Re: Maintenance Formula
 

Fill a ship with point defence wipe out a lot of fighters or even find a race that uses missles a lot. After a few fights the ship become legendary from experience because they killed a lot of seekers or units. Refit them to carry your best beam weapon then you have a killer ship. I wonder if this was as intended? I think point defence since it already gets a bonus to hit probably shouldn't up the ships experience quite as much as a beam weapon would.

I got a lot of legendary ships this way just because I have been fighting a lot of fighters and seekers since the full game came out. With the experience bonus these ships really fight well. So bring on your fighters it will only make my ships tougher to beat.

Re: Maintenance Formula
 

Tomgs, that sounds very much like an exploit of the game engine imo. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif But still, if it works, use it. But as you say, either pdc's shouldn't up the experience so much or ships should lose some experience when retrofitted based on what the new components are compared to the old ones.

Re: Maintenance Formula
 

I agree with the others who state that fighters should have a maintanence cost. If you look at current day fighter planes, they require constant maintanence and the pilots neet constant practice, both of which are considerable expenses for their militaries.

Having units free of maintenance encourges players to build as many as they can until they approach their limit. Then they have to start dismantling them to replace them with better models. As players learn how to optimize the game, this will become a big advantage for micromanagement players (those without families or other persuits in life).

How about facilities? They are absolotely free of maintainace. You can build a research lab and never have to pay another resource to keep it going. If they were to add maintainace for these, they would have to adjust the numbers a bit to keep expensive facilities like Monoliths cost effective.

Re: Maintenance Formula
 

Yes, the Point Defenses earning experience definately seems like a gaff to me. I have PD ships at +15% in the first few turns of a war simply by attacking planets armed missile WPs. I think its somewhat silly and I think its probably more of an oversight than a planned thing.

I'd hesitate to call it a 'bug', but I wouldnt be surprised if it went away at some point. Personally, I'd like to see it go, but its not a major issue.

On the issue of Emissive Armor...well, I already dropped it from my tech set in the standard form. I found it quite silly that such a low level and attainable tech can completely nullify Fighters which require far more in terms of research to get rolling. Also, the who concept of adding 1 point of EmArmor and your whole ship is protected didnt sit right.

Was there any other use to EmArmor that I may have missed OTHER than to negate Fighters? I havent seen many Ship weapons that do less than even the 30 level. The Armor does not appear to be culmulative with itself. Anyone?

For my set, I simply made the upper level armors give a better size/damage resistance ratio at an increasing cost in resources. I'm fairly pleased with it and players are about evenly split between the 'armor route' and the 'shield route' in our games. I see reasons and benefits to both schools and thats what I prefer...tradeoffs and decisions.

Anyways, back to Fighters...Commander G echoed my concerns...once people figure out the mechanics, they will realize that until the very high techs, Ships are NOT cost effective when dealing with the maintenance free defenses. IMO, nearly EVERYTHING needs a residual upkeep cost. That way, you need to build to expand and expand to build. FWIW, I feel that maybe 5% for Fighters, 2-3% for Satellites and Mines and MAYBE a 1-2% for Troops, although they are so limited on their own and take up space so its prolly not a necessity. I also kind of like the idea of Research Labs costing some residual amount to runn as well. Maybe a small (preset) upkeep on them as well would give pause to people dropping 20 of them on a huge world while ignoring economic expansion.

Talenn

Re: Maintenance Formula
 

I agree, fighters and weapon platforms need a small upkeep. Not so sure about sats and mines though as they are strictly drop and forget. Well, the mines anyway. Maybe give them a lifespan? After x years there is y chance sat/mine won't work. I don't think troops need much of an upkeep as they tend to die like flies when invading anyway. At least in the demo they do.

Anyway, if fighters and weapon platforms get upkeep we should be able to retrofit and scrap them. I want to be able to scrap all units except mines anyway, regardless of upkeep. If we get to retrofit them the can't cost more than original design value shoould be set higher than for ships. ie the difference in cost allowed is lower. Makes sense?

Re: Maintenance Formula
 

or... for mines, give them a low supply usage, then set values on how much supplies they carry. over time, they use up there supplies and fail, even passing a message through the interface. this way, no major coding and it can be done right in the existing files with little tweaking. also, you could build a "supply storage" for mines so that they can Last longer...

Re: Maintenance Formula
 

I'm not sure about the need for upkeep. For all their various capabilities, mines, sats, and fighters are ultimately defensive weapons unless deployed by a fleet. You can deploy thousands of mines, but they won't bring the enemy empires to their knees.

The need for big, balanced fleets brings up the second problem with maintenance and resource use: minerals are king. How many of the rest of you research "resource manipulaiton" so you can turn radioactives and organics into minerals? 8)

Seems to me that ship maintenance ought to be tweaked so that the bulk of the maintenance costs come in organics and radioactives, and not minerals. Then you'd need minerals to build stuff, and organics/radioactives to maintain them. Perhaps the formula could work by taking the net cost of the ship (all three resources combined), and splitting up a given fraction of this as a per-turn cost, with the cost divided out as 10% minerals, 45% organics, 45% radioactives?

Re: Maintenance Formula
 

James Sterett :
"I'm not sure about the need for upkeep. For all their various capabilities, mines, sats, and fighters are ultimately defensive weapons unless deployed by a fleet. You can deploy thousands of mines, but they won't bring the enemy empires to their knees."

Actually, I've been experimenting with using sats as weapons pods. Against the AI they have proven incredibly effective. In mid game I was using a Med Transport, 15 Cargo II and 5 Sat bay III's. It was capable of holding 30 Large Sats (A mix of seeker pods/Gun Pods. Those 30 Sats between them had 3300KT of storage available (after the bridge) for weapons and gear. This ship took down a small fleet consisting of a Cruiser, BC and BB. No damage, no lost pods. With the exception of Warp point assaults, I never encountered a situation where I couldn't get most (if not all) of the pods deployed before engagement. Against fixed installations they are even more effective: Duck inside missile range, drop a set of 5 seeker pods, and duck away again. The enemy missles can't target your pods, and they just pound the defenses into scrap.
Another advantage of this technique is that it allows you to divide up the building of a ship across multiple build queues. You only need one shipyard to produce the ship, while even domed colonies can produce the pods.
Keep in mind that a similar amount of firepower in conventional ships (say in battleships) requires the maintenance on 4 to 5 800KT ships and their components. The weapons pods in this tactic though are maintenance free. So you are only paying maintenance on the ship, with 15x200min to build the cargo bays, and 5x100min for the Sat bays.
I'd never consider this trick against humans, but the AI sure doesn't like it http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Maintenance Formula
 

Seems to me one of the simpler cures here would be to let seekers target sats. 8) This would prevent the "drop it off in bombardment range" problem.

However, from a wider perspective, should we change game mechanics to knock out tactics that work well against the AI but not against a human? I'd think that's a situation where the underlying answer is to improve the AI.

If sats/mines/fighters become cost-ineffective, then they never get built, and the system is less rich. As it stands, they *are* cost-effective, but they also have some serious limitations. A number of people have commented on the ease of killing satellites and fighters if you have point defence (which, bein useless against ships, put the designer into a tradeoff decision at some level - a Good Thing). All these weapons need help to get into a system other than the one they were built in, which severely limits their flexibility. Yes, you can get away with your sat carrier against the AI - but it's a fragile system. As a fleet support ship it would fare much better, and seem far less anomalous.

Re: Maintenance Formula
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by James Sterrett:
[b]Seems to me one of the simpler cures here would be to let seekers target sats. 8) This would prevent the "drop it off in bombardment range" problem.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Actually, I see no problem with the introduction of "AFHAWK" systems (seeking point defense systems). These would help balance the weapons pod concept (which I agree, should not be so overpowering against the AI). On the other hand, now you're looking at using these systems as "one shot" systems. I.E. they will get off their missile salvo, prior to getting pounded by incoming light seekers. If you were then to introduce single shot seeker components, you get very close to both the Missile pod idea from the Honor Harrington novels, as well as the External Ordnance racks from the Starfire novels by Weber and White.
The question becomes one of balance -
Given a seeker weapon that can target anything - How much should they mass, what dam, what reload rate will keep them in balance (I.E. not destroy the effectiveness of fighter Groups). Apply that to single shot pods as well - Keeping damage/range the same as the equivalent level CSM, while upping reload to 30, how big should they be.

The trade off with single shots is - how much longterm fire power am I willing to give up for a larger initial punch.

A regular CSM I does 60 dam every 3 turns. By making the reload time 30 on SS CSM I, you've reduced longterm firepower per launcher by 10. If you were to make them mass 15kt, you've now given them a longterm dam/kt of 30% of a CSM, for the advantage of 3.333 times the initial firepower. Does this sound fairly balanced? Which way would you adjust the mass of the launcher?

SDK