Neo Standard for SE V?

[Atrocities]

Nice list Fyron... I say go.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Escort and Monitor.

[dogscoff]

I don't have se5 (haven't even played the demo), so maybe I'm not the best person to be commenting here, but that never stopped me opening my mouth before. I also haven't read much of this thread. Anyway, taking into account the resizing feature, I'd say the best list I've seen so far is Ed Kolis'

Scout - we need something that suggests a small ship sacrificing firepower for speed and/or range

Baseship - OK, it's already referred to in the data files, but no stock shipsets actually have any.

Worldship - for the doom stars, deeath stars, terror stars, battlemoons of our evil overlords

Resource Ship - for robo-miners and such (don't really need a resource base as the base hulls are general purpose - only the Battle Station has a military connotation)

Infantry - for non-mechanized troops

These (with the possible exception of the scout) are the hull shapes that can't be achieved by resizing existing models, and that will be used by modders. Scouts, worldships and infantry were certainly popular in se4 with both modders and shipset makers alike, so I think those are the ones that need to be made. And once you have a worldship/scout model, the modder can resize it to offer small/medium/large/huge worldships/scouts and so on.


Although I disagree with all the monster stuff he went on with after: I think that's probably too mod and race-specific to be included in every shipset.

[Suicide Junkie]

You could always steal a planet model to use as your default worldship like I did for SE4's P&N mod.

...that rock world with the big crater that looks like a death star...

[AstralWanderer]

Given that SE5 allows variable tonnages for a class based on tech and that models can be scaled to correspond with this, it would seem better to have models and classes linked to roles rather than pure size.

Variations on tonnage would then be dealt with by added a prefix to the class (e.g. Small, Medium, Large, Super, Giant, Titan, Star, Galaxy). An exception could be made for warships where there is a need for a very wide range of sizes and there is a standard list of terms (from both naval terminology and previous SE games).

Military
-Warship (ship-to-ship combat)
--Frigate
--Destroyer
--Cruiser
--Battlecruiser
--Dreadnaught
--Behemoth
--Deathstar
-Defence (fleet defence via PD, shields or armour, repair/resupply)
--Escort
--Defender
--Baseship
-Carrier
-Fighter
--Interceptor (targets other fighters)
--Bomber (targets capital ships)
-Drone (automated targeting)
-Non-ship units
--Starbase
---Construction
---Combat
--Weapons Platform
--Troop
---Infantry (planet defense)
---Armour (planet offense)
Non-Military
-Explorer (high speed, extra supplies)
-Transport
-Coloniser
-(Resource) Extractor
-Terra/Astraformer (for Stellar Manipulation)
Special
-Space Monsters
-Racial Specific
-Technology Specific

Having much larger ship classes available would fit the ethos of a game allowing Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres and also allow for the more "significant" items of Stellar Manipulation to be made much larger, requiring bigger ships (a planet buster should need to be Death Star sized at least...).

The downside is that forcing roles on specific classes could limit player flexibility in fleet design - but for multiplayer games it gives a reasonable idea of opponents' fleet makeup (e.g. offensive/defensive).

[Phoenix-D]

Again, the neo-standard is supposed to apply to many mods. Its a request for commonly used MODELS, not for mod ideas.

[Suicide Junkie]

The point that the neostandard would do well to expand on the roles of a ship rather than just a lot of sizes is a good one still.

[se5a]

lets bully aaron into giving us a size multiplyer in the vehicle sizes.txt, that way we can use say, the frigate model, give it a mutiplyer of .75 and call it an escort.

also with the carriers, since there's only one model, give the larger ones a multiplyer of 1.25 and 1.5
that way you can easly see that it's bigger in combat, without having to have a whole new model.

ditto with the troops sats, mines, drones fighters and anything else that shares models.

[Phoenix-D]

There IS a size multiplier- but for some reason its in each empire file, so you need to define separate entries there. You can re-use the same model.

[Fyron]

That is exactly the wrong solution to the problem, though. It needs to be mod-controllable, not shipset-dependent.