FreeOrion

Moving a discussion started here to Brainstorming:

"Full square" - so, if I understand that correctly, that means a slot type that can take all ship parts (as all of them fit in a full square), and we'll have ship parts that are also "full square" (e.g. colony pod) that would only fit in this special full square slot type.

The more I think about it, the more I like it. Brilliant idea!

I vote for incorporating that into 0.4.2

Yes, that's the idea.

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I have a couple of issues with that:

First of all, some kind of vague "specialness" is not as conceptually appealing as the more concrete "size".

Secondly, and more importantly, it's not really practical gameplay-wise. Would you have any ship that can hold a colony pod be capable of mounting a Stellar Converter?

If the scout needs his fuel tank, well then maybe scouts need to have medium hulls. Or, if we really need to have small scouts, the small hull can have extra fuel. Then building medium has a tradeoff between needing an extra fuel tank to keep up with the smaller ships, or equipping other good stuff. Which isn't necessarily better than what we have now, but I don't think it's worse, and it avoids the small colony ship thing.

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Using "slot size" has some pros, but also more cons, especially implementation-wise. It is a lot more awkward to have different sized icons jumbled together in the "ship parts" panel. There is no ideal solution that doesn't result in odd, space-wasting gaps.


Why not? The only early hull with a "special" slot might be slow with very low structure, and have no other slots. Yeah, you could put a stellar converter in it, but it would be very vulnerable. On the other hand, by the time you have high level techs like the stellar c. you probably also have a better hull with a special slot.


I see no down-side to that change. It makes the basic hulls more distinct.

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When I read eleazar's suggestion my first reaction was similar. Yeah, the idea of introducing some kind of "slot size" is conceptually more appealing. However, as I already said, the more I thought about it the more I liked eleazars solution. The handling, especially UI wise, is simpler and more elegant, and functionally it gets done what we need.
In addition to the question "Why not?" I ask: How would using "large" slots instead of "special" slots make any difference in regard to that? You could still fit a stellar converter in the same "large" slot as a colony pod, unless you plan to use more different slot "sizes" that just "standard" and "large". And I don't think that's a good idea, I wouldn't go down that road. If we implement something like this, the UI will quickly become complicated and cumbersome to use.
If we do that, I'd suggest we scrap the standard hull. The basic small and basic medium hull would be quite distinct, while the only difference between the basic medium and standard hull would be one additional external slot (and a slight difference in speed) - not enough to justify an extra hull type. If however we want to keep the standard hull, I'd suggest to rename it to "basic large hull" (more consistent naming) and to try to make it more distinct compared to the basic medium hull (so that the differences between the basic hull types are more "evenly spaced").

I did that before RC2.

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revision 5080

" ~ Increased the effectiveness of shields and armor by ~ 2x
~ Removed internal slot from basic small hull, but increased fuel capacity
~ Switched the premade colony and outpost ships to a medium hull, but increased the cost of the colony and outpost parts to compensate.
~ gave the large basic hull a little more structure."

There's a lot more that could be done to make slot/part/hull situation better, but hopefully this resolves the worst problems.

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Excellent I think that's probably the best solution for 0.4.1.

If that's such a big deal - and I'm not sure that it is; we could change the layout completely to something designed to support different sized ship parts - we could use some other visual indicator to show that it's a large part. For instance, it could have a black background instead of grey, and then when you begin to drag it out of the parts window, it would expand to its full size. Or, if you don't like that, there are doubtless several other possibilities. Since we have total freedom to design the UI, I'm dubious about any argument that prefers one gameplay feature over another based on our current UI.

Because by having a Stellar Converter and a Colony Pod use the same type of slot, you're committing to having exactly the same restrictions on what type of ship can carry them. Sure, in the beginning of the game, the only ship with a special slot would be slow and weak. How about later on, though? I can't imagine that we would prevent the player from building fast colony ships, but having a fast planet-destroying death star just seems like the sort of thing that shouldn't be allowed, for reasons of balancing, and because it's just plain goofy. Gigantic epic weapons should feel gigantic and epic. If I can put one on the same hull that my first colony ship was made from, it feels a lot less gigantic and epic.

We wouldn't use large slots for colony pods - eleazar was just suggesting that the special slot could replace large slots, in addition to solving the problem at hand. My suggestion for dealing with the problem at hand was to remove the internal slot from the small hull and give it more fuel, which we did. Now the issue is the larger question of whether it's better in general to have large slots, or a special slot.

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I feel I should note that hulls can have effectsgroups, so if a part is notable because of its effects, it doesn't need to be a part; it could merged into a specialized hull. Also, parts can have effectsgroups that reduce the speed of ships.

In general, if it's something like a weapon, or some other thing that does stuff to other objects, that makes more sense to have as a ship part. On the other hand, stuff that affects the way a ship responds to actions taken against it, such as recovering damage, or absorbing SR weapons, is something that feels like a better fit for hull effects. It makes sense that a hull has some special properties that allow it to reflect weapons, or fly into a sun, but less sense that it has some special property that allows it to turn a planet into an asteroid belt.

Stellar Converter in particular strikes me as a ship part, rather than a hull.

But none that dampen the blow to epicness dealt by being able to put a Stellar Converter on a middle-sized early-game hull.

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The thing i liked about "slot size" that a special slot type doesn't address is slot bloat. I.E. big hulls tend to have an awful lot of slots. But with slot sizes, you could drop a small part in a big slot, and it would count for multiples of that part. I.E. if you put a laser in a large slot, it would count for 4 lasers. Less clicking and dragging to outfit a large hull when some of the slots are "consolidated" into large slots.

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I don't think that's really an important issue. At least the dragging isn't necessary, unless you're particular about the order / location of the parts, since you can just double click a part repeatedly to add it to any available slot (or to move a part to another slot it could fit in in order to make room for a part that can only go in an occupied slot).

True, but: Regardless if we stick to the current UI or redesign it from scratch - every UI we can come up with will get more complicated with each variable aspect it has to deal with. "Slot type" is one, "slot size" would be an additional one. Furthermore, our current UI is very cleverly designed to handle the different slot and corresponding ship part types. A full square "special" slot type would fit perfectly into this system, and until we can come up with something better, I'd rather stick to it.
In concede you have a point here. A good one.
In this case the issue that you can fit a stellar converter on the same hull as a colony pod doesn't arise, so my original objection still stands: How would using "large" slots instead of "special" slots make any difference? We would use "special" slots exclusively for giant epic ship parts like stellar converters. The only real advantage I can see that "slot size" could give us is that you can differentiate between "large" internal and "large" external slots, and would be able to make "large" ship parts that can fit only in one of them. A "special" slot type on the other hand can't do that - it would just be able to receive any ship part, internal, external and of course "special". But do we really need that kind of differentiation?

That is one of the major differences, yes. The other is that four regular sized parts can go in a large slot, which lets the ship still be big and epic without using a part that necessarily requires it to be big and epic. A stellar converter is good, but so are 4 Death Rays; big epic ships should still be able to be big and epic without requiring them to have big epic parts. Also, there was some discussion about certain parts having a specific "large version", which would be different than just four regular ones. The example in that case was missiles, the idea being that big heavy ships would be more specialized for LR, decreasing the motivation for annoying the hell out of your opponent with really fast LR ships. I believe this was somewhere in the thick of that discussion.

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