After a couple days of playing the game extensively, I've encountered what I consider to be some potential issues for balancing that were exposed to me by the interaction of ship construction and combat mechanics. Due to forum post character limits I will split the thread into 'problem' and 'solution' posts.



The issue I have been noticing is that building few larger ships isn't more efficient than building more smaller ships, while smaller ships have combat and strategic advantages that make it easy for them to achieve disproprotionate attrition rates against larger ones, leading in the end to a 'kamikaze' military strategy using no-defense, all-offense destroyers ultimately being the optimal one in every case where you don't possess a very major technology lead over your opponents - and it's still at worst break-even then. I'll summarize first, and explain in more detail later.



A number of things intersect to produce the problem:

- The unit of battle is the fleet, not the ship, but there's no increase in efficiency in tonnage, production cost, command points, or hitpoints for using larger ships.

- Custom designs allow the creation of kamikaze offensive units on small hulls, packing offense individually capable of downing larger ships.

- Numerical superiority is a defensive advantage too: ships only engage one enemy at a time in battle and 'overkill' damage from a given volley of fire is wasted.

- A defending ship needs both tech superiority and the right defense distribution to counter kamikaze type attackers while still being offensive threats.

- Kamikaze attackers with tech parity never need to refit to different weapons (since their raw tonnage of weapons will overcome defense) or armor (since they don't use it).

- Large ships stacking offense aren't better off - more of their damage potential goes to overkill instead.

- Designing ships to survive long time periods by healing is unattractive due to low healing rates.

- Disposable kamikazes will be even more effective against ships designed to heal.

- Small ships produced more frequently allow for tonnage imbalances favoring the small ships in the intervening turns where large ships are still not finished.

- Ship hull and healing technologies being in nonmilitary tech trees can give a weaponry tech advantage to the small-ship strategy.



To explain in detail now:



Ships have essentially the same ratio of production cost to tonnage, hitpoints to tonnage, and command point cost to tonnage, regardless of hull type. Hull type only changes how many ships 'contain' those hps, tonnage, and command point costs. This is critical to the ability of small ships to achieve disproportionate attrition ratios because a fleet of command points X has tonnage Y and hitpoints Z regardless of its composition; thus a fleet of many small ships is deploying the same tonnage and hitpoints at the same production cost as a fleet of larger ships. Certainly if you deploy four dreadnoughts against four destroyers, the dreadnoughts are likely to win handily. But for roughly the same cost as four dreadnoughts, you would actually deploy sixteen destroyers.



Which leads to the second aspect of gameplay contributing to the issue, namely that customized ship designs allow you to stack small ships for sufficient offense each to rapidly endanger if not outright destroy larger ones, at the cost of having little to no defense of their own other than their numbers. Numbers however are actually a very powerful defense: because ships seemingly fire in singly-targeted volleys during battles, a larger ship can only engage one smaller ship at a time, while all the smaller ships produced at the same cost can fire simultaneously. And since overkill damage (damage above the ship's remaining health) is wasted, every time a ship is destroyed it's actually absorbed additional hitpoints worth of enemy punishment over its maximum for the sake of its allies... and small ships can (and will) do this more often than any other type. So you would not just deploy sixteen destroyers to face off against four dreadnoughts, but you'd deploy sixteen destroyers loaded out with weapons of the same type and little or nothing else, who would use each other as 'human shields' for protection. Additionally, large ships designed with a lot of offense end up being even worse at fighting numerous smaller ships because more of their damage potential will be going to overkill, especially if they're mounting a lot of missiles (due to their 'hit all at once' nature).



That segues nicely into noting that because of the lack of scaling between hulls, without a non-trivial tech lead it's not practical to create a larger ship with the defensive capacity to defeat the offenses of an equivilant tonnage worth of smaller ships even if you choose the 'right' defense against their 'stacked' offense type, especially if you're much offensive load of your own (and of course, a ship with no guns can't win battles). Worse still, increasing ship hitpoints costs tonnage separate from either weapons or defenses, so while more advanced weapons get better at both beating defense and dealing damage for the same tech and tonnage, a defending ship has to pick between having more health or having more defense in tonnage, as well as get multiple techs to have defenses against any possible weapon. Using kamikaze small ships leverages all of this in your favor, since you never have to refit to the 'right' armor against enemies when you aren't using any to start with, and will probably not badly need to refit to different weapons at all if you have tech parity (or even a 1-2 tech lag) since the attacker is going to attack against less tonnage worth of defense than they're wielding in offense.



Additionally, because it takes a tonnage investment that would detract from protection or offense for ships to be able to heal at all, and because the healing rates don't scale well with ship size or health, building large ships to hopefully survive combats is less strategically attractive due to long healing downtimes when they are damaged. While fleet consolidation and new production to be used as 'fleet healing' via ship replacement at much faster rates than can be achieved with waiting around for damaged ships to heal with any size ship, small ships allow for the most 'granular' loss and replacement effect in addition to benefitting the most from 'overkill tanking' as described above. There's also a strategic deployment advantage for your small ships - if two empires both produce 100 tonnage worth of ship per turn, at 4 turns one could have 4 destroyers and the other 1 dreadnought. But the empire producing destroyers would get their 100 tons 'out' and available every turn, while the other empire would get their tonnage in slower chunks. On every turn that wasn't divisible by 4 in this example, the empire with the small ship strategy would have more tonnage on the map, giving them a better chance to wield 'local superiority' in tonnage even if overall production is equal.



Finally, because the small-ship strategy doesn't use battleships, cruisers, or dreadnoughts, and doesn't care about healing ships between battles, it allows for a focus on the military tech tree, especially in the early game. This means the small ships can be deploying more advanced weapons earlier (as long as the user techs them), creating an early window of imbalance in offensive power for their owner to take advantage of. In fact, an early focus on the economy and military trees will give both a command point (and thus numerical) and weaponry advantage to someone who deemphasizes healing and hull technologies, making the kamikaze destroyer/corvette an especially strong 'early rush' strat. While destroyers are a researched hull, it's an early one and its ability to mount more weapons makes it ideal for the strategy, and thus worth it by mid-game if not immediately.



Through actually employing this strategy I've seen it working in practice, in every regard. Against AI opponents it actually places them into a situation where their tendency to favor their most advanced possible ship designs backfires on them - my kamikaze destroyer fleets performed best against fleets of a few dreadnoughts, and worst against fleets that were loaded with small ships like themselves. When my destroyer fleets went up against AI units that were properly-defended against their weapons they took somewhat more losses, but still came out ahead overall in the amount of production/tonnage I lost vs the amount of production/tonnage I destroyed in the battle. In the few cases where I didn't have tonnage and/or numerical parity or superiority in the battle, I could still often score 'double KOs' if not full-on battle draws where my destroyed ships would at least break even on attrition (frequently by inflicting losses from beyond the grave with their missile salvos). And obsolete, non-upgraded destroyers from early in the game that were 3-4 techs behind are able to score kills and remain dangerous into the mid-game (in addition to being able to overkill tank as well as a new ship).



Given all of that, I'm especially concerned about the effect this will have on multiplayer games. 4X multiplayers have a tendency to be dominated by early rushes as it is, especially at medium and low player skill levels, unless design steps are taken to prevent it. So far, my expectation and game experience has been that the all-out attack destroyer strategy is an early rush one that can continue unchanged for the whole game (only upgrading weapons, and that need only be along a single axis if you wish), rather than one that makes a strategic gamble about winning early or else.

I've thought of several potential solutions to ameliorate or reverse this problem and swing the balance in favor of larger ships that survive combats and heal without making a kamikaze destroyer rush completely invalid as a tactic. I believe that larger, survivable ships should have a modest but not insurmountable overall combat advantage because producing them requires significantly more techs - they are the more advanced ships according to the tech trees. Implementing all of these ideas would likely be overkill on the problem; the goal is to present a number of alternatives that in some combination will address it. To summarize:



- Double command point caps; increase small ship CP cost to 2, medium ship to 3, and large ship to 5.

- Increase the tonnage available to larger ships to 250 for battleships and cruisers, and 600 for dreadnoughts.

- Give production cost discounts to equipment installed on larger hulls, making them more efficient in terms of production cost per tonnage.

- Allow all defenses to function against all attacks, at reduced effectiveness where they aren't the optimal defense.

- Make overkill damage AOE in combat, having a portion of it hit other ships or divide across the entire remaining fleet.

- Add a "target everything" card that makes your ships divide their attacks as evenly as possible against the entire enemy fleet for that phase.

- Reduce the tonnage cost of healing modules, and make healing modules scale with ship size (use percentage healing more, and at higher percents).

- Provide ship healing alternatives, such as production -> healing or dust -> healing, for hangared ships.



The first three suggestions are to attack the problem via improving efficiency for large ships. I personally like the first one best, if there's any solution that would 'one-shot' this problem without destroying the viability of an attack destroyer strategy, I think it's this one. What it would do is reduce the numerical advantage of small ships in fleets from the current 4:2:1 to 3:2:1.2, and give larger ships a tonnage advantage in fleets of 1.6:1.32:1 as opposed to tonnage equality. The second would give large ships a tonnage advantage per command point of 1.5:1.25:1 without changing the ship numbers. Doing both would almost certainly be overkill, however, leading to a massive tonnage advantage for dreadnoughts. Meanwhile, a production discount for larger ships is kind of counterintuitive since larger, more advanced units usually cost more to produce in 4X games - but a destroyer rush strategy relies on destroying more enemy production than is expended, so making bigger ships relatively cheaper to produce is attacking it at its foundation. Combining this with one of the other two efficiency-related options will likely place a nice advantage in the hands of the larger ship types, while still leaving some room for destroyer attrition warfare (such as for empires that aren't especially good at researching), especially if the cost reduction of the big ships is 20% or less.



The next three suggestions are meant to address what makes the strategy work so well in combat itself. The first two would increase the ability of fewer big ships to fight more smaller ones. Overkill resulting in AoE splash damage reduces the ability to overkill tank, taking some of the advantage away from just having more units and accepting that some will die in almost every battle. A card, I'd say of the Offense or Tactics type, that makes ships spread their damage equally around the other fleet would effectively eliminate the ability to have anything be a human shield when played, and would make offense-stacked large ships able to duke it out with smaller ships on even or superior terms. The downside to this is that it would have to be researched, adding to the research burden that fielding larger ships already carries. And if combined with overkill AoE, might result in sort of cascading explosions as broadly-weakened ships fall in a chain reaction when one of their friends dies. Finally, if 50% of the non-ideal defenses applied to all attacks, and incoming damage were split proportionately against all defenses in return, it would be much more practical to build ships that could survive combat without engaging in a constant 'rock-paper-scissors' refit race. I think this last suggestion is one that probably ought to be implemented anyway, especially for the sake of multiplayer.



The final two suggestions are to make it so that surviving but damaged ships can return to combat sooner. Flat healing rates on the heal modules is fine for in-combat healing, in my opinion, but out-of-combat healing should always be percentage based so that dreadnoughts aren't stuck healing 20 hitpoints a turn out of their 1200 base hp pools. For the second suggestion, being able to funnel production into hangared ship repairs will let ships designed early in the game without healing modules heal at all, and gives a strategic importance to retreating ships to friendly hangars for healing, as well as to preventing the enemy from doing the same. It also gives a value to having control of systems near a battlefront, rather than making those systems liabilities as their striking populations are unproductive and their low system hitpoints make them ripe for re-capture by the enemy. As it stands I favor destroying the enemy fleets prior to sieging their systems at all - and then sieging their empire broadly once I can do so without opposition, to limit how long I have to defend weak and striking new holdings.



If I were making the decisions, I would probably start with trying out this combination: the command point change, making all defenses work against all attacks at lower rates, and both healing-related ideas. I'd probably try the 'target everything' battle card too, and make it easier to counter if it proved to be too powerful in conjunction with the rest. If I found that destroyer rushing was still too good, I'd look at overkill AoE next, but I don't think it will be necessary to go that far.

I'm not sure, destroyer fleets can be counted by using the corresponding defense card. Can't really test it out yet as multiplayer isn't available yet and the AI isn't very bright at this point in time. In my experience, dreads are very capable of taking out destroyer fleets although I've always enjoyed tech superiority (as I said, AI isn't very smart yet). Good fleet compositions are very helpful too, having 2 or 3 Aegis Battleships with a repair mod each, and dreads with +Shields (UE can easily get up to 8k hp and still have good firepower), + 20% rep module, +lots of firepower. Hissho destroyer fleets can be somewhat troublesome, for sure.



Basically, I am not sure where I stand, but it is an interesting point and one that we can't really test out until multiplayer is released.

Vector78 wrote:


Ships have essentially the same ratio of production cost to tonnage, hitpoints to tonnage, and command point cost to tonnage, regardless of hull type. Hull type only changes how many ships 'contain' those hps, tonnage, and command point costs. This is critical to the ability of small ships to achieve disproportionate attrition ratios because a fleet of command points X has tonnage Y and hitpoints Z regardless of its composition; thus a fleet of many small ships is deploying the same tonnage and hitpoints at the same production cost as a fleet of larger ships. Certainly if you deploy four dreadnoughts against four destroyers, the dreadnoughts are likely to win handily. But for roughly the same cost as four dreadnoughts, you would actually deploy sixteen destroyers.

Your math is incorrect. A fleet of destroyers actually deploys significantly more tonnage than the same CP fleet of dreadnoughts.



Max tech dreadnought:

Tonnage: 400*1.3 + 50 (from tonnage extension support module) = 570 tons



Max tech destroyer:

Tonnage: 100*1.3 + 50 (from tonnage extension support module) = 180 tons



4 destroyers: 180*4 = 720 tons > 570 tons



Add to this that destroyers get a 25% discount on weapons...



Also, I did some separate analyses of this concept, and determined that it is in fact possible to beat the pure offensive destroyer fleet with equal tech dreadnoughts unless your entire fleet (or a number of destroyers greater than 4) targets a single dreadnought on any given combat round.



Balancing issues in combat are one reason why I would love to have the combat resolver be moddable (what I see as ideal might not be what someone else things should be).

I would be tempted to override the targeting IA with something that makes (close to) optimal decisions regarding the assignment of firepower, make weapons 100% accurate, though they can be dodged, or blocked, or distracted via electronic warfare (for missiles only)...

Math aside, this is an important issue to address (though we will need multiplayer, and therefore the beta, in order to perform comprehensive testing).



On the other hand, we have a lot of other posters complaining that small ships are no longer relevant once you've unlocked dreadnoughts, so not everyone has reached the same conclusion about ships.

I'm in favour of having both a CP restructure and adding in non-optimal defences at a reduced value (33% would be my pick, maybe 20%).



One of the things you have to remember though, is having destroyers vs dreads being a 50/50 proposition at equal tech level is not what this is about, since the guys who didn't have to research dreads has a crapload more tech somewhere else. It should be sestroyers with weapon advantage vs dreads with lagging tech be a 50/50 game of rock/paper/scissors. There needs to be some advantage in going for dreads, otherwise it's kind of pointless.

I was only looking at the base, unmodded tonnage because I was focusing on a minimalist teching view - you make a really good point about tonnage deployed for if you do tech up the other trees - flat tonnage increases do 'multiply' for more ships. That and the tonnage discount for weapons on a destroyer do make it practical in the mid- and end- game to build destroyers that don't load fully on a single weapon, but mix weapons or even use engines, while still keeping enough offense to beat dreadnoughts. Being able to warp-backdoor the other guy without having to rely on just 1 warp ferry in the fleet moving you at half speed, would be pretty nice.



That said, part of the driving idea behind this strategy was that I could avoid teching side trees and still keep up with the joneses militarily while following a conquest-oriented strategy. This is an ideal strategy for Hissho, IMO, thanks to their tech penalty and combat bonuses, as well as rushing/always war being a good snowballing strategy for their race. On the other hand, the races I've actually played full games using it with so far have been Sophons and Horatio - and both of them used the strategy successfully. In the Horatio game I had a brief hiccup in the early game before the Hissho AI had researched bigger hulls and were fighting me with destroyers, that were better cause they had combat bonuses - but once they switched to deploying cruisers I almost couldn't lose.



Generally, I've found in practice that masses of destroyers do really well against dreadnoughts, but those are AI-related battles. Which cards are played have only a minor effect in my experience, in fact, I usually just play a card that the enemy hasn't got a counter for yet if I can, or that is least likely to be countered, whether or not it's much help. Just to deny the enemy a card bonus for picking right. Adaptive Strategy is a good one for that, and Magnetic Field has been too, against the AI. I'd probably follow a similar 'just don't get countered' strategy against players - including not playing a card.



But yeah, controlled testing will probably require multiplayer where people cooperate to set up controlled battles and repeat them. I think the theory's solid and like I said, so far it's been working wonderfully for me.



Edited in: I also note that the AI puts a lot of emphasis on your military power in diplomacy, making it important for even a peaceful strategy to have a strong fleet in the early game. To me though, that just encourages early warmongering because the advantage to be had in conquering your nearest neighbor is enormous, both in terms of eliminating a rival before any AI FIDS bonus can snowball for them, and in terms of being able to colonize your nearby systems without opposition. Throw in the lack of an appreciable penalty for having a large empire, and really it seems that rapid early expansion (REX) and a successful early war (by definition using small ships) are going to be cornerstones of all my strategies now.

The problem, it seems to me, is that there isnt really any clear distinction in behaviour and/or roles for different ship classes. Theyre just bigger or smaller lumps of stuff to glue guns & shields to. Sure there are different tonnage bonuses for weapons etc, but there arent really any clear roles that come out of this.



If the different hull sizes actually *behaved* differently, then we might have somewhere to go on this.

e.g:

Make destroyers faster by default.

Make destroyers more accurate by default.

Have some large weapons which can only be fitted on large ships.

Implement something like fighter bays on large ships.

Have a C&C module which can be fitted to large ships which increases the number of smaller ships which can be fielded.



Just... *anything* to give ships some kind of distinct roles.



To my mind the solution shouldnt be to try to 'balance' destroyers vs dreadnaughts, but to encourage some sort of combined arms approach, where a successful fleet will comprise of a variety of ship sizes and designs, each fulfilling different roles.



At the moment, the actual ships themselves are almost an irrelevance. You might as well just add up the total number of guns and shields, do some math, and tell us the winner.

Destroyers can be countered by super tanked battleships. Since destroyers die easy it doesn't take many guns for a fleet of battleships to kill them.

ArrowLance wrote:
Destroyers can be countered by super tanked battleships. Since destroyers die easy it doesn't take many guns for a fleet of battleships to kill them.

I find that battleships are however always outnumberd, and destroyer wars often come down to who has more ships. Maby if the game had medium and large moduels that can only be fitted on such ships, you could equip yourself with spesific anti-small and anti-large ship weapons.



But if i was to suggest a change?

More ship modifyers (And more modules)



Defences that are all universal but act in diffrent ways (Not in the Gal Civ method of RPS defences that have a 1/3 effectiveness)



And defences that are better, leading to more drawn-out battles.

Igncom1 wrote:
I find that battleships are however always outnumberd, and destroyer wars often come down to who has more ships. Maby if the game had medium and large moduels that can only be fitted on such ships, you could equip yourself with spesific anti-small and anti-large ship weapons.



But if i was to suggest a change?

More ship modifyers (And more modules)



Defences that are all universal but act in diffrent ways (Not in the Gal Civ method of RPS defences that have a 1/3 effectiveness)



And defences that are better, leading to more drawn-out battles.

I've never had this problem vs AI, of course it is dependent on having modern resistance technology.

Yeah, however i do have the habit of equiping each of the destroyers with Planetary invasion weapons so i guess that might be it!



I like to call it my zerg rush.

Igncom1 wrote:
Yeah, however i do have the habit of equiping each of the destroyers with Planetary invasion weapons so i guess that might be it!



I like to call it my zerg rush.

I find myself rarely using invasion modules. I just build lots of ships and let it take its time.

Its a shame you cant just Bombard a races colonys off the map.....some times they are just 'That' bad

Igncom1 wrote:
Its a shame you cant just Bombard a races colonys off the map.....some times they are just 'That' bad

30 year invasions really are the best. Families raise their kids with the fact that "someday those glowy dots will be our rulers."

ArrowLance wrote:
30 year invasions really are the best. Families raise their kids with the fact that "someday those glowy dots will be our rulers."

That's... that's awesome. Someone should write a short story about this. Maybe even a not-so-short story.

I hate long sieges myself, especially cause newly conquered colonies are both vulnerable and unproductive. Tying one or more fleets to them for lots of turns doesn't make me happier. I could see using specialist 'invasion ships' for sieges, maybe stack a cruiser with %fleet invasion bonus, and attach one to a fleet of standard warships for each siege.



Anyway, something I may have needed to make clearer in the original post - you'd avoid giving battle when you didn't have a numerical advantage with your destroyers, unless that wasn't possible. But it's not too hard to try and ensure a weakened fleet always ends its turn 'in between systems' and it seems impossible to engage one like that. Also bear in mind that you can 'lose the battle, win the war' by destroying more tonnage than you lose, even if the battle is a 'defeat' or 'draw.' If you lose 7 destroyers but kill 2 dreadnoughts, you still came out ahead (albeit not by very much) in production attrition. Or 3 battleships for 5 destroyers.



I actually think a part of the reason larger ships can work more 'as intended' against the AI is that they tend to build larger ships once those are available themselves, and seem to never put more than 50% of a ship's tonnage into weapons. I've also found that missiles seem to be a cornerstone weapon for me - yeah they're slow, and sometimes a few destroyers will be 'sunk' before they launch, but they do hit very, very hard and especially once you get Decay Shells, a single destroyer armed with them can reliably one-shot a dreadnought whose flak has been depleted (and it only takes one destroyer's salvo to deplete the flak enough for the second to land). So in that instance specifically, you can lose 2 destroyers before they even launch, and still kill the dreadnought pretty reliably.

just tested this out and OH MY GOD how powerful those defenseless destroyers are! especially as I used gravers who get that +30% tonnage on their ships, so much damage!

daveybaby wrote:


Make destroyers faster by default.

Make destroyers more accurate by default.

Have some large weapons which can only be fitted on large ships.

Implement something like fighter bays on large ships.

Have a C&C module which can be fitted to large ships which increases the number of smaller ships which can be fielded.

I agree, there isn't really a reason to use bigger ships. I can make swarms of smaller ships, and be just as good if not better. Large ships need to be truly massive, then scalled down accordingly. There shouldn't be a linear progression to hp and tonnage, there should real advantage to going large ie: 2X more hp and 1.5 more tonage etc.

I encountered this yesterday and was on the receiving end of it. When battling Sophons my battleship / cruiser fleets were decimated by groups of 9 destroyers, all with different weapon/defense combos. Even though in each battle I had a numbers advantage even without and blunders in battle card selection I was torn apart because I could never destroy more than 4 ships per battle while mine were all destroyed due to the engaging single targets issue.