I did some searching, but couldn't find anything on this topic – which surprised me greatly. If I missed it despite my multiple search queries, I apologize. As a regular on the Planetary Annihilation forums, I know how annoying duplicate threads and recurring suggestions are.

The main thing I want from Limit Theory is fleet combat. I come from a background in Eve, and I loved the fleet combat in Eve. I loved having a strong fleet composition with logistics ships and the like.

Logistics ships were dedicated repair ships. They didn't have any offensive weapons, instead their primary purpose was to repair friendly ships and keep them alive during combat. This adds an extra dimension of strategy and fleet composition. You need enough logistics ships to keep your ships alive, but not too many that you don't have enough dps to destroy your opponents. Heck, sometimes we would run fleets with less than normal logistics ships just to bait people into fights or leave a logistics ship on the other side of the gate to fein weakness.

Then there was the strategy involved in attacking an enemy fleet that has logistics. Sometimes you went strait for the logi, sometimes you tried to beat through the offensive capable ships.

At any rate, that conveys the idea.

Is that something that has been planned or considered for Limit Theory?

We can infer from what's already there that something along these lines will happen. Carriers equipped with facilities capable of resupplying and repairing other ships seem trivial to implement. It also seems a fairly short jump to the idea of "repair drones" which can work on larger vessels.

I wouldn't like to see anything like a "repair beam" or other magical technology which just restores hit points. Aside from the unrealism of it, that's edging close to the idea of "Holy Trinity" gameplay which has been previously derided in these forums.

McDuff wrote:We can infer from what's already there that something along these lines will happen. Carriers equipped with facilities capable of resupplying and repairing other ships seem trivial to implement. It also seems a fairly short jump to the idea of "repair drones" which can work on larger vessels.

I wouldn't like to see anything like a "repair beam" or other magical technology which just restores hit points. Aside from the unrealism of it, that's edging close to the idea of "Holy Trinity" gameplay which has been previously derided in these forums.

That makes sense.

Carriers repairing and repair drones and stuff sounds awesome.

Not the same as Eve, but same concept – which I like that.

Thanks for the answer!

Disclaimer just in case: educated guesses, actual game may differ.

Hello brianpurkiss. I've spent years playing EVE Online myself, and I get where you're coming from. I've given thought to shield-boosting logistic vessels in Shield Harmonics under Shield/Shield Interactions. However, I haven't really given much thought to armour or hull-repairing vessels, but I agree with your point that these things would be desirable.

Like McDuff, I'd be in favour of armour-repairing logistics vessels to maintain a fleet of repair drones, since we know drones will be used for construction (source), and repair is similar to construction. I argue here and elsewhere that the number of drones that can be simultaneously fielded should be limited by bandwidth, as in EVE Online - in this case, armour logistics vessels sacrifice offensive capability to increase bandwidth and keep more (and better quality) repair drones fielded.

I've also been giving thought to the idea of "resource networks" inside of ships, one of which could be a repair network - a set of channels that connect between the different ship systems and a specialised production unit in the ship that fabricates mechanosynthesis-capable nanobots specialised for performing repairs. These nanobots could be distributed about the vessel to help mitigate damage (they however cannot be used to repair a ship or a component perfectly whenever it sustains damage). An armour/hull-repairing logistics ships could be specialised to produce these nanobots in relatively large quantities and maintain a "swarm" of them around itself that it could direct to help repair other vessels. This would work in conjunction to the drone idea.

ThymineC wrote:Like McDuff, I'd be in favour of armour-repairing logistics vessels to maintain a fleet of repair drones, since we know drones will be used for construction (source), and repair is similar to construction. I argue here and elsewhere that the number of drones that can be simultaneously fielded should be limited by bandwidth, as in EVE Online - in this case, armour logistics vessels sacrifice offensive capability to increase bandwidth and keep more (and better quality) repair drones fielded.

I see one problem with that (personal dislike, YMMD):
EVE achieves this with a "magical" bonus on repair or shield recharge, similar to the "core modules" that were discussed in the LT forums. To me that seems "gamey", and I'd rather see a classless system, where a ship's capabilities depend solely on the mounted equipment.

But that would allow any big ship to carry a repair module (maybe sacrificing a turret) and act as logistics vessel. Still a sacrifice of offensive capability, but not on the same level as in EVE.

Rabiator wrote:EVE achieves this with a "magical" bonus on repair or shield recharge, similar to the "core modules" that were discussed in the LT forums. To me that seems "gamey", and I'd rather see a classless system, where a ship's capabilities depend solely on the mounted equipment.

Yeah, I assume that ship's capabilities are dependent on their mounted equipment.

Rabiator wrote:But that would allow any big ship to carry a repair module (maybe sacrificing a turret) and act as logistics vessel. Still a sacrifice of offensive capability, but not on the same level as in EVE.

This is an odd way of explaining it, but...

In The Wealth of Nations, the famous economist Adam Smith claimed that free trade could be advantageous for countries in which one country had an absolute advantage in the production of one set of goods and another country had an absolute advantage in the production of another. This is pretty intuitive.

However, along comes the economist David Ricardo, who in 1817 published On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in which he argues that these two countries only need a comparative advantage in the production of two (sets of) goods in order to benefit from trade. Less intuitively, this holds even if one country has an absolute advantage in the production of all goods over the other.

Ricardo used the example of a trade in wine and cloth between England and Portugal. He assumed that Portugal was technologically superior to England and could produce both wine and cloth at less expense than England could i.e. it had an absolute advantage in the production of both. However, he assumed that England was better at producing wine than cloth, and showed that it would be beneficial for both countries for Portugal to produce an excess of wine that it could then sell to England in exchange for cloth.

I'm not confident, but intuitively I feel this theory of comparative advantage could be extended to fleet combat. Let's say that you had a battleship and a logistics repair ship. Let's also assume that the battleship has an absolute advantage in the production of damage and repair. However, the logistics repair ship is not so much disadvantaged in the production of repair as it is in the production of damage relative to the battleship, so it can be said that the logistics vessel has a comparative advantage in the production of repair. In this sense, a fleet composed of one battleship and one logistics ship might benefit overall if the battleship were specialised in the production of damage, and the logistics ship in the production of repair, even though the battleship may have an absolute advantage in the production of both, as Portugal had over England in the production of wine and cloth. Therefore, a wise fleet commander would specialise each ship to do what it was designed to do.

Edit: I think McDuff screwed up the title of this thread haha.

Rabiator wrote:

ThymineC wrote:Like McDuff, I'd be in favour of armour-repairing logistics vessels to maintain a fleet of repair drones, since we know drones will be used for construction (source), and repair is similar to construction. I argue here and elsewhere that the number of drones that can be simultaneously fielded should be limited by bandwidth, as in EVE Online - in this case, armour logistics vessels sacrifice offensive capability to increase bandwidth and keep more (and better quality) repair drones fielded.

I see one problem with that (personal dislike, YMMD):
EVE achieves this with a "magical" bonus on repair or shield recharge, similar to the "core modules" that were discussed in the LT forums. To me that seems "gamey", and I'd rather see a classless system, where a ship's capabilities depend solely on the mounted equipment.

But that would allow any big ship to carry a repair module (maybe sacrificing a turret) and act as logistics vessel. Still a sacrifice of offensive capability, but not on the same level as in EVE.

Why do equipment-defined ship capabilities contradict thymines general suggestion?
He never said that any of the capabilities are defined by the ship itself (besides some large-scale modifications as hangar bays)

That's an interesting use of Ricardo

Why did I screw up the title of the thread?

McDuff wrote:That's an interesting use of Ricardo

Why did I screw up the title of the thread?

Well it's just that the title got messed up at one of your earlier posts, which I presume you must have done accidentally. This should correct it.

Edit: And it's still broken. Weird.

ThymineC wrote:

McDuff wrote:That's an interesting use of Ricardo

Why did I screw up the title of the thread?

Well it's just that the title got messed up at one of your earlier posts, which I presume you must have done accidentally. This should correct it.

Edit: And it's still broken. Weird.

Titles have a max length. Before the "RE:" was added, it was fine. But once the RE: gets added in, it truncates the last few letters.

Simply the act of replying with the 'RE' in the subject line breaks it. Like this subject line of this post.

Oh yeah, cheers. That makes sense. I didn't notice that McDuff's post was the first reply in the thread.

ThymineC wrote:I'm not confident, but intuitively I feel this theory of comparative advantage could be extended to fleet combat. Let's say that you had a battleship and a logistics repair ship. Let's also assume that the battleship has an absolute advantage in the production of damage and repair. However, the logistics repair ship is not so much disadvantaged in the production of repair as it is in the production of damage relative to the battleship, so it can be said that the logistics vessel has a comparative advantage in the production of repair. In this sense, a fleet composed of one battleship and one logistics ship might benefit overall if the battleship were specialised in the production of damage, and the logistics ship in the production of repair, even though the battleship may have an absolute advantage in the production of both, as Portugal had over England in the production of wine and cloth. Therefore, a wise fleet commander would specialise each ship to do what it was designed to do.

Edit: I think McDuff screwed up the title of this thread haha.

The question is how big the advantage of the specialized ships is, and if it is sufficient to compensate for the hazard to the logistics ship if it finds itself a target.

Logistics ships in EVE have massive boni for their support modules. For instance, a quote from http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Osprey :

Traits:
Caldari Cruiser skill bonus per level:
12.5% bonus to Shield Transporter boost amount
5% reduction in Shield Transporter capacitor use

Role Bonus:
1000% bonus to Shield Transporter and Energy Transfer Array Range
200% bonus to Energy Transfer Array transfer amount

That
1) makes keeping the Osprey in the background feasible, where it is hopefully out of range of enemy ships
2) makes it a lot more effective in "producing repair". With skill level 5, 162.5% of the normal boost amount at only 75% of normal energy consumption.

Without such massive advantages, I question the viability of taking logistics ships into battle. They would be obvious primary targets, and once they are down the combat ships are out of logistics.

Maybe keeping them behind the front could work, when you rotate battleships out of combat and send them to be patched up by the repair ships. I had some good results with that in 2D strategy games, where the logistics units were shielded from combat by the front line units. But exposing logistics units to enemy fire was always ungood .

i personally think that doing meaningful repairs in combat is kinda illusory, even more so with systems that you dont have aboard the damaged vessel.
lots of interference from weapons fire and ECM systems, shields between the ship to repair and the repairing ship.
and the worst of all; people will be trying to actively disrupt your repair efforts.

in short: lots of things that make repairing harder.

out of combat repair ships / fleet tenders
yes

in combat repairs...
errr... nope

just my opinion

Up to 100% maybe not. Docking, replacing a damaged shield generator/turret, and getting back out there, that could be feasible.

Think about it more like a pit stop in an F1 race. You're not going to do any major repairs in that 10-25 seconds, but you can fuel, reload, swap some modules out.

There's also the possibility of having ships "in reserve" ready to go once other ships drop below a certain damage threshold. Like in other sports, the depth of the bench as well as the players on the field becomes a part of the strategy.