Could we have some sort of way to pull up two existing designs side by side and compare them? Likewise, some sort of rating of the ship in the ship design in terms of mobility, protection, firepower, etc would I think make the game more newbie friendly. As it is you really have no means beyond trial and error to figure out what works. Some sort of basic design rating system would help new players get pointed in the right direction, I think.
I will say that Cliff has provided a good comparison as far as mobility, in that on the Deployment screen you now get a hovering tooltip that includes the ship speed (although this basically just lets you match ships so that they can group properly etc., or at least that’s how I use it).
Just idly thinking about it, I’ll agree that a bit more comparative detail would be helpful, but figuring out a “basic” rating system would probably be a lot trickier than it sounds, just because players value different things differently etc. Armor, shield strength/resistance, speed. Those are about the only hard numbers relating to a given design - other than the weapon ranges, which are helpfully displayed on the deployment grid. Anything more (armor/shield penetration, DPS etc.) winds up being a hardpoint-by-hardpoint analysis and might result in a very cluttered screen. And you can do a bit of that already by clicking on the various traits in the weapon description window.
Or possibly I’m missing your intent entirely. I’m a big enough person to admit that.
I see your point about there not being any standard of comparison. Maybe use the example ships or some of the opposing ships as a baseline?
I was thinking of something along the lines of the ratings bars in Mechwarrior 4. The bars rated your design on speed, firepower, armor and heat efficiency. For this game it might be firepower, target tracking, speed, armor, hit points, shielding, or something like that. The bars wouldn’t be very helpful to a veteran shipwright, but that’s not the point. The idea is to get new players pointed in the right direction so they don’t get frustrated and quit because their first seven designs all turned out to be deathtraps.
Ah, I see what you’re getting at. Sort of a simple “color-coding” level of system that gives you an aid to seeing what REALLY doesn’t work.
Although using the tutorial ships as a baseline? Ewww. A quote from the manual:
“The few ships you are given at the start of the battle are just examples, and any true Space Admiral would be better off ditching them and designing his/her/its own ships from scratch.”
They’re admittedly fairly atrocious as warships go.
The default designs may suck, but they sucked less than my first several concoctions.