Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

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pheldens
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Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#1 Post by pheldens »

or making them more expensive, I think this would improve usefulness of other hulls like the advanced robotic hull
, the sentient robot hull should also come before the giant hull IMO.

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MatGB
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#2 Post by MatGB »

I mentioned a similar idea to this in a different thread, there's currently a big gap in power levels between the battlecruiser sized hulls (Ravenous, Sentient, Nanorobotic) at about 6 - 8 external slots, and the Battleship/Dreadnought sized hulls with 12+ slots.

Plus, the fleet upkeep rules means that building anything other than the biggest and best ships is frequently a bad choice.

What I want to do at some point sooner rather than later, hopefully before the next release, is rebalance the tech tree a fair bit in a large variety of ways, and then look into the overall balance of the hull that we've got in the game, when I last did a major balance pass it was to bring the costs of all of them to be roughly balanced against each other cost/benefit wise, so that two hulls of equalish power had roughly the same overall costs. I'm happy that that's worked out relatively well, but I'm not happy with the balance within the hull lined and at the big picture.

But I first want to introduce more internal slot parts and a variety of damage control and similar options within a ship design as part of the power imbalance is the very limited choices you have when building something.
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pheldens
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#3 Post by pheldens »

another thing you can do is swap the slot layout of the giant hull and the robot sentient hull

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MatGB
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#4 Post by MatGB »

pheldens wrote:another thing you can do is swap the slot layout of the giant hull and the robot sentient hull
Can you be more explicit here, not sure which hulls you mean, or why you'd want to do that.
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pheldens
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#5 Post by pheldens »

'sentient hull' <> 'titanic hull'


in most my games I have jumped from big hull -> robot hull -> titanic hull
none of the other hulls really matter right now (sometimes nanorobotic hull)


I always build custom ships

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MatGB
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#6 Post by MatGB »

Titanic Hull is meant to be one of the biggest ships in the game, which it is.

Sentient Hull is meant to be more subtle and have a completely different strategic use, mostly as a battlecruiser/commerce raider analogue. The Organic line possibly needs a 'big beast' monster ship, but the Sentient is quite good at what it does right now, the vision and stealth bonuses for itself and its fleet is good.

One of the drawbacks of the upkeep system is you tend to not have or want mixed fleets, making flagship abilities less obviously useful, the exception being that the Logistics Facilitator is an obviously powerful support ship for the Titans. I'd like to do something else about that, but I don't know what (and the very Simple fleet upkeep model we're using does have a strong appeal because of its simplicity)
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Sloth
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#7 Post by Sloth »

MatGB wrote:The Organic line possibly needs a 'big beast' monster ship, ...
I have actually collected some ideas for a 'big beast' organic monster ship:
- It's unique (i.e. it can be build only once per empire)
- It growth (structure) for the rest of the game.
- It has an effect like Defense Mines (damaging all enemy ships in the same system each turn).
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pheldens
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#8 Post by pheldens »

this upkeep system is already in effect? since it has never been on my mind as a consideration, you can just steamroll the enemy with raw giant power and some milkcow logistic ships


stealth and speed arent very relevant either they are not of any consideration to me, a giant can be made to fly 140 or so with some engine upgrades



anyway my main point is that it should become available later in the game since its the most powerful ship, only the sunship is more powerful maybe, but those become available at the end only, when the match is already longsince decided

AndrewW
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#9 Post by AndrewW »

pheldens wrote:this upkeep system is already in effect? since it has never been on my mind as a consideration, you can just steamroll the enemy with raw giant power and some milkcow logistic ships


stealth and speed arent very relevant either they are not of any consideration to me, a giant can be made to fly 140 or so with some engine upgrades



anyway my main point is that it should become available later in the game since its the most powerful ship, only the sunship is more powerful maybe, but those become available at the end only, when the match is already longsince decided
Upkeep has been around a long time, just based on the number of ships you have, not the size. Same upkeep amount for say a scout and a titanic hull for example.

Can get a solar hull up to a starlane speed of 300, or 320 if you don't use shields.

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MatGB
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#10 Post by MatGB »

AndrewW wrote:.

Can get a solar hull up to a starlane speed of 300, or 320 if you don't use shields.
And that's why I want to have a lot more internal slot parts, I look at my solar hull designs and it's a very simple choice as there's nothing else to do, and not using the slots is fairly pointless.

One of the ideas put forward is for upkeep to be based on the number of slots actually used, that could be interesting.
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AndrewW
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#11 Post by AndrewW »

MatGB wrote:And that's why I want to have a lot more internal slot parts, I look at my solar hull designs and it's a very simple choice as there's nothing else to do, and not using the slots is fairly pointless.
Well, does make them a little not filling them all up. But I do the same thing, fit a shield in there then go for engine parts.

But agreed, more choices would be good.

mel_o
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#12 Post by mel_o »

One way to deal with the issue of small and large ships having the same "upkeep" could be to change the FLEET_UPKEEP_MULTIPLICATOR to use the total number of slots (or used slots?) in all owned ships rather than just the number of owned ships, so cost goes up by (maybe) 0.2% per slot rather than 1% per ship. Might not be easy to calculate that number in FOCS though, I'm not familiar with it...

Having the cost increase based on the number of used slots could be explained in-universe by needing to maintain more pieces of specialised equipment
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#13 Post by Geoff the Medio »

mel_o wrote:...use the total number of slots (or used slots?) in all owned ships rather than just the number of owned ships, so cost goes up by (maybe) 0.2% per slot rather than 1% per ship. Might not be easy to calculate that number in FOCS though, I'm not familiar with it...
There are SlotsInShipDesign and PartsInShipDesign values available, added specifically to support something like that.

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MatGB
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#14 Post by MatGB »

Yup, and I like the addition of PartsInShipDesign, I plan to mess around with various numbers at some point after we've got Release out of the way to see which I prefer and where it should be set to.
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AndrewW
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Re: Moving giant hulls to later on the timeline

#15 Post by AndrewW »

What about each part adding it's own maintenance percent to the fleet upkeep?

Might be more complicated, but would allow for some parts to have more expensive upkeep, though would probably need to assign a FleetUpkeep value or something to each ship when it is designed to keep track of. Would of course take care of empty slots as well (they wouldn't add to fleet upkeep).

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