A reason not to build huge ships

[Mor (OP)]

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 This way will see more outdated capital ships and larger reliance on more economical support vessels.

[alex_brunius]

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.

[Iranon]

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.

[alex_brunius]

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.

[Mor (OP)]

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...

[alex_brunius]

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 )

[Mor (OP)]

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.

[AL]

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.

[Mastik]

Please stop telling us how to play the game.  You dont like big ships, fine dont build them. 

[Rich.h]

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?

[Mor (OP)]

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....

[Gabethebaldandbold]

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

[Rich.h]

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.

[83athom]

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.

[Mor (OP)]

@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..