Weapons, engines and mods, Oh my!

[PvK]

Well yes, that's sort of my view, as well. Ship classes don't just represent to me the ability to build a ship of a certain size, but the ability to build a certain design, or which size is only one part. I have 1800kT colony ships available from the start, but I don't think that includes the ability to build a 1700kT propulsion system for a 100kT command module, and have it be linearly efficient compared to a more reasonable design.

I did consider adding a "Faster Ships" tech area, to allow developing engineering for ship designs with more propulsion capacity. I also considered other tech areas for other types of ship classes. However SE4's interface starts getting clunky when there are tons of ship classes, so it seemed like more clunk than it was worth, although I did add a couple of areas for specialized "Fast Colony Ships" and carriers, due to fan requests.

There are also issues to consider from the very abstract SE4 movement and combat systems, as well as from a game balance perspective. Most basically, if a ship design has enough of a speed advantage over its enemies, it can do silly things in combat compared to weapon ranges. This can cause imbalances with unrealistic tactics that take advantage of the lack of opportunity fire in the combat engine, such as ramming or hit-and-run without the enemy being able to fire back at all. Moreover, it can imbalance the need for research into (and ship design related to)propulsion if speed increases can be acquired by tacking on an extra engine for 10kT, compared to having to do extensive research and costly deployment of advanced engines.

Now, there might or might not be a way to re-design the entire set of values for combat and propulsion components in order to address all of this in a different way, for the purpose of satisfying a desire for more flexibility in the number of engines that can be stacked on a design, but that wasn't what I was trying to do.

PvK

Originally posted by geoschmo:
We likely could strap 30 engines on the shuttle if we assembled it orbit.

Actaully in reality I think their would be no concrete limit to the number of engines you could put on a ship. Although what would happen, and I think this is what Fyron and SJ were trying to say, is that putting an engine on a ship by itself increases the mass of the ship. In SEIV terms there is a limit to the number of engines for a specific hull size becasue once you reach a certain number of engines you have in effect changed the hull to the next size up.

Geoschmo

[Fyron]

PvK, in mods like P&N and Adamant (those that use full QNP), researching more propulsion technology is certainly necessary. It takes a large chunk of hull space to even go 6 movement. More propulsion means you can lower the amount of space needed to get going at 6 movement, or you can make the ships go faster, while still taking up as much space for engines. Just tacking on one more 10 kT engine often has no effect because it requires several of them to get one movement point on all but the smallest of ships. In P&N, a Destroyer requires 12 Ion Engine Is to get 6 movement points, which takes up 120 kT (40% of the hull). Researching Contra-Terrene Engines means that you only need 9 of them to get 6 movement. So as we can see, researching more propulsion technology is certainly a very good idea. With large ships, the amount of kTs freed up only gets larger.

[PvK]

Thanks. I haven't really absorbed much of what P&N does, though I think it's really a wonderful mod. I haven't yet studied much of Adamant mod either, though I will one of these days. What you say demonstrates that yes, unlimited QNP engines can avoid some of the issues I mentioned, with certain values.

Certainly that sort of system has some advantages, but I think using engine limits also has some of its own, as I've rambled about enough.

I still like the trade-offs and limits created by Proportions. I'd probably sooner add more engine types and variants, or go to a scale-mounted engine system, rather than unlimited QNP, because that would allow me to retain more appropriate to-hit modifiers for engines. Scale-mount engines is a cool alternative, but not entirely perfect either. Ah well.

PvK

[Fyron]

Well, P&N and Adamant use small numbers for Standard Movement (3-7 or so), whereas Proportions uses big numbers. Engines per move for a ship size is equal to tonnage structure / 50 (which you have in Proportions). If you double (or triple) both of these sets of numbers, you can get slightly more precise movement scales for ship sizes, but you hit the 255 cap on max standard movement points much more quickly. Basically, it boils down to whether you want to require a handful of engines to go "fast" or if you want to require a lot of engines to go "fast".

[Suicide Junkie]

I have 1800kT colony ships available from the start, but I don't think that includes the ability to build a 1700kT propulsion system for a 100kT command module, and have it be linearly efficient compared to a more reasonable design.

Of course it dosen't... after putting on the colony module, and all the required cargo bays, how much space do you have left?
40%? ... 20%? How much will you use for engines, supply tanks, defenses?

Most basically, if a ship design has enough of a speed advantage over its enemies, it can do silly things in combat compared to weapon ranges. This can cause imbalances with unrealistic tactics that take advantage of the lack of opportunity fire in the combat engine, such as ramming or hit-and-run without the enemy being able to fire back at all.

The thing to note is that, yes, speed should be an advantage! In tactical, it may be abused vs AI, but not vs humans. In strategic its AI vs AI, and thus perfectly valid, IMO. The second thing to note, is that in order to get a really good speed, you will have to strip out almost all of the armor/shields and guns...

Sure, you can fly circles around the enemy, but you can't do much damage, and your ships will drop like flies as soon as the enemy gets a chance to fire on you.
PS: Don't expect super-speedy rammers to be very effective, since you'll have no armor to bulk up your impact damage, and you just spent thousands of radioactives to build those precious engines.

In any case; I played many games like this at home with two other people... Each liked their own tactics, and are solidly convinced theirs is best.
(Me = big on defenses - if you can't kill me, I can't lose)
(Brother = Big on Weapons - boom, you die, I win)
(Father = Big on engines/speed - weak attack, and no defense, but if you can't hit, it don't die.)

[Taera]

this topic deserves a rename

[Fyron]

In Adamant, colony ships are 3300 kT and the colony module is 3000 kT. I treated them as roughly 900 kT mass ships for purposes of engines per move, mostly just to make them slower than if they were 300 kT mass (without having no chance to move, as 300 kT is not enough to move much with a mass of 3300 kT).

[PvK]

Again, from what SJ says, it sounds like it is possible to get around most of the issues I anticipated with unlimited-engine QNP, if you use different sorts of values from the ones I used in Proportions. P&N seems like a great mod - I'm really hope I get more time so I can give it more of a shot (I've only started one game of it so far, though I've been tempted by the mentions of replacement players needed for PBW games).

I wouldn't say either system is better - they're both good and interesting (way more so than the unmodded system).

I still rather like the results of the Proportions QNP. I wouldn't change Proportions to unlimited-engine QNP, although it might make an interesting racial advantage. Proportions offers a nice range of propulsion designs possible with different combinations of engine types, with interesting trade-offs in cost, speed, fuel consumption, and combat mods. Those things could still exist without engine limits, but the engine limits add some baseline abilities to ship classes which give the classes themselves performance differences to consider. I like that small ships can go quite fast with just a few low-tech high-output engines (but can't go insane speeds by tripling the number of engines, even though they have "room" to do so), while massive ships take a lot to keep up to speed, and usually can't keep up with the fastest small ships. If you really want a fast large ship, though, you can spend a lot and develop gravitic drives (which isn't as efficient for smaller ships, so there is an interesting backwards efficiency effect there if that tech is developed) and/or deploy scale-mount emergency propulsion (which can be a nasty surprise for enemy light ships if mounted on a heavy interceptor ship).

PvK

[Fyron]

Again, from what SJ says, it sounds like it is possible to get around most of the issues I anticipated with unlimited-engine QNP, if you use different sorts of values from the ones I used in Proportions.

That is what I was hinting at.

Also, I never said that either system was intrinsically better, just that I prefer unlimtied QNP. I think that all resulted from a word being taken differently than it was intended (proper-QNP).

[Andrés]

Mainly, reality is much more complex than SE4, and it seems to me from considering real-world examples, that one of the constants is that bigger is almost universally more expensive per unit measure rather than less - it's up to the larger and more expensive designs to realize their worth through even better performance.

I don't know where you get that impression from.
I think you may be comparing a group of tiny ships that is actually smaller than the massive one. If they are enough for the job, then yes the big ship would be overkill, but that does not make it less efficient.
That logic does not make any sense.
In general bigger designs are more efficient BECAUSE they are bigger.
Buying a large bottle of Coke is cheaper than buying many small cans.
Installing central air conditioning in a building is cheaper than installing an individual unit in every room (specially when it comes to usage and mantenance cost)
The same goes for ship systems.
Building a heavy baseship must be much cheaper than an equivalent tonnage of frigates.
Frigates will have their advantages, harder to hit, can be built faster by using many SYs. When it comes to use they can be much more flexibe being able to operate in many places at once.
Heavy baseships advantage is only being cheaper and more efficient.
Yes there are many technical details such as specialized parts, facilities, and support know how and technologies.
That is what's why you have to research to get larger hull, anyone that can design a certain ship can easily design something twice as big, research means solving all those technical issues involved in the larger design.