I'll be honest, not enough. (I've been trying to find out more details here (logs, whatnot) to come at it from a numbers angle - but no luck)Geoff the Medio wrote:I'm wondering about increasing the cost of ships, so that it's not possible to build 50 or 100 at a time of not-completely-outdated ships. It sounds you consider the current increase in cost to be well-matched with the increase in power of more advanced ships, though, so I'm worried that making higher-tech ships more expensive will make them useless and cause you to want to build only lower-tech ships in larger numbers. Have you played around with fewer-higher-tech vs. more-lower-tech enough to have a sense of how much more useful higher tech is, other than that it's fewer individual ships to manipulate in the UI?yandonman wrote:Do I make 1 bleeding edge ship or 20 of the still viable last turn's model?
I think combat works something like this, just based on watching the outcome of battles:
- For each turn, every ship in a fleet gets to "fire" once.
- Fleets alternate within the turn, one ship at a time.
- Each ship fires by randomly targeting a ship in the other fleet, unloading its entire offensive power.
- Shields then hull are damaged by simply subtracting their health by the offensive power fired at them (I can see this having more nuance in the future, different weapons vs different armor or shield types, etc).
It *feels* like:
If (Count of Ships in Fleet 1 / Count of Ships in Fleet 2) > (Average individual ship in Fleet 2's hull/shields / Average individual ship in Fleet 1's offensive power), then Fleet 1 wins.
For example:
Solar D5 (my big ship)
O: 700
D: 375 + 135 = 510
Mark VIII Bs (SuperTesters favorite ship)
O: 24
D: 12 + 15 = 27
By my calculations, 25+ Mark VIII Bs would kill my Solar D5. And that kinda feels like what I was running into.
So (to answer one of your original questions), if I was put in a situation where I needed the most effective fleet in 10 turns, and I had this set of ship options
Asteroid (Hv) D5(C) - 220 PP / 4 turns
O: 200 H: 180 S: 45
Quantum D5(C) - 267 PP / 10 turns
O: 250 H: 200 S: 45
Solar D5(C) - 756 PP / 20 turns
O: 700 H: 370 S: 135
I think I would mass product the Asteroid (Hv) D5(C)s.
One of the big surprises for me was how much turn-time mattered in ship production relative to going new tech or staying with current tech - especially in late game where I have 2.4+K PP per turn. I found it less easy to spend enough per turn . For example, I found that I could put more hull on the board faster if I stayed lower tech. Heavy Asteroid hulls had a 4 turn cost, Quantums had a 10 turn cost, and Solars have a 20 turn cost.
Currently the cost of a ship comes from its weapons. Hull (armor) is probably too cheep for its usefulness.
I found it very micro-management intensive to have a constant production of high tech ships. I found I instead did huge batches, for simplicity sake. Queue up 50 Solar ships (my max high tech ship), wait 20 turns, gather 50 Solar ships. Then queue up another 20, 30 or 50 more. Come back in 20 turns. Production felt very - jerky and sporadic.
I also notice that I look for slot count/number over any other variable when selecting a hull, and then ease of knowing what I can build at a particular location. Ship's that require black holes are very easy to remember where to build: they have a black hole icon on the main map and the system name is underlined (gotta remember to build to appropriate stuff, but that's easy).
Ships that require asteroids, slightly less easy, but click on an underlined system, see that it has an asteroid belt, and remember that you put all the stuff there and you're good to go.
Ships that require anything else (geo-integration, orbital-incubators, etc) really frustrate me as I click on my planet that has the Shipyard and go looking for ships to build, only to find that it's not available. Come to find out I didn't build that one facility needed for that ship here, so I can't build that ship. So now, I tend to build all shipyard extensions at backyard shipyards (front lines only get orbital dry dock for repair), just so I don't have to go hunting for my one system that's underlined and has that one building that supports the type of hull I need. An improvement here would be nice.