Carrier Battles Mod

[Captain Kwok]

There should be a tech area with the beneficial gifts and other positive items that the AI doesn't research, since it doesn't understand them.

[Suicide Junkie]

Yeah. That is definitely gonna be done.
Perhaps as a racial tech "Good Samaritans: Allows access to helpful intel projects"

The main problem with getting the AI repair ships as I understand it, is that it would use up one of the warship design types. And the AI can't really afford to lose one.

Putting one of the small, high tech repair bays onto larger carriers could be a good solution.


An interesting political setup has appeared in my game:
- The drushocka are offering treaties, while everybody else is getting quite grouchy.
Since the druk are Neutral culture that might make some sense. Although Traders and Pacifists are the ones that really benefit from treaties.

[Suicide Junkie]

An interesting thing here on the comparisons chart:
After 40 turns on medium tech start. 7 races, 3 neutrals...

The Eee appear to have lost their homeworld on turn 35.
The Drushocka had their homeworld blockaded on turn 38, but liberated it on the next turn.
The Ukra Tal had their homeworld blockaded on turn 20, liberated it on the next turn. It was down to 50% production, so it took some damage. Then on turn 26, it was hit again. This time it only lost a little bit more, to maybe 40%. They are slowly rebuilding.
The Terrans had their homeworld blockaded on turn 35, and it only came back to 50% as well.


Half the AI races have had major attacks on their homeworlds by other AIs.
Some defense bases may be in order.

[Captain Kwok]

You can use one of the other design type designations (like attack base etc) for a repair ship design.

[Suicide Junkie]

Well, having played a couple of decent battles, I think I need to do some work on the missiles. They're really dominating in combat, especially the light explosives, which pack enough firepower to hurt ships, but are also really fast.

Missile speeds will definitely be adjusted downwards. That may be enough.

I believe Rollo is already using all the available designs.
The nature of CB is that you need a wide variety in ships to field, and we picked the X most important types I could think of, where X was the number of available AI design slots, including attack base.

[Will]

Hmm, wasn't aware of a hard-code limit to the number of designs an AI can have. Pity, since CB basically encourages using as many designs as possible.

Also, a suggestion for a sort of tweak to the mod overall; is there a setting for Combat To Hit Defense for planets? I know it's normally an obscenely big penalty, but how about changing it to a really big bonus? Explain it away as atmospheric interference, or difficulty targeting a specific spot on a constantly rotating sphere, whatever; but the result is, a lot of the damage to planets caused by direct-fire weapons is nullified, and you really would have to use Planetary Bombardment Missiles to glass a planet, or capture it with troops. Or just spend a really long time bombarding it with "conventional" weapons.

[Ed Kolis]

Yes, there is a setting in Settings.txt; I think it's called "Planet Defense Modifier" or somesuch...

[Suicide Junkie]

That is an interesting idea.

It should be noted that tiny planets can easily have hundreds of thousands of hitpoints already, due to troops acting as planetary armor.

1% hit rates would require tens of millions of damage points to be thrown at the planet in order to clear it. Not a bad proposition, actually. Rollo's AIs seem to be fairly good at dropping troops, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem for them.

[Will]

It would also have the effect of drawing out battles more. I see a huge parallel between the inspiration between Carrier Battles and WWII Pacific theatre. Battles over tiny islands would go on for months at a time, and it wasn't really an option to just bring a few warships alongside the island and shell it until all the enemy resistence suddenly stopped. It was necessary to send troops ashore, and systematically root out all enemy strongholds, which still took a long time, but was generally faster than trying to pick them off at a distance

Then, Planetary Bombardment Missiles become the equivalent of nukes, ICBMs. No precision necessary, just fling it in the general direction of those English pig dogs, and let the massive taunt defeat them

[Suicide Junkie]

A refresh of the download link for those who want to try this out:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...?Number=408927


Hmm... Nukes & ICBMs?
PBMs are very very slow, easy to pick off if you have air defenses still. And they'll only kill a couple turns worth of infantry or tent to twenty tanks each.


Game Update
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Turn 55.
The Terrans and Ukra-Tal have lost their homeworlds permanently.
The CueCappa and the Vikings have stagnated, and there aare now six races that are about 50% higher score than them.
The CueCappa have lost a lot of ships recently... A small attack on my borders, followed by a huge attack that wiped out most of my assault fleet that was gathering. Unfortunately attrition is not going their way, since they are not building new ships very fast at all.

I think the EEE homeworld may have been infected with a plague... their population is dropping steadily for the last 20 turns. I suppose it wasn't glassed, but is merely rioting.