Thoughts on ship design

Just a short little post today; I have class in a bit.

What if armour was done more like MechWarrior, where it didn’t take slots, but was added at the end with up and down arrows? That would avoid people using hardpoints for more armour and other crazy abusive things like that. It would also make it easier to ensure that your ships has a little over eight armour (or whatever threshold you want) or goes the same speed as a certain other ship class without the current one-of-these-and-one-of-those trial and error. You’d need to re-balance the total number of slots a bit, but it would fix more than it broke.

EDIT: I thought about this a bit more while waiting for the bus, and came up with some more details.

You could have one slot below the ship for just armour, so that you can still control what flavour you use. Next to that, you could have a slider (much better than arrows) that controls the number of millimetres (for fighters) or metres (for frigates and cruisers, but obviously with a much higher max for cruisers). Each type of armour would have a certain cost, weight and damage absorbed per unit, and you can balance it so that, for example, a frigate with maxed out light-weight armour would only be able to shrug off frigate weapon damage, but one that maxed out a heavy armour would be able to stand (briefly) against a cruiser, but be very slow and expensive.

Korivak,

I love the idea with the armour - it would really add to the game in my opinion!

I just got the game and haven’t gotten too far in it yet (most of the way through the battle list as Fed.), but I’m already glad to see this thread. It’s the first concern I had, as a veteran strategy gamer and space-sim enthusiast - it already seems to me like the Federation hulls and modules need some work to encourage a wide variety of interesting, distinct, viable ship designs. Great to hear that Cliffski is thinking along these lines, and that the game’s development is progressing to the point that he can focus on this kind of stuff!

One related point Korivak made that caught my eye:

This would be a great side-effect of more distinct roles for each ship (and race, for that matter). As it is, I’m having a hard time knowing what to expect from the enemy pre-battle, which might not be so bad, and a hard time figuring out exactly what’s going on during the battle, which I think is less desirable as it makes it hard to learn and improve. It’s difficult to even tell if some non-Federation ships are frigates or cruisers, which seems like a pretty basic piece of information that would be strategically relevant. I’d even like that information to be available in the deployment phase - at least a count of each opposing ship class.

Some kind of “intelligence” functionality, giving the ability to view enemy ship schematics, might be cool. I know that part of the challenge of the game is observing the battles and learning what mistakes you made, so I’m not sure if that’s something that would ever be considered for inclusion, but I think it would be fun - more opportunity for theorycrafting about the best designs to counter your enemy’s ships and all that. You could balance it a bit by making intel reports cost credits pre-battle, or only offering them post-battle (after the boys in engineering and salvage sort through the wreckage, of course).

So that’s my thoughts on the game so far. As I said, I’m still pretty new to it, and as I play I might find that I get better insight into how to analyze an enemy fleet. But for now, I’m feeling like some more informational/visual cues and differentiation of roles would make the game both more entertaining and easier to learn.

Today, I’m going back to fighter design again for a bit. Back to basics.

The important factors in fighter design are:
Offensive Capability. This is a combination of raw firepower, the ability to deliver it, and effectiveness.
Defensive Capability. This is primarily based on speed, but could also potentially include armour.
Efficiency. This is based on the number of wasted resources – namely slots, power and hull bonuses – and the final cost.

These are basically the same for the other two hull sizes, with minor additions like shields and crew.

Currently, a fighter will have either one or two weapon hardpoints, which defines raw firepower. Based on this, the Federation is the most varied, and the Rebels are the most powerful. The Alliance and the Empire are both severely limited in this respect. I would suggest that at least one of each type of fighter should be available to each race, for better balance and variety of potential designs. The hulls-have-weight suggestion that has been mentioned would also help here – by making the two-hardpoint hull heavier, you help define and balance it. You would get either increased speed, or more hitting power, but not both.

The ability to deliver damage is based on the min and max range and on the speed of the platform. A high speed strafing fighter is much more able to deliver than a slow torpedo bomber that never reaches the target.

The effectiveness firepower is largely based – as with all weapons – on tracking speed and penetration. I feel that more options here would be handy. Have a cheap, rapid fire and fast tracking anti-fighter gun with no shield and very little armour penetration, a basic gun that won’t get through shields but will break fighter armour and weakly armoured frigates, and a heavier gun for anti-frigate work and chipping away at cruisers. In the same pattern, have fast tracking but slow anti-fighter missiles, anti-frigate rockets and anti-cruiser torpedoes. Three types of weapon, each designed for a specific enemy. To communicate this to the player, you could have a ship rating section with three bars, one for each type of target, that fill up when you add weapons. Factor in ship speed and maybe range, too.

For defensive stats, you can have two more bars and a blank space. The first is for speed – 1.0 would be weak, 2.0 decent, 3.0 good and 4.0 amazing. The second would be for armour, with the scale starting at zero and maxing out at the top penetration of anti-fighter weapons. The blank space would be for a shield bar on frigates and cruisers. Fighters don’t use shields, but leaving a space would make the interface more consistent.

I’m going to repeat my armour-on-the-outside-with-a-slider idea here, maybe in a diamond shaped slot below the ship. Pulling armour out of the general slots inside the hull would make for more balanced, and more varied designs – You can’t have too much armour, and you can always add a little without taking up a slot. Right now, it tends toward all or nothing designs, since one slot of armour may as well be ultra-heavy, rather than much weaker light armour in the same space. For fighters, this would also encourage a bit of armour on more designs, rather than the almost automatic “just add a second engine!” we have now.

I don’t think the current resource system is working with fighters. I’ve already mentioned the general problem of the two main types of fighters being backwards, plus the more specific but similar problem with pulse lasers versus standard lasers. I have thought about this a little more, and have come up with a drastic suggestion that I think could work: drop power use from fighters.

Fighters, in general terms, are not meant to be self sufficient. They carry limited fuel and limited ammunition. The reactor-and-some-stuff-running-off-it model they use now is the wrong model. They should not be like tiny little frigates.

Instead, make the key stats on each of the six weapons be weight and cost, with no power draw. Then, your little dogfighting fighters will be faster than your gunships, which will be faster than your rocket strike fighters, which will be faster than your torpedo bombers. Let the cost vary freely, and be the main means of balance.

So now you have one slot for armour, one or two for weapons, and no reactors or power. Now you have to add an engine…but how do you balance it without power? Maybe an engine-only slot…I think a triangle has a certain appropriateness. On fighters with one visible engine and one contrail, you get one slot. On fighters with two, either give them two slots (so that the fast-looking ships actually are faster) or give them one with the little hardpoint style set of lines to indicate doubling. Balance based on cost, with a range of engines that get sharply more expensive toward the top. Ship speed will naturally balance out based on the default weight of the hull and the number and type of weapons. Torpedo bombers will never be fast, even with a pair of engines…just a bit less sluggish and extremely expensive. On the other hand, an anti-fighter interceptor can be decently fast and quite cheap, or very fast and correspondingly more expensive.

At this point, you can either drop general slots from fighters entirely, or give them some actually interesting toys. Something like the target boosters on cruisers that makes them hit more accurately, or maneuvering thrusters that give them a bonus to their dodge without making them actually go faster on the map, or whatever. Something with more personality, that makes each design a bit more distinct.

For fighters, the only bar in the last section would be cost. By making it a bar instead of just a number at the top, it makes players a little more aware of the cost of their designs. (I personally don’t tend to notice the cost of my designs until some of them turn red on the deployment screen when I’m near the cost limit. In my defense, I’m so focused on the speed and power limitations that most of my designs either work or don’t work, and cost is not really a factor. The more forgiving and flexible design limits I describe above would steer players more toward effective designs at effective prices, rather than the system we have now.) Frigates and cruisers would add the bars for power and crew under this.

I think that racial bonuses on fighters are pretty pointless. The only one that’s any good now is speed (further benefiting the Rebels when it comes to fighters). Ten percent extra hull on a fighter is a rounding error, especially when a cruiser weapon gets a luck hit. Ten percent extra armour is a mean joke, especially on the Hornet – 2.3 default power and two general slots pretty much means reactor and an engine, and no armour at all. Extra power is rarely useful, because of the round numbers on almost all the modules and the small amount of power that fighters get. Plus I hate power and want it to go away.

I’d replace them weapon bonuses instead. Give a gun bonus or a missile bonus or a torpedo bonus. Make the different hulls more distinct and unique. Speed can stay, but only apply it to one hull per race – basically anything that looks fast should get it, but never overlap it with a bomber hull. Armour bonuses would also work on the stockier looking hulls if the armour-on-the-outside idea is adopted and fighters ended up actually using armour.

I realize that these are pretty significant changes, but as far as I can tell no one really enjoys designing fighters all that much currently, so it is a good place to start trying new design ideas. If they work on fighters, you can start rolling the appropriate ones on frigates and cruisers later on.

Thoughts? Feedback? TLDR?

GREAT!.. you talk like a true caldarian.

As a gallente I appreciate that. No false pretense of tact and political correctness… just the true hard core of caldarian beliefs :-/

OOC: Your post are great, I like how you analize everything about the ships and weapons. Thanks!. do a triple, double, quadruple post, anything, this is your thread and is great :slight_smile:

One possibility in removing generators from fighters is having a cruiser act as a carrier. Have carrier modules that you add to the cruiser which fighters launch from, then return to after they’ve burned their ammo or fuel. You could make stronger meaner fighters, but if you manage to take down their carriers, you’ve cut the legs out from under them.

I was going to suggest limited fuel and ammo and resupply landings at carriers, but I didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself. The changes I’ve already mentioned could easily take days of solid coding to implement, if not longer. And while my fighter redesign can be merged into carriers or left to stand alone (or ignored entirely), I for one would like to see carriers added at some point down the road. Galatica comes to mind as an iconic source of inspiration.

Adding a couple more module slots to fighter designs could also help. At present, most of them don’t have the space for any options, but an extra module slot to everything would give them an armour/extra engine tradeoff most of the time. Extra modules for fighters would also be much more plausible if they had space to put them.

Edit: Reading another thread, I see that extra slots being used for more engines can easily make fighters unhittable. There are a couple of solutions there, but another possibility is to create better weapons for killing fast fighters - currently, nothing can hit things if they move quickly enough, and tractor beams are only a partial solution.

Engine-only slots and hulls with weight would help with that. You can work out how much speed you’d want, and balance for that. More specific slot types would help with a lot of the abusive designs we see: too-fast fighters (tracking speed maxes out at 2.9, if memory serves) and all armour cruiser tanks (better now, with the recent balancing).

I don’t like the idea of too many slot types. It would complicate the ship design process and lead to too many cookie-cutter designs - it puts too many constraints on what I can build. If I want to be able to make a fighter that’s a pile of engines with one small gun on it, I should be able to do that. Much better in my opinion to shape the game mechanics to make theoretically “abusive” designs hard to field successfully.

Continuing to use fighters as an example, I think Darloth has the right idea: add weapons that are better at hitting fast targets. Personally, I think the anti-fighter missile module already in the game would be a great candidate for a revamp (if for no other reason that from a realism standpoint, you’re never going to be able to build a fighter that can outrun or outmaneuver a missile). If it could hit even the fastest fighters with some degree of reliability, it would bring the deployment of super-fast fighters back into balance - now you have to choose whether or not to build a really fast fighter that will get blown to smithereens if it runs into that weapon, or a slower fighter with some armor on it that can take a hit, even if it is an easier target.

Regarding tactics like armor or shield stacking, diminishing returns and adjustments to the armor repair modules are a great start. I personally would also like to see reflectivity changed to something a little less binary, as I’ve seen suggested elsewhere. Instead, it could reduce incoming damage by a percentage. In cases where weapon penetration is almost equal to reflectivity, damage would be reduced by a small amount; if penetration is much lower, damage would be reduced greatly (to a max of say 95% or so). If it’s somewhere in the middle, a modest amount of damage gets through. (Obviously there are lots of ways it could be scaled, linearly or otherwise.) That way it would still be hard to rip a heavily-armored cruiser to shreds with fighters armed only with small pulse-lasers, but the same cruiser wouldn’t also be practically immune to mid-range cruiser and frigate weapons as it is now. So not only would it curb excessive armor (or shield) stacking, it would make for more interesting weapon loadout selection too - you’d have to balance penetration characteristics against damage/cost/range/etc. a little more carefully than you do now. As it is, it’s too easy to simply disregard low-to-mid penetration weapons out of hand.