you never know until you try it.

- Lots of variations in point defense and fighter weapons. You've got those in other mods -- an example is active armor, give it a range 1 weak point defence ability. To model it blowing itself up to defect a missile.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Oh, something related to that whole WWII in space thing...

What does everybody thing of this mount idea:
Take your basic DUC, laser cannon, APB, etc.
The mounts will scale it up and down without massively altering the damage/kt/turn like stock. Some change, but not insane.
The mounts would be named things from "9mm" to "8-inch"

Giving you 9mm DU pistols and 8-inch DU cannons from the same component, with a military flavour.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

The same component being used on a troop and a battleship, just with a different mount? That's interesting.

So could you mount your dreadnaught with 900 9mm pistols if you wanted? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Never thought of this...does it work? I was working on ideas for ESG's (expanding sphere generators) for an SFB (star fleet battles) mod. I was going to use the point defense ability, with a big weapon, so that it could also be used against big ships that get to close...does the PD ability work on other component types?

Kana

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I think you can give the point defense ability to pretty much any component, but the "oppotunity fire" that you are trying to gain wont work against ships. Even if the weapon can target ships, the point defense ability will only use the opportunity fire phase to shoot at seekers. Missles, fighters, drones.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Ooh, very realistic! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

edit: this was in response to SJ's post about the mounts

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

SJ said:
You can easily set it up so that even a ship that is fast on the strategic map is slow in combat (Imperial Star Destroyers come to mind). Just give the hulls the Combat Movement ability with a negative value (or a positive one for smaller ships). That's how I'm trying to do it in my mod.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Yeah, I don't think that works. You can set up the file with a negative value and all, interestingly it doesn't give you an error. But in combat it doesn't seem to have any effect. Ship still moves at strategic speed/2.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Here's an idea:

Have weapons for fighters divided between ones that can attack seekers/fighers/small stuff and can attack ships or planets. This is working off of using either fighters or bombers, which I think adds a level of finesse to tactical fighting. Anti-ship weapons would take up large space on a fighter encouraging a specialized design, where anti-fighter/seeker weapons would be smaller allowing for more flexiblity.


I don't think that nerfing Point Defense or ship based weapons is a good idea.

Think about it like this: point defense weaponry is meant to be small, agile, and flexible. It would be insanity for large ships not to field it in some catagory or another. I'd think in a carrier focused environment there would be ships that their sole purpose is point defense to protect carriers and support ships from missiles or fighters that slip past your fighters.

In an environment like this I'd think that ship based weaponry would be longer ranged with higher damage. Reload times would be higher and the weapons themselves would be heavier though. Also, in this enviroment seekers need to be more flexible. Perhaps ships should be able to launch more of them and certain technologies could make them faster, more armored, or some combination of effects. It would keep non-carrier ships important for combat, IMO.

Imagine it like this: Fighters would either play fleet defense or provide cover for bombers. The bombers would attempt to destroy ships before they can fire their deadly long range weaponry and missile volleys at your fleet.

Sorry if that dragged on a bit.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Geo, I just checked it, you're right. It'll take a positive value and use it but not a negative one. Back to the drawing board for me. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Well, I currently play a mod with similar ideas to this (though, it isn't as in depth as I want, so maybe your mod will be better)

First off: To encourage carrier use I made resource production far lower then normal SEIV, but cranked storage, then I made fighters slightly cheaper to build, while making ships much more expensive. I made two types of point defense, interceptor cannons for targetting just missiles/drones, and interceptor missiles that target any unit but are smaller and do less damage then regular missiles. Fighter defense is generally handled VIA a mount, the point defense mount that reduces size and range of weapons, but keeps damage the same. Then there are the "slugger mounts" which are standard ship to ship mounts, while they increase the damage (not on par with SEIV standard mounts, but increase them enough) they increase the cost exponentially.

Drones are similar to SEIV drones except they are half the size and have a mount that reduces component/weapon cost and size by one half. Makes them much more valuable.

I use leaky shields, but not leaky armor. Leaky shields are more easily penetrated by fighter weapons as all weapons fire as one for a group of fighters.

Fighter hulls have a combat movement bonus, however, I am currently modding fighters as follows:
Two components,
Standard fighter engines: 1kt, 1movement (plus bonus for high tech) 5 per fighter, must have 1. At most a fighter will have 8 system/4 combat.
Fighter Thrusters: 4kt, 6 combat movement (at max), one per ship.
Fighter hulls: small 6kt, medium 10kt, heavy 14kt. Weapons will range from 1kt (small guns) to 2kt (heavy weapons/missiles), fighters will only need cockpit (1kt), but can have a life support system that provides additional supplies (1kt). And then of course sensors. So a medim fighter could have:
1 Engine 1kt
1 thruster 4kt
1 cockpit 1kt
1 combat sensor 1k
1 ECM 1kt
1 heavy weapon or two light weapons.
(Short range fighter/bomber)

5 engine 5kt
1 cockpit 1kt
1 Combat sensor 1kt
1 life support 1kt
1 heavy weapon 2k
(long range bomber, or fighter if you replace the heavy weapon with a light weapon)

One question: Does anybody know for sure if the Combat Best Experience ability works for fighters. I had planed to use it on fighters to simulate the experience or training of a ships pilots, but don't know if it works.

I would also suggest using a proportions style economy, I use a watered down Version (way more watered down then I would like) and I think it works well.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I thought experience of any kind did not appy to units.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Point defense does have to be nerfed significantly... Stock PD is an impenetrable wall.

Note: Just to be clear - Point Defense is comprised of Fighters, missiles, fighters and more fighters http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
An unopposed fighter screen should shoot down 95% of what the enemy capital ships can throw at you.

The way I see it working is the following:

A first wave of fast fighters from both sides will meet, and start duking it out.

The bombers will tend to be slower, and by the time they get through the skirmish zone your second wave of interceptors should be gunning for them. If they fail, and the bombers get in range, your capital ships will certainly take critical damage.

The capital ships could take down a few bombers with anti-fighter missiles, and should also be able to shoot down a few of the bombers' missiles with their own anti-missiles, but not many. Any remaining close-in fighter screens will have a small window of opportunity to shoot down the missiles as well, after which it is down to how much armor you have.

Once the bombers are spent, the remaining fighters will continue to dogfight and the capital ships will lob supporting missile fire into the fray.

When one side gains an advantage, their fighters may press on to strafe the hopefully crippled enemy capital ships.
The small fighter guns will certainly be much less effective than the bombers, and the missile fire will slowly whittle down the fighters, but they will keep shooting until the battle is over.

Your 50-200kt support ships should be positioned to protect your big expensive carriers as long as possible, but once your fighters are gone, you're in deep trouble.

Small numbers of fighters getting past the main lines are not too much of a threat.
Assuming the ships have good strategies, a group or two of fighters sneaking in will quickly find a pack of missiles locked on.
Missiles are most effective against small numbers of large stacks, so these situations are advantageous to the defender. The capital ships are shooting different enemies than the fighters are, and there is less wasted ordnance.

---

Allowing ship-to-ship weaponry to target fighters as well is reasonable, but the accuracy should be pitiful. Only the smallest guns would have much chance beyond the 1% minimum.

It is the carrier battles mod, and fighters should be the primary weapons and defenses in combat http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif.
Once your fighters have been defeated in space, your capital ships are all but lost.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Are you sure...? Most of the material I've read on the abilities and such says it is possible...it would suck if it isn't...cause then I would defintely wait until SEV comes out before finishing the mod...hopefully with user definable damage...

Kana

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

The only thing I can see as a real problem to this mod is the micromanagement that will come in the later stages of the game.

To over come this i suggest you have the transport ships cargo increased quite a bit to ferry fighters up to staging areas.

Mind you i am assuming that the player would build a cargo ship and set it to load fighters from fighter producing planets and drop it off where your fleet is being trained.

This would help with the running out of space problems that players would have to hunt down on 100 + planet empires.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Here's another thing. In standard SE4, your carriers have to have loads of fighter launchers, and not waste too much space on big guns or shielding. For this new mod to be significantly different from SE4, we'll want to change how fighters are launched. They'll have to press the attack, and orbit the carrier on CAP.

One suggestion, the standard fighter group is 5 (some people use 10 or more, I know). The standard fighter bay launches ... 4. Now, I know, you just need 5 bays to get an even multiple, but I want the carriers to degorge fighters at the start of combat, so maybe its useful if the standrd bay could launch 10, or more.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Aren't those conflicting requirements, for the most part?
If you spew the whole lot of them on turn 1, then they'll all be zooming away to the main fight.

If you have slower launches, you'll get waves of fighters, and always have some nearby for defense.

Although, I suppose you could just design some that use the smaller engines, so they are the same speed as the carriers, and add heavier guns and/or armor...

---

I suppose it would be really easy to have some regular-style bays, plus a superbay component that allows you to launch massive numbers at a time at the expense of some space and cargo.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Actually, I would set it up so each fighter bay can basicly hold one fighter of the corresponding highest available tech for the bay. That way, you can have two doctorines, either disgorge all your fighters at once, or relly on larger fighter numbers being disgorged in waves.

That is basicly the way it is in my mod, my friend I was playing against developed a tactic where he used massive baseships with hordes of fighters, but instead of ever seeing combat he used long range fighters entered a system launched all his fighters and then various targets in system, with his carriers never even seeing combat.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Also: in regards to scaling components up and only having certain base components, I love it!

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Which materials are those? They need to be corrected, because they are wrong. Geoschmo is quite correct.

SE5 will have user definable damage.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Yeah, that's the thing. Suppose I'm playing standard SE4, and I'm playing with fighters. I try to make attack fighters and interceptors with max engines and 1, maybe 2 tiny antiproton beams. The CAP fighters have the rocket pods, and that leaves space for only one engine, so they stay closer to the carrier. *SIGH* It doesn't matter really, in standard SE4, its hard to get enough fighters on a carrier -- much less enough of two types, and then they combine into groups at random.

But if you mod is inroducing new weapons, engines and propulsion rules, you could fine tune this some more. Give fighters specific anti-ship weapons, and specific anti-fighter weapons, to try to give them individual roles.

Another idea, when you get a halfway working mod. Setup a PBW game around it. That way it stays fresh in people's minds. For example, like with the small ships mod.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I would also add combat to hit bonuses for smaller ships (escort - destroyer) to represent small antifighter gunboats that support the fighter screens.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

If I remeber correctly it was the FAQ/instructions for the SE4 Modder by DavidG. I don't remeber seeing it in the Modding Manual, and if you say it isn't in there, then it probably isn't...well that sucks...I'm defintely going to have to wait till SEV comes out then...Bah!!!!

Kana

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I would like to play this mod...someday. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

An update:

Added the cannon mounts. From 20mm to 100mm in 5 steps. -10% accuracy per level, variable increases in damage power up to +70% for the biggie. The biggest two get a range increase as a bonus.
Weapon size scales as radius squared, so you get the whole gamut from 2kt guns to 50kt guns.

Been working on some scale issues between C&C, engines and cargo requirements.
More work still to be done, especially on balancing damage vs shields/armor on the 4-way fighters/ships interaction.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Just for that, I would never use the larger mounts unless I had a ridiculously high combat bonuses advantage over all my enemies. With the way combat bonuses work in SEIV, that is much too large a penalty for the larger mounts to be viable unless they give a damage bonus of around +200% to +300% at a minimum for the largest. Yes, that's triple to quadruple damage/space, and even then the largest might not be useful.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Keep in mind that the ranges are only 2-4 for these capital ship weapons. The zero-point will be in the middle, too.

So the 20 and 40 mm guns should have some chance of hitting fighters, and the 100mm gun should have about 40% to-hit even at the doubled max range.
Also, the additional punch of the big guns will be more effective than it looks, since the captial ships will be using leaky shields. The smaller guns will end up doing no damage to most capital ships, and much of the medium guns' damage will be negated.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Suicide:

The more you describe your idea, the better it sounds. Can't wait to check it out.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Hmm. Doesn't this mean that 2kT guns have much more firepower AND accuracy than the same tonnage of larger guns? Or is the 70% firepower advantage calculated per kT, so the 50kT gun actually does 50/2 x 1.7 = 42.5 times the damage of a 2kT gun?

PvK

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

+70% in damage/kt/turn
Plus the fact that they're huge makes them do tons of damage

so the 2kt gun might do 2 damage, while the 50kt gun does 85 ish.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Don't quote me on this, but isn't that true in reality? Take a .22 caliber rifle and scale it up to a 16 inch bore and (ignoring physics) it'll outperform a 16 inch battleship gun.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

So, how are missiles going to be handled?

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Could you be more specific?

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

Suggestions for weapons.

Rock slinger I - X gives way to
Space Bow I - X gives way to
Star Bow I - X gives way to
BB Gun I - X gives way to
Enhanced BB Gun I - X gives way to
Slug Gun I - X gives way to
Bore Gun I - X gives way to
Cannon I - X gives way to
DUC I - X gives way to
Gas Laser Gun I - X gives way to
Chemical Laser Gun I - X gives way to
Phased Energy Cannon I - X gives way to
Phasers I - X gives way to
Enhanced Phasers I - X gives way to
Poloron Beam I - X gives way to
Phased Poloron Beam I - X gives way to
Wave Motion Gun I - X

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

The way I see weapons is a set of advantages and disadvantages...

Eg:
DUC: average
Ripper - very short range, + high damage
Laser: + Long range, - less damage, + low supply use
Torpedo: + accuracy bonus, - less damage
and so on.
SE3 style, sort of, with it being mostly a balanced tech hedge rather than a tall tech tree.

---

Missiles will be the only things with serious range, probably 20 + no fizzle.
There will probably be a comparable number of missile types to DF weapon types, with tradeoffs in:
- damage vs speed vs hitpoints vs warhead type vs reload rate vs cost and such.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I think a thickness mount for armor will be good too:
EG:
Steel Armor Plating I
size - 1
HP - 3

Then we have mounts:
1-inch plating: size x1, hp x10
2-inch plating: size x2, hp x18
3-inch plating: size x3, hp x24
4-inch plating: size x4, hp x32

The rationale being as follows:
Thicker plating is less efficient in hp/kt, however the large hp per component makes it less leaky, and also improves the performance of any leaky shields which are still operating.

For example, the 1-inch steel plating (when shields are not destroyed) will be immune to weapons of less than 30 damage per hit.
4-inch plating, on the other hand, will have 80% the structural strength of the thin armor, but will be immune to weapons of less than 96 damage.

Re: Carrier Battles Mod
 

I suggested something like this for Adamant a while back (well, I suggested standard armor and then light and heavy armor mounts) but Fyron said it would be too complicated; he only wanted 2 types of armor http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Just a silly question... why are you measuring the gun bores in millimeters but the armor in inches? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

edit: oh, and maybe it would be good to have a "default" thickness for armor - in other words, instead of your scheme where the armors have 3 HP unmounted and the mounts raise their hitpoints by factors of 10-32, have the armors 30 HP unmounted and have the mounts raise their hitpoints by factors of 1 (no raise) to 3.2. That way if you forget to use a mount on your armor you're not screwed, you just get a "default" 1-inch armor http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif