marhawkman wrote:Well small ships are pretty much target practice for large ships. That severely reduces their usefulness.
You need to give your statement some context... do you mean that in your envisioned system, small ships would be useless, thereby negating any problem with making it strategically effective to make a lot of small ships, or do you mean that, by definition, small ships are ineffective?
The idea is to give people something to research in the way of ship tech. to add just a bit more to combat than just researching better weapons and armor.
How does having three sub-sizes per size accomplish adding more to combat than just researching better weapons and armour (if there isn't already more to combat than that) ?
ewh02b wrote:3 small classes, 3 medium classes, and 3 large classes. And by classes, I mean that the ship has a specific function, something the outer hull is designed specifically to do. [...]
My idea involved designing the entire ship from the ground up. So no preset designs.
If you want to discuss premade ships roles vs. freeform design, please do it on another thread. I don't want to get too sidetracked from the issue of how big a range of ship numbers to have.
utilae wrote:Geoff the Medio wrote:The point of the above discussion about big ratios of effectiveness, and increasing effectiveness per unit cost with ship size, was to make it more effective to use big ships, so nobody would be able to make lots of small ships and compete, meaning everyone would make big ships, meaning everyone would have the same number of ships.
I am completely against this. [...] I don't even know that the problem you are trying to remove is even a problem.
Do you disagree with me, or the idea I referred to there, which was not mine? My own suggestions are
here and
here which strived to have all sizes be useful and necessary for an optimal fleet, in roughly equal numbers, doing different jobs, with each size better suited than the others to some jobs, not just each jobs being best done by the biggest or smallest available size at any given time.
I wrote what I wanted twice, effectively, and it was ignored, and then for some reason my explanation of someone else's suggestion gets multiple quotes objecting...?
skdiw wrote:If you want a roughly equal mixture of different sizes, the sizes must be researched in parallel
Again, please explain what you mean by parallel as I asked in one of those linked posts.
So you'd still want to research the harder-to-get sizes, since you do get a benefit from doing so. That doesn't mean the harder-to-get sizes are better than the easy-to-get ones, though...
this is a contradictory statement.
You seem to not get the distinction between total performance, and performance according to specific criteria. Define the total value T of a ship size as the sum of its relative values according to several different measures. Those measures could be range R, fuel economy F, combat effectiveness C, stealth S, special equipment mounting ability E, travel velocity V, etc. Then, for any given ship size
T = R + F + C + S + E + V
You could argue that only the best one or two measures should count, or that the weighting should change, or that it should be each measure's value squared, etc. but that's beside the point. The point is that there can be several different ship sizes with the same total value T that all have different values in each of the components of T.
Then, you'd want to research the harder-to get sizes in order to get ships that are very good at some of the measures listed above that your current ships aren't as good at. This would give you a tool to make a better ship for a particular purpose than you could have made before, but it doesn't mean that the new size is any better overall than the ones you already had. You do get benefit from having researched the new size beacuse your newly available ship designs are better for a few roles than the ones you could make before, but you still need all the designs based on the older sizes for other roles to go with the new ones to make a good balanced fleet.
moreover, you don't want large to have a niche role. that would severely undermine large ships and research.
You're going to have to explain that one...