Some premade designs to help newcomers

Creation, discussion, and balancing of game content such as techs, buildings, ship parts.

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Rydra
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Some premade designs to help newcomers

#1 Post by Rydra »

Hi there,

I've been rolling around designs and I'd wish to share a patch that will add several extra ship designs that will help newcomers understand the game and fighting as well as ship roles.

All the designs have been created with the purpose of being as cost-efficiently as possible. The methodology I used to do all the designs is to compare the attack/structure values of a ship with a weapon and the attack/structure value of a ship replacing a weapon with an armor, take price into account and calculate who would win the fight.

Example:

Protoss I Lazor: Laser 4, Laser 4, Weak cloak. (22/30) Cost: 79 PP
Protoss I: Laser 4, Zortrium Armor, Weak cloak. (11/41) Cost: 52 PP

Cost difference: 27 PP. % price diff: 27/52 = 51.9%

In order to stablish a fight in which both would hypothetically have the same cost, we multiply the cheaper alternative stats by the % price difference (1.519)

Fight: Protoss I Lazor (22/30) vs Protoss I (16.71/61.2). Clear winner Protoss I, so I picked it as the main optimum design.

Almost all my ship designs (I've not included yet the asteroid designs, but they are coming on the way) have all external slots minus one filled with armor. Armor is ridiculously strong for its power and price. Either it needs a price increase, or weapons need a price decrease (decreasing weapons price would lead to a more dynamic game IMHO). Later on i'll suggest some numbers to tune up armor and weapons so you can either decide on building offensive ships or defensive ships without worrying too much avoid cost efficiency.

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To apply the patch, use patch -p0 -i new_premade_designs.diff on the root directory of freeorion.
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Some premade designs to help newcomers

#2 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Could you make a version without using the name of a StarCraft race?

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Vezzra
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Re: Some premade designs to help newcomers

#3 Post by Vezzra »

Rydra wrote:Armor is ridiculously strong for its power and price. Either it needs a price increase, or weapons need a price decrease (decreasing weapons price would lead to a more dynamic game IMHO).
If the stats for a part are unbalanced, I think it's better to correct the stats of the part in question, instead of trying to balance things by changing other parts. Simply because said other parts may in turn become unbalanced, in this case decreasing weapon build costs would also require a revision of shield build costs (otherwise shields would become too expensive compared to weapons and armor). So, if armor parts are currently overpowered, the best solution would be to either raise their build costs or lower their strength.

Concerning your suggestion of predefined ship designs, there have been a lot of them, as you probably have seen when editing premade_ship_designs.txt (they haven't been deleted, just commented out). The new weapon/armor/shield stats rendered them obsolete, as would any new premade ship designs whenever we put in revised numbers, which is bound to happen frequently as the new numbers still require tuning. Therefore I wonder if it wouldn't be better to wait with new premade designs until we have numbers that seem sufficiently balanced and will last for a while.

Unless you don't mind to revise your premade ship designs accordingly each time of course ;)

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Rydra
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Re: Some premade designs to help newcomers

#4 Post by Rydra »

Geoff the Medio wrote:Could you make a version without using the name of a StarCraft race?
done
Vezzra wrote:
Rydra wrote:Armor is ridiculously strong for its power and price. Either it needs a price increase, or weapons need a price decrease (decreasing weapons price would lead to a more dynamic game IMHO).
If the stats for a part are unbalanced, I think it's better to correct the stats of the part in question, instead of trying to balance things by changing other parts. Simply because said other parts may in turn become unbalanced, in this case decreasing weapon build costs would also require a revision of shield build costs (otherwise shields would become too expensive compared to weapons and armor). So, if armor parts are currently overpowered, the best solution would be to either raise their build costs or lower their strength.

Concerning your suggestion of predefined ship designs, there have been a lot of them, as you probably have seen when editing premade_ship_designs.txt (they haven't been deleted, just commented out). The new weapon/armor/shield stats rendered them obsolete, as would any new premade ship designs whenever we put in revised numbers, which is bound to happen frequently as the new numbers still require tuning. Therefore I wonder if it wouldn't be better to wait with new premade designs until we have numbers that seem sufficiently balanced and will last for a while.

Unless you don't mind to revise your premade ship designs accordingly each time of course ;)
I don't mind doing so :), I'll post now in a new thread some numbers I've come across to balanced armor and weapons.
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