Fleet Carriers - How do you want them balanced?

Personally I think it would be neat if they had more use then just refitting and respawning. Feel free to discuss how you would like to see them used.

I hope they have really high jump ranges (the highest in the game) but very limited in some way. Maybe a unique fuel you can't get by fuel scooping to prevent them from becoming explorer vessels. This would still make them great for getting around in the bubble with your mates.

For me, I'd like to see two different versions. One with a combat focus and support role and one more mining and trader focused. I think they should be slow and have terrible ability but have lots of weapon hardpoints making a turret boat possible. It would be awesome bringing one into high rez or a conflict zone and have it back you up.

I think it would be neat if the crew mechanic was expanded upon and you would have to hire multiple crew members to fill roles like gunner, engineer, poilet, ect. Alternatively they could still be multi crewed and flown but not nearly as effective without crew bonuses.

The more trading/ mining focused one could come equipped with a unique tractor beam (or larger limpets if that breaks lore) and have lots of internal slots to hold cargo for winged trading missions or store ore.

These are just some ideas I'm throwing out there. Obviously they would have to be balanced and not op. I don't want fleet carriers to replace tbe big 3. Just complement them while being useful and cool. Please share your own ideas! :)
 
I want them to be balanced by being as complicated and expensive as possible. I want to be able to do a lot of things with them, and I want to be able to FAIL at a lot of things with them, and I want to be able to avoid, mitigate, or remedy that failure by doing even more things. And I want to expand the range of things I *can* do with them, by doing yet even more things.

#1 way to balance them is by actually putting them in the game. Right now Fleet Carriers are totally unbalanced.
 
I don't see them functioning much different to megaships, just positionable by the squadron leader and with a mechanic to move them about (gathering materials, iirc)

The advantages of an always-friendly port in any system are already significant.
 
Last edited:
I don't see them functioning much different to megaships, just positionable by the squadron leader and with a mechanic to move them about (gathering materials, iirc)

The advantages of an always-friendly port in any system are already significant.
And so profoundly boring as to fully justify Frontier's choice of scrapping the feature altogether.
 
Prohibitively expensive and requires obscene quantities of ridiculous materials to fuel a single jump and presence in a system is static (no supercruise).
 
Balanced ha my a-$-$, they better not even come out with fleet carriers before they fix all there bugs and server crashes and oh yeah half the crap for the update doesn't even work. They better balance there coding skills before they bring anything else to the table.
 
I want fleet carriers to sort of be the "commander mode" of the star system they're in. You'll be able to use the orrey mode in a new way, by seeing conflict zones, distress calls, ships in supercruise etc. A carrier could select any of these, and aid in player operations by dispatching limited numbers of NPCs* or by using a small amount of fuel jumping to it directly in the same manner as a capital ship to any destination within a star's influence. Secondary stars would have to be jumped to using much more fuel and prep time for the jump (several hours so as to not ruin hutton orbital) and other systems would probably have to be done on a weekly basis through fleet goals of harvesting jump fuel.Fleet carriers could contract directly with system minor factions to make whatever their current operation profitable, be it combat, or mining, or piracy. My intention is to make some of those activities massively profitable through faction contracts. Fleets would take on a percentage of ship insurance costs for their NPCs, so there is some risk in performing unsuccessful operations, and the carriers would have to have weaknesses just as capital ships do to add risk and prevent farming.

*NPCs would be available to you in varying quantities depending on your influence of the system and the size of your squadron. It would never be extreme. At best it would be like the ATR.

Also in systems would be to harvest and synthesize cargo. Your squadron could obviously purchase fuel to move the ship, but you should also be able to put down extraction sites that need to be defended to do the job more effectively. This would also let you see precious metals and minerals directly, or take those materials to another facility to turn them into more specialized products that can be sold for greater amounts at systems that need them such as weapons, crop harvesters, stuff like that. One of the upgrades you could get for a carrier could actually be a biodome so you can produce your own foodstuffs or drugs, but that would mainly be for the traders and explorers because you'd sacrifice some combat ability.

A bare minimum fleet carrier should cost a billion. (small pads.) This can be pooled from the squad mates. 10 bil will get you the best carrier. (large pads, maybe even huge pad)

I also want to differentiate what these carriers are from other large ships like the panther clipper. I think that the panther clipper should be only operational with more than one pilot. This would require you to fly with at least 2 NPC pilots, but can only launch a fighter with 3. You can have additional multi crew to launch even more fighters and get more pips. Otherwise these would be normal ships with an exceptional jump range, but they could only park in systems with capital ship dry docks, limiting you to maybe a 10th of the systems you could park another ship in.
 
Last edited:
And they should only be allowed to jump once a month, the ship needs to be repaired and reactor has to cool down.
 
I think they should be a way for an entire Squadron to Jump great distances at once. Something like being able to mass jump to the current CG at will (At will means as long as you have enough mats/fuel, and an hour long Jump cool down is complete), or to a Thargoid attack zone, or with some max jump range.

Certainly there should be re-fuel, re-pair, and re-arm, and well as a shipyard and outfitting with access to ship/module transfers. There should be a message board that lets Squad leadership post priorities, and maybe a way for members to accept tasks or acknowledge marching orders. I would like to see transfers be instantaneous to Carriers. I want carriers to be able get squadrons to exciting and exotic locations, and get back to their home system in one session. So Groups can plan squadron-wide activities in advance, and/or spontaneously decide something needs to get done.

I do have concerns over players wanting squadrons to confer some material benefit to joiners, that is unavailable to non-joiners. So, I would rule-out Shared Banks, Material trading, Credit transfers, Module swapping, anything that can materially help a squad mate to advance. I don;t think a carrier should disrupt or change the local economies just because of it's appearance. It should and would offer a great advantage to the squad just by having the docking services.

P.S. I was reminded that I would also like to see squadrons be able to have multi-tiered levels of 'Diplomacy' with other squads. At best this should include a message on resolve that shows if another Commander is Allied, Friendly, Cordial, ect. to your squadron. These states should have a challenge-accept mechanism so a diplomatic status can't be forced on another group. That's right, a declaration of war has to be accepted. That doesn't stop you from attacking anything, it just doesn't become part of the auto-registry system and anything else one of these states may indicate.
 
Last edited:
So since you guys brought up pricing, I think it would be cool if there were different sizes with different loadouts. Maybe the cheapest offering could only handle a few small ships for tiny wings that are just a few friends.

Then you could move up to huge carriers that could handle large ships but you would have to pay a lot for that luxury.

Also i really like the idea of slowly upgrading or unlocking services and upgrades on them. It could be a whole effort the squadron could contribute towards. Like donating thousands of ore could unlock the shipard. Turning in certain materials would increase fsd jumprange, ect. This would really bring the squardan together with some shared goals.
 
I think it would be great if the initial price was for a spine that could accommodate upgradeable modules. There should be basic spine sets corresponding to trade or career focuses (trade, research, combat, exploration, anti xeno, rescue, etc.). Obviously - there should be commensurate missions for the spine selection.

Even though it has been mentioned that no solo-ownership is a thing, the squadron lead will be calling the shots...

Unless it is structured so that a quorum of squadron members is required to execute a move. I doubt this will happen so the Squadron leader will be the guy.

I hope that they structure moves on a permit cost basis rather than material gathering thresholds. More popular well traveled systems could charge punishing permit fees, where less traveled systems could have extremely low costs, thus making the bubble feel more alive with distributed carriers.

Blocked players should not be limited from systems with fleet carriers, but the fleet carrier instances should be locked out to players not in the squadron, or guested as part of a wing or alliance.

Fleet carriers should not occupy the same instances as previously established game assets, given the bugginess we experience already with these instances (remember disco cap ships?).

Squadrons should be permitted to upgrade fleet carriers by hiring module specialists (NPC personalities) that offer missions to complete module constructions.

Jump distance should be a function of the current tier drive modules, which can be upgraded or downgraded. 30ly as a base seems reasonable.

Though a silly consideration, I do believe that advertising should offset upkeep costs - but maintaining advertising should have an energy cost associated with it.
 
Last edited:
I think it would be great if the initial price was for a spine that could accommodate upgradeable modules. There should be basic spine sets corresponding to trade or career focuses (trade, research, combat, exploration, anti xeno, rescue, etc.). Obviously - there should be commensurate missions for the spine selection.

Even though it has been mentioned that no solo-ownership is a thing, the squadron lead will be calling the shots...

Unless it is structured so that a quorum of squadron members is required to execute a move. I doubt this will happen so the Squadron leader will be the guy.

I hope that they structure moves on a permit cost basis rather than material gathering thresholds. More popular well traveled systems could charge punishing permit fees, where less traveled systems could have extremely low costs, thus making the bubble feel more alive with distributed carriers.

Blocked players should not be limited from systems with fleet carriers, but the fleet carrier instances should be locked out to players not in the squadron, or guested as part of a wing or alliance.

Fleet carriers should not occupy the same instances as previously established game assets, given the bugginess we experience already with these instances (remember disco cap ships?).

Squadrons should be permitted to upgrade fleet carriers by hiring module specialists (NPC personalities) that offer missions to complete module constructions.

Jump distance should be a function of the current tier drive modules, which can be upgraded or downgraded. 30ly as a base seems reasonable.

Though a silly consideration, I do believe that advertising should offset upkeep costs - but maintaining advertising should have an energy cost associated with it.

I see what you're saying here. Would it be better to have a common frame, and specialized modules? Squadrons with more varied interests would be better served this way.
 
I suspect they won't be what a lot of people want them to be.

I suspect they will more or less just be like ships like the Gnosis, but where we get to choose where they jump to. I presume they will require some form of fuelling to jump. They might come with their own mini-CGs to upgrade them (doubt it though). They won't be destroyable, but might have the mechanics that allow people to steam data/materials.
 
Top Bottom