The invention of the torpedo really hosed the big ship as the be-all end-all of combat. The torpedo doesn't really care how big or powerful you are, it will still wreak massive damage anyway. It was, however, much shorter in effective range than the big guns on a battleship (or any gun on the post-Dreadnought battleship) so the smaller ships could effectively eliminate the quick torpedo boats with smaller, easier-to-aim guns ("destroyer", you might know, is short for "torpedo boat destroyer").



And then the aircraft carrier gave us Wedge Antilles.

GC13 wrote:
Considering that Endless Space is mimicking Age of Sail battles and not World War II battles there's no good reason in the fiction to encourage mixed fleets; bigger was always better in the AoS, except for the bigger ships being too expensive to allow to roam. The silly part, then, is that it's destroyers that get spammed rather than dreadnoughts, even when the technology for dreadnoughts has been researched. Let the big ships fight the wars, and use small ships for territorial control like the historical analogy suggests: make big ships strong per but weak per and we'll see both types used.

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?

Considering that Endless Space is mimicking Age of Sail battles and not World War II battles there's no good reason in the fiction to encourage mixed fleets; bigger was always better in the AoS, except for the bigger ships being too expensive to allow to roam. The silly part, then, is that it's destroyers that get spammed rather than dreadnoughts, even when the technology for dreadnoughts has been researched. Let the big ships fight the wars, and use small ships for territorial control like the historical analogy suggests: make big ships strong per but weak per and we'll see both types used.

Due to the way combat works in this game the only way to truly fix mono-hull spam (in this case Destroyers) is to alter Combat itself. Optimizers will always find the best Hull type for battles no matter how much you alter individual Hulls. Even changing the Module bonuses each gets will not change this, it will just lead to fleets of specialized ships of each Hull type but still all being Mono-Hull within that fleet and Mono-Hull within that role (combat, invasion, scouting, etc.)



This is because the way the math works in combat, it boils down the the number of ships you have / can target then the amount of fire power each of those ships can put out per turn. The cards can modify this enough to alter a close match in numbers but overall the static nature of combat (the ships basically line up and shoot) there will always be one optimal formula for fleet building because things like Speed, Manoeuvring and Weapon Arcs are not a factor.



Unless there is more to combat than line up and shoot there will always be one uncontested most cost effective way to build a fleet. Changing individual ship stats will accomplish nothing more than shifting that formula to another hull and weapon combo. Only by altering that way combat is calculated can Multiple Hull Type fleets become viable for combat.

The world war 2 wargame Darkest Hour forces you to have "capital ships" and "screen ships" by giving you a large "no screen penalty". Ideally you want a system similar to world war 1 naval tactics, where your real heavy-hitters are the battleships, but you need to have the smaller ships or you might lose an extremely expensive ship to a torpedo fired from a destroyer. What you want is to encourage diversity, so you get the following results:



Side A is three battleships and six destroyer groups.

Side B is twelve destroyer groups.



Result: The six destroyer groups from side A keep side B's destroyer groups away from side A's battleships, side A's battleships pound side B into slag, losing maybe a destroyer group or two in the melee.



Side A is three battleships and six destroyer groups.

Side B is six battleships.



Result: The destroyers from side A run riot while the battleships slug it out, and torpedo side B into dust. Alternatively, side B spends all battle shooting at cheap destroyers while they get blown up by battleships.

Yeah, i agree with that idea.

Mermel wrote:
There is also the possibility of efficiency/power tradeoff.



Bigger ships are CP efficient

Smaller ships are cost efficient



There is already a CP limit in place. The only addition needed to make it work like this, is to stop damage overkill by allowing to target multiple ships per turn.

This is exactly the size tradeoff I think we need, but it will take more than stopping overkill damage to make it worthwhile. Doubling the base production cost on mid-sized ships and quadrupling it on dreadnoughts while giving mid-sized ships a base of 300 tons and dreadnoughts a base of 800 might be a decent place to start—play with the numbers from there.

There is also the possibility of efficiency/power tradeoff.



Bigger ships are CP efficient

Smaller ships are cost efficient



There is already a CP limit in place. The only addition needed to make it work like this, is to stop damage overkill by allowing to target multiple ships per turn.

There would of course still be a most economical choice, but also a most powerful choice.



I made a post about it a while ago, but never got any feedback, so I don't have a clue what was actually going on with that suggestion.

For the interested:

/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11825-suggestion-ship-roles-and-size



In any case, the current ship design and combat system are not complex enough to provide space for different types of ships except the most economic choice.



I'm not pleading to revamp the battle system. I like it as it is, the cards are great and it feels streamlined enough. It's just the possibility of damage overkill, that makes bigger ships even less useful as their smaller counterparts.



(I really hope I got it right, that every ship has only one target per turn)

tbh is seems that the dreadnaught seems to be compleatly obsolete in terms of used CP to damage and HP ratio, im thinking maybe since it is the most durable and useualy last to go down ship give it the role of a flagship of sorts to give out some decent fleet bonuses to the other ships depending on the fleet composition perhaps? atm it seems i may as well stick with battleships and cruisers since i can spam them out of the factorys like there is no tommorow. and for less CP costs considering the max fleet CP is so dam tiny.

Is it possible to implement some kind of flagship/rank system - for example limit the size of fleet of destroyers to 4-5(numbers are out of the head) ships max, corvettes even less and in order to have larger fleet you need to have larger ships in formation performing battle and command and coordination functions. For example 1 dreadnought can command 6 destroyers and so on. Or make some kind of command module that weights a lot and after and after destruction of ship with such module fleet wait for 2 turns for new command ships and auto-returns to nearest friendly system. IMHO this idea and class specific weapons/defence/armoring should be explored.

I feel dreadnoughts should be very very expensive (double or maybe triple the industry of every module compared to the same one on a DD) making it far more economical to use just 1 (for fleetwide bonusses) and fill the rest with cheaper smaller ships.



also, they should be realy expensive in so far as maintentance goes. I'm also not averse to the idea of having a different resource: "supplies" which constitutes fuel, ammo, food, etc which you can only get through a new conversion industry->supplies. dreadnoughts would use up lots of that stuff every turn. to differentiate it with dust you should be able to build improvements that boost the conversion rate.



of course, they should be fearsome ships and might deserve a bit of a buff.

I also feel flak of destroyers should help protect a dreadnought, but I might be going too far off topic here.

One way you might be able to coax some diversity out could be to give fleet-wide synergy effects to ship hulls which diminish in numbers. e.g.:



Destroyers - (Tracing Shots) +5% weapon damage for first destroyer, -1% lower additional bonus for each subsequent destroyer (perhaps even allow this to go negative?)

Battleships - (Screening) +6% damage mitigation for first battleship, -2% additional bonus for each subsequent

Dreadnought - (Flag Ship) +25% strategy card effect, second ship adds no additional bonus, three or more dreadnoughts remove the bonus