Fighters and carriers

Don't know how about you, guys, but while I was recently thinking about creating fleets and own ship designs it came to me, that I really miss the swarms of little fighters during combat. Coz' right now what we basically have, are situations where let's say 3 fighters defend a whole planet against an invasion... or worse, 1 fighter and 1 troop transport makes a whole invasion fleet!
To counter that a bit I set some rules on myself:
1. When building fighter, instead of naming it like: "Barracuda" I prefer to name it: "Red Devils Squadron" and pretend, that there are much more than only 1 fighter in it.
2. I never add life support to fighters and tend to station them on planets or starbases (so that longer journeys are only for the bigger ships)

But I still miss the ability to build carriers...
What do you think?
17,757 views 33 replies
Reply #2 Top
Yeah..I kinda miss that too
Reply #3 Top
How can you 'miss' something that was never there in the first place?
Reply #4 Top
Well, I miss that from other similar games, i.e. galactic strategies, or other games based in the galaxy. For me it's just not the same... fleet which consists of only 4 fighters? Oh come on, that is a joke!
Reply #5 Top
By the end of a game you could easily have a fleet of around 20 fighters.

The point of Gal Civ isn't massive fleets though.
Reply #6 Top
....Since when is there a Certain number requirment for a fleet?......

It's been my understanding that a FLEET just needs to be more then one ship....
That'd be like saying a Flock of Birds isn't a Flock UNLESS it has 20 or more birds.....What if it's only 19 birds? is it just...."19 Birds that happen to be flying in the same spot towards the same destination?"


I don't see a Number requirment here, do you?
Link

Reply #7 Top
It's the make-every-game-the-same brigade!

I just don't think of tiny hulls as 'fighters'. Given how it scales with the colony ships, which are shown in the movies as being ridiculously, absurdly large, and all. I don't miss fighters - honestly, not every setting has fighter weapons that do squat to capital ships - and I don't really consider that GC2 contains any fighters. A fighter that takes the entire industrial output of planet Earth to construct? Na uh.
Reply #8 Top
Incredible! I had the exact same idea 2 days ago while designing a huge ship and turning it into something resembling an aircraft carrier, but in space. Put him in a fleet together with 20 tiny ships. Then, this came to me:
Carrier Logistics Center
Size: 45
Cost: 450
All Small and Tiny vessels in the same fleet as the vessel that has this upgrade share that vessel's support and propulsion systems.
Would be great, no?
Reply #9 Top
A fighter that takes the entire industrial output of planet Earth to construct? Na uh.


Exactly my point - yet for some reasons they are called fighters. I am not going to moan that GalCiv2 sucks, because it has no fighters. I am just saying that it would be nice to have them...and wanted to show my solution (i.e. treating single fighters rather as squadrons).
And maybe you're right that the other option is just to rule the fighters out totally..besides you could always take a tiny hull and make it quite big with adding extras to it.
Reply #10 Top
All Small and Tiny vessels in the same fleet as the vessel that has this upgrade share that vessel's support and propulsion systems.
Would be great, no?


Good idea, and quite simpe, too! But would add some flavour to the game
I don't know anything about modding - does anyone have an idea if that could be done?
Reply #11 Top
That isn't the sort of thing that is easily moddable.

Generally, modding involves changing stuff that is already in the game. e.g. replacing one the Large hull models with a Star Destroyer model. Or changing the Nano ripper to be less powerful. Carrier class ships would almost certainly require access to the source code.
Reply #12 Top
Actually i like the idea of having a ship module (sorta like construction mod) that gives it a bonus to it's (and only it's) own Logistics......and even then, ONLY to Tiny-Small ships.....

Who knows? i for one like that idea better then being able to "Fit" tiny ships into a bigger ship. Maybe not even have it at a set value so much. More like having it a % boost to what you've researched in Logistics so far.....
Reply #13 Top
I can believe that a ship can take an entire planets manufacturing output for weeks.

Lets look at the systems first.

Fire Control,
Navigation,
Communications,
Life Support,
Weapons Delivery,
Power Systems.

Now, we have to build this space going ship that has to be able to defend, attack, scout, report, escort and generally wave the flag throughout the known galaxy. At first we have just the standard well spaceport to build it in. We have the technology to start making the components, we have the ability to fit them in place, we have the ability to get the right people to make them, the ability to have the right people ship them correctly, the ability to have the right people check them for damage, the folks to install them, the folks to test them, the folks to fix them, not to mention the fact that we are sending our sons and daughters into the worst freaking enviornment ever known to anyone so we want to make them as safe as possible... so we we set up Quality Assurance points along everything, we maximize mechanical space to intall and secure backup systems and redundancy checks and the systems that check the systems to ensure they are working well.

Even though we have all of that, we do not have a huge industrial base of skilled labor types to actually build these systems fast and install them fast at first. We do not have the colleges and advanced schools required to get a technically trained work force togeather to put the space vessel togeather. Speaking of which, who is going to be feeding all of them folks. Who is going to be taking care of their children, who is going to be ensure that the grass gets mowed...

Looking at the overall picture... "Geez, it takes me 16 weeks to make a base model fighter with a laser and cannon and some armor on it with 5 billion people" , I can see where folks start thinking... thats a bit long... but when you begin to put in that the average person in the world has an average intellect, than think well the average person does not know where Iran is much less understand that Power is as easy as PIE. You begin to understand why it could actually take a while to create a spacecraft that is only a fighter...

Remember also that if a SU-35, Typhoon or Super Hornet could fly in space over great distances at speeds beyond light and still talk to you and perform all of its other functions, it may well be a LOT LARGER

W/R
Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large
Reply #14 Top
I dont care what you guys say I still miss the 400 ship fleets from MOO3. Especially when I have 400 Superdreadnoughts carrying 60+ fighters each. Thats a whole lot of ships
Reply #15 Top
Have any of you wondered how a 1000 troop transport counquers 5 bilion people ( or whatever lives there) ?? i always wondered why peaple search reallity in computer games... its all symbols. Think about a normal map, you got cities marked with dots. One troop transport on the maps is only a symbol, of lets say a whole invasion force ( fighters ,troops,supplies etc) andone tiny hulled ship is a symbol for a hole squadron of 20 ships ?

Ps dont mind my english
Reply #16 Top
I've been wondering if combat in GC2 takes place, so to speak, in normal space or at FTL-speed? If a battle takes place at a speed of several lightyears per day, that just might be a bit too much for a fighter pilot to cope with neh?

This be my first post by the way (At least I think it is...), my lurking days are hereby over!

PS
Kane lives!
Reply #17 Top
Have any of you wondered how a 1000 troop transport counquers 5 bilion people ( or whatever lives there) ?? i always wondered why peaple search reallity in computer games


ever notice that 1000 troops is actually 1 billion of your population?

If you want the whole fighter justification thing its not to hard to imagine your way right to it. Hyperdrive capable ships are incredibly complex and expensive. I.E it takes 1 week for an entire planet to build one. It is so complex that a single person cannot operate a ship. Space weaponry is so massive a tiny ship in GC2 is the size of multiple current super carriers. Anything smaller wouldnt phase these monster warship. The names "fighter" is used as an old holdover from wet navies and atmospheric forces to give admirals a grip on the crafts role in the line of battle of the modern space fleet.

its all a bunch of nonsense but i can justify anything you want ot question. It is after all just a game.
Reply #18 Top
You tell 'em!
Reply #19 Top
You can see the sort of scale of the tiny and small hulls because you can see the cockpits. They really aren't that big.
Reply #20 Top
A "simple" way to implement fighters in the game would be to add them as a new type of weapon. This type of weapon would be a carrier module. A ship could have a beam, mass driver, missile and figther value.

Graphicaly this module would spam fighter in the begining of a combat and the fighter will attack each round. If the carrier change is target the fighters move toward this new target. Some fighters should stay near the carrier all the time however.

For the ingame mechanic they will be like any other weapon in the game. The strengh of the figther will depend of the the level of technology of your carrier module tech tree, like all weapon. I don't think the AI will have a lot of difficulty to implement this kind of novelty.

The carrier module should produce a defence and an attack value for the ship with the module. The attack value is easy to understand but the defence value represent the dogfight betwen figthers, because if the carrier die, well the figther are dead because they have a very short short range survivality.

The carrier module should be huge to prevent abuse and should only fit on big ship and maybe cargo ship they should see if it work.

Anyway by making thing like that I will be happy and they could implement a important factor of science fiction space battle, the fighter. You could not design your own fighter but I can live without that. If I remember correctly it's was not possible either in MOO3.

Let me know what you thinks of this idea
Rakasak
Reply #21 Top
A "simple" way to implement fighters in the game would be to add them as a new type of weapon


Good idea, how about a new weapon tech tree in the expansion? Carriers with fighters (instead of ,or as well as beam/missile/mass driver).

We know a death/terror star is going to be in the expansion, so how about the ultimate end of the carrier tech tree ending in a terror star which can obviously destroy entire planets and is protected by fighters (giving it a high fighter attack rating). After all a planet buster would have its own defensive ships, dedicated to protecting just it.
Reply #22 Top
You can see the sort of scale of the tiny and small hulls because you can see the cockpits. They really aren't that big.


Cockpit OR a really small observation deck?
Reply #23 Top
Regardless of how it's doable, why do it at all? As I said, in many universes fighters simply can't lug effective weapons. In GC2, tiny and huge ships mount different numbers of the same guns. If you're going to make 'grain of sand' style fighters, what will they mount? A laser-1 0.001 beam? What's the bloody good of that?

Seriously. Fighters (and carriers) are useful on Earth because planes are faster than boats, and a plane can carry many missiles that can kill boats. This is *NOT TRUE* in space. People have already noted that huge ships are actually *FASTER* than tiny ones, since they can mount more engines. There is no way to mount regular GC1 weapons on 'one man fighters', so given the combat system, they'll be taking 0.001 beams against 23 shields and doing nothing. The only concievable use they would have is for scouting, but there's no reason the technology would scale down that far.

Basically, the only way this would work is with a fairly widespread rework of the tech tree. And for what? Stupid fighters that will die by the thousand? Unless they're treated as missiles, there are no weapons to kill fighters in the game, so they'll buzz around in their hundreds of thousands, doing nothing, until they're picked off by individual beam shots. Hooray.
Reply #24 Top
Er... I make fighters by using the tiny hull, putting a single weapon on it, and then calling it a fighter...

I do like the idea of being able to mount a second weapon on it and scrapping the engines and support systems on them, and having to have them follow around a ship with a 'carrier' or 'fighter bay' module on them though. Make the 'fighter' class vessel use the carrier-module equipped ship's range/speed, provided they're in the same fleet.
Reply #25 Top
During my first game I wondered myself: "Hey, where the &^$* are the carriers?!" During my second game as I expanded into the tech tree more, I was supremly dissapointed. To compensate, I get ultra logistics ASAP, create 'fighters' of my own, (usually one light figter with a tiny hull and a heavier fighter with small hull) and sprinkle 'squadrons' of 'fighters' throughout my fleets,but I usually only have one or two designs. Corvettes, destroyers, and battleships are more dominent among my forces.

Still, it would be cool if they could implement carriers and fighter squadrons with a series of patches.