Carrier Battles Mod

[Captain Kwok]

As it was mentioned by others, the kinetic missiles only work when they can be auto-fired. SJ really intends the mod to be used with either auto-resolved combat or strategic combat.

What was the displayed cargo storage of the carrier? What was the tonnage of the fighters being added? Are you using the transfer cargo window? If your carrier has cargo space, there should be no reason why the fighters won't load.

Lastly, remember that you need to two types of components for movement. You'll need the reactors (for supplies) and drive thingies for actual movement points.

[Suicide Junkie]

Tactical just won't work, because the SE4 UI does not support clicking on missiles.

Fighters are intended to not be able to fly through space on their own. They must be delivered to the combat area via carriers, or have the combat come to them, ala planetary defense.

Not being able to load cargo is bizarre; I presume you are familiar with the standard SE4 interface. Perhaps a screenshot would shed some light on your situation.
A savegame would let us try it ourselves too.

[scJazz]

Black_Knyght said:
<SNIP>got hammered because not a single frackin' thing worked like it said it would.

One of the BEST things about this Mod IS the fact that NOTHING works the way it does in straight SEIV. That is the whole point, well not really the whole point but a major side-effect. I've spent 3 or 4 weeks now re-learning everything I knew about tactics, design, research, etc. It is frickin great!

Except the part about Plasma Weapons being totally useless nerf material which I still standby!

[Violist]

Plasma weapons are perfectly useful, just as the other weapons in CBmod are, but they're less immediately apparent.

1) They use no supply whatsoever.
2) They fire every turn.
3) Their costs make them extremely useful for balancing costs in large fleets, reducing build time and maintenance.
4) They have a large 'punch'.

The first point is fairly obvious in its meaning and benefits. Ships with energy weapons can continue fighting long past the limits of kinetic-armed ships, and they can devote all of their supply storage to engines. They have longer operational range and time than their kinetic kin. Especially if you plan to share supplies between ships and you have missile ships (which chew up supplies like there's no tomorrow), this is an important aspect to pay attention to.

Firing every turn is an enormous benefit in close-quarters combat and in large-scale operations. Ships on the front line will take lots of damage and they can't move around much, so they have to shoot at point-blank range into the enemy right next to them. You might find it interesting to put ships like this one in your simulator and watch how efficiently those twin cannon chew up ships. Short-range DF weapons are far superior to long-range DF weapons for massive battles.

Point 3 is extremely important to note. Everyone knows how horrible Stock SE4 is on this subject - everything is minerals. Life is minerals. If you are unlucky enough to start in an area without many minerals, you're going to die. Ships cost ridiculously high quantities of minerals to build and maintain. Energy weapons require radioactives almost exclusively, making them very useful for balancing firepower and cost from the scale of the individual ship to the scale of the 500-ship fleet. You won't be able to build as many as you can if the kinetics, but they'll keep your minerals cost down and make sure you can use your spaceyards with a lot more efficiency. Stock shipyards spend about 80% or more of their time sucking up minerals but they often build the orgs and rads in the first turn of construction. Keeping ship costs balanced means you can make better use of your colonies' resource amounts, can maintain your ships more effectively, and perhaps most importantly, build very powerful ships much faster.

This brings us to perhaps the deciding factor - damage. Leaky shields are very interesting in their effect of draining damage from each shot. I'm sure you're all aware of how futile it is to launch 50 20mm DUC shells at a ship with even 20 shield points. You're going to get 2 shots through to the hull. As the damage absorbtion on the target increases, so does the amount of 'punch' (damage per shot) required to break through the shielding and inflict damage that can be felt to the underlying hull. Let's examine the options...

Torpedo weapons - long range, massive damage that *increases* as range increases, long reload time (3). These weapons are the heaviest guns you can find, easily. But... they have hefty size requirements, and even their longer range won't be useful when the entire battle map is clogged up with 400 combat ships and literally thousands of fighters. Plus, they fire once and then they're useless for 3 turns. On the plus side, you can't put enough shields on a ship to protect it from a torpedo hit.

Beam weapons - long range, very high damage that trails off as range increases, medium reload time (2). Masers, Lasers, X-Ray lasers, GRasers, these guns do huge amounts of damage when they hit, and even the heaviest of shielding is well-nigh useless against them. However, they have an incredibly high cost in Rads, and they suffer from the same reload time problem that torpedo ships suffer from.

Projectile weapons - short range, good damage, negligible reload time. Projectile weapons have the best damage/turn/kt ratio of all the weapons in CBmod, and if they can get within range of the enemy, they'll slice through enemy ships like a tablesaw through... well, anything, really... the main disadvantage of projectile weapons is against ships with very heavy leaky shielding. Since even the 100mm ones do ~120-150 (not sure of the actual entire range here) per hit, if a high-tech ship with around 60-80 points of shielding goes up against a DUC ship, the armor will not have to absorb much damage to keep the ship fighting and alive.

Plasma weapons - the focus of this article. Plasma weapons are *almost* twice the damage of projectile, twice the size, and have slightly less cost than the beam weapons. It is important to note that on their own they are a very good mix of beam and projectile weapons. However, the trick here is the punch - while the extremely important ratio of (damage / turn / kT) isn't quite as good as the projectile weapons, they do a lot more damage *per shot*. This is important:

Consider a ship with 80 points of leaky shielding. We'll pit it against two potential designs in the safety of our minds. Each ship will spend 50 kT on weapons.

Design 1 features twin 100mm Depleted Uranium Cannon IIIs (114 damage each, up to 3 range). It will do 228 damage each turn to the enemy. However, due to the way leaky shielding works, each shot will lose 80 points of damage, thus, we'll get each shot doing 34 damage on average, for a turn total of 68. A lot worse than 228, no? Also, this will use up 100 supplies a turn...
Weapons cost: 1500, 0, 250
Damage lost to shielding: 70%

Design 2 features a single 100mm Plasma Cannon III, doing 209 damage to 3 range. It will similarly lose 80 points of damage per shot to the shields, but, since the damage is so much higher, it will be doing 129 damage a turn average.
Weapons cost: 250, 0, 4800
Damage lost to shielding: 38%

There is no denying that the plasma cannon is significantly more expensive, but note the difference in combat prowess. Design 1 has to make 4 times the number of shots in twice as many turns to pull off the same amount of damage to the hull as Design 2. In this time, enemy ships will be shooting at it, it might miss, it is blocking space that other ships need for moving around in...

Just imagine that the shielded target has some armor. 34 damage a shot is just enough to take out a single 20cm armor component of Tritanium. Another tech level up, and your projectile cannon can't even knock out 20cm armor. The only way it could do much damage would be to score a very low-probability lucky hit against a shield generator and reduce the shielding, whereas the plasma ship will be slicing out chunks of the hull with a vengeance.

Against heavily shielded enemies, plasma is clearly superior. Against enemies without much shielding - and for general purpose construction, due to cost - projectile is clearly superior. This is the beauty of CarrierBattles Mod. Everything is balanced very, very well.

Hope this helps

[Suicide Junkie]

It should be noted that in that particular example you used, the 100mm DUCs would be dealing 34 more damage than the shields can handle, and that damage adds up each turn.

Although it would take more than one round worth of hits, the higher tech armor would slowly crack.

[Violist]

Good to note, yes. Still, one round is a lot of time.

[Jake Monroe]

nice little splurge there Vio. Very usefull. A+

[scJazz]

OK so I finished my first full CB game. I've played 2. The first one I quit around turn 120. I was just learning the ropes. I thought I'd provide some feedback from the viewpoint of first time player. This is not meant to be a list of suggestions or complaints. It is simply what I think after having played one game and some of the experiences I had while playing it.

My playing style: Always research intensive, always try upgrading ships, always get the Propulsion Expert trait!

First and foremost I enjoyed the experience!!! So whatever else I say in this post should be viewed through this lens.

1) The game lasted until roughly turn 210. This is about twice as long as a stock or TDM game. TDM is the only other mod I've ever played. I was playing against high number of high difficulty AIs with no bonus as suggested in the docs. My feeling is that the game took so long because of the very large number of ships involved, the difficulty/inability to easily destroy planetary defenses, and the overall requirement to basically capture every enemy planet. Adding to this is the relatively slow speed of the ships. I was using basically speed 6 for nearly every design up to the very end. Around turn 170 I started mass producing a speed 8 destroyer design. Normally, at the end of a game I'd be using speed 13 battlecruisers and just glassing every world I came across.

2) I liked the QNP. I hated the fact that the larger exhaust ports were basically unusable because of the loss of efficiency. So I was forced into using warship designs with rediculous numbers of small ports. The only designs I used the larger ports on were non-combatant support ships like the fighter ferry/transports. I would have used larger ports but I felt that the inefficiencies of thrust vs weight basically were too high and would put my combatants at too high a risk of losing full speed due to battle damage.

3) The leaky designs were really freakin cool!

4) It was a complete pain to repair my fleet escorts! The whole repair bay/repair facility thing was pretty annoying and time consuming. I appreciated the whole concept of having to really setup fleet repair facilities and dedicating entire planets to the task with years of setup required. Still the large number of very small easily damaged components left me with a significant management task of constant repairs throughout the game. This got a bit old. I've started my second game and after the initial push I'm considering using the small number of very large components approach. Minimal use of 20mm mounts, larger engine ports, minimal use of 20cm armor. Perhaps this will work out and I won't feel the loss of efficiency too much though even writing the last two sentences irked me.

5) Missiles are just too damn slow. OK this part is a gripe. I had to use ship designs that were speed 6 because otherwise I was going to get jammed up with the whole fleet-outruns-the-missile-bombardment problem. Toward the end of the game when I was using speed 4 and 5 fighters primarily I nearly stopped production of my A series fighter bombers because of this very problem. In the end I just suffered ludicrous losses to this fighter class. I'd like to see the missile speeds increased at higher levels to maintain some sort of parity with the possible combat speeds of ships. Some might comment along the lines of missile speeds are just fine for me because a) I use slow ship designs b) always use strategy X which is superior. Whatever your point of view missile speeds totally do not work for me because they are too slow and don't fit anything in the way of my design philosophy or combat strategy. Along the same lines I never used the nuclear missiles because it just made this problem worse. Then there is the whole multiple salvos chasing after the target because it is retreating. Sets up a situation where 4 to 6 salvos are fired on a target over around 15 turns, the first salvo finally hits the target around turn 16 when the map border stops the retreat. Naturally this wastes supplies and causes target saturation problems. Missiles should be faster than the ships that they are designed to kill. Reference US torpedo design after the release of the Soviet Alfa attack sub for an object example. Speed up the missiles... the end.

6) Plasma cannons are useless in AI games because the AIs never use 100cm armor. Actually never saw them use anything but 20cm armor. DUCs seemed more useful because of their weight and cost. I'm sure that in a PBW game plasma cannons become useful but not against the AI. I never play PBW so... plasma cannons are nerf toys. BTW I only saw 2 fighter designs by one race out of like 8 AIs that used plasma cannons at all.

7) I got the impression that the AIs weren't varied enough. One game isn't enough to tell but they all seemed to use the same ship designs.

8) AIs kept having a problem with what I think were their PD or anti-fighter designs. I killed hundreds of these ships in 1 on 1 engagements. They would not return fire on my ships even though in cases they had range advantages and more than enough of a chance to shoot. Would it be better to weight the AI designs toward generally useful designs rather than specialized to avoid situations where the AI sends out dozens of these essentially useless ships to get blasted. Mind you I'm not saying the designs are useless I'm just pointing out that a more generalized approach for the AIs might be better because they don't use the ships correctly. Alternatively AI strategies could perhaps be changed so that PD ships will fire on ships and fighters, etc.

9) Not one AI used a PBM against any of my planets. OK not like they had much of a chance but they seemed intent on wasting their time using DF weapons against a few planets in totally fruitless and repeated attacks. Not sure what can be done about this... perhaps an AI cruiser that uses a few DF weapons and PBMs get to a very generalized attack strategy.

10) The mount descriptions make to hit chances unreadable in Tactical Combat. Take note I'm not manually fighting ships in Tactical but I do use it to get a feel for planetary defenses (which you can't see in any form in Strategic) or Fleet make-up (same problem). I wanted to go in and edit the descriptions to read 2c, 2cm, or 20 but never did. I get the impression that Mount descriptions should only be 1 character because of this issue.

11) AIs should use more Training Facilities. I think.

OK that is enough... there is more but this is a good chunk.

Again... I enjoyed the overall experience and am already at turn 50 of my 2nd game. Thank you SJ and the entire modding community for making SE so playable for so very very very long!

(NOTE: This entire post was written using Writely another cool toy from Google. It is currently in Beta @ www.writely.com. Check it out and help destroy the MEE known as M$!)

[Suicide Junkie]

Part of the overall AI weakness you are seeing is the fact that you are playing a sequential turn game.
AIs are hardcoded to treat it as simultaneous all the time.

---

The game is intended to involve trench warfare, but a fleet of Planetary Bombardment missile ships can either chew through it or soften the enemy up before your invasion.

About the size/number of components, I think you've got it.
#2 and #4 are your design tradeoffs. You can pack a bit more in, or you can make it easier to repair. And the large engines are much cheaper in resource cost too.

They are indeed pretty slow for open combat, but open combat is pretty hard on all the weapons.
Big densely packed fleets make all the weapons more effective; the targets won't be able to evade or run, and there will be a lots of targets to choose.
Choosing a strategy that spreads your fire around is also very important. Because of the leaky shields and armor, crippling an enemy is much easier than destroying them; 2 or 3 disabled enemy ships means less return fire than 1 vaporized ship. This is particularily so with missiles since they tend to overkill a ship.
I think I will increase the speeds by 1, however.

The size of the armor is not the important part of making plasma cannons more useful, but rather the shielding.
Strong shields can block most or all of a DUC shot, but plasma has almost double the punch.
Still, plasma is the least commonly used weapon. It does make an effective anti-planet gun; high power and no ammo means you can leave the ship in orbit to rain down death for as long as you need it to. The low accuracy is mitigated by the fact that there is no ammo needed and all the time in the world to blast away.

The AIs are indeed mostly the same. The only major differences are what culture they choose at the moment. Rollo should be around again this fall to finish up the AIs, I believe.

One on one engagements with a warship vs a PD ship are clearly one-sided. Even if they did fire, PD guns would bounce off your shields harmlessly and merely waste ammo.

I find that the AI tends to blockade a planet and send down suppressing fire while they bring in their troop transports. If you don't push them off fast enough, they'll eventually take the planet. And if the planet is undefended, they'll wipe it out with DF and move on. Not bad for an AI.

And as for training facilities, it is known that the AIs can't be made to use training except by blind luck. The training is quite slow and limited, which mitigates this somewhat.

--

Having defeated the AI, how do you feel about taking over an empty slot in a PBW game with real humans?

"Carrier Battles #8" and "Carrier Battles Deluxe #2b" both need one more player to replace Axel, who is doing well but got kicked in the head by real life.

It should be noted that these two games both are using older versions of the mod.
- CB8 uses v1.3e, which has oversized carriers (400-1000kt) and a different missile scheme, among other things.
- CBd2b uses v1.4a, which has a faster missile scheme and lacks some of the latest features such as AIs, logos and ruins.

Both games are at their peaks, with big empires, large navies and plenty of battles involving hundreds of ships.

PS:
I think the slow missiles in v1.6 may have been left over from when I was trying to fit a "missile propulsion" tech into the mod, which would increase their speed; 2 and 3 being the base low-tech speed.
I'll make a few more tweaks and release v1.6b soon.

[scJazz]

Violist said:
<SNIP>
You might find it interesting to put ships like this one in your simulator and watch how efficiently those twin cannon chew up ships. Short-range DF weapons are far superior to long-range DF weapons for massive battles.
<SNIP>
Hope this helps

About 2/3rd through my first full game I started production of a similar design. It became the single most produced class of ships.