Realistically, what is it that should make Strike Craft successful? Why should they do anywhere near as much damage as they do? In part, I ask this based on relative size of the craft and of the weapons that they use.
Based on a number of factors in Stellaris (Command Points, Cost in Alloys, Build Times, number of S-slot equivalents, etc.), I view Battleships as being 8x the mass/volume of a Corvette. If they are proportional to each other, the Battleships would be 2x as long, 2x as wide, and 2x as tall as a Corvette – put another way you could kind of squish 8 Corvettes into the same volume as one Battleship. Vanilla descriptions of Hangars and the SC that are “mounted” there talk about 8-craft wings that come out and attack targets. Even if the Hangar slot basically takes up more volume than an L-slot turreted weapon, a Battleship could conceivably have 6 Hangars mounted (by L-slot equivalence) and that’s just taking up maybe a third of the Battleship’s internal volume. So if we only have a Hangar hold the 8-craft wing, and each craft takes up 1/8th of the 1/18th of the Battleship’s internal volume, then at most each craft is 1/144th of the volume of the Battleship.
Weapon-wise, all of the weapons on a Corvette are worth 3 S-slots (either 3 actual S-slots, or a G-slot (M-slot equivalent) and an S-slot, or 2 S-slots and a P-slot (S-slot equivalent)). A Battleship could carry 6 L-slot weapons or variations that would each be equivalent to 24 S-slots, or 8x the S-slots of a Corvette. This makes sense based on relative volume and mass of the two ships. But the typical ratio of damage output increases by 2.45x each size (square root of 6). For example, a Corvette with 3 S-slot Tier-3 X-Ray Lasers averages 4.69 damage per day each or 14.07 DPD total, while a Battleship with 6 L-slot T3 X-Ray Lasers averages 28.17 DPD each, 169.02 DPD total, or basically 12x (12.01) as much as the Corvette (two size increases and a doubling of slots). Not counting the outsized increase given to X-slots, if we accept that an 8x difference in size leads to a 12x difference in damage, then a 144x difference in size would translate to north of 330x damage (that’s 2.29x to the 7th power in doubling to just 128x size).
Compared to the 169.02 DPD of the Battleship, a single Tier-3 SC (at even just 1/128th the size) should do less than 0.51 DPD or 4.10 DPD as an 8-craft wing – currently, Tier-3 Advanced Strike Craft do 40.00 DPD as an 8-craft wing. If each Hangar is actually holding one or more 8-craft wings as spares, the size ratio could be even bigger, leading to an even larger difference in damage – at 1/256th, which would probably be just one spare wing, the damage drops to 1/755th of the Battleship, 0.22 DPD each or 1.79 DPD per wing.
How would 1.79 DPD for the attacks from a Tier-3 L-slot-equivalent weapon compare to even a T3 L-slot X-Ray Laser’s 28.17 DPD (never mind the 32.62 DPD for a T3+ Proton Launcher)? Sure, the engagement range of the SC/Hangar could allow its carrier to stay outside of its enemy’s guns, but in practice this distance defense is fleeting at best and the length of time for SC to reach attack Range cuts into their advantage, so let’s just think of it as a 50% Range advantage over the X-Ray Laser. And compared to an X-Ray Laser, SC typically enjoy full Shield penetration (versus having to deal with Shields at a 50% damage malus for Lasers). Between the two, that might be worth as much as half of the X-Ray Laser’s damage – at just 50% of the X-Ray Laser’s DPD, the T3 SC should be doing 14.09 DPD, or about 7.9x what its size would tell you it should do.
In order to justify that much more damage than what I figured, Strike Craft would have to be getting huge advantages elsewhere that we hadn’t accounted for. The one that makes the most sense to me is that the much closer firing Range of the SC could account for more precise shots, but that’s a huge increase by one factor alone. And all of this assumes that nothing is shooting at the SC wings, cutting into the carrier’s damage output while the carrier itself isn’t necessarily taking damage. If shooting at the SC versus at the carrier is seen as an advantage, maybe that cuts into the remaining difference.
The flip side of this is SC Hull and Shields, or just total “hit points”. A Tier-3 Battleship doesn’t exist, so we’d have to work with a Tier-3 Corvette, meaning Advanced Corvette Hulls (500 Hull) and a maximum of 330 points in Shields and/or Armor, so 830 hit points (assuming no other modifiers). A single SC is around 1/63rd the damage capacity of a Corvette, so 1/63rd of the Corvette’s hit points would be 13.20 per SC. Currently, each T3 SC is shown to have 45 Hull and 30 Shields, or 75 hit points (around 5.7x as much).
Matched up against that would be Flak (and to a lesser extent Point-Defense). Both weapons go into P-slots, so they’re basically equivalent to an S-slot shooting at a Corvette. If they do the equivalent damage as a T3 S-slot X-Ray Laser, then they would be doing 1/63rd of that if they’re expected to hit SC at the same basic rate. T3 S-slot XRL is 4.69 DPD, divided by 63 is 0.07 DPD per 1/32nd S-slot equivalent. That’s one 1-hit-point hit every 13.4 shots (7% net Accuracy, after removing Evasion minus Tracking), at the 4.6 day Cooldown-per-shot of the S-slot Laser. But the Flak (or PD) mount is still an S-slot as a whole, so you’re talking about 32 tiny weapons firing over 4.6 days, or 6.96 shots/day or 3.48 per 0.5 day Cooldown. If you consolidate the 3.48 shots per Cooldown phase to a single effective shot, it’s basically a 24% net Accuracy shot, leading to 0.47 DPD. If you state Accuracy as 75% (same as vanilla) and then expect a net Tracking around 50 points below the SC’s Evasion, you’d get that effective damage rate – if you expect Flak Tracking to end up negating SC Evasion, then base Accuracy would need to be around 25% on 2 shots per day to get the same rate. This compares to Tier-2 Flak Cannons at 2.5 damage per hit and 4.50 DPD, or T4 Flak Artillery at 4 DPH and 6.00 DPD (at 75% Accuracy and regularly matching Tracking to Evasion). The changes in damage rates versus SC hit points go from 75/6 = 12.5 mount-days to destroy an SC, to 13.2/0.48 = 27.5 mount-days - might need to look at balancing that somewhere (probably Hangar Cooldown for replacement wings).
Of course, Ranges get really tight at this point, with S-slots typically having half the range of an L-slot, basically halving Range every 2 drops in size (or 0.707x each drop in size). An S-slot Laser has Range 40, and our realistic SC is 1/32nd the size of the Corvette, so that’s 7 drops in size, leading to a Range of 7. The Flak mount is in the same boat, with its weapons only having Range 7 – if you want to extend that Range by even a little bit, you’d need to give back in effective damage (extending Cooldown is probably your only option, with Accuracy already so low). I don’t know if you’d be able to justify (even with drops in DPD) much more than a doubling to Range 15, which is far less than the current Range 30 for Flak.
If I was looking at this much more from a realistic standpoint, I would first change Ranges relative to the system map to be much shorter (and/or make turreted weapons have junk Accuracy at full Range) and then let Strike Craft attack from closer to their current apparent Ranges – Strike Craft should be fantastic at attacking well outside of turreted-guns Range, and their naturally low damage should be viable because of that Range. I’d still look to boost their damage through some kind of critical hits or something similar, but I don’t think you’d really need to get it all the way up to near the other L-slot weapons. I’d also look at getting advanced versions of SC (like how Proton/Neutron Launchers are to Lasers/Plasma weapons), probably some sort of bomber – that would be after actually getting a Tier-4 SC as well.
Lastly, the changes to Flak’s Range would greatly impact its ability to protect large sections of the fleet, and might require changes to how fleet formations work to ensure coverage for otherwise Flak-less warships. Even a drop from Range 30 to 15 would basically cut the coverage area by 3/4 (Stellaris doesn’t handle the vertical element well enough to worry about it actually cutting the volume by 7/8).
As always, this has been a look at how Strike Craft might more realistically be shown in Stellaris. If you're not at all worried about it being realistic, nothing to see here, move along.
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