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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Zpock
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#76 Post by Zpock »

Sounds good impaler. Why not say all engines are reactionless to excuse top speed etc in space? Hydrogen particles in space slowing down the spaceships is pretty far stretched semi-realistic fluff. Better have some completely unrealistic but believable (for immersion!) fluff.

If maneuvering is used for how much your ship can turn and actually maneuver in combat (possibly avoiding hits by actually dodging the shot), the small-ships-hard-to-hit factor could be something else. Like actual size directly. So small ships are always harder to hit just becouse they are small.

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Prokonsul Piotrus
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#77 Post by Prokonsul Piotrus »

As for fluff explanation, I like the honorverse one(s). Ships can reach any speed, but inertial compens (that reduce the g impact on crew) can only take so much before they fail - so you need betet ic tech to go faster (and avoid turning your crew into jelly). Second, all space is filled with some particles (including hydrogen, which is actually the most common stuff in the universe, setting dark matter speculation aside), and going fast means you are having problems spotting the bigger chunks...so some deflectors (in honorverse called particle shielding) is required as well. Thus internal compensators limit the top acceleration of the ship, and particle shielding limit their top (relative) speed.

Fluff aside, some other comments. First, pictures: no matter how many and how pretty designs we use, sb will be unhappy. While I like the idea of assignign pics to mass range (say, pic #5 to all ships mass 50-60, or perhaps several pics to chose from per mass range/class - like in Stars), I certainly hope that we will go with SE4 'mod all' solution, and allow players to create pics of their own (thus making THEM to the job for US :D).

Second, for size tech ship - I agree it should be limited by spaceyard efficiency (and perhaps some other techs like engine tech which can only move ship thiiiis big). Still, a player should be able to build giant forts (especially) and deathstars if he wishes from the starts. Stupid, sure, but setting arbitary restrictions on size (you need to invent bigger hull...yeah, I am sure you can't imagine anything bigger then this...wow, let's invent a 'cruiser') is no better.

Third. I find it hard to believe refiting spaceships would be easier then ships of today. Of course, given dedicated technologies (like 'modular design tech allowing more efficient refits'), would help, but I don't see why refiting a space BB into a carrier would be any easier then today.
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Ranos
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#78 Post by Ranos »

Zpock wrote:Don't see much point in that system Ranos. Why would the player want to do anything but set his hulls as big as he can? Doing that every time he gets a new construction tech, meaning a lot of pointless clicking. Only reason I could see is sacrificing some space so that the hull gets an innate bonus to maneuverability or similar. But then, the player can just use the extra space to put in a maneuvering jet and get the same effect, so why include another game complicating way to do what you can alredy do? If the moos/space empires fill bag designing is used I would make it something like:
I thought I put a part in there about just having preset sizes for each ship size. I must have forgotten to put that in.
Zpock wrote:Option1: Like Moo1, you have small/medium/large/huge hull size and they get larger as you get more tech.
This option is the best but with more sizes.
Zpock wrote: Try not to think how it should be done from a realism/make sense point of view. Think how it should effect gameplay. How does refiting to a new armor give a -25% penalty enhance the gameplay, make it more interesting and fun? How do you want refiting to be used? To let the player make a few ships in the beginning of the game and then let him upgrade them again and again as he increases in tech? Let him change the composition of his fleet, so one turn he has only missile ships but the next carriers? How does that effect the countering system, will it be cost effective to convert your ships to counter the enemy? Should the player be forced to stick with his designs or let him change them at will considering this? Maybe the refitting should just let the player upgrade his phaser III to phaser IV and not much more? Will the player be forced (to keep up) to upgrade from phaser n to phaser n+1 all the time in a micromanagment heavy system, like in space empires? Is that fun and good for gameplay?
I wasn't, and I don't think Piotrus was either, thinking of it from a realism/makes sense point of view. It was coming from a gameplay POV. Instead of somebody being able to continuously refit a ship, it is limited in some way.

There are a lot of questions in that one paragraph so I'll answer them with single senteences and in order.

Making penalties for refitting also means it is more beneficial to build new ships then to be refitting all of the others. Skip that one since the next is the same. No, players should not be able to continuously refit ships. No, this would make building new ships almost completely pointless. Skip that one since it's irrelevant because of my previous answer. The player should be able to refit maybe once or twice and thats it. Continue from last question, designs should be able to be changed whenever the player wants, but not the ships themselves. Upgrading weapons would be one type that could be done over and over, it's just changing a few parts in an individual system, while installing new weapons, etc. would be installing a brand new system. No, I would prefer either a button to click to upgrade from Mk2 to Mk3 or it be compltely automatic when the tech is developed. And no, that kind of microing would not be fun.

I would prefer limits here but having no limits could be interesting. Its something to be discussed I guess.
discord wrote:zpock: actualy in space, size does not matter all that much, from a enginering point of view....we COULD today, if we spent ALOT of resources on it, build a deathstar like thing.....but by the time we would be done, technology would have far out paced this monstrosity, since it would take decades, if not centuries to build.
We couldn't do it today because we don't havethe technology to make it possible. A moon sized spaceship would take extremely strong metals to keep it together. The ammount of energy it would take to keep the object in orbit would be greater than we could produce and the gravitational effects on the planet would be devistating. Moving it with the propulsion systems we have would take more fuel then the ship could hold.
Zpock wrote:Why is the penalty needed?
Because if a shipyard is designed to hold a certain sized vessel, building something that is bigger than the space available would take a lot of work.
Impaler wrote:Now I was also thinking that their should be a completly seperate Component that is used to determin top speed in combat, call it the "Deflector" perhaps (Fluff explination is that hydrogen gass in space must be deflected away by an electromagnetic field or else the ship will be slowed). The deflector has a "Deflection" value and much like with speed the value is sumed. A ships Maximum speed is equal to its Deflection:Mass Ratio.
Engines have been able to do this just fine in all other games and I think they should be used in FO as well. Just my personal preferance but it also would help keep complexity down. If a player has to install 5000 components on a ship just to make it function properly, it will be far too boring for most people.
Prokonsul Piotrus wrote:Third. I find it hard to believe refiting spaceships would be easier then ships of today. Of course, given dedicated technologies (like 'modular design tech allowing more efficient refits'), would help, but I don't see why refiting a space BB into a carrier would be any easier then today.
I explained it in my last post. Was there something you didn't understand?
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#79 Post by Zpock »

I'm seing a lot of opinions here that are not backed up with arguments or only realism arguments. Here are the realism arguments I found in the last 2 posts, left out the off topic realism discussion on spaceship engineering tough:
I find it hard to believe refiting spaceships would be easier then ships of today. Of course, given dedicated technologies (like 'modular design tech allowing more efficient refits'), would help, but I don't see why refiting a space BB into a carrier would be any easier then today.
Because if a shipyard is designed to hold a certain sized vessel, building something that is bigger than the space available would take a lot of work.
(you need to invent bigger hull...yeah, I am sure you can't imagine anything bigger then this...wow, let's invent a 'cruiser')
This last one is an ironic comment/argument that essentialy says, "people will not invent a space cruiser in the future since they can think of a bigger ship and don't limit themselves to making just cruisers". Sounds like a realism argument to me, doesn't have anything to do with gameplay.

Please, can you try to write not only how you think it should be done, but also WHY? How it makes the game more fun and interesting without adding more then a fair amount of micro. For example, the spaceyard penalty for making ships larger then a "size limit". Why is it necessary? Do you think people will somehow bea ble to abuse for an unfair advantage small shipyards to build stuff that takes 50 turns until it's finished and can be used? What do you think happens if the other player attacks the planet building the huge ship with his ships that he built in only 40 turns? This isn't even an important issue. But why add something redundant?

My 20 questions on refiting ships tough, the point wasn't that I wanted them ansvered in a short sentence each. Maybe I should have made it clear before, but I wanted some deep discussion with arguments on them. If you don't have time to answer them all with arguments included, try taking one at a time or something. I'm not pissed off or anything :) just want to know how you think.

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#80 Post by Ranos »

Zpock wrote:I'm seing a lot of opinions here that are not backed up with arguments or only realism arguments. Here are the realism arguments I found in the last 2 posts, left out the off topic realism discussion on spaceship engineering tough:
I find it hard to believe refiting spaceships would be easier then ships of today. Of course, given dedicated technologies (like 'modular design tech allowing more efficient refits'), would help, but I don't see why refiting a space BB into a carrier would be any easier then today.
Because if a shipyard is designed to hold a certain sized vessel, building something that is bigger than the space available would take a lot of work.
(you need to invent bigger hull...yeah, I am sure you can't imagine anything bigger then this...wow, let's invent a 'cruiser')
This last one is an ironic comment/argument that essentialy says, "people will not invent a space cruiser in the future since they can think of a bigger ship and don't limit themselves to making just cruisers". Sounds like a realism argument to me, doesn't have anything to do with gameplay.
Where are all of your arguements as to why it should happen? Most of the time these things are peoples preferences. These are the things they would find fun.

Sorry for yelling in the following senetence but I want everyone who reads this thread to understand this. IF SOMEBODY REFERS TO A REAL LIFE THING, THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT A REALISM ARGUEMENT. A REALISM ARGUEMENT STARTS WITH OR CONTAINS THE FOLLOWING PHRASE: "WE SHOULD DO IT LIKE THAT BECAUSE THAT IS HOW IT IS DONE IN REAL LIFE." SOMEBODY MAKING A REFERENCE TO A REAL LIFE THING IS ONLY FOR PURPOSES OF REFERENCE AND EXAMPLES. WE LIVE IN A REAL WORLD AND THERE WILL ALWAYS BE EXAMPLES FROM REAL LIFE BECAUSE OF THAT. PLEASE, EVERYONE, SHUT UP WITH THE REALISM ARGUEMENT BS.

Again, I apologise for the yelling but I am sick and tired of people using the "Thats a realism arguement" line for a justification of why someone's comment is irrelevant. This is a futuristic space game which contains 99% fictional material but is based on real life so real life examples will be made.
Zpock wrote:Please, can you try to write not only how you think it should be done, but also WHY? How it makes the game more fun and interesting without adding more then a fair amount of micro. For example, the spaceyard penalty for making ships larger then a "size limit". Why is it necessary? Do you think people will somehow bea ble to abuse for an unfair advantage small shipyards to build stuff that takes 50 turns until it's finished and can be used? What do you think happens if the other player attacks the planet building the huge ship with his ships that he built in only 40 turns? This isn't even an important issue. But why add something redundant?
I hope you would give us the same curtesy. There is no reason why it is necessary because it isn't necessary. It is a preference and I don't think it would be enjoyable for me to be able to build a planet-sized ship at the beginning of the game, whether it takes 10 turns or 10,000 turns. I therefore think that there needs to be limits on it in some way, whether it is limiting the size of th ship or penalizing the player for attempting to build a huge ship. It isn't redundant. There is a limit on how fast you can build ships by make the pp/turn but that is a limit, not a penalty. The penalty would make it take even more work to build this. It is purley to discourage somebody from building a huge ship when they don't have a godd level of tech to do it. Now, you tell me why there shouldn't be penalties in this manner.

I didn't want to elaborate more on your questions in my last post for two reasons, one it was going to be a long post and I didn't want to make it longer and two, I'm at work and don't want to take tons of time writing posts. I'm still at work so I won't do it in this post either, but I'll do it when I get home in a couple of hours.
Last edited by Ranos on Sun Oct 31, 2004 8:08 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Impaler
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#81 Post by Impaler »

I dont think its nessary or fun to limit the number of times a ship can be refited. The number of ships in a players fleet with rise continuosly through the course of the game so new ships will be built from Scratch even if 100% Free and Instant Refiting/Upgrading were alowed. Its a strategic choice for the player to make in the Balance or new construction, refiting and waiting for a better time. Depending on how efficient it is to scrap your ships (% refunded), the level of obselecence of the ship and costs of Refiting make for an interesting balancing game for the player.

Having Penalties associated with Refiting is a viable option, refiting an old ship to new tecnology could produce a ship slightly weaker then an otherwise identical ship (aka same components and configuration) built from scratch. The Penalty could even be cumulative so even without a hard cap their would still be some kind of practicaly limitation. Personaly I wouldn't go for that complex just saying a ship is in or not in "Original Configuration" and apply a bonus/penalty based on that.

Infact this gives me an idea, we already have plans for Refinments to all types of components aka Mark I, Mark II, Mark III. Lets expresse all thouse "inefficiencies of refiting" by giving a -1 to a Refited items Refinment level. Thus the Refinment level can gobble up what would otherwise be a confusing mess of penalties.

Infact why not fold the Slot type Bonuses in as well, a Slot type now acts to give a Bonus +1 Refinmentlevel to a particular class of Components, other types of components are disadvantaged with a -1 to Refinment level. Generic slots have no modifiers aka +0 to all so their more "jack of all trades, master of none" style.

Their could also be a wide variety of other effects which can modify Refinment levels such as Race Picks "Klackons get -1 Refinment to all Engines" ect ect. The possibility of seleraval cumulative negatives along with "level 0" tecnology means that it would be possible to have components with negative refinment levels. Thus the stat tables for components will need to extend into the negative range a bit but this should not be a problem.

In Conclusion: All Bonuses/Penalties to components should be expressed in Refinment level above or below what a player would normaly recive from their Tecnology level.
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Impaler
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#82 Post by Impaler »

As for fluff explanation, I like the honorverse one(s). Ships can reach any speed, but inertial compens (that reduce the g impact on crew) can only take so much before they fail - so you need betet ic tech to go faster (and avoid turning your crew into jelly). Second, all space is filled with some particles (including hydrogen, which is actually the most common stuff in the universe, setting dark matter speculation aside), and going fast means you are having problems spotting the bigger chunks...so some deflectors (in honorverse called particle shielding) is required as well. Thus internal compensators limit the top acceleration of the ship, and particle shielding limit their top (relative) speed
I like that "Dont turn them into Jelly" idea. It got me thinking, wouldn't races that live on High G Planets be able to tolerate higher Acceleration (assuming it in the direction of "up" inside the space ships). So the Grobnolians from the Giant Plant Grob with Gravity level 5 can build ships that have up to 5 acceleration without needing an Inertial Compensator. But the Fralians from the tiny Airless moon of Prax can only tolerate level 2 accerlation without being crushed and they would need a level 3 Compensator to be able to use level 5 Acceleration without harming themselves. This could make High G races a bit more interesting then simply prefering Big planets.

Now if the Max Acceleration is determined by the Engines and Max Safe Accerattion is determined by Compensator + Race Bonus then theirs potential for max accerlation to be greater then safe acceleration. That brings up the idea of potentialy performing "Emergency Crushing Aceleration" inwhich you push the engines to the max and risk killing some of the crew and/or tearing the ship apart. If you also exceed the normal capacity of the Engines you risk blowing them up ala StarTrek.
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Zpock
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#83 Post by Zpock »

Ranos wrote:Where are all of your arguements as to why it should happen? Most of the time these things are peoples preferences. These are the things they would find fun.

[Snip bold caps]

I hope you would give us the same curtesy. There is no reason why it is necessary because it isn't necessary. It is a preference and I don't think it would be enjoyable for me to be able to build a planet-sized ship at the beginning of the game, whether it takes 10 turns or 10,000 turns. I therefore think that there needs to be limits on it in some way, whether it is limiting the size of th ship or penalizing the player for attempting to build a huge ship. It isn't redundant. There is a limit on how fast you can build ships by make the pp/turn but that is a limit, not a penalty. The penalty would make it take even more work to build this.
What opinion did you want my arguments for? I'm not perfect in this but I try to back up my opinions with (gameplay) arguments. Opinions in themselves are worthless, only if backed up by arguments will they be able to become more then your own opinion. You can't discuss anything with just opinions either, that's just banging opinion on opinion and acomplishes nothing. If someone bases his opinion by inspiration from the real world, fine, but he better bring some arguments to why it's good from a gameplay perspective bringing these things in. If he doesn't, that's the same as saying "WE SHOULD DO IT LIKE THAT BECAUSE THAT IS HOW IT IS DONE IN REAL LIFE".
It is purley to discourage somebody from building a huge ship when they don't have a godd level of tech to do it. Now, you tell me why there shouldn't be penalties in this manner.
Oh look, an argument. So first you said there was no argument, you don't care it's just how you want it. Then you did come up with one. Answering your question: "Don't fix what is not broke." Here comes my argument: The penalty removes an interesting strategy, to try and build a really huge ship at the beginning of the game. If the strategy is to have any merit the huge ship must have some advantage over a large number of small ships built in the same time. The strategy also has a major drawback, you are vulnerable to attack for the time you build the thing. So I don't see this strategy as cheesy or abusive in any way whatsoever. Or maybe you just don't like having many possible strategies in the game?

Maybe the strategy is worthless even without the penalty, wich may be the case if the huge ship doesn't have much advantage over many small ships built in equal time so that the risk isn't worth the reward. Why would you want to put in an extra rule just to make the worthless strategy even more worthless? To make the game more complicated just to make it more complicated? You want the programmers to do pointless stuff?

In the third possible case here, building the "death star" IS somehow an overpowered strategy that lets the player win every time, even tough he is vulnerable as hell for 50 turns or more. Then I think there's something very very wrong with the game, wich will not be fixed by that penalty. More like tuning down overpowered huge ships.

Isn't the whole point with the "build as big as you can" idea by piotrus that you can, build as big as you can? If you let the player build as big as he can, but with some pointless penalty, so there's no point doing that, you just complicated the game so that he can, then complicated it even more so he can't. Leaving you were you started but with +2 layers of complexity.

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#84 Post by Ranos »

I have been trying to figure out what I wanted to say and what my opinions on the latest issues are.

Ship Refitting

This could go two ways. You can either refit a ship as many times as you want or you are limited to one or two. By limiting it, you force the player to build new ships on a regular basis. By not limiting it, a player can refit the ships he starts with at the beginning of the game to be usable at the end of the game. Both have good pointsand bad points. I really don't think there are good gameplay reasons why either should be done. I prefer to limit it and I'll tell why later.

Whichever system we go with, there should be some kid of penalty/penalties involved in refitting. This is to put more emphasis on building new ships instead of on refitting the old ones. At the moment, I'm at a loss for a gameplay based reason why this should be done. My main reson for it is that I think it would be completely stupid to have refitting be equal in cost to new ship building. To me it seems to be a balance issue. The game would be unbalanced if the two were equal. Whenever somebody got a new tech and designed a new ship, they would refit the old ones to keep them useful.

When I stop and think about it, to say that everything should have a reason based in gameplay is ridiculous. There is a reason why everything would work in gameplay what matters is the one that people enjoy more. More strategies, less strategies, more complexity, less complexity, more of a challenge, less of a challenge.

While allowing continuous refitting would allow all ships to be usefull for the whole game, limiting refitting would force the player to have to figure out what to do with the obsolete ships. Are they cannon fodder in a big battle, are they scrap to add money or materials into your empire or are they patrols to keep down piracy in the systems you control? Limiting balances the game more by preventing people from wasting loads of pp/time/money refitting their ships all the time while somebody else uses that pp/time/money to build more new ships. Both have their strategic values and it all boils down to preferance.

Puting any penalties on refitting, whether it be simple cost increases or complex systems that effect damage done, HP, speed, etc, gives players more of a reason to build new ships than to constantly refit the old ships. Not having penalties allows people to always refit their ships with now additional cost, making it be smarter to keep your ships upgraded so they are usable in battle.

Shipyards need to be limited in some way. Two ways have been brought up that I can recall. One is pp/turn, which we are already going to use. The other is max ship size. Having a max ship size gives the players limits and forces them to use strategies where ships will generally be the same size. Having no max size allows players to build ships as big as they can dream up which forces players to expect the unexpected when a battle begins. They could be facing a hundred little ships with one weapon on each or they could face a huge behemoth that can destroy a ship with a single shot from a huge superweapon.

By making a max size that increases over time, the start of the game will have players fighting with similar sized ships. As the size increases, so does the diversity of ship sizes. Maybe at some point in the late game, the max ship size will be removed allowing the building of moon or planet sized ships. This allows for changing strategies over the whole game from same vs. same to who knows what it will be. This also boils down to what you prefer. Would you rather have evolving strategies or who knows what strategies we'll have to use?

The topic of this thread is how ship design is done. There is no good way, bad way, right way, wrong way because all of the methods that have been introduced have been used in one manner or another in other games. Each person has things that they liked and disliked about those systems. What seems easy to me, and therefore a good gameplay reason to use it, seems difficult to another person and a reason why it shouldn't be used.
Zpock wrote:Here comes my argument: The penalty removes an interesting strategy, to try and build a really huge ship at the beginning of the game. If the strategy is to have any merit the huge ship must have some advantage over a large number of small ships built in the same time. The strategy also has a major drawback, you are vulnerable to attack for the time you build the thing. So I don't see this strategy as cheesy or abusive in any way whatsoever. Or maybe you just don't like having many possible strategies in the game?
It removes an insane strategy from the early game, building something that big would take 1000 or more turns to build using your single planet's industrial capacity and prevents you from building other things to increase the size of your emepire. The strategy is easily viable late game espacially if we remove size caps at that time. Having the size cap would prevent people from making a stupid mistake at the beginning that would cost them the game.

If that strategy is either overpowered or underpowered, then there are some balance issues. It would be interesting in the late game to allow a huge ship llike the deathstar that has one or more huge weapons on it and the only way it can be destroyed is with a small surgical strike, like the trench run in Star Wars IV. This would make for some interesting strategies but would be unbalancing.

So I ask you this, which do you prefer? That is what it is really about, how many people prefer which system and what the design team thinks would work best.
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MisterMerf
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#85 Post by MisterMerf »

On the topic of ship size caps, I agree with Ranos: Technology should limit the max size for some portion of the game.

I think (but can't back this up) that removing limits from the beginning will result in either an unusable strategy (not practical or terribly useful to build a significantly large ship) in which case the lack of limits doesn't hurt anything

...

or it may result in an overpowered strategy in which other players MUST attack while a significantly large ship is being built (else they will be unable to stop the ship's rampage when it is complete). This side of the coin seems undesirable to me.


If it can be shown that unlimited ship size can be balanced, perhaps by implementing it in v0.4, then I have no objection.

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#86 Post by Impaler »

I think a possible balance for the "Huge Rampageing early game ship" could be that a ship being consturcted in space is actualy Destroyable in space combat. Think of it as the Return of the Jedi incomplete Death Star senario. Rebels attack the ship/construction yard in space in a raid. Any damage done is subtracted from the building bar of the ship and if you destroy it completly you have eliminated a LOT of enemy production points before they could do any damage to you.

Another idea. To builld a ship simply free-floating in space is more expensive then building it inside of a nice cozy enclosed shipyard. Think of it as the cost for all that scafolding ala HomeWorld. Thus you realy have to pay through the nose for that Big Early ship. Building a Shipyard instead and them making lots of smaller ships would be more cost effective.
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discord
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#87 Post by discord »

wich actualy brings us back to my earlier suggestion of shipyards, and making them a central part of the game, by having to invest vast amounts of resources into them(to make them more productive), and therefor making them prime strategical targets.....

first off, this is a reality thing, i personaly happen to like reality based things, cause they actualy make sense.

a shipyard 'dry dock' can only handle that much space being built inside it, for obvious reasons, building things free floating takes alot more effort, represented in higher cost(in time and resources), building things free floating does remove the size limit, but has its drawback....however, you CAN have several docks in a shipyard, wich means you can work on several ships at once...shipyards are more cost effective.

next up, production, should be funneled to shipyards, from other systems aswell...preferably....

all this comes at a cost ofcourse, that being the upkeep of the shipyard(s), wich should be significant.

and as to how to balance things? make hulls/ship designs R&D projects, that makes 'constant refitting' less fun, and limits ship size early game, all using a 'soft limit' wich is almost always better then hard limits.

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#88 Post by Impaler »

Shipyards definatly should be Big and expensive things. Building a ship free floatining is also expensive as hell so I guess we can just roll it all together and make a "Building anything in open space very difficult and expensive" rule. Building the Giant ship is like having a shipyard with Engines, its designed and built in the same way and is basicaly just a Ship that dosen't move and has "Bays" within it that are used for making ships. If you combine both abilities you have your own Howeworld Mothership.
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discord
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#89 Post by discord »

quite true impaler...wich would be real cool...

side note, i would like the possibility of a truly nomadic species/faction/whatever, that can do EVERYTHING inside their ships, research modules, food production, production, money/resource storage, etc.

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#90 Post by Impaler »

Totaly with you on Nomads they would ROCK!!

That idea I had for the Space Pirate Race would be heavily nomad oriented with most setlments being small and located in asteroid belts, planets woundn't be at atractive but their not prevented from using them.
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