I have exactly what we need:  yet another lame idea to give carriers somewhat of a nerf.

Instead of any of the above ideas, how about this?

Fighter Pools

Instead having fighters be completely "free" and unlimited, how about a "pool" that has to be maintained?  Fighters are added to the pool  by being built from a shipyard and/or planet.  Fighters are removed from the pool when they replenish a carrier's destroyed fighters or stock a brand new carrier with fighters.  Every fighter has maintenance -- maybe have 'active' fighters (the fighters every carrier/starbase/planet/etc.) cost a lot more than 'reserve' fighters (fighters in the pool).  Also, maybe make replacing destroyed fighters take a turn -- so if your carrier loses fighters in a fight, it won't instantly have them replaced for the next fight in the same game turn.  To make even more a nerf, maybe require a carrier to be within the parent civilization's cultural borders to replace fighters, so carriers operating deep within enemy territory will have to move back to home turf to have their destroyed fighters replaced.

Another possible idea is to make fighters 'sub-tiny' -- maybe have half the mass cap of a 'tiny' hull.  Actually, I'm not 100% sure they use a tiny hull's mass cap ... but if they do, maybe make them smaller than Tiny.

Are you playing with a mod?  I've taken my carrier group into a battle, lost half my fighters but won that battle, started another battle with the same group the same turn and all of my fighters were restored.

I am running 1.03 as well.  That is strange.

I could see this working as well, however, you still have the logistics issue.  I can have 17 modules on a huge hull, this means that I would have 34-51 fighters depending on the carrier module.  with a logistics cap of 40 currently I can have 4 carriers with equal amount meaning I have the following...

A fleet of 4 huge ships with 136 small fighters using 40 logistics, equivalent to 448 logistics.

or make the fighters count against the cap. then you get.

A fleet of 1 huge ship with 34 fighters using 112 logistics over cap, can't add anymore ships.

One could argue they would never be able to add ships to a fleet with the carrier, however, the carrier essentially is a fleet of small ships, potentially larger than normal, and still potentially OP.

Then you make a cap on carrier modules as I suggested capping Huge hulls at 3 or 4.

You then get up to a logistics score of 46 potentially allowing you to add other ships to the carrier fleet if you can get your logistics cap up to 60.  Then you possibly though have the carrier under powered being each carrier took up space preventing weapons or shields on the huge ship.  

Then I argue if you count the carriers against the logistics cap you either don't count the Huge hall toward the cap or count each carrier module as "3" or "5" depending on the carrier module meaning that each ship doesn't add but, the module does and offsets some of the initial logistics cap balancing some of this out.  Example as below.

1 huge ship with 4 low end carrier modules (8 small ships or 24 logistics normally) then has logistics cap of 22.  

This then allows other ships to be added to fleet, offsets for the space needed for carriers still counts against the cap and doesn't make it as OP using the above option from Chibiabos.  In reality it's like having a free huge hall ship in the fleet, however, wouldn't be as strong as a huge hull ship with no carrier modules being one wouldn't be able to put as many weapons/armor/engines/extras on it.  This, however, does give the carriers a little extra (which I believe is the design) with out going overboard.

You're going to break ship designs either way, I would suggest they put something like this into play when they break the sensor ships that way you're breaking all the ships all at once instead of breaking ships multiple times.

Fundamentally what we are discussing is not AI balance, but weapon balance.

Regardless of how the AI uses it, right now carriers are so strong that they beat equivalent weapons and defense modules. And as the old saying goes "an obvious choice is not a choice at all".

The goal is to make carriers useful but different from other types of modules your ship can employ, so that its a strategic decision whether to use them or not.

The AI can be balanced around whatever is decided, though it should be noted that some of the ideas here "such as forcing ships to return to their borders to restock fighters" would be much harder to code than ones such as "fighters are rebuilt every X turns".

Not really, no.

It's a balance issue, but not a balance issue that gives a player an unfair advantage - it's one that kills interesting choices. Currently, running a carrier-based fleet is by far the best option regardless of your other techs. The only counter-strategy to carrier spam is carrier spam (this is also true of early-game colony spam). That's bad for the game, since it makes playing a matter of 'correct' and 'incorrect' choices, rather than various options. There should always be multiple valid strategic choices for the player to make (tall vs wide, laser vs missiles vs drivers etc); the moment you're faced with a no-brainer choice that's poor design.

Yea BUt, and i hate to bring real life into the game,  a carrier is king of the seas (and space in this case.  Don't get me wrong, i agree with much of what has been said and suggested.  Just do not want to see the Carrier nerfed into just another ship. 

I have had some very good fights against AI carrier based fleets with no carriers in my fleet and won,  so it is not true that they always win the day.

Not arguing that nothing should be done,  just playing devils advocate  

What Chibiabos said...

The problem is that carriers are considered support ships and are not the top target priority for any ship class. One of the first goals of tactics is to reduce the eyes and ears and voice of the opposing force. That means support ships that improve attack, defense and any other operational support for the fleet. That is what interceptor or assault ships should be going for. They should only be concerned about escorts or guardians as they fly by on the way to the real targets. One or the other of these classes should be hunting the carriers -- the real threat to your continued existence. The Battle of Midway was about sinking carriers, not shooting down other fighters.

The other issue is that the fighter needs to be tiny, not small in size. A thruster, weapon and (maybe) light defenses with a shell around them to hold them together is a fighter. Tiny ships have about half the hits of a small, which makes them easier to swat -- they're supposed to be mosquitoes, not beetles.

Both of those changes would make carriers a bit less op, even if you gave them four tiny fighters compared to three small ones.

Okay Ultimately I think as many have said there are many good idea's this is what I think most of you seem to agree with (some exclusions.)

Something needs to be done with carrier modules.

• Most seem to be okay with limiting carrier modules per ship type or greatly increasing cost/size of modules.
• The fighters on carriers should be tiny and or count some against logistics cap.
• If fighters don't count against logistics cap, the modules should.
• Enemies should target carriers if in range.
• Carriers should be a little more powerful than ships without carriers.

Fighters should not be the best of the best.

• Instead should be either created from a pool selected by the player.
• Should only re-spawn over time or in (ZOC) or by docking at a shipyard/star base/planet.
• Fighters should have their own tech tree to be researched.

To me that seems to be where most points are pointing too.  I personally love the ideas and I hope Paul, Brad and the rest of the Galactic Civilizations III team does too.  Keep the great ideas coming

I've started out the code for a Carrier balance mod.

Changes so far:

• AssaultFighters changed to Tiny.
• Carrier module maintenance raised from 0.75 to 2.5 (all types, 3.5 for escort).
• Carrier module mass raised from 70 to 85 (assault); 48 to 65 (drone/guardian); 70 to 110 (escort)
• Carrier module manufacturing cost raised from 68 to 350 (assault); 300 (drone/guardian); 550 (escort)
• Carrier modules to use use normal mass, rather than supportmass - no 30% reduction from early tech.
• Carrier module threat raised from 6 to 9 (12 for escort)
• Carrier module value raised from 10 to 15 (20 for escort)
• EscortCarrier modules made compatible with AssaultCarrier modules as a strict upgrade: 2 to 4 fighters. I would like to introduce an actual EscortFighter which is Small (much like the current one), but that'll take a bit more work.

I like a lot of the other suggested ideas, I just don't know how codable they are. You *can* theoretically have fighters with fixed tech levels quite easily by using Static blueprints, but currently modding ShipStaticBlueprintDefs.xml causes a CTD.

The code is here: https://github.com/TurielD/Carrier-Balance-Mod 

I invite anyone who's interested to contribute

That is not easily programmable with the current way ship designs are set up.

hay bud

Good recap.  Don't see the above 2 as being feasible or more accurately (cause SD can do anything ) attention would be better spent elsewhere imo.