Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up?

[Suicide Junkie]

You might want to thin those out a bit, or at least be very careful with your organization in the vehicletypes.txt

You can't obsolete hull sizes, so it is going to get cluttered very fast.

[Dizzy]

That's easily enouhg fixed.

You can use a space before a regular hull type name and a dash or asterik before an Advanced ship. That'd easily allow you to visually identify the hull types. Or something like that. But agreed, if its not done right, there'd be too long a list.

[Rollo]

I think what SJ means is that the list is going to get very cluttered when design a ship, since hulls cannot be obsoleted.
In your intial layout you already have at least 20 hulls, plus tech that will modify those hulls. Each level of advanced hulls will act as factor to the hull number. So depending on many levels you plan, you can easily come up with 60-100 hulls.
That's a long list to scroll though and find the right one.

Someone wiser then me has said something to this extent once:
When make a mod:
- Plan carefully.
- Start small.
- Keep your focus.

With this in mind, I'd cut down that list somethng like this:
Code:

---

Ship Contruction 1

- Corvette

- Light Cruiser

- Escort Carrier



Ship Contruction 2

- Frigate

- Cruiser

- Light Carrier



Ship Contruction 3

- Destroyer

- Battle Cruiser

- Carrier

- Tech Area: Base Ships and Worldships

- Tech Area: Advanced Hulls

- Tech Area: Advanced Carriers, - Hvy Carrier, - Massive Carrier





Ship Contruction 4

- Heavy Destroyer

- Battleship

- Dreadnought



Ship Contruction 5

- Hvy Dreadnought/Juggernaught

- Tech Area: Advanced mounts

---

Each level of early Ship Con will give you a small and a big hull and a carrier. After level 3 you can branch off. If you continue with Ship Con, you get a 3rd class of hull: Dreadnoughts (huge). I'd also possibly move the better carrier hulls to advanced carriers. And cut level 6 for Ship Con altogether (Hvy Dreadnought=Juggernaught).
There, still pretty big, but much more focussed.
Just my 2c, of course.

[Baron Munchausen]

The problem with all of these ideas is that they simply carry forward the long-standing conflation of ship size with ship role that has been in SE from the beginning.

Honestly, the actual components are what make it what it is. The size is simply a function of the size it needs to be and your ability to build ships of that size. Battleships of the 1st World War were 18-24000 tons. Battleships of the Second World War were 30,000 and up. Were the old battleships reclassified as cruisers because of this?

So while I agree that the current tech tree of ship hulls is too rigid in SE I don't think the solution is the right one. I'd stop calling the hulls by any 'class' names at all and use the design names to differentiate the ships. Then ship construction can just let you build bigger ships and you design them as needed for their role. Proper economics of scale in the design system would result in the familiar 'capital ships' and 'escort' classes without any artificial categories needed.

[Suicide Junkie]

Yes!

No artificial categories, let the components speak for themselves!
Difficult to do, since you have to carefully balance everything and avoid the pitfalls of ubertechs.

However, not impossible, as the fighters in CBmod show...
As you research fighters, you get not only bigger ones, but smaller ones too. And special ones, like the ER fighter, or the stealth fighter.

[Dizzy]

Ummm Baron, nm...

Rollo, nice. I like it. Maybe add a few here or there, but its a good start.

I'm excited about the tech branch. Having the AI coded so it has to choose a path sounds cool. All the AI in the end wont be fielding all the same classes anymore. That'd be cool to see such different stuff at the later stages of the game.

[Fyron]

The purpose of multiple hulls available is so you don't use your big 2000 kT hull with only 400 kT used to make a small ship. This is especially important in any mod that has scaling of any sort (including, but not limited to, QNP). The problem with stock is that there is not any reason to build those small ships... The proposed type of setup absolutely requires a lot of rebalancing to make different hulls meaningful.

[Baron Munchausen]

Imperator Fyron said:
The purpose of multiple hulls available is so you don't use your big 2000 kT hull with only 400 kT used to make a small ship. This is especially important in any mod that has scaling of any sort (including, but not limited to, QNP). The problem with stock is that there is not any reason to build those small ships... The proposed type of setup absolutely requires a lot of rebalancing to make different hulls meaningful.

Which is to re-phrase what already said, that the current ship design system doesn't take scale into account. A larger ship ought to be proportionally more expensive to build and maintain because you need more materials or at least more elaborate engineering to make a larger structure work. A larger ship ought to require proportionally more engines, or at the very least the same proportion of engines, for the same performance. But in fact ships become more and more 'efficient' as they become larger in the SE IV system. Using less than the maximum tonnage for a given hull doesn't make your ships faster or more maneuverable either. Bizarre.

[Dizzy]

Baron Munchausen said: <Snip>
...the current ship design system doesn't take scale into account. A larger ship ought to be proportionally more expensive to build and maintain

Well, you cant make hulls too much more expensive cuz the AI wants to always build the biggest ships. So you can take advantage of that and build more numerous smaller hulls.

One way to make the gulf narrower between large and smaller hulls would be to nerf the weapon mounts. All the large and heavy and massive mounts would need the same scaling damage equal to the tonnage increase. That way they are no more powerful than smaller hulls.

There is a way to make the engine scaling issue a little better... Speed up the smaller ships somewhat and make the bigger ships a bit slower using the max engines in vehiclesize.txt.

I have an idea for mounts that'd be cool... Since the mounts would be equally scaled no matter the hull size, mounts would need some flavor. I suggest some basic types that give and take. For example, besides the standard scaled mount have 3 others; an Accuracy mount adds to hit but subtracts some damage %, also an Extended range and Overload mount to round it out.

The AI could use AI tags to identify with a particular mount so instead of setting up ALL the AI with standard scaled mounts, we could have some AI that use variety. I.E., the Cue Cappa would use the extended range mounts on all their weapons... cuz with their long eye stalks, they can see farther. Or something.