Carrier Alternative

[TechSY730]

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.

Exo waves won't spawn with carriers, but the AI might package some fleet ships (the only ones eligible for carrier redeployment IIRC) up into carriers if too of many of them start congregating on the same planet.

Actually, that is a decent use for carriers, even with this unit stack idea. If there needs to be a consolidation of ships, but unit stacks won't reduce ship count very much due to sheer diversity of ships, then it could fall back to the carrier logic.

[Mánagarmr]

Excuse if I'm not overly informed, but aren't we just band-aiding a more fundamental problem here? We already have caps to limit the amount of ships spawning. Why not just crank these caps down in case the lower settings aren't enough to prevent the need for a carrier-like mechanic in the first place?

[Hearteater]

Even on Ultra-Low, with multiple homeworlds a wave can easily spawn far too many ships to reasonable be handled.  This solution avoids the blunt solution of carriers and replaces it with a fix that simulates nearly the same result as having spawned the original number of intended ships.  I don't think caps could be lowered enough to avoid this issue, unless multiple homeworlds were also heavily limited.  Even then, a long game with high AIP (such as a full galaxy conquest) would still probably break 1k wave sizes.

[Mánagarmr]

Right. As long as it isn't something that'll directly hurt anyone playing the game "normally" (Ie super-extreme setups such as multiple HWs and similar) I don't argue against a fix.

I honestly forgot some high level players play with many HWs for the fun of it. I'd totally forgotten it was possible

[Hearteater]

This suggestion is meant to replace the use of Carriers to mitigate large wave spawns.  This happens when more than 1000 units would appear in a wave.  So 1000 ships will spawns, and eveything over than will get dumped into Carriers.  Since Carriers have less firepower than the ships inside them, they actually make the wave much less threatening than they should be.  A 1000 ship wave and a 2000 ship wave have fairly similar difficulty levels.  The biggest danger of the Carrier is it might carry its ships past your AOE turrets.  Of course 1000 extra ships might just kill all your AOE turrets.

So I've suggested using small stacks (which are sort of micro-carriers really) to reduce the memory/CPU load while still having the proper offensive punch, and at the same time maintaining the same defensive vulnerabilities (to AOE damage for example).

[Mánagarmr]

That's not an entirely dumb suggestion, I must say. I just figured that if oversaturation is a general problem, then lowering the overall ship count would be a better solution, but now that I understand that this only happens in rare extreme cases (such as the aforementioned multi-HW games), I fully agree with your suggestion.