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Balancing small vs large ships

#1
While threads about scale in general and how the flight models could interact, long distance travel, or weapon statistics (see tracking) pointed out some crumbs about the interaction of small and large ships, they didn't tackle the whole cake.

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#2
I like your idea's. But I was thinking that turrets (on any ship) would have settings. Like if they needed take out a smaller target or for normal encounters they would use standard laser, but for targets with more armor (not shield, as you noted there is a difference) you would use AP (armor piercing rounds which would obviously penetrate armor. And if you needed to take out a heavily shielded target, you could use anti-shield rounds which could penetrate shield. Both would have their disadvantages too, like AP would be slow and not be as effective to non-armored targets because they were designed mainly to penetrate armor, not disable ships, and would be near useless against shield. Just throwing ideas out there
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#3
That would be the same as the automatic laser switching in X3.
Turrets there would automatically install "small" lasers when targeting a fighter.

That's a serious balancing and micromanagement issue because you could not easily limit the capabilities of a ship.

Changing the loadout of docked craft - I can see that.
That would add more flexibility to fighters. Would require some sort of equipment template system, though, because that's simply not doable by hand when you have a fleet.
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#4
Many good points on all aspects Gazz.

There is one situation I didn't see though but I'm assuming a little bit on the order here.

In regards to a paper tiger (a capital ship that specializes in long range, incredibly high damage output but at a cost of defenses), I'm guessing that because of the large power output, that they may be susceptible to the 'death by a thousand cuts' as you put it? Should damage potential be the balancing factor to how much damage ships can do? I agree that small fighter ships shouldn't be able to take out a large capital ship (if there are no bombers or shield piercers present), but to a paper tiger, maybe it should be different?
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#5
While that's implied with "This could be a function of shield size or an additional system to install.", I could probably have worded it more clearly. I just tried hard not to bloat every point with excessive detail. You know I'm not good at that! =)

If such a "strong shield" requires lots of shield generators or an additional specialised system, that would require space.
If you use that space to install Big Guns™ instead, you won't have that extra beefiness. Your ship would be more of an artillery or anti-tank unit.
Obviously, that's one system that should have an "absolute space" component so the bigger the ship, the less the percentage of space that this system takes up.

Balancing is a tricky beast.
If you don't build a solid foundation of diverse concepts but try to simply up-scale everything as in X3, you'll run into all kinds of nasty balancing problems.
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#6
Gazz wrote: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.
There's an alternative to this option: self-repair. If capital ships are able to slowly repair damage (this is reasonable if we consider them to be like submarines, with tools and manpower available within the ship to conduct repairs even during engagements) then death by a thousand cuts is not possible but a single fighter is not rendered a useless irrelevance.

With self-repair:
1) A handful of fighters pecking away at a capital ship can barely do enough damage to outrun the ship's self-repair rate.
2) But a handful of fighters could deliver the coup de grâce against a severely damaged capital ship with just a sliver of health left.
3) Several squadrons of fighters could do significant damage to a capital ship in a coordinated attack.
4) In an engagement on equal footing between capital ships, self-repair is less relevant because the weaponry is so powerful.
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#7
Huge capital ships (think battleships) should be sort of defenseless (too a point) in regards to fighters. That is the main reason for escort ships, destroyers and cruisers, because of their smaller guns and ability to focus on anti fighter weapons.
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#8
It seems to me that the balance between small and large ships lies primarily in the strategic, rather than the tactical dimension.

The great weakness of a large ship (e.g. a battleship) is that whilst it represents a very strong concentration of firepower, that firepower can only be in one place at a time. It can project a massive amount of force at one point, but outside of its immediate operational radius (effectively the range of its scanners), it is useless.

By comparison, a group of smaller ships perhaps have lesser power in comparison, but they are much more flexible in how they can project that power, simply by splitting up the group. They can spread out to carry out recon and patrols, escorting, blockades, and a number of other mission. On the other hand, because of the dispersed nature of their firepower, they are less effective at the direct projection of force than the battleship.

So the most effective force is one that combines both large and small ships; the small ones to give it flexibility and breadth, and the large ones when concentrated firepower in depth is needed.
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#9
This by the way also ties into the discussion of jump gates versus jump drives, because they each contribute to a strategic advantage for either large or small ships, respectively.

For instance, if jump gates are the only (or even primary) means of interstellar travel, a couple of large battleships can blockade a system simply by sitting in front of the jump gates and shooting anything that tries to pass through (think Honor Harrington here). Meanwhile, if jump drives are common, perhaps limited by gravity wells, that favours smaller ships, because they would be necessary for patrolling the entire perimeter of each planet's gravity well to prevent any ships from slipping through (think the blockades in Star Wars).
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#10
While static wormhole thingies in the Honorverse (like the Manticore junction) provide limited shortcuts, most traffic uses the the Warshawski sail which is not limited to a specific location. *nerdrage*


That's one reason why I suggested the "widely visible jump anomalies" in the other thread. While it allows for more strategy than a handful of heavily fortified jump points, the "widely visible" part would simplify the patrol patterns that an AI faction has to run to get a hint about something happening in that direction.
Then it could investigate.

Sure, an AI faction could have 500 scouts patrolling deep space but that's a stupid waste of CPU power. Rather design a better system that does not require handling such ridiculous numbers of ships. Quantity never makes a feature more interesting - it only makes it more of a chore.
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#11
By comparison, a group of smaller ships perhaps have lesser power in comparison, but they are much more flexible in how they can project that power, simply by splitting up the group. They can spread out to carry out recon and patrols, escorting, blockades, and a number of other mission. On the other hand, because of the dispersed nature of their firepower, they are less effective at the direct projection of force than the battleship.
And yet still, inevitably small ships will clash with larger ones - what we're looking here is ways for them to interact in a meaningful way when push comes to shove.

---
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.
This will be a pain to balance, since there will be no established ship classes/sizes. I'd rather work with shield regeneration rates, combined with energy management - if a large ship funnels all its energy into the shields, the regeneration should be able to offset the damage that a group of much smaller ships can do. If it shoves its power reserves anywhere else, it can and should die the death of a thousand papercuts.

In regards to fighters vs. capital ships, I had another idea. What if fighters could attack from inside a much larger capital ship's shield bubble? It's basically a trench run maneuver - you need to get uncomfortably close to the target, but once there, you can go straight for the juicy bits. Given a sufficient quantity of attackers and suitable weapons (i.E., larger payload missiles/bombs/torpedos) it should be possible to take out a large target that way. Puts a lot of emphasis on interceptors and flak armaments, however.

Against ships that are only slightly larger (like say, fighter against tramp freighter or destroyer vs corvette), you'd still have to brute force your way through the (much lighter) defenses. But at least it'd remove the issue that small craft anti-cap weapons would need to do an insane amount of shield damage to overcome defenses. Also beats "shield piercing" as a necessity in that you have to employ the smaller ships strong points (speed and maneuverability) instead of assigning a potential gamebreaker ability to a very small selection of weapons (which could prove problematic, given the random nature of the universe).
...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.
Simply give them atrocious tracking rates once firing; locking them completly might push them into being useless, depending on how maneuverable capitals turn out to be. But I like the visual concept of this.
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#12
Hardenberg wrote:
...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.
Simply give them atrocious tracking rates once firing; locking them completly might push them into being useless, depending on how maneuverable capitals turn out to be. But I like the visual concept of this.
However, even if they don't lock on, they should be able to blind-fire. Trust me, there have been plenty of times when I got vaporized in Freespace 2 by a stray beam cannon laser or an attempt at a capital ship trying to hit someone else.
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#13
Hardenberg wrote:And yet still, inevitably small ships will clash with larger ones - what we're looking here is ways for them to interact in a meaningful way when push comes to shove.
I guess my greater point is that these finer questions of implementation should not be discussed in isolation, as they both depend on and influence the overall style and atmosphere of the setting.

For instance if smaller ships are balanced to the point where can pose a credible threat to a single large ship, then nobody will build those large ships. They would represent too large an investment in return for a craft that would be very vulnerable and less flexible than the smaller group. That's exactly why we don't have battleships any more in modern navies: A couple of cruisers with missiles has enough firepower to sink a battleship that costs a hundred times as much, so it's completely unreasonable to build it in the first place.

So the questions of how and how much to balance different types of ships are intimately connected with the flavour of fleet combat that one want to see. Are we working with a WWI/partly WWII-style setting with large battleships that dominate the battlefield whilst the smaller ships act as auxiliares, maybe with the power to influence, but not to decide the battle? That leads to one set of specifications.

Or should it be the modern variety, with more mobile task forces that consist primarily of smaller, but quite powerful craft that each has a very considerable impact on the course of the battle? That leads to another set of specifications.

Otherwise it seems to me that we're putting the cart before the horse to some degree.
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#14
I would like to see a fighter be able to take down a large capital ship. The way I imagine this is that one class of ship isn't directly more effective against one type of ship ( i.e battleships are not more effective at taking down fighters than pods and so forth) but depending on their loadout and how you use them. Now obviously a different ships have different roles, but I don't want to have to hire a whole fleet of pilots so I can take down any ships. My (new) idea is that different have different uses, like against heavily armored battleships you would use, direct fire (think RPG) missiles, against large, fast ships you'd use homing missiles, beam weapons against shields, and then your typical (or not so typical) lasers. Most ships could equip all these without any drawbacks in general, more specific weapons, or more weapons would start drawing more power, and of course you don't need to equip or buy all these weapons if you want to like use most of the power for shields or such. Larger weapons, like missile pods, could only be used on larger ships.

My definition of ships
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Re: Balancing small and large ships

#15
Hardenberg wrote: I'd rather work with shield regeneration rates, combined with energy management - if a large ship funnels all its energy into the shields, the regeneration should be able to offset the damage that a group of much smaller ships can do. If it shoves its power reserves anywhere else, it can and should die the death of a thousand papercuts.
I'm not in favour of that system (it's how X3 does it) because it reduces game balance to the micromanagement of acquiring / using large numbers of fighters or drones.
I added it to the OP for completeness' sake, though.

Hardenberg wrote:What if fighters could attack from inside a much larger capital ship's shield bubble? It's basically a trench run maneuver - you need to get uncomfortably close to the target, but once there, you can go straight for the juicy bits. Given a sufficient quantity of attackers and suitable weapons (i.E., larger payload missiles/bombs/torpedos) it should be possible to take out a large target that way. Puts a lot of emphasis on interceptors and flak armaments, however.

Sure, it sounds like fun but how would a capital ship defend against it?
If the fighters are below the shields, other ships in the formation can no longer assist the capital ship with their fire so that fighters only need to get close enough and they can take out every ship one by one.
There would only be 2 possible defenses.
Intercept all fighters before they can even get close to the ship, resulting in 100% losses, or littering every single ship with Flak guns because effectively, every ship is on it's own when fighters approach.
Frequently taking 100% fighter losses doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
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