Balancing Carriers

[Nerei]

First off sorry for getting carried away. It tends to happen.

I know any potential changes will probably not make it into the next patch due to time etc but I thought I would mention it anyway. I did search a bit on the forum but I did not find anything directly covering this. If it has already been brought up then I am sorry.
Also if I have missed something obvious please let me know. Compared to some of the people here I have not played that many hours.


First off lets compare say Gerald R. Ford the currently most advanced carrier with something really old like Midway. This comparison is on Jan 01 2020.
Gerald R. Ford basically have slightly less aircraft capacity and is slightly slower but have nearly unlimited range, longer detection range and better defences.
It does however cost an insane amount to build and maintain compared to Midway. We are talking in the 10 times annual cost and nearly 70(!) times as much to build.

If we start breaking down the advantages and disadvantages of each vessel things start looking interesting.
First off what is the purpose of a carrier? To me basically it is to bring as many aircraft to a given point as fast as possible.
Simply following this Midway is better.
It packs more planes than any super-carrier and except for Kittyhawk and Enterprise is also faster. They do however only bring 66% of the aircraft Midway does at greater cost and only a few km/h faster. Given that our typical escorts like the Arleigh Burke is the same speed as Midway that speed advantage is less advantageous.

What points do Midway lose out on then?
It has less defence but given that we need our escorts anyway as the defences of any carrier is insufficient to survive any real attack that is not that critical. Midway also brings more aircraft and in many ways her defence "is" her aircraft so from that point of view Midway actually has significantly "better" defences than say Nimitz.
The lower cost also means we can bring far more escorts meaning Midway will ultimately be a harder target to hit.

It naturally has significantly less range than any nuclear powered carrier but given that it has 100-400% longer range than the escorts that we need to bring along anyway if we drag it into a warzone that is fairly less relevant really.

It has less detection range than the later carriers but again we are bringing along an escort. Zumwalt has nearly the same detection range but it is slower so it will negate the speed advantage of Midway. This one is a bit harder but ultimately if all else fails the extra slot on Midway could just go towards an AWACS group.

Then there is the really nasty part. The price.
We can field 10 Midway carries for "each" Gerald R. Ford. That is 60 aircraft vs 5. Yes we are going to use more personel but from that standpoint Midway uses 1600 less for each vessel. For the price of Gerald R. Ford We can build a Midway class carrier and an entire battlegroup to go with it! A battlegroup we will just as much need for Gerald R. Ford I might add.


More aircraft at the destination faster with a larger escort to protect it? yes please.

Really I cannot see any reason to build more modern carriers. Their advantages like being nuclear powered, better defence and detection are for the most part either done better by or nullified by their escorts.


The problem is ships like Midway have their aircraft capacity defined by the time they where build. The number for Midway is fairly accurate when we are dealing with say F4U corsair fighters. Nimitz is also correct but here we are dealing with aircraft like the F-14A. That plane is like 5 times heavier and take up upwards of around 5 times the space.
From a game perspective an F-11 Goshawk or A5M is largely identical to said F-14A (only the F-14 is heavier but Midway still easily fits 6 units of F-14). However from a practical perspective they are worlds apart. Here the F-14 takes up like 6 times as much hanger space and weigh 10 times more. It also require a carrier far, far larger to have any chance of getting airborne. Actually it needs a ship larger than Midway for that.

Aircraft like the F-14 was largely what forced the retirement of the Midway carriers as they where incapable of handling them. The only thing that saved Coral Sea and Midway from the breakers in the early 1980's was Ronald Reagan wanting a large fleet so they ended up serving as 2nd rank carriers until the end of the cold war. At this point however Franklin D. Roosevelt had already been scrapped. Likewise the Essex carriers found themselves too cramped to effectively handle the increasing size of aircraft during the cold war.
Here however Essex is just a nice cheap Nimitz with more than long enough range for the nuclear advantage of Nimitz to be largely irrelevant.


The most accurate way to solve this problem would probably be to define a hangar volume and maximum aircraft launch weight for each carrier and a launch weight and volume for each carrier aircraft. This system however would probably end up being too convoluted for most people.

Alternatively expand the flight-deck types. Currently there is long and short-deck carriers which before I say anything else I must commend. It is better than what I have seen in most other games.

However it could still be expanded to be more accurate for post world war 2 carriers.
Add say small and large jet fighters sizes (with the current long deck representing world war 2 aircraft). The advantages of carriers like the Forrestal and onwards would be that they have the flight-deck to handle the larger aircraft which would make them valuable as they can bring the best aircraft.
If say small jets count for twice the space of world war 2 aircraft Midway would be restricted compared to the newer carriers that would then at least have some good advantages.

I know the idea of upgrading have been brought up and dismissed but with ships it does make more sense than with say aircraft or tanks where usually an upgrade would basically mean replacing the vehicle. Here upgrade really is sailing the ship to port and rebuilding it.
Say Have the option to refit carriers to handle better aircraft. Midway would then be refittable to carry larger jet fighters like the F-4 but lose overall capacity in the process. It would however not be refittable to carry F-14 fighters as these are just too large.

Also it is probably worth rebalancing cost and maintenance as it would also prevent this kind of disproportionate advantage for old vessels. Midway should be fairly expensive to build in 2020 and her maintenance should also be quite high.
You could actually make this a disadvantage for the older ships by having them cost more to maintain to simulate their older age.
I know this would go against logic if I build a new one but generally speaking the balancing of carriers should be changed so I hardly have any incentive to build 75 year old world war 2 era warships over modern fleet-carriers. I guess something as simple as a unit maintenance multiplier could do this.

Anyway I just thought I would bring this up as it just bothers me that I have to convince myself to not just build 75 year old ships over shiny new nuclear powered supercarriers.

[Zuikaku]

The easiest solution is to increase air capacity by one for each new class in (super)carrier evolution. But the problem is when the capacity reaches 6 or 7 that means they can carry well over the 100 of aircrafts.

But in some strange way, Nimitz is just enlarged, improved, more advanced, more tough and sensor packed nuclear powered version of Essex class. And far more expensive.

[Nerei]

Yes calling Nimitz a more expensive Essex with different stats is not that far off.
Increasing aircraft capacity amongst the Supercarriers might work. The problem is it also needs to work with ships like Midway that starts out with 6 aircraft spots. With that as base Ford end up with a capacity of 11 which is a bit high. Also the problem is maintenance. Even if ford can support twice the number of aircraft it still cost like 10 times more to field meaning it needs to have around 5 times as many slots as the updated version has to be competitive from an economic perspective.

Ultimately I still think a large part of the problem is to be found in the evolution of aircraft from F2F to F-14 that the game does not show on carriers. 11 slots on Gerald Ford is probably not absurd if you use interwar aircraft as the yardstick. However they use numbers derived from large, heavy cold war era aircraft while ships like Midway use far, far smaller world war 2 era aircraft.

[merlinx_at]

... Alternatively expand the flight-deck types. Currently there is long and short-deck carriers which before I say anything else I must commend. It is better than what I have seen in most other games.

However it could still be expanded to be more accurate for post world war 2 carriers.
Add say small and large jet fighters sizes (with the current long deck representing world war 2 aircraft). ...

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