Ships: Upgrades and Designs

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yaromir
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Re: Ships: Upgrades and Designs

#16 Post by yaromir »

Interesting discussion.

For me #1 issue would be elimination of drudgery/micro-management.

Contrast upgrade systems of HOI and HOI2.

In HOI you have to click each individual unit, click 'upgrade' then wait, then click 'deploy', then click location then group.

Very Bad.

In HOI2 each unit has an 'upgrade counter' which accumulates PP if they are allocated on the strategic slider. Once PP reaches 100% the unit is upgraded.

Very Good.

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So, I find appealing the idea of hassle-free refitting, however, I don't believe it should come for free. Each ship should accumulate PPs and once enough is accumulated, ship is upgraded.

This can happen on per-component basis or on design -> improved design basis (which would be more involved)
Staying awake and aware is perhaps the hardest thing to do.

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Robbie.Price
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Re: Ships: Upgrades and Designs

#17 Post by Robbie.Price »

Goodmorning all,

RE:
yaromir wrote:Interesting discussion.

In HOI2 each unit has an 'upgrade counter' which accumulates PP if they are allocated on the strategic slider. Once PP reaches 100% the unit is upgraded.

Very Good.

----
So, I find appealing the idea of hassle-free refitting, however, I don't believe it should come for free. Each ship should accumulate PPs and once enough is accumulated, ship is upgraded.

This can happen on per-component basis or on design -> improved design basis (which would be more involved)
I Like this idea, generally, but have one small issue with it, in that if you research a new tech, suddenly all your ships are demanding pp's again, on a game where the user gets two or three upgrade demanding techs suddenly ships have pp's 'maintenance' costs for several turns till they are all finished upgrading, during which time production grinds to a near halt.

Instead i propose that the upgrade costs be folding into the maintenance costs, maintenance involves replacing of
old warn out pieces, the majority of the cost of which is not the piece itself but the labour-hours/manhours (for those not from 'Politically Correct' north america) and delivery. It's not a stretch to include replacing out of date subcomponents as well in the process {these would be upgrading tech from mark 1 to mark 2 of the same weapon/engine/etc. [upgrades of this sort being more refinements, miniaturization{not modeled in the game i think}, and reliability, typically you replace a subsystem of a existing weapon/drive, or re-arrange/re-plate armor all the support structure remains, and it's the support structures which typically cost]}.

AS long as there are PP paying options to speed up the process. [Sending a ship to doc, setting a doc to upgrade mode, building a maintenance support ship ...] the user still has the flexibility to choose to pay or not.

This would be more clumsy for 'refitting' [here used to mean complete overhauls, where ship components are replaced with non-derived technologies] but could still be done [i think, not sure . . . ].

In my mind there are two ways to refit: refit an individual ship, refit a entire class/or subclass of ships array of ships.

Refitting a single ship, tell the ship to refit, tell it what to refit into, see what costs and how long it will take, accept. *costs would be PP's and or Money, payed upfront or over the duration of the upgrade[paying all upfront costing perhaps differently then over time], on a component by component basis and time would be just how long till it's done also component dependent*.

refitting a group of ships, would involve selecting the group(all FrontlineFigherClass_B's, All orbital defenders of planet Y. . .) then tell them what to refit into. In this case i don't want to see all the ships waiting the same amount of time, then all going from Class_B's To Class_C's in one turn(4 turns later, or whatever). Instead, i would model this as a delayed upgrade.

In short, the upgrade window would have a cost(T/M)/ship, and total cost. It then would additionally have a 'Delay time' in which new components are build and prepared to be shipped to ships. [costs might be all at once, or spread out over 'Delay Time' number of turns{Which i prefer}.] and a rate. The rate would be one of the probabilities I mentioned in my last post, and would be calculated using all the previously posted parameters, but more strongly on the location of the ships in question relative to one another [one group one planet, high rate, one group outside your territory smaller rate, lots of groups all pokadotted about the map very slow, One ship 100%] , and would not necessarily be fixed[you could check back in on progress if you wanted after the fact], If after ordering the refit, some of the ships grouped together, or back into your territory, these numbers would self-adjust.

The two systems would be the same at code level. 1 ship just having a 100% rate after delay.
Costs would determined on a component by component basis. and could be modified by the user to a small extent. There are two components Delay time, and Rate. Paying more PP's then the minimum would reduce Delay Time strongly, and rate only a little, paying more then min would increase the rate a lot, but not decrease the delay time very much. And paying both before the end of the delay time *paying upfront* would reduce both costs, slightly.

Lastly, Since Refits cost pp's and Money, if the full deposit of pp's and money has not been accumulated by the end of 'delay' then the rate would be significantly reduced, and the % of upgraded ships would be limited to the % of full deposit made. [end of delay time, you've payed 40% of the payments, the upgrade rate would be 40% of what was originally quoted and no more then 40%(rounded down) of the ships you set to be upgraded would become upgraded till you payed off the deposit].

Anyway, best wishes all,
I'm always open to ideas
Robbie Price

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Krikkitone
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Re: Ships: Upgrades and Designs

#18 Post by Krikkitone »

I would allow you to have "upgrading" as a project, and you determine priority by where it is in the queue.

There would be the Regular PP maintenance costs of ships, and you could also have the Upgrade project... which the more PP it accumulates, the more ships get upgraded...

you can Choose to either grind your production to a halt while things get upgraded
OR
make building new ships a higher priority than upgrading the old.

also a side note... refits/maintenance/ repair of ships should NOT cost money .. PP only {although using money to keep ships from running away/betraying you makes sense}

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