Ship Design: Stars! vs Moo vs SEIV

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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Impaler
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Ship Design: Stars! vs Moo vs SEIV

#1 Post by Impaler »

I wanted to do some Brainstorming on the overall "putting of stuff into the hull" that will be done in ship designing, ther other ship design thread mostly adresses the nature of refinment to that stuff. Depending on ones view on Moo style miniturization some of the following senarios may be un-usable.


1 Stars! - In Stars the Hull has Slots which hold X number of Components of a particular type. Their are Weapon slots, Shield Slots, Armor Slots, Mechanical Slots, Engine Slots, Sensor Slots, Electrical Slots, General Slots and a few other slots I may be forgeting. The key points are that each Slot must have Identical Components in it, you couldnt mix Missles and Lasers in a single weapon slot. Secondly you could have any number of thes identical components in thats slot as long as your under the Cap, esentialy its a component Stack. Larger Hulls had both a greater number of slots and a higher cap on thouse slots. Components have a Mass quantity which is used only to compute a total mass for the whole ship and thus determine how "big" the ships is.

2 Moo - In Moo compoponents are of different sizes and these sizes are subject to change through the course of the game by miniturization. The Components in a ship are listed spreedsheet fashion and various modifiers can be attatched to them to change their properties, this is also how directional facings of weapons are selected.

3 SEIV - In Space Empires each component has a small Graphic picture you can drag and drop into the a grid for the ship. The Grid itself is unlimited and the # of components is limited by keeping the total Mass of the Components below the Hulls limit. Esentialy Mass in this system is equivilent to Space in the Moo system but without Miniturization. Space Empires alows upgrade/refinment to its components as you would expect the Mass remains the same and the component simply produces more "effect" cost tends to incresse. Hull types have a number of arbitrary restrictions to give them flavor, example a "Freigter" Hull is cheaper per unit of Mass alowed then most other ships but half the ship must be full of Cargo Blocks and it cant hold as many engines.


What are peoples feelings on what are the best elements and goals for the overall ship design process, how visual should it be? How complex? How are modifiers attached to things? How is Armor aplied to the ships? Dose the ship take damage from differnt directions differntly or is it all the same? Do weapons have firing arcs? Do Hulls put restrictions on what you can place in them?
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#2 Post by Ranos »

The only Space Strategy games I've played were the MOO series, so I don't know what the benefits of the ways the other two games did ship design. Due to this, I am in favor of doing it the MOO way, with some changes.

First, The hull you choose has internal sapce. Armor does not take up space since it is on the outside. Maybe there could be something that takes up space inside to install more mounting brackets so you could put on more armor. That would of course reduce the ammount of space you have.

I would like to see us be able to put more shields on a ship. In MOO, you just select the shield level and in MOO3 the generator size, and thats it. I would like to see FO put more generators in making the shields stronger.

Something that occurred to me is a combination of two of the systems. The reason for this has a basis in reality but is only a suggestion. I'm not saying we should do this because it would be this way in real life, it's just a thought.

Combine the MOO and Stars! systems. Using the MOO system, there would be internal systems, engines, shield power plants, fighter bays, missile bays, etc. Using the Stars system, there would be external slots for mounting weapons, shield porjectors/generators and missile tubes.

The reason for this is that in real life, not all weapons could fire in all directions. A weapon that was mounted on the port side of a ship (this of course depends on the design of the ship, but lets say its a cube) could fire in a 360 degree circle rotating forward, up, backwards and down, and a 180 degree arc pointing to port. I don't think I need to go into more details about that. I don't know how hard that would be to program into the game, but I think it would add some flavor to the game.

If my idea is voted against, then I would say just stick with the MOO system of doing it. It keeps it simple and understandable.

The SEIV way seems complicated with having to drag and drop everything.

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#3 Post by utilae »

I like Moo2, cause it is simple, and fast. I have not played the others, but I think the fastest to design would be the best.

Though a few little graphics, ie to make things more graphically appealing would be nice.

Maybe we could expand on the Moo2 system, make it better.

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#4 Post by noelte »

utilae wrote:I like Moo2, cause it is simple, and fast. I have not played the others, but I think the fastest to design would be the best.
I played them all. I liked the way moo2 is doing things best. Here you have the greatest degree of freedom and it is simple.
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#5 Post by Daveybaby »

I've said this before, but i think its pointless to make a decision on how detailed you want ship design to be until a *firm* decision has been made on the scale of space combat (for all i know it has been made, but if it has i havent seen much evidence because everyone on the board still seems to have different opinions).

i.e.

If we are typically talking control of a handful of individual ships, then make them incredibly detailed, with internal systems, individual shield facings, power generators, crew count etc etc. i.e. something like 'starfleet command'.

If we are dealing with hundreds of ships at a task force level, then all we are interested in is the number of weapons in the ship, its speed and its hitpoints/shields, i.e. more like the typical Moo level of design.

And for numbers of, say, a few dozen ships, we would want something somewhere between the two.


The worst thing that could possibly happen to space combat would be if the level of control was driven by the ship design process. Completely the wrong way around.
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#6 Post by haravikk »

I liked the MOO2 system best as well as it was nice and simple. The only thing I missed in MOO2 was some kind of broadside weapon, ie a weapon which can fire only to the sides of the ship.

In this vein it would be cool if different ship hulls had different 'bonuses' for certain weapon arcs. For example, some races would have long, thin ships which would be able to fit more broadside weapons (so they take up less mass) than a race who's ships are more square, but can fit more front weapons.

If we kept ships roughly the same size/shape then this could be related to armour and shield choices. For example, if you choose to put reinforced shields to the front of your ship then front-mounted weapons will take up more space (less of them), while broadside weapons would remain light.
This allows you some interesting design decisions. For example, you could put a lot of weapons on the sides of your ships, and heavily reinforce the front so they can head straight for the enemy without suffering much damage and firing a few forward or spinal mounted weapons along the way, then strafe past with a devasting broadside salvo.

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#7 Post by Ranos »

Daveybaby wrote:I've said this before, but i think its pointless to make a decision on how detailed you want ship design to be until a *firm* decision has been made on the scale of space combat (for all i know it has been made, but if it has i havent seen much evidence because everyone on the board still seems to have different opinions).

i.e.

If we are typically talking control of a handful of individual ships, then make them incredibly detailed, with internal systems, individual shield facings, power generators, crew count etc etc. i.e. something like 'starfleet command'.

If we are dealing with hundreds of ships at a task force level, then all we are interested in is the number of weapons in the ship, its speed and its hitpoints/shields, i.e. more like the typical Moo level of design.

And for numbers of, say, a few dozen ships, we would want something somewhere between the two.


The worst thing that could possibly happen to space combat would be if the level of control was driven by the ship design process. Completely the wrong way around.
Why? Why does combat have to dictate the way ships are built? I would love it if there were hundreds of ships in a battle that could only fire there weapons in directions dictated by their location on the ship. That is of course my opinion and it may be difficult to program but I don't see how it would be more difficult to program for 100s of ships per battle has opposed to a handful of ships. The main purpose of this post was how ship designing should be done. I went and elaborated a little more on my opinion of it.

How do you think ship designing should be done Daveybaby, MOO style, Stars style or SEIV style? I think Impaler was talking about the screen setup and how you put things on the ship, not how the ship worked in combat, that was my addition.
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#8 Post by utilae »

Daveybaby wrote: If we are typically talking control of a handful of individual ships, then make them incredibly detailed, with internal systems, individual shield facings, power generators, crew count etc etc. i.e. something like 'starfleet command'.

If we are dealing with hundreds of ships at a task force level, then all we are interested in is the number of weapons in the ship, its speed and its hitpoints/shields, i.e. more like the typical Moo level of design.
Even if we control ships at the taskforce level, I see no reason why we can't have the level of detail that you would have if controlling individual ships. If we had weapon firing arcs for example, all ships in the taskforce would fire if there weapon arcs reached the target, while those who were not in range would not fire. Also damage taken to a ship in a taskforce could still have the detail of internal systems and stuff. The player just wouldn't have very high control over such things, but may be able to see the total internal systems for a task force.
haravikk wrote: If we kept ships roughly the same size/shape then this could be related to armour and shield choices. For example, if you choose to put reinforced shields to the front of your ship then front-mounted weapons will take up more space (less of them), while broadside weapons would remain light.
This allows you some interesting design decisions. For example, you could put a lot of weapons on the sides of your ships, and heavily reinforce the front so they can head straight for the enemy without suffering much damage and firing a few forward or spinal mounted weapons along the way, then strafe past with a devasting broadside salvo.
And we could have cool area effect weapons. Yes, we should have weapons that shoot only certain directions.

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#9 Post by Daveybaby »

Ranos wrote:Why? Why does combat have to dictate the way ships are built?
Because if youre going to have 2000 ships in a battle, its wasted effort to simulate the damage to each weapon on each ship, it just becomes irrelevant.

Conversely, if youre controlling 3 ships, you will want more detail than just a single 'health' meter.

The risk is that we come up with an inordinately complex, or overly simple ship design philosophy, and because of that it drives the combat to a certain scale so that the design effort isnt wasted - which is the WRONG way to go about things.
How do you think ship designing should be done Daveybaby, MOO style, Stars style or SEIV style? I think Impaler was talking about the screen setup and how you put things on the ship, not how the ship worked in combat, that was my addition.
You seem to have failed to grasp the point i was making. There is no point in picking a ship design philosophy until we know how combat will work. i.e. until we know how much detail we will need to put into it.


Utilae wrote:Even if we control ships at the taskforce level, I see no reason why we can't have the level of detail that you would have if controlling individual ships.
At which point youve achieved 2 things:
(1) Wasted your time implementing a detailed model which will have no significant effect on the outcome of a battle
(2) Confused, frustrated and annoyed the player, who cannot figure out why (say) changing the facings of his missile racks doesnt seem to make any difference to the outcome of battles involving 2000 ships.
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god point

#10 Post by Manilla Moxy »

Daveybaby has a point - if we have battles of over 2000 ships, the fight will not be of who has the most cleverly designed ships, but who fires first. Because a lot of that fire will be concentrated on mny ships, making them die.

If we have battles of only 5 ships, then the fight gets interesting because it takes a lot to kill a ship. So every little detail counts.

It all comes down to hitpoints. Do I have 1000 hp's spread through 500 ships (at 2 hitpoints each) or 5 ships at 200 hitpoints each.

For the 2 hitpoints, I don't care much how I design where I put the engines, the specials, the arcs, because all that matters is who fires first.

For the 200 hitpoints, I care a lot about how I design, because even making the wrong turn and exposing my opened shield has bad results.

then there's something in between,
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#11 Post by MisterMerf »

A brief thought on ship design, first. I was an avid player of the Mechwarrior games for awhile. By far my favorite part of the game was designing mechs. When it comes to FO, that level of detail and the need for careful and sometimes time-consuming balance seems like a questionable idea. For a game in which you're likely to go through more than 30 ship designs in a game, painstaking detail in the design process seems very impractical. Especially if 30 was, as I intended, a conservative estimate.

Of course, if a single multiplayer game is going to be a week-long endeavor anyway...
Daveybaby wrote:At which point youve achieved 2 things:
(1) Wasted your time implementing a detailed model which will have no significant effect on the outcome of a battle
(2) Confused, frustrated and annoyed the player, who cannot figure out why (say) changing the facings of his missile racks doesnt seem to make any difference to the outcome of battles involving 2000 ships.
I think we're straying a bit from the pure ship design standpoint. Whether the weapons have facings or not is a detail at this point.
It seems that most of us agree that the Moo-style is the most flexible and easiest at this point (I agree). Beyond that, we have to decide how we want to refine it.

I agree with Daveybaby in that refining the Moo style will have to evolve along with our expectations of fleet engagement.

Manilla Moxy: Daveybaby appeared to be coming at this question more from the CPU processing perspective. To be honest, even if engagements DO have 2000 ships, it can still be designed to give ships a reasonable average lifespan (by making focused fire not all that focused or giving shields interesting properties or whatever).

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Re: god point

#12 Post by utilae »

Daveybaby wrote: Because if youre going to have 2000 ships in a battle, its wasted effort to simulate the damage to each weapon on each ship, it just becomes irrelevant.
I see no reason why we cant do this. It is very likely that we will show a laser beam be drawn from one ship to another, so why not calculate damage on the target ship at the same time.

Really, the whole controlling of ships at the taskforce level is cosmetic, it is only an appearance, hiding what is really going on. Just because control is simplified by way of taskforces doesn't mean that the mechanics are simplified.
Daveybaby wrote: Conversely, if youre controlling 3 ships, you will want more detail than just a single 'health' meter.
Think of it this way:
TotalTaskForceHealth=Sum(allShipsInTaskForce)
Daveybaby wrote: You seem to have failed to grasp the point i was making. There is no point in picking a ship design philosophy until we know how combat will work. i.e. until we know how much detail we will need to put into it.
How do we know how combat will work without knowing what our ships are like? Plus we can look at what is going on in brainstorming, see the general trend of things and never set anything in stone.
Daveybaby wrote: At which point youve achieved 2 things:
(1) Wasted your time implementing a detailed model which will have no significant effect on the outcome of a battle
(2) Confused, frustrated and annoyed the player, who cannot figure out why (say) changing the facings of his missile racks doesnt seem to make any difference to the outcome of battles involving 2000 ships.
On the higher level, if one taskforce attacked the side of another taskforce (which has zero shields on the sides) all the ships in the target taskforce are gonna take heavy damage then if they were attacked from the front. See, it would still take into account something as detailed as shield facings. All we are doing with taskforces is simplifying control of the ships, and not necesarily the details.

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#13 Post by Ranos »

Daveybaby wrote:Because if youre going to have 2000 ships in a battle, its wasted effort to simulate the damage to each weapon on each ship, it just becomes irrelevant.
I never, nor did anyone else that I can see, ever mention anything other than firing arcs being a detail. That is something that would not be irrelevant to combat with 2000 ships. In fact, it would add more of a tactical challenge to combat.
You seem to have failed to grasp the point i was making. There is no point in picking a ship design philosophy until we know how combat will work. i.e. until we know how much detail we will need to put into it.
Space combat and the way ships are designed go hand in hand. They must be done together. They have to show up together in the same version. Therefore, it doesn't really matter which one comes first.

Until you made your post, nobody but me had said anything about specifics on ships. The point of this thread was and is to come up with a general layout of how ship designing will be done. Do we select weapons from a menu and then select the specifics of the weapon (the mount, long range, armor piercing, continuous fire and whatever other mods and details there will be) in a window that is brought up or do we click and drag? There weren't any details of how weapons would work or how damage would be done in battle.

The having to find room for internal stuff was meant, on my part, to make ship building a little more challenging and make you think about how everything will fit instead of just slopping it together and calling it good. That is something I would have fun with. Do I think everyone would have fun with it? No, but this is about brainstorming and coming up with new ideas.
Daveybaby wrote:At which point youve achieved 2 things:
(1) Wasted your time implementing a detailed model which will have no significant effect on the outcome of a battle
(2) Confused, frustrated and annoyed the player, who cannot figure out why (say) changing the facings of his missile racks doesnt seem to make any difference to the outcome of battles involving 2000 ships.
I don't want individual weapon damage. That would be far to complicated and deatailed. Having different shield strengths for different sides of the ship would make things interesting and be more tactically challenging, but it isn't all that necessary. Same with firing arcs.

To top off all of the above, just because we come up with a detailed ship design model, doesn't mean it can't be scaled down if the space combat doesn't require it. This is all about ideas, not final solutions and last minute preparations. If you don't think this thread is a good idea, then don't post, but don't interefer with the rest of us trying to come up with some good ideas.
Manilla Moxy wrote:Daveybaby has a point - if we have battles of over 2000 ships, the fight will not be of who has the most cleverly designed ships, but who fires first. Because a lot of that fire will be concentrated on mny ships, making them die.
It does not depend on who fires first. Have you played MOO3? Although it isn't the greatest example, it's the only one I know. In MOO3, it doesn't matter who fires first, it matters who desinged their ships better and who is better at the tactics of space combat. Even MOO2 mattered on how well you placed weapons. Firing first means nothing other than you got the first hit.
utilae wrote:Think of it this way:
TotalTaskForceHealth=Sum(allShipsInTaskForce)
I don't think this is a good way to do it. Each ship should have its own shield, external and internal hit points. Lumping all ships in a TF into one hitpoint grouping would take the purpose out of TFs and instead of having 20 TFs to a side, there should just be 20 ships to a side.

The purpose of a TF is first and foremost control. It makes control much easier. I posted somewhere else that I would like it if ships would move independantls but were ordered at the TF level. This would make for impressive battles (think DS9 and the battles they had). But this isn't the purpose of this thread and as we argue with Daveybaby more, we stray further from the topic.

Now, lets quit discussing whether this thread is a good idea or not, and start discussing the topic of this thread!
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#14 Post by Impaler »

Ok atempting to redirect this thread back to its original purpose.

A tenative plan that combines a bit of each of the 3 games.

First off the Player Designs a "template" which is like that in Stars!. The player is designing this template with generic stacks of various size. For example I could put in a "Mechaincal" stack of size 6 in the Design. The more restrictive the stack the cheaper it is to put in, the more Generic the more expensive.

When Weapon stacks go into the ship the player needs to designate the Firing Arc (if we have this feature) and the size of the device. So if the player places a "small" size Forward Arc Weapon slot X 3 then this space can hold up to 3 small weapons. 3 is the "hight" of the stack. This will remove the consept of "weapon size mods" such as "mini-mount" or "Super Heavy Spinal Mount". These features will now be IN the template itself and when ever weapons are placed in that slot they automaticaly take on thouse features.

The total Volume of Stack Space in the Template determines what Size class it fits into, say 100-119 = Destroyer, 150-250 = Battleship ect. Their might also be limits on how many and how tall each stack can be. These could be based on Ship Hull discoveries, say for example Discovering Destroyer alows you to make a template with up to 12 stacks, max stack size of 4 ect ect. The template can also holds all ship wide Modifers such as "Super Reinforced Chassie" (give double Structure points) and determines costs for Armoring the ships, total struture points, and other high level features.

The Template esentialy becomes the Skeleton onto-which the player can put the devices they discover in a mannor much like that in Stars! (but with the additonal weapon Modifer options which Stars! and SEIV lack). The goal would be to make Template designing very rare, likly their is a high cost assosiated with making a new template or it carries an upkeep cost. The player likley has only 2-3 Templates for Each Hull size they have access too so around 10 in the early game to 20-30 or so Templates total in the mid and late game. Ships of one template cant be upgrade to another template, they can change only to ships based on a similar template.


The second half of the Dessign process is to put stuff into that Template to create a finished ship design. This works just like Stars with Dragging and Dropping stuff into the Stacks to fill them up. Note that a Stack can only hold one TYPE of item so if you wish to have more then one type of something you need more then one stack that can hold it. We also have the option of Modifers being attached to various devices (especialy weapons but likly all devices have some modifiers they can use along with a few "universal" modifiers). These are attached as small trangular corners overlapping the edge of the Decives picture Box. Their would be a maximum of 3 Modifiers on any single stack with one in each corner accept the lower right corners which is reserved for displaying the Devices refinment level. The Modifiers can be draged and droped from their own list in much the same way as devices.

The ships Mass is determined by adding up the Templates Mass + Mass of Devices on the ship + All armor Mass. The Mass is used in some way to determine the ships speed and acceleration. My preference is that Mass/Cumulative Engine Values = Acceleration/deacceleration. Top Speed comes from another Device called the "Deflector". Mass/Cumulative Deflector Value = Top Speed. This would greatly incresse tactical variety as you can now make any combination of Speed/Acceleration you want.


Ship Damage - This stack based aproatch would make applying damage directly to components more viable, with each Hit being done to one of only a dozen or so stacks and each stack having some health value the number of computations needing to performed and stored for each ships is relativly small. It also means that sub-system targeting becomes possible in battle which would simply be a means of preferentialy hitting a special kind of stack like the Engine or Sensor Stack for example.
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#15 Post by Sky Keeper »

Stars! approach to my mind is somewhat limiting. As it tries to have required hull types for every general strategy you choose (stealth, long range, close range, chaff...) it had only few competitive solutions to ship designs. Stars! is more of a strategy game (chess-like), with a limiting universe.

I treat Moo as a space opera story telling game with strategy comming in second. That's why I vote for less restricting model: model of Moo and Moo2.

But some "flavour" things are welcommed such as:
1) external armor that only cost, but don't take space
2) specialized space - a space that can be used for a system of specific type only(if that system takes more space - the extra space is allocated from "general" space) (a Stars! inspired addition).

PS. SEIV method lies somewhere in between.

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