5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotkeys

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Ragwortshire
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5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotkeys

#1 Post by Ragwortshire »

I had fun playing about 100 turns or so of a game as the Chato, against 2 Eaxaw and an Egassem. So far one Eaxaw is dead, the Egassem is getting beaten up and the second Eaxaw is putting up a serious fight.

The AI:

The AI seems to be quite scary already. :D It manages its fleets much better compared to earlier versions. However, I don't agree with the way it designs its ships; I think it uses way too many weapons and shields, and not enough armor.

For example, I saw Eaxaw Organic Hull ships with the 3x Laser 4 and no armor! Attack 33, with 11 HP and production cost of 97 + ship tax.
Once I researched Laser 4, I fielded 1x Laser 4 and 2x Zortrium Plate: Attack 11 and 33 HP (so obviously just as powerful) but a cost of only 49!
Of course maybe the AI didn't have Zortrium, but in that case it should at least field 2x Laser 4 and 1x Standard plate: Attack 22 and 17 HP for a cost of 71. Better and cheaper than what they actually built. (I still think a single gun is best though.)

With the shields, of course if you can completely resist enemy weapons then a shield is always worth it. ;) But when the cost of the shield is comparable to the cost of the rest of the ship, I think the AI should think twice about it. In the actual game I have Laser 4 - a Defense Grid on an Organic Hull is not paying for itself in this case.

But still, it's a testament to the rest of the AI's programming that it can still compete even while using these suboptimal designs.

Bug?: On several occasions I got a message saying there was a combat in a given sector which appeared to be empty of enemy ships and planets. When I clicked on the combat to read the log, it was blank. Is this a known issue? If not maybe I will try to get a definite example.

Designs: If you delete a design, the ships with that design stay in existence - so far, so good. But ships in production get irrevocably cancelled. :( Maybe there could be some sort of warning when you delete a design which you have in production, to say that you'll lose your progress?

The Research Display: There's a couple of features I would really like here. First, for locked technologies, it would be really nice if the total cost and time needed to research the tech and all of its prerequisites. Perhaps these could be shown in red, underneath the actual cost and time for the tech itself? Often technologies have prerequisites which are more expensive than the tech itself - in such cases it's hard to gauge accurately how hard it will be to reach. Secondly, maybe I missed something but it would be nice to be able to show only Applications and hide the Theoretical Prerequisites.

Hotkeys: Again, I'm new and I apologise if I've missed them. The main hotkeys I would like are to quickly open/close the Production and Research screens, and to show/hide the SitRep. Also on the Production and Research screens, it would be nice to be able to select an item in the queue and move it up or down using the up and down arrows. Left and Right could be used to increase or decrease the number of repetitions of the item, in the case of the production screen.

Also, if these hotkeys are implemented (and especially if they're already there and I missed them!) then it would be nice if hovering over the item in question showed a tooltip with the relevant hotkey. I really think that's the easiest way of getting to learn them.

Overall: I really, really like this game - as attested by the fact that I installed Tortoise SVN and MSVC, and had my computer compile the code for an hour, just to be able to play the (almost) newest version for a couple of hours. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it develops! Thanks to all the developers for making such a fun game.
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#2 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Ragwortshire wrote:The main hotkeys I would like are to quickly open/close the Production and Research screens, and to show/hide the SitRep.
F2 through F5 open/close such screens.

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Dilvish
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#3 Post by Dilvish »

Ragwortshire wrote:I had fun playing about 100 turns or so of a game as the Chato, against 2 Eaxaw and an Egassem. So far one Eaxaw is dead, the Egassem is getting beaten up and the second Eaxaw is putting up a serious fight.
The AI:
The AI seems to be quite scary already. :D It manages its fleets much better compared to earlier versions. However, I don't agree with the way it designs its ships; I think it uses way too many weapons and shields, and not enough armor.

For example, I saw Eaxaw Organic Hull ships with the 3x Laser 4 and no armor! Attack 33, with 11 HP and production cost of 97 + ship tax.
Once I researched Laser 4, I fielded 1x Laser 4 and 2x Zortrium Plate: Attack 11 and 33 HP (so obviously just as powerful) but a cost of only 49!
Of course maybe the AI didn't have Zortrium, but in that case it should at least field 2x Laser 4 and 1x Standard plate: Attack 22 and 17 HP for a cost of 71. Better and cheaper than what they actually built. (I still think a single gun is best though.)

With the shields, of course if you can completely resist enemy weapons then a shield is always worth it. ;) But when the cost of the shield is comparable to the cost of the rest of the ship, I think the AI should think twice about it. In the actual game I have Laser 4 - a Defense Grid on an Organic Hull is not paying for itself in this case.

But still, it's a testament to the rest of the AI's programming that it can still compete even while using these suboptimal designs.
as noted in the thread on the changes, these are just initial AI ship designs, expected to change. As for specifics, I intentionally left off standard armor, but the AI will start using it with Zortrium. I am starting to come around to the idea of also using some standard armor. I also agree that the Defense Grids are not seeming worth the cost. I think the adjustment that actually should be made is reducing the cost on Defense Grids, but in the meantime I will probably take them out of the AI ship designs. **edit** actually, I just put through some adjusted designs...**
Bug?: On several occasions I got a message saying there was a combat in a given sector which appeared to be empty of enemy ships and planets. When I clicked on the combat to read the log, it was blank. Is this a known issue? If not maybe I will try to get a definite example.
known issue -- it's from stealthed floaters and whatnot, triggering a combat but not doing or receiving any damage. someday it will be probably made so no combat is triggered.
Designs: If you delete a design, the ships with that design stay in existence - so far, so good. But ships in production get irrevocably cancelled. :( Maybe there could be some sort of warning when you delete a design which you have in production, to say that you'll lose your progress?
I totally agree, and started a thread on that a few months back. No consensus was reached on what the right treatment should be, iirc. I am leaning towards coloring the ship design panels with the same kind of light/dark emphasis like is used to distinguish if production or research elements are getting any PP/RP -- if a ship design is on the queue and currently being allocated PP (and perhaps if it has any accumulated PP even if not receiving any this turn) then the design panel would be lightened as a warning.
The Research Display: There's a couple of features I would really like here. First, for locked technologies, it would be really nice if the total cost and time needed to research the tech and all of its prerequisites. Perhaps these could be shown in red, underneath the actual cost and time for the tech itself? Often technologies have prerequisites which are more expensive than the tech itself - in such cases it's hard to gauge accurately how hard it will be to reach. Secondly, maybe I missed something but it would be nice to be able to show only Applications and hide the Theoretical Prerequisites.
Hmm, I dunno, doesn't seem too hard to me to follow the trail back and check costs, but I could see some value to it being summarized automatically for you. I think Theories are being phased out, hence no more button to show/hide them.
Hotkeys: Again, I'm new and I apologise if I've missed them. The main hotkeys I would like are to quickly open/close the Production and Research screens, and to show/hide the SitRep. Also on the Production and Research screens, it would be nice to be able to select an item in the queue and move it up or down using the up and down arrows. Left and Right could be used to increase or decrease the number of repetitions of the item, in the case of the production screen.

Also, if these hotkeys are implemented (and especially if they're already there and I missed them!) then it would be nice if hovering over the item in question showed a tooltip with the relevant hotkey. I really think that's the easiest way of getting to learn them.
There are some hotkeys supported, if you search over my past posts you should be able to find one where I posted some info yanked out of the code. It should be documented better, I agree. Be warned, at least on my system (Linux) the hotkeys do not all seem to work correctly. Most significantly, using ctrl-enter to end turn seems to cause turns to be doubled/skipped.
Overall: I really, really like this game - as attested by the fact that I installed Tortoise SVN and MSVC, and had my computer compile the code for an hour, just to be able to play the (almost) newest version for a couple of hours. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it develops! Thanks to all the developers for making such a fun game.
That's very nice to hear, thanks!
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Vezzra
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#4 Post by Vezzra »

Dilvish wrote:I also agree that the Defense Grids are not seeming worth the cost. I think the adjustment that actually should be made is reducing the cost on Defense Grids
I admit I've opted for very high costs for the shields for the initial testing phase. However, these costs were also chosen with the prospect in mind that ship structure will be significantly raised, something I left out when I committed the initial revision of weapons/armor/shields. First, I didn't want to do too much at once, and second I think that doing some playtesting with the new settings might give a better feeling for how much that raise should be. My first suggestion of multiplying the current values by 10 or 5 seems too much now, but I still think it should be at least by 2, if not 3.

That would result in longer battles, occasionally lasting even several turns, meaning that a ship will be able to sustain far more hits before it is destroyed. As shields reduce the damage dealt by each hit, this will significantly enhance a shields relevance/usefulness. If it takes 10 hits to destroy a ship instead of 2, that means a shield will absorb 5 times the damage.

It also means that a shields usefulness will be enhanced if it's supported by a heavily armored hull (and be less useful if put on an only lightly armored hull).

So we have to balance shields very carefully. If shields are too cheap, they'll become a "must have" item, and not an option that has it's advantages but also drawbacks, that might make you think twice if you want to put them on your ships. If they are too expensive, they won't be used at all. I expect it will take us a while until we'll get these numbers right.

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Dilvish
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#5 Post by Dilvish »

Vezzra wrote:That would result in longer battles, occasionally lasting even several turns, meaning that a ship will be able to sustain far more hits before it is destroyed. As shields reduce the damage dealt by each hit, this will significantly enhance a shields relevance/usefulness. If it takes 10 hits to destroy a ship instead of 2, that means a shield will absorb 5 times the damage.It also means that a shields usefulness will be enhanced if it's supported by a heavily armored hull (and be less useful if put on an only lightly armored hull).
I see things a bit differently, with shield value very highly dependent on what attacks it is expected to be subject to. Regardless of structure, if the shield value matches or nearly matches the incoming attacks then it makes the ship either indestructible or at least hugely extends it's battle staying-power. For lesser shield:attack ratios, if structure is very high relative to incoming attacks then the shield makes a fairly simple proportional extension of staying power, by a factor of attack/(attack-shield). My rule of thumb would be if the shield increases the cost of the ship by less than that then it's worth it, if not, then not. If structure is low-ish, or not high, relative to incoming attacks, then the picture is more muddled, but I think it tends to put a higher value on the shield than with high structure. A shield might make no difference if the attack were really powerful relative to shield, or might make the very significant difference between surviving one round versus 2, or 2 vs. 3 if the shield value is at least approaching the same order of magnitude as attack.

With reference to Defense Grids in particular: at this stage I (or the AI) am most likely using organic hulls with standard armor, so structure of 17. By the time I get Defense Grids I will probably have, or be about to get, Laser 2. A Defense Grid would make taking out Dyson Forests trivial, but they're fairly easy to manage at this point anyway. The next known significant enemy/target are Sentries -- attack Laser 4, strength 11. A rough analysis is that a defense grid would mean it takes 3 hits rather than 2 to take out one of my ships, increasing its battle value to 3/2 base. So if the Defense grid cost less than 50% of a ship without it, then it would be a good deal. But currently they nearly double the cost of a ship, so are not (for this target). They would be well worth it against Acirema, but that's a relatively rare encounter. Against other empires, I have to figure they are most likely also fielding Laser 2 or better, now or very soon, so the Defense Grid value proposition is marginal, soon becoming negative, with respect to them. Over all that means I might make at most 1 or 2 ships with Defense Grids. Maybe that's reasonable, but it still seems to me the cost should be a bit lower.

Since the AI does not currently tailor attack fleet composition to specific target characteristics, the current AI does not use Defense Grids at all. Again, that might totally be reasonable, there are plenty of things the AI is not yet sophisticated enough to take advantage of.
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#6 Post by Vezzra »

Dilvish wrote:I see things a bit differently, with shield value very highly dependent on what attacks it is expected to be subject to.
Yeah, you're absolutely right of course, the average power of the hits a shield sustains in battle is the primary factor that determines it's value. I didn't mention that because I took it for granted anyway. However, the problem is that this is a quite difficult estimation, because this is a factor that's not easily predictable.

The values for the base structure of the hulls on the other hand are a well known (because fixed) factor. If we raise them e.g. by a factor of 3, we can safely assume that ships will last significantly longer in battle. An organic hull with standard armor will have a structure of 39. This will make putting a shield on it more likely an investment that's worth even a higher cost - notwithstanding the fact that the power of the weapons of the opponents is still the more important factor.

That said, I'm definitely not opposed to lower the build costs for the shields. However, if we do that, we need to adjust the costs for all the shields, not only the defense grid, otherwise the more advanced shield types end up unproportionally expensive.

Do you have some specific values in mind?

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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#7 Post by Ragwortshire »

I thought of a couple more things: Large Hulls seem very, very expensive for what they are - couldn't the cost be reduced to 35 or so? On the other hand, Organic Hulls are cheap, powerful hulls available in the early game that render all the starting ships obsolete (apart from maybe dedicated scouts). I think the combination of attributes is a bit too much. More on hulls later.
Dilvish wrote:
The Research Display: There's a couple of features I would really like here. First, for locked technologies, it would be really nice if the total cost and time needed to research the tech and all of its prerequisites. Perhaps these could be shown in red, underneath the actual cost and time for the tech itself? Often technologies have prerequisites which are more expensive than the tech itself - in such cases it's hard to gauge accurately how hard it will be to reach. Secondly, maybe I missed something but it would be nice to be able to show only Applications and hide the Theoretical Prerequisites.
Hmm, I dunno, doesn't seem too hard to me to follow the trail back and check costs, but I could see some value to it being summarized automatically for you. I think Theories are being phased out, hence no more button to show/hide them.
I ought to have said: It's tedious to have to look back at every prerequisite and count up the cost manually, and just guessing tends to be inaccurate. As for the theories, apologies for the following rather useless criticism: I think removing a helpful user interface feature because the gameplay it relies on is planned for removal at some unknown point in the future is putting the cart before the horse.
There are some hotkeys supported, if you search over my past posts you should be able to find one where I posted some info yanked out of the code. It should be documented better, I agree. Be warned, at least on my system (Linux) the hotkeys do not all seem to work correctly. Most significantly, using ctrl-enter to end turn seems to cause turns to be doubled/skipped.
Okay. The functionality for having tooltips already exists, right? (For example on buildings you can hover over to see what their prerequisites are.)
Vezzra wrote:The values for the base structure of the hulls on the other hand are a well known (because fixed) factor. If we raise them e.g. by a factor of 3, we can safely assume that ships will last significantly longer in battle. An organic hull with standard armor will have a structure of 39. This will make putting a shield on it more likely an investment that's worth even a higher cost - notwithstanding the fact that the power of the weapons of the opponents is still the more important factor.
The problem with this is that the hulls already have too much structure, IMO, for their cost. In particular certain hulls offer better structure-for-cost value than dedicated armor parts! The primary offenders here are the Asteroid Hulls (though the Organics definitely do this too!). 50 Structure for 10 cost is better even than the top armor (which gives a mere 30 structure for 12 cost). This has some very unfortunate consequences.

A Large Asteroid Hull with a Laser 4 and *nothing* else costs 40 to build, has 50 HP/11 Damage. A Large Asteroid with a Laser 4 and five Xenotronium armor, on the other hand, costs 80 to build and has 140 HP/11 Damage. If I pit 4 of the first kind of ship against 2 of the second, it's pretty easy to verify that the 4 should win, nearly all the time. If we instead put two Laser 4 and four Xenotronium, we get a ship with cost 102 and 122 HP/22 Damage. Again you can verify that four of these will lose to ten of the one-gun spam ships.

When you think about it this is not surprising. If the ship hull itself is the most cost-efficient part of the ship, then the optimal design will naturally be to build as many hulls as possible and as few of everything else. This leads naturally to massive amounts of spam, something that seems to be generally regarded as a Bad Thing.

TL; DR: By all means increase the Stucture of the hulls if it's deemed reasonable; just be sure to raise the costs to compensate!
That said, I'm definitely not opposed to lower the build costs for the shields. However, if we do that, we need to adjust the costs for all the shields, not only the defense grid, otherwise the more advanced shield types end up unproportionally expensive.

Do you have some specific values in mind?
The key issue is really the cost of the ship hulls. The more you make the ships cost, the better shields start to look because the proportional cost to add one decreases. In general if the shield costs 50% of the total cost of the ship (including the shield), then it needs to block 75% of enemy weapons damage to be cost-effective. If it costs only 33% (so 50% of the cost of the rest), then it need only block 45% of the damage.

I realise the question wasn't addressed to me, but: If the cost of hulls were increased so that spam was no longer an option, and if the shields were a mere 20% cheaper across the board, I would have been *much* happier to use them on my larger ships.
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#8 Post by Dilvish »

Vezzra wrote:...The values for the base structure of the hulls on the other hand are a well known (because fixed) factor. If we raise them e.g. by a factor of 3, we can safely assume that ships will last significantly longer in battle. An organic hull with standard armor will have a structure of 39. This will make putting a shield on it more likely an investment that's worth even a higher cost - notwithstanding the fact that the power of the weapons of the opponents is still the more important factor.
Although changing hull structure can have some effect on the significance of shields, like I discuss above, I disagree that more structure necessarily means more reason to have shields. I see the basic issue (with current costs) as 'do I want 1 ship with a Grid, or 2 ships without (all having the same structure value)? At a minimum, a Grid would have to be expected to make my ship last twice as long in battle (and that ratio has very little to do with the actual structure value), and even then the lone ship would only be inflicting damage at half the rate of 2 ships.
That said, I'm definitely not opposed to lower the build costs for the shields. However, if we do that, we need to adjust the costs for all the shields, not only the defense grid, otherwise the more advanced shield types end up unproportionally expensive.
I'm not so sure we need to maintain a particular point/cost ratio; the Deflector Shield already seems reasonably priced to me, for example.
Do you have some specific values in mind?
I think that somewhere around half to 2/3 of the present Grid cost is where I'd start to use them more & consider having the AI use them more.
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Vezzra
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#9 Post by Vezzra »

Ragwortshire wrote:Large Hulls seem very, very expensive for what they are - couldn't the cost be reduced to 35 or so? On the other hand, Organic Hulls are cheap, powerful hulls available in the early game that render all the starting ships obsolete (apart from maybe dedicated scouts).
That's a known issue. Hulls are quite unbalanced right now, the entire hull line will undergo a major revision. See here for a discussion about that.
The problem with this is that the hulls already have too much structure, IMO, for their cost. In particular certain hulls offer better structure-for-cost value than dedicated armor parts!
We are actually dealing with two issues here: One thing is that hulls among themselves are unbalanced right now, the other thing is the need to balance their costs compared to armor and shields. Of course both need to be addressed by the major revision I mentioned above.
The key issue is really the cost of the ship hulls. The more you make the ships cost, the better shields start to look because the proportional cost to add one decreases. In general if the shield costs 50% of the total cost of the ship (including the shield), then it needs to block 75% of enemy weapons damage to be cost-effective. If it costs only 33% (so 50% of the cost of the rest), then it need only block 45% of the damage.
This is where things start to get very difficult with some of our game mechanics (which I personally would like to get rid of). Currently the costs for the hulls increase with each ship you build (to simulate "maintenance costs"). So the more ships you have, the more expensive the hulls get - but not the parts, this only affects the hulls. That means the ratio of hull costs/ship part costs shifts during the course of the game. Once you've achieved significant expansion and managed to ramp up your industrial capacity accordingly, you can build quite a lot of ships. As I've seen in my test games, this raises the costs for the hulls to an extend that the costs for the ship parts become almost irrelevant mid/late game, which isn't a good thing IMO.

If we increase the base costs for the ship hulls, this problem will get even worse. So you see, there is quite a couple of things that need to be addressed to really solve the current problems with unbalanced costs.
I realise the question wasn't addressed to me
Well, no problem - after all, this is an open discussion on a public forum, everyone is welcome to chime in ;)

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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#10 Post by Vezzra »

Dilvish wrote:Although changing hull structure can have some effect on the significance of shields, like I discuss above, I disagree that more structure necessarily means more reason to have shields. I see the basic issue (with current costs) as 'do I want 1 ship with a Grid, or 2 ships without (all having the same structure value)? At a minimum, a Grid would have to be expected to make my ship last twice as long in battle (and that ratio has very little to do with the actual structure value), and even then the lone ship would only be inflicting damage at half the rate of 2 ships.
I see what you are getting at here, and basically I agree. It's just that during my recent test games I found myself considering if I should put a defense grid on my ships especially when using hulls with very low structure. Once hull+armor surpasses a certain level of structure, the effect you describe kicks in, so it doesn't make much of a difference if the ship's structure is 50 or 100 with regard to the significance of a shield.
I'm not so sure we need to maintain a particular point/cost ratio; the Deflector Shield already seems reasonably priced to me, for example.
If we lower the cost for the defense grid to 40 or even 30, it will have a far better cost/strength ratio than any of the other, more advanced shields. Shouldn't it be the other way round? I mean, after all you're investing a lot of RP to get the "better" shields, what's the point if they don't give you more for your money (your PP)? That has been something that has bothered me with the death ray before the revision, they were very expensive RP-wise, but less cost effective than the plasma cannon. That doesn't make much sense to me.
I think that somewhere around half to 2/3 of the present Grid cost is where I'd start to use them more & consider having the AI use them more.
Half of the current costs seems a bit low for me, that might be too close to make the shield an "always have" item. 2/3 of the current costs sounds reasonable. Instead of costing three times the PP of their corresponding weapon types, we can make that twice the costs of the weapons.

I'd like to have some more opinions/feedback on that from the other playtesters. What are your experiences?

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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#11 Post by Dilvish »

Vezzra wrote:If we lower the cost for the defense grid to 40 or even 30, it will have a far better cost/strength ratio than any of the other, more advanced shields. Shouldn't it be the other way round? I mean, after all you're investing a lot of RP to get the "better" shields, what's the point if they don't give you more for your money (your PP)? That has been something that has bothered me with the death ray before the revision, they were very expensive RP-wise, but less cost effective than the plasma cannon. That doesn't make much sense to me.
With the old shield mechanic, and particularly before fleet maint got added to hull cost, I would see that concern between Death Ray and Plasma cannon being very well placed; fairly equivalent strength fleets could be built relying on either part, and the question was would you get more total bang for your bucks by building a lot of medium damage ships, or a lesser number of higher damage ships. That part cost ratio would be very significant. Here the non-stacking aspect makes all the difference. The different shields are not at all interchangeable; a shield with capacity 2X is worth more than twice the worth of a shield with capacity X (imho). I don't think they need to be both more powerful and cheaper, or even the same, on a point basis.
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#12 Post by Ragwortshire »

Vezzra wrote:
Ragwortshire wrote:The problem with this is that the hulls already have too much structure, IMO, for their cost. In particular certain hulls offer better structure-for-cost value than dedicated armor parts!
We are actually dealing with two issues here: One thing is that hulls among themselves are unbalanced right now, the other thing is the need to balance their costs compared to armor and shields. Of course both need to be addressed by the major revision I mentioned above.
The key issue is really the cost of the ship hulls. The more you make the ships cost, the better shields start to look because the proportional cost to add one decreases. In general if the shield costs 50% of the total cost of the ship (including the shield), then it needs to block 75% of enemy weapons damage to be cost-effective. If it costs only 33% (so 50% of the cost of the rest), then it need only block 45% of the damage.
This is where things start to get very difficult with some of our game mechanics (which I personally would like to get rid of). Currently the costs for the hulls increase with each ship you build (to simulate "maintenance costs"). So the more ships you have, the more expensive the hulls get - but not the parts, this only affects the hulls. That means the ratio of hull costs/ship part costs shifts during the course of the game. Once you've achieved significant expansion and managed to ramp up your industrial capacity accordingly, you can build quite a lot of ships. As I've seen in my test games, this raises the costs for the hulls to an extend that the costs for the ship parts become almost irrelevant mid/late game, which isn't a good thing IMO.

If we increase the base costs for the ship hulls, this problem will get even worse. So you see, there is quite a couple of things that need to be addressed to really solve the current problems with unbalanced costs.
I knew about the maintenance costs... but I guess I just haven't really made it to the mid/late game yet! Thanks for the detailed explanation.
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#13 Post by Vezzra »

Sigh, I've been working on a quite elaborate reply when Firefox crashed. I don't think I'll have the time and nerves to recreate everything, so I'll try for something less comprehensive... :(
Dilvish wrote:With the old shield mechanic, and particularly before fleet maint got added to hull cost, I would see that concern between Death Ray and Plasma cannon being very well placed
You're right, but because of how the fleet maintenance mechanic works, it effectively negates balancing of build costs (once you have many ships, hull costs get so high that the costs for the ship parts are more or less irrelevant). So when I balance build costs, I simply do that as if the maintenance mechanic doesn't exists - it makes no sense to me to factor in something that basically renders balancing useless.
Here the non-stacking aspect makes all the difference. The different shields are not at all interchangeable; a shield with capacity 2X is worth more than twice the worth of a shield with capacity X (imho). I don't think they need to be both more powerful and cheaper, or even the same, on a point basis.
Again, you're right, but there are several things to consider:

Research costs for the shield techs are very high, so you should get much in return. I agree, it's probably not necessary to make the more advanced shield parts more powerful and more cost effective, but they shouldn't be significantly less cost effective, otherwise the gains by having a more powerful part are countered by high build costs to an extend that might make them not worth the high research costs.

Especially when factoring in what you pointed out earlier in this discussion: The value of a shield is primarily determined by the strength of the weapon it's going to be up against. Against less powerful weapons the deflector shield is probably vastly more valuable than the defense grid, but against more powerful weapons (which are expected to be around once you get to the more powerful shields) it's a different story. The deflector shield will be of course still be far more valuable, but not by the same factor.

Another thing is, if we're going to apply the concept that shield parts should get more powerful, but not more cost effective, we need to apply that consistently. We can lower the cost for the defense grid, keep that of the deflector shield, but then we still need to adjust the plasma and blackshield to achieve the same for them.

Finally, the question is how much effort we want to put into fine-tuning the build costs for shields anyway. The main problem are the costs of the shields compared to that of the rest of the ship, where the hull plays a major part. However, the hulls are due for a major revision, so it's probably better to get that done first and then get back to the shields, otherwise we might end up with much wasted effort ;)

Nevertheless we can still make some quick adjustments to the shield part costs. I'll post some suggestions in the Reworking weapon/armor/shield stats thread.

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Dilvish
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#14 Post by Dilvish »

Ragwortshire wrote:As for the theories, apologies for the following rather useless criticism: I think removing a helpful user interface feature because the gameplay it relies on is planned for removal at some unknown point in the future is putting the cart before the horse.
The removal of Theories is not something planned for removal at some unknown point in the future; the process has already begun and and in fact is closing in on completion, it seems to me.
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Ragwortshire
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Re: 5997 Feedback: Ship Designs, Tech Tree Display and Hotke

#15 Post by Ragwortshire »

Dilvish wrote:
Ragwortshire wrote:As for the theories, apologies for the following rather useless criticism: I think removing a helpful user interface feature because the gameplay it relies on is planned for removal at some unknown point in the future is putting the cart before the horse.
The removal of Theories is not something planned for removal at some unknown point in the future; the process has already begun and and in fact is closing in on completion, it seems to me.
Okay. Apologies; this wasn't at all clear from me reading the forums. In fact, from a search I got the impression that a small number of theories might be retained indefinitely.
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