[balance] Remove -75% build penalty on Carriers!

Actually the Build penalty has been great , and I still use carriers as a means of making my oppoenent overbuild flaks which i can just overcome with superior lrfs.

I think the balance is fine..

Maybe 50% for bombers tho. THAT WOULD BE ACE

I realize that you can use carriers to make your enemys spam flacks but that is not the point. carriers are not ment to be used to trick your enemy, they should be able to destroy your enemy. if you have just a few flack in your fleet, they will counter more fighters squads than themselves just because they were brought to the level they should have been when carrier spamming was a "Problem".

really you can build LFs to trick your enemy into overspamming LRFs but that is not a LFs primary role in combat. it may be a stratagy but LFs still counter carriers, flack and support cruisers like they are supposed to. cariers don't.

Now with flack buffed and carriers nerfed there is almost no point in building carriers just because fighters are killed off and are not replaced at all.

first:

when did this happen? are you talking about 1.17? did it JUST come out...?

If so, your complaining before the official change log thread... wowzies...

perhaps it makes carriers more stratigic... perhaps it will make it a better startigy to dock your strike craft untill you can either distract the enemy flacks, or you move in some units (preety much anything) to keel the flacks.  Bombers can kill flacks too.

no this has been around since 1.16. it has just recently become a more public debate.

Since flack can kill squads of fighters easily, and carriers were--and i am just guessing here so don't rail me for this--used mainly for fighters.  Now about the only point for carriers is for bombers--whcich is what i use light carriers for already. It would be nice to reduce the nerf because then it would be more reasonable to build carriers again to help counter lrfs

YES the Nerfs on carriers needs to be removed or reduced to 25%. That'S all this game needs to once again have every ship matter in a battle. And to stop the over favorotising of 1 ship class. And ever if noob spam carriers it doesn'T matter because they can be hard countered by LFs and now FLak as well sicne it got the bost it needed. LEaving them as they are is just breaking the game.

you people whine too much. first everyone wanted a nerf on the carriers now you want a boost. jesus christ make up your mind.btw flaks worked if you used them right before anyway.

I think the biggest issue is that everyone seems to use a tight fleet formation.  You try to pack as many units into a small space as possible, maximizing threat range overlaps, including those of flaks.  This greatly diminishes the usefulness of strike craft mobility.  I think if the game were changed to encourage more sparse fleet formations, flak would have a much harder time covering the large distances, and strike craft would excel due to their mobility.  This would also be a buff to faster units like LF.

actually, as far as I could determine, the penalty IS only 25%. if you look at those carriers with enemy forces in the grav well, it will say 'strike craft build rate 75%'. that means it is AT 75%, not reduced BY 75%. this is evidenced by the fact that a light carrier under attack displays 38% which is exactly those 75% times the 50% you get when under attack (which was there right from the start and affects pretty much everything that can house squads). if you guys say even those 25% are too much, maybe because of a similar buff to flak, ok. I'm not a balance expert, but at least let's get the facts right. and I am pretty damn sure that I understood this correctly.

also, where do you get the info that 1.02 (talking about entrenchment versions here) changed anything? I checked the 1.02 log and it says nothing about changes either to flak or light carriers. big changes came with 1.01, while 1.02 was mostly fixing some issues like the emergency government upgrade and ai surrender. if somethat was in fact changed and it was not listed in the change log, then let me say, this makes me unhappy. then, either you publish rough changelogs without going too much into details or you publish everything and every balance change. but then, the past logs documented changes pretty well, so I'd be surprised if a flak buff got overlooked in the log.

now, if I am mistaken, please go ahead and correct me.

The build rate is in red and in sins terms that is a 75% reduction in build rate. Plus the change was brought in to entrenchment in 1.00 or 1.01. Cannot remember exactly but it was there near the start. I for one like the build reduction and LFs wont hurt a really well rounded fleet with some repair ships and the appropriate captial IMO.

Wrong people called for a buff of the flak frigates by a large majoraty. Only a tiny minoraty wanted a nerf on carriers.

This would destroy the game and/or effectively remove the Advent as a race from the game.

Would not. Remember advent alos have LFs. They also ahve 3 SC wing per carriers. It would demand advent players to amke choises like Vasari and TEC players thou.

Just so everyone is on the same page.  This penalty, as far as I'm aware, is specific to Entrnchment.  Vanilla sins does not have it.

But part of the Advent's strength is that its fleet benefits synergistically from being in close proximity to the capital ships and guardians having various range-limited abilities that buff up and peserve the fleet.

My statement was more abstract; I didn't suggest any specific changes to accomplish what I talked about, only what I believed to be the general issue.  Obviously there would be balance implications, and not just for Advent, that would need to be dealt with.  However, I think more fleet strategy with regards to positioning and tactics would be a definite step forward for the game.

you cant counter LRF / FLAK combo with scouts,flak eat mass scouts for breakfast.....only answer to this is kodiaks with their own suppor.but then we have the fagvent repulsing them away...

OH btw.AI in this is game not just bad,or horrible bad.IT SUCKS.CAPITAL SHIPS WHEN REPULSED FROM THE DIRECTION THEY TRY TO MOVE TO - START TO ACT IDIOTIC AND KEEP CRASHING INTO THE REPULSE BARRIER WHICH IS DEATH.AI AND PATHFINDING SUCKS ASS.

I find carriers still more useful than flak to mix with lrf's.  Early on with fighters you can take out a few of their lrf's before they get shot down, making the lrf vs. lrf tilt in your favor.  Later on you have bombers vs. heavy cruisers and starbases whereas they're still stuck with flak.  Over all I think it works fine, it just isn't as dominating as it used to be.

Jix is right, it'd screw up the Advent pretty bad (the fleet dispersal thing).

If you did something like that, you'd also have to introduce an option to change the formation of your fleet (ie: position of what genre of ship goes where) - just one pre-set formation wouldn't cut it anymore. While this would make for some nice/interesting variety, it would also unfortunately fudge the balance of the game right out the window (not to mention drastically increase the need for micromanagement skills, and thus make the game less accessible to some customers), and be way too much of a p.i.t.a. to solve.

So to that effect: I veto your motion, Darvin3.

-Itharus

For some reason I thought it was 50%, but I think the penalty needs to stay. If carriers were easier to destroy I could see reducing it, but as it is even with a good amount of LRMs and LFs it is hard to kill more than one carrier before they either start winning the battle or retreat. And now that we have starbases following them if they retreat it is probably not a good idea unless you have a significantly larger fleet.

Also, though I don't use it as much any more, don't you dare do anything to stop my advent battleball!

Also I completely agree with Juan. Carriers are much better support than flak.

The thing is GoaFan77 since fighters are so easily destroyed, you don't need to worry about killing the carriers. you can kill his first wave of fighters off pretty wuick then every few minutes you get a wave of squadrins with 1 fighter. What is the point of trying to kill the carrier if it cant hurt your fleet? By using flack in your fleet carriers just become wastes of fleet points, nothing else.

Really i would much rather have flack suporrting my fleet because it over counters the 1 most used counter to lrms. If they waste their money on carriers I laugh at them. just because they just wasted money on a ship that wont help them one bit.

top vasari: clearly you dont build much fighters. If i am your opponent and you are following your own advice and i have carriers i spam bombers and send them after your buildings and caps.

anyway...

I think that the build penalty should be only for carriers that are engaged. Or they are in the midst of a battle. If there is a battle going on in a grav well and your carriers are in said grav well but they are on the far side of the grav well from the battle then they should not have a build penalty. So they should make it so there is a build penalty on a carrier ONLY if enemy units (should include SC) are within a certain range of said carrier.

This would result in players mad rushing LFs or even scouts to carriers but i would like this much better than current

But a current way to avoid build penalties is to keep you carriers on the edge of the grav well and once their SC has been depleted then retreat them to your next planet over ( a star would be better) and then send then back over once the SC are rebuilt (not really effective if the jump lane is long)

That would be fine with me. If the ship is actually under fire then yeah slap on a build rate penalty. The crew is trying to keep the ship alive with repairs and not building fighters. Sounds good!!

What if we removed the build penalty while the fighters/bombers were docked? That way they' be removing their air presence in the well for a shorter reproduction time, and allow the squadrons to fill. Does that seem like a good trade-off?

Could add an interesting micro management aspect.

I would be okay with this too, if we really need to do anything with the carriers. Derek's idea would be harder to implement (and what do you mean by engaged, getting shot at or just near enemy ships).

And top Vasari, so what if all your fighters get shot? You just retreat them where you have a star base waiting and they are free to regenerate their fighters and then they just come back. Every time they do this they will probably destroy some of your ships but they can easily escape without losing a carrier (unless you build several phase jump inhibitors, but even then they can probably blow them up before you can destroy very many of them).