Dreadnauts, Juggernauts and Leviathans - Oh My!

Ah, thankyou kind sir
I have also included a link in the first post.

You’re most welcome, my dear chap.

[Mr. Burns] Eeeeeeeexcellent! [/Mr. Burns] I’ve also done the opposite for you in the other thread.

I’ll admit, I envisioned the order of classes as being Dreadnoughts, Battleships, and then Juggernauts/Leviathans, the latter two being interchangeable, with perhaps a Juggernaut being more attack oriented and a Leviathan being more defensible. Its simply a naming convention thing however.

Another thing is to consider cost as well, as thats a major portion of the balance. With these ship classes, are we attempting to standardize cost with size? My current cruisers (GSB stock ships) generally cost between 2.8k and 3.2k. If a Dreadnought is to be a supercruiser or battlecruiser type distinction, which we are saying, should it have anywhere between 1.5x and 2.5x the cost of a standard stock cruiser? Its size lends it to that comparison, using Archduke Astro’s specs. Even then, a cost modifier should be considered as heavier weapons are developed; a large fleet of Dreadnoughts is a very dangerous fleet indeed. It should vary between hulls, but I’d propose another 10-25% cost nerf to these ships after the original cost. Large hull, armor, or shield bonuses obviously can and should drive that up. I can estimate that to be 4.5k+15% or around 5,175 credits. Thats still rather cheap for a design that is supposed to be able to threaten large groups of cruisers.

The Juggernaut presents even more of a challenge. Once again, with Archduke Astro’s size requirements that appears to be around the size of 4-6 stock cruisers. Massive. To start I’d propose a 5x cost minimum increase over the cruiser. Juggernauts should not be well represented in battle numbers wise, in my opinion. Especially with the large amounts of modules and hardpoints, cost modifiers don’t need to be much larger than the Dreadnought, probably in the realms of 15-35%. I estimate a Juggernaut could cost around 15k+25% or equaling 18,750 credits. This isn’t cheap, but fleets of Dreadnoughts can be truly deadly depending on how they are armed.

Now to the Leviathan. Oh dear, where do we even begin? As Archduke Astro pointed out, thats 9x the surface area in 2D. A full 10x the cost of a stock cruiser is required at minimum, I think. A Leviathan every battle would get boring after a while, and I honestly think the cost should be prohibitive enough to make it unusable in several scenarios. One, maybe two max, should be present, and highly vulnerable to fast frigates or corvettes. That being said. I’m guessing the cost modifier should be similar to that of the Juggernaut, around 15-40%, depending on various configurations. This calculates to be about 30k+30% or around 39,000 credits. This is no mean feat to have a ship like that out in the field.

That being said, I haven’t even barely mentioned other hull modifiers for each class. This gets rough without estimation of modification slots available for each class, which of course will change per modder. One thing to consider though is especially armor tanks. The vast amounts of slots makes available more and more 74 armor tanks and such. This is somewhat overpowered in my opinion. My theory is that the larger ships should actually have armor, shield, and engine, and possibly power nerfs until dedicated classes or dedicated modules can be made. Cruiser sized modules won’t work well on these ships, as massing them up is too strong.

I might propose a general 10% decrease systemwide on a Dreadnought, 15-20% on a Juggernaut, and perhaps a 25% on Leviathans. Still, this really is less of a science than the above calculations, and may depend on each ship. Should we be able to get more specific class hardpoints and modules then those nerfs won’t be nearly as powerful.

Hopefully my wall of text is understandable…

Finally I’ve read all the walls o’ text >.<

About the sizes, I’ll bring to the thread a pic were it shows at max (non hacked) zoom a couple of dreadnoughts from my mod:
(forum cut mah img, right click see full image or you won’t see everything)

1366×768 198 KB

The ‘Federation Whale Dreadnought’ (pictured on the right side) has a size of 495 meters which is a big difference in comparison with the 210 size ‘Federation Armadillo Cruiser’ behind it. The ‘Rebel Nidhogg Dreadnought’ (on the right side) has a size of 350 meters.

I’m just bringing this so people can clearly see some of the commented sizes in the game and can comment about that without having to make their own oversized ships

The proposed sizes by Darkstar are more or less the ones I think are right for them (that’s just my opinion) but there may be some people that 500 may be [size=120]Big[/size] for their taste.

I never considered juggernauts before to use as ship class. Changes some names in his notes

One of the main lessons about armor tanking is that more slots you fill doesn’t always means more armour. I don’t remember the exact formula, but the more occupied slots the ship has, the less armour rating your ship will have and armour already has stacking penalty which affects all installed plates. That means there’s a point were a limit is reached and some of the armour tanks I’ve made in crappy designs don’t use full slots in order to be in that limit. Of course making dreadnought specific plates with bigger stacking penalties brings less headache than tweaking the bonus to limit the total armour and not make adding a few armour useless.

Oh, great. Internet went down again while writing a post. Calls tactical nuke aimed at Telefonica

Personally, I would agree with the above definition that the ships should be classified by abilities and engagement envelopes. A Dreadnought should be larger then that of the cruiser, the Juggernaut a step up from the DN, and the levi’s… should just faceroll everything. But this brings us to the question of how to implement them in game terms? Should the Dread’s use CR weapons? Should we give the Levi megacannon to a Fenrir?

I’ve always actually thought of the order a little bit differently, but agree on the Juggernaut and Leviathan classes being essentially the same size but different roles. For me, based on numerous books, games, and shows, the order has always been heavy/cruiser, battleship/battle cruiser, super/dreadnaught, Juggernaut/Leviathan.

Heavy/Cruiser - The main workhorse of a peacetime fleet. Less costly to maintain than the larger ship classes, but with enough firepower to keep the peace against any internal issues (pirates, rebellions, etc).

Battleship/Battle Cruiser - Both of them are essentially the show pieces of a peacetime fleet. Much heavier offensive/defenseive firepower, much more armor, and are typically faster than any of the other ship classes. The differences between them are small. Battleships are heavily armored but slower. Battle Cruisers cost the same as Battleships and have the same firepower, but trade armor for speed.

Super/Dreadnaught - The main workhorse of a war fleet. They have the most firepower, armor, and speed of any mainstream ship, but are much more expensive than their peacetime counterparts. These form the foundation of your fleet, and your general strategy is based around them. The Superdreadnaught is a bit larger than a regular dreadnaught, but has even more firepower and armor.

Juggernaut/Leviathan - The show pieces of a war fleet. There are few of them, they are prohibitively expensive to build and maintain, and are mostly used for morale purposes. These are designed more for their shock-and-awe effect on the enemy rather than for their actual cost-effectiveness in battle. While its true that they have truly devastating firepower and the most armor of any other ship in the fleet they are also slower than the Super/Dreadnaughts and Battleships/Cruisers that make up the main body of your fleet. Due to this limitation they are mostly used in a defensive capacity, or in battles where speed isn’t necessary (when the enemy is being forced to hold their ground rather than retreat, as in defending a planet).

Sizes:
Heavy/Cruiser - up to 256
Battleship/Cruiser & Super/Dreadnaught - up to 512
Juggernaut/Leviathan - 512+

I lump the Battleship/Cruiser and Super/Dreadnaught together because as Archduke pointed out, and I agree, the classification between them really comes down to capabilities rather than specific size. I like to think that a Battleship/Cruiser is basically able to defeat two Cruisers before being destroyed while a Super/Dreadnaught can take out up to 4 without being destroyed.

I combine the Juggernaut and Leviathan classes because really once you get to that physical size, complexity, and cost they are all simply variations on a fleet-in-a-ship, if done realistically.

Sources:
The Honor Harrington series by David Weber - Super/Dreadnaught, Heavy/Cruiser, Battleship/Cruiser
The Starfire series by David Weber and Steve White - All
The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell - Battleship/Cruiser, Heavy/Cruiser
The Helfort series by Graham Sharp Paul - Dreadnaught
and various other Sci-fi novels, games and books.

With those numbers, about 20% of all modded ships are Leviathans- yet, you say that there aren’t many of them…

Some sizes from history:

Armored Cruiser 519 feet
Dreadnought 527 feet
Superdreadnought (Iron Duke) 580 feet
Yamato (I don’t know: super duper dreadnought?) 839 feet
Iowa (also super duper, but fast) 880 feet

My point being that you don’t need to make each succeeding ship class so much larger than the previous one to justify an order of magnitude greater performance. It’s in the construction, and the class of weaponry, not the hull size. So your dreadnoughts need only be 5-10% larger than your cruisers, add another 10% for your superdreadnoughts, and then, oh heck, knock yourselves out for the super duper dreadnoughts of the void/leviathans.

Only problem: all of these larger ship sizes were still vulnerable to fighter/bombers, torpedoes from destroyers, mines, and submarines. In GSB terms, if all you want to do is create large ships that are invulnerable to everything except their counterparts, you are creating a situation that has never existed in history.

Thoughts? Comments?

Leviathans are just a moral booster- scaring the enemy and making the rest of you’re fleet/crew/whatever feell safer…

the true meaning of leviathan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan

That just gave me an awesome idea…

I leave for days to play my shiny new expansions and this happens?! No fair pouts
Anyways I agree with darkstar’s order, but remember: Don’t overkill. Leviathans, IMO, should be replaced by space stations that cannot move. If it could move, then it would be super slow and impractical because of the added cost/crew needs/power consumption of engines. Unless there are huge mega-engines, no one will put engines on a leviathan anyways*. dreadnoughts and juggernoughts I love, but juggernoughts should be fast. few hardpoints, lots of engines available. Idk why, but when I hear ‘juggernought’ I think a fast, heavy ship that gets in fast and wipes out anything in its way. To counter this maybe less armour and hull strength? I don’t know, just an idea.

*Except maybe when engines are required

I agree, and it follows the notions I posted on game balance. Every class should be vulnerable to every other class.

In addition, for both scale and tactical purposes, these large ships should be required to have engines. Otherwise you have not a moon, but a space station - which I’d also like to see, BTW. I always thought star bases were an cool feature of Star Fleet Battles, and would make an excellent scenario feature for GSB with additional victory requirements.

Rather than counting pixels, I’d rather talk about loadouts and design specs, as I’ve done in the small-ship thread. In the game and expansions I have, cruisers have a minimum of fourteen slots and five hardpoints within those fourteen. Classifying designs by hardpoint count:

• Light Cruiser: 5 hardpoints
• Heavy Cruiser: 6-7, 20-slot hull cap
• Battlecruiser: 8-9 hardpoints, 20-slot hull cap. Lots of weapons with either good speed and poor defenses, or good defenses and poor speed.
• Battleship/Dreadnaught: 10-12 hardpoints, 30-slot hull cap for all the super-cruiser classes below. Limiting the slot count means that either defenses gets proportionally thinner or speed decreases as the weapon count grows.
• Juggernaught: 13-15 hp
• Leviathan: 16+ hp

Do folks think this is a sensible draft scheme?

I actually have to agree with Ebongreen. Using the number of slots for each hulls is probably the best way of going about this. It’s pretty much the middle ground between going by size and going by capability.

I don’t suppose it would restrict too much flexibility by mixing and matching the two standards, size and hardpoint?

I don’t understand what size standard you have in mind, or what restrictions you are looking towards; if I did, I’d try to answer, at least in regard to my notions. :-,

Another difficult part of designing trans-cruiser ships is that we’re talking about inventing a fourth class of vessel. I’ve never done a mod for GSB, but I don’t see standard cruiser parts working as real battleship substitutes. The history of wet navies until World War II was putting bigger guns on bigger faster ships with more armor, ad nauseum. WWII also saw vessels practically max out speed-wise in the 30-40kt range, regardless of size.

For this game, putting more and more cruiser beam lasers on a bigger and bigger spaceship with more and more super-heavy cruiser armor and more cruiser engines misses the point. Then all you have is a really really big cruiser, not a battleship. Wet battleships are supposed to make mincemeat out of cruisers at longer ranges and with bigger guns than cruisers have; it’ll take some clever design to have cruisers (or anything else) both be menaced by and be a menace to trans-cruiser spaceships. It’s a major balance issue, as well as a significant AI issue since the AI currently only recognizes three classes of ship.

Again, I’m new here, so I’m doing more guessing than knowing. Is this a correct reading of the game engine and AI?

yup. youre right.

I particularly liked the places where Archduke Astro went into detail around the first page, and I thought your ideas meshed rather well.

Got it! Yes, AA and I seem to be of similar bent overall.

I’ve gotta say, reconsidering my earlier draft, I wonder if

• CA:~6 hp
• BB/DN:~8 hp
• JN:~10 hp
• LV:~12 hp

might work better. The more I look at existing designs, the more I think a “rule of thirds” makes a good balance: about a third of slots for hardpoints/offense, about a third for defenses, and about a third for engines and overhead. So an 18-slot 6-hardpoint cruiser would be a standard design option, with the current 20-slot limit allowing for what would be seven- or eight-hardpoint battlecruisers in function if not name. A balanced battleship design would be 24-ish slots or so, moving into very new territory.

Frigates (~4 hp) and fighters (1-2 hp) fit into the pattern cleanly too.

12 hp for leviathans?! there are some current ships with about 50 hp dude… The one that I have in mind (Dominator Central Core) are not designed to move and have more hp than standard, but it is still not the biggest ship around/in progress (Check the Deserters/arms race thread). The bigger ships, I’m guessing, will be able to have 50 hp and 100 standard. I would suggest that they go up at an increasing rate, e.g. CN 6 hp, BB/DN 10 hp, JN 16 hp, LV 24+ hp. An even steeper curve may be needed tho, like CN 6, BB 12, JN 21, LV 33+

In the end it is a matter of opinion, but that is not what this thread is about, its finding an agreement right?