Carrier - ultimate ship?

they do seem a little OP.

When the AI has carriers, I counter with beam ships and range extenders.  It cost resources, though.  But I destroy the interceptors before they can touch me and by the time the other ship comes in range, my fleet can fire again.

They are over-powered. Carrier modules need to have a hard limit or increased mass to limit the number of modules you can put on a ship. Otherwise, you can just pack carrier modules on 4 huge ships and run around with 4 ship fleets hitting the 64 ship hard cap. That would not be so bad, though, if each weapon module could actually hit a different target, instead of only each weapon type.

Yup, that is one side of the story. The other is that you drive through galaxy with self-replenishing fleet which is in fact upgrading itself automatically without any costs - what jumps out from carrier depends on your current technology, not tech you had when the carrier was build - and without any resource costs.

That way when I research smth like nightmare torpedoes I do not build even single ship armed with them - there is never enough antimatter to build meaningful force manually. While those tiny bugs that jump from my carriers have like 64 missile attack - each. Funny.

Plus, I have impression that carriers are just too good in both protecting your fleet (sheer number of moving targets) and attacking (the same large number of strong weapons) at the same time, while having rather modest costs to build and maintain.

Well drones are tiny ships and behave in battle just as if you had tiny ships in your fleet. Tiny ships aren't a joke, they are really good so handing out free ships is questionable. At some point the drones get all upgrades so you might have free drones that in the shipyard would cost 400 construction points.

And the upgrading is really powerful feature. It's also mind boggling how op the ai carriers are at some difficulties. I had drengin carriers at the age of war with carriers that had 50 missile attack per drone ship while mine had 4. But they still lost because AI can't build fleets.

The issue might also be that we can't really control how our ships behave. For example if I have a missile boat with 12 missile modules installed, it shoots every single missile to the same target no matter how much hp the target has. So if the enemy has 4 drones it takes 4 salvos from one ship to kill them all. I found that the best way to kill carriers is to have carriers yourself. By having more ships, you get more salvos that are shooting at individual targets and thus less damage is wasted.

But overall, when it comes to battle, it's not the carriers that are silly. I have never defeated the ai with any other strategy than: "gather forces and use more force than they have per individual battle". I have never somehow technologically outsmarted them because harder difficulties have the best tech like right away. And tactically it's not even possible because the combats are automatic.

I don't have problem with carriers being very powerful, let them be - but in my opinion power should come with price tag, they should get quite a number of tweaks to be balanced a little bit better:

- they should definitely cost more in terms of production, I mean carrier modules should be among most expensive ones;

- they should cost more in terms of maintenance;

- drones should be equipped only with those weapon variants which do not require special resources;

- carrier logistics cost should be bigger than hull size itself - at least +1 for every carrier module; 

- [optional, idk] maybe drones should not be treated exactly like regular Tiny ships you can manually build, but should fall in category of it's own, "drone", weaker than Tiny hull - less space for modules, less hp, only slightly better evasion chance, etc.?

It might be general problem with game's economic balance, I encountered a few things which elude me how they were really calculated on design stage in terms of value/costs ratio. I mean - when you have X choices in game, when only one is optimal and all the others are clearly worse, it makes whole beautiful diversity only an illusion. Right now I see like 0 reasons why anything but carriers (+ maybe, some single other, dedicated support ship per fleet) should ever be built once you finally can build them. There is no meaningful choice or trade-off here, only reason I build anything else is for fun.

These things are pretty irrelevant in late game (where Carriers come into play anyway), especially maintenance and logistics, since you will have plenty of money to support the maintenance (or use Precursor modules) and only need 3-4 carriers per fleet. With some blessing from the RNG goddess, you can even get a group of planets decent enough to pump out ships worth 15-20K in 2 days or less.

The only real way to nerf carriers that actually matters is to limit the number modules that a ship can have, either through mass or hard caps (like 3 modules of any kind per ship). Lowering their firepower by limiting them to non-resource weapons would help, but the difference is not much when you have 60+ of these per fleet.

You might be right, late-game would not feel these changes enough, but I would add it anyway, as carriers are just too cheap comparing to other ships right now. But yeah, something more should be done to keep them in check in late game.

Increasing their logistics cost, like by the number of carried drones would help a bit imho. And/or nerfing the drones itself, like creating special type of weapon only for them, instead of autobuilding them with weapon systems used by "normal" ships. 

I still dont quite understand that with all the different weapon placements on a ship, how in gods name can it not target more than one thing at a time?

wait sorry thats logical thinking, that has no place in this game any longer. my bad

weapon placement does not do anything, only offense vs defense stats, accuracy vs evasion and range, i.e. if you can you hit the ennemy before he can strike, you get a free shot with no reply.

When the battle comes, each ship targets one ship, regardless of how many weapons it has.  Ideally, you could send a missile volley to one ship, use your beams for another one and have the kinetics fire at everything that comes close to you.  But I don't think it's the general direction they want Galciv to evolve toward.

Pardon the late replies, but I figured best not to make another thread.

I see people saying Carriers are OP, but I threw some carriers in a fleet with some cruisers and they did nothing.  They released some Guardian drones that never saw combat.  Now I've only unlocked the first tier of Carrier tech, no specialization.  But it seems that the first module just isn't useful at all.  What am I doing wrong?

Here. Just try it again with Assault drones. And don't bother with cruisers, just throw on more Assault carriers. 😉

I'll do that when I unlock them I guess.  And Carrier spam sounds like a shame, oh well.

How many carrier modules did you stack? It does not matter which one you use--Guardian, Assault, or Interceptor--, what matters is how many you stack per ship. Two is useless and 3 is not very effective. Wait until you can stack at least 4 carrier modules per ship. Your goal is to have about 60 drones per fleet. Then you will see how ridiculous it is.

Yes, numbers are most important, but the type actually does matter due to starting position, Assault drones start farther away from your carriers and close to the enemy, that way swarm starts fighting sooner and rest of fleet is far away. I usually used missiles, so most often drone swarm had also first strike and was priority target for anything firing back, so carriers themselves were perfectly safe without any weapon, armor or guardians.

Also, medium hull carrier with 3 bays equals 6 drones, so 3-4 carriers fleet has 18-24 missiles to shoot. This setup is usually enough to clear enemy fleet, the bigger the ships, the better for you (huge Alpha damage with low rate of fire is perfect enemy for you, more smaller ships will hurt more). If enemy fleet has more starting positions that's even better, as whole swarm fights (well, massacres more likely) only one enemy group at a time.

Of course I went crazy after that and made fleet with more carriers, with drone swarms of around 50. After that I stopped even paying attention what I am attacking and lost interest in building anything else, save for some stray missile&dodge boosting support here and there (not really needed though).

And the best thing is that lost drones just reappear over time for free, so you stop to suffer any losses.

Nevertheless, if you are only playing the AI, any optimized ship is overkill, whether it be a carrier or even fully loaded large hull. You can rule the galaxy with one balanced huge hull.

Intresting. Tweaked this for my mod after reading this.   (No it does not use standard blueprints or AI Tech specialization choices)

Could be. Carriers happen to be quite cheap and fast to build though, you construct them faster than any really optimized large hull. Plus, you don't bother with upgrading weapons, as drones use just best current reasearch, ignoring resource costs, aaaand any losses are replenished over time automatically and for free.

IIRC logistics, you get 4 large hulls vs. 36 assault drone swarm from 6 medium carriers, my bet goes to drones in current  battle system and I think you can get carriers faster and cheaper.

Quoting Horemvore, reply 16

Intresting. Tweaked this for my mod after reading this.   (No it does not use standard blueprints or AI Tech specialization choices)

End of Horemvore's quote

Which way of tweaking you followed, just out of curiosity?

Higher mass (45), mass scaling of 10% per module, limit of 2 guns per fighter, however, they have more HP since I added this as thier filler rather than guns.

My huge hulls with 900+ Capacity laughs at your feeble attempt of a mass mod.   

Although, when you say 2 guns per fighter, what kind of offensive stats would we be looking at?

Oh sure. I am just saying there is no point to bother, though. lol

You'd still only get 10 modules on that hull with nothing else.  Firepower would be about half of what it is now, 1/3 in extreme hull mass scenerios.

Never put all your eggs in one basket, as they say. The ideal number of modules to me is 4 or 5 per ship, so there is plenty of space leftover. The reduced firepower would make a difference, though, but I suspect not as much as intended since that still does not mitigate the issue with targeting. Even at half power, multiple that by 60 and you still have more than enough.

That is probably true for standard blueprints. Fortunatly I am not working with standard blueprints. I went with 6 carrier modules in my blueprints for the AI, might reduce that will see.