I ment established as in "said in this thread". I would suspect most of these points have majority support but that as we all know irrelivent so lets not go into that discussion.First, none of these things has been established as the way that everyone or the majority of people want to see them work. If that isn't what you meant by your statement, then sorry for the misunderstanding.
I see you favor a very "nitch" oriented strategy which is traditionaly whats used in most games because its more exiting and strategicaly interesting for the player. Each ship hase a very specific purpose and will excell at it and often suck at everything else. A good comander deploys his forces to take advantage of his strengths and minimize his weaknesses. The oposite aproatch the "Jack of all trades" ship . A vast mono-culture of identical and generic ships simply crushes the oponent with numbers.also don't want new designs to have to be researched. This would bog down the research process and take focus away from the actual techs and thier refinements. This would only force the players who want to make lots of designs to have to choose between the new tech and the new ship.
It also makes having different purpose ships more difficult. Some people like to design ships that incorporate everything on that one ship. I like mine to be closer to what realistic would be, not because it's realistic but because it makes for better strategy for me. I want to have my main warships with the big guns, missile racks and/or fighters; have them escorted by ships with some smallr guns and lots of pd and have a few recon vessels to find the enemy.
By having to research each new design, you totally through this type of strategy out the window.
A traditional RTS game like StarCraft has a set number of designs and they all work together in a nice rock/paper/scisors kind of way. But when we alow player design and unlimited numbers of designs we have a problem. You see the "nitch" mentality when well exexuted is inherently superior to the jack of all traders aproatch. If the nitch comander has just one design able to decsivly defeat his oponents ships he will be victories even if all his other designs fail. The proposed mechanisms are aiming at correting this imbalance by making you pay for large numbers of designs. This will bring balance to the game and prevent arms-races of design inwhich players create and field huge numbers of designs to gain an advantage.
Its one of my overarching design philosophies that game mechanics should avoid any situation ware a player can gain a competitive advantage by repeating some tedius actiitvity a mind-numbing number of times. Adding a cost in game terms rather then simply a cost in time and patience is the best way to fix this. It will not make a large design library impossible by any means it simply balances out the advantage of doing so.
No one has proposed that their be any limits on the numbers of individual ships of a particualar design that you can have at any one time. Neither is the number of designs ever given a hard cap as in Moo1, we have been disussing soft caps, marginal cost mechanisms and the like. I get the impression your simply making a statement that you dont want us to use a design mechanism that so far no one has even mentioned You dont realy think any of us would be so stupid to hard cap the number of ships a player could own at any one time? Also I dont understand what your point on 1$ maintance means. Dave Babby was talking about the total Maintace budget for your whole fleet being multiplied when you have a lot of designs not when you have a large number of ships. If anything I would expect their to be economies of scale so the 100th ship cost less to maintaine then the first.The number of ships of each design should be limited in no way either and definately not if the number of designs is limited. This would force each empire to only have, at most, a few dozen ships at any one time. each of those by themselves isn't too bad because it still alows for lots of ships, but combining the two together would knock the number way down.
If the first ship costs $1 in maintainance, then the 100th ship should also cost only $1.
You misunderstood me, the player can make ships cheaper by Research AND/OR building them. Building a ship generates Reasearch points towards the next level of refinment automaticaly so effect is identical to atma's original proposal with an additional option for how to trigger it. For exapmple lets use your numbers.This isn't prototyping since the player would have to choose to refine the desing to decrease the cost. The best way, imo, is atma's idea of making each additional ship of a certain class cost less than the one before it, with a cap on that so the cost to build a ship doesn't get ridiculously low. This best way to implemented this is to have a starting percentage that the cost is reduced by. Then that number gts smaller and smaller until the reduction is zero.
Level 1 Refinment - 1000 cost
Level 2 Refinment - 990 cost
Level 3 Refinment - 981 cost
Level 4 Refinment - 972 cost
Getting 1 level for each ship you build would be unfair to realy large and expensive ships so I think it would be better to add RP based on the ships cost so small ships dont get cheaper super fast. You can reserch the refinments as traditional technologies. Both inputs can raise the refinment level simultaniusly.