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Questioning Fleet Role: Carrier


Dreamstar

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Hello again, friends, today I want to pose another mind racking question to you all.

 

The viability of carrier combat in sci-fi games.

Here is the dilemma. a carrier is a ship that houses several smaller ships, or even a squadron or two of fighters or bombers.

How can you make a ship like that viable against a battleship with railguns or some other crazy sci fi weapon.

 

1.) how do we as players prevent the loss of our valuable asset, Pilots. and prevent sending them to a resurrection node

 

I believe the answer rests in two areas.

1.) Carriers will have alot of defense, heavy shields and heavy armor. they wont mount many guns and so they'll have more power / more modules for shields.

2.)  Drone ships, take the flight seat from a fighter ship and put it on the bridge of the carrier. Now your fighter pilot gains the added security of the ship and defense of any Space Marines guarding his body. While he pilots a drone ship in nearby space.

 

think of the possibilities of faster movements the drone ships could make on players that design standard fighters. ((If they implement any kind of G force limits to human bodies))but even if not then the ships could have smaller profiles by design since there is no human inside of them, just a communicator, maybe it uses some kind of sub space channel for nearly instant communication with the pilot.

 

It makes the carrier themselves a huge target, instead of the fighter ship having the same value of destruction as the carrier. because all the players will be inside the carrier. More fleet possibilities?

 

Consider yourselves lucky my criminal mind wanted to keep this concept all for itself to gain a advantage in a few early wars, That said I would really like to hear what anyone thinks about this or anything similar

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Personally I'd like to see a carrier that uses some combination of stealth, speed, and range to defeat a battleship. Battleships are all about firepower and armour, carriers should use that against them. Carriers should try to fight a one-sided battle, where lots of small, difficult to hit bombers bombard the battleships while they cannot hit the carriers because the flight range of the bombers is too high and the carrier is either too fast (not amazingly fast, just faster than a slow hulking behemoth of a battleship) to catch, or hidden away somewhere behind a moon or something. Add in some fighters to protect the bombers from smaller ships and to do some screening, maybe throw in some supporting cruisers and you've got a force to be reckoned with.

 

Of course, there'll always be a counter. Battleships should be accompanied by battlecruisers and cruisers, either of which should be faster and more powerful than a lone carrier caught with its trousers down.

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hahaha the great joy of strategy, and I will look forward to competing on the open markets with different styles of the same ship!

 

Maybe a Shield Tank Carrier, Maybe a Carrier with Range extending Communicators, and fast engines! who knows maybe someone will take a battleship frame and mount "flight decks" to it, thus making Aviation Battleships like the japanese did.

carriers that focus on interceptors, multirole, or bombers exclusively.

 

I also think the customization for Skills, will make interesting choices available. a Person that trained weapons or offense skills. Might have a significant impact on the performance of a ship.

Maybe they have skills to make the fighters / bombers do more damage for a while, or to make Flak Canons more accurate ect.

Navigators or Engineers might be able to overdrive the engines and help keep you out of range, at a dangerous risk though!

 

I am really liking the possibilities, Maybe you intentionally build a small carrier, and put a Active Cammo module onto it. You hide out in an asteroid field, you snuck in by having a module that decreases your signature by a lot. The enemy is sending out fighters and using long range scanners in the area to try and find you though. they know your signal is in the area. but they havent spotted you or locked on yet. So you engage your active cammo and move into the shadow of another asteroid then turn it off again because it either takes alot of energy, or makes heat build up or something. and the cat and mouse game continues. Until either you run out of drones / fighters / or decide to run away.  (Does that sound about right?)

 

all these ship thoughts are leading to ideas that need new threads though. How to keep blob fleets from happening? /Could Reactors go nova to force people to spread ships out/ Will modules be restricted by tonnage class or have a differnt mechanic of control like the ammount of energy a reactor or many reactors can put out to affect say the strength of a shield generator? or how large a Active Cammo Field (stealth) might be, Will blocks have mass that affects acceleration, will engines generate torque, and or heat signatures? please feel free to make a new topic with any of these if it sparks some thoughts. i dont have any follow up at the moment except the initial concepts.

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  • 2 weeks later...

If you use drone fighters wouldn't it be cool if you could program formations for them it would add a whole dynamic to battles by having formations to counter formations and trying to develop the most powerful formation for your drone fighters.

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It will be interesting to see what they have in mind for actual robotic / artificial intelligence drones. that operate semi autonomously.

 

I was thinking they might allow us to use the kind of drones our current armed forces use. They are drones, but there's always a person somewhere operating it, if we expanded the technology a few decades Im sure we will have entire fighter craft and bombers that use similar remote flying technology.

 

 

I dont think it would take much more effort to allow players to do this, just let us designate a control console as the cockpit of another vessel. Might need to create one extra module, a Transmitter to put on the carrier and that could have a specific operating range put in place by the devs.

Otherwise the usage of the items could be defined by the tags and code players have access to?

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It will be interesting to see what they have in mind for actual robotic / artificial intelligence drones. that operate semi autonomously.

 

I was thinking they might allow us to use the kind of drones our current armed forces use. They are drones, but there's always a person somewhere operating it, if we expanded the technology a few decades Im sure we will have entire fighter craft and bombers that use similar remote flying technology.

 

 

I dont think it would take much more effort to allow players to do this, just let us designate a control console as the cockpit of another vessel. Might need to create one extra module, a Transmitter to put on the carrier and that could have a specific operating range put in place by the devs.

Otherwise the usage of the items could be defined by the tags and code players have access to?

 

This will help maintain the lives of countless of players belonging to large corps and operating under carrier type vessels, the drone gets destroyed but your crew is still alive and does not require them to travel distances to res. nodes... Which ids something not many mmos, if not any, let the player do... Well at least I can't think of one.

 

 

So yeah carriers are going be and awesome thing in Dual... :squeee:

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Wasn't basically every sizeable ship in Star Wars a carrier of some sort? Considering the vast options of player customization and creativity, multipurpose ships such as a cross between battleship and carrier could make for some interesting gameplay.

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Hi everyone,

 

Thinking about carrier gameplay is indeed a very interesting idea .

(please bear in mind that, for now, nowhere we have confirmed there will be remote piloted ships in Dual Universe. While nothing might prevent make some, there was confirmation that it will be feasible either, for the time being).

 

And it will probably be quite efficient. However it might not be the ultimate strategy despite how it looks like at first glance:

- Flying a swarm of drone-ish ships means your ships are fast and easy to manoeuvre. But it also means these ships will have light resistance, which can be easily countered by large "area of effect" attack, resulting quickly in the drone-ish ship destruction.

- Gathering a big group of players in one single ship with strong shields and armor doesn't guarantee to be safe. In fact, in some cases, it's even the contrary: Combat won't probably be only a matter of firepower and defense. Electronic Warfare and Propulsion Jamming. Once the ship can't fire or move, even with strong defenses, it just a matter of time before the opponents succeed in destroying it. In many scenarios, it's better to have a fleet of medium-sized ships than one big ship, especially for this reason: it's much more difficult to immobilize/neutralize everyone ;)

 

About AI drones: the use of this will be severely limited to make it far less efficient than a real player pilot. We want to see it as a "last resort" if you don't have enough people to complete a multi-player spaceship crew for example: we want it to do a decent job. Not an amazing job. So if AI drones or related stuff gives the feeling to the dev team of being overpowered (meaning having the same efficiency as a player or better) at some point, you can expect them to be nerfed.

 

But in any case, it's really exciting to see some unusual strategies discussed here! :)

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  • 3 weeks later...

If all goes as planned and the ships can be designed however they want then i'll happily try to create my dream of a fleet carrier, large, slow ships with a mushroom kind of design, where the head consists of nearly only armor, so that fire from the front might create craters with a depths of dozen of meters without dealing serious damage and fast interceptors which try to kill the enemy before they can get around the carrier :P

 

Ofc the mass distribution would make it slow and hard to turn around, but thats how a realistic, massive carrier should be anyways.

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  • 4 weeks later...

:P it has been a while since I stopped by the forums, hehe.

 

Now on the topic of carries, I have recently been playing world of warships, which is now on open beta. Very fun game BTW. I really like the philosophy wargaming put into the carriers over there. Which comes from lots of study on how actual carriers worked during the 20th century.

 

It comes down to the simple fact that carriers are support craft. This means that

1. It deals a lot of dmg, not by itself, but with its drones/planes

2. On direct combat, if engaged in combat, the carrier is itself is weak to heavy attacks.

 

With those two things in mind, carriers are usually very far away from the actual combat.

 

 

While this is only for wows I believe the same can be done when choosing a route use carriers, but ultimately it all comes down to the player himself or the corporation.

 

 

Just my quick two cents on carriers. :)

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:P it has been a while since I stopped by the forums, hehe.

 

Now on the topic of carries, I have recently been playing world of warships, which is now on open beta. Very fun game BTW. I really like the philosophy wargaming put into the carriers over there. Which comes from lots of study on how actual carriers worked during the 20th century.

 

It comes down to the simple fact that carriers are support craft. This means that

1. It deals a lot of dmg, not by itself, but with its drones/planes

2. On direct combat, if engaged in combat, the carrier is itself is weak to heavy attacks.

 

With those two things in mind, carriers are usually very far away from the actual combat.

 

 

While this is only for wows I believe the same can be done when choosing a route use carriers, but ultimately it all comes down to the player himself or the corporation.

 

 

Just my quick two cents on carriers. :)

That is very true. Carriers are generally more of a support ship from a distance and uses its fighters/smaller aircraft to deal damage. Now, in Dual Universe I can see this becoming very different. For example, a player (or a group of players) make/design a well armored carrier that can carry smaller spaceships/fighters to use in combat AND can deal heavy damage at the same time :) An example would be a Star Destroyer, It can deal lots of damage with its own heavy guns yet it also has hangers to launch some squadrons of fighters. :D It'll be interesting to see what designs players can come up with for Carriers in Dual Universe :D

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  • 3 weeks later...

When I first started this thread. There was no information on what kind of targeting or equipment setups could be available.
So when this was first theorized i was going with the hopes that it might follow first person shooter logic, only with ships, and turrets, maybe fly by wire missiles - though thats not the case.

Since things will probably involve more pushing tab, or selecting targets from some element of the user interface, the overall useful-ness of light craft like fighters and bombers seems very diminished.. Especially if the team intends to create modules around various types of ships. just say for example destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, dreadnoughts, battleships, Super Heavies. which will cover to great effect all of the things that fighters and bobmers can do. So why outfit a squadron on light craft, when you could bring 2 or 3 more cruisers or what have you.

 

I want to point out the difference here in having a NPC filling a spot on the bridge of your cruiser, and a drone fighter or bomber like in EVE. Drones are quite strong in swarms, and also in blob fights there can be hundreds if not thousands of drones, blobs arent fun but i think the Team at DU is anticipating they will exist. though i hope they incentivise some other means of fighting. Would ai drones, and fighter craft exist. would fighters with NPC pilots exist do they serve any purpose or will they just be clutter in the game.

 

I try to envision players making some ships similar to a BattleStar, Gallactica in specific, but I really wonder about fighters and bombers being able to do anything.

 

The main possibilities that come to mind.

-Being able to target enemy modules specifically. Shield Generators, Power Coupling's, Engines. and either disabling them or causing a debuff on the enemy.

-Fast transport for boarding parties, or infilitrators. if they exist.

-Able to target incoming Missiles or Bombs.

-Fighters having a Afterburner boost that accelerates them to crazy speeds.

 

To add, I like world of warships, but the model of combat is very controlled. there's a strict limit on the aircraft carriers and the dev team there spent many painful weeks arguing about their balance. Imagine how the game would be if it was 6 carriers and 6 battleships on each team every match.

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When I first started this thread. There was no information on what kind of targeting or equipment setups could be available.

So when this was first theorized i was going with the hopes that it might follow first person shooter logic, only with ships, and turrets, maybe fly by wire missiles - though thats not the case.

 

Since things will probably involve more pushing tab, or selecting targets from some element of the user interface, the overall useful-ness of light craft like fighters and bombers seems very diminished..

 

for me it doesnt sound like that at all, as far as we know we could as well have to control missle turrets and fighters as in the show andromeda, via virtual reality googles, which i would think of as awesome.

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Hi ...
 
- About "Friendly Fire" and "Manual Targeting":
We would like to implement that. We really would like. But there a very high chance we won't, at least for now (maybe with computer technology evolving, it will change in the future). The fact that massively multiplayer single-shard sandbox games like EvE Online are able to reach several thousands of players at the same place and the same moment is possible due to some compromises (and while we are aiming to higher flexibility in this regard, we're still subject to compromises too): combat system using Targeting/Locking/Firing mechanics in this kind of game is not completely unrelated to the ability to create massive battles, as it's an efficient way to lighten a lot of real time combat calculations.
 
- About "Bigger means more complex":
Well bigger ships will certainly be harder to destroy/invade if they're built in a smart way by players. However we do have some ideas to balance their toughness: They will be slower, less agile than smaller ships, due to their mass. Big Weapon Turrets will also at disadvantage against very fast ships. But nothing will prevent builders to create specialized ships: like a huge battlecruiser full of small weapon turrets to hunt down hostile small and fast ships. But there will be a choice to make: Energy consumption. Every module in a ship will require energy. So it won't be possible to have everything in infinite number, even on a big ship.
 
- About "Terrain":
We have already planned to have asteroid belts (even if it won't be for the Alpha).
But having specific cosmic phenomenon producing side effects in some areas in space (like strong gravitational fields or ionized clouds) is a great idea. I will transmit it to the dev team!  :)
 
- About "Arms Diversity and Rock/Paper/Scissors":
This is already planned: We are thinking about weapon families, with each type of weapon very efficient in some cases and not very efficient in others. Right now we plan to have at least 4 different types of damage, but it might still change in the future.
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

 

 

the above was from a different thread.

 

Given that anything is still subject to change Im left mostly just going off of the vibe they are giving off. I think I see them wanting to take an approach similar to EV.E where you select ships and then use moves. If it makes sense to do it just like eve where you very boringly clump your weapons together and push a button to fire them and they auto fire over and over as long as you have ammo or energy in your capacitor, then ok.

 

Im hoping they make the game a bit more dynamic than either

1.) Select target, navigate intentionally user unfriendly menu and select keep at orbit X-Meters,

2.) blobbing up and clicking align to target, and waiting for someone to warp the fleet.

and then: Push button 1 that is keybound to auto fire all your weapons. and the automated turrets track your enemy based on metrics and stats.

 

Terms and concepts: Player Controlled Jet, AI Drone

 

In a game where many ship classes are competing for roles on multiple levels.

Will it be of any use to take a player and put them in the cockpit of a fighter / bomber, when they could be on the bridge of a cruiser? - Does such a scenario imply that any possible advantage of a player controlled fighter jet is rendered ineffective because that player could just instead solo captain a cruiser with NPC's filling the sub commander chairs?

Player controlled fighters might be more valuable than say Drones, in this case. but would 1 fighter jet outweigh the advantage of piloting say a cruiser and just putting NPC's in the sub commander spots. and then being able to command both the turrets on the cruiser and a compliment of Drones?

 

Assuming that its unreasonable to balance Player controlled fighters in a meaningful way, Is it better to focus on Carriers having a fixed compliment of NPC controlled fighters/ bombers / drones? and a 'Standard' bridge with 2-5 players, or whatever the dev team comes up with.

 

In terms of damage they may be reluctant to make carriers the alpha-dog, a good strength is their flexibility, but many advantages of carriers start to fade out when were talking about ships having Railguns capable of penetrating shields and hull at obscene ranges, potentially even further than the operational flight range of light space craft. In which case people might think to make carriers into some kind of ship medic and replace their weapons with modules than can repair allies, why wouldn't a battleship do that as, or more effectively? I think Id like to see Carriers being a ship in command of Electronic warfare and special bombs/ missiles more so than a sitting duck that tries to repair some nearby allies before being instantly destroyed in one enemy salvo.

 

Combining the possibility of being able to have active stealth fields, or hiding your signature by being in asteroids or what have you. I think it will be just as effective to design a battlecruiser with active stealth and a bunch of guided torpedo's or missile bays and take out a few enemies before retreating all while at extreme range. Unless possibly there could be stealth bombers / fighters / drones, or that there is a significant advantage to Player controlled Fighters/ Bombers. Or alternatively that the Drones/ Fighters are not a major part of the carrier and more that it controls the flow of fights by Electronic warfaring enemies, and possibly having some kind of anti-virus// anti hack // anti ECM role to protect allies.

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