Carrier Alternative

[Hearteater]

I like Carriers, but I think the problem they solve (keeping the number of ships down to reduce CPU/RAM load) might be better solved in another way.  What if instead of Carriers, AI-spawned ships could spawn in small stacks.  So instead of spawning 2000 ships, it could spawn 200 ships, each in a stack of 10.  You wouldn't even need to display anything special about stacks if they automatically split when the total ships in the system dropped.  For the best feel, stacks should be mixed with normal ships.  So if a wave should spawn 2200 ships, instead of 200 ships + 2 carriers, you would get say 800 regular ships and 140 stacks of 10.  Only a total of 940 units are spawned, but the fight's difficulty reflects 2200 ships.

If I were to break down the details, I'd go with:
1) All ships in a stack are of the same ship type
2) A ship stack's damage is multiplied by the number of units in the stack
3) When a stack's health reaches zero, the number of units in the stack is reduced by one and the ship is fully healed
4) AOE damage is multiplied by the unit count of the stack
5a) Stacks require one tractor beam/unit in the stack, and cannot be tractored if fewer tractors are available from a single source
6a) Paralysis duration is divided by the number of units in the stack
7a) Engine damage is divided by the number if units in the stack
5-7b) Ship stacks are immune to tractor beams, paralysis and engine damage
5-7c) Ship stacks split off one ship when struck by tractor beams, paralysis or engine damage, leaving the rest of stack unaffected
When the total number of ships in the current system drops below a given threshold, stacks of units begin to split into individual ships

Granted the AOE damage handling isn't perfect, but it is a fairly reasonable approximation given stacks would only appear in very large battles.

[barryvm]

Wouldn't stacks of ships be less efficient in terms of  damage output ?
If I understand you correctly a "stack" of ships would be treated as a single ship and thus save CP power.
But to accomplish this a stack would have to fire on a single target.
If this target is a fleet ship, it would probably be killed and any "excess"  damage the stack inflicts would be lost.

PS: I'm not familiar with the current mechanics involving carriers: I seem to remember they are capable of firing but I do not know if they attack a single or multiple targets.
If the former, then of course my argument isn't valid.

I do like the idea in that you can actually see what ships you're up against and use counters effectively instead of the "surprise" you get when a carrier deploys a few hundred bombers right next to the homeworld command station shields.

[TechSY730]

This is a cool idea, as it would preserve the balance of large battles much better than even the new revised carriers would.
It also sounds like a nightmare to code...

For the single shot vs the multi shot thing, I guess you could have it increase the number of shots instead of increase the amount of damage. Though this could lead to silliness like 400 shots per salvo.
A combination of increasing damage and increasing shots per salvo for each extra ship added could be used to keep large stacks from getting too out of hand, but some fancy math would be needed to keep the DPS of the stack around the same as the DPS of N individual ships. (Basically, how can you take N * damage and turn it into X * (Y * damage), such that X can be made an order of magnitude less than N for large Ns, but still make X * (Y * damage) a decent approximation to N * damage? N is the number of ships in the stack (integral) , X is the number of shots per salvo of the "stacked ship" (integral), and Y is the multiplier to individual damage of the "stacked ship" (might or might not be integral), where both X and Y are functions of N)

[TechSY730]

As for the mechanics of Carriers, here are some of the relevant mechanics of carriers in terms of damage scaling with fleet size in (as of this writing, unreleased) version Prerelease 5.036:

Previously carriers were way less dangerous than the ships they contained, tending to make a wave + a stack of carriers feel a lot more like that many back-to-back waves. This is better than the pre-carrier condition of waves capping out at 2000 ships, but still tends to cause the actual difficulty of waves to increase much much slower with the size of the wave than is desirable. So:

    Now gets +1 shots-per-salvo per 16 ships inside the carrier (that's on high caps; per 8 ships on normal, 4 on low, 2 on ultra low). So a carrier containing 1000 ships on a high caps game has 63 shots per salvo.
    Base Attack Power from 1400*mk => 19200*mk (the base strength of 16 fighters on high caps, but without the fighter's bonuses).
    Seconds-Per-Salvo from 2 => 4 (same as fighter, cuts down a bit on shot-spam).
    Can no longer fire as though ignoring through forcefields, but it can still move through them.
    Shot type from dark matter => energy bomb as the idea is not for these to be easily counterable via counter-dark-matter turrets.
    Hull-bonus against Turret from 0.1 => 1.
    Hull-bonus against Structural from 0.1 => 1.
    Hull-bonuses against Scout and Command-Grade staying at 0.1.
    In summary, a full carrier is now pretty dangerous, but the firepower is still significantly lower (by about 3x, probably) than its total contents. That's fine as they'll probably still feel more powerful than you want them to be.
    Thanks to Wanderer for inspiring this change.

[barryvm]

Now gets +1 shots-per-salvo per 16 ships inside the carrier

Well, ignore my former comment:
it seems the stack mechanic Hearteater proposes would result in a more accurate approximation of a large group of attacking ships than the present carriers do.
It would also give more visual feedback about the attacking fleet's composition.

[Hearteater]

The excessive overkill issue could be a problem.  Obviously no approximation solution is going to be perfect.  A few ways of mitigating the overkill issue are:

1) Double the number of shots fired by a stack, multiple the damage per shot by half the units in the stack.  This compromises shot size for some additional processing of extra shots.  So x2 attacks and x5 damage for a 10 unit stack, instead of x1 attacks and x10 damage.

2) Prioritize high health targets for stacks.  Less frequent overkill when any high health targets are around.

3) Save extra hits from each attack.  Determine the number of hits required to kill the target of a single attack, and save any extra to apply to the next attack.  Add additional bonus shots when saved attacks exceed the number of units in the stack.

Example: A Teleport Battle Station Stack of 10 ships fires.  A single TBS has 8 shots, so the TBS stack has 8 shots.  Each shot "hits" 10 times (once per ship in the stack).  Their first shot hits a target with only 5000 health.  Since each TBS hit does 2800 damage, two hits are expended to kill the target and the other 8 are saved.  The second shot of the TBS is now resolved, only it has 18 hits now (10 from the ships in the stack, +8 saved over from the previous shot resolution).  This continues until all 8 shots have resolved.  If the saved shots are 10 or higher, the stack will get an extra shot (just like current attack refunding for targets dying with shots in flight) for every full 10 saved shots.  Any saved shots below 10 are just held and added to the next normal attack resolution.

[Nodor]

.. I'm busying imaginging a stack of 10 Hunterkiller 5's.

Or a stack of artillery golems.

[Hearteater]

I suspect it would probably be okay to limit stacking to fleet ships only.  Starships and above probably never need to stack.  Some "large" fleet ships should probably never stack (Tractor Platforms and Mini-rams come to mind) just because it would be a bit awkward.

[Eternaly_Lost]

I suspect it would probably be okay to limit stacking to fleet ships only.  Starships and above probably never need to stack.  Some "large" fleet ships should probably never stack (Tractor Platforms and Mini-rams come to mind) just because it would be a bit awkward.

I am not so sure about that, I have a save game where there is a counter attack of 224 H-K Mk V, and I don't know how many Motherships as they popped the second said counter attack came due to the Fallen Spire Exo-Fleet being there.

You very much can get starships in numbers that are larger then fleet ship caps coming to attack you. Granted that is Fallen Spire only, but that is were Stacking is likely needed the most as ship volume is insane in that.

I often see waves starting to reach 10,000+ ships by the end game, so stacking those would be a big help on FPS and Memory issues, assuming it was done correctly.

[TechSY730]

Can this go up on Mantis? That way, it won't be lost in the "shuffle" of the forums.
I guess have a link to this post on the forum in the description so people can see some rational and further ideas on the topic.

[Hearteater]

Mantis suggestion is now up.  Feel free to vote .

[TechSY730]

I suspect it would probably be okay to limit stacking to fleet ships only.  Starships and above probably never need to stack.  Some "large" fleet ships should probably never stack (Tractor Platforms and Mini-rams come to mind) just because it would be a bit awkward.

I am not so sure about that, I have a save game where there is a counter attack of 224 H-K Mk V, and I don't know how many Motherships as they popped the second said counter attack came due to the Fallen Spire Exo-Fleet being there.

You very much can get starships in numbers that are larger then fleet ship caps coming to attack you. Granted that is Fallen Spire only, but that is were Stacking is likely needed the most as ship volume is insane in that.

I often see waves starting to reach 10,000+ ships by the end game, so stacking those would be a big help on FPS and Memory issues, assuming it was done correctly.

But in those waves or exo waves with 10,000+ ships, how many of those are guardians/starships/other big stuff?
If you are seeing thousands of starships and/or gaurdians, then maybe it is worth it. Otherwise, the saving you get from stacking those probably won't be worth it

[Hearteater]

How many fleet-sized ships do you get with 224 H/K Vs?  I could see large ships stacking starting at smaller amounts in that situation.  For example, if fleet ships start by stacking 10 ships/stack, starships and up might stack 2 ships/stack.  I think an ideal goal would be past 1000 ships in a wave, ~75% of the total ship icons in the wave represent single ships, and the other 25% are a stack of some size.  So if large ships made up more than 75% of the ships in a wave, they'd start getting stacked too.  And there is nothing to say a stack of fleet ships couldn't be 1000 ships, but probably somewhere around 25 or so it would be too much just from the standpoint of visually being able to identify threats.

[Eternaly_Lost]

I suspect it would probably be okay to limit stacking to fleet ships only.  Starships and above probably never need to stack.  Some "large" fleet ships should probably never stack (Tractor Platforms and Mini-rams come to mind) just because it would be a bit awkward.

I am not so sure about that, I have a save game where there is a counter attack of 224 H-K Mk V, and I don't know how many Motherships as they popped the second said counter attack came due to the Fallen Spire Exo-Fleet being there.

You very much can get starships in numbers that are larger then fleet ship caps coming to attack you. Granted that is Fallen Spire only, but that is were Stacking is likely needed the most as ship volume is insane in that.

I often see waves starting to reach 10,000+ ships by the end game, so stacking those would be a big help on FPS and Memory issues, assuming it was done correctly.

But in those waves or exo waves with 10,000+ ships, how many of those are guardians/starships/other big stuff?
If you are seeing thousands of starships and/or gaurdians, then maybe it is worth it. Otherwise, the saving you get from stacking those probably won't be worth it

Waves, not exo waves, I did not bother to count the ships in there.

As for number of large ships, that save has 1272 massive ships with a total firepower of 1,215,972 (yes, 1.2 million) en route to my planets. So I am seeing thousands of very large ships attacking me. Granted those ships are spread out, but they are there. The AI very much is not happy with me in that game at all.

[Hearteater]

Yeah, but 1000 ships should be roughly the same load on a processor regardless of size.  Carriers don't appear until a wave breaks 1000 ships.  So 1272 massive ships is just barely above the threshold that would suggest a carrier should be used (and I'm not even certain if Exo-Waves ever use carriers anyway).  Just doubling-up those massive ships into stacks of 2 when possible should get it below 1000 units easily though.