Time efficiency? If this is in reference to when I spoke about drawn-out battles then you've mis-understood me Geoff. Time efficiency wasn't the issue, combat efficiency was.Geoff the Medio wrote:By inefficient, I meant cost inefficient. "Inefficient" does not mean slow by default, though it could be if you specified "time inefficient", but this is not, in my mind, the default interpretation / meaning.solrac776 wrote:*cost* efficiency. That's where you lost me. The previous post reads as your promoting small ships that were inefficient in battle.
I disagree with building pre-defined roles into the game (though being able to modify a design after the pre-defined role was selected, is an adequate compromise).utilae wrote: So, I had this idea. Ships can have roles, eg scout, gunship, fighter, repair, suicide, defense, etc.
To have your large scout/small scout scenario, it's un-necessary to have explicit roles. Just build it into the game mechanics. If small ships are innately harder to detect and innately faster than larger ships, then you already have a motivation for building small scouts. If you then have (in the game) more detection/scouting equipment than what could be fitted on to a small ship (which innately carries little) or that are simply just too large to fit on a small ship, then you have a motivation to build a large scout. Then the choice is the player's. They could build either of both types, or neither, or mix-and-match.
It's better to add such "role" mechanics into the game, instead of into the ships. If you want to emphasize scouting, provide equipment/research that promotes scouting. If you want to emphasize the usefulness of larger ships, provide equipment/research that is too large to be fitted on smaller ships. I believe that we can have all the roles we desire, by just providing a set number of ship-sizes and a rich array of components that promote these roles. Then let the player decide the roles of his ships by the components that he puts on them when he designs them.