Aeson
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Joined: 8/30/2013
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quote:
Hab does have an effect on game mechanics, however, in that it increases boarding defense strength. Oddly enough the effect remains the same, regardless of your hab tech level. Life support, on the other hand, adds nothing to the game mechanics, other than its cost, size and resource requirement.
Since the size of the habitation modules does not change, I tend to feel that the amount of personnel carried per habitation module does not change, which makes sense with the lack of impact that habitation module improvements have on boarding defense. Instead, I feel that upgrades to the habitation module really represent improvements in the computer systems and automation routines which allow the personnel carried to be used more efficiently; after all, there's a limit to how many people you can pack into a given amount of space, but improvements to the computer systems could potentially come without requiring a significant increase in the volume dedicated to them, while more efficient algorithms which allow for better use of the existing computer systems could arguably be installed on the fly.
quote:
I can understand that adding in a full crew mechanic would take some time and effort but until that can happen it would be better to scrap life support. If a ship requires 50 spaces of life support/hab modules, then just make the ship size 50 spaces smaller. You still get the same number of engines/weapons etc and now don't have to deal with what is at the moment just an annoying warning in the design screen.
This isn't quite the same - ship speed is equal to something like the total thrust divided by the size of the ship, and something similar applies for turning rates. Removing the life support and habitation modules makes the ships faster, because they're now smaller. Beyond that, as Osito mentioned, the number of habitation modules impacts the boarding defense of your vessel, and removing the module limits your ability to affect this; boarding modules and troop bays also impact boarding defense, but boarding modules are large and must still have their pods in order to contribute to boarding defense, and you have to be carrying troops in order for a troop bay to contribute to boarding defense. I can see an argument for an 'auto-add enough life support and habitation modules' or for combining life support and habitation modules into a single module under the current mechanics, but not for simply deleting the two module types and pretending that it changes nothing.
Besides that, I can't really say that I care whether one habitation module supports five guys or five thousand. I can say that a ship with 10 habitation modules has about double the crew of a ship with only 5 habitation modules, and I don't see that there's a particular advantage to adding a crew requirement to each module, as that would only change the optimization from 'I need X habitation modules per Y size' to 'I need X habitation modules per Y crew', which decouples the ship size limit from all the ship components while adding another item to track in ship design. It also means that I cannot say that I need 3 habitation modules to build a size-300 ship before I decide what I'm putting on it, because I don't know what the crew cost will work out to (unless crew cost = component size, but then there's absolutely no point to having a crew cost because it's listing the same limit twice). Complicating the design process is not necessarily the same as making the game better.
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Life Support - 
RE: Life Support - 
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