One thing I liked about MOO is the variety of ship sizes. I forget what the sizes were in MOO1, but in MOO2, the smallest ship size is 25 kT and the largest ship is 1200 kT. (OK, it doesn't say kT but I'm assuming each space unit is a kT). That's a factor of 48 between the smallest and largest ships! In MOO3, the jump is even bigger - something like 90 times, because there are 14 hull sizes with each being square root of 2 times the size of the Last. Compare this with SE4, where largest ship (Baseship, 1500 kT) is only 10 times the size of the smallest (Escort 150 kT)... Now I know that in MOO2, at least, small ships were fairly useless, but that's just because they weren't given enough defensive and speed bonuses. (+50 to defense for a frigate might seem like a lot, but then remember that in MOO2 you could have bonuses going up into the 200's!) It might not seem very "realistic" in wet-navy terms to have some ships 100 times the size of others, but this is a space game, it's supposed to be epic and awe-inspiring! (Why else do we have Battlemoons?
) Of course, this change in scale would also necessitate a change in the scale of construction rates - in unmodded SE4 a top-level planetary spaceyard builds only 50% faster than your basic laser-popgun-age model!
That certainly won't get anything big done in any reasonable amount of time! (Then again, we don't want a "yawn, popped out 8 more doomstars this turn" like we got in MOO2
)
Oh well, done ranting for now
Re: Revamping SEIV Ship Hull Sizes & Features
Threaded Mode