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

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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.

As Cordone mentioned depends entirely on range, the ability of PD to reliably hit SC and Missiles is just a completely arbitrary game mechanic, it has no basis in reality. Again, Stellaris is not realistic and it's not trying to be.

If we where being realistic kinetics would be pure PD, and lasers would be either the main weapon or PD depending on what type of missle propulsion we where talking about.
 
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The issue with destroyers and cruisers is that their traditional water-navy roles either don't make sense in Stellaris strategy or end up competing with another ship class.

A destroyer is a "torpedo boat destroyer" - its job is to intercept torpedo boats before they can destroy your big expensive battleship (and also to hunt other threats to the battleship, like planes and subs). True to their role, destroyers in Stellaris can pack lots of point defense slots and small weapons for killing corvettes. The problem is that strike craft also serve as PD and they can fit on a battleship (and all else being equal, the bigger hull is better). So the solution here should probably be to nerf strike craft - maybe make them more vulnerable to PD, or reduce their effectiveness against missiles?

Cruisers, meanwhile, are generally either raiders or support ships - something with enough firepower to bully weaker ships and enough speed to run away from anything that can hurt it. But Stellaris has no real concept of raids because of the doomstack problem, and corvettes are faster anyway, which leaves cruisers stuck as a low-budget knockoff of a battleship. And we don't want to simply make them better at being battleships, because battleships already exist and we don't want to take away from them. We need a new niche for them.

One option would be to buff their specialist loadouts to make "missile cruisers" or "light carriers" part of the meta, since cruisers are pretty unique in being able to carry missile and carrier loadouts. But missiles might take away from the role of corvettes, and it seems sort of weird for the smaller ships to be better at carrying fighters than the larger ones. Still, it's a viable option and would give cruisers a distinct identity.

There's also the option of fiddling with the costs instead of their combat stats. If cruisers are noticeably cheaper for their command points than battleships, then you'll end up putting cruisers into your fleet for the simple reason that you can't afford a fleet of nothing but battleships.
 
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The issue with destroyers and cruisers is that their traditional water-navy roles either don't make sense in Stellaris strategy or end up competing with another ship class.

A destroyer is a "torpedo boat destroyer" - its job is to intercept torpedo boats before they can destroy your big expensive battleship (and also to hunt other threats to the battleship, like planes and subs). True to their role, destroyers in Stellaris can pack lots of point defense slots and small weapons for killing corvettes. The problem is that strike craft also serve as PD and they can fit on a battleship (and all else being equal, the bigger hull is better). So the solution here should probably be to nerf strike craft - maybe make them more vulnerable to PD, or reduce their effectiveness against missiles?
Hmm... you mean the problem is the following?
There is a niche application for both Cruisers and Destroyers, though the fact that PD slots don't actually target Strike Craft for reasons no one can fathom really strains the use of these ships in a specific role. If PD weapons simply ACTUALLY target strike craft when in combat instead of just saying they do in the tool tip then these ships have a very clear and useful identity in fleet compositions.
The fundamental issue with fleet compositions will continue to boil down to this simple fact until the target priority for PD gets fixed and they actually target Strike Craft with priority instead of not targeting them at all or leaving them at the lowest target priority. If PD weapons actually function as intended then every ship class has a useful role and purpose in the game at all stages of the game (though cruisers would still get the shortest end of the stick and this is fine because they are busted OP when you first research them).
 
The fundamental issue with fleet compositions will continue to boil down to this simple fact until the target priority for PD gets fixed and they actually target Strike Craft with priority instead of not targeting them at all or leaving them at the lowest target priority. If PD weapons actually function as intended then every ship class has a useful role and purpose in the game at all stages of the game (though cruisers would still get the shortest end of the stick and this is fine because they are busted OP when you first research them).
Just to be clear, are you talking about:
  • "point-defense" (general group of weapons that fit into P-slots, includes PD and Flak) attacking strike craft
  • "Point-Defense" (specific weapon group that is designed to "destroy incoming missiles", per Wiki) attacking strike craft
  • or something else?
Now there is/was an issue where specific Point-Defense weapons will freak out and prioritize strike craft OVER guided weapons, even if the SC are not within range. That priority bug should have been fixed years ago, and I'm not for certain if there is anything similar for Flak vs. GW (I don't remember hearing such). I know PD and Flak CAN attack their opposite responsibility, but that needs to be better managed in terms of "saving themselves" for their preferred targets at the expense of not attacking for protracted periods.
 
Mechanical changes do not seem to be on the horizon and it doesn't seem that they are interested in expanding combat mechanics, juggernaut aside, little has changed for ships since 2.0. And the past track record for combat balancing hasnt been great.
  • PD v missiles/SC was unfixable by paradox in its intitial form - it's why we were given P and G slots years ago,
    • To set a soft limit on utterly ventilating enemies with 100% missile fleets OR
    • To stop missiles being rendered utterly impotent by ships with dozens of PD guns on them.
  • Stellaris' solar systems/art-style literally cannot cope with the ranges of large ship guns
    • late-game fleets literally drop out of hyperspace and are at max range on the starbase or some enemy fleets
    • At this point you have to ask why we even still have cartesian movement in systems? Either just go back to provinces, or commit to scaling up solar systems and making more "room" for battles. But I digress.
  • There remains no solid "Hull" component path or even "stealth path" (though in fairness its hard to imagine how this would work, without "in system" sensor mechanics - perhaps an evasion-maths rework could look at this, with "stealth panneling" as an alternative to shields/armor that turn your ships into evasive glass cannon).
    • One could also make the case that Armor is nowhere near as interesting as it could be, with the way it currently works.
  • My earlier post on how 1-dimensional wars are (we would need more ways to fight, more things to fight over for different ship roles to really matter).
With that (and more that I cba to rehash) in mind I really only see 2 ways to limit fleets (arbitrarily) with the game as it is now:
  1. Upkeep costs, repair times and construction times for Battleships being (painfully) higher than other ships (notably making cruisers the budget battleship)
    • No adjustments to weapon ranges/targeting maths would likely still mean the trade off will be worth it "often enough", as the one-punch potential of KA battleships cant be underestimated.
    • ... The thermonuclear option for increased battleship upkeep costs would probably be this lol:
    • 1625860202053.png
    • Attrition can further be increased by mandating that capital ships (battleships and bigger) can only repair at stations with shipyards - or do repair but do so far slower than smaller classes.
  2. Limiting construction by ship class
    • Either statically (below I take 1 + the ship's footprint (e.g. 8 for battleships) and / by FC. So it scales with fleet cap)
    • 1625861365949.png
      1625863496085.png
    • Or dynamically (which I'm still trying to present nicely in the UI) - but this is script driven and allows for things like
      • the Galactic Community to pass Tonnage resolutions that could (for example)
        • halve your base battleship capacity (18 to 9 in the above example),
        • ban them all together,
        • or put you in breach if you cant afford to field a substantive amount of them whilst being adjacent to a Purifier nation (as a random example).
      • Federal perks, defensive pacts, GC states of emergency, ethos (e.g. militarists get more BBs), new starbase buildings ("Capital ship pens") and even having certain types vassals could do similar things.
        • This country_vassal_naval_capacity_contribution_mult still exists from when vassals used to provide fleet cap for example.
Is this arbitrary? Yes.
Are the figures I've used arbitrary? Also yes.
Does this respect "realism"? God no. This is a game with genocidal horny mushroom aliens.
Would it work to make battleships more scarce whilst not nerfing them in to the floor, making some room for smaller ships (which is what would be needed without sweeping mechanical changes)? Yes.

Unfortunately there are no expanded class-v-class damage modifiers (the one exception being ship_damage_against_starbases_mult, which is useful for creating anti-starbase weapons, after inflating starbase stats by 100x lol) so when increasing the DPS of any weapon, like a bomber or torpedo, increases it against ALL targets - not just against meta ships.
  • For example, you can't create a "Widowmaker Torpedo" that obliterates Battleships with extra damage, and stick that on Destroyers,
  • As, that missile will vaporise everything not just BBs with how damage currently works
  • (you can mitigate this slightly by constraining Missile buffs to an Aux mod that can only be fitted on small ships, but that, too, is quite arbitrary).
I think a combination of 1 (increased attrition, economic pressures) and 2 (Enforced fleet caps, either fixed or floating, taking in various sources) above, combined with some expanded, selectively applied, damage modifiers (or unique abilities like a short turbo boost on destroyers) might be enough to make smaller ships viable in to the late game - without some grand overhaul of mechanics.
However only 2 of those 3 things are possible right now.
 
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Galactic Community to pass Tonnage resolutions that could (for example)
It would actually be kind of neat if there was a space Washington Naval Treaty resolution. The most militarily-powerful council member forms the cap at however many battleships and titans they have. The rest of the council gets 3/5 the allowance each and all other galactic community members get 1/5. Any councilor without a titan is permitted to build one, everyone else is not allowed to build one if they don't already have one but may keep theirs if they already possess one. Anyone over their allowance is in breach of galactic law. Federation fleets are counted as part of each of their members' fleets in accordance with their contribution to the federation fleet.

The custodian/galactic emperor is, of course, exempt from the naval treaty.

Also this would obviously be opposed by militarist empires, especially those with the Honorbound Warriors personality or otherwise expansionist personality types, and endorsed by pacifists and isolationist xenophobes
 
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Make larger weapons have worse tracking and make them bad agaisnt small ships. Meaning you need either line battleships with small weapons or destroyer/cruiser escorts. Also NERF STRIKE CRAFT PLS
 
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The issue with destroyers and cruisers is that their traditional water-navy roles either don't make sense in Stellaris strategy or end up competing with another ship class.

A destroyer is a "torpedo boat destroyer" - its job is to intercept torpedo boats before they can destroy your big expensive battleship (and also to hunt other threats to the battleship, like planes and subs). True to their role, destroyers in Stellaris can pack lots of point defense slots and small weapons for killing corvettes. The problem is that strike craft also serve as PD and they can fit on a battleship (and all else being equal, the bigger hull is better). So the solution here should probably be to nerf strike craft - maybe make them more vulnerable to PD, or reduce their effectiveness against missiles?

Cruisers, meanwhile, are generally either raiders or support ships - something with enough firepower to bully weaker ships and enough speed to run away from anything that can hurt it. But Stellaris has no real concept of raids because of the doomstack problem, and corvettes are faster anyway, which leaves cruisers stuck as a low-budget knockoff of a battleship. And we don't want to simply make them better at being battleships, because battleships already exist and we don't want to take away from them. We need a new niche for them.

One option would be to buff their specialist loadouts to make "missile cruisers" or "light carriers" part of the meta, since cruisers are pretty unique in being able to carry missile and carrier loadouts. But missiles might take away from the role of corvettes, and it seems sort of weird for the smaller ships to be better at carrying fighters than the larger ones. Still, it's a viable option and would give cruisers a distinct identity.

There's also the option of fiddling with the costs instead of their combat stats. If cruisers are noticeably cheaper for their command points than battleships, then you'll end up putting cruisers into your fleet for the simple reason that you can't afford a fleet of nothing but battleships.

Actually they have clearly defined roles, your somewhat overstating the SC issue. But it's kinda besides the point for cruisers. their problem is L and XL beat DD late game so the cruisers clearly defined role of carrying lots of M mounts is meaningless.

Make larger weapons have worse tracking and make them bad agaisnt small ships. Meaning you need either line battleships with small weapons or destroyer/cruiser escorts. Also NERF STRIKE CRAFT PLS

Larger weapons allready have the lowest tracking possibble, (zero, none, ndda, nothing), their tracking values aren;t the source of the issue.
 
  • PD v missiles/SC was unfixable by paradox in its intitial form - it's why we were given P and G slots years ago,
    • To set a soft limit on utterly ventilating enemies with 100% missile fleets OR
    • To stop missiles being rendered utterly impotent by ships with dozens of PD guns on them.
At the time, I tested this. If I recall my tests correctly, missiles never were rendered impotent by ships with PD guns on them - ships with PD guns had their firepower reduced proportionally to however many PD guns they were equipped with. Because of the overpriced component problem, the PD components cost too much for the benefit and drawback they introduced to the fleet composition.

The issue can be illustrated with the following example:

Fleet A is equipped solely with missiles. Fleet B is equipped solely with guns. Fleet C is equipped with guns and point defence. Otherwise, Fleet B and Fleet C are of identical cost.

In match-ups where Fleet C could win, the equivalent Fleet B would kill Fleet A faster and take fewer losses.
 
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They could have -10% base tracking. The formula would still work.

Would it though, i don't mean mathmaticlly, but would a negetive value actually b applied or would the game treat it as zero or error out?

Also this is only an issue late game, early game it largely works, XL mounts aside, and thats really just down to their sheer DPS.
 
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Yeaah lets not destroy the game by hardcapping the amount of ships of each type you can build. All that would accomplish is make ONE viable way to approach fleets, and ruin everything else, so nothing would change really, except now you've ruined it for non min maxers too.

Maybe have upkeep costs on Battleships increase based on a percentage of fleet capacity, and increase on top of that if over fleet capacity.

For instance, say you have 1000 fleet capacity, you can build say, 350 to 500 fleet points worth of battleships before increased costs kick in. this introduces a soft capping system that encourages using other ships, although this is just a half solution, to really fix the problem we need to make cruisers and destroyers worth having.

For total win, make it an option that by default is on but can be toggled and adjusted just like growth.
 
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"Strike craft suck" 2 minutes later "NERF STRIKE CRAFT"

glad none of the people here are making the balance decisions.
 
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Apparently there is no simple solution.

Just an idea (I’m thinking about another game) - keep the BBs strong as they are , but increase their population consumption and upkeep, both to be a bit higher than their worth in battle.

You can still spam them and they‘ll trash the mixed fleet, but with the same overall cap you’ll have a more expensive fleet with high upkeep that is also very slow and vulnerable to corvette/strike craft spam without support. So economically they’d be less viable. Perhaps slow down their repair speed significantly as well, basically mimic more how sea Battleships are handled in HoI 4 and generally the real earth battleships of the past.
 
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No, no changes to how strong the BBs are are needed but making them "cost more than they are worth" is literally asking for them to be abandoned by anyone caring about max effectiveness, and despite that being an awful un fun way to play, prioritizing only what wins easiest, its also those people who find balance issues first, even if they don't know jack about how to fix it without ruining the game.

At least they know what the problem is most of the time. even if they are the worst at suggesting fixes.

See my earlier suggestion about soft capping BBs with an increasing cost after a certain % of fleet capacity worth.
 
Mechanical changes do not seem to be on the horizon and it doesn't seem that they are interested in expanding combat mechanics, juggernaut aside, little has changed for ships since 2.0. And the past track record for combat balancing hasnt been great.
  • PD v missiles/SC was unfixable by paradox in its intitial form - it's why we were given P and G slots years ago,
    • To set a soft limit on utterly ventilating enemies with 100% missile fleets OR
    • To stop missiles being rendered utterly impotent by ships with dozens of PD guns on them.
  • Stellaris' solar systems/art-style literally cannot cope with the ranges of large ship guns
    • late-game fleets literally drop out of hyperspace and are at max range on the starbase or some enemy fleets
    • At this point you have to ask why we even still have cartesian movement in systems? Either just go back to provinces, or commit to scaling up solar systems and making more "room" for battles. But I digress.
  • There remains no solid "Hull" component path or even "stealth path" (though in fairness its hard to imagine how this would work, without "in system" sensor mechanics - perhaps an evasion-maths rework could look at this, with "stealth panneling" as an alternative to shields/armor that turn your ships into evasive glass cannon).
    • One could also make the case that Armor is nowhere near as interesting as it could be, with the way it currently works.
  • My earlier post on how 1-dimensional wars are (we would need more ways to fight, more things to fight over for different ship roles to really matter).
With that (and more that I cba to rehash) in mind I really only see 2 ways to limit fleets (arbitrarily) with the game as it is now:
  1. Upkeep costs, repair times and construction times for Battleships being (painfully) higher than other ships (notably making cruisers the budget battleship)
    • No adjustments to weapon ranges/targeting maths would likely still mean the trade off will be worth it "often enough", as the one-punch potential of KA battleships cant be underestimated.
    • ... The thermonuclear option for increased battleship upkeep costs would probably be this lol:
    • View attachment 738751
    • Attrition can further be increased by mandating that capital ships (battleships and bigger) can only repair at stations with shipyards - or do repair but do so far slower than smaller classes.
  2. Limiting construction by ship class
    • Either statically (below I take 1 + the ship's footprint (e.g. 8 for battleships) and / by FC. So it scales with fleet cap)
    • View attachment 738755View attachment 738764
    • Or dynamically (which I'm still trying to present nicely in the UI) - but this is script driven and allows for things like
      • the Galactic Community to pass Tonnage resolutions that could (for example)
        • halve your base battleship capacity (18 to 9 in the above example),
        • ban them all together,
        • or put you in breach if you cant afford to field a substantive amount of them whilst being adjacent to a Purifier nation (as a random example).
      • Federal perks, defensive pacts, GC states of emergency, ethos (e.g. militarists get more BBs), new starbase buildings ("Capital ship pens") and even having certain types vassals could do similar things.
        • This country_vassal_naval_capacity_contribution_mult still exists from when vassals used to provide fleet cap for example.
Is this arbitrary? Yes.
Are the figures I've used arbitrary? Also yes.
Does this respect "realism"? God no. This is a game with genocidal horny mushroom aliens.
Would it work to make battleships more scarce whilst not nerfing them in to the floor, making some room for smaller ships (which is what would be needed without sweeping mechanical changes)? Yes.

Unfortunately there are no expanded class-v-class damage modifiers (the one exception being ship_damage_against_starbases_mult, which is useful for creating anti-starbase weapons, after inflating starbase stats by 100x lol) so when increasing the DPS of any weapon, like a bomber or torpedo, increases it against ALL targets - not just against meta ships.
  • For example, you can't create a "Widowmaker Torpedo" that obliterates Battleships with extra damage, and stick that on Destroyers,
  • As, that missile will vaporise everything not just BBs with how damage currently works
  • (you can mitigate this slightly by constraining Missile buffs to an Aux mod that can only be fitted on small ships, but that, too, is quite arbitrary).
I think a combination of 1 (increased attrition, economic pressures) and 2 (Enforced fleet caps, either fixed or floating, taking in various sources) above, combined with some expanded, selectively applied, damage modifiers (or unique abilities like a short turbo boost on destroyers) might be enough to make smaller ships viable in to the late game - without some grand overhaul of mechanics.
However only 2 of those 3 things are possible right now.

Generally agreed, particularly with:
  • My earlier post on how 1-dimensional wars are (we would need more ways to fight, more things to fight over for different ship roles to really matter).

For my two cents, I think it boils down to this: There are no alternative uses for your ships, so there is no need for alternative types of ships.

Ultimately every fleet battle in Stellaris (whether fleet v. fleet, fleet v. defenses, or a mix) boils down to the same formula. You throw all of your ships/defenses at each other and try to do the most amount of damage. There's only ever one mission, blow up everything, so there will only ever be one build, whichever ships are best at blowing everything up.

Even if we fix the battleship problem, that issue will still remain. Players will just settle on the next correct build, because there will always be a ship or ship set that is best at doing the most damage to other ships all at once.

  • Basically, we're asking the wrong question. The issue isn't "what ships are players building?" It's "what do players need to do with those ships?"

Players only need to do one thing, so they're only building one ship.

The way to fix this is to give fleets different roles and missions. If fleets needed to do things other than just blow each other up, then players would need to build the ships that are best at those different missions and assignments. While I haven't read much of this thread, people have referenced how Stellaris ships compare to real life navies. That's a good analogy. Actual navies have different ship classes not just for mixed fleets, but because their ships need to conduct a variety of missions. An aircraft carrier would make a poor choice to intercept pirates, for example, while a submarine is best for picking off lone enemy ships. Different ships exist to carry out the different missions that navies need to conduct.

Say we had four basic things that a Stellaris fleet could do:

  • Artillery
  • Ship Combat
  • Raiding
  • Support/Defense
Now we could build fleets based on the ships that are best for that. Battleships, for example, could keep their long range guns but might have a minimum effective range, making them excellent for blasting away at fixed defenses but a poor choice for engaging fast-moving enemy fleets. (We would probably need to lop a decimal point off of all weapon ranges, as @Pancakelord referenced above, but it would be worth it.)

This would almost automatically give cruisers an effective role in the game, as your heavy hitters that can still engage the enemy up close and personal. They would have real guns, without the weakness of a battleship in close combat.

Corvettes would be well suited to raiding, since their speed could make them effective pirates and tools of harassment on enemy mining stations and trade routes. (Of course, like artillery, this would require some retooling to how the map works. Right now choke points and FTL snares make raiding a non-option.)

And destroyers could provide the support necessary to keep a starbase in the fight far longer than it should, especially if we focus our long-range weapons on strike craft and missiles. (I can see an excellent destroyer module along the lines of "Gravitic Field: Bend spacetime enough to deflect many kinetic and beam attacks, reducing the accuracy of weapons the further away they're fired.)

Obviously you wouldn't use single-ship fleets. Every ship would still have its role in different missions, you wouldn't send your battleships on an artillery strike unescorted for example. But you could build your fleets around the mission they're trying to accomplish.

Right now we are doing that. We're building fleets around the mission. It's just that there is only ever one mission, and so there's only ever one fleet. Making battleships less desirable won't change that. It will just change the composition of that one fleet.
 
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Generally agreed, particularly with:
  • My earlier post on how 1-dimensional wars are (we would need more ways to fight, more things to fight over for different ship roles to really matter).

For my two cents, I think it boils down to this: There are no alternative uses for your ships, so there is no need for alternative types of ships.

Ultimately every fleet battle in Stellaris (whether fleet v. fleet, fleet v. defenses, or a mix) boils down to the same formula. You throw all of your ships/defenses at each other and try to do the most amount of damage. There's only ever one mission, blow up everything, so there will only ever be one build, whichever ships are best at blowing everything up.

Even if we fix the battleship problem, that issue will still remain. Players will just settle on the next correct build, because there will always be a ship or ship set that is best at doing the most damage to other ships all at once.

  • Basically, we're asking the wrong question. The issue isn't "what ships are players building?" It's "what do players need to do with those ships?"

Players only need to do one thing, so they're only building one ship.

The way to fix this is to give fleets different roles and missions. If fleets needed to do things other than just blow each other up, then players would need to build the ships that are best at those different missions and assignments. While I haven't read much of this thread, people have referenced how Stellaris ships compare to real life navies. That's a good analogy. Actual navies have different ship classes not just for mixed fleets, but because their ships need to conduct a variety of missions. An aircraft carrier would make a poor choice to intercept pirates, for example, while a submarine is best for picking off lone enemy ships. Different ships exist to carry out the different missions that navies need to conduct.

Say we had four basic things that a Stellaris fleet could do:

  • Artillery
  • Ship Combat
  • Raiding
  • Support/Defense
Now we could build fleets based on the ships that are best for that. Battleships, for example, could keep their long range guns but might have a minimum effective range, making them excellent for blasting away at fixed defenses but a poor choice for engaging fast-moving enemy fleets. (We would probably need to lop a decimal point off of all weapon ranges, as @Pancakelord referenced above, but it would be worth it.)

This would almost automatically give cruisers an effective role in the game, as your heavy hitters that can still engage the enemy up close and personal. They would have real guns, without the weakness of a battleship in close combat.

Corvettes would be well suited to raiding, since their speed could make them effective pirates and tools of harassment on enemy mining stations and trade routes. (Of course, like artillery, this would require some retooling to how the map works. Right now choke points and FTL snares make raiding a non-option.)

And destroyers could provide the support necessary to keep a starbase in the fight far longer than it should, especially if we focus our long-range weapons on strike craft and missiles. (I can see an excellent destroyer module along the lines of "Gravitic Field: Bend spacetime enough to deflect many kinetic and beam attacks, reducing the accuracy of weapons the further away they're fired.)

Obviously you wouldn't use single-ship fleets. Every ship would still have its role in different missions, you wouldn't send your battleships on an artillery strike unescorted for example. But you could build your fleets around the mission they're trying to accomplish.

Right now we are doing that. We're building fleets around the mission. It's just that there is only ever one mission, and so there's only ever one fleet. Making battleships less desirable won't change that. It will just change the composition of that one fleet.
While i agree that ships should have more certain roles, i would base this more on the roles we already have and in the current form. A ship should fill its role perfectly, but with heavy downsides. A carrier has high dps with strikecraft, but significiant less hp because of the hangar bays. When designed as carrier, only the proper ship modules are available.

As mentioned, artillery ships have insane dps, but when engaged closer by line or swarmer ships they are helpless without support. And of course i can not mount a hangar bay on that class of ship.

Swarmers are fast, pick low hp targets, deny emergency ftl jumps but have low dps and need bigger gunned ships to deal initial damage to shields and armor to fullfill their job later on.

Line ships have medium weaponry and are all-rounders and the general meatshield of a fleet.

Every hull size can be assigned to a role except for some things. A battleship cant be a swarmer and a corvette cant be a carrier. But why not have a battleship in the picket class or a cruiser as torpedo launcher base? With this, you can build fleets with all different kind of ships. No ship class or role dominates. With a tricky way to organize ship modules, certain hull sizes would fit better for a role, a cruiser can fit a more dps for claimed fleet cap as missileship as a battleship, a battleship is a better carrier just because of the sheer size as a cruiser or destroyer.

I know this is a gamey approach, but imho it would bring some life to fleet battles. There would also be room to give fleets more stances. Protect, patrol, raid, travel amd more give bonuses to what is needed currently. But a raiding fleet is not well prepared to engage a big fleet battle...
 
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A carrier has high dps with strikecraft, but significiant less hp because of the hangar bays. When designed as carrier, only the proper ship modules are available.

As mentioned, artillery ships have insane dps, but when engaged closer by line or swarmer ships they are helpless without support. And of course i can not mount a hangar bay on that class of ship.

Swarmers are fast, pick low hp targets, deny emergency ftl jumps but have low dps and need bigger gunned ships to deal initial damage to shields and armor to fullfill their job later on.

Line ships have medium weaponry and are all-rounders and the general meatshield of a fleet.
Just to be sure: the only job you envision for ship is to fight in decisive battles?
 
Just to be sure: the only job you envision for ship is to fight in decisive battles?
Yes and no. Its a more engaging system on how ships behave when they fight and give every kind of hull sizes and roles a place in the game. This could be a way to bring (corvettes,) destroyers, cruisers and battleships to a interesting powerlevel without overhauling the whole fleetsystem. This is redefining the behaviour of ships in battles, thats in the end the purpose of these warships.

There is stil a lot of stuff on how fleets and ships could play different, like raiding, different fleet stances, bombardment and on and on. But that touches so much other game mechanics that its very unlikely to happen.
 
Is the "double plus" size-increase mechanic the root of many of these issues? By that I mean that the damage increase from an S-slot to an L-slot is not x4 (double then double), but x6 (x2.45 then x2.45). Why is this true? I've mentioned it before in this thread that armor increases in this manner do not make sense. In the same comment, I also thought that the simple physics of a proportionately longer barrel means that a kinetic slug would have greater exit velocity, even when power and slug mass also increase proportionately. But energy weapons may not have a similar greater-than-proportional increase as they get larger, so it may not make sense to have them follow suit. Even with a realism-based justification for greater per-shot damage, it perhaps makes more sense for the larger kinetics to instead give back some rate-of-fire to keep their progression strictly exponential.

So if an L-slot weapon is only worth x4 of their S-slot equivalent in terms of damage in or out, the weapons that are only M-, L-, or X-slot would probably need to give back some of their advantage. For example, a Kinetic Battery is a Tier-3 technology (per Wiki), same as an Advanced Railgun. The S-slot ARG averages 4.99 DPD, while the L-slot currently is at 30.00 DPD; the L-slot-only KA averages 35.15 DPD. If we drop the L-slot advantage on the ARG from x6 to x4, then it becomes 20.00 DPD; keeping the same ratio between the two L-slots, the KA drops to 23.43 DPD (but still keeps its very favorable vs-defense rates). A straight progression from S- to X-slot might be simplistically viewed under this new format as x8, but for, say a Mega Cannon, the current jump is closer to x17.25 (from Tier-4 Gauss Cannon S-slot at 6.52 DPD to Tier-4 Mega Cannon X-slot at 112.50 DPD). If we just factor out the three x2.45 increases, we see that the X-slot is doing an extra 17.4% times its x8 rate (equivalent to x9.39).

Are there good reasons for the larger slots (both weapons and utilities) to have these bonuses, i.e., is there enough of a drawback for being a larger ship to justify this as balance? Well for one, a larger ship isn't going to be able to dodge as easily while a smaller ship does have some capability there and two, its typically larger weapons will hit less often than the smaller ship's comparable guns. But there is also an advantage in being a single ship with a single stack of hull, armor, and shield points rather than x2 ships each with only half (or x4 ships with only 1/4 each, etc.), in that a ship is mostly fully functional up until its last point (yes, there is a reduction during the last half of hull points) This means that two ships each doing 1/2 the damage of the single larger ship, match outputs up until the larger ship focuses down one of the two smaller ships, approximately when the two smaller ships have only gotten the larger ship down halfway (maybe more because it's easier to hit). After that, the larger ship is still pretty much doing exactly as much damage as it was before, but now the single smaller ship is at half that output, and the fight would end (if to the death) with the larger ship still having ~20% of its overall health (maybe 10-15% if low-hull penalties are severe and mostly felt by the larger ship) and the two smaller ships turned to atoms.

(And just thought about this: in a vanilla disengagement scenario, would the earlier departures of the smaller ships or the larger band of susceptibility for the larger ship, lead to a significant shift in the typical end result above?)

If a smaller ship is gaining enough of an Evasion/Tracking advantage over the larger ship, perhaps it's able to overcome and surpass the divided-attack penalty, in which case perhaps the larger ship does need some advantage. But doesn't increased range of the big guns swing things back the other way? Yes, some - while there is a fairly quick nullification of that advantage as fleets close the distance, the unanswered damage of the longer alpha strike further unbalances the divided-attack penalty. There also needs to be relatively close pacing of the increasing advantages/decreasing penalties during technological advancement of the larger-ship and smaller-ship fleets. As for the bonus damage for the X-slot, perhaps it's fine, as the forward-fire-only disadvantage does come into play enough maybe to justify.

All of this is to say, if a fleet with larger ships and a fleet with smaller ships approach and just go to town on each other, would they basically blow up at the same time? If the answer is basically "yeah, most of the time", then that part of the system is much closer to balance. There are still tons of systems that would still need to be tweaked to make this more even (e.g., KA-like options for S- and M-slots), but if pure size is eliminated as such a great advantage, then it gets us closer to viability for all classes.