The worst kind of balance would be to simply scale firepower and shields with size. If there are no conceptual differences then the bigger ship always wins unless enormously outnumbered. If half the fighter wing is destroyed, they are gone for good and the firepower is halved. If a capital ship takes severe damage, it can be repaired, resulting in no loss at all.
I don't intend to explore every feature in detail but mainly to find possible areas where small and large ships can be set apart in role, construction, or armament.
- Err... the more I think about it the more I'm leaning towards Armour Damage Mitigation instead of what I wrote below.
Still... the basic premise applies. =) - Shields mitigate damage.
Not just absorb but mitigate. If the damage of a bullet is below the mitigated value, the shield takes no damage at all.
This could be a function of shield size or an additional system to install.
The biggest ships may end up completely immune to fighter-class lasers.
One thing that made capital ships feel decidedly un-capital in X3 was that a freighter, deploying a swarm of cheap fighter drones (even if they were overpowered in TC) could easily destroy the biggest capital ships. Once you set up a factory or three for them, your freighters would be guaranteed to win every battle.
Damage mitigation prevents a death-of-a-thousand-cuts scenario. Instead you have to bring some sort of dedicated anti-capital armament. - How to overcome damage mitigation
- Anti-capital lasers deal with that through brute force. They do a lot of damage.
- Shield piercing lasers should be a costly affair (in space or construction points) but would be a way for gun boats to do something about capital ships, such as penetrating their shields at close range, hitting specific subsystems.
They would have to be short-ranged and do a small fraction of "real" anti-capital laser damage (to avoid becoming an "always best" option) but half their damage would penetrate any shield, potentially damaging important subsystems.
They would also be pitiful at destroying a battleship's armoured hull. - Torpedoes would be purpose-built to do something about capital ships, either by delivering huge payloads (more suited for a capital ship launcher) or by having a shield piercing property.
Then you would have to get your bombers uncomfortably close to get a lock on a small subsystem and take it out. - While it would be possible for a capital ship to gain that capability, the designer may want to invest the construction points into other areas.
- The obvious alternative to damage mitigation is shield regeneration.
If a capital ship regenerates it's shields faster than fighters can damage it, it takes no damage.
Carriers with large numbers of cheap fighters become the weapon in the game because they run circles around capital ships and the carriers stay out of harm's way.
The only balancing mechanism in the game would be the micromanagement in acquiring more fighters. This is how X3 does it. - Clear distinction between anti-capital and point defense / Flak weapons.
Damage alone won't do the trick.
- If you put a lot of Flak on your cruiser, you will do well against fighters and missiles / torpedoes but you would be handicapped against a battleship-style ship.
Fighters wouldn't become useless either way but the losses would be greater when attacking a task force with a strong AA component. - As described here, continuous beam lasers that lock their tracking while firing and ramp up damage slowly would be extremely ineffective against fighters - whether they can aim at them or not.
The fighter would simply fly out of the forming beam while it's beginning to ramp up in damage. - Ship-interaction with selfsame continuous beam lasers:
The laser takes a long time to charge up. Then it fires for maybe 10 seconds.
The range of this laser would be very very long so capital ships could have real long range duels.
The twist:
If a friendly is "laser designating" a target for the capital ship, the capital ship laser does move while firing. It slowly "walks it's fire" towards the designated target area. - If the range of movement for laser (Flak) turrets is limited then you're either wasting lots of construction points on Flak or you accept blind spots in your cover, relying on your own fighters or overlapping fields of fire from dedicated Flak escorts.
A fighter wing could do a "trench run" taking out an important subsystem.
- If you put a lot of Flak on your cruiser, you will do well against fighters and missiles / torpedoes but you would be handicapped against a battleship-style ship.
- Interstellar travel vs. system security
As decribed here, a point-to-point jump would generate a jump anomaly that can be detected from much farther away than the jumping ships themselves.
Small scouts patrolling the perimeters of inhabited systems would provide early warnings about such sneaky incursions. - Detection and stealth.
A carrier would be detected at very long range. A small scout... not so much.
Knowing where the enemy is before they know where you are is a major strategic advantage. - As a result of that, there must be a way to use that to your advantage in combat.
- Delayed energy setting.
It's already confirmed that a ship's energy settings will be adjustable.
But... the more generators you put into a ship, the longer it takes for the current energy level to reach the ordered energy level.
Ships at cruising speed routinely direct energy from their shields and weapons to engines.
For a fighter, the energy adjusts quickly to an altered setting.
For a battleship, it takes several minutes for shields and weapons to reach their desired levels.
That way there is a window of opportunity for small / fast ships to zoom in, put energy back to shields and weapons, and attack a capital ship before it is fully prepared for combat.
Capital ships would detect each other at long range so both have time to prepare for an engagement.
If capital ships do not configure for "cruising speed", they may be fully prepared but they don't cover a lot of ground, giving the enemy lots of time to prepare a reception.
Engagements can become a lot more complex, requiring you to cover your bombers while they stage a surprise attack on a hostile task force.
Heavily stealthed scouts may have to find you an opening in the enemy's CAP to let your bombers get closer before they are detected. - Capital ships could exploit delayed energy settings through an "All stop, silent running" feature.
You successfully scouted the enemy's task force, staying undetected yourself.
You set your own capital ships to flank speed, overtaking the enemy and putting your TF into it's course.
Set energy levels to "combat" and order all ships to go silent.
Unless the enemy is scouting vigorously, you might just get your ships into range before the enemy has a chance to use it's currently greater speed to turn and run. - What to do if the ambush failed and the capital ships have reached full readiness?
Are fighters useless now?
- Fighters could be important for detecting and intercepting capital ship missiles.
Without early detection, point defense would have much less time to engage them.
Shooting down the enemy fighters would give your own CSM a better chance to hit their targets. So depending on your fleet, fighters would have different roles in different situations and don't go out of style easily.
- Fighters could be important for detecting and intercepting capital ship missiles.
- Delayed energy setting.
- Long distance travel / operational range.
While larger ships are generally not the fastest, they have much greater range.
A cruiser has a much greater range than a coast guard boat. While a B-2 bomber is said to have a total range of 11000km, an F-16 has an operational range of around 1000km.
This seems to put the advantage clearly into the capital ship's camp but it's only one difference.
If a "go anywhere" jump drive requires a minimum of X construction points (CP), it would be more efficient to limit it to large ships where it requires a lesser percentage of the ship's total construction points.
Limited-ammunition guns/lasers would also require fewer CP. Ammo could be handled by a generic "supplies" level, that is automatically refilled on a friendly carrier.
As a result, carrier-based fighters would be a lot meaner on a per-ton base but unsuited for prolonged engagements.
At the same time, long-range fighters would be possible. They just wouldn't be as useful in a straight fight. - Carriers repair fighters.
That way the damage taken in an engagement can largely be repaired if the carrier itself does not risk it's own skin. - Carriers can build fighters / drones.
Basically a Protoss carrier.
Laser-based ships do not run out of ammunition so carriers should not run out of fighters. At least not quickly. Supplies to build fighters could be limited, though, just like ammunition for heavy anti-capital missiles for the non-carriers.
If this capability was an energy hog, "real" carriers could be limited in their own shielding and armament. - Docked ships can change their weapon loadout.
Carrier-based fighters would gain a lot more flexibility than capital ships - which need to dock at something like a shipyard for that.
Would require some sort of equipment template system, because that's simply not doable by hand when you have a fleet.
Could be done in an abstracted way through a sub-menu of the launch order if you have templates defined for this type of fighter. - Speed.
Regardless of whether you're in the Newtonian camp or not, there is the issue of 2D vs 3D.
The amount of engines you can put on a ship would be limited by the 2D space they take up while still having a "clear shot" at free space behind the ship.
The mass of the ship increased by one more power because the volume is 3D.
The bigger the size (length, width) of the ship, the many more engines you need to achieve a given speed.
Fighters without a lot of "fixed size" installations like jump drives would be able to achieve great speeds in comparison to capital ships. - Ships could be more differentiated at the construction stage.
A ship can - but does not have to - install a "core module".
For instance, the fighter module would increase speed by 100% but severely limit the allowed total energy generation of the ship.
The battleship module requires a minimum point cost of the ship and increases hull and maybe shield strength by 50%. Also makes installing big weapons less and smaller weapons more costly.
This doesn't conflict with the principle of PG but would allow you (and the AI =) to build more specialised designs without requiring massive vertical scaling.
Without such a system, there is considerable danger of all ships ending up samey.