Cap ship classes earning respect.

Given that most capital ships are considerably weaker than the Carrier capital ships, there's plenty of room to buff them in this manner and give each class of capital ship its own distinct role.  The hardest will be the support capital ships, since they're really defined by their specials.

The problem with making battleships have an "overwhelming" combat presence is that they need to be counterable in the early-game.  The bigger problem is that in many cases they can't actually catch up to kiting units and can't get close enough to large enemy forces without geting focus-fired to death.  This is why I favour a move speed change; make them fast enough to catch kiters and escape enemy LRF.  This allows their potent strengths to be employed more easily.  In fact, most capital ship varieties could use a move speed increase for these sorts of reasons, and the only one I'd keep as is are the carriers (which already are godly at kiting).

The biggest difficulty is the support capital ships.  These guys are defined only by their special abilities, but there are lots of other capital ships with great specials.  Aside from the Rapture, which has two uncapped fleet support abilities that make it great in the late-game, these guys really don't ever have a distinct role that makes them shine above the other options.  That needs to change.

Yea agreed... I think that the way to fix battleships being counter-able in the early game would a speed boost and make their DPS/hull/shield go up  in a parabolic curve. So that the increases are small in levels 2 and 3 but steep in 8, 9 and 10. This would make allow frigates to take one down early but later they become scarier.

And with kiting, perhaps that can be a bit of a counter to them. 

Possibly adding in a second bank of weapons may also help the battleships. The DPS is still under control but you can now engage more targets. This allows for more power and require bigger sized fleets but you can still use the weaker units early on.

Yea I like that too. That would scale nicely.

Battleships at the moment have no teeth. Cept the Kortul of course...

If you're going to increase battleship DPS, this is the way to do it.

Best to put them on the left and right broadsides. That way the forward guns remain their focused powerful selves for main targets and leave the broadsides to hitting multiple units. Which the sides usually have more gun turrets anyways. I mess with this option a lot and have had a lot of success.

i would be worried about hero unit abuse, e.g. using a high-level kol to kill several enemies and retreat before they can retaliate

Personally that's the point of something like a Kol. If you don't have a strong enough fleet to withstand a lone Kol/Radiance/Kortul raider, then you are not playing right. To me, these battleships should be able to take on and win/break even with a fleet that is twice their value. This size of fleet is not hard to build, at least in my personal experience.

Yea agreed. They should be combat powerhouses. Some to fear on the battlefield.

At the moment the kol is a joke. 

Fares a little better in Distant Stars. Not sure if I would say it's totally up there with what Ryat said.

Personally, I would rehash the Carrier for weaker cap to cap power but heavy anti-air power (not counting SC). Then make Kol a powerhouse with moderate to little SC defense. Maybe even move SC defense to the Dunov or Marza, given that the Kol was the first military designed vessel, thus making it likely flawed in initial design. It would be a big shuffle to say the least.

Here are some numbers I was toying around with... I didn't mess around with targets per bank though. These aren't for a balance mod for online but more for SP/RP type of fun.

Existing Capital Ship Modifications

(all values are modifiers to the current stats)

Weapon Damage:

Battleships: 4x
Carrriers: 2x
Colony: 2x
Siege: 2x
Support: 2x

Planet Bombardment:

Battleships: .5x
Carrriers: .25x
Colony: 1.5x
Siege: 3x
Support: 1x

Durability (Hull/HullPerLevel/Shield/ShieldPerLevel/BaseArmor/BaseArmorPerLevel)

Battleships: 2x
Carrriers: 1x
Colony: 1.75x
Siege: 1.5x
Support: 2x

AntiMatter

Battleships: 1x
Carrriers: 1.1x
Colony: 1.3x
Siege: 1.2x
Support: 2x

Culture

Battleships: .5x
Carrriers: .75x
Colony: 1.5x
Siege: 1x
Support: 1.25x

kols would then make a proper fleet pointless, everyone would just rush to battleships, they are already annoying with their flak burst in numbers and the finest hour buff

I'm with a110 on this one; if Kols (especially at low levels) outperform frigates in combat then there's no reason to build frigates.  Cost-for-cost, frigates must outperform their respective capital ships otherwise we turn the early-game into a capital ship slug-fest until you can hit a critical mass of frigates to counter them.

That's kinda the point though. Late game, the caps become fodder for mass frigates. So what's the balance to keep them competitive? I think the answer would best lie in high end upgrades that the caps get, but the frigates don't. After all, the chassis can accommodate more equipment.

Also as I pointed out earlier, reaching that higher level of fleet is still achievable. Even AI on normal can does this relatively easy. Especially when you have another cap (any will do) that keeps the main guns of the battleship occupied. But some of the changes makes the battleships more survivable and makes it worthwhile to build a fleet around. Because a fleet of 30 Cobalts is made so much better with a Kol smack dab in the middle of them.

No its not. Distant Stars has not incorporated extra banks into the battleships yet. Still in test stage but may be implemented with the next upgrade. Along with new pirates.

Muhahahahahaha!

So then we have an early situation where capital ships are the end-all, and a late situation where they are near useless.  This is the worst of both worlds, in my opinion. 

We need to make them scale better into the late game.  Currently the Kortul is about appropriate as far as early-game power goes, and I wouldn't feel comfortable increasing its combat performance much.  The other battleships should be taken to its level, and any further changes shouldn't be directly to its combat capacity.

They do need to scale better. Maybe something like more toys with research. Like adding banks with research. After all, we can do this with Starbases. Will have to check into this more and implement into DS.

There is an issue with Battleships though as they severly underperform compared to carriers. At a minimum they should rival carrier capital ships which have the potential of 100 dps with a bomber buildout and their own weapons at LEVEL 1. Add in abilities and the level 1 carrier can exceed 130 dps. IMO battleships should atleast start with the same dps/supply(50) of Heavies which really isn't much if durability isn't touched. Adding capital ship specific research to allow them to scale better would be nice too for later game (Hull, Armor, target banks, all worth looking at).

When we modded the move speed of the Kortul so it could catch kiting carriers, it beat them all in a straight fight at level 1.  Battleships hit hard and with the right abilities can plough through the enemies. The Kol and the Radiance both need generic help to bring them to the level of the Kortul, but that has more to do with substandard abilities.  Kiting remains the core issue here.

Because it has a healing ability I can see this happening.

This simply isn't true. Battleships start with an average frontal 25 dps. The average dps of battleships is around 50 for all banks. Most siege capitals actually outperform Battleships in terms of forward damage. In fact pretty much all TEC capital ships start with an average around 50 dps so not much difference there. Vasari has the biggest Variance from 50 to around 40 for non-battleship. Additionally building a battleship to plow through enemies doesn't happen when 50 supply of LRM generate 100+ frontal dps. Battleships have some good tanking abilities but I don't consider them good for plowing through enemies.

The only thing IMO that sets capital ships apart currently are abilities and number of strikecraft with only minor differences in hull/armor/dps/bombardment. I frankly got the impression capital ships had soft differences so the AI wouldn't necessarily suffer based on it's random capital ship selection. Humans obviously choose the strongest choice which is currently Colony or Carrier when pitted against an equal opponent.

I'm pretty sure everyone in this thread understands this. I personally read this as "it would be nice if IC added more capital ship specific research to the research trees".

What hinders you to adjust the current Caps to your wishes?

I sometimes generare a "clumsy beast" by simply adjusting the values of an existing cap I won't build anyway.

That usually gets ~100-150Logistic points, ~4 times the original build cost with Metal being raised the most, long build times. I mod it to be very slow (50-100 usually).

It gets ~ 1.5-2 times the defense values (armor, shields) and is being made very slow (~half the speed and 1/4 the acceleration)

I give it a VERY powerful short range weapon (range ~1500) and a slightly weaker than usual very long range weapon (~15000 range) and usually a defense against strikecraft.

The idea is a ship that comes useful at late game and that is - due to low speed - a strategic weapon which can't easily be relocated.

I always think about the "Monitor" class from David Webers book there : big, slow, nasty

Nothing hinders us. I often use and modify Distant Stars and the cap ships there to my liking all the time.

The point of this thread is more for the base game with no mods.

Monitors were developed by bugs.

Well, I'm not opposed to it generating ideas for mod use. After all, most I know play a modded version of the game. But there's still the question of what ideas, if any, we would take for that purpose. I could see Herodias' idea. Granted, that very much changes the beast, calling for players to relearn the vessels. High end research and/or individual upgrades would be my first way of tackling the subject. A combination to perhaps have a slightly hindered beast early on that can be pushed to perform in the late game might work nice.

Another issue is the variance in game style. I like to keep research average-slow and play SP drawn out games. This allows research to become supremely important, as you have to pick the best stuff from the get go. In MP, people often play at the fastest, meaning an expanded tech tree adds 1.5 minutes of extra clicking and nothing more.