Babylon 5 Mod

[Wenin]

Cool, I follow you now.

[Raapys]

A bug: The Engine Mount for ships of size 4999-5011 has incorrectly Cost, Tonnage, Tonnage Structure and Supple Percent set to a very low value. Should probably be 44 or 48 or some such. As a consequence, the biggest ships of 5k tonnage can actually move ridiculously fast.

One thing I've observed, though, is that there's really little difference between the respective ship sizes. They're approximately as fast, they can take approx. as much, they take approx. as long to build, etc. This seems to me to make it a little pointless, since there's not much reason not to just build the biggest one, rendering the previous sizes researched useless.

So what if that was changed? Bigger speed/movement gap, bigger tonnage gap, bigger material and maint. cost and *far* bigger building time differences between the different ship sizes. What I hope this would achive is to put some more thought into what sizes to build, make them distinctly different, not just have a ship that is slightly bigger than the previous one I just researched.

Just as an example, a Scout currently has 100 tonnage, an Escort 150, a Corvette 200, a Frigate 300, Destroyer 400 and a H.Destroyer 450. On a homeworld planet they all take about 1 or 2 turns to build. This largly render just about all of those sizes except the last, and perhaps the first, redundant.

I'm not proposing any immediate changes, I'm just looking to see if others have an opinion about it. It's just that I find myself always building the biggest ships, unless I'm making a pure scout ship, and it sort of feels like the rest are going to waste.

[grumbler]

The ships all move at about the same speeds because this is frictionless space, and speed is limited only by the relationship between mass anbd power (yeah, that _should_ be acceleration, not speed, but we have the model that we have).

Smaller ships are harder to hit, so building smaller ships makes some sense. Larger ships get mounts that disproportionately increase the power of their weapons, so bulding them makes sense as well. Intermediate-sized ships get a balance of the two approaches, so building them can ALSO make sense.

Large ships have much more total armor, but it is leaky armor and thus you could find yourself losing your reactor and going dead in space - large ships are a gamble.

I always build a mix, as playing game with all big ships and all small ships taught me that those approaches had definite limits. Try it yourself.

It is true that many hull types become redundant (why build a destroyer when a heavy destroyer has the same total weight in required components and therefor a smaller percentage taken by required components?) but that is true of the original design as well, and I think it works out well.

If we were to do this from scratch I think I would allow small, medium and large ships from the start and just make them better as technology improved, rather than just larger. Maybe with SE5 that's what we will do.

[Timstone]

Hey Grumbler,

Everything alright?
Just for the record, I'm still busy building a new version of the weapons creation sheet I've posted in my sig. This one should be waaaaay easier to use. Fortunately I have colleagues who can help me with it. It's going slow (my colleague doesn´t have that much time), but we´ll get there. I hope it can be used for SE V too. Would make the production of a SE V version of The Mod a lot easier and faster. I hope we can keep in touch with eachother. Maybe even Val will honour us with a visit. Would be nice if he helped again (and everybody else from the "old" core of course).
This of course doesn't automatically mean there will come a SE V version of The Mod.

[Fyron]

SEV version will potentially be a lot easier to make and maintain, due to having a single entry per component family. No more 10 MB component files!

[Raapys]

I'd really love a quick release of a B5 mod for SEV when it's released. Any idea how much work a port would take? Or will it all have to be rebuild from scratch?

What you mentioned, grumbler, is something along the lines I was thinking. Have like 5-6 different ship-size research areas available from the start, which when researched gives ships with widely different abilities, combat speed, price, maintenance and such, then let the next research levels improve those ships in all sorts of ways, while also maintaining the differences.

[Ed Kolis]

Imperator Fyron said:
SEV version will potentially be a lot easier to make and maintain, due to having a single entry per component family. No more 10 MB component files!

/me plugs the Templatizer
http://wiki.spaceempires.net/index.php/Templatizer

[Captain Kwok]

Too bad SE:V will make your templatizer program obsolete.

[grumbler]

Hi, Tim, everything is fine (just finishing all the exam grading today, final grades go in next week and the school year is done).

Just waiting for SEV so's we can get this underway again. Dunno where we are gonna get the 3D artwork, though.

[Timstone]

Fyron:
Wow, now that's im provement. Cool feature. Thumbs up for Malfador!

Grumbler:
3D art? Well, I'm proficient with both LightWave, 3D Max and Solidworks. I think that part won't be the biggest problem. All the 3D art sure as hell can't be completed with the first release, but a gradually release is certainly possible. Ah, we'll cross that bridge when we get that.
I'm glad you feel like making a SE V port for The Mod. You made me a happy camper. Two thumbs up for you again friend.