Thoughts on Fleet Size 2000

[MassiveBallSack]

Played my first game of sins 2 yesterday. Had a blast and love the improvements to visuals for space battles!

One thing I noticed though was how limited the fleet size/supply is in sins 2. Feels like you can only realistically have one fleet operating at a time now and there's no settings option to increase it like in sins 1?

What's everyone thoughts on this.

[Elhazzared]

It doesn't matters what size the fleet cap is. If you had 3000 you'd make a 3000 fleet, if you had 4000 you'd make a 4000 fleet and the reason is because the AI will also put most of it's fleet power into a single fleet meaning you need to do the same.

[Bovril Brigadier]

Origineel geplaatst door jenkem_lover189:

Origineel geplaatst door Strayed:

Advent can get their fleet supply into the six digit numbers with smart farming of Deliverance Engines.

so that's what that is? i just learned the ropes and was having a ton of fun exchanging this planet (playing as TEC enclave btw) with the advent primacy. finally secured it, made a starbase and sat to make a fleet capable of a major offensive and what do i find? they vastly vastly exceed my fleet supply and im like wtf how. i can try and take planets where their forces arent concentrated but once they attack me or come to a planet's aid, it's just a matter of time. really frustrating.

Yeah the Advent Wrath are worst for it as ships entering their orbit have a chance to convert to your side and Deliverance Engines fired at a planet can also convert a good portion of ships over including garrisons. Only counter to it is to go all Capital Ships or be Advent yourself but that doesn't stop them from say farming Minors which become a steady supply of ships.

[Asuzu]

Origineel geplaatst door UncleIstvan:

Well, you have to draw a line somewhere. Increasing max supply makes already questionable planet defenses and summons entirely useless in late game, also makes micro-intensive capitals less useful.

With zero-supply defenses being useless, now there's only one way to beat enemy fleet - to have a bigger blob, preferably with counters to his most numerous ship type. So you end with even less incentive to have a second fleet.

What could work is adding debuffs for having too much of the ship type in one gravity well, to encourage multiple fleets and combined arms tactics. But such mechanics are notoriously tough to implement properly.

The only planet defense I made work more or less is mass spam hangars hugging the planet lowest orbit, retrofit bay, twin fortress with 3 hangars just inside the retrofit bay's range for heals, and switch it all to bombers. If you got Pranasi, add 5 emergency gauss turrets on top. You can go nuts and add impenetrable fortress and spam even more hangars. Basically gives you the bomber power to shred any capital.

Unless you are hit by 2k main impossible AI stack with a Titan, it will hold and send them fleeing.

All other defenses suck badly, limited range and not rotating just makes them useless. Also fortresses weapons are mostly useless except hangars. Simply put, with hangars you can project force across entire system, with anything else you don't.

[Polysorbate]

As another person said, the actual fleet size is kinda irrelevant in the big picture, you could be limited to 500 or 5000 at absolute maximum and gameplay would be similar. The problem (as in Sins 1) is doomstacking.

IMO the game should be balanced so that an equal-tech "half" fleet plus a well-defended planet can narrowly defeat an opponent "full" fleet, and I feel like that's roughly where we are right now (until titans enter the picture). I think the defender should have a little more advantage than it currently has right now (defender inherent advantage in IRL warfare is usually 3:1), but it's certainly not gamebreaking as-is.

On the subject of titans, I wish corvettes still had their "capital ship counter" role. So far though it feels like corvettes just get shredded past early game now. I hugely enjoy (in theory) the concept of them being too fast for non-turreted weapons to track, but there still seem to be so many turreted weapons in an avererage fleet that they don't really have much of an opportunity to shine. Not to mention that their damage output is pitiable, especially against armored targets. If they had an EMP ability, like (just spitballing here) "for every hit the target is completely disabled 0.25 seconds" you could still have a big impact if you had like 20+ of them held back for a critical moment.

[Sabaithal]

Well one thing that might deter the use of doomstacks I suppose would be RoF nerfs? It would make sense, realistically even, that a hundred ships in a huge disorganized blob would need to severely limit their fire to avoid hitting each other.

Capital ability cooldown nerfs as penalty for too many allied ships being nearby wouldn't be a bad idea either.

Essentially instead of hard limiting doomstacks its saying "you CAN doomstack, you might win, but you will take disproportional losses if you do."

[doublejesus]

Issue is that once you get over 75 missile frigates you hit a fulcrum where capital ships can't exist in large scale fights. The computer is too dumb to clear out that huge of a mass of missile frigates they will alpha strike them one of at a time wasting thousands of damage meanwhile your capital ships are melting before they can even turn around to run.

[Asuzu]

Origineel geplaatst door doublejesus:

Issue is that once you get over 75 missile frigates you hit a fulcrum where capital ships can't exist in large scale fights. The computer is too dumb to clear out that huge of a mass of missile frigates they will alpha strike them one of at a time wasting thousands of damage meanwhile your capital ships are melting before they can even turn around to run.

Yeah pretty much that. And vasari spam 100s of their missile spammers, and I won't leave home with less than 70 LRMs either.

Unfortunately, even fixed PD doesn't help much against lategame missile spam.

And yeah, capitals are very sad when they get focused by that. Overall, most capitals feel weak af.

The only real answer I found to to not waste damage, is just right click enemy missile spammers with my bombers and my own LRMs, that way they spread damage and kill them faster.

Advent has a godlike tech to make missiles redirect, but it's kinda wasted on them since they don't even have a missile cruiser lol, and Tempests fall off quickly with their pathetic 0 penetration, as other players replace their comp with cruisers with much higher durability than the frigs.

[Polysorbate]

Rate of fire nerfs could be good. What about movement speed nerfs? It would make sense that a huge fleet would need to move slower to maintain cohesion or whatever. So you could have small nimble fleets, medium well-balanced fleets, or hulking deathballs that are cumbersome, easy for smaller fleets to escape from, but still overwhelmingly powerful if you're held in place by an interdictor or a need to defend territory.

[Sabaithal]

Origineel geplaatst door Polysorbate:

Rate of fire nerfs could be good. What about movement speed nerfs? It would make sense that a huge fleet would need to move slower to maintain cohesion or whatever. So you could have small nimble fleets, medium well-balanced fleets, or hulking deathballs that are cumbersome but still overwhelmingly powerful.

If you slow the overall game speed down this already kind of happens. Though I wouldn't mind it having its own slider.

Unless you're talking about local ships getting speed nerfs depending upon how many other ships are nearby. Not against that idea either.

[Nitro]

I'd be okay if it scaled to map size.

[Shinkirou]

Origineel geplaatst door ExavierMacbeth:

I think the real problem is that there are no controls to limit doomstacking. So expanding the fleet cap just tends to make the doomstack fleet that much harder of a nut to crack.

Limit fleetsize per gravity well or something, makes fleet comp more important than doom stacking. And make running multiple gravity well sized fleet make sense.

[Fendelphi]

Overall, I think the current balance of fleet supply is ok(outside of mass stacking converted/captured ships).

If changes should be made, it would be something like this:

You always have infinite fleet supply, with the cap only being a "soft cap". However, if you go over it, you get increasingly harsh penalties.
1) A reduction in all forms of income, depending on how far beyond the cap you are.
2) A reduction in speed for all ships(scales with how far beyond the cap you are).
3) A slow down in unit production and planet developement(a set amount).
4) A reduction in Culture push(a set amount).

Basically, you can choose to go over the cap, at the cost of slowing everything down. It could be useful for desperate defense of a planet or even system, or for cracking a fortified position.
If you want to operate huge fleets, or multiple "large" fleets, things will slow down mechanically, giving the opponent the time and various options to respond.

I dont think trying to mess with "fleet/gravity well dependent debuffs" would be worth it. It would just artificially force certain fleet compositions or make it particularly hard to take on a well entrenched defensive position.


As for missile spam, I still think that missile frigates/cruisers should have an increase in fleet supply cost.

[Problem Solver]

There are a couple mods you can subscribe to that change the supply. One even says unlimited. Better have a really good computer for that one.

[白猫咪星人]

Can not just increase fleet size, they will need to re-balance all the ship in ratio.
At the moment any fleet size mod may just ruin the game because it make all the ship or even titan can be easily destroy by large group or ship...

[Jambie Lionheart]

I'm ok with it on the small to medium maps but it's gunna suck on the larger ones.