What's wrong with cruisers?

[GloatingSwine]

By doing this though, all you've really done is re-invent troop transports. I'm not going to put armies in a ship that's going to go into a fleet combat because they won't be as good as real combat ships, so I'll just design a "troop transport destroyer" and a "fleet destroyer", and we're back to separate troop transports.

Better to just have a proper army-building interface and an army capacity stat that's increased by army buildings. That way armies could be built as easily as fleets can, and would no longer be effectively limitless in size.

But would still have to be microed separately, increasing the interface fiddle that a player needs to deal with and causing the AI the tragic weakness that it can never effectively protect them and always loses them making it even crapper at war.

Making them part of ships would make the game better, better for players and better for the AI because it can't screw it up as bad. Whether it satisfies your craving for verisimilitude or not.

A bit later in the game the Focused Arc emitter + 4xCloud Lightning gave it good competition, but Cloud Lightning got a stealth nerf so I don't think it matches up as well any more. I still tend to use that one though because I only have to worry about energy weapon improvements.

Only at frankly unrealistic levels of repeatable technologies, by which time the game is almost certainly long since over. AE+CL can be a specific counter to the Contingency because they're shield/armour heavy but is generally worse otherwise.

 

[sillyrobot]

But would still have to be microed separately, increasing the interface fiddle that a player needs to deal with and causing the AI the tragic weakness that it can never effectively protect them and always loses them making it even crapper at war.

Making them part of ships would make the game better, better for players and better for the AI because it can't screw it up as bad. Whether it satisfies your craving for verisimilitude or not.



Only at frankly unrealistic levels of repeatable technologies, by which time the game is almost certainly long since over. AE+CL can be a specific counter to the Contingency because they're shield/armour heavy but is generally worse otherwise.

I suppose always expecting the Contingency -- being a very wide synth-ascended empire -- helps skew my choice.

 

[Dmitrius]

By doing this though, all you've really done is re-invent troop transports. I'm not going to put armies in a ship that's going to go into a fleet combat because they won't be as good as real combat ships, so I'll just design a "troop transport destroyer" and a "fleet destroyer", and we're back to separate troop transports.

Better to just have a proper army-building interface and an army capacity stat that's increased by army buildings. That way armies could be built as easily as fleets can, and would no longer be effectively limitless in size.

Building armies isn't the problem.

 

[Gort11]

Building armies isn't the problem.

Building armies is a problem for me. If I want 15 armies built in three months I have to go to 15 different planets and recruit one army from each, then I have to order them to merge when they're built.

A proper army-building interface would do this in a couple of clicks.

 

[Dmitrius]

Building armies is a problem for me. If I want 15 armies built in three months I have to go to 15 different planets and recruit one army from each, then I have to order them to merge when they're built.

A proper army-building interface would do this in a couple of clicks.

Yeah, I get that, but honestly I think that's only a small part of the issue and the solution offered covers your complaint.

I don't mean to condescend, it's just I feel there's a bigger problem that needs to be addressed.

 

[Valkj]

For me, cruiser lack a niche.

Corvettes are quick and able to avoid artillery, making them a foil to heavy ships.

Destroyers screen missiles.

Cruisers ????

Battleships have huge weapons that deal devastating damage over large distances.

Cruisers need a role to feel relevant.

I think they should be specialised/replaced into support ships.

The carrier ship

The repair ship

The troop transport ship

Cruisers are already the biggest missile ship.

I suggested earlier that all X weapons be turned into Missiles. Such long range firepower should come with a disadvantage, and using a slower-than-light projectile weapon at those ranges is frankly completely unrealistic.

Now that the biggest most cost-effective firepower in the game is locked into fragile missile hulls, which makes a niche for cruisers as missile cruisers to overwhelm the PD so those X-missiles score more hits. Now you at least have Cruiser + Battleship fleets, but who knows how the meta develops once these two are paired.


Note: I think the above suggestion suffices, you are always looking for the smallest amount of changes to fix your problem...
But if you want to further push cruisers as missile ships, you could add an Auxiliary component that buffs missiles. A cruiser would be able to stack those buffs because it has 2 aux slots (2x +25% range and missile evasion for example), so now cruiser missiles come at 3 G slots at 150% range and +50% evasion, making them decidedly better than 4x corvette with 1 G slot and 125% range and +25% evasion.

 

[Dmitrius]

Cruisers are already the biggest missile ship.

I suggested earlier that all X weapons be turned into Missiles. Such long range firepower should come with a disadvantage, and using a slower-than-light projectile weapon at those ranges is frankly completely unrealistic.

Now that the biggest most cost-effective firepower in the game is locked into fragile missile hulls, which makes a niche for cruisers as missile cruisers to overwhelm the PD so those X-missiles score more hits. Now you at least have Cruiser + Battleship fleets, but who knows how the meta develops once these two are paired.


Note: I think the above suggestion suffices, you are always looking for the smallest amount of changes to fix your problem...
But if you want to further push cruisers as missile ships, you could add an Auxiliary component that buffs missiles. A cruiser would be able to stack those buffs because it has 2 aux slots (2x +25% range and missile evasion for example), so now cruiser missiles come at 3 G slots at 150% range and +50% evasion, making them decidedly better than 4x corvette with 1 G slot and 125% range and +25% evasion.

Regarding ranges.. you know that it's abstracted right? Otherwise the turning circle of tiny fighter jets would have to be tens if not hundreds of thousands of miles.

Secondly I have no issues with cruisers being missile ships, but missiles are really easy to deal with over range which is why corvettes are usually a more efficient option.

Thirdly, stay the hell away from my tacheon beams!!! All xl weapons should be missiles indeed !!?!

 

[Valkj]

Regarding ranges.. you know that it's abstracted right?

Well yes/no, I didn't do any math because it doesn't matter. Nowadays you do not have to be a nerd to know about speed-of-light delay - everyone knows about probes with guidance systems and thrusters landing on comets - and then I am supposed to believe a mega cannon near the sun can hit a corvette orbiting Jupiter. In fact, what kind of advanced society would settle on "Mega Cannon" as a name?!

Thirdly, stay the hell away from my tacheon beams!!! All xl weapons should be missiles indeed !!?!

You can have tachyon beam missiles. They unleash their tachyon beam at point blank range! (but they overpenetrate the target so it still looks cool)

 

[Cordane]

There have been a few proposals to add supply consumption to the game. One clear way of differentiating cruisers (which I suggested in my supply-adding post a while back) would be to give them the highest rate of supply storage / supply usage, allowing them to be the ideal long-mission ships. Battleships would beat them in the most common combat matchups, but battleships would also be limited to strikes that were either short in distance (to avoid outrunning your logistics) or in time (because they could only live off bunkered supplies for a while).

Also, just to be clear: most of the time, with actual blue-water ships, bigger means faster, not slower. Yes, they are less maneuverable, but they have similar or superior top speed. Partially this is because the increase in engine power more than makes up for it (nuclear-powered ships can be absurdly fast, but nuclear reactors are rarely worth putting in any but your biggest ships), but it's also partially just physics (see speed-length ratio for details, but the short version is that for displacement hulls - which any heavy warship will be - longer means higher max speeds). In practice, capital ships usually don't want to leave their escorts behind, and some lighter ships' hulls are designed specifically for speed (at the expense of factors such as weight of armor or weapons, damage survivability, and/or unsupported range), but the whole "bigger means slower" thing is a myth for most warships. It's honestly weird that it's so common; bigger ships have been faster (though less agile) clear back to the age of sail (given sufficient wind, at least; sufficiently-small boats can move on a breeze that will barely provide any drive at all to a large ship... but wind speed usually increases with altitude, and bigger ships can mount taller masts and more sail area aloft).

The only surface vessels that masively outperform this "bigger = faster" rule are those with hulls designed to operate mostly out of the water (planing hulls, hydrofoils, etc.). You can put effective weapons on those, but generally only as a single-shot glass cannon. The original "destroyers" were "torpedo-boat destroyers", designed with lots of light, fast-tracking weapons suitable for destroying "torpedo boats" that were essentially fast, agile, short-range, and cheap hulls with a single heavy torpedo each. They only got one shot, but their speed-optimized hulls could (ideally) get close enough to have a good chance of hitting and that one torpedo could cripple or outright kill even a cruiser or battleship given a lucky hit.

In Stellaris, missile corvettes are supposed to stand in for torpedo boats - though of course they are far from a perfect equivalent - and destroyers are supposed to be their counter.

None of what you offered about oceangoing vessels has any bearing on proportional spaceships:

The speed-length ratio has to do with the resonance of wave action along the length of a moving ship – ships that are considerably larger than the wave action have little negative effect from the wave movement. A spaceship has effectively no resistance from any portion of space that it would pass through, and certainly none that would operate in a cyclical way that would influence one size or shape of ship differently from another.

One ship that has a larger proportion of its mass and/or volume allocated to motive elements (e.g., sails, drives) compared to another will almost certainly be faster than the second. That’s not counting any technological (dis)advantage it may also have. Also note that part of the motive elements of a ship includes the frame, which is still one of the biggest concerns for a spaceship. If ships stay proportional in all of their elements as they increase in size, the cross sections of their structural elements won’t increase as fast as their mass (Square Cube Law), and they won’t be able to handle the same accelerations in either straightforward movement or in maneuvering. If a larger ship wants to have as good or better performance as a smaller ship (at the same tech level), they will have to utilize proportionally more of the ship’s volume and mass toward structure and drives, at the expense of other capabilities (like weapons and defenses). For the structural elements, only if they’re somehow such a small percentage of the overall volume and mass that they can be increased considerably without impacting overall numbers, then you might be able to justify maintaining or even increasing performance without losing capability.

A big consideration when looking at torpedo boats (TB) versus torpedo gunboats or TB destroyers is the relative sizes of the craft, with TBs typically being about half the length of gunboats or destroyers and one-eighth of their displacement. Depending on your thoughts on relative sizes of ships in Stellaris, you might see (as I do) that Corvettes are half the size (volume/mass/”displacement”) of Destroyers, making them only about 79% as long, wide, and tall - much bigger than their TB ancestors. TBs may have only carried one torpedo tube, but typically had multiple reloads. And again TBs were slower than gunboats/destroyers (in theory and in operation) mostly based on their modest cost and poor resonance with wave action, not intrinsically their size.

 

[Zenopath]

The real issue is that the game has no tactical component.

There has always been a use for different ship sizes depending on the situation you want them for, but other than corvettes being given an arbitrary ability to hunt pirates and evasion tank, every size upgrade is an improvement over the last size and invalidates the previous size. Again other than destroyers which fail to be better than corvettes, cruisers are flat out better than destroyers and battleships are better than cruisers.

This is pretty much the situation of naval combat before the invention of the aircraft carrier. Battleships were engaged in a game of escalation, trying to get ever bigger and bigger, with each generation of battleship making previous generations obsolete. The HMS Dreadnought could handle pretty much any number of smaller ships way outside of the effective range of the smaller ships, and move fast enough to keep out of range long enough to pound them into oblivion. This is why the idea of a dreadnought became so en-grained in our culture, there was nothing cruisers could do against a battleship, so they ruled the sea.

Really the question is, is it worth building cruisers that will be obsolete before once I get battleships? Well I mean, you do need a early to midgame force that isnt corvettes... or do you?

In my games I dont bother to build cruisers percisely because you can make it pretty far in the game with only corvettes. To negate this, and give cruisers a bigger role, heres my suggestion:

1) Give cruisers ability to reduce by 25% all incoming small turret attacks damage, making it very hard to take down cruisers with only corvettes. This would be a damage reduction based on general tankiness of thicker armor. Then battleships would need to reduce 40% of small turret damage to make them even more dominant, BUT...

2) Make battleships harder to research, by locking them behind a few prequesites, so that you are forced to play with cruisers for a longer period of time, because rushing to battleship tech early game isnt so easy. Lets say you need to first get teir 2 starbases to unlock cruisers, then teir 3 starbases to unlock battleships, this would be sort of logical since starbases are basically same thing as a starship, minus the engines, and you shouldnt be able to build a huge starship of a given size without also being able to build a huge station of same size. You could also require tier 2 (for cruisers) and 3 (for battleships) engine tech to be able to move the ships, etc.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Cruisers are already the biggest missile ship.

Sadly they're also the worst missile ship because they can only have 3G per 4 fleet cap and corvettes can have 1:1. Because G slot weapons ignore shields but other weapons on the same ship don't barring disruptors (which are low DPS), if you're going to use G slots you want to go all in on them. If you want cruisers to be missile ships they need that G stern they don't have.

I suggested earlier that all X weapons be turned into Missiles. Such long range firepower should come with a disadvantage, and using a slower-than-light projectile weapon at those ranges is frankly completely unrealistic.

I think everyone just ignored that because it was silly.

Now that the biggest most cost-effective firepower in the game is locked into fragile missile hulls, which makes a niche for cruisers as missile cruisers to overwhelm the PD so those X-missiles score more hits. Now you at least have Cruiser + Battleship fleets, but who knows how the meta develops once these two are paired.

No, if X slot firepower can be effectively stopped people just stop using X slots and pack a couple of kinetic artillery instead to drop shields for their Neutron Launchers, which are now the most functional big gun.

 

[ubuntufreakdragon]

what about collateral damage, if a weapon misses it can target another ship (both friend and foe) within remaining range and try to it it instead (tracking reduces the chance for this), the new target can than again try to evade the shot.
So once bbs are swarmed by corvettes they will likely kill their neighbour when firing, needing some backup by other shiptypes to stop these corvettes.

 

[Methone]

what about collateral damage, if a weapon misses it can target another ship (both friend and foe) within remaining range and try to it it instead

Missiles do this already, no? Except they only target foes, because presumably they have IFF. And other weapons don't do this because other weapons are basically either flashlights or thrown rocks. Unless I'm misunderstanding you.

 

[Von Consul]

the whole "bigger means slower" thing is a myth for most warships. It's honestly weird that it's so common; bigger ships have been faster

Really neat information, I didn't know all that about the length and speed calculations. Thanks for sharing it.

I think the myth has to do with the battlecruiser from the turn of the century. This is what I was thinking of in my post. The Wikipedia article covers the main idea:

The goal of the design was to outrun any ship with similar armament, and chase down any ship with lesser armament; they were intended to hunt down slower, older armoured cruisers and destroy them with heavy gunfire while avoiding combat with the more powerful but slower battleships.

From there you get the idea of a search and destroy long range boat.

But yes, the lack of logistics and strategic issues render the Naval classes moot. Every ship has the ability to traveling entire length of the galaxy, so why build a big one over small? Bigger guns? But at what point are bigger guns useful?

The ships basically exist for their own sake they don't solve a problem.

 

[mrt1212]

Really neat information, I didn't know all that about the length and speed calculations. Thanks for sharing it.

I think the myth has to do with the battlecruiser from the turn of the century. This is what I was thinking of in my post. The Wikipedia article covers the main idea:



From there you get the idea of a search and destroy long range boat.

But yes, the lack of logistics and strategic issues render the Naval classes moot. Every ship has the ability to traveling entire length of the galaxy, so why build a big one over small? Bigger guns? But at what point are bigger guns useful?

The ships basically exist for their own sake they don't solve a problem.

I love this fwiw.

I mean when I think about why I need ships, the reasons are to dissuade enemies and take ovsr enemies. But the exact designs and classes dont matter that much as long as my A> their B.

I love bespoke ships but I know thats for fluff but yeah...ship classes etc are are kind of a gussied up artifice to achieve two and a half means.

 

[ubuntufreakdragon]

Missiles do this already, no? Except they only target foes, because presumably they have IFF. And other weapons don't do this because other weapons are basically either flashlights or thrown rocks. Unless I'm misunderstanding you.

A BS fires a giga canon at a covette 10 units away and misses, 10 units behind that corvette is another allied BS one might argue the Gigacannon shot would hit this BS instead if it can't evade, too.

 

[Dragatus]

Missiles do this already, no?

From what I've been told missiles do not in fact do that. They only retarget if their intended target is destroyed before they can reach it. But if they miss they are lost.

 

[Gordreg]

I honestly don't think that cruisers need anything changed in their weaponry abilities. What they need is a comprehensive boost to their Galactic speed, and perhaps an increase to their anti-pirate potential. Make them more effective at patrolling and peacekeeping and defending the trade lands. Great ships to have in times of peace and to keep fast-moving patrols going, but of course in times of war they'd be outgunned by dedicated Battleships built for combat and combat alone.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

I suggest:
A. Strategic Use for Cruisers - Cheap, fast and flexible
Cruisers gain -25% upkeep.
Cruisers can match or exceed corvette speeds
Cruisers gain increased evasion.
Cruisers have more section variety (more G and hanger options)

It would give them a strategic use (cheap standing army allows fielding far more of them especially for pacifists who can keep ships docked, fast reaction fleet to chase raiders, good deterrent thanks to high health and disengage enabling multiple fights, can refit to counter threats with more sections and utilities) vs a tactical use (still inferior to other ship classes of equal cost due to the lack of X and L slots and weakness of hangers). I think the upkeep alone would be enough, extra speed would be nice though to better mix them with corvettes - especially as you could wait to build the corvettes until the war begins to supplement the fleet.

OR
B. Tactical Use for Cruisers - Hit and Run, Chip damage specialist
Increase HP/Armour/Shields on all ships so that ships have a higher chance to disengage against L sized weapons that currently can negate disengagement chances almost completely (or increase fire rate for L slot weapons but decrease damage, keeping the same DPS)
Keep X weapons alpha strike being enough to one-shot most ships as that's fun.
Bonus to MIA times for cruisers - get back into action slightly faster than other ships after a lost battle.

The effect would be that the cruisers higher disengage chance + health has a chance to shine. They'd retreat from battles, you'd still lose with them but could do more chip-damage to enemy fleets defensively. Could be annoying if taken too far as you struggle to kill ships, just make sure the disengage chance is capped and can't/is unlikely to work on 100% of ships per battle.

OR
C. Jack of all trades. Master of Utilities.
Give them 1 copy of each utility unlocked

(The same feature could be used for stations and platforms - it would also fix the bug with autodesigns removing the useful utilities for completely useless ones on stations too).
Make them better (and very slightly more expensive) all-round ships. They'd have more passive regen, higher speed, better shields, more energy to either give them a tiny bit of damage or more shield/armour flexibility etc. I don't think any utility is dramatic enough to make them overpowered, adding one extra utility wasn't enough to make them good and I doubt this would make them overpowered either (worth trying at least). But something to try that leans into the bonus they already have. Also they'd grow in power the more utilities you unlock, currently many utilities feel like dead techs to me because they don't fit my plans and I can never afford to fit them into any ship designs. I like killing 2, or 3 birds with one (small) stone if possible. Giving them more utility slots that can fit anything could be overpowered as you could stack enigmatic stuff, but having 1 max of each utility is much less dramatic and more "jack of all trades" which I like.

 

[GloatingSwine]

A BS fires a giga canon at a covette 10 units away and misses, 10 units behind that corvette is another allied BS one might argue the Gigacannon shot would hit this BS instead if it can't evade, too.

That would require fundamentally changing the way every single weapon works, in a way that would massively impact performance.

See, projectiles other than missiles don't actually exist. Everything is hitscan, it rolls to hit and if it hits it draws a graphic that hits, if it misses it draws a graphic that misses. There is no projectile being modelled passing through space, just a graphic demonstrating the effects of a dice roll.

Having to calculate every projectile as an object (bearing in mind a late game gun corvette megaswarm could be spawning 3000+ projectiles every 3.5 days) would increase the performance load of combat exponentially.

So no, this is a non-starter.

Even a non-simulated version where it just rolls to see if a nearby target is hit increases calculation by an order of magnitude because every weapon instead of every ship now has to check if there are any valid targets to reroll and then check to see if it hits them.