Any use for a really small carrier?

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Ruatha:
I've built a destroyer with two capital weapons, ECM, solar sails and solar panels. And a fighter bay level 1 and a cargo bay.
The Destroyer can launch one fighter each combat turn up to a total of 12 small fighters.
The 12 fighters and the ship arrives a firing point approximatly at the same time. In a battle group of 4 destroyers that makes 48 fighters and 4 destroyers for the cost of two ordinary small carriers with a total of 36 carriers.
The fighters may have rocket pods.
Is this a good early game strategy (I haven't got into anyy fight with them yet, and the simulation results are non-conclusive).
I was thinking of pairing them with an orinary fighter carrier to overwhelm any point defence so that some of the major fighter Groups get a chance to fire. Do pint defense cannons target "Strongest" first or?
I quite like these destroyers as I haven't seen any of them before (Maybe becourse they're useless?!?)
They come at half the price of an ordinary carrier and can fire 14-26 weapons at first combat turn (per destroyer and it's own fighters) depending on the fighter arnament, I like that!

Are they useless? Should I stop making them?

In the simulator one on one against my other top-design destroyer I loose three fighters (that one has a Point defense cannon and 5 Depleted Uranium cannons level 5 instead of Two for the fighter destroyer)

Gosh, I think you should tell us if it's a good strategy. That's what this forum is for, reporting your experiences with playing the game!

Point-defense probably follows whatever strategy the ship has been given. Another 'over-simplification' of combat, I think. We ought ot be able to use different strategies for PD vs. main weapons. In practice, I suspect that PD just targets what comes into range first and so it is effectively targetted at 'fastest' most of the time.

Small carriers are a nice concept but I think the design of the game is slanted against them. In "RL" the usefullness of small carriers is in protecting convoys of civilian merchants or military supply ships from light raiders like submarines and enemy planes. In SE these units are invisible. No civilian merchants are available and only the single abstract 'supplies' has to be gotten to your ships. No ammunition ships, no food ships, no medical ships, etc. It would be a micromanagement nightmare if they were included anyway. So the 'fun' of getting down to the logistical level and protecting your supply lines (or attacking someone else's!) is absent. Ah well, you can't have everything in one game.

If the way sensors works can be changed in SE V there will be a use for small carriers, though. This is their other use in "RL"... scouting. You now, if you have anything in a system, even one dumb satellite, you can see EVERYTHING in the system. This is ridiculous. Implement limited sensor ranges and suddenly scouting is necessary and small carriers would be great for this.

Other than that, I have always wanted to experiment with 'self escort' by putting a fighter bay or two on a transport (it has cargo capacity, after all) and a few fighters. Will a transport with 'don't get hurt' orders launch fighters in strategic combat? Or will it just run away with the fighters still stored and get bLasted with them still on board? I don't recall seeing sat-layers ever deploy their satellites in strategic combat. I've never gotten around to testing this idea.

Maybe if you make one class of transport with mostly fighter bays the AI routines will treat it as a carrier? Then it can be an 'escort' for other transports and LOOK like a transport until your enemy attacks. Then it turns out to be a Q-ship. And while it is not attacked it can still be an effective fighter transport, moving decent quantities of fighters from the 'rear' to the front lines.

[ January 04, 2003, 05:02: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Skulky]

Well, you can actually specify strategies for PDC, sorta. If you have a dedicated PDC ship and you want it to shoot down mostly enemy missiles, not enemy ships (and it mounts other weapons that can hit ships) or you are suddenly confronted with a bunch of missile shooting *******s and need to convert your fleet quickly, you can set the strategies to target by type: Seekers targeted on us (to keep that ship alive), and seekers targeted on others, followed by everything else.

My second thought, to simulate real life supply and trade within an empire, or maybe just real life supply, your empire could build a certain number of extra ships under control of ministers and produced for free. They would be sent to and from your fleets and between planets generating trade. You could order ships to "escort" which would make them follow these ships around and attack any enemy's within 2-5 sectors.

Assuming pathfinding could be resolved for humans, this could be viable in PBW. adding the idea of making small "raider" ships that woudl fly in and out attacking these supply lines. Also, pirate races in P&N could really pirate stuff at Last.

Trade treaties coudl also be represented by these little ships (few larger than a med transport, most DD or FG size) with their own shipset graphics flitting between empires. You could then introduce a distance modifier (optional) that would mean you could get bettter trade with neighbors and worse trade the further away an empire is.

These ships would be grayed out and not be as visible as your normal ships, they could even be "turned off" so you didn't see them in the empire window or something. Of course, if you left them on someone could slip in a little ES raider and you might think its part of these fleets, or you could have an intel option called "conceal raider in civilian transport" and well that'd be what happened. All sorts of good reasons to mounts weapons on transport hulls.

WOW. that was long winded. I'm thinking SEV at least, Maybe SEIV Zirconium edition, Platinum if we're lucky. If not, SEX???