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Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: January 23, 2019, 04:16:39 PM »

I must say that I don't like how commercial designs cost nothing to maintain. I agree that you should not need maintenance supplies and do overhaul on them but you could very well add a wealth cost to them, one you have to pay each 5 day cycle no matter where they are. But this is not the main discussion soo...

Maybe Steve can make commercial ships also cost maintenance. Let me explain.
Every ship of commercial size or specification does have maintenance supplies. Those are drained during flight time, but at a (very) low rate. Every time they do arrive at a port which has maintenance supplies, they auto refill their stockpile. So normally commercial ships shouldn't ever get into trouble of running out of maintenance supplies - other than if you are careless enough having them never show up at a port with supplies. Thinks breaking apart should only be checked by the game if a commercial ship runs out of supplies.

This could serve the point of having commercial ships also cost supplies as well as not increasing micromanagement by much. You generally have to pay attention that you have ports in the queue which have maintenance supplies and have them produce enough. It would even be possible to give those ships a general order "if maintenance < 10%" go refuel at nearest supply depot; if they don't drive on a route which has supply refuel in them.

And for ships without an engine one maybe can create a maintenance supply ship which can deliver to those ships maintenance supplies with an automated commmand. Something like "Check all fleets in system if they have >25% maintenance supplies. Íf not restock them."

It would be no more problematic than making sure they have enough fuel to get where they need to go.  ;)
Posted by: TMaekler
« on: January 23, 2019, 06:44:45 AM »

I must say that I don't like how commercial designs cost nothing to maintain. I agree that you should not need maintenance supplies and do overhaul on them but you could very well add a wealth cost to them, one you have to pay each 5 day cycle no matter where they are. But this is not the main discussion soo...

Maybe Steve can make commercial ships also cost maintenance. Let me explain.
Every ship of commercial size or specification does have maintenance supplies. Those are drained during flight time, but at a (very) low rate. Every time they do arrive at a port which has maintenance supplies, they auto refill their stockpile. So normally commercial ships shouldn't ever get into trouble of running out of maintenance supplies - other than if you are careless enough having them never show up at a port with supplies. Thinks breaking apart should only be checked by the game if a commercial ship runs out of supplies.

This could serve the point of having commercial ships also cost supplies as well as not increasing micromanagement by much. You generally have to pay attention that you have ports in the queue which have maintenance supplies and have them produce enough. It would even be possible to give those ships a general order "if maintenance < 10%" go refuel at nearest supply depot; if they don't drive on a route which has supply refuel in them.

And for ships without an engine one maybe can create a maintenance supply ship which can deliver to those ships maintenance supplies with an automated commmand. Something like "Check all fleets in system if they have >25% maintenance supplies. Íf not restock them."
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: December 28, 2018, 10:36:51 AM »

Are you going to let us spectate NPRs in C# as you talked about in another thread? Sounds fascinating to watch.
Can't wait to read about NPR vs NPR tests too.

The next campaign should be two NPRs, with jump ships and one without, and a TN player race, plus Precursors and Swarm active. My focus at the moment is the code to make that new campaign happen.
Posted by: Whitecold
« on: December 28, 2018, 09:48:53 AM »

Steve, just for comparisons sake, how much warship tonnage did that NPR have to go along with the ground defenses? I am just trying to estimate the required build capacities.

It has about a million tons of warships. It is quite a large NPR with 1.5 billion population, 1100 construction factories, 56 research facilities, 245,000 tons of naval shipyard capacity and 1.1m tons of commercial shipyards.

It recently upgraded all its warship designs and is now building its first run of second generation ships. It can also upgrade its ground force designs, although it hasn't done that yet.
If you want to drop roughly equal forces, 500kt of troops, and assume your drop ships survive 3 runs, and assume your drop ships carry 50% of their tonnage, you need 300kt of dropships.
That would be currently 30% more military tonnage, but then again an equal sized empire should likely not be able to easily make that effort to conquer a homeworld. Every other colony will be much more lightly defended.
That is a tall order, but by no means infeasible. Putting on shields or using military engines will increase survival rate a lot, as double the speed means half the time under fire even without any lower to-hit chances from going above tracking speed, but maintenance and ease of building would likely still outclass any higher performance, which seems sad.

I think a buff to naval shipyards would make invasions possible, and simultaneously help larger ships, which seems to be a separate goal of C#.
Alternatively, increasing the cost of ground units some would decrease total formation sizes, and thus reduce transport requirements for invasions.
Posted by: Tree
« on: December 28, 2018, 08:59:28 AM »

Are you going to let us spectate NPRs in C# as you talked about in another thread? Sounds fascinating to watch.
Can't wait to read about NPR vs NPR tests too.
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: December 28, 2018, 07:38:18 AM »

Steve, just for comparisons sake, how much warship tonnage did that NPR have to go along with the ground defenses? I am just trying to estimate the required build capacities.

It has about a million tons of warships. It is quite a large NPR with 1.5 billion population, 1100 construction factories, 56 research facilities, 245,000 tons of naval shipyard capacity and 1.1m tons of commercial shipyards.

It recently upgraded all its warship designs and is now building its first run of second generation ships. It can also upgrade its ground force designs, although it hasn't done that yet.



Posted by: Whitecold
« on: December 28, 2018, 01:56:13 AM »

Steve, just for comparisons sake, how much warship tonnage did that NPR have to go along with the ground defenses? I am just trying to estimate the required build capacities.
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: December 27, 2018, 07:55:15 PM »

I edited out the picture for brevity. 

Steve - I have to say, I'm impressed as hell with this new ground combat system.  I am very eager to get my hands on it, and equally and concerned that I, as the Imperial Overload, will be making decisions involving individual soldiers.  In the picture you had granularity down to individual soldiers, right?  I'm very curious as to how that is working out, from a game-play overhead perspective?

Yes, individual soldiers and vehicles :)

Game play is relatively straightforward as you move around larger formations (there are a lot of ground-combat-related posts in the changes log that go into detail). You can set their position on the battlefield (front line attack, front line defence, support, rear echelon) and decide which formations are supported by other formations, orbiting ships and atmospheric fighters. Shots and casualties are at the individual level while morale is for all units of the same type in one formation.
Posted by: alex_brunius
« on: December 27, 2018, 07:41:39 PM »

I must say that I don't like how commercial designs cost nothing to maintain. I agree that you should not need maintenance supplies and do overhaul on them but you could very well add a wealth cost to them, one you have to pay each 5 day cycle no matter where they are. But this is not the main discussion soo...

I think this is an interesting point, and it's not a far stretch seeing how you already pay fuel for them and upkeep for alot of other things not military.

It could well be used as a balance to add some cost to large civilians fleets be that freighters/colony ships running stretched out supply lines, geo survey ships or large commercial invasion/troop transport/logistics fleets.

I like it.
Posted by: Kurt
« on: December 27, 2018, 07:08:21 PM »

You can't really break down into sub-formations and then reassemble, because there are no fixed templates. The formation template is for building purposes. Once built, you can add and remove units from formations without restriction. Plus, morale can be very varied formations with the same original template type.

Ground combat is going to be complex in terms of organisation even without sub-formations. You can still create very detailed OOBs though (see my German OOB below) and as long as your individual transports in a fleet have bays sufficient for the small formations, you can load the whole hierarchy with a single order.


I edited out the picture for brevity. 

Steve - I have to say, I'm impressed as hell with this new ground combat system.  I am very eager to get my hands on it, and equally and concerned that I, as the Imperial Overload, will be making decisions involving individual soldiers.  In the picture you had granularity down to individual soldiers, right?  I'm very curious as to how that is working out, from a game-play overhead perspective?

Kurt
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: December 27, 2018, 06:10:40 PM »

I'm not saying this is a problem, but it will make invasions from an economic standpoint allot easier.

I agree on this point. However, if the transport ships were military, the economic impact of building the type of ground forces lift capacity you will need to invade a home world would be prohibitive. Even with commercial ships, easier is certainly not easy. The military investment will be in the forces required to beat back the defences, rather than the transport assets. That isn't to say that having a few specialised, large military assault ships is not a good idea, but they are probably not viable on the scale required when you need to land a million+ tons of troops.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: December 27, 2018, 05:26:19 PM »

I must say that I don't like how commercial designs cost nothing to maintain. I agree that you should not need maintenance supplies and do overhaul on them but you could very well add a wealth cost to them, one you have to pay each 5 day cycle no matter where they are. But this is not the main discussion soo...

I do think that having this sort of "artificial" rather big difference in cost/maintenance will make the choice of design very hard and in favor of commercial drop ships only. The cost of military ships are astronomically more expensive. There are no military equipment you could not put on an escort ship to follow the drop ships that would make it worth using military drop ships.

I'm not saying this is a problem, but it will make invasions from an economic standpoint allot easier.
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: December 27, 2018, 01:22:34 PM »

I am very worried that the benefits of no maintenance will completely outclass any other possible drop ship design. There is every incentive not to experiment with adding weapons, adding shields, better sensors, because it would all make it a lot more expensive by breaking commercial status. That feels just sad. Yes, pure armor+drop module designs will preform good, and likely better than many of the complicated designs, but they at least won't be much worse, and thus people will experiment with them, but the expense of the shipyards and maintenance will block most of that off.

OK, I can understand that concern. I think the underlying problem is two-fold. The new ground forces (and their logistics) are likely to take up a lot of space and planetary defences are going to be much more formidable.

You could still design some large military drop ships and the changes to maintenance actually make that easier in C# than in VB6 (easier to create the facilities - cost is the same). I could also look at making it easier to create very large military shipyards, probably by adjusting the bonus given to large shipyards (so no changes early on but accelerating benefits later). However, having said that, I think the opportunities for ingenuity in overcoming planetary defences will be a combined approach from supporting warships of different types, fighter missions, suppression by missiles, etc. rather than the design of the drop ships themselves. The mission is escorting/supporting those transport ships to the drop point, rather than necessarily having complex transport ship designs.
Posted by: Whitecold
« on: December 27, 2018, 12:55:40 PM »

If the flag was called 'Requires Maintenance & Naval Shipyard' vs 'Doesn't Require Maintenance & Naval Shipyard', would that be easier to accept without suspension of disbelief?
Calling it a convenience feature is not exactly the best wording on my part. What I meant was that it is exactly as you said a choice about gameplay and micromanagement, and anchored entirely on game mechanic. The only in-world justification is high-maintenance vs low-maintenance, and for simplicity's sake there is no further graduation.

I very welcome the addition of commercial magazines and maintenance supply storage, which had been a weird point of "Why does a magazine cause my engine to fail" Similarly I very much like the new structural hull, that offers a clear choice between orbital platform and ship, not needing an orbital habitat for the completely different purpose of building it by construction factories.
What I meant for the most part, once you define a role, you automatically define military or commercial flag. Any decent sensors, any weapons, any high powered engine triggers it.

My suspension of disbelief is not threatened by the exact wording, but specifically by heavily armored commercial-flagged drop ships, since there are many systems I might reasonably add which suddenly make it military flagged.
Classifying drop modules as military modules would resolve the issue, but might require some other adjustment to not make landings impossibly hard. Limiting the armor to 1 layer would also do it.

I am very worried that the benefits of no maintenance will completely outclass any other possible drop ship design. There is every incentive not to experiment with adding weapons, adding shields, better sensors, because it would all make it a lot more expensive by breaking commercial status. That feels just sad. Yes, pure armor+drop module designs will preform good, and likely better than many of the complicated designs, but they at least won't be much worse, and thus people will experiment with them, but the expense of the shipyards and maintenance will block most of that off.
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: December 27, 2018, 11:51:35 AM »

I understand that commercial/military is mostly a convenience feature, for me the line just goes down "If it ever comes intentionally into harms way, it should be a military design anyway," which is clearly the case for a drop ship.
(In contrast to a non-drop troop ship which may load troops onto drop ships for a second run, which would be a good use for shields, since they can regenerate between runs)
It is a personal opinion, but when designing a drop ship, I don't want to think about if it qualifies for the very artificial commercial/military classification. For any other ship role, it is basically already given what it will end up as, which is the best way to "hide" such a convenience feature without breaking suspension of disbelief. The only exception that comes to mind is the geosurvey ship, which may end up commercial or military.

It's not a convenience feature. It was the result of a lot of debate on the forums about maintenance micromanagement vs game play. The only game play effect of 'commercial' is flagging whether a ship needs maintenance facilities and naval shipyards. This cannot be done on an overall class design level, because you don't know what systems may go together or what purpose a player may intended for a design. There are also plenty of situations where unarmed 'commercial' ships are put to military use, including picketing, scouting, decoying, etc. and there are many times that 'commercial' troop transports are used to deliver troops direct to the battlefield.

BTW the same debate re maintenance also covered the differences between relatively small warships and large ships intended for industry, transportation or logistics. The decision was to have two different types of shipyard. In early versions there used to only be one shipyard type and freighters were the same size as warships. That was hard to accept, so as long as something had only commercial (easy to maintain) systems and had less powerful engines (commercial engines), it had less rigorous construction requirements and could be built in the new 'commercial' shipyards. This debate was about ten years ago and also moved shipyards from the surface into orbit.

If the flag was called 'Requires Maintenance & Naval Shipyard' vs 'Doesn't Require Maintenance & Naval Shipyard', would that be easier to accept without suspension of disbelief?