Re: Flagships
 

Making flagships very expensive to built and to maintain coupled with only one being effective in a fleet should be enough without tying it to some artificial milepost that allows you to built one. 50 ships, what kind of ships? I can build empty escorts with no engines to keep costs down and make them easy and fast to build to get around the ship limit. And what happens if as a result of a battle you drop below the threshhold of 50, do you lose the flagship? The point is, if they are expensive, you could never afford to let them alone, they would always have to have escorts which further drives up the costs of maintaining a fleet having one. And you could never just build them for a rainy day like you do fighter/troops/satellites. The cost should serve as an adequate limiting factor. Additionally, flagships should be so full of command components, etc. granting the fleet whatever bonuses it receives to leave little room for weapons, meaning it needs and should have a lot of friends to do the fighting and even a fleet of flagships shouldn't be near as good as a single flagship and same number of the best attack ships. Further the happiness/experience/morale of the race should be seriously affected by the loss of one as this represent the pride and joy of your armed force, the best of the best so to speak and its loss would reasonant throughout your empire.

Re: Flagships
 

I don't know if assigning a number of ships needed before being able to build flagship would work. Questions from other Posts here bring up valid questions, as to what happens when you fall below that number etc. Also what would we do with the training facilities if we base experience or attach experience to flagships and still make them important in the game? Maybe base it on fleets. If you have say 5 fleets, you would be able to build up to 5 flagships, as your fleets increase, this would allow you to build up to that number but no more. Then you would have choice of either building them or not depending on the cost and what you could afford. once built, they remain in the game and count towards whatever number is assigned even if you fall below the number of fleets. The training facilities could still train up to whatever limit is set, but with a flagship present it would give an experiece bonus above (pick a number) above what it currently has. Therefore, you could train your fleet but would pick up the additional bonus only with a flagship present...I hope I explained this right....

just some ideas mac

Re: Flagships
 

yeah mac that makes sense. Good ideas. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Flagships
 

OK Modders, Here's the challenge....

Within the existing Game (newest Patch) Can we implement what is being discussed?

Or something simlar to:

New hull Designs (i.e. Command Cruiser): With a high Maintenance cost and that are the only hulls that can accept new components such as:

Flag Bridge(Used in addition to regular bridge. Must exist before any bonuses from other components are applied)

Fleet Fire Control: Bonuse to Attack

Fleet Defense Control: Bonus to Defense (or if certain mods are in use a bonus to Point-Defense)

Fleet Communications: Bonus for combat movement or xperience?

Any others?

Only bonuses from 1 ship can be applied per fleet.


So Can something like this be done?


RhineStone Cowboy

Re: Flagships
 

In many mods I get Messages along the lines of "component cannot be used on this ship type". It seems important to me that the new components should only be used on the special "command-hulls".

The command-hulls may not be super expensive to build, but should be very expensive to maintain (is maintenance calculated directly from cost?) because all the best cuts of Alberta beef would go to the Admirals ship. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif Realistically tho, all the new equipment and excellent personell would end up on the command ship, so it should have a fantastically high maintenance cost compared to the other ships.

Finally, I like the idea from Beck, only one of the special components should have a combat effect on the sector. This will keep people from loading up on just command-ships in a particular sector.

Just my thoughts,
Jimbob


>Typo<

[This message has been edited by jimbob (edited 25 October 2001).]

Re: Flagships
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>OK Modders, Here's the challenge....
Within the existing Game (newest Patch) Can we implement what is being discussed?
Or something simlar to:
New hull Designs (i.e. Command Cruiser): With a high Maintenance cost and that are the only hulls that can accept new components such as:
Flag Bridge(Used in addition to regular bridge. Must exist before any bonuses from other components are applied)
Fleet Fire Control: Bonuse to Attack
Fleet Defense Control: Bonus to Defense (or if certain mods are in use a bonus to Point-Defense)
Fleet Communications: Bonus for combat movement or xperience?
Any others?
Only bonuses from 1 ship can be applied per fleet.
So Can something like this be done?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
1) Flagship equals major maintenance.
So totally done http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif
Use the 50% maintenance ability from bases, but multiply the "value1" amount by -20.
That gives Flagships 10x more maintenance compared to regular ships.
I reccommend putting this ability into the "Flag Bridge", so that the standard hulls can be reused.

Having separate fleet-bonus-generating sub-stations would make it difficult to limit their use to flagships.

You could put all of the abilities into the FlagBridge, and make it 150KT in size. That would guarantee that they are only used on flagships by definition http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

It may also be possible to come up with a scheme of +ve and -ve maintenance changes to limit their use.

It could also be set so that the maintenance on Flag equipment is extremely high, but one is required in every fleet in order to have a chance of winning.
If not having a flagship saves you 20K per turn, but drops your accuracy against flagship-using enemy fleets to 1%, you're toast.
If flagship parts were made as expensive as SM, you would limit them nicely. Forcing them to use a Flag Bridge could be difficult, unless you included that space in the specific bonus components.
IE, have "Flag Bridge + Fire control", "Flag Bridge + Defense Control", "Flag Bridge + Fire/Defense Control combo"... etc, all as single (large) components.

IF component restrictions by hull are possible, that would work great, but I don't think the patch included support for them.


[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 25 October 2001).]