Having to-hit chance, especially for heavy weapons, affected by hull size is something that's been on my list to do for some time, but Sven is (rightly) cautious about making small ships "too good." But we'll get there eventually.

Arioch wrote:but Sven is (rightly) cautious about making small ships "too good." But we'll get there eventually.

You don't want to end up like Stellaris where the best ship design in the game is the starting corvette design with no upgrades.

SmaugTheDragon wrote:

Arioch wrote:but Sven is (rightly) cautious about making small ships "too good." But we'll get there eventually.

You don't want to end up like Stellaris where the best ship design in the game is the starting corvette design with no upgrades.

This should not be the case here. I do not know exactly where Stellaris went wrong with this (played only 80 hours so far and that will remain so for quite some time yet), but the system should be fairly simple mimicing real-life naval combat:
1. Small ships are more agile, and well smaller, and are thus harder to hit (this is already somewhat in place here it might just need some more weight)
2. From the above it follows that captial ships need a screen of escort vessels to protect them from these small destroyers, gunboats, submarines or even frigates
3. Why build larger ship then? Because:
3.1. Large vessels fill a combat role, small ships cannot: such as carrying fighters/bombers, logistical centres, command bridges or heavy mounted guns that act like naval artillery agains ground targets
3.2 There is a size between small and capital. These medium hulls are confgured to combat small crafts and as escort cruisers can wipe out even swarms of them

Thus:
1. Yes, if a capital ships is attacked by a swarm of destroyers it will loose 99% of the time in real life, in SiS and I guess also in Stellaris
2. You NEED to bring escort craft along with capital ships to protect them (this might be where Stellaris went wrong as they are not effective enough?)
3. You could wipe out destroyers and Frigates (small) with Cruisers (medium) alone, but then if the enemy has a capital ship, it will wipe out your Cruisers

To simplify, in 1:1:
- Small beats large (or at least a couple of them as capitals can still have some anti-small weaponry but not that cost effectively like small)
- Medium beats small
- Large beats medium

Can you produce a single size and beat everything? No. You need to have a balanced fleet and those who can go a level higher will always have the advantage as producing medium should be more effective then producing small en-mass and producing a capital should be again more effective then producing medum en-mass. Cruisers thus need to be bad against capital just like destroyers/frigates against cruisers. The way to achieve this is weapon mount sizes available to them

Example: Already using this method, I always produce destroyers even late game. They get PD and Leech/EMP missiles to harass and weaken large ships. Then I send in a capital to take the final blow and be quickly done with it - the capital recives an escort of at least 2 medium in general to protect against other small vessels

It should be still possible to overcome your hard counter with numbers or higher tech, but SiS has this already covered, hat is why it only needs a slight adjutment in my oppinion so this balance is not broken

Stellaris went wrong (severely wrong) with combat balance because for most of it's development, armor was going to be a flat reduction of damage rather than a percentage.

So if a weapon does say, 6 damage and you have 5 armor, you take only 1 point. The costs for techs and and weapons were scaled with that in mind. Getting a weapon with 7 damage wasn't just 16% better in most cases than a weapon with 6 damage since it had to defeat armor. If up against the same 5 armor, it would actually be a 100% damage increase (2 points vs 1 point). So the costs were created with that interaction in mind.

Somewhere towards the end of development, it appears that they changed to percentage based armor (probably to avoid a higher tech race having an insurmountable advantage over lower tech armor/weapons). But when that happened, all the other interactions went out the window (if armor now stops say, 20% incoming damage, going from 6 to 7 for your damage isn't a dramatic increase anymore and definitely not worth the cost in research and resources on the ship). Hence, low-tech corvettes which are cheap and require nothing can be spammed out in large numbers and then overwhelm the severely over-priced higher tech ships.

The announced 1.8 patch supposedly will rebalance all of the costs and damages for the weapons and in theory, fix the problem. Too bad it took more than a year to get that fix out....

Anyways, back to SiS, I agree that we certainly don't want smaller ships to be 'better' than larger ones or the combat will suffer the same fate as Stellaris. Teching up and buying more expensive ships would never be worth it.

That's why it's generally 'safer' to just increase the role of the smaller ships rather than their combat power per se. And as mentioned above, that could take the form of commerce raiding/protection and maybe morale bonuses for 'showing the flag' etc. These would be more soft advantages to the smaller ships rather than actual buffs.

I think playing on Epic speed, it works pretty well as it is anyways. The bulk of my fleet for a large chunk of the game is cruisers and destroyers with an occasional carrier or battleship later on. Sure, once I hit late game, the smaller ships fall out of favor but vs fighter/missile races they still have a definite screening role.

Maybe if they were more consistently placed in the front of the formation (or better yet, if you could choose from a few pre-set formations!) they would be able to excel at that combat role even more and really wouldn't need any additional help.

Uncle_Joe wrote: Maybe if they were more consistently placed in the front of the formation (or better yet, if you could choose from a few pre-set formations!) they would be able to excel at that combat role even more and really wouldn't need any additional help.

This is a good idea. Placing Destroyers in the front row would strengthen their inteded role in the fleet. They can go somewhat on the sides but not much

What needs to be thought of in this case, is that the front role should not be allowed to be rreached by any enemy weapon+ the movement points of ship carrying the weapon. This is so that destroyers are not viped out in the first turn by medium and large vessels just because they start within range.

The player should always have the chance to influence which ships should come in range first and while this can be achieved by selectable formations, I doubt this is be included. What could reasonably done is increasing the distance between the two ships as long as the tactical map can be dynamically sized in the beginning of the engagement

Here is example of a attack formation including carrier as capital:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_strike_group

I think the principle should be the same for any capital ship though: 1 Cap needs at least 1 Cruiser and a 2-3 Destroyers/frigates
Obviously the escorts should scale with the number of capitals - though I doubt the AI can be equipped to uphold this principle especially on large maps

What I did notice is that it frequnetly sends battleships or carriers escorted by either a couple of destroyers or Heavy Cruisers. Now I do not know if these are intentional "escorts" but if yes, I would love to see both small and medium hulls included in the escort even if the ratio is a bit off

Having to-hit chance, especially for heavy weapons, affected by hull size is something that's been on my list to do for some time, but Sven is (rightly) cautious about making small ships "too good." But we'll get there eventually.

Yes it will be a balancing act, so don't sweat trying to get nail it right now; currently the balance is not bad and anything you do on with it will just be gravy.

-Will

Escorts- one challenge with making small ships make sense as escorts is that historically escorts were important when another small ship carried a weapon that could sink a large ship in a few hits if it got close enough (WWI/WWII-era torpedoes) or if the enemy is slinging large numbers of intercept-able weapons at you (modern era missiles). In both these cases the small 'escort' has an important tactical job. If neither of these criteria are true then fleets look more like age-of-sail era fleets where most of the fleet is 'battleships' since there is nothing for the 'escorts' to protect them from. In SiS depending on enemy research this criteria may or may not be true. It would probably require some of the other suggested tweaks to make the escort concept work all the time.

Fleet Formations- Yes, we definitely need some sort of fleet formation manager, though I have no brilliant ideas on how it should work. But the current default 'crescent' formation gets increasingly unwieldy as your fleets get bigger. The current default formation layout make sense but there are plenty of times I've wanted to tweak it and with the fairly limited turn radius for large ships especially you don't have time to adjust the formation before the shooting starts. I don't want to have to hand-place every ship but maybe something that allows one to easily define 'place X class ships at the front, Y class ships at the rear, split Z class between the sides evenly' would be enough.

Stellaris balance - Beyond the armor issues (which is an issue) Stellaris also has bad cost scaling on the higher tech weapons; your cost/damage ratio often stays fairly flat or even gets worse with the higher tech weapon. So not only often do naked corvettes win, but naked corvettes with the most basic weapons win. The whole concept of the fleet cap was supposed to be mitigate this but as always smart players work around it.

-Will