Question: Any plans to bring the hangar/missile capacity of old ships up-to-date?

[Troubleshooter11]

All the ships and new E variants that have been added to the game from Kingdom's End onwards have unique missile storage capacities and more modest and sensible hangar bay space. Are there any plans to retroactively rebalance the missile/hangar capacities for the older ships?

To give you some examples:
All the fighters in the game have 20 missile capacity, with the exception being the Boron fighters and the new Xenon F which have unique values.
All the capital ships in the game (pre-KE) have 40 hangar bay space for S sized ships regardless of docks, while newer ships have 4 or 8 depending on the amount of S-docks.

[Koizuki]

... retroactively ...

As far as I'm aware, the answer to this will be 'no,' because the devs seem to expressly not want to change things that are already in the players' hands, which is why they have the E variants to begin with, while leaving the old models available to the player.

There were quite a number of complaints about the E-series carriers being "useless" because they rebalanced the S/M slots on them, and some players just want every carrier to be Raptor-sized, or even larger, or something, so those players could opt to continue using the older "placeholder stats" ships. It's an unfortunate consequence of the devs having relied on such (possible) placeholders in the past, and now the players have gotten used to them. They seem to be more thoughtful about the stats of the newer ships since the Boron DLC and onward.

[Nanook]

I, for one, certainly hope they don't rebalance the old ships. The new E variants have ruined one of my favorite game styles. I sometimes like to fly around in an L-class ship, carrying a bevy of various S-class ships in the hanger, way more than any of the new E-class ships can carry. My hangar might hold 3 or 4 personal fighters, a scout ship, a mining ship, 4+ mini freighters, with room for a number of captured ships. I would've been satisfied with the nerfbat leaving room for ~20 ships, but to drop my favorite ships down to 4-6 max was just too much. So now the only way for me to play that style is to either play a custom game with the older ships, or somehow get my rep up to be able to buy those ships from the NPC's. It makes me sad.

[MKL81]

All the ships and new E variants that have been added to the game from Kingdom End onwards have unique missile storage capacities and more modest and sensible hangar bay space. Are there any plans to retroactively rebalance the missile/hangar capacities for the older ships?

To give you some examples:
All the fighters in the game have 20 missile capacity, with the exception being the Boron fighters and the new Xenon F which have unique values.
All the capital ships in the game (pre-KE) have 40 hangar bay space for S sized ships regardless of docks, while newer ships have 4 or 8 depending on the amount of S-docks.

I doubt they will be changed, as it seems Egosoft hardly ever walk back design decisions, even if they are unpopular or unreasonable. That being said - it can make reasoned that destroyers should have lower ship capacity than carriers, but reducing the carrier capacity, as it happen with those new E variants, is an absolute nonsense. They became useless.

[gbjbaanb]

I'm one of those crazy guys who think a carrier should be able to, well, carry some ships! If the devs think that 16 ships is enough for anyone (and to be fair that's a balance that might be appropriate) they also have to not only cope with the mining ships that can carry 40 but also the vig swarms of 40+ fighters that you should be able to counter with a single carrier rather than needing 3. I think the balance between, say, a Shark and a Colossus is so off kilter that the Colossus is a "pocket carrier" now and the Argon simply do not have anything that can be considered big capital sized ships (how many turrets does the Behemoth have? Not nearly enough)

But anyway... for missiles, I think the game needs a tweak for them. X3 had missiles carried in cargo and that was good, if a bit unrealistic. Now we have separate missile capacity that only gets used if you have equip a laucher instead of a gun. This, however, is a backwards step. a player-flown fighters cannot reasonably lose one of its guns to equip missiles that will run out quickly. So you see players not using missiles and giving up a fun aspect of dogfighting that X3 had. So I would like to see missiles take up cargo cap again, but have each laucher come with a missile magazine.

What this change would allow for is fighter hardpoints. If the laucher had missiles then fighters could have 1 or 2 missile-only slots that stored 1 (or 2 for heavies) missile. You equip them automatically on docking, but otherwise you can now get the benefits of:

1. fighters get a missile or 2 for the fun of using them when things get hairy, or you need that torpedo.
2. the launcher concept pretty much remains the same, except you have an "ammo" stat for each rather than a single ship-wide number.
3. you can pick up lots of missile loot.

I would also like missiles to be traded at defence platforms (so you can buy more and keep in the action without having to trawl all the way to a wharf or eq dock)

Maybe something for X5 (or the next X4 release Bernd talked about). My personal opinion on backwards compatible ships and stats is - screw them, new game, new rules. If they want to keep the backwards stuff, then allow the player to pick which release of stats or configs to start a new games with (as you'll have to do this in order to put the new stats in on a new game anyway). So I can start a new 7.1 game with only E variants (frankly there's no need to even have E variants with this mechanism, replace the old ones) but those desperate to keep their old ships can start a new 7.1 game but select the "use 6.0 stats" and get the old ships instead.

[LameFox]

This game really does feel like it needs a balance pass in a lot of ways and it's kind of disappointing that they probably can't ever do that without slowly replacing ships. It's one of the reasons I was kind of hoping people were right back when it was predicted they'd re-release it like X3R -> TC -> AP. Like, on the one hand I get not wanting your ongoing save screwed up every time a game updates, but also it's been 5 years and it feels weird that we have a weird blend of the original copy/paste stats and divergent DLC content and also some power creep thrown in on top.

[Caedes91]

... retroactively ...

As far as I'm aware, the answer to this will be 'no,' because the devs seem to expressly not want to change things that are already in the players' hands, which is why they have the E variants to begin with, while leaving the old models available to the player.

There were quite a number of complaints about the E-series carriers being "useless" because they rebalanced the S/M slots on them, and some players just want every carrier to be Raptor-sized, or even larger, or something, so those players could opt to continue using the older "placeholder stats" ships. It's an unfortunate consequence of the devs having relied on such (possible) placeholders in the past, and now the players have gotten used to them. They seem to be more thoughtful about the stats of the newer ships since the Boron DLC and onward.

And the complaints were completely legit in my opinion. 16 ships...Seriously? Current day carriers already carry much more fighters.
This thing looks just as if not more massive than the Raptor. It at least has much more space than for just 16. But then again, fighters in X4 are too spacious in general. No serious military would ever field such "comfortable" ships.
If anything, it's the Raptor that needs to be reduced or at least the hull redesigned, so that the ships don't simply disappear into wormholes. Terran Tokyo the same. The Hull needs to be much bigger. Especially the M-landing bay needs to go or moved, so it doesn't go directly into the engine anymore.

From the beginning, I have suspected, that the communication between the diffferent teams at Egosoft is not working. The designer and artist do their thing, the devs' balancing works separately.

This is especially the case for the DLC ships. As they most certainly are outsourced, given how they look magnitudes better than what the basegame offers. The terran fighters seem to come from Egosoft though, given how out of place they look compared to the capital ships. But look at the empty grey square surfaces of the Syn and Asgard. The designer clearly intended for more turrets, but Egosoft seems to have nerfed their designs for balancing reasons.

To summarize: I am also for retroactively changing the stats, not only legacy ships, but all in general. It cannot fly with anyone, that some miner can carry more fighters than actual XL-sized carriers. Neither from a gameplay standpoint, nor from common sense point. Otherwise what is the logic, that we space-time-bending technology for ship cargo, but no FTL-capabilities.

[Koizuki]

Personally, I do feel like I agree that the devs just need to bite the bullet and redo the stats of the entire lineup, because as it stands, everything is going to be compared against the old "placeholdere value" ships, and that is not going to go well, as is obvious here.

I feel like it's less a "nerf,' and more that the devs finally picked some reasonable values they want to balance around, while making the ships a bit more unique (I'd go even further and mix up the number of docking pads some more, too, alongside speed/shield/hull/cargo values to really give each faction's carrier a niche to play in.) I never really minded the Vanguard/Sentinel variations because they offered sidegrades depending on what stat you needed more, but I do wish it was done a bit more liberally rather than just a few % difference in hull/cargo and speed/crew.

The "reasonableness" of the value they've decided on can be debated, but I don't think smaller carriers are necessarily a bad thing, if they are done properly; The Guppy makes a great patrol carrier with just enough fighters to cover most tasks, and the ZeuS E is actually very fast for a carrier, and I use it as a blitzkrieg carrier with a wing of Burst Ray fighters meant to charge in ahead of the group, disable all the enemy capitals, and then retreat. Let's not also forget that docking space is completely irrelevant when a carrier is using Position Defence, as all the fighters will be flying in space anyway, and only needing to dock for repairs/resupply. I think I have over 100 fighters assigned to some of my sector defense Colossus carriers (of which there is only one per sector) because they are all running Position Defense guarding the various gates.

The Raptor is the superior force projection ship, but it's offset by being the slowest carrier in the game currently, and only having a single shield so it can be taken out if the AI ever were smart enough to rush it with some capitals (which they probably aren't, admittedly.)

In either case, the fact that the older ships continue to exist in their "placeholder" form means that any new iteration that isn't just straight up better/bigger than it will get panned by some players. But in my opinion, they aren't nerfing those ships; they're simply getting around to deciding what sort of values they wanted to balance the factions around (because they do not get the option of using the older ones,) and it just so happens that it's smaller than the previous placeholder values. That's how I see it, anyway.

[gbjbaanb]

The Raptor is the superior force projection ship, but it's offset by being the slowest carrier in the game currently, and only having a single shield so it can be taken out if the AI ever were smart enough to rush it with some capitals (which they probably aren't, admittedly.)

The shark is a very good carrier too (possibly better than the Raptor, it is definitely more survivable). What is interesting about these 2 is that they were both added as late DLCs. Seem the devs have been infected with a good case of the power creeps.

[Koizuki]

Right, the Shark is also a good super carrier, albeit with worse turret options than the Raptor, but it trades some fighter storage capacity for better shielding, the Boron's unique instant travel mode transition, and its interesting "side loading" docking bay. It also has 4 launch tubes, allowing it to launch 20 fighters per wave, compared to the Raptor's 21 per wave, but the Raptor should be faster at retrieving fighters since it has those 21 physical landing pads. (I'm not entirely sure if fighters can land via launch tubes, but I have some doubts.)

Meanwhile, the Colossus has 10 launch tubes, so it can deploy 18 fighters per wave despite its smaller raw capacity, so it is only slightly behind the super carriers in that respect. In my eyes, these are great little things to have being different between them because they allow you to utilize them in specific niches. They just need more of this, so that not every faction have ships that just feel kind of "samey."

[jlehtone]

The shark is a very good carrier too (possibly better than the Raptor, it is definitely more survivable). What is interesting about these 2 is that they were both added as late DLCs. Seem the devs have been infected with a good case of the power creeps.

The Split was the first (and thus oldest) DLC, wasn't it?

(I'm not entirely sure if fighters can land via launch tubes, but I have some doubts.)

They don't.