Carrier balance idea.

This idea sounds good to me.  Of course the main variable to consider is the antimatter drain rate.  Too low and carriers still stay "broken", but too high and carriers lose ALL of their strength.  Maybe the TEC drain rate could be slightly reduced to compensate for the jump drain (don't have much experience with TEC, mainly an Advent user).  The main point is choosing an appropriate drain rate, just enough to make them balanced.

I stopped here.  They have what...?

Answers.com says:

The carrier's weapon is the squadron. Squadrons come in two major flavors: Fighter and Bomber. Entrenchment adds something too, but I'll gloss over that.

When I say the weapons are modular, I mean that the carrier has two or three empty squadron slots for its weapons. Players then pick if they want those weapons to be fighters or bombers(or other).

Does that explain it? Or were you too shocked that I used a big word to accurately describe the carrier?

A good drain rate would likely give carriers nearly unlimited combat with one squadron, but around 10 minutes with two squadrons. Keep in mind that it gets boosted through research, parking, stars, and, synergies, but gets reduced through jumps, combat, antimatter drain, and flak.

The main idea is that the carrier is a support cruiser, and its support should be taking antimatter just like all the others.

TEC already has it hard, and with Entrenchment WHO needs MORE DEFENCE THEN A GIANT STARBASE??????

Well... disregard the second part of that sentence.

My main point is, with starbases and hangars TEC doesn't really need any more defensive strikecraft providers.

I'm not totally against said idea, I even have suggestions for the TEC. Make TEC carriers have a faster antimatter recharge rate for a little after jumping, make then have a slightly faster antimatter recharge rate overall, or make their strikecraft use less antimatter.

What about capitol carriers who have special abilities as well as squadrons?   Without the squadrons, the special abilities aren't too amazing compared to other cap ships, but squadrons by themselves don't mkae them too much better than the cruiser carriers until high levels.  They would be using way too much antimatter in a battle to be effective for more than a few minutes.

Modular isn't really a big word.  I just didn't realise you were talking about fighters and bombers as weapons.  I was thinking how do fighters or bombers have modular weapons?  It's a lot more clear what you were trying to say now.

Or would it be possible to make the bombers need to rearm. The bombers now just sweep and shoot until the target is destroyed and have infinate ammo. I would say that if they need to land and rearm then the damage needs to increase though. But needing to rearm would lower the overall DPS and maybe cause a fleet of carriers to jump in, strike, then jump away. The fighters could stay as is and not need to rearm.

All that said I think the cruiser carriers should stay as is. I don't think they are broken. The capitol ship squadron limit should be increased though. They get up to level what 5 or 7 and still only have 5 squadrons? Why buy those when you can buy 3 TEC cruiser carriers and have 6 squadrons for only 42 fleet points? No embargo? So what when I'm going to take over the target planet anyway.

I like the notion of squadrons needing to re-arm... i think this idea could work with proper tweaks to the anti-matter.

Maybe add a separate anti-matter counter called "Squadron supply" so that jumping doesn't affect it. It doesn't make sense that strikecraft would be penalised because their carrier jumped... You could even expand this to be upgradable later on so that your fighters could stay out longer? I like the concept

I didn't quite get the idea, BUT anything to slightly to moderately nerf carriers and strike craft is a A+ in my book  

I was thinking more along the lines of:

-reduce the amount of shields and hp of the carriers

-Make carriers un-able to replace strike-craft while in battle

-Give all cap ships some kind of flak built in

-And Make Flak Frigates WORK! so they could finally hard counter strike craft. 

-Reduce the engagement range of the carriers to 2/3 of the gravity well, so they can't just sit at the very edge of the well, dish out dmg, and then jump away as I pursue them. They can jump from system to jump replacing their fighters to hit back whenever they want and I can't catch them. How is that balanced.

Ironclad, 90% of all multiplayer games is now carrier spam spam in your spam, please implement some sort of fix, because a lot of people don't want to play a game that is all about spamming one type of unit that is so cost-effective over everything else, it'll be foolish to not spam of. 

This idea seems too much of a nerf, Carriers could stand to loose a bot of hull points but other than that they are ok. The time limit seems iffy, although it's nice to try to take their AM with abilities, it stands to limit the fighters.

The real problems are the flak frigates, they need to fire 2-3 shots to kill one fighter, not even the vasarii ones, just the TEC ones, if your fireing at a vasarii fighter,it will take at lease 5 shots to kill one of the fighters, and then you have 2 more to kill, and then thats just one squadren out of 50!

What would really fix the ballance is a power upgrade to the flak and other anti fighter friggates, not just the banks upgrade beacuse they still seem useless with it. If they could kill a fighter in 1 hit that would work (2 hits for vasarii) and perhaps have less cooldown between shots, but it should just be a ddamage modifyer vs fighters, like 200% vs fighters and 75% vs other ships - 50% vs big ships so it don't become over powered and overly spammable.

That ought to make the game ballanced.

lol dorian you are spamming the word spam.

Dont mess with their % to damage just increase their dps.

Not a ridiculous idea, but I would opt for something more simple, more easily implemented, and most importantly, more easy to balance.  Costing actual resources to build strikecraft might not be a bad idea.  Fixing flak frigs can be considered, etc.

Having said that, the real danger here is that if something is done to the carrier, it is over-nerfed.  THINK ABOUT IT.  That's the history of other games, and this one as well.  The PJI was over-nerfed coming out of beta.  Some say the siege frigate was over-nerfed (something that I was glad to see, actually).  When they decide to nerf the carrier, it will be an over-nerf, I can promise you that.  Then, it will be back to long range frigate spam, and everyone will be complaining again.

If my choice is to have an "OP" or "unbalanced" unit, I would prefer it to be the carrier.  At least the carrier is a higher tech unit, so it should be powerful, and one has to tech through the tree to get it (except for Advent).  And at least the carrier is expensive in terms of resources and popcap.  When it was lrf spam out the wazzoo, you didn't have to tech through the tree to get them (lrf are low tier units for vasari and TEC).  If it's back to lrf spam, people won't build carriers, they won't build HCs, they won't build anything else - just lrf.

Be careful what you wish for - it just might come true.  I'm starting to think that we should just leave well enough alone.  While the game might not be perfect, it is probably "good enough," considering what might happen if carriers are touched, that we might should just avoid the risk.

Ugh...carriers are do not need a nerf.  Stop playing likes it's v1.05 and start playing with balanced fleets.  The only thing I would like to see is a small buff (10%) to flak and about a 40% DPS increase to LFs.  That should balance out the carriers.  However, the game is pretty balanced even without those changes.

Flak needs a major buff, not a slight buff. 

Make it 30% and then maybe, MAYBE Flak frigates will be worth it. Cap ships all need flak as well. 

I think maybe if each cap had about 1 flak turret I would be ok with that.  Giving flak a 30% buff effectively makes them the way they were prior to v1.1.  Prior to v1.1, they were too strong.  10% is sufficient.

I think flak frigates could use a slight boost to dmg, but to balance it this way: one flak frigate to kill one squadron in two, maybe three passes. That way people could still use the carrier spam as a tactic, and people who are smart enough will be able to counter that with a cheaper flak spam. Do you really think 20 flak frigates should take down 60 squadrons? Maybe with abilities like Flak Burst, but come on people...

So what you're saying is that if flak is unavailable, carriers should have unlimited control over the skies? It's quite sensible that squadrons shouldn't have have an unlimited deployment time on the field. They are a low risk, highly adaptable, and difficult to counter form of damage. Even with a direct flak counter ready ( LFs are currently a SOFT counter to all antimatter units), a carrier ball can still cut a swath through gravity wells over twice as fast as typical frigates. An antimatter drain for carriers would change a few things in fleet combat:

- It places carriers into a role of front loaded damage in a fleet engagement. No longer would they be the ships that just keep going and going and going. They come in, hit hard, and turn the tide of battle in those critical opening moments. They'd still have enough time and power to do that, but direct counters would be more capable of diminishing the pain.

-10 minutes without upgrades is pretty good. Keep in mind that upgrades not only increase the raw max capacity (so they'd get 13mins at max research), but also increase the matter recharge rate. This means the antimatter drains even slower, so 13min can easily reach 20min or more. It is unlikely a carrier would remain uncountered for 20minutes, but that is more than enough time to raise hell. Carriers that do get countered will have their time of engagement cut down by much more, depending on the strength of the counter.

- It cuts carriers down a notch as a hit and run type of unit. They would have to be more conservative in their movements, and while squadrons may have excellent mobility, the carriers themselves won't be.

- Carriers that lose their squadrons will remain toothless for a longer time. This will give players more time to press the advantage. Currently, it is nigh impossible to stop a carrier from spitting out an unending tide of fighters, even AFTER they run out of antimatter.

- Keep in mind that carriers which are not fighting, are not losing antimatter. They're recharging it at the same rates as before. This means it's only an issue if you use carriers as an high speed raiding unit, which does not make sense, given it's the biggest damn cruiser in the game.

Yes, an antimatter drain would be a nerf to carriers. However, I suggested it not because carriers need a nerf, but because I think carriers should be a more unique style of support unit, instead of being a flying gun factory. Don't even get me started on the carrier-clowncar meme.

Now that I think of it, making carrier's rely on anti-matter is the BEST IDEA EVER.  

FINALLY, we would have carrier no longer spam producing strike craft the sec they lose them. Oh yea strike craft need to cost something too. 

What about boosting flak frigates dmg slightly, while at the same time increasing the antimatter requirement for strikecraft?

I've always thought that having squadrons outside of the ship all the time was...well...rather unlike carriers. Having a time limit on the amount of time that squadrons can be out is a great idea. Even better is the notion that squadrons need to reload/refuel. Perhaps we could set a limit on the distance a squadron can travel or how many times they can fire before having to return to the carrier to reload/refuel. I think this would make people use the docking ability more often that, as of right now, is not really used. Maybe that is too much of a nerf; who knows...maybe in the future, carrier spam is the way to go. Fighters/Bombers will only need carriers to jump...but I digress. Anyways, I agree, something should be done. Maybe just making Flak Frigates a little more useful will do it.

I totally disagree with your idea, although I don't mind having weapons, for small defense

I'm all for them making strike craft act a bit more realistic in terms of docking but I'm pretty sure they don't need a nerf.

The best way to even them out would be if they fixed the stupid flak frigate AI so they didn't chase fighter squadrons accross gravity wells when there is a ton more right near them.

Having said that I think it's a shame that gameplay rules overrid common sense that they decided not to give caps and star bases flak guns.

I dont want to amke carriers suck again.  Also I don't want peopel talkigna bout "realism" cause that's just silly given the setting of the game.

That being said I wouldn't mind a change that makes your squadrons dock after a volley.  The volley might have to be changed so that the dps stays what you want it to be. But this woudl make carriers have penalties for attacking far away targets. As is carriers just hit any ship/structure ing ravity well with impunity.  I think that's a bit messed up,e specially when you have your carriers circle around causeing ships chasing the carriers to lose half their dps.