Quote:
Nomor said:
That's fine, but using grumbler's current mod as a test bed I find that the margin for engine choice has been reduced anyway to the options I gave.
If you go over the higher number I listed you basically have a ship that is all engine. Which I suppose makes my limiting things a bit meaningless. 
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Well, my version assumes that you want to devote 30%, 40%, or 50% of the space on most ships to engines. Given that the rest of the command and control stuff generally takes about 10% of the hull (and tha6t is why some small hulls don't need Crew Quarters or life support) that leaves you with 60%, 50%, or 40% of hull space for everything else.
Some ships, like scouts, will probably be unarmed and unarmored, and so have more speed, but by and large the tradeoffs between speed and everything else are pretty linear. With a few classes, minimum requirements for, say, cargo or fighter launch facilities limit engie choices more severely, but this was intentional, as the human player can exploit the speed versus capacity tradeoff more than the AI (and a ship with twice the speed but half the capacity is generally much better for the human than one with normal speed and capacity, at least for hauling cargo and pop). Extra speed is of very limited utility to ships that will e in fleets, of course, unless you give every ship the additional speed.
Still, there is always room for tweaking. Any thoughts in this area are worth looking at. In particular, I am wondering if the early-game advantage of propulsion expertise (which increase your colony ships by a full 50% in speed) is not unbalancing.