Better scaling of supports

[kasnavada]

I've run a few test with scaling support ships, and the smallest ship wins.

Just run battleship + gunship size one VS battleship + gunship size 16 and the first set will always win.

As their build cost is basically a multiplication (size 10 is ten times size 1)... the point of having bigger ships seems low to me. Yes, you do have "lower" losses (with size 1 ships some will always die) but the victory is by quite a large margin.

Could you implement something to reduce this, like reducing the cost / increasing the power of larger ship slightly ?

[Astasia]

I would imagine that's a direct result of your weapon choice and total lack of counters. With gunships/cannons larger ships will waste a lot of potential damage destroying smaller ships, a tiny ship can soak up a bullet of any strength I believe. I bet if you tried the same test with beams it would be a lot closer as those will continue on punching through multiple ships, and if you added ablative armor to the flagship the size 1 ships would be completely useless.

[kasnavada]

Nope, it's not dependant at all of weapon choice nor counters.

Tried missiles, gunships, lasers, different designs... I indicated one example because it's easy to test, but that's not all I did.

What I tried is with the same flagship and just a larger version of the support ship. The flagship with the "smallest" supports always win by a large margin.

Run the test yourself =).

[Sytch]

Have you tried with size 8? Because the support capacity of the default battleship is 568 which isn't divisible by 16. Thus you're getting 11.5k strength for 1 size vs 11.2k for 16 size. If you try the size of 8 you'll get 11.5k vs 11.5k and those bigger supports easily crush 1-sized ones no matter how many times I try.

[Brocifer]

Also, put torpedos on the flagship. Torpedos are hard counters for swarms, as they do area damage. You can rip large holes in a swarm fleet with them, while larger ships mostly laugh at the impact.
Furthermore, the gunship design isn't all that good. Front mounted weapons tend to be destroyed first. So larger ships are still there, but they tend to lose their weapons first, rendering them useless.
Try a different design with less exposed weaponry or switch to rear fired missiles completly. I imagine the result would be different.

Oh, and larger ships are already more efficient regarding build costs.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Large enough supports all but immune to the fire of tiny supports. Unless they use muon cannons i guess.

Note that verdants subvert the weapon loss problem, since Sinew can be placed in front of weapons.

[kasnavada]

@rkfg
Yes, I know, and tested it. it barely changes anything. If I get the power of the "size one" at 90% of the "size large" fleet, the size 1 wins easily. They can't get much farther than this though. So balance is "close".

@Brocifer : sorry, but I think you're missing the point about where I'm placing weapons. No, as stated in my second post, changing the support type does not change anything. Yes, I know that the gunship is "bad".

I did not try the torpedo because I thought it would discriminate against the "lower" size but actually, I just ran a few tests. It removes supports from both ships and flagship fight =) Very cool =).

[kasnavada]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von TheDeadlyShoe:

Large enough supports all but immune to the fire of tiny supports. Unless they use muon cannons i guess.

Note that verdants subvert the weapon loss problem, since Sinew can be placed in front of weapons.

Please, run the test. That was what I thought too before I ran tests, I was surprised to see the opposite actually. It seems that the DPS wasted "killing" a 30 hp ship makes up for whatever the "bigger" ship would hold. Also, the fact that there are way less supports seems to make the flagship targeted much, much more. That's harming it's life expectancy by quite a lot.

PS : plate armor does not have nearly enough damage resistance to nullify the fire of 50 tiny ships. Sadly ?

[Deep One]

It mostly seem to be a result of the flagship with few big supports takes a lot more fire as it seems to be split evenly between all available targets regardless of their size. Also setting supports to "bomber" does not seem to work.

If you put a big torpedo on the flagship it definitely swings it in the big supports favour tough. It be nice if maybe there was some other aoe options like a flak turret? THat you could mount on supports too.

On the other hand I'm not sure being good chaff for the flagship is enough to keep small ships viable tough, if bomber "target flagship" starts working.

[kasnavada]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Karl XII:

It mostly seem to be a result of the flagship with few big supports takes a lot more fire as it seems to be split evenly between all available targets regardless of their size. Also setting supports to "bomber" does not seem to work.

I ran a few tests on this too, that's actually not "evenly". It is higher though. It seems dev set some "dunnowhat" percentage to target either the flagship or a support ship. I know not what that percentage is though. Bomber might just set that percentage higher, hence why it seems like it does not work. Or maybe it does not. Game is not out yet =).

To test this, I tried 2 ships with about 4000 support with 128 size support gunship against 1 ship with 4000 size 1 gunship. If it was even, the about 70 ships comprising the "large size" fleet should barely hit the enemy flagship. In practice, it's shredded in a matter of seconds with 3750 remaining size 1 gunships. The remaining supports did take out of the attackers after its flagship died. Yeah for Inigo Montoya I guess =).

PS: about your suggestion, I'd rather get the "high-size" support stronger (either via more damage / damage resistance / lower cost...) than implement specific anti-swarm weapons to balance it. What I mean by that is that it should be a choice to use large or small weapons, and that using the "anti-swarm" or "in one shot I'm killing one or your fat guys" weapons should be an answer to a choice your opponent made, rather than being a choice because "by default game design made this or that choice the best one, so meta tells we need to put some anti-swarm. Also, I'm all in favor or more weapons... but not as a balance solver.

[Deep One]

Tried a huge unarmed but super armored flagship, to take that factor out of the equation, 32 size beam supports with an armor layer in front seem to beat size4 same design.

[kasnavada]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Karl XII:

Tried a huge unarmed but super armored flagship, to take that factor out of the equation, 32 size beam supports with an armor layer in front seem to beat size4 same design.

That's a nice test, and nice to know.

However it does not take the flagship out of the equation... since it's heavily armored it takes much of the shots instead of the supports. Again, it's true that in the other cases I tested, the flagship is probably way more effective against a size 60+ ship than against a size 1. I was aiming to use ships with very large amount of support ships to remove as much of the flagship influence as possible but couldn't reverse the results.

[Deep One]

I don't think it's taking more fire by being heavily armored, just that it will suck up a bit more of the fire due to fewer targets, not sure if that effect is large enough to matter that much, the larger laser supports seem to win very easily in this situation, I think due to their higher damage resistance.

Missiles are another story tough, then small ships win because missiles easily get over the damage resistance, and it's easy to get into overkill range as well. I'm not sure about railguns, they just seem a bit pointless to me, I guess the idea is to be good at brawling at point blank but the damage output isn't that impressive compared to the other weapons.

[kasnavada]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Karl XII:

I don't think it's taking more fire by being heavily armored, just that it will suck up a bit more of the fire due to fewer targets, not sure if that effect is large enough to matter that much, the larger laser supports seem to win very easily in this situation, I think due to their higher damage resistance.

I think depending on your design that it's possible to make a flaghip immune to support damage / laser (due to it having better armoring options compared to what supports have) and I think it makes a significant difference on the result. Currently, from what I've tested, a difference of 1 to 128 in size does not make supports immune or significantly resistant to each other.

I've not really tested armoring the flagship much because of the previous assumption, or maybe I did not find the right test case.

[Deep One]

A size 100 has 5.26 damage resistance.

If you fill up 30 hexes with a weapon, at size 1, cannons do 1 damage, beams do 1 I think (if it is calculated once per second the beam is fireing? beam dps is 1), and missiles do 4.5.

So basically a ship 20 times larger, his armor is 80% immune to lasers and cannons (20% damage always gets trough), for missiles you need to outsize it by almost 100 times to get to that point.

[Brocifer]

Okay, try your tests with support ships that are set to shield. Beats the small ones every time in my tests. Plus, the small ships of the same blueprint cost 50% more than the larger ones

In my battles, a fleet costing 11 million (Flagship included) destroyed a fleet costing 16 million with a material loss of about 4.5 Million.

So, one strategy to counter swarms are large shield ships. Small ships are pretty bad shields (I set both support fleets to shield) Without the shield option, the flagship dies pretty fast, rendering the whole fleet useless.

The other way to counter support swarms, are torpedo specialized flagships. A fast flagship with torpedos on board is a nightmare for support swarms. This requires some micro though.

In addition, a swarm of supports should only appear some time into the game. There are techs which make torpedos even more effective vs. swarms.

The only thing that is a bit off in the whole picture is the torpedo targeting logic.
It tends to be fired at the flagship, where it seems to do the least damage.

I don't know how it would be, if the aoe range techs would have been researched.

But yeah, swarms are pretty much a bad idea in my book. You can suprise your enemy with a fleet formed that way, but it is a cheesy tactic. They have kind of a hard counter with a big support shield fleet. That fleet is still effective against other types of fleet composition, costs significantly less and has no hard counter I can think of.

So in conclusion: Swarms are a cheesy tactic. You can surprise your enemy with it, but there is a counter which leaves the big support player in a far better position afterwards.

Edit:
Tests were done with beam fleets, size 1 on the swarmer side, size 50 on the other. I do some more testing with mixed weaponry.