Okay, it's time for a more well thought out post. I'm going to disagree with the above posters for a moment because I think it is way more complicated than that. This game is very complex, and there are so many changes that were made that is beyond just tweak this or increase that. I also think there are ulterior motives because making fleet ships more powerful would also do the same for the AI, decreasing starship utility value(efficiency). My post is neutral, although I will say I do believe that fleet ships should be part of every game.
Before I suggest solutions, I thought I would point out some inequities. I'm going to use the references tab of 4.033 to support my positions on normal ship capacities.
It seems most of the debate in IRC focuses around siege versus heavy bombers, as if these are to be compared on equal playing fields. And more specifically, starship proponents would point out that, against force fields, heavy bombers are spectacular. At first glance, they might be right. However, let's look at the numbers from the references tab:
Heavy bombers/siege full capacity vs. AI force field generator on Mark one:
siege takes 188.8 seconds to killheavy bombers take 229.6 seconds to kill
HP of both :
siege 1 millionheavy bombers 112,000
Range (affects attrition):
siege 38,000heavy bombers: 4000
Under both conditions, assuming a wormhole of size greater than 38,000 units, the heavy bomber fleet will never be at maximum capacity before it hits the force field. Also note that these do not take into account guardians and hybrids:
Max capacity versus hybrid-hive(heavy armor) time to kill :
siege 9.6 secondsHeavy bomber 87.55 seconds
versus artillery Guardian:
only one siege needed, one-shotmaximum capacity heavy bomber 1.22 seconds (not instantaneous)
I chose the artillery Guardian because it only takes 4.8 seconds for the artillery Guardian to kill 10 heavy bombers. Assuming a battle takes only 10 seconds for the heavy bombers to reach their target, you have already lost 22% of your fleet, with numbers
skyrocketing. With the siege ship, it's an instant kill. In the reverse, it takes 29 shots from the artillery Guardian/34.8 seconds to kill a siege.
You can see immediately that against the ideal Guardian as well as hybrid hives, bombers in this homogenous tale don't last long while starships are the clear winner.
Looking at resource costs, you can see that the siege requires twice as much crystal/second. Look at the build times:
maximum capacity fleet build time without engineers(supported by initial economy):
heavy bomber 19:36 min.siege 41:40 min.
However, with an engineer assist, the numbers are drastically changed, as the
income per second is actually higher with the heavy bomber than it is with the siege! You can mouse over the tooltips yourself at the relevant constructors.
Metal/crystal:
Siege resource per second build time: 8/s|120/sheavy bomber per second build time: 120/s|17/s
I hope this clearly illustrates how inept a bomber fleet is, where it may marginally be useful against the AI force field but stinks up the place with other difficult hallmarks of the new 4.0 ai war.
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Just for comparison, because heavy bombers are really the bright spot of the entire discussion, let's take a brief look at fighters and frigates, rounding out the triangle ship discussion.
The resource drain cost of the Mark one fighter and frigate are the same as the bomber, just with the crystal and metal requirements flipped.
Range(remember, this is part of the key attrition variable):
fighter 3000
frigate 10,000
Against the enemy starships, you will see that a maximum capacity standard fighter loses in all battles except for leech, siege, and bomber starship. Against regular triangle ships, the fighter will only counter the bomber(not really a surprise here). The missile frigate is even worse, losing to leech starships due to their immunity, but otherwise reflecting the same win against bomber starships and siege; they assume the same rock paper scissors role in the triangle.
Now, let's look at the artillery Guardian, and the hive:
maximum capacity versus the artillery Guardian(34,000 Range):
frigates (45 shots to kill, 9.18 seconds)
fighters (134 shots to kill, 5.47 seconds)
Unfortunately, given that the range difference 24,000-31,000 difference, your fleet will suffer serious losses, as the Mark one artillery Guardian only needs to shots to kill a missile frigate and five to kill a fighter(this one doesn't seem as bad, but you have 31,000 Range to cover before you get there +5 seconds minimum if you focus fire every fighter on that one Guardian).
These are both ideal scenarios, with minimal interference on the battlefield. As soon as you start to add the usual wave size, these theoretical time to kill numbers skyrocket.
Looking at the hive...
Maximum capacity versus just one hybrid hive:
frigates(1000 shots to kill, 204.9 seconds)
fighters(1667 shots to kill, 68.04 seconds)
Remember the earlier statistic? 9.6 seconds and insta-kill for the siege at 34,000 range? We haven't even talked about the other starships yet, but already we can see a pattern of clear inequity.
To go off on a tangent on what the solutions might be, and the discussions that should be had, is what the role of fleet ships are supposed to be. We see some total expense of the starships over the fleet ships, although this is not obviously account for attrition(the amount you need to spend to replace them). All it takes is to lose your bomber fleet once and to replace it, you could have had siege ships. How many bombers do you use in a single game? How durable are they? What is their survival rate? Looking at the HP on the chart, we can see that heavy bombers don't last long in this game, and you can expect that the efficiency number will be better than the raw expense number. This maybe unintuitive from looking at the chart.
For my experience with the game, I spent the last year almost exclusively going fleet ships. That's right, I enjoy nothing better than giant fleets going into space battles and seeing things blow up. When unity came out, I tried going high-capacity ship levels and testing the game as I used to play it. However, this was like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, and I had to adjust my play style to include starships. Quickly, I realized that the variety of defensive structures of the AI that can hit multiple targets seems tailor-made to decimate fleet ships while encouraging starships. So I have now switched my play style to a starship game, to some sadness, which is why I posted this analysis here. I am not just posting numbers with no practical gameplay experiment; these numbers do reflect my experience with fleet ships. I could go on… I could probably write 100 pages about this game analyzing it and turning it over, and I highly doubt that anyone actually read this whole post.
There are some things that this post doesn't cover-like riot ships, those ultra durable awesome starships. It also doesn't cover the cloaker starship, which has a cloaking limit on it specifically only for starships at earlier Mark levels. Even at later Mark levels, it cannot handle a fleet(740 maximum ships), nor would you want it to because as soon as you de-cloak, you can suffer serious attrition from one volley of a heterogenous hostile planet. This post does not cover golems, spire ships, Zenith ships, specialty fleet ships(there are a few winners here, notably autobombs). There are also some very clear losers, like most of the neinzul children fleet ships, which suffer from some defects with the regeneration chamber and mobility in general.
Do I think that fleet ships are pointless and useless? Not entirely. They are great on defense, and they can be good meat in a large battle. Heavy bombers themselves, especially a higher Mark values, certainly increase in utility value. However, immunities given to the AI have further decreased fleet ship value, such as the excessive armor on raid ships and leech immunities. It is possible to win the game without researching any fleet ships. Whether or not you think that the problem as a player, I guess that is your opinion (if you rephrase the question, do you think fleet ships should be integral to the game?). AI War: Starship Command is certainly a different game title.
If you have read this far, I commend you. Going to stop now.
