Battleships died out because modern naval warfare is entirely based around aircraft carriers, as they provide more flexible and more powerful force projection. Others have suggested the use of fighter bays or similar features for strike craft as a way to introduce this sort of mechanic.



The advantage of bigger ships is [shouldbe] that there are bits of equipment you can mount on them that give them capabilities that are not physically possible for smaller ships.

Examples:

Warp drives for which the power requirements are so heavy that you wouldn't have room for anything else on a vessel smaller than a cruiser (see formation of jump points in Babylon 5, for example).

Spinal-mount weapons around which the entire rest of the ship is designed, which may be aimed at planetary bombardment or at annihilating capital ships.

ChaosBlade wrote:
Agreed.

But do keep in mind that interesting navy railgun project, Big ships might not be as dead as people thing they are, they are just hibernating

If anyone is as old as me and played Traveller in the 70's, there were things called Spinal Weapons fitted on larger ships (basically the ship is built around the weapon).



Man I would love to have the High Guard design rules to build ships.

Agreed.

But do keep in mind that interesting navy railgun project, Big ships might not be as dead as people thing they are, they are just hibernating

Kagegod wrote:
Each ship class should have a role bonus not just some stat bonuses that suggest a role. I would like to see something like dreadnoughts being highly effective siege ships by having a bonus to invasion strength. Battleships should then have bonus damage against larger targets (other battleships and dreadnoughts) but have no effect on invasion strength of a fleet. Cruisers should be a good middle ground ship which could specialize in fleet bonuses (healing, sensors, additional invasion support, etc) and attacking smaller targets. Destroyers should be small and nimble by comparison to other ships and should have a bonus to defense against ships larger than cruisers but as a trade-off do less damage against them.



This is just a super quick way to try to illustrate my thoughts on the topic, but fleet composition has been a pet peeve of mine. I would like to see it encouraged that you have diversity in your fleets and make you have to adapt to what an enemy might be throwing at you.

Oooo! I love this general idea. The details of your plan could be quibbled with, but it's great. I fully endorse this (for what that's worth, ahah) as a partial fix to the fleet composition problem!

Yurixy wrote:
This can be compared with EVE Online. I played EVE some months and I can say that in EVE it makes more sense. Bigger ships are supposed to be a lot better than small ones.

Solution: Make 2Cp Ships with 4x the Tonnage of 1Cp Ship, and 4Cp Ship with 4x the Tonnage of the 2Cp Ship. This would be more balanced for me, in my opinion.

The 4x multiplier is the minimum I see as reasonable. Could use 6x or 8x also.

Bolded the incorrect part for you. Bigger ships in EVE are larger targets (signature size) and have guns that are less effective against smaller ships (tracking speed on turrets, explosion radius on missiles) as the smaller ships have faster movement and a smaller sig size. You can say SOMETIMES bigger ships will work better, but it's entirely situational.



But then, EVE is EVE and this is Endless Space. Very different games with very different combat mechanics.

steinernein wrote:
So uh.. a carrier doesn't count as a big ship?



And really, the OP is being silly because the whole ship argument comes down armor vs armaments and has varied throughout history. When armor is better you build bigger, when weapons are better you build smaller. This game has a few 'problems' that needs solving and really why should we even bother with pseudo-historical arguments? As many have already echoed in this thread the real question is ... do destroyer swarms make this game fun? NOPE.avi

Carriers aren't a direct combat ship, so nope, they don't count as big ships. That doesn't mean they're not awesome though.



As for the "pseudo-historical argument", it was merely an example to illustrate the main point: the math says that as long as the weapons of a smaller ship can penetrate the armour of a larger ship, a swarm of smaller ships will ALWAYS beat an equal strength group of larger ships.



That isn't based merely on history, it's an undisputed mathematical fact that is derived from the "Power Law" (Wikipedia link). It is as much a truth as "5*5 = 25" is.



The reason I brought this up was due to the multiple posts around the forums saying "you're just not playing right. It just makes sense that dreadnaughts beat destroyers, right? I mean if they're equal strength the bigger, big ship wins, right?" And the answer is "no, the smaller ships always win in an equal battle."

Each ship class should have a role bonus not just some stat bonuses that suggest a role. I would like to see something like dreadnoughts being highly effective siege ships by having a bonus to invasion strength. Battleships should then have bonus damage against larger targets (other battleships and dreadnoughts) but have no effect on invasion strength of a fleet. Cruisers should be a good middle ground ship which could specialize in fleet bonuses (healing, sensors, additional invasion support, etc) and attacking smaller targets. Destroyers should be small and nimble by comparison to other ships and should have a bonus to defense against ships larger than cruisers but as a trade-off do less damage against them.



This is just a super quick way to try to illustrate my thoughts on the topic, but fleet composition has been a pet peeve of mine. I would like to see it encouraged that you have diversity in your fleets and make you have to adapt to what an enemy might be throwing at you.

Battleships were not intended to fight alone, they are by design fleet ships that rely on screening from smaller ships. This screening serves to keep small enemy ships are range and occupied so that the battleship's superior firepower and range could come into play. Furthermore the reason that battleships have become obsolete has less to with the battleship and more to do with weapons development in the past 50 years. The original reason that battleships were the king of the fleet was due to the ability to launch Volkswagen sized shells over a distance of a few miles. The development of guided missiles and more efficient explosives has meant that you no longer need a giant turret to sink the enemy warship, you can set up a trough on deck and do so just as easily. Furthermore, the development of the nuclear submarine (which is much more difficult to detect then the diesel/electric hybrids used previously) drastically curtailed the ability of a battleship to survive an engagement due to its poor turning radius and speed (too slow to dodge torpedoes). Battleships were briefly considered for use as off shore gun batteries, however aircraft do a much better job as they are more difficult to detect and counter then a battleship moored off of a coast. Endless space as not made battleships technologically obsolete, and I believe that it is the combat mechanics that need tweaking (allowing split fire, shared point defense/ECM, the ability to screen larger ships with smaller ones, etc) rather then the ship itself.

I looked through the forums and didn't see any clear discussion of this. If there is one and I missed it I apologize.



There is actually a real life reason why the destroyers in this game can overpower an equivalent number of CP of similarly equipped larger vessels (especially dreadnaughts). The same thing happened in WWII, and that's part of the reason that battleships suddenly stopped being produced by absolutely everyone, even though everyone thought they were really cool (air power was another reason, but that's a separate discussion).



EDIT: As I mentioned above I realize that air power was also part of the reason that large tonnage direct combat ships disappeared in real life. But ES doesn't have carriers, so "air power" (or space fighters, or whatever) is irrelevant to the conversation in question. All that matters for this discussion is the effect of the power law on naval combat, so that's what I discuss below.



(In real life):

1) Battleships can carry bigger guns with longer range. This makes then desirable, as they can hit smaller ships before the smaller ships can fire back.

2) Due to the way the "Power Law" applies to ships and their armaments, as long as smaller ships can carry heavy enough weapons to penetrate the armour of a Battleship, they'll still win, even with the longer range of the Battleships accounted for.

3) I can't find them online, but I've seen some interesting mathematical examples of this (playing with this is an exercise in some 2nd and 3rd year math classes at universities, if you get a good prof who likes naval warfare). When you run the numbers you get interesting results that look pretty much like what I've listed below (though these are random numbers pulled out of thin air, just to demonstrate the idea):



2 battleships vs 20 smaller ships. Both fleets have equivalent firepower. The fleet of 20 ships was slightly cheaper to produce than the 2 battleships.



Ships remaining after 1st round of volleys: 2 battleships vs 18 smaller ships. Remaining fleet firepower ratio: 100% to 90%.

2nd round: 2 battleships vs 16 smaller ships. FP ratio: 100%/80%.

3rd round: 1 battleship vs 14 smaller ships. FP ratio: 50%/70%.

4th round: 1 battleship vs 13 smaller ships. FP ratio: 50%/65%.

5th round: 1 battleship vs 12 smaller ships. FP ratio: 50%/60%.

... skip a few rounds...

10th round: 0 battleship vs 7 smaller ships. FP ratio: 0%/35%.



This is reminiscent of what happened in real life battles, although this particular example didn't actually happen. It was hoped that the greater range of large ships would make up for both the power law and the fact that they were more expensive, but it didn't. Small, cheap ships (like cruisers, destroyers, and even frigates) ruled the day, in the end.

__________________________________________________________________________



So how does this effect the game? Well, cheap, throwaway destroyer fleets often make dreadnaughts useless. That's because of the power law. If the makers of the game want people to migrate to larger tonnage ships later in the game, they need to overbuff the larger ships in order to counteract the effect of the power law. That will stop what happened in the real world (cruisers and smaller, only) from happening in the game world. Another option would be to do what happened in real life: replace the larger tonnage straight-up combat ships with similarly large vessels with special abilities that other ships can't match. In real life this ended up creating aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships. I don't know what the ingame analog of those would be, but I'm sure other people on the forums have ideas.

I remember reading about a fighter sortie attacking a tanker/ship in the middle east about three years ago, and it took many bombing runs to sink it. Our current technology isn't the type of one-hit wonder bombs depicted in Hollywood.

So uh.. a carrier doesn't count as a big ship?



And really, the OP is being silly because the whole ship argument comes down armor vs armaments and has varied throughout history. When armor is better you build bigger, when weapons are better you build smaller. This game has a few 'problems' that needs solving and really why should we even bother with pseudo-historical arguments? As many have already echoed in this thread the real question is ... do destroyer swarms make this game fun? NOPE.avi

gopher65 wrote:
I like all of those ideas.

I took the initiative and created a proposal with my ideas. Saw a "banks"/multi-target one there too.



/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11850-suggestion-capital-ship-bonuses-related-to-force-multiplier-role



Hope you don't mind.

There are NO Battleships that are on active duty in the US Fleet that I am aware of. The last Battleship was the Missouri which was used as part of a feint in the Iraq war but has since been decommissioned. I also would like to see a 'benefit' to using such large, time consuming and expensive ships in a fleet. There are a lot of good ideas here.

Igncom1 wrote:
And the reason the y have stopped building super carriers, is because smaller carriers are more efficient......look it up?

huh we use super carriers now cos its can be used as a forward base and removes the need and cost of frontline bases in other counties and as such is replaceing carriers.

Valazzar wrote:
Small ships are generally great for self defense, which is also why most nations dont build aircraft carriers, but for actual offensive warfare, you will want bigger fleets, bigger ships...havent heard of many invasions led by destroyers either.

Name one country that is still using and building battleships. Hint: there are none. There is a reason why they don't, and that reason carries over into games like this. There is also a reason why games like EVE go far out of their way to make big ships viable, making them far stronger per unit of resources used to construct them than little ships. It's to balance the fact that little ships can easily swarm and destroy giant ships that are at the same tech level. ES hasn't done that... at least not to the degree that is needed to balance out the inherent advantage of smaller ships.



(Note: I believe the US still has an old WWII battleship that is technically in service, but it isn't used for combat operations. It's just a relic they keep around.)

OP does not reveal what race he was making his comparison at, he does not reveal at what tech level he made it. Therefore the cost claim cannot be verified.

OP Makes a questionable reference to to real life where we apparently dont build big ships because its stupid. Except we do build big ships, and its not stupid.

In actual real life naval warfare, you do not simply "swarm" the enemy unless its close to the shores where little gunboats can be used for that purpose.

In actual real life navies, big ships have escorts, you dont have these "monofleets" that are referred to here, you used mixed ships to counter many potential threats.

Small ships are generally great for self defense, which is also why most nations dont build aircraft carriers, but for actual offensive warfare, you will want bigger fleets, bigger ships...havent heard of many invasions led by destroyers either.



I do like the idea about banks though.

Andargor wrote:
I'm all for dread- or BB-only modules for massive fleet support functions. Or maybe a huge bonus to repair/damage mods/cards, and/or allow more than one card played per turn, and/or some other advantage that make them worth the production to bring at least one to a fight with smaller ship escorts (a force multiplier). Have only one of the "capital ships" give the bonus, makes putting more than one in a fleet counter-productive.



EDIT: Or increase the command point cap for the fleet by +1 or +2 if there is at least one BB or DN

I like all of those ideas.