quote:
Originally posted by Jubala:
Ok, that explains that. I've been checking out the starfire site and lurking a little in the forum, but I usually don't understand much because of all the ingame abbrevations used. Like discussions on shipdesign. Plain gibberish if you ask me. 
But I do understand enough to know I want to play the game.
Ship design in Starfire is pretty much like in SE3, but there is an upper case letter code for each system type instead of a graphic icon. For example, S = a shield system, A = armor, L = laser, I = “ion engine”, etc… There are wads & wads of systems, though. Secondary codes, sometimes numbers or sometimes lower case letters, are used to reflect generational improvements in the same system. Again like SE3, damage is normally scored on systems left to right, with each damage point killing one system. Damage from some weapons skip certain types of systems, or can sort of randomly select which system takes the hit. Shield systems are not destroyed but rather go down due to overload, and will be back up at the beginning of the next battle (if you survive this one), while everything else would need to be repaired. Shields & armor go to the left (in that order), but the order on everything else is pretty much up to the designing player. Different hull sizes take different numbers of engines per MP, increasing as the hull size goes up (the smallest get multiple MP per engine). Where multiple engines are required for one MP, the engines for each MP are placed in a drive room represented by (), for example (II) is a drive room with two engines in it. That is an addition since the earliest Version of the game, though. Ships have to include crew quarters & life support like SE4 (a combined system is available for small ships), but that is also a change since the original Version. So, neglecting the later (because I can’t remember the codes) a simple ship might look like like:
SSAA(II)L(II)L(II)(II)
But, you could put all your engines Last so you can run away once you have been “mission killed”, or put all your weapons Last in the hope of killing the other guy even if you have to limp home, or mix them up like above to compromise between those two design philosophies. You had the same sort of decisions to make in SE3, but in SE4 the random allocation of internal damage eliminates that aspect of ship design. Of course, with the huge variety of systems there are infinite ways to design a ship both from the standpoint of what systems to include and what order. This gets into what to research as well, in the strategic game. The designers are constantly tweaking the game balance to try to keep all the system types viable. Thus all the debate on the topic in the Starfire forum.