AI using only latest ship class...stupid!!!

The AI in the Balance Mod uses a few different ship sizes.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I agree there should be a nice range of different ships sizes.It would also help the A.I being able to mobilize larger fleets.

I think you mean the dreadnaught should be 100 times more expensive to maintain.

That only makes sense if you are going to make the DN 100 times as powerful as the DS... which requires a complete rewriting of the whole system to handle. Fine for a mod, but rather drastic for stock at this point.

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If a DN costs 5 times as much to maintain relative to strength, it is 100% useless. Why ever bother with them when you get 5 times as much raw strength from smaller ships? Concentration of power and defenses is not worth _that_ much.

Unless you plan to also give them Impervium armor to make them very hard to damage by the smaller ships, thus forcing everyone to build them for no reason but to comply with the rules of Impervium...

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The fact is we need to use the basis of WW2 fleets because all 4X game do,and it sucks to not have any use for all those smaller ships in battle..Bigger stuff will always be more expensive and harder/longer to build even for super-advanced interstellar empires.

Frigates are always useful. The problem is with destroyers and the smaller sizes after light cruiser. Has anyone found a reason to use them? I didn't play with those sizes long enough to find out what could be their purpose.

I bet somebody said the same thing about air combat, and imagined battle lines of zeppelins maneuvering to "cross the T" for a broadside. Face it, space combat will be a whole thing of its own and it's only the conventions of science fiction that make us treat it like navies. I cite the Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy on space combat:

Noumenon: Thank you for the link. It's a really good read (and some good laughs).

But you already have that! Perhaps they are not as powerful as you suggest, but it probably would seriously screw up the game balance.

Torpedo boats.... Are you totally insane? You can build those already. BUT, no one does since they SUCK and get blown away really fast.

(since at least one person will wonder: use no armor and shielding and the longest range weapons you have. Torpedo boats are tincans with idotic amounts of firepower.)

Oh, so you are not really complaining about sizes being not different and useful enough, as to the AI not being able to use them effectively. This is not really a "bug", albeit you might consider it as a minor one.

I don't think the AI will ever be able to use different ships sizes correctly, and the more distinct they will be, the harder it will be to teach it.

And I strongly disagree, missile frigates or "archers" can win you many fights without even have their paint scratched. (Many players even consider them being overpowered)

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It not only hurts the A.I in maintenance costs and fleet sizes but also kill its ability to react to war because of slower build times.Is there a way to mod this so the A.I builds mainly mid range ships with fewer low and high class ships?

"And I strongly disagree, missile frigates or "archers" can win you many fights without even have their paint scratched. (Many players even consider them being overpowered)"

True. but they have several shortcomings, complete lack of fighter defense, and anything with weapons of equal range can mangle them rather quickly, even if it has less firepower. Also they tend to get shredded by the "satellite bobby trap" approach to securing warp points. Why? Missiles can't target satellites, and the satellites will be in firing range as they exit the warp.

Of course they have their own counters. But you can't honestly tell they "SUCK".

I absolutly agree with the statement above. I try to fight with brain and they just come and rush and shoot everything down with rockets and this with my "good" working point defense.

No strategy no brain just build and rush and hope that you build faster than your enemy.

Best wishes for conquering the univers.
Schinkera

So much horrible misunderstanding of the game mechanics... C&C style actions? Seriously? :rollseyes:

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For the standard game, it's not a bad strategy to build primarily larger ships. With less hull space devoted to engines and support components, larger ships have more firepower per kT of size which is further enhanced by the standard game's weapon mounts. However, the standard AI is really in need of some refinement and detailing, which shows up in generally poor vehicle designs and less than stellar orders.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I'd worry more about the standard game's annoying habit of building ships until its economy can no longer support further building due to all the maintenance costs, effectively hamstringing itself.

There are advantages and disadvantages of larger ships vs smaller ships.

Larger ships are (generally) tougher to take down, and can mount more weaponry. But, they can only be in one place at one time.

Smaller ships are almost always cheaper (special fuels concerns aside) and you can put the firepower that the money one larger ship would have bought into several locations by buying several smaller ships instead.

In today's Navy, smaller ships act as escorts for the larger ships, finding targets and things targeting them so that the larger ships can pound opponents into rubble or artificial reefs. They also help by showing the flag and projecting power into a greater number of locations than USN CVA's possibly could without having the planes land on land.

In a game such as SE, there are really very few reasons to make smaller ships. Cruisers and smaller ships are faster than ships larger than Cruisers, and as such can reach hot spots and hopefully do some destroying long before the heavies would show up. They also have an easier time chasing down enemy combatants that are fleeing due to no more weapons, but have undamaged drive rooms (though IMO Fighters fill this role best). This, of course, relies on keeping fleets close to home in centralized reaction nodes, rather than keeping them on the edges of your empire, either expanding those edges or holding them against others who want the stellar territory.

The best strategy game that had the question "hordes of small ships or a few big tough ones?" was the original Master of Orion. It only had 4 sizes of ship, but for the price of a single huge ship you could build several hundred small ships (small, medium, large, huge are how I remember the sizes, though the in game names were different IIRC). The differences in build costs, and the way that all ships in a fleet of a given class moved as a single unit, made the question of Huge or Small a relevant one. Games since have not - they have always favored significantly the larger ships.

Yeah.... that is pretty silly. Especially since most aren't useful to them. I mean really.... Why build 12 transports and have all of them hanging out at your homeworld doing nothing?

1.44/BM1.09
So this has been a rant about how the standard game does it, but I noticed a few dozen posts back that CK said the BM AI used a range of ship sizes, any more detail about that? How does the BM do with fleets and ship sizes, ect. I'm only a short time into my first game, and enjoying the hell out of it, but so far I've only seen lone frigates or small groups of them, enenmy fleets with a mix of frigates and transports, single destroyers on patrol, and a few carriers hanging around the home worlds. How complex does the BM AI get?

It depends on how advanced the game is. AI fleets usually consist of transports (Supply, Repair, Mine Sweepers), Patrol Ships (Destroyer sized), Carriers, Point Defense Ships (max at Cruiser size), Defense Ships (Largest size), Attack ships (Largest size), and Attack Bases (Base Ship size). You'll also see Scout Ships (Frigates) used for scouting throughout the game. It's not perfect by any means, but it is improving.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Well that sounds miles above using only the largest present class, so thanks very much for that! I agree with the OP that using only the largest class is off-putting. Keep up the good work on the BM.

I just say go back to playing S.E. IV, it's way better in my opinion.

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WHY SHOULD I FEAR WHAT WRONG I HAD NOT DONE?

~Ardius (me)

did you test this theory with your spacefleet??

But seriously how much real life experience does anyone have here??

Except the standard AI in SE:IV follows the same build the largest ship available routine.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

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Wait a second knowledge of warfare??? I'm just here because of the free donuts...

Groovy Baby Yeah!

I don't think it's such a bad thing the AI only builds the latest ship class. Personally I only tend to build the 2 latest ship classes. The reason is the way ship design is handled in the game. If you compare the cost it's like your spending more resources and space on all the engine components in those smaller ships and not getting nearly the same fire power. The larger ships often take out enemy forces larger then them with few losses. This is the other advantage if you try to make a swarm Fleet in SEV you better hope your can afford high production cost cause unless you do major damage to their fleet chances are you'll loss a lot of lil ships which will need replacing while they still have several large ships with a ton of firepower.

The other supposed down side if you can't cover as much ground. Well you don't need to the game has a TON of bottle necks because of the warp points. You can mine them, put sats up, or even build a station there. And as for defending your planets at home that is what WP, Fighters, and Sats are for. They do a good job especially against someone with small ships that often have poor PD cause they are ment for LR combat. This forces your enemy to choose either face you fleet head on to stop the advance or hope they can break through your defenses and hurt you enough to bring down your fleet from lack of maintance all while having to worry about keeping their own fleet maintance up. Not to mention they are probably deep in enemy lines so no fresh supplies.

But over all I think the lack of usefulness on ship sizes is from game design. You guys talk about how in warfare they use smaller ships for all these different uses well they aren't really needed in this game. I mean you don't need small ships scanning for the big ships to find stuff. The big ships have just as good of sensors as the small ships. There is not much need to send small ships out on patrol or to intimidate the enemy cause they don't respond to that and ships can't get through a warp point if you have a fleet parked there so no patrolling needed. And as for torp boat idea I usually refit my old small ships into missle boats and have them set to max range while my bigger ships take the beating. But I don't build any new smaller ships. Most of the task it seems you would expect from smaller ships are rendered fairly useless in these types of games.

Most games have poor maintance design so that having lots of small ships cost more then fewer larger ships and the same maintance cost in large can easily take out the smaller ship fleet. Two examples are from MOO series. In MOO2 the first ship size used 1 maintance point while the largest used 6 maintance points. Now 6 of the small ships couldn't do anything against 1 of the largest ships. Then in MOO3 which was a terrible game anyway they tried to force you to use other ships by requiring you to make "FLEETS" which you needed a curtain number of escort ships and picket ships. The only problem with this was the poor design which allowed you to put the larger ships like BS and DN in the escort and picket lines so there goes the need for small ships let again. Pax Imperium, Imperium Galactic, Galactic Civilizations, and so one. Most 4X games tend to have this problem as the tech gets better the ships get larger and more effecient use of space so people only build the largest ones.

I can understand you wanted to see the smaller ships for a more "realistic" feel but at the same time it doesn't add much to the game because most of the smaller ships roles aren't needed. The only way I really see it happening is with a mod. But you'd almost need to design new components for each ship size. After all a Battleship didn't just use like 5 frigate engines to move or use the same type of weapons. It had much larger guns with more firepower. I think the Mount system does a good job of representing that but since you often can not get as much damage out of them I don't think most people use them they just instead crame more non-mounted weapons on.

Look at the big brain on Pyromancer! Very good post there. It seems that making some of the smaller ships faster through space might help, that way you might have a qucik reaction fleet of frigate types and a main battle fleet of the biggies. While we're on the subject of historical fleets, at least some eras had fleets that were composed of nearly all of the same types. The brittsh era of sail had main battle fleets compsed of "ships of the line" which were nearly all the biggist things that technology allowed. Sure there were frigatews for scouting and raiding too, but the main fleet was mostly 64 gun heavies. Also, take the modern carrier force, its really only 2 ship sizes, despite the differences in terminology. Theres the carrier ... and everything else. Destroyers and cruisers are nearly the same size nowadays and all are twice the size of their WW2 counterparts. There are no PT size boats in a carrier fleet. Lastly, look at Starfleet, only capitol ships in that navy, with very few exceptions.

One modification that helps is to switch to a movement system which requires larger ships to use more engines in odrer to move a comparable distance. Balance mod does this and it works well. The result is that large ships and small ships both use a similar percentage of their hull size for propulsion. It makes no sense that a larger ship should be more efficient because it uses the same number of engines...

On top of that, I wonder if it would be possible to give frigates and other small ships an inherent movement bonus, similar to how solar sails and high-tech engines work in stock. Hull sizes can certainly have abilities, but I don't know if the bonus movement ability would work in this case.

Frigates, Destroyers and Light Crusers are already faster (maximum speed) than the bigger ships, and they need less engines in BM, therefore they are more efficient.

It is actually very possible to mod the game such that all ship sizes have more of a role (lots of SE4 mods did this). The first step is to implement more size-scaled components, such as QNP engines (getting the same speed takes the same percentage of hull space irregardless of ship size). You could scale things like CS, ECM, master computers, etc. if you like, but those usually aren't a critical portion of the ship cost. Next, get rid of the ridiculous weapon mount system. Either have no mounts, or make each mount have big tradeoffs (more range for less damage ratio, more raw damage for less damage ratio, etc.). A huge part of the problem with using small ships is that the weapon mounts makes them like paper. Taking out size requirements on the mounts helps (or you could craft special mounts for big vs. small ships). These things alone go a long way to making ship sizes more competitive.

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I thought the problem was that small ships were TOO powerful?