Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => Aurora Suggestions => Topic started by: Mor on February 09, 2016, 02:07:19 AM
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In a recent discussion it has been suggested that as far as ship design goes bigger is generally better. Going over the component formulas and other ship mechanics it seem to be the case, however, there always long term economical consideration like shipyard capacity and resources.
I would like to suggest that Armor refit will be extremely costly and scale up with ship size. Because it will require radical structural changes to the ship hull design, that the refit system isn't intended for.
No one stops you from building a death star, but if you are planning to planning to gut it out and play leggo with it wlil cost you a fortune. This way will see more outdated capital ships and larger reliance on more economical support vessels.
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I think the main downsides are meant to be strategic/economic as you mention.
Larger shipyards, Huge needs of maintenance facilities so few places can base it, Excessively long build-times, Inflexibility of deployment ( hard to split it up if your navy is a single huge ship ), Massive consumption of fuel, resources, money, time and manpower to support it and so on.
The only two mechanics that substantially favor big ships IMO are shields and damage mechanics (redundancy from multiple parallel systems). They don't really get any offensive bonus do they?
And the defensive upside is balanced by the defensive downside of shock damage, so if the ship is hit with powerful missiles shock damage can propagate straight through armor and if your unlucky trigger cascading secondary explosions.
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There are many reasons to go with small or medium-sized ships.
Shiyard capacity.
Initial retool cost.
Required maintenance facilities, - this can become very limiting if we intend to deploy our fleets near the fringes of our empire.
Risk of a chain of secondary explosions.
Strategic and tactical flexibility.
Sensor footprint.
I see no need for a heavy-handed change to limit the effectiveness of large ships, and the reasoning doesn't make sense to me.
Especially since some of the limitations on giant constructions on earth are due to gravity, which wouldn't apply to orbital shipyards.
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I would like to suggest that Armor refit will be extremely costly and scale up with ship size. Because it will require radical structural changes to the ship hull design, that the refit system isn't intended for.
I can add that armor already is pretty costly, and does scale with size of ships. Armor is significantly more expensive then any civilian components, and on par or more expensive then many military too. For ships built similar to real battleships (30-40% of tonnage being armor), it's extremely expensive to refit and upgrade their armor to new tech.
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I think the main downsides are meant to be strategic/economic as you mention.
Larger shipyards, Huge needs of maintenance facilities so few places can base it, Excessively long build-times, Inflexibility of deployment ( hard to split it up if your navy is a single huge ship ), Massive consumption of fuel, resources, money, time and manpower to support it and so on.
Unless you are speaking about fighters or FAC this is not true. When comparing a larger ship to two smaller ones, there is no difference between maintenance, fuel, crew etc needs. In fact it can be argued that larger ship are more efficient because they need less armor and fluff component redundancy.
Also deployment flexibility is not an issue, few larger ships are just as flexible as many small ones and require less micro. While larger shipyards are not a limiting factor, because the longer you play the larger your industrial and shipyards capacity will be.. From that follows that we should encounter spoiler deathstars ...
I see no need for a heavy-handed change to limit the effectiveness of large ships, and the reasoning doesn't make sense to me.
Its not a new concept. In Aurora if you want to design larger more complicated system like engines it takes more RP to do so. Similarly in the real world, if you want to refit "sensors" you put a new dish and new tech, but if you want to make extensive changes to your hull armor and profile, it will require extensive work redesign and reconfiguration. Its like comparing new room decor and new house reconfiguration that would require additional support to account for earth quakes etc...
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Unless you are speaking about fighters or FAC, for large ship there is no difference between maintenance, fuel, crew etc needs when compared to two smaller ones. In fact it can be argued that larger ship are more efficient because they need less armor and fluff component redundancy.
Large ships don't need less armor unless you want them to have less protection... Each "point" of armor that is added and can absorb damage weights the same ton regardless of ship size.
And there is a huge difference in maintenance in that you need twice the population, resources, money and industry to build maintenance facilities for the big ship with 2x size.
The strategic reason a single large ship needs more fuel is because it's harder to put in hangars and move around using efficient engines, and it's less flexible so instead of having the right force spread out over a big empire you always need at least one deathstar, no matter how small the threat ( It's impossible to move around half a deathstar ). A single big ship will simply overkill alot of stuff and expend more fuel when moving around to do so. And when you move the big ship around, the area it came from is without protection, so you need to build more tonnage of ships to cover and protect a big spread out empire with only huge ships.
I agree they need less redundancy though when it comes to mandatory components like fire controls.
And larger shipyards is not a limiting factor, because the longer you play the larger your industrial and shipyards capacity will be. From that follows that logic we should encounter spoiler deathstars ...
Spoiler or NPR deathstarts or massive capital ships lategame would be immensely cool!
Its not a new concept. In Aurora if you want to design larger more complicated system like engines it takes more RP to do so.
Ah good, you even found another downside of huge ships that we forgot about ( more RP cost of huge subsystems ) :)
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My suggestion is simple and realistic. Those who practice the overwhelming firepower doctrine, would enjoy the same advantages as before, however, in the long term those huge ships will become a burden on the economy, and parking them in planetary hangars during peace time wont do. Refitting hull armor isn't that common task, but should be a considerable undertaking, and generally distinguish ships of different generations.
@alex_brunius .
You are confusing things. 2 ships will require more armor space, than one ship with all their content, all other maintenance related stats are either the same or infavor of the large ship. And there is absolutely no difference in cost of designing the same components. See this thread. http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8244.msg85811
As for the rest I am not talking about a black and white scenario of only deathstars, but the simple concept that for those who have the capacity, building n ships of size X will be less efficient than building one large ships size nx. And with spoilers in mind, they have been around for millions of years, if there is no diminishing return to building larger, then you should encounter death stars from start.
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I feel the truly large ships are seldom employed already as things stand, no need to push that design philosophy even further into the ground.
Personally I don't really use refits anyway, so there are already plenty of obsolete ships still in service at any given time in my games. Increasing refit cost would probably just make me ignore the refit feature entirely, which I think is not a sign of good game design.
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Please stop telling us how to play the game. You dont like big ships, fine dont build them. ::)
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My suggestion is simple and realistic. Those who practice the overwhelming firepower doctrine, would enjoy the same advantages as before, however, in the long term those huge ships will become a burden on the economy, and parking them in planetary hangars during peace time wont do. Refitting hull armor isn't that common task, but should be a considerable undertaking, and generally distinguish ships of different generations.
@alex_brunius .
You are confusing things. 2 ships will require more armor space, than one ship with all their content, all other maintenance related stats are either the same or infavor of the large ship. And there is absolutely no difference in cost of designing the same components. See this thread. http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8244.msg85811
As for the rest I am not talking about a black and white scenario of only deathstars, but the simple concept that for those who have the capacity, building n ships of size X will be less efficient than building one large ships size nx. And with spoilers in mind, they have been around for millions of years, if there is no diminishing return to building larger, then you should encounter death stars from start.
I'm not sure if you have tried playing with actual large ships (400kt+) but I will take a guess that you haven't, vessels of substantial size require absolutely vast industries to even get them airborne let alone keep them flying. Take for example a 200kt ship at mid tech levels and you have the following issues.
1. You just bought yourself a 100k research project for the jump drive alone.
2. If you happen to have this thing armed with massive weapons there is another large amount of RP that are totally useless to anything smaller than this vessel. (in general with small ships you can reuse components on other designs with ease)
3. The amount of investment in shipyards you make means a double/triple/etc amount of minerals needed, time required for the tonnage growth, and population required to actually work there.
4. You need a much higher mining output to even have the materials to begin with, and to sustain the vessel for maintenance, this in turn needs a larger industrial output to build enough mining facilities, which again needs more population. In general this means having more colonies as you need a greater total population growth rate, which once again needs more of everything.
5. Once you finally get airborne you find your fuel needs are ridiculous and as such you have to really think about gas giants, this means either massive fleets of harvester or a few giant orbitals doing the harvesting. Either choice again is costing you industry, population and minerals.
5. You have to spend even more RP on things like shipyard operations otherwise it take eons to grow the shipyards to the needed tonnage, ship construction speeds if you want that monster vessel to launch in your grand childrens lifetime, and construction, mining, and fuel harvesting if you want to even dream about having the industrial capacity to actually pull off this sort of construction.
6. Finally if all that wasn't making your industry collapse under the weight you have the whole maintenance issue, either you now have a craft that chews up minerals anywhere it orbits or you have to try and construct giant hangers to house it. This really limits just where you can park the thing as it means hangers require massive amounts of construction also.
I'll throw a few numbers at you for example of this, in my current game I am currently only just able to start thinking about moving to the nest size stage of ships, this will mean I will be fielding 400kt command carriers and 200kt general warships with around 60kt patrol craft. I have had to devote earth to shipbuilding and industrial construction and nothing else. It currently have a population of 4bn and of that 300m are shipyard workers and another 500m construction workers. I know for a fact that when I do my ship size increases I am going to be somewhere around 200-300m short of population to actually work in those shipyards (around 4-6 years of population growth). To actually pay for all of this I had to look at really moving large amounts of minerals fast, I was quite lucky and 5 of the systems next to sol hold vast mineral amounts but at low access rates, this meant spending the last 3 years or so doing nothing but building some 7000 auto mines (since I did not have the population to actually use normal mines) and ship them out (which also required upscaling my freighters to get the cargo moved in that time period). I am about to also upgrade my harvesting operations to be able to actually fuel ships of this size which is going to mean switching to orbital habitats as the miners are likely to need to jump up to somewhere around the 300kt mark of just mining type parts. My current game I play with overhauls switched off but I do still use hangers just to keep my task group list somewhat tidy, now at this time with nothing bigger than 200kt I require a hanger PDC of some 5mt just to properly house a fleet which means some 55000BP to make so there are very few places I have the industrial output to build one, thus my fleets have to make long trips to and from the hanger which again is chewing up fuel.
So just to allow me to launch a proper 400kt ship (which is really not that large in anyway) I have had to devote my entire industrial and research output to increasing my capacity over a 7 year period. In that time I will have fallen behind in general tech advances compared to anyone sticking to sub 100kt ships. I have lost out on general expansion of the empire and as such have my populated colonies far less spread out than I would really like. You are correct in that there are only a small number of diminishing returns when going big with ships. But the overall knock on effect on your empire is vast, this is probably why we don't see NPR deathstars flying round. From a gameplay perspective building big ships is just total madness that leaves you wide open to conquest, the only reason to ever do it is for RP. There lies the biggest problem with trying to make it even harder to build big ships, this is not a multiplayer game and as such the player will always have the advantage of a human brain to call on for things like design ideas etc that will give them an advantage over the NPR. This then begs the question what purpose does making what is a very hard, long and frustrating process even more of all of those things actually achieve?
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I'm not sure if you have tried playing with actual large ships (400kt+) but I will take a guess that you haven't, vessels of substantial size require absolutely vast industries to even get them airborne let alone keep them flying. Take for example a 200kt ship at mid tech levels and you have the following issues.
That is a strawman argument. The economic constrains on fleet size are know. The question is whether a person with the same industrial capacity is better investing resources in building 400kt shipyards\ships or twice as many 200kt shipyards\ships. The stats seem to favor the larger ships.
Also non of that is changed by my proposal. Which only addressed the fact that realistically making radical structural changes to ship should be higher than simple refit of internal compartments. And would better reflect advancment in hull armor tech. A hundred years ago we used wooden ships, surely you understand that refit them into metal hull ships would take extensive structural changes....
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I'm not sure if you have tried playing with actual large ships (400kt+) but I will take a guess that you haven't, vessels of substantial size require absolutely vast industries to even get them airborne let alone keep them flying. Take for example a 200kt ship at mid tech levels and you have the following issues.
1. You just bought yourself a 100k research project for the jump drive alone.
2. If you happen to have this thing armed with massive weapons there is another large amount of RP that are totally useless to anything smaller than this vessel. (in general with small ships you can reuse components on other designs with ease)
3. The amount of investment in shipyards you make means a double/triple/etc amount of minerals needed, time required for the tonnage growth, and population required to actually work there.
4. You need a much higher mining output to even have the materials to begin with, and to sustain the vessel for maintenance, this in turn needs a larger industrial output to build enough mining facilities, which again needs more population. In general this means having more colonies as you need a greater total population growth rate, which once again needs more of everything.
5. Once you finally get airborne you find your fuel needs are ridiculous and as such you have to really think about gas giants, this means either massive fleets of harvester or a few giant orbitals doing the harvesting. Either choice again is costing you industry, population and minerals.
5. You have to spend even more RP on things like shipyard operations otherwise it take eons to grow the shipyards to the needed tonnage, ship construction speeds if you want that monster vessel to launch in your grand childrens lifetime, and construction, mining, and fuel harvesting if you want to even dream about having the industrial capacity to actually pull off this sort of construction.
6. Finally if all that wasn't making your industry collapse under the weight you have the whole maintenance issue, either you now have a craft that chews up minerals anywhere it orbits or you have to try and construct giant hangers to house it. This really limits just where you can park the thing as it means hangers require massive amounts of construction also.
I'll throw a few numbers at you for example of this, in my current game I am currently only just able to start thinking about moving to the nest size stage of ships, this will mean I will be fielding 400kt command carriers and 200kt general warships with around 60kt patrol craft. I have had to devote earth to shipbuilding and industrial construction and nothing else. It currently have a population of 4bn and of that 300m are shipyard workers and another 500m construction workers. I know for a fact that when I do my ship size increases I am going to be somewhere around 200-300m short of population to actually work in those shipyards (around 4-6 years of population growth). To actually pay for all of this I had to look at really moving large amounts of minerals fast, I was quite lucky and 5 of the systems next to sol hold vast mineral amounts but at low access rates, this meant spending the last 3 years or so doing nothing but building some 7000 auto mines (since I did not have the population to actually use normal mines) and ship them out (which also required upscaling my freighters to get the cargo moved in that time period). I am about to also upgrade my harvesting operations to be able to actually fuel ships of this size which is going to mean switching to orbital habitats as the miners are likely to need to jump up to somewhere around the 300kt mark of just mining type parts. My current game I play with overhauls switched off but I do still use hangers just to keep my task group list somewhat tidy, now at this time with nothing bigger than 200kt I require a hanger PDC of some 5mt just to properly house a fleet which means some 55000BP to make so there are very few places I have the industrial output to build one, thus my fleets have to make long trips to and from the hanger which again is chewing up fuel.
So just to allow me to launch a proper 400kt ship (which is really not that large in anyway) I have had to devote my entire industrial and research output to increasing my capacity over a 7 year period. In that time I will have fallen behind in general tech advances compared to anyone sticking to sub 100kt ships. I have lost out on general expansion of the empire and as such have my populated colonies far less spread out than I would really like. You are correct in that there are only a small number of diminishing returns when going big with ships. But the overall knock on effect on your empire is vast, this is probably why we don't see NPR deathstars flying round. From a gameplay perspective building big ships is just total madness that leaves you wide open to conquest, the only reason to ever do it is for RP. There lies the biggest problem with trying to make it even harder to build big ships, this is not a multiplayer game and as such the player will always have the advantage of a human brain to call on for things like design ideas etc that will give them an advantage over the NPR. This then begs the question what purpose does making what is a very hard, long and frustrating process even more of all of those things actually achieve?
I am new to this game, but I seriously think that the tactical flexibility you gain with a series of 40k vessels comanded by, say, a 60k carrier packed with fighters massively outreaches the brute force of 1 single deathstar, specially against the AI. And a series of smaller vessels is just much much easier to manage in terms of economy.
I cant imagine any serious advantage of such enormous ships besides their awesomeness
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That is a strawman argument. The economic constrains on fleet size are know. The question is whether a person with the same industrial capacity is better investing resources in building 400kt shipyards\ships or twice as many 200kt shipyards\ships. The stats seem to favor the larger ships.
The problem being a 200kt jump drive cannot jump a 400kt ship, and to reverse that only a madman you design a single 400kt jump drive and use it for both 200 and 400 size ships as it would be a vast amount of wasted hull space for the smaller ships. To throw a quick number out there this is a 400k RP project at mid tech levels, the same applies for many other ship parts. When you go big you have to do it one of two ways, either you go huge in every ship type you have (which is lunacy as it means you have unimaginable industrial requirements). Or you simply scale up your ships but keep varying size types, the issue then is that as you get larger and larger at the top end you start to loose the ability to have off the shelf components that can be fitted into multiple design types. This means your research becomes more and more devoted to doing nothing but designing different sizes of the same component type that each are specialised for a ship size group.
Arguing that the stats favour larger ships is a little strange, of course they do. When you have what is technically unlimited resources (we do have the entire universe to play with after all) then it stands to reason that bigger will always be better, more people, more mines, more research, and so on. If that wasn't the case then why bother even leaving sol in the first place? However if you want big and all the benefits it brings then you really have to devote time and effort into achieving it. Doing things to just make big ships harder to attain than they already are will just annoy folks who use them. Then they will simply use SM to create them so as to skip the annoying new game mechanic, thus it expands the gameplay of Aurora in no way at all and brings nothing constructive to the table.
I am new to this game, but I seriously think that the tactical flexibility you gain with a series of 40k vessels comanded by, say, a 60k carrier packed with fighters massively outreaches the brute force of 1 single deathstar, specially against the AI. And a series of smaller vessels is just much much easier to manage in terms of economy.
I cant imagine any serious advantage of such enormous ships besides their awesomeness
You have pretty much summed up exactly what big ships are, they are just at a power level of 9000. If this were a multiplayer game I would bet that a player who aimed for 500kt+ ships going against one who kept sub 100kt will loose every single time. Hell even a new player who doesn't understand some of the game mechanics would probably win as they will bring more ships in to player, both faster and of a general higher tech rating than the larger craft.
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2. If you happen to have this thing armed with massive weapons there is another large amount of RP that are totally useless to anything smaller than this vessel. (in general with small ships you can reuse components on other designs with ease)
weapons usually don't cost that much, even at mid line techs. You also have to concede the point that once you research a weapon, it can be used on any design.
3. The amount of investment in shipyards you make means a double/triple/etc amount of minerals needed, time required for the tonnage growth, and population required to actually work there.
Its not as bad as you put it. Shipyards grow at an exponential rate, and their building speed increases in the same way. In the end, a large ship may end up being faster to build.
4. You need a much higher mining output to even have the materials to begin with, and to sustain the vessel for maintenance, this in turn needs a larger industrial output to build enough mining facilities, which again needs more population. In general this means having more colonies as you need a greater total population growth rate, which once again needs more of everything.
End level small ships are a lot more expensive than mid level large ships. So your statement could be argued wither way.
5. Once you finally get airborne you find your fuel needs are ridiculous and as such you have to really think about gas giants, this means either massive fleets of harvester or a few giant orbitals doing the harvesting. Either choice again is costing you industry, population and minerals.
If you design your engines right, fuel isn't a problem. 0.7x - 0.8x power engines have about the same speed as 1.0x while vastly reducing the amount of fuel.
5. You have to spend even more RP on things like shipyard operations otherwise it take eons to grow the shipyards to the needed tonnage, ship construction speeds if you want that monster vessel to launch in your grand childrens lifetime, and construction, mining, and fuel harvesting if you want to even dream about having the industrial capacity to actually pull off this sort of construction.
2 5s? And this one being the same as 3? Anyway, like I said, its not as bad as you put it.
6. Finally if all that wasn't making your industry collapse under the weight you have the whole maintenance issue, either you now have a craft that chews up minerals anywhere it orbits or you have to try and construct giant hangers to house it. This really limits just where you can park the thing as it means hangers require massive amounts of construction also.
Maintenance isn't a big problem. Right now my whole end level battlefleet of large ships eats only a few hundred materials annually.
WALL OF TEXT
Made some good points. However, there were shortcuts you could have made. 1; you really didn't need a pdc hangar to house your fleet, even if overhauls were turned on. 2; I usually make some (4 per system plus 2 per actual colony with population) 1k - 6k ton patrol ships (Gunships, corvettes, etc) while my main shipyards build. Cheap, fast (low range), but will explode if you sneeze on it.
This then begs the question what purpose does making what is a very hard, long and frustrating process even more of all of those things actually achieve?
A ship with 20+ layers of armor, plus a few thousands levels of shields, a few thousand points of internal hp, enough defenses that missile spam may be rendered completely useless, plus being armed to the teeth (massive batteries of lazors blasting away at puny tin cans, several hundred strong waves of missiles to annihilate entire fleets).... shall I go on?
I am new to this game, but I seriously think that the tactical flexibility you gain with a series of 40k vessels comanded by, say, a 60k carrier packed with fighters massively outreaches the brute force of 1 single deathstar, specially against the AI. And a series of smaller vessels is just much much easier to manage in terms of economy.
I cant imagine any serious advantage of such enormous ships besides their awesomeness
200k tons of lots of small ships equal 200k tons of one ship. While the small ships do have a higher tactical mobility, large ships are just more efficient in cost and space (economy wise). While you can split your small ship fleet to cover 2-3 systems or encircle an enemy fleet in an assault, the large ship is like using a sledgehammer to break an egg. It gets the job done, even it is messy, and usually comes back in one piece while the small ship fleet usually comes back with a chunk of it missing. The large ship can repair from its yard quite quickly while the small ship fleet has to repair and build new ships to fill its ranks back out. Trust me, until you actually build and play around with large ship fleets you can't really understand why.
And while that seems I'm supporting Mor, I am agreeing with Rich.h. Large ship fleets are a completely different doctrine from small ship fleets and you have to sacrifice quite a bit to be able to field them. When you play them like you do small ship fleets, they will seem bad in comparison. You have to change the way you play or you will suffer the consequences, such as getting overrun from other empires and such.
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@Rich.h. You ignore the main point:
None of that is changed by my proposal. Which only addressed the fact that realistically the cost of making radical structural changes to a ship should be higher than simple refit of internal compartments. And would better reflect advancement in hull armor tech. A hundred years ago we used wooden ships, surely you understand that refitting them with GPS and refitting them into metal hull isn't the same...
Realistically Hull structural redesigns are rare in the extreme. And the cost of such monumental task should be reflected during refit, and the larger the project the more effort it should take.
As for the question of whether a person with the same industrial capacity is better investing resources in either building 400kt shipyards\ships or twice as many 200kt shipyards\ships. Jump drive are the only exception. (assuming that it isn't more economical to pave an imperial jump gate lane toward your destination, iirc you coplained about WAYYYYYY to many resources laying around) Everything else seem to favor the larger ships. starting with armor, if I didn't mixed the math in my head two 200KT ships will use about 20% more armor HS than one 400kt ship with same rating.
Arguing that the stats favour larger ships is a little strange, of course they do. When you have what is technically unlimited resources (we do have the entire universe to play with after all) then it stands to reason that bigger will always be better, more people, more mines, more research, and so on.
Larger is not necessarily better, see the concept of Diminishing returns. Generally it adds more complexity and require better understanding of the rules to find your sweet spot. Skipping a lot of turns, spamming the galaxy with mines isn't, and only gives you an even bigger advantage over the AI. And again, if there no diminishing returns than why the spoiler race aren't spamming deathstars?
Doing things to just make big ships harder to attain than they already are will just annoy folks who use them. Then they will simply use SM to create them so as to skip the annoying new game mechanic, thus it expands the gameplay of Aurora in no way at all and brings nothing constructive to the table.
That entirely depends on your preservative\attitude e.g. A while back someone on reddit complained about Aurora design, manufacturing and supply process being needlessly hard, maybe he thinks we are just trying to annoy him..
I see this as yet another economic consideration when constructing\maintaining your fleet. When was the last time your delayed upgrade or scuttled a ship? Think about it as a challenge, or by all means use the SM that why it is there for..
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The issue of for example swapping out wooden panels for steel ones though is already pretty well catered for, since armour is an expensive component refitting new armour can quickly push you past 100% or more of the original design cost. At that stage you can end up with a refit taking 2 or even 3 times as long as it does to build a new ship from scratch.
However in the end I still fail to see what changing this mechanic could possibly "add" to the play experience of anyone? As has been stated already that none of the NPR or spoiler races seem to ever field ships in the multi 100kt range, and this is a strict single player game. The effort involved in making large ships generally means the only folk who bother to do so are those who decide they want a deathstar "just because". I myself for example have a game running where the doctrine is to use large vessels as I want them to have many RP subsystems a ship of that class really doesn't need. Now if the mechanics were changed to make it a tedious chore to build up my industry I would either SM the industry in place, or simply SM the ship into being. I still get my RP ship for how I want to play that game but all that really happens is the developer has had to spend time and effort on a mechanic that actually has zero effect.
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Hell even a new player who doesn't understand some of the game mechanics would probably win as they will bring more ships in to player, both faster and of a general higher tech rating than the larger craft.
You'd be wrong about that. I've just tested this exact proposition, and new players are terrifyingly bad. One of them described his strategy as 'hope nobody else has figured out missile defense'. And his was the best fleet.
On the OP, I don't agree. The problem is that there is no way in Aurora to distinguish between minor refits that slightly increase ship size (the equivalent of bolting more AA guns to the deck) and things that would require major hull work (adding on more engines). If anything, I'd say that the cost of an armor refit should be proportional to the fraction of ship size affected. Adding on a couple of extra fuel bunkers to a freighter should be much cheaper than adding the equivalent amount of tonnage to a frigate. (This may be how it works now. I don't know.)
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Maintenance isn't a big problem. Right now my whole end level battlefleet of large ships eats only a few hundred materials annually.
Strange, my battle ships eats roughly 600 each. And when I make them bigger, I easily cross into four digits. And they are not endlevel in any way.
A hundred years ago we used wooden ships, surely you understand that refit them into metal hull ships would take extensive structural changes....
But we did. Heck to a large degree we still do. We bolted extra metal on the outside, we built armoured boxes to house the powder in and we replaced wooden parts with metal as they failed. But as rot and worm sets in and we learn how to build bigger and stronger (not to mention not needing sails and the like) we built new ones.
And this is before you start to argue what happens if you strip all the internal modules out and slap them in a new hull. Is it a new ship or a retrofit?
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But we did. Heck to a large degree we still do. We bolted extra metal on the outside, we built armoured boxes to house the powder in and we replaced wooden parts with metal as they failed. But as rot and worm sets in and we learn how to build bigger and stronger (not to mention not needing sails and the like) we built new ones.
And this is before you start to argue what happens if you strip all the internal modules out and slap them in a new hull. Is it a new ship or a retrofit?
Uhh....
Examples? I can't think of a single case where a ship with a wooden hull was converted to an iron hull. Not just bolting metal armor on the outside, but turning the ship's basic structure from one to the other. And I've done a reasonable amount of reading on shipbuilding from that era.
The thing I like least about Aurora's shipbuilding model is the lack of a clear 'hull', and the resulting complications in things like retrofit and shipyard building. For instance, if I build matched geo and grav survey ships and give them all the same components, except for the specific sensors, I think of them as being built on the same hull, and realistically they should be, and I should be able to build them at the same yard. But I can't, because all components count when determining yard similarity. Even though in reality, I should be able to just hand the shipyard whichever module I want and have them install it.
Armor is sometimes conflated with the hull, but it doesn't quite fit. Yes, most modern designs use armor as part of their structure (modern in this case going back at least 100 years, and probably more like 150), but that doesn't cover the case of bolting iron onto a wooden ship. (Which didn't happen as much as you'd think, actually. For a long time, wood was considered better protection, and by the time metallurgy caught up, the nature of warships had changed enough that just cladding existing ships wasn't really viable.)
If I could think of a good way to get a 'hull' mechanism in and working, I'd have suggested it long ago. It's unspeakably irritating to not be able to simply swap out the guns on my ship when the new ones are just improved versions of the old ones, and by all rights should fit in the same slots.
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HMS Warrior. Iron Hull, Wooden Armour...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Warrior_(1860) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Warrior_(1860))
(well that's an over simplification it's armour was 4-5 inches of wrought iron backed by teak, but MAN the section of the teak they have on display is impressive!), Warrior is a more interesting tour than HMS Victory is incidentally, though Victory was quite emotional for me.
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Uhh....
Examples? I can't think of a single case where a ship with a wooden hull was converted to an iron hull. Not just bolting metal armor on the outside, but turning the ship's basic structure from one to the other. And I've done a reasonable amount of reading on shipbuilding from that era.
The thing I like least about Aurora's shipbuilding model is the lack of a clear 'hull', and the resulting complications in things like retrofit and shipyard building. For instance, if I build matched geo and grav survey ships and give them all the same components, except for the specific sensors, I think of them as being built on the same hull, and realistically they should be, and I should be able to build them at the same yard. But I can't, because all components count when determining yard similarity. Even though in reality, I should be able to just hand the shipyard whichever module I want and have them install it.
Armor is sometimes conflated with the hull, but it doesn't quite fit. Yes, most modern designs use armor as part of their structure (modern in this case going back at least 100 years, and probably more like 150), but that doesn't cover the case of bolting iron onto a wooden ship. (Which didn't happen as much as you'd think, actually. For a long time, wood was considered better protection, and by the time metallurgy caught up, the nature of warships had changed enough that just cladding existing ships wasn't really viable.)
If I could think of a good way to get a 'hull' mechanism in and working, I'd have suggested it long ago. It's unspeakably irritating to not be able to simply swap out the guns on my ship when the new ones are just improved versions of the old ones, and by all rights should fit in the same slots.
An entire wooden hull? No, I dont think that has happened. At least not unless you count stripping out everything but the hull and placing it in a new place. Replaced parts that were vital to structural integrity? Yes. I see if I can find the source for it, but it has been a while since I read it so it might take some time. I see now that I might have misread your comment a bit but bolting extra metal on the outside is a retrofit. And not just iron. Was not always done to increase protection, but it was done.
And has there not been a number of threads recently about how to get several different shipdesigns out of the same wharf? I think geo and grav was one of the examples given but dont quote me on that.
Sword of the Stars 2 have a retrofit system kinda like you describe. Imo it was one of the few good things that game had.
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An entire wooden hull? No, I dont think that has happened. At least not unless you count stripping out everything but the hull and placing it in a new place. Replaced parts that were vital to structural integrity? Yes. I see if I can find the source for it, but it has been a while since I read it so it might take some time. I see now that I might have misread your comment a bit but bolting extra metal on the outside is a retrofit. And not just iron. Was not always done to increase protection, but it was done.
Oh, I'm sure there were some iron repairs done on wooden ships, but they were just that-repairs. That sort of thing doesn't really show up in Aurora, due to the granularity of the ship model. I can think of exactly one case (well, two) of a ship's basic hull being replaced, and that was Cassin and Downes after Pearl Harbor. And the Aurora equivalent was scrapping a ship and reusing the components.
Bolting armor on did occur, but my point was that we don't really have a good distinction between 'extra armor' and 'hull'.
And has there not been a number of threads recently about how to get several different shipdesigns out of the same wharf? I think geo and grav was one of the examples given but dont quote me on that.
I saw that thread, but decided not to mention it in my original post. It's not quite the point I was trying to make. Upgrading my destroyers when I discover advanced lasers shouldn't require a totally separate shipyard either. Two ships where everything is the same size, shape, and general type (and which in real life would undoubtedly be built on the same hull) should be buildable at the same shipyard without the use of exploits like that. (I don't use exploit in a derogatory sense. It works, but it doesn't make sense.)
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http://www.amazon.com/Avoid-Huge-Ships-John-Trimmer/dp/0870334336
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As I see it this argument is about large scale ships being overpowered compared to smaller ones right?
I'm starting a new game just to test this idea, but I really think rich is spot on about the logistics not supporting the idea.
Edit: there will be 3 phases to the experiment, the first is simple enough, 2 sets of ships will be built, each fleet equivalent, but one being comprised of ships 6 times the tonnage while the other will be 6 equal ships. Each fleet shall be designed with the same total RP and as close as possible mineral requirement. The ships will be analysed and weighed up, then pitted against each other.
Phase 2 is testing the logistical effect of long term buildup for large ships vs smaller ones.
Phase 3 will repeat phase 1 but also taking into account the results of phase 2.
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Commendable, but I'm not sure how applicable this is - I probably wouldn't simply scale my designs up or down.
If going for larger ships, I'd invest more tonnage into passive protction, possibly electronic warfare AND CIWS.
Tactical benefits of smaller ships - e.g. smaller sensor footprint and ways to exploit it, ability to surround and corner faster targets - are hard to standardise.
Similar for the logistics aspects (value of easily splitting your fleet. Relying on the jump gate network vs. jump ships would make a huge difference; similar for designed maintenance life)..
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For the record re-increased armour protection you should look at the Italian Conte di Cavour and Andrea Doria Battleship classes. They were rebuilt into what amounted to totally new ships including upgraded armour protection. Even the RN Queen Elizabeth class had additional deck armour added and the Hood's armour was due to be upgraded had the war not intervened.
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@alex_brunius .
You are confusing things. 2 ships will require more armor space, than one ship with all their content, all other maintenance related stats are either the same or infavor of the large ship. And there is absolutely no difference in cost of designing the same components. See this thread. http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8244.msg85811
Actually it's you that are confusing things.
If you double the size of the ship you don't get any free armor, you just need less columns to cover all components with same thickness!
A consequence of this is that each component also gets protected by less actual armor boxes, and that you get less total boxes of armor that can absorb hits, unless you also make the armor thicker.
If my ship of size A have lets say 20 columns of 4 thickness armor ( 80 boxes ) and I make it size 2*A it now needs just 32 columns. This means that instead of 160 boxes to make it thickness 4, it just needs 128.
However that does not mean the ship can absorb twice as much punishment as two small ships! It still has the same thickness of armor, so the same weapon can get through it, and if it's hit by 2x as heavy fire it will be destroyed quicker since the fire becomes 60% more concentrated ( less then 2x as many armor columns so much bigger chance for 2 shots to hit the same place then if fire was spread equally on the two small ships ).
What I am saying is that if you want to keep at least twice as good protection on a twice as big ship 128 armor boxes is not good enough, you need to increase its thickness to 5 to match the combined amount of armor boxes on the 2 smaller ships ( 160 ), and this also means that the 2x bigger ship now has exactly 2x as much armor tonnage!
And please stop claiming maintenance of large ship is the same as small ones. You need absolutely massive maintenance facilities and shipyards with many millions of workers on your planets to support massive ships. This is a huge extra cost for huge ships.
Claiming large ships have the same maintenance, support and logistics needs as small just makes you look silly. This game is not all about the ship stats.
If this game had multiplayer and you could play competitively it's easy to prove how useless big ships are. The player aiming for small ships can quickly build up and refit his shipyards and has cranked out 50 ships and 10 times as much tonnage by the time the big shipyard has launched the first ship. And from there it becomes worse because now a new level of techs has been researched, and the player with big ships can either stick building obsolete stuff or send the only huge shipyard back to re-tooling for years, while the player with small ships can retool quickly and happily keep pumping out larger volumes of upgraded ships that hit the battlefield faster and with more tonnage.
And randomness also favors the smaller ships. All it takes is one unlucky hit and the big ship goes boom, while with 50+ small ships they are expendable, and magazine explosions change little or nothing since the ships are often lost on first salvo when under fire by bigger guns anyways.
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I saw that thread, but decided not to mention it in my original post. It's not quite the point I was trying to make. Upgrading my destroyers when I discover advanced lasers shouldn't require a totally separate shipyard either. Two ships where everything is the same size, shape, and general type (and which in real life would undoubtedly be built on the same hull) should be buildable at the same shipyard without the use of exploits like that. (I don't use exploit in a derogatory sense. It works, but it doesn't make sense.)
I see it as setting up the facilities to build the components needed. So really easy to just swap out the turret but not quite as easy to make them on site (or having a number of factories retooled for the task, same thing really).
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For the record re-increased armour protection you should look at the Italian Conte di Cavour and Andrea Doria Battleship classes. They were rebuilt into what amounted to totally new ships including upgraded armour protection. Even the RN Queen Elizabeth class had additional deck armour added and the Hood's armour was due to be upgraded had the war not intervened.
Also, pretty much all old Japanese battleships (and former battlecruisers rebuilt as fast battleships) leading up to WW2.
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Well heres my initial very basic research, as expected there is no advantage to merely multiplying a ships systems to make a bigger ship. Obviously however a larger ship can do away with redundant systems to become cheaper, but then you're changing a variable, the smaller equal fleet has this redundancy and getting rid of it is a risk that the smaller fleet can take too, therefore it's not really an advantage. What I'm truely interested in is the effect persuing large ship sizes has on a empire.
Here's what I have, it's an attempt to replicate the first ship design in Sublight's battle for Barnards star.
Amon class Cruiser 11,050 tons 283 Crew 2057.76 BP TCS 221 TH 352.5 EM 0
2126 km/s Armour 2-44 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/55/0/0 Damage Control Rating 5 PPV 70
Maint Life 2.04 Years MSP 582 AFR 195% IFR 2.7% 1YR 187 5YR 2805 Max Repair 315 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months Spare Berths 0
Magazine 814
235.2 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (2) Power 235.2 Fuel Use 58.29% Signature 176.4 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 500,000 Litres Range 14.0 billion km (76 days at full power)
Size 12 Missile Launcher (50% Reduction) (10) Missile Size 12 Rate of Fire 600
Size 5 Missile Launcher (2) Missile Size 5 Rate of Fire 50
Missile Fire Control FC84-R6 (2) Range 84.9m km Resolution 6
Missile Fire Control FC300-R75 (2) Range 300.1m km Resolution 75
Torpedo (42) Speed: 27,600 km/s End: 52.7m Range: 87.2m km WH: 9 Size: 5 TH: 138/82/41
Delivery Van (50) Speed: 10,800 km/s End: 454.4m Range: 304.5m km WH: 0 Size: 12 TH: 36/21/10
Active Search Sensor MR300-R75 (1) GPS 23625 Range 300.1m km Resolution 75
EM Detection Sensor EM5-55 (1) Sensitivity 55 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 55m km
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposesRP required for ship systems is 10634, 300,000 research points were already spent to reach magneto plasma level.
This next design is simply the same ship with 6 times as many systems.
Amon - x6 class Cruiser 66,150 tons 1667 Crew 12339.76 BP TCS 1323 TH 2116.5 EM 0
2133 km/s Armour 4-145 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/55/0/0 Damage Control Rating 30 PPV 420
Maint Life 2.03 Years MSP 3498 AFR 1166% IFR 16.2% 1YR 1135 5YR 17019 Max Repair 315 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months Spare Berths 0
Magazine 4884
235.2 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (12) Power 235.2 Fuel Use 58.29% Signature 176.4 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 3,000,000 Litres Range 14.0 billion km (75 days at full power)
Size 12 Missile Launcher (50% Reduction) (60) Missile Size 12 Rate of Fire 600
Size 5 Missile Launcher (12) Missile Size 5 Rate of Fire 50
Missile Fire Control FC84-R6 (12) Range 84.9m km Resolution 6
Missile Fire Control FC300-R75 (12) Range 300.1m km Resolution 75
Torpedo (252) Speed: 27,600 km/s End: 52.7m Range: 87.2m km WH: 9 Size: 5 TH: 138/82/41
Delivery Van (302) Speed: 10,800 km/s End: 454.4m Range: 304.5m km WH: 0 Size: 12 TH: 36/21/10
Active Search Sensor MR300-R75 (6) GPS 23625 Range 300.1m km Resolution 75
EM Detection Sensor EM5-55 (6) Sensitivity 55 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 55m km
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposesIgnoring for a second the unneeded redundant systems, you'll notice this ship has 4 armour levels rather than 2, the Standard Amon has 88 armour, to have an equivalent 6 times the total would be 528 armour, which isn't quite reachable, level 4 gives this ship slightly more at 583. the cost is 12339.76 BP vs the others 2057.76 BP, which is 5.996 times the cost, very slightly cheaper. Now again 6 times larger:
Amon - x36 class Cruiser 395,650 tons 9982 Crew 73852.1598 BP TCS 7913 TH 12700.5 EM 0
2140 km/s Armour 7-480 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/55/0/0 Damage Control Rating 181 PPV 2520
Maint Life 2.04 Years MSP 21116 AFR 6918% IFR 96.1% 1YR 6741 5YR 101117 Max Repair 315 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months Spare Berths 0
Magazine 29304
235.2 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (72) Power 235.2 Fuel Use 58.29% Signature 176.4 Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 18,000,000 Litres Range 14.0 billion km (75 days at full power)
Size 12 Missile Launcher (50% Reduction) (360) Missile Size 12 Rate of Fire 600
Size 5 Missile Launcher (72) Missile Size 5 Rate of Fire 50
Missile Fire Control FC84-R6 (72) Range 84.9m km Resolution 6
Missile Fire Control FC300-R75 (72) Range 300.1m km Resolution 75
Torpedo (1512) Speed: 27,600 km/s End: 52.7m Range: 87.2m km WH: 9 Size: 5 TH: 138/82/41
Delivery Van (1812) Speed: 10,800 km/s End: 454.4m Range: 304.5m km WH: 0 Size: 12 TH: 36/21/10
Active Search Sensor MR300-R75 (36) GPS 23625 Range 300.1m km Resolution 75
EM Detection Sensor EM5-55 (36) Sensitivity 55 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 55m km
Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s
This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
Again this is almost 6 times as expensive, 5.98 times in fact, and has slightly less than 6 times the total armour, this time with 7 levels. It's obvious theres no clear advantage to the increasingly larger ships, speed, fuel use, armour, cost are almost exactly the same, only when you sacrifice redundancy and prune down the extra sensors or lower the armour, or maybe spend more research points on larger engines, then there's an advantage.
How well do the ships compare in combat though?
Oddly enough if I spawn a shipyard just large enough to construct each ship the construction time is as follows:
Amon: 54 months, Amonx6: 74 months, Amonx36: 78 months.
I just found a bug with shipyard build rate, construction time goes up as total shipyard size goes up, spawning a large shipyard slows down construction of all ships across every shipyard, I'm pretty sure that shouldn't happen.
If this is intended then it's a massive handicap for large ship construction, give me a few minutes to test it.
Edit: After deleting all shipyards and just creating a single yard for each class the build time is now as follows:
Amon: 1 slipway = 38 months, 36 slipways = 47 months.
Amonx6: 1 slipway = 64 months, 6 slipways = 47.5 months.
Amonx36 1 slipway = 68 months
Edit: Once you reach 127,000 naval tons total build rate starts going down across every shipyard.
You lose about 10% build rate for every increase of 127,000 tons of naval, and approxximately 1,270,000 commercial.
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However that does not mean the ship can absorb twice as much punishment as two small ships! It still has the same thickness of armor, so the same weapon can get through it, and if it's hit by 2x as heavy fire it will be destroyed quicker since the fire becomes 60% more concentrated ( less then 2x as many armor columns so much bigger chance for 2 shots to hit the same place then if fire was spread equally on the two small ships ).
However, damage is usually spread out more across the hull. While, yes it has the same thickness, the rng will spread that damage out. While the small ships have more armor overall, they will both start taking internal damage before the large ship. I have tested this out quite a bit. One of my posts in the 'whats going on in your battlefield' showed the results of building a big scout ship that encountered an enemy, getting all of its armor striped off from battle, yet it only took 1 - 2 hits of internal.
And please stop claiming maintenance of large ship is the same as small ones. You need absolutely massive maintenance facilities and shipyards with many millions of workers on your planets to support massive ships. This is a huge extra cost for huge ships.
Claiming large ships have the same maintenance, support and logistics needs as small just makes you look silly. This game is not all about the ship stats.
While yes, they do need a lot more maintenance facilities to maintain them, it usually doesn't take that long or costs that much to build them up enough.
If this game had multiplayer and you could play competitively it's easy to prove how useless big ships are. The player aiming for small ships can quickly build up and refit his shipyards and has cranked out 50 ships and 10 times as much tonnage by the time the big shipyard has launched the first ship. And from there it becomes worse because now a new level of techs has been researched, and the player with big ships can either stick building obsolete stuff or send the only huge shipyard back to re-tooling for years, while the player with small ships can retool quickly and happily keep pumping out larger volumes of upgraded ships that hit the battlefield faster and with more tonnage.
True, however it is also true that in Supreme Commander FAF a t1 bot spam will usually overrun an enemy and destroy them in the first few minutes.
And randomness also favors the smaller ships. All it takes is one unlucky hit and the big ship goes boom, while with 50+ small ships they are expendable, and magazine explosions change little or nothing since the ships are often lost on first salvo when under fire by bigger guns anyways.
Incorrect. I've actually had filled missile racks and p-gens go boom in the middle of a fight in some of my large ships. To something big, it hardly notices them. They have thousands of internal HP so they can take quite a bit of internal punishment from their own components that go boom.
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@Rich.h. Modern militaries commonly employ major designs, which go through modifications over its service life, and eventually are supplanted by a future, vastly different design. This suggestion is natural extension of Aurora upgrade system that tries to take that in to account. Our upgrade system include three elements:
- The first are the "basic/core" components which has no upgrades or will upgrade immediately when the background tech is researched, with no cost, and no requirement to go to port. I imagine those as things can be handled by the crew like software updates or things made available with basic maintenance supplies. (unchanged)
- The second are "design" components these need to be designed, prototyped and installed when the ship is in port. Limited internal system upgrades can affected in the original slipway, cost considerably less than building a new ship, but take more time. I imagine those as modular compartments replacement install a higher res radar, outfit a turret, etc (unchanged)
- The last is hull armor retrofit which is a fundamental change to the ship structure, not a paint job. These should be a substantial undertaking that cost resources based on the size of the project.(changed)
Right now with miniaturization, ever expanding shipyard capacity, and no diminishing returns to building bigger (Which I suspect that NPR generation don't take into account) its a system with only upsides that doesn't encourage verity. Also you can keep retrofitting the same ship from "wood" to super duper technobuble tech over the course of centuries.
This suggestion offer the same, but offer more options by making smaller ship more economically viable long term. Its realistic, its great from RP stand point (older capitals with newer escorts), and most of all for you its non-intrusive i.e. Since hull armor retrofit aren't that common, this sort of ship upgrade system would have a single design live for quite a long time; Unlike overhauls, it requires no endless micromanagement; and it offers no hard limits, only little thinking and planing. So your emperor can still build his megalomaniac projects and upgrade, at a cost.
p.s. Sorry had no time to read all the post since, or make more than this quick reply. Hopefully I didn't miss anything.
Edited.
Btw, people please don't forget its not about the economical constraints of big fleets, but whether a person with the same industrial capacity is better investing resources in either building 400kt shipyards\ships or twice as many 200kt shipyards\ships, for example.
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To give a quick example of the maintenance argument here are the figures using those three ships posted above.
1. The 11kt ship needs 55 facilities costing.
8250BP
4125 Duranium/Nutronium
2.5m workers
2. The 66kt ship needs
49500BP
24750 Duranium/Nutronium
15m workers
3. The 396kt ship needs
297000BP
148500 Duranium/Nutronium
90m workers
If you were to assume a mid level construction rate of 30 then to build enough maintenance in a the two years it takes to build as the above design example for those ships you need the following number of construction factories on a planet.
138 & 6.9m workers
825 & 41m workers
4950 & 240m workers
Also consider the mineral needs to build the final amount of maintenance facilities is pretty much the entire contents of a good comet.
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It takes about 25 years to expand a yard large enough for that ship, and 48,000 neutronium and duranium to upgrade it.
The yard itself requires 41 million people to run too.
Of course a yard with smaller slipways but equal total tonnage costs exactly the same to build and run, but ships built from that will be made slightly faster.
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For the record re-increased armour protection you should look at the Italian Conte di Cavour and Andrea Doria Battleship classes. They were rebuilt into what amounted to totally new ships including upgraded armour protection. Even the RN Queen Elizabeth class had additional deck armour added and the Hood's armour was due to be upgraded had the war not intervened.
The same was done to some of the USN battleships during the 20s. However, that armor was non-structural, and doing so was very expensive. Which is why it wasn't done more. They were rebuilding ships because they weren't allowed to build new ones, not because it was the best solution overall.
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The same was done to some of the USN battleships during the 20s. However, that armor was non-structural, and doing so was very expensive. Which is why it wasn't done more. They were rebuilding ships because they weren't allowed to build new ones, not because it was the best solution overall.
This is very correct. Under the Naval accords they could not build new ships, so they rebuilt old ones. If they could build and replace they would of built and replace.
Due to the increased flexibility of smaller ships, other then the RP or sheer giggles of having a deathstar floating around to devastate worlds, you are generally better off IMO (Which is not that great in this game) to have a fleet of smaller ships, as if anything, you are not tethered to one yard for building and maintenance. Also, if you can build 2 big ships, or 20 smaller ships, and in combat by missles or mesons you have 10% damage. In the 20 ship fleet you will have more then one spot to do repairs, even if you lost your fleet ships they will be quicker to be replaced and still have 90% of your fleet in operation. If one of your big ships gets damaged, you have to deal with it by shipping it far away, and while it being repaired for 10% damage (assuming you have a yard big enough open to fix it) you have 50% of your fleet not in operation.
Also putting too many eggs in a few ships means that if you have issues in more then one spot your super-deathstar can't be there in one time and you can lose hole systems, while a smaller ship navy can at least hold the line till reinforcements come.
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This is very correct. Under the Naval accords they could not build new ships, so they rebuilt old ones. If they could build and replace they would of built and replace.
As far as I know that treaty came about because it was bloody expensive to build new ships. And the treaty did not say that you could not build new ships, only how many and how big. Now this had a couple of things to do with the arms race that was going on at the time that none really wanted to pay for, but that was more of navies expanding rather then replacing. And you dont really build a big bb just to throw it away a couple of years later, they are way to expensive for that.
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As far as I know that treaty came about because it was bloody expensive to build new ships.
That, and the popular perception that the naval arms race contributed to the start of WWI. Nobody wanted to have a building race, which seemed to be forming before the WNT was signed.
And the treaty did not say that you could not build new ships, only how many and how big.
Uhh....
It did say you couldn't build new battleships. Thus, if you wanted better battleships, you had to make them out of your old ones. Nobody did big refits on other types of ships, because there was no point in doing so. It was better to throw the old ones away and build new ones.
Now this had a couple of things to do with the arms race that was going on at the time that none really wanted to pay for, but that was more of navies expanding rather then replacing. And you dont really build a big bb just to throw it away a couple of years later, they are way to expensive for that.
Not really. The service life of a warship was a lot shorter back then. The early dreadnoughts were worn out by the end of the war, and they were maybe 15 years old. They'd have been headed into reserve anyway, if the treaty hadn't sent them to the scrapyard instead. For another example, take the flush-deckers. The ones that survived into WWII were about 20 years old, and had pretty much all spent significant time in reserve. The ones that didn't spend time in reserve had been scrapped because they were worn out. It's often cheaper in the long run to build a new ship than to upgrade an existing one (something politicians today have trouble understanding), but it was the way of things back then. Also, design art was evolving a lot faster back then than it is today, which meant that ships became functionally obsolete much more quickly.
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Uhh....
It did say you couldn't build new battleships. Thus, if you wanted better battleships, you had to make them out of your old ones. Nobody did big refits on other types of ships, because there was no point in doing so. It was better to throw the old ones away and build new ones.
It said nothing about building new battle ships (and note that I separate battle ship from battleships). The WNT only limited how many/big/armed and total displacement of capital ships you could have. You were completely free to build new ones if you wanted as long as you removed the old ones. Also the WNT said nothing (apart from individual size of the ship) about battle ships that were not capital ships. The London NT 1 and 2 later placed restrictions on cruisers, destroyers and submarines as well and those restrictions were similar to the ones above (aka size, armament and total displacement of the fleet). Nowhere does it say anything about not building new ships...........................
And I am of the opinion that most of the warships that got decommissioned (and sold for scrap) after ww1 was so because states needed money in a really bad way, not because they were worn out. Obsolete I might agree on, depending on what ship we are talking about, but not worn out. I mean, lets take Dreadnought herself as an example. Commissioned in 1906, decommissioned 1919. During this time she was refit (at least) twice (and do note that this was before the treaty), the last time started just before the end of the war (and just before being decommissioned) when, imo, the UK government realised they needed cash badly and sold here for scrap. I have a hard time believing that she was "worn out" by that time. Fun fact, she is the only battleship to take out a submarine and she did it by ramming ;)
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It said nothing about building new battle ships (and note that I separate battle ship from battleships). The WNT only limited how many/big/armed and total displacement of capital ships you could have. You were completely free to build new ones if you wanted as long as you removed the old ones. Also the WNT said nothing (apart from individual size of the ship) about battle ships that were not capital ships. The London NT 1 and 2 later placed restrictions on cruisers, destroyers and submarines as well and those restrictions were similar to the ones above (aka size, armament and total displacement of the fleet). Nowhere does it say anything about not building new ships...........................
From Part 3, Section I:
(a) Capital ships and aircraft carriers twenty years after the date of their completion may, except as otherwise provided in Article VIII and in the tables in Section II of this Part, be replaced by new construction, but within the limits prescribed in Article IV and Article VII. The keels of such new construction may, except as otherwise provided in Article VIII and in the tables in Section II of this Part, be laid down not earlier than seventeen years from the date of completion of the tonnage to be replaced, provided, however, that no capital ship tonnage, with the exception of the ships referred to in the third paragraph of Article II, and the replacement tonnage specifically mentioned in Section II of this Part, shall be laid down until ten years from November 12, 1921.
The 10-year holiday (later extended 5 years by the London Naval Treaty) is mentioned in every work on the subject I've ever read.
And I am of the opinion that most of the warships that got decommissioned (and sold for scrap) after ww1 was so because states needed money in a really bad way, not because they were worn out. Obsolete I might agree on, depending on what ship we are talking about, but not worn out. I mean, lets take Dreadnought herself as an example. Commissioned in 1906, decommissioned 1919. During this time she was refit (at least) twice (and do note that this was before the treaty), the last time started just before the end of the war (and just before being decommissioned) when, imo, the UK government realised they needed cash badly and sold here for scrap. I have a hard time believing that she was "worn out" by that time.
Reliable sources on this say differently. The British fleet had been worked very hard during the war. The USN was in slightly better shape, but there was a reason why almost all of the retained battleships had their machinery replaced. It was just not possible at the time to make a machinery plant that would last more than 15-20 years. And real-world refits don't work like they do in Aurora. No matter how often you refit, ships still age.
Fun fact, she is the only battleship to take out a submarine and she did it by ramming ;)
Yes, I was aware of that. I am also aware of the Bunga Bunga plot where a bunch of fake "Abyssinians" got aboard.
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As far as I know that treaty came about because it was bloody expensive to build new ships. And the treaty did not say that you could not build new ships, only how many and how big. Now this had a couple of things to do with the arms race that was going on at the time that none really wanted to pay for, but that was more of navies expanding rather then replacing. And you dont really build a big bb just to throw it away a couple of years later, they are way to expensive for that.
Actually there was a 10 year Moratorium on new construction on battleships. Sub 10,000 ton cruisers were not restricted. There was some leeway to replace older ships that were X years old, but most of those were scrapped as part of the fleet reductions.
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From Part 3, Section I:The 10-year holiday (later extended 5 years by the London Naval Treaty) is mentioned in every work on the subject I've ever read.
Bha, one should not check sources late at night. I specificity remembered (and checked) that states built ships in the period but missed that those were covered in the treaty as exceptions. Still only applies to capital ships though (yes those others were covered as well in the London treaty some 8 years later).
Reliable sources on this say differently. The British fleet had been worked very hard during the war. The USN was in slightly better shape, but there was a reason why almost all of the retained battleships had their machinery replaced. It was just not possible at the time to make a machinery plant that would last more than 15-20 years. And real-world refits don't work like they do in Aurora
Thus the imo. And of course ships and material age. That said, you dont go out and buy a new car just because the radiator is broke. Now yes, there is a bit of a difference between ripping out the boilers of a bb and changing the radiator, but as long as the overall design is not obsolete (as one could argue that for example the Dreadnought class was) it is still far cheaper then building a whole new ship.
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Bha, one should not check sources late at night. I specificity remembered (and checked) that states built ships in the period but missed that those were covered in the treaty as exceptions. Still only applies to capital ships though (yes those others were covered as well in the London treaty some 8 years later).
It happens. And I'm also aware of the London Treaty. (First and (aborted) second.)
Thus the imo. And of course ships and material age. That said, you dont go out and buy a new car just because the radiator is broke. Now yes, there is a bit of a difference between ripping out the boilers of a bb and changing the radiator, but as long as the overall design is not obsolete (as one could argue that for example the Dreadnought class was) it is still far cheaper then building a whole new ship.
Not as much as you'd think. Changing boilers is a very expensive operation, particularly when it involves cutting open deck armor. I'll have to see if I can find figures for cost on the refits of the Standards. Also, ships do become obsolete. Dreadnought had thin armor, small guns, and a really terrible gun layout. Few of the ships with guns smaller than 14 inches survived the treaty, and I strongly suspect that the battleships which did survive wouldn't have if they'd been able to be replaced by more modern ships.
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Edit: After deleting all shipyards and just creating a single yard for each class the build time is now as follows:
Amon: 1 slipway = 38 months, 36 slipways = 47 months.
Amonx6: 1 slipway = 64 months, 6 slipways = 47.5 months.
Amonx36 1 slipway = 68 months
Edit: Once you reach 127,000 naval tons total build rate starts going down across every shipyard.
You lose about 10% build rate for every increase of 127,000 tons of naval, and approxximately 1,270,000 commercial.
You...
I'm pretty sure this is not a bug. Most likely cause in this situation: You do not have enough workers to man the shipyards.
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You're absolutely correct.