This mod changes the game to set your max fleet size using the total deployment points of your fleet, rather than raw ship count. Similar to vanilla this is a “soft” limit, and you can exceed it at the cost of increased supply use and reduced burn speed that scales proportionally based on how much you exceed the base limit.
Why?
The Venn diagram of people reading this post and the people who have watched High Tech Best Tech is a single circle.
Why (seriously)?
I’m not the only one who’s noticed this, but as a player frigates only “feel” relevant in the very early game when money is tight and their cheapness is the major selling point: once you start having a decent amount of money to throw at your fleet frigates tend to be overlooked in favor of bigger, flashier choices, and most frigates you have wind up being purged from your fleet in favor of larger ships. You might keep a couple around for capping points at the start of a battle, but that’s largely it. This is a shame, because (ignoring the Tempest, vanilla’s problem child) the modverse has some interesting and creative frigate designs that don’t ever really get their due.
However, if you’ve watched an AI fleet tournament you’ve probably noticed that it isn’t the multi-capital fleets that tend to run the table: these often end up doing average or poorly. Instead, the fleets that usually have the most consistent performance are frigate/destroyer swarms, with a few larger ships thrown in as support. While the fleet tournaments are not a 1:1 representation of campaign fleets (notably, there’s no individual player to tip the scales and wider fleets reduce the effect of one ship’s AI going derp), it shows that smaller ships can still be relevant on the tactical map. So why do we tend to not give them a second look?
The vanilla fleet cap tends towards/rewards top-heavy fleets: with a 30 ship limit, eventually the only way to improve the quality of your fleet is to upgrade to bigger ships. This was worse in .91 when fleet DP determined starting points: I found myself using Infernus and Cathedrals as cargo/fuel haulers to tip the initial deployment balance in my favor for some of the more over the top mod bounties and fleet encounters. Moving to officers in .95a made this less absurd, but the issue remains: you don’t have a choice between an Onslaught and seven Brawlers, you have a choice between one fleet slot and an Onslaught, or seven fleet slots for the Brawlers. This means that smaller ships–which rely on numbers and wolf pack tactics to compensate for individual inferiority–can’t use either in a player’s fleet, nor do they have the slack for the higher casualties this strategy tends to generate.
This mod seeks to rectify that: even if you don’t want to recreate Cums’ greatest hits, moving to a DP limit allows you to bring smaller ships in a quantity that makes them useful beyond their current “cap and forget” role, while still remaining (somewhat) balanced.
What is configurable?
The DP limit and over-limit penalties can be changed in settings.json. The default DP limit is 600: anecdotally, most end-game vanilla bounty fleets seem to hover around this range (some over, some under).
Should I use this mod?
It would depend on how you like to build your fleets: if you find yourself running balanced (in terms of ship class) fleets and find yourself chafing against the vanilla limit, this mod will be an overall buff. If you like to run fleets composed entirely of Paragons and Gowns, you will probably be happier with vanilla’s fleet limits.
Anything else?
Check the README: this mod works by adding a hidden skill to the player, so there are some additional steps that you may need to take with certain other mods and/or if you wish to remove this mod mid-game.
Changelog
Regardless; this is perfect. Definitely gonna be using this. Every game I end up hitting the fleet cap; and as soon as I do, the long winnowing process starts, where I scrap or sell frigates to make room for destroyers, smaller freighters to make room for atlases, until, eventually, ending up with a probably 26 uber-capital ships forming a slowly advancing wall of death and 4 fast assault ships to chase after fleeing enemies.
If using smaller ships as well as larger ones means I could use sixty ships, and have packs of frigates each escorting a carrier? Hell yes.
Wasn’t vanilla like this at one point? I could’ve sworn that deployment points or something was the factor.
Regardless; this is perfect. Definitely gonna be using this. Every game I end up hitting the fleet cap; and as soon as I do, the long winnowing process starts, where I scrap or sell frigates to make room for destroyers, smaller freighters to make room for atlases, until, eventually, ending up with a probably 26 uber-capital ships forming a slowly advancing wall of death and 4 fast assault ships to chase after fleeing enemies.
If using smaller ships as well as larger ones means I could use sixty ships, and have packs of frigates each escorting a carrier? Hell yes.
A very long time ago yes, the Fleet Points were used to cap the size of the player fleet and as an early “deployment points” before it was changed to the deployment cost. Now Fleet Points are just an internal metric to rate a ships “power” on the battlefield in auto-resolve and generate AI fleets. Interestingly, those start equal to the current deployment points for frigates, but scale less with bigger ships making a capital ship only worth 4-5 frigates in auto-resolve despite 10 times the deployment cost.
Great mod. Can I request sector wide option?
I assume you mean that NPC fleets would adhere to similar composition rules, and in that case it might be a bit far off: as noted by Tartiflette above the game uses an entirely separate metric when generating NPC fleets, and I would need to check 1)how much of it can be easily modified/altered and 2)that it doesn’t break a bunch of things in the process (e.g. some of the special fleets that get spawned during the Academy quest chain, making sure you don’t get zerged by 600 DP worth of drones when you scavenge your first derelict probe).
I won’t say never, but there are a decent number of moving parts that I need to look into.
New update is out. You will now receive a periodic notification on the campaign layer if your fleet is over the DP limit, along with the associated supply use penalty: the notification interval can be configured in setttings.json. Save compatible.
This mod sounds great.
Sadly, I just tried to start a new game with it, and got crash with error
486605 [Thread-3] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain - java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CharacterStats.refreshCharacterStatsEffects(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CharacterStats.setSkillLevel(Unknown Source)
at FleetSizeByDP.FleetSizeByDPPlugin.onGameLoad(FleetSizeByDPPlugin.java:20)
at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.CampaignGameManager.o00000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.title.TitleScreenState.dialogDismissed(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.ui.Oo0O.dismiss(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.ui.impl.o0oO.dismiss(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.J.actionPerformed(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newnew.buttonPressed(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.ui.I.Ò00000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.ui.I.processInput(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.ui.Stringsuper.super(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.BaseGameState.traverse(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.state.AppDriver.begin(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain.main(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher.o00000(Unknown Source)
at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$1.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)I’m running a few mods, so can it be a compatibility issue with other mods?
Hello!
This mod sounds great.Sadly, I just tried to start a new game with it, and got crash with error
I’m running a few mods, so can it be a compatibility issue with other mods?
The error indicates that the hidden skill is not loading, so it is possible. Could you post/PM me your enabled mods? You can find the list in your mods folder as enabled_mods.json.
EDIT: Quality Captains was the most common mod conflict, but the latest version of QC (v1.0.8 ) should not have any issues with this mod. If you want to use an older version of QC, there are some steps to follow in the README that will allow compatibility.
However, unless I’ve misread, this mod still seems interesting.
Time to have like 70 frigates BAYBEEEEEE
EDIT: Quality Captains was the most common mod conflict, but the latest version of QC (v1.0.8 ) should not have any issues with this mod. If you want to use an older version of QC, there are some steps to follow in the README that will allow compatibility.
Yup, that was the problem, thank you. Updating QC fixed it.
Anybody else seem to have this problem?
Right now I’m guessing it’s between this one and Quality Captains….
Hello all, for some reason my automated ship seems to be stuck at 26% readiness despite me having the correct skill and I’m trying to track down the mod doing it.
Anybody else seem to have this problem?
Right now I’m guessing it’s between this one and Quality Captains….
The max readiness depends on the DP of any automated ship(s) in your fleet and their AI cores (if any): what are you running?
….The max readiness depends on the DP of any automated ship(s) in your fleet and their AI cores (if any): what are you running?
A Radiant with a fixed Alpha core. I think it’s about 70 dp?