Shark7
Posts: 7937
Joined: 7/24/2007
From: The Big Nowhere
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Jorgen_CAB
Regarding ship design there seem to be an over arching tendency to only build very large ships, with a few exceptions they are just better in all respect.
Bigger ships does not need more fuel because they need the same size hyper-drives. This seem to defy all laws of physics, even if hyper-drive in and of itself does that... but that is beside the point. ;)
Also you can build any size ship in a singe shipyard, bigger shipyards should require bigger yards or at least take up several yards to build. In reality a country is severely limited in construction based on the size and capability of their naval yards. Bigger ships also tend to be less cost efficient on maintenance since they have more complex military system that needs constant support on less quantities.
I still think that bigger ships should overall be more powerful, but it should be more expensive to build up the infrastructure to build and maintain them. The game also give very few reason to spread ships out since detection generally is quite easy and it's not harder to detect a large ship than a small one (unless you use cloaking devices, which again is the same no matter the size of the ship).
I'm not looking into making smaller designs more powerful, but rather a reason for building them. Like scouting, reconnaissance, patrolling and stuff like that. It seems to be too much focus on big combat fleets being able to do everything.
Perhaps hyper-speed should be much slower within star-systems. Use the excuse that hyper-space around the gravity-well of a star makes it very slow, that would put more of an emphasis on spreading out smaller ships on patrol duty with faster in-system hyper-drives, while bigger combat ships have fast hyper-drives but slower in-system drives. Or something like it.
I could also see how acceleration and maximum speed could be tied to the size of a vessel. Large ships could theoretically achieve the same acceleration, turn rates and speed as a smaller ship. But, in reality, there are huge physical limitations on larger versus smaller structures and acceleration. This could also be a mechanic in favour of smaller ships.
I still like the game as it is, but things could perhaps always be better, my version might obviously not be to everyone's liking though.
I am a big advocate of a hardpoint system per 'chassis', as well as a more defined role within the fleet.
With a few modifications, the ships could become very much more useful is based on size. You could soft-cap ship size based on construction level as is current, but take it further...each ship class can use a certain % of construction size with the current 230 being the base (IE you always get at least 230 space to work with). For instance:
1. Escort 20% of current ship size or 230, whichever is bigger
2. Frigate 40% or 230.
3. Destroyer 60%.
4. Cruiser 80%.
5 Capital ships and carriers 100%.
So you ships all start with a 230 size but as your building tech increases, the smaller ships can't be built as big as the larger ones.
Add to that a fuel factor...the smaller the ship, the more efficient it is. So while a lumbering size 1500 battleship needs 6 fuel cells just to crass 1 sector, the escort capped at size 300 can go 5 times as far on half the fuel, etc.
Another way to improve would be to make the meaning of the small, medium and large startports mean something. Small can build escort or frigate, medium up to cruiser size, and large is required for capital ships and carriers.
Anyway, some ideas for DW2, don't really expect is in the current game.
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Distant Worlds Fan
'When in doubt...attack!'
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Optimization overhaul of the game. - 
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