How do we make Destroyers and Cruisers more desirable in the late game?

[Amorenkaire]

Thoughts?

My grudge with the stereotype of 'big ship = slow' despite space having now medium creating friction, and thus the only thing relating to speed should be thrust vs. weight (with bigger engines being generally more efficient than smaller engines) aside...

I feel like speed should be adjusted and trade protection values tweaked too. I know its minor since trade protecting with ships is a niche aspect, but it always bugged me that corvettes were the most efficient ship for the job, as opposed to destroyers and cruisers (which typically performed that role). I also feel like cruisers with dual afterburners should be the fastest ship in the game (followed by corvettes with afterburner), and perhaps the Afterburner auxilery boosting trade protection as well to allow a natural 'light cruiser' design?

A more complicated system would be too adopt a sort of Man the Guns fleet mission system from HoI4. Allowing cruisers to function as first response, and Battleships to be set on fleet in being to reinforce those quicker ships that are there to tie up the enemy. But this flounders with Stellaris' current mechanics and would be an immense overhaul just for some flavor.

Simple solution?

Push corvette towards missile boat (it already does that well), push destroyer towards picket (it already does that well enough, there's just more efficient, e.g. carrier, options), push cruiser towards 'tank' (think 1.8 meta, cruisers being the front line ships that take the beating and limp away), push battleships towards the big guns or carriers in the back.

Could probably have it done by battleships having less armor/shield slots for their size, or tweak tracking and dodging effectiveness. Carriers would have to stop being some of the best pd ships against missiles/torpedoes to give destroyers that role.

 

[ZeeHero]

its not that big ship is slow. it's big ship has big mass, and thus is harder to move efficiently. unless you handwave with "inertial dampers" but I'd rather not becuase then its even harder to justify big ships having a hard time hitting small ones for balance reasons.

 

[Carl_Bar]

The thing is assuming similar engine designs a bigger ship will be slower. Energy density limitations withing the combustion chamber, (or equivalent), and nozzle, (which are typically though not exclusively thermal in nature), put a hard cap on how much thrust you can get out of a given cross section of nozzle area for a given engine design. And in general for a given mass a smaller craft will have a greater thrust nozzle to cross section ratio. You can work around that with broader shorter designs, but those quickly run into other compromises.

Amusing AFAIK the most raw energy efficient and cross sections dense propulsion system is a mass driver, but they have a pretty hard upper limit with current knowledge on absolute thrust levels and propellant density. Hence why fusion, ion, and derivatives are looked at as the top propulsion systems these days. There's also IRL safety concerns with them ATM.

 

[ZeeHero]

it will accelerate slower, in space the top speed isnt much different.

 

[Carl_Bar]

it will accelerate slower, in space the top speed isnt much different.

Assuming you want to be able to manoeuvre relative to the enemy fleet and the rest of your fleet for in combat at least there's a practical upper limit set by your thrust to weight ratio. Too fast and you'll overshoot your enemy in one brief firing pass, or otherwise be unable to manoeuvre as you wish because you can't slow down fast enough. How much time you can afford to have to take to significantly change your vector is going to depend on weapon ranges ofc.

 

[fourteenfour]

An L-slot weapon is going to have a fairly difficult turret to maneuver and more distant targets on average (both for sensors and flight time) than an M- or S-slot. A beefy computer is going to help that L-slot proportionately well, but not as much in absolute numbers as for those smaller slots. An L-slot weapon might still have respectable Tracking at relatively close ranges (as sensor lag and flight times will be quite small), but will see a sharp drop once ranges get short enough to see turret turn speed become a much bigger factor.

X-slots only having a base Tracking of 0% is nowhere near low enough, but all of the calculations for Tracking and Evasion in the game are based on a 0-100 scale, and wouldn't readily adapt to a wider scale. I think it would be helpful though, as a single continuum that also incorporated GW and SC at proper values would be, too.

Whether there should be Tracking improvements based on improvements in turret technology, rather than just sensors or computers, is another issue.

Tracking is just so oddly used in this game.

However your conception is just wrong. The further away the target is the less movement of a turret is required. This is why I proposed previously that if we want to minimize the impact larger weapons have we need to assign them a minimum range. This minimum range can be mitigated with technology which allows for improved responsiveness of turreted weapons; why high technology turrets would have turning issues is beyond me.

 

[Cordane]

it will accelerate slower, in space the top speed isnt much different.

I wrote about this a while back, basically that top speeds are determined in large part on the ability of ships to regularly shrug off damage from micro-asteroids and such (even when those aren't moving on their own), impacting the ship while it is travelling at more than 1% of the speed of light. A civilian ship is going to have to either get at least very low grade shields or armor, or keep its speed below a threshold its hull alone can comfortably withstand. Military vessels are way more resilient, but the impact force is equal to the mass of impactor times the square of the effective impact velocity, so they can't go too much faster (never mind the longer times to get to the higher speed and decelerate back down for docking, etc.).

 

[kviiri]

Overall I wish Stellaris had taken a few pages from the good ol' Master of Orion's playbook. MoO was a hugely influential early space 4X (in fact, I seem to recall 4X as having been coined for MoO?) and had a ship designer system plus a simple tactical combat minigame.

The rough gist:

• ship size influences available space plus an intrinsic dodging bonus for smaller ships
• each component (weapon, armor, engine, etc) requires both space and power (with power being automatically accounted for by dedicating a larger amount of space for the ship's power plant)
• ships can have up to three different weapons, up to 99 of each
• equipment below your best tech level gets miniaturized, rendering old weapons and such still useable for cheaper and taking up less space
• armor decides the ship's HP, shields are a per-hit flat damage reduction
• each hit can destroy at most one ship (barring special anti-stack weapons)

The miniaturization aspect is particularly interesting, since it creates a kind-of emergent RPS mechanic. One can fit more low-damage weapons on the hull than one can fit high-damage weapons, so they tend to shine in number of hits --- necessary for taking out low-tech fighter doomstacks. However, shields reduce the damage linearly with the amount of hits suffered, rendering shielded ships very resilient against low-tech weaponry. But shields tend to lose against bigger guns, whose damage output doesn't falter much with small flat reductions, and with the shields consuming power and space, shielded ships seldom have an arsenal capable of gunning it out with unshielded ships of a similar size.

The overall RPS is something like Small ship doomstack < High shields, massed weaponry < Big ships focusing on single-hit firepower < Small ship doomstack though of course there are a few more nuances apart from that. (Plus we're talking about a 1995 game, it's not as neatly balanced as I'd have you believe)

 

[Cordane]

Tracking is just so oddly used in this game.

However your conception is just wrong. The further away the target is the less movement of a turret is required. This is why I proposed previously that if we want to minimize the impact larger weapons have we need to assign them a minimum range. This minimum range can be mitigated with technology which allows for improved responsiveness of turreted weapons; why high technology turrets would have turning issues is beyond me.

Yes, angular velocity of the turret is smaller when the target is further out, but at that point the biggest concerns are sensor lag and flight time. At the ranges where sensor lag and flight time aren't as concerning, turret movement is a bigger deal for L-slots than smaller weapons. And honestly, no target is going to be able to travel at speed at ranges where angular velocity is a big concern for very long, as no warship (maybe an SC) can do a turning acceleration hard enough to stay there.

 

[firenze419]

Why don't you just have small slots available only on corvettes and destroyers and medium slots on cruisers? Wouldn't that fix the problem?

 

[Carl_Bar]

Why don't you just have small slots available only on corvettes and destroyers and medium slots on cruisers? Wouldn't that fix the problem?

Nope, by the time you unlock battleships you only need L and XL slots to be effective. it's the complete inability of the other 3 ship types to carry L mounts efficiently that largely relegates them to uselessness.

 

[firenze419]

Nope, by the time you unlock battleships you only need L and XL slots to be effective. it's the complete inability of the other 3 ship types to carry L mounts efficiently that largely relegates them to uselessness.

Can l and xl hit smaller ships? If so, maybe we could increase evasion or reduce tracking on them so they can't

 

[Carl_Bar]

Tracking is just so oddly used in this game.

However your conception is just wrong. The further away the target is the less movement of a turret is required. This is why I proposed previously that if we want to minimize the impact larger weapons have we need to assign them a minimum range. This minimum range can be mitigated with technology which allows for improved responsiveness of turreted weapons; why high technology turrets would have turning issues is beyond me.

Yes and no. Aiming at a target a long way away, (and in this case honestly even a decent chemical propellant kinetic weapon would be far enough), is less about raw movement than it is about pointing accuracy. In effect the minimum rotational and elevation movement need to be sufficiently small that at maximum effective range the difference in aim points of one minimum move is less than the cross section of your target. That can end up in millionths of a degree at even a few tens of km vs smallish targets. This of course assumes the weapon itself has no innate inaccuracy, if it does that further complicates things as your pointing accuracy might have to be higher to keep the pattern of rounds in the target area, (this is why IRL CIWS systems often use very high RoF guns, it takes a 100 or more rounds to get even one to hit a missile nose on at a few km). Though if the inaccuracy is greater than half the targets cross-section no amount of pointing accuracy can compensate.

At the same time if the targets capable of moving crosswise at hundreds of times it's own cross section you need a system that can not only point accurately but swing through the neccessery number of steps fast enough. For the same drive input precision faster slew rates requires greater drive input RPM's.

The more likely issue is RoF differences. one of the best ways to compensate for a small evasive target is to follow the CIWS example and spray a large number of shots in a very short time frame at and around the targets estimated position, so long as the gap between any two rounds is smaller than the targets real cross section the pattern effectively expands the targets effective cross section as the real cross section only has to be somwhere in the area encompassed by the pattern.

As an aside as i outlined with the formulae earlier, anything above a few seconds of flight time out is effectively impossible to hit. But given we have kinetics, laser,s and missles co-existing if realism was in play then flight time would be virtually zero for lasers. For kinetics your maximum effective range is a few hundred km tops. Which just reinforces my earlier point.

Stellaris is not realistic and it's not trying to be.

 

[Carl_Bar]

Can l and xl hit smaller ships? If so, maybe we could increase evasion or reduce tracking on them so they can't

The normal endgame L mounts and all XL mounts allready have 0 tracking and corvettes at least are already way high on evasion, (by endgame they're at the 90% cap normally), and they barely hold their own. The issue is there are sources of tracking that aren't part of the weapon that aren't adequately compensated for by anything else on the evasion side.

 

[Tobasco da Gama]

Assuming you want to be able to manoeuvre relative to the enemy fleet and the rest of your fleet for in combat at least there's a practical upper limit set by your thrust to weight ratio.

That's what Evasion is modeling, not Speed.

 

[Carl_Bar]

That's what Evasion is modeling, not Speed.

And? I'm really not sure how this relates to what we where discussing.

 

[Maethendias]

give destroyers and cruisers abilities to soak damage for the fleet, or provide fleet support, or supress enemies

give us modules that would enhance the ability to screen for your mainline ships, like i dont know, not just point defence against missiles and strike, but pd for lasers and kinetics too which can only be fitted in destroyers or cruisers. For example point defence lasers disarming kinetics, or mirror drones redirecting energy weapons

 

[fourteenfour]

Overall I wish Stellaris had taken a few pages from the good ol' Master of Orion's playbook. MoO was a hugely influential early space 4X (in fact, I seem to recall 4X as having been coined for MoO?) and had a ship designer system plus a simple tactical combat minigame.

Another consideration with Master of Orion combat was beam weapons had dissipation at range. However at closer range these same weapons actually hit harder. Heavy/Large beam weapons suffered less from dissipation at any range.

Yes and no. Aiming at a target a long way away, (and in this case honestly even a decent chemical propellant kinetic weapon would be far enough), is less about raw movement than it is about pointing accuracy. In effect the minimum rotational and elevation movement need to be sufficiently small that at maximum effective range the difference in aim points of one minimum move is less than the cross section of your target. That can end up in millionths of a degree at even a few tens of km vs smallish targets. This of course assumes the weapon itself has no innate inaccuracy,

At the ranges we are contemplating its a meaningless to consider the size of the ship performing the actions; well a Juggernaut might be an exception. However the amount of deflection from your course is going be limited when you are actively trying to close the distance so that your own weapons are in range.

Finally, a Corvette will never ever ever be small enough to warrant its evasion as presented in this game. All we have to do is look at strike craft and missiles and the interaction with point defense weapons. If we can take down missiles and strike craft there is nothing a corvette is going to be able to do to evade an attack. It is magnitudes larger and less maneuverable than any missile or strike craft. At the ranges where Corvette weapons are at the travel time for nearly any attack is near instantaneous and your only defense is not being the easiest target.




The original point of the discussion was how to make destroyers and cruisers more desirable across the game. There are only a few methods, some are below

• Limiting roles each class can assume
• Expense of larger ships and where we can build and repair them
• Limiting the minimum range of larger weapons

 

[DaRealJaymc1130]

I had a thought the other night that relates to this topic.

What if each different ship type had variable logistic upkeeps beyond just "park in orbit to reduce upkeep"?

Battleships are the largest ship class, they require the largest crews, expend the most ammunition (at least IRL), and need the largest ports to facilitate onloading and offloading of various materials and supplies.

Corvettes are the smallest ship class, and so would require the lower bound of all these aspects rather than the highest bound.

What if, in order to simulate real life logistical concerns, ships out on a voyage gained increasing logistical upkeep operation costs based on duration of voyage and the distance from home ports? This way sending out a large fleet of ships a long distance has a more dramatic impact on an empire's economy. Sending out large vessels ramps up that logistics cost at a very high rate, while sending out smaller vessels ramps it up at a lower rate.

With these kinds of conditions there are meaningful choices to make for all ship classes because the economic impact enforces making those choices. Do I NEED a full battleship fleet to fight that war half way across the galaxy and tank my economy to do so? Or can I get by with a cruiser fleet that costs less to deploy and will travel faster on the way out and the way back in reducing the effect and duration of the economic impact.

Ships could also have actual ammunition totals for non energy weapons (meaning the balance of the numbers would have to change some). This ammunition could be replenished by salvaging battle debris or docking at a friendly port, but otherwise would make energy weapons more preferential for long duration conflicts or conflicts very far from home while ammo weapons offer more bang for the buck but come with a limit on how much bang is generated before a ship can bang no more and loses combat effectiveness.

 

[Cordane]

Finally, a Corvette will never ever ever be small enough to warrant its evasion as presented in this game. All we have to do is look at strike craft and missiles and the interaction with point defense weapons. If we can take down missiles and strike craft there is nothing a corvette is going to be able to do to evade an attack. It is magnitudes larger and less maneuverable than any missile or strike craft. At the ranges where Corvette weapons are at the travel time for nearly any attack is near instantaneous and your only defense is not being the easiest target.

That depends largely on your definition of the ranges (or more: times) involved - at a typical range of 10,000 km, sensor lag will be negligible and lightspeed weapons will of course be near instantaneous, but a kinetic weapon will still need over 3 seconds of flight time if its slug is "only" travelling at 1% of the speed of light. Bump that out to 100,000 km, sensor lag is still paltry and lightspeed weapons are very quick, but that kinetic is now almost 34 seconds barrel to BOOM.

In order to evade an attack, it's imperative that the target (most likely proactively, by "drunk walking") deviate from its expected trajectory enough that no part of it is in the path of the attack. If a Corvette is able to use lateral thrusters to make a 0.2G thrust (approx. 2 m/s^2), it can achieve over 13 meters of displacement in 3.67 seconds (sensor lag plus flight time) and 1.3 km of displacement in 36.67. Now depending on how wide that Corvette is, it might be able to turn a dead-center hit into a graze or a graze into a miss (or just laugh at how badly the kinetic missed at 100K km).

The problem that GW and SC have when trying to Evade is again range and time, as those values are both far smaller. Now I don't agree that GW and SC should be so easy to shoot down - their abilities to laterally thrust are going to be way higher than a Corvette and they'll certainly be narrower. But they will also be facing weapons small enough and specialized enough to have an easier time staying aimed on any target. (I'm also in favor of limiting or removing fleet-defense PD/Flak and focusing on ship-based defenses, which make much more sense relative to what I just covered.)

I think the biggest issue is that the Evasion and Tracking system is using entirely the wrong scale for measuring their effectiveness. For one, Corvettes should not be at the top of that food chain, it should be GW followed closely by SC and then several notches down would be Corvettes. But it also needs to go low enough to properly account for the truly big ships. If Juggernauts and Colossi are absolutely massive, then maybe the 1.3 km of displacement above might not be 100% sufficient. (I probably wouldn't gimp kinetics THAT hard, but ranges might also be getting into millions of kilometers (1M km is ~3.33 light-seconds) and that could lead to some laughable but logical results.