Quite frankly there is absolutely nothing short of using an entirely different combat system and all new ship designs that will make single ship type fleets the "optimal". Mostly the ship designs. You'd need to remove the ability to customize ships to the extent that its possible now, implement firing arcs and such and force people to build specialized ships that each have only one or two purposes. Doable of course but I quite like the system as it is now as its simple and doesn't distract from what I think is the focus of the game, the conquest of the galaxy.

I think the only way to solve this problem is to force diversity. By making class/size specific modules and adding enemy class/size dependent modifiers to weapons or hulls.

That way players would be discouraged from using mono-hull builds, as that'd leave them vulnerable and ineffective against certain enemy compositions.

You could even add limits to the amount of ships of a certain size that can be in a fleet. That way you could make the larger hulls actually superior without it simply shifting the scales all the way to dreadnought.

The simplest and most effective way to manage the issue is also one you can take from just observing reality. Larger ships with more CP can fit bigger and more devastating weapons. While at the same time, they can mount defenses that are more effective. Classic example is a WWII Destroyer vs a Battleship. Destroyer: light armor, light weapons, can use torpedo's to harm larger ships. Battleship: Heavy armor, BIG guns, and allot of smaller weapons to boot.



A simplistic mirroring based on the ship hull could be done. So say we have our base laser that does 30/40 damage on a destroyer. May be the CP2 ships get a +20% to effective weapon damage making them viable with out having to make a new weapon. May be they can also get a flat 20% bonus to defense effectiveness (deflector and shield...not flack) to also represent their larger systems. The same enhancement could then be given to the Dreadnought class...may be a 50% increase to defense and offense.



So then why use a smaller hull? While they would be less effective, they still have the equalizer...torpedo's! Guided weapons have always been the small ships weapon of choice vs much larger enemies. And given that destroyers can cram on allot of weapons thanks to their bonus, a destroyer could kill a dreadnought if the dread was unprepared. But bets are that the destroyer would not survive the fight any way.

Igncom1 wrote:
Yeah, as meany before me have suggested, the addition of more stratify to the combat system via: more modules, more combat cards, fleet formations, mission strategy, combat doctrines and est. will extend the idea of warfare beyond the mathematicians grasp and onto true strengths of the intelligent, the brave, the witty, the lucky and the devious.

If someone has the courage to gather all the posts and threads talking about it...

I can already join the post I wrote in a thread and my own thread of suggs.





Post about size and accuracy/damages.



Topic about tonnage according to ship size (idea n°4)



Others can also put link and someone, objectively grouping all the ideas.

Ketobor wrote:
I believe a rework of defenses to promote larger ships in a fair and balanced context would dramatically improve ship diversity.

Small ships will always have a role in the current system - to apply the most fleet-wide bonuses per CP possible, using limited modules (1 per ship). I believe retaining this role is important and easily achievable.

If larger ships are balanced to retain superior combat implications - which can be achieved by relatively minor defense reworks - then the interplay of large and small ships in fleets becomes a mechanic through which they travel, repair, and more readily achieve combat bonuses for minimal cost.

I completely agree however that also means we would need more modules earlier in the tech tree that could provide such bonuses, aside from engines.

Mabey instead of having really high hp numbers and weapon number, we could go the starcraft route and have everything scaled back so its easy to work with.

master of orion 3 did this right, with fleets requiring not only the main body but also recon (for spotting) and point defense (to intercept missiles and fighters and to absorb most of the damage).

you could easily trick the system and assign your heavy hitters to the wrong role in the hope to reach maximum damage. issues rose when your shiny new fleet made of extremely powerful dreadnoughts was eaten alive by the first volley or was unable to see the enemy at all. on the other hand, without a huge tech advance a swarm of small ships, even an endless one, would have never stood a chance against a dreadnought, at the very least they would have kept it busy but never able to damage it.



as already suggested, formations would help a lot, even in the simple form of "these many ships on front line, these many on back, front take 10% damage more".

I think you're missing the point. Although people play 4x games online, it's never there to replicate the exquisitely balanced interplay of units and abilities you might find in say, Starcraft. People role play a little, and coo at the awesome fleets and pretty ships.



What people are asking for is not a perfectly balanced system which totally removes monohul fleets. No, they just want some diversity in tactics and aesthetics available to them in the most basic level. They want to able to win a 'hard' single player AI game with some cool and interesting fleet compositions. As a veteran TW and Galciv player, there are obviously army comps or hulls styles which offer better chances of success. THATS NOT THE POINT. We just want to be able to have a supported dreadnaught at least hold its own against roughly equivalent destroyer fleets for example. We want to have the smallest iota if viability in our diversity.

Well currently, yeah, but give the developers a few years and this choice might end up being a constraint.

Igncom1 wrote:
That would destroy any sort of major creativity when it comes to fleet composition.

As it stands there is no creativity so I do not see what is being lost.

That would destroy any sort of major creativity when it comes to fleet composition.

What about CP restrictions? Like 60% of all usable CP's in a fleet can be filled with 1 CP-ships, everyting above has to be 2+ CP's? That would actually weaken the early game war acts, but would even so avoid Destroyer-only-fleets.

I wouldn't mind seeing specialized fleets, each containing many instances of a single ship type; it would be a definite improvement over the destroyer-always setup we have now.



There was an idea you posted just today about being able to post ships to different parts of your fleet. Done right I think a similar concept with ship placement could work wonders for giving you an incentive to have multiple ship types per fleet, and since you could do it with nothing more than percent alterations to accuracy and target prioritization it wouldn't even require re-coding the system—the aforementioned alterations should hopefully be able to go in easily.

Yeah, as meany before me have suggested, the addition of more stratify to the combat system via: more modules, more combat cards, fleet formations, mission strategy, combat doctrines and est. will extend the idea of warfare beyond the mathematicians grasp and onto true strengths of the intelligent, the brave, the witty, the lucky and the devious.

I think the idea stated above would actually result in something like that by default.

Having no small ships in your Fleet will make every loss quiet expensive, as big ships would be a real costly thing. (The prize per HP would be higher for bigger ships)

So having a big ship with a lot of smaller ships in the fleet would keep the economical loss small. No need to introduce an extra penalty for not having them.

Sure, you can still have a fleet that is composed purely of big ships with a lot of firepower, being able to take out another fleet quiet fast. But pitch that big ship fleet against a combined force and the economic damage for the victorious big ship fleet might be higher than that for the destroyed combined fleet.

That is the idea behind it.

Sure, you can still make a the big ship only fleet, and it is quiet powerful, but you should only do so if you really have the economical or technological edge, being able to outproduce your opponent big time or having ships that are just so damn powerful you don't even care anymore what they are against.



But anyway, I feel like these things might actually don't really belong here. It's almost a design proposal. Too bad the discussions and proposals are sometimes really dependant on each other.

I think you're overstating the differences of ranges in fleet engagements back in the day. The different ranges between carronades and standard cannons made a big difference in ship vs ship engagements like you'd find in anti-pirate campaigns, but if your ship-of-the-line had carronades it could use them (apparently, though, this stopped when fleets stopped fighting so close to one another).

Igncom1 wrote:
That's quite clean cut, a little racial variance might bring some nice variance on top of that.



Overall i quite support it. But what was the leading reason behind the end of AOS type combat an thus the beginning of more modern fleet combat?

As I understand it, the way things tended to be arranged in the Age of Sail is that there were "Long Guns" "Medium Guns", and various small types of which the most effective was probably the carronade.



Long Guns were about as accurate as you could possibly be on a rolling ship without modern control system stabilizers. On the other hand, they tended to be immensely heavy (let's ignore that for now) and, due to size, relatively slow-firing. Medium guns, as I understand it, were basically smaller long guns. A carronade, however, was basically a short, stubby long gun. The short barrel reduced accuracy significantly, but, being short, they were significantly lighter and fired faster. As a result, you could mount a much heavier weight of broadside, effectively, if you were willing to close to knife-fighting range before you unleashed it... something even captains of ships with long guns were, as I understand it, often inclined to do. One of the notable features of AOS combat, as far as I can tell, is that it took a concerted assault or really clever tactics and good luck to take out a sailing ship. You didn't defeat them by sinking them or blowing up their magazines: you defeated them by killing enough of their crew that they couldn't fight back anymore. This takes a surprising amount of smashing the other guy to achieve.



So, where does that leave us with ES?

Weapons that can destroy entire ships in one shot do not work like that. When you can destroy a ship in a single salvo, as opposed to taking at least four (to pick a number based on the rounds per phase in ES) of them, it's going to feel like WWI or WWII naval combat: Ranged accuracy is king, and defenses exist primarily to keep enemies who can match you in range from defeating you in a duel. Ships get armored to handle the average hit by an equivalent ship and there's basically a hierarchy of ships where you basically trade speed for firepower. Destroyers and some cruisers get torpedoes so they can actually fight back against bigger ships, which is most of them, because they had to get that close anyway.



However, early-game could easily feel like the age of sail... if it weren't for the fact that AIs suck at designing ships and therefore I stack just enough kinetic barriers to deflect long-ranged shots while putting enough lasers on to take out a 1CP ship in 1-2 rounds. The problem with later-game is, once you can reliably destroy targets in a long-range phase, there's no reason to let enemies enter an inner phase, and down that road lies HMS Dreadnought, which eschewed close-combat guns for as many long-range guns as it could fit.

A change in combat behavior over time is imo not possible with the ES system and a reasonable amount of work.



The civ series has something like that during it's tech tree, but the units there are set, there is no possibility of customization. The tech tree offers new types of units down the line.



If you go to SMAC (Sid meiers Alpha Centauri) you see a system which is at least rougly comparable to ES in the way of having customizable units. The combat there never changes very much, which is a good hint on how difficult it might be to model a system that has



A)

customizable Units



B)

Shifts in the way combat is fought



I'm not saying a combination of both is impossible, but it would be just too much work to be reasonable.



In conclusion:

If you want to change the rules of combat, you have to introduce something new to the mix.

Gradual changes won't cut it there. So, a new weapon type further down the tech tree could accomplish that, or a new ability in form of a card or a set of cards. Think of something like evasive maneuvers, giving smaller ships higher evasion. But first and foremost the issue about big ships being kinda wimpy and useless considered you have to invest quiet some tech points into them has to be solved.

Perhaps if one tweaked the torpedo and flak stats over the length of the tech tree, one might be able to replicate it.



As I understand it, torpedoes are somewhat neglected because of the overkill effect. If dreadnoughts could soak a bit more fire and abuse percentage repair modules, perhaps torpedo spike damage in the medium phase would become a valuable counter. If you then tweaked the torpedo stats on higher level techs to begin outpacing flak, you could make dreadnoughts become less effective at the very endgame.



But I believe Endless Space is still a long ways away from the balance testing required to give the tech tree that kind of depth of flavour. I would guess that the first priority is just getting all three damage types balanced against one another at all levels, before even worrying about giving them advantages between game-stages.

Could the endgame of endless possibly replicate such a change? Would that be fun? Would it even be possible?