Ship Talk

[pydna]

I noticed early on Ed mentioned Stars!

One of the design aspects of Stars! I loved is that shrewd design can compensate for lack of technology (within reason).

A lot of posts mention players want firing arcs for weapons. Thats fine, however what I would love to see is the ability through shrewd design to compensate for lack of firing arcs.

For example.

Lets say my beam weapons only fire in a 90 degree arc. My opponent has vessels with beams that fire in a 180 Degree arc. Economically I can't research to a new tech AND build a new fleet in time to defeat him.

so I look at my design options and realise I can compensate partially by giving my vessels better manoeuvring jets (turn facing quicker) and better computers (getting better initiative).

The result is that whilst my design isn't as advanced it can hold its own (in the short term) against my opponents design.

This only one strategy, ideally it would be great if there were three or four different design strategies players could employ to give ship building some real depth.

[jars_u]

Originally Posted by pydna

...players could employ to give ship building some real depth.

Designing better ships and then using them to blow stuff up better is one of my favorite aspects of 4X so I'm in favor of the general idea of ship design having real depth that impacts combat certainly and overall game-play as a result.

Speaking specifically to both SE4 and 5 for example while numerous perhaps even too numerous weapon options existed for a player to research and use in his/her designs some of the real differences (to me) were often (but not always) too negligible to really justify one over another in any real overall design strategy.

But at the end of the day the question will be "Is the game fun?" and tedious MM (depending on what your preferences are) - especially as mentioned elsewhere - later in the game can be a serious kill-joy.

[Timstone]

I have a small question.
When I played Ascendancy I could send my ships home in one turn with the "Recaller". I know this can be implemented. Just state the following with every ship you produce: "Impaler 01 build on stardate 1979 at Earth". You can use this data to send that particular ship homewards in the blink of an eye.
Would such a system be useful/wanted.
Obviously implementing such a system wouldn't mean you have to show the data. But you could check out which ship is most antiquated or which shipyard build the most ships.
More numbers to crunch!

[jars_u]

Originally Posted by Timstone

...But you could check out which ship is most antiquated or which shipyard build the most ships...

Ship design was always one of my favorite aspects of both SE4 & 5 - but managing and upgrading all the incremental designs was certainly a chore especially as the game went on.

Unless SL affords individual ships a greater level of importance then I think most 4X games do - I would be in favor of a oversimplified and perhaps even a "unrealistic" way of dealing with this issue. Perhaps a monetary cost of upgrade only with limited time investment and generally loose or multiple valid upgrade locations.

In SE a construction/repair style ship would take too long to perform an overhaul and sending back to a shipyard meant not only the time invested in the upgrade but also a two way trip (perhaps made worse by an already damaged ship) - that combined with the restrictions on percentages of old/new component on an overhaul more often then not at least for me ships either rarely got upgraded or since no attachment existed with ships the older ones were used as bait/kamikaze ships in battle.

[jars_u]

I see on page 2 of the off topic thread there is a discussion that also address this issue in some detail - I think the off topic is now on topic and we need a new off topic thread!

[Gregstrom]

Originally Posted by jars_u

I see on page 2 of the off topic thread there is a discussion that also address this issue in some detail - I think the off topic is now on topic and we need a new off topic thread!

Yeah, you have a point there.

I think it's implicitly accepted that many elements of ship design are tied in with combat mechanics. It'd be kinda nice if the thread title acknowledged this, as I guess discussion of the two would be simpler if it took place in the same thread. For simplicitly, I'll quickly quote the appropriate comment here:

The way this maneuverability system would work is, combat would be turn-based, and fleets would be stuck on little "plates" - regions of space that they're confined to, with the size determined by their acceleration attribute. Each round of combat, the plates would shift in space based on their current strategic speed, acceleration, and orders from the previous game turn ("pursue other fleet" or "maintain course to Rigel" or whatever). Then the ships in turn could maneuver on the fleet-plates in a non-newtonian fashion (e.g. "move 3 km forward" or whatever); each ship would be confined to its fleet-plate, though, to avoid breaking the strategic movement calculations. Then ships would fire weapons if possible, and you go back to the plate-shifting phase, until the fleets are out of weapons range or all but one side is wiped out.

It would be interesting in this system, actually, if capital ships had little or even zero maneuverability, while fighters could zip around like crazy... would put more emphasis on the fleet formations and strategies, since you couldn't tweak those to any significant degree in combat if the maneuverability was so poor!

[Xrati]

OK, you got it.