Make carriers great again!

[Aquilegia]

Real life carriers on the seas are OP, or at least they were in WWII. Carriers and fighters in space would probably be an extremely bad and wasteful idea. There's almost no space to hide in space, it's 3d, high speed ballistic loads or lasers could target objects from insane lengths away. Not much reason to put a person into a ballistic load. Weaponry would probably be massive in weight and size to target such long ranges.

Stellaris fleet combat is a bit more based on Earth naval warfare, than it would be on space warfare. This is ok, because it looks nice and recognizable. But this doesn't mean fighters should be as powerful in Stellaris as they would be in real life on the seas. They should be better than they are now though.

 

[monsterfurby]

Regarding point defense: In general, any sort of hard counter or rock/paper/scissors philosophy doesn't really feel right to me. In real life, the solution to better point defense on ships hasn't been "let's switch to beam or small projectile weapons" - it has been "more, cheaper missiles". Same with armor - improvements in armor technology weren't responded to by completely swapping out one weapon for another. Instead, adjustments were made in ammunition to make existing weapons more flexible.

Of course, that kind of means that game-design-wise, weapon technologies would have to either become immensely more complicated or be simplified to a simple, straight line model, both of which are not exactly perfect solutions. However, I do think there's a case to be made for a moderately more realistic weapons research system that takes into account the variety within one type of weapon system.

Real life carriers on the seas are OP, or at least they were in WWII. Carriers and fighters in space would probably be an extremely bad and wasteful idea. There's almost no space to hide in space, it's 3d, high speed ballistic loads or lasers could target objects from insane lengths away. Not much reason to put a person into a ballistic load. Weaponry would probably be massive in weight and size to target such long ranges.

Stellaris fleet combat is a bit more based on Earth naval warfare, than it would be on space warfare. This is ok, because it looks nice and recognizable. But this doesn't mean fighters should be as powerful in Stellaris as they would be in real life on the seas. They should be better than they are now though.

Imho, the standard Stellaris should aspire to is to be able to emulate as broad a range of sci-fi settings as possible. It should be as viable to have a frigate/cruiser-based navy similar to what we see in Star Trek as it should be to have a more fighter/carrier-based navy in the vein of Wing Commander, Star Wars or Babylon 5.

 

[Exarian]

Imho, the standard Stellaris should aspire to is to be able to emulate as broad a range of sci-fi settings as possible. It should be as viable to have a frigate/cruiser-based navy similar to what we see in Star Trek as it should be to have a more fighter/carrier-based navy in the vein of Wing Commander, Star Wars or Babylon 5.

Please remember Battlestar:Gallactica remake. In BS:G fighters, battleships, carriers, missiles and balistics were all viable. On top of that BattleStars are combination of Batlecruisers and Carriers (BS is basically super battleship with two carriers attached to hull, one on each side ) - something very close to BB we can make in Ship Designer.

 

[speckbretzel]

I'd like to see a revival of the carriers.

 

[SnakeInATopHat]

One solution that I think could fix all this is make the carrier keep launching squads at intervals, just like regular weapons do (you could see this as the carrier launching its 400 squads that are down in the hold if you have a problem with realism) this would make carriers the king of attrition, which is what they are IRL, but would still be countered by mass PD or fighters.