The devs have put on their roadmap a "fleet builder" concept. This will allow a player to build a series of ships as a "fleet collection" rather than spitting out individual ships turn by turn. Its a cool concept, and one that I think a large amount of the player base will enjoy. But it does have a pretty major balance impact to the game, and its worth discussing before that concept is finalized to decide how best to address the new problem.
Lets first dig in on what the issue is, and then look at some options to address it.
Understanding the Power of Ships - The Two Methods
When thinking about how "good" a ship is in your fleet, there are two principal metrics.
This is the metric of how best to build the "ultimate fleet". Your goal is to fill the logistics "slots" of a fleet with the best ships possible in the most optimum configuration for what you plan to fight. Its most important when you have time in between wars to build fleets, and your willing to trade time for long term performance.
This is how good a ship is compared to how fast you can get it into the game. This metric comes most important when you are still building up your fleets (such as a sudden war declaration you were not prepared for) or often as a war goes on and you suffer attrition from your initial fleets and need to replenish your forces. Its less about getting the absolute best performance, and more about something now is more powerful than something later.
Our discussion today will mainly focus on the second metric.
One Ship per Turn - A Key Balance Mechanic
When it comes to large ships, they tend to actually underperform on logistics cost. If I can have 1 cruiser or 6 fighters in a fleet, the 6 fighters often bring more firepower and actually soak more damage due to evasion and the overkill effect (if a fighter dies in one shot but still gets hit with 5 others, at the end of the day it soaked all of that damage).
They also tend to underperform on military cost. A cruiser might cost 150+ military, a fighter 25, so again 6 fighters for the same cost.
HOWEVER, there is a key balancing agent here, the 1 ship per turn mechanic. For my big spacedocks with a lot of military, I often can build a cruiser in 1 turn. So if my choice is generating 1 cruiser every turn.....or 1 fighter every turn....the cruiser clearly wins in this case.
So what tends to happen in games is that you get a natural mixed fleet effect due to the differing levels of spacedock production. Your best spacedocks produce capital ships, your middle docks produce frigates, and your weak docks produce fighters. This is great, by using a mixture of ships you get the most amount of ship per turn possible, which is very important when dealing with wars of attrition (which high level AIs are pretty good at).
But...the current fleet designer concept will remove this restriction. In theory a spacedock might produce 3 cruisers in 3 turns or 18 fighters in the same time period. This breaks down the mixed fleet concept, and now we return to raw power per military....what ship type gives me the best bang for the buck. And while targeting will make certain ship types useful here and there, you will still see the game ruled by the smaller ships in general based on current ship stats.
Fixing the Problem
Now that we have defined the problem, lets discuss ways to fix it.
Logistics = Capital, Time = Small
I mentioned before that right now small ships tend to win out both in military cost AND logistics performance, but they don't have to. You could lower the logistics footprint of larger ships. This means that the "ideal fleet" will actually be capital ship heavy. So now you have different priorities based on your current need. If your not at war, and looking to build the best fleet possible....go capital heavy. But if you need fleets now, or need to keep replenishing what you've lost.... than you build the more military efficient small ships.
This helps, though you still deal with problems such as frigates vs fighters or cruiser vs battleships. It still comes down to what ship will be the most optimal for what your looking for, and it will be hard to justify any other type. I don't think this alone will solve the problem but its a good start.
Splash Damage
The Anti-Matter bomb right now is the sole "splash weapon" in the game, and completely changes the dynamics of late game combat. Swarms of fighters and especially frigates, which were once very powerful.... can now get hard countered by AM ships. This forces players to either start beefing up their fighters/frigates with hp modules or shift towards fleet that are more capital heavy until the AM ships are taken out.
You could introduce other such weapons earlier in the game.....perhaps not as wide or as much damage as the AM bomb but still a splash type weapon. In this model, small ships would still be the best bang for the buck in standard performance....BUT would have a harder counter. Therefore swarms have to be used carefully, if you can avoid the splash ships....you will dominate, but take a few too many splash hits in the face and watch your entire fleet fall to ruin.
Support Modules
Adding additional support modules naturally creates a desire for a couple of capital ships with these modules surrounded by a swarm of light ships benefiting from those modules....which I would argue is the kind of mixed fleet the game wants to encourage.
Also, you could consider a support module like:
Gemini Module: The ship now fires two barrages at two different ships, each at half your weapon strength (or maybe 1/3 strength for balancing, whatever is needed).
This kind of thing allows bigger ships to become a more "anti-swarm" vessel, so it provides a way to make them more competitive at countering swarms.
Stronger Defenses
Defenses tend to be best on bigger ships, but defenses in GC4 are "weaker" than the equivalences in previous GC games. It comes down to attrition, historically defenses in GC didn't wear out quickly, they provided a constant supply of damage soak or tended to wear out slowly. Currently defenses give out pretty fast, which is one of the reasons large ships tend to get outperformed by swarms. You could consider making defenses stronger which would make larger ships more competitive as a defensive soak. Or you simply could apply this to the type, for example perhaps Battleships have +25% armor/+25% shields as a property of the ship type as an example.
Harder Supply Limits
A more stringent form of balance is some kind of supply system. Perhaps each ship consumes 1 "supply" regardless of size, and so even though a swarm is more powerful....its very supply inefficient, creating optimizations where again mixed fleets have better performance. This would require the most work as you would need to add in mechanisms for such a supply but its an option.
So those are my thoughts. There is still a good amount of time before the fleet builder concept is realized, but its good to start thinking about what adjustments should come along hand in hand with the builder concept so that we don't have to deal with a few versions of very bad ship balance when the concept is unveiled.
What do you think?
