Ship Talk

[Xrati]

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.

You will probably die! Anticipation and strategy are two key elements that you want to eliminate by giving someone a "work around" to being out played in your designs. You want to penalize a player for designing a better ship then you.

[pydna]

No Xrati not at all.

My point is better technology is not the be all and end all for fleet victory. Well thought out design and overall strategy should play a major part as well.

Weapons systems are not the the only factor to influence combat. Electronic Warfare, Targetting Systems, Chaff, Decoys etc would also play a significant role as they do in our present day military.

Q, as for too much micromanagement or the AI couldn't handle it. I figure if a 16 bit game from the 90s written in Visual C could handle it. A game written now could easily accomplish this.

Cheers

Pydna

[Gregstrom]

?? Err, I was suggesting that ship design and combat mechanics share a thread. I probably didn't make myself clear enough, sorry.

[Xrati]

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.

Whaaaaat????

[Gregstrom]

Large chunks of the thread are about combat mechanics already - combat movement and how it relates to weapon firing arcs was the first topic discussed in this thread.

Unless you're purely talking about artistic design, ship design is heavily interlinked with game mechanics - they're one of the agents through which you interact with the game, after all.

[MattII]

How detailed are ships going to be, will you have to have juggle power food and fuel, or just 'supplies'?

Also, one thing I never really liked about Space Empires was the fact that if you wanted to upgrade so much as one single weapon you had to make a new design. In regards to this, I'd like to propose:
1. Ship names don't need changing if you simply upgrade the components, only if you change them.
2. Rather than having a dozen different designs, you build one general ship type and equip it with a load of 'Hardpoints', onto which can be placed whatever guns, extra shields or one-shot missile launchers you want.