Opinions on various shipsets

[Arkcon]

Hey all, I just wanted to get some general opinions from people on the various shipsets you can download from PBW and elsewhere. I suppose the more compete question should be:

What does an opponent's shipset have to provide to you in order to be satisfactory for you?

OK, now here's the background to that question. I'm always downloading a new shipset when I PBW. I like to keep things interesting with new shipsets that people haven't seen before. I'm also a little compulsive about not having the same shipset as someone else in the game.

Malfador's website gives some guidelines on shipset creation: same color scheme, and similarity in shape, and points out that the top down model must be clear so everyone can recognize it.

So I download this shipset, and write an emp for it, upload the emp, and then I say, "Better check out this shipset". Well, the race portrait was fine, but the escort portrait was a little dark, then ... Well, the ship set turned out to be ghastly, it was made up of random ships of other shipsets, at first glance, you'd never know what you were looking at.

So I find this other shipset, called the Dragons, nice renderings of dragons of different sizes. They look pretty nice, breathing fire at other ships (good work there Andres). But, they're all pretty much the same, just different sizes. You can't really tell a destroyer from a light cruiser from a battle cruiser. Or is that really important.

I occasionally ponder working on a shipset of my own. I was gonna use POV-Ray to make metallic bumpy ships using the blob function. But I wonder if with my limited skills I can make them all unique enough.

Question is, is any of this important to anyone else?

[ May 02, 2004, 18:51: Message edited by: Arkcon ]

[TerranC]

Originally posted by Arkcon:
What does an opponent's shipset have to provide to you in order to be satisfactory for you?

Do you mean to ask what makes a shipset look good?

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by TerranC:

quote:

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Originally posted by Arkcon:
What does an opponent's shipset have to provide to you in order to be satisfactory for you?

Do you mean to ask what makes a shipset look good?

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Yes. No. Not really. Kinda. Wait ... um .. nnnooo. Umm. What was the question? Oh yeah, OK. On a level it seems I'm trying to ask "What looks good to you?" Which is a pointless question, I know.

To distil the question down, what would make a shipset look so bad to you, that you'd hate to play against someone who uses it on PBW, drop out of the game, put a shot gun shell through the monitor, hunt down shipset designer and give him an atomic wedgie, that sort of responce.

Yeah, you could just not use the shipset, and let SE4 substitute. That completely solves the problem. So I am kinda trying to find out what looks "good enough" to "most people". Just to avoid that being necessicary.

[TerranC]

Originally posted by Arkcon:
To distil the question down, what would make a shipset look so bad to you, that you'd hate to play against someone who uses it on PBW, drop out of the game, put a shot gun shell through the monitor, hunt down shipset designer and give him an atomic wedgie, that sort of responce.

Well, that's much easier to answer.

I would have to say that compiled shipsets usually get on my nerves; except a few, most compiled shipsets are poorly done, where people grab pictures of the defiant, enterprises, imperial destroyers, borg cubes, asgard ships, some fan made sci-fi creations from the net and horribly distort them to fit the sizes that se4 uses and proudly proclame it as "the best shipset made, ever" or "I made it all" or "They're all my creations".

Besides that, there's little that ticks me off, although off-scale renders (Ie: half of the ship is cut off in the picture) come close.

Edit: and no, it's not a pointless question, not at all.

[ May 02, 2004, 19:18: Message edited by: TerranC ]

[Slick]

I don't mind looking at a new shipset, but I agree that it should show ship sizes proportionally. Also, colony ships, war ships, carriers and transports should look a little different; enough to distinguish quickly by sight. This one is a little vague, because if it is an alien race, who knows how their ships are designed, but this is a game afterall. I don't mind a little learning curve, but if ships are too similar or if larger sizes in kt are shown as smaller graphics, I hate that. Some shipsets are downright deceiving; their BB's are smaller than their Cruisers!

Just my $0.02

Slick.

[Solymr]

I hate ships that don't really look like the hull size they're meant for, i.e colony ships looking like warships or vice versa. It just looks silly I think.

And as mentioned before, shipsets with ships ripped from tv shots just look down right....tryhard I guess? So what if your Baseship looks like a Borg cube?