| base engine rating 5 8 12 16 20 25 32 40 50 60 80 100 | (5hs) ship engine output 25 40 60 80 100 125 160 200 250 300 400 500 | ship speed with 25% mass to engine 1250 2000 3000 4000 5000 6250 8000 10000 12500 15000 20000 25000 | (5hs) FAC engine output 50 80 120 160 200 250 320 400 500 600 800 1000 | 1000t (20hs) FAC Speed 2500 4000 6000 8000 10000 12500 16000 20000 25000 30000 40000 50000 | (1hs) Fighter engine output 15 24 36 48 60 75 96 120 150 180 240 300 | 500t (10hs) fighter speed 1500 2400 3600 4800 6000 7500 9600 12000 15000 18000 24000 30000 | base missile engine rating 1.25 2 3 4 5 6.25 8 10 12.5 15 20 25 | Max missile speed with 50% mass to engine 12500 20000 30000 40000 50000 62500 80000 100000 125000 150000 200000 250000 |
| Current fire control speeds |
| baseline 1,250 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,250 8,000 10,000 12,500 15,000 20,000 25,000 | 4x 5,000 8,000 12,000 16,000 20,000 25,000 32,000 40,000 50,000 60,000 80,000 100,000 |
| Current Proposed |
| baseline 10,000 16,000 24,000 32,000 40,000 48,000 60,000 75,000 100,000 125,000 150,000 175,000 | 4x 40,000 64,000 96,000 128,000 160,000 192,000 240,000 300,000 400,000 500,000 600,000 700,000 | | baseline 3,750 10,000 22,500 50,000 100,000 180,000 280,000 400,000 720,000 1,200,000 1,760,000 2,520,000 | 4x 15,000 40,000 90,000 200,000 400,000 720,000 1,120,000 1,600,000 2,880,000 4,800,000 7,040,000 10,080,000 |
A couple of thoughts on your proposals.
1.) Moving the fighter engine multiplier. You used the 10hs fighter as your baseline, most fighters I have seen were in the 5-6hs area. At that size fighters have a good turn of speed, and they are not all powerfull. You have to make some significant design choices and that is something that I think that Steve wants.
2.) As for changing the tracking speed for turrets there is one thing that helps keep the turret size down. The reasearch cost for a given turret tracking speed is 1 step lower than for the same fire control tracking speed. For me that means that my turret tracking speed tends to be higher than my fire control tracking speed. For many turrets the hull space penalty is more like 32% than 40%. This is still significant, but turrets are a large mass penalty item in real life. As for the fighter part of the idea, I rarely use turrets for gauss cannon on fighters, not because of the mass needed, but because such fighters tend to be small and fast already with there own speed aproaching the x3-x4 base tracking speed. This effectivly makes turrets unnessasary for fighters.
3.) The weapon tracking beyond the light speed barrier has been discussed before, and Steve has considered this. I never got the feeling that he was convinced one way or the other so it is probably a good time to bring this up again.This last one was mainly to restart the discussion around beam ranges.
Brian
I don't like the beam range suggestion for two reasons:
- Lasers are popular enough already. Allowing beams to fire beyond 1400k km would give lasers an even greater advantage over the other weapon types. To stay competitive, particle beams would need vastly increased range, either by improving existing tech levels (giving them a huge advantage early on) or adding further tech levels (requiring several orders of magnitude more research, or tweaking RP costs -- not necessarily a bad thing). Railguns would desperately need better velocity tech. As is, they only get a x9 range multiplier compared to the laser/meson/microwave x12. Plasma Carronades would become little more than a joke. Gauss Cannons would be unaffected since they're only useful for PD, really. It'd technically still hurt them since offensive gauss ships would spend more time outside their own range but within the enemy's kill zone (since hit % is determined by actual range relative to max FC range).
QuoteA couple of things to think about. Plasma Caronades are already a joke as far as range goes. By even a few tech levels of research they are horribly short range. Their advantage is that they are DIRT cheap compared to lasers. Both for research and to build. Railguns are another cheap weapon system. They are not really supposed to compete against the other beam weapons at high tech. They are significantly cheaper to research than lasers at the mid to upper levels and they are more damaging in close. Large railguns are also fairly long range. A 50cm rangex9 has a max range of 1.8m km and has a faster rate of fire than the 50cm laser does. Rp cost difference is 495000 rp vs 505000 rp, and the railgun has an extra size in there that the laser does not. (45cm) Also the max damage for the laser is 64 points and the railgun is 80. The railgun will still have a place if the ranges are doubled, maybe even if they are trippled. Your point about the particle beam is however valid, and if the ranges are increased then they need to have longer ranges. Probably more at higher tech but that is a different discussion.
Brian[/list]
That would in turn make beam weapons that cannot be turreted pretty much obsolete.
To be honest, I don't know why more weapons can't be turreted.The weapons that can not be turreted currently are Railguns, Particle beams, and plasma caronades. Of these systems the railgun should not be turreted. If it was then it would become the single best pd weapon, even better than the gauss cannon as two 10cm railguns get 8 shots and only the highest tech gauss cannon could get more than that. Plasma carronades could be turreted without any real effect in game terms as they are effectivly short range lasers. Particle beams are the only beam weapon where turreting would make for an interesting choice. Their long range could be used as an outer intercept zone against incomming missiles or small craft. The trade-off of course would be less of them on board a ship. Particle beams are also fairly massive as compared to equal tech lasers or mesons. The smalles size particle beam (pb) is 5hs where a 10cm laser is only 3hs in size. Personally I think it is more of a flavor choice of Steve's. Weapons that are basically for shooting at enemy ships are not turreted. Those that seem to be more dual purpose or point defense nature are turreted.
Gauss Cannon were introduced much later and I had not until recently looked into why they so much larger in quad turret mounts than the others. I have a real problem the best point defense weapon needs 60% for tracking gears and weapons intended for ship-to-ship only need 40% to fill the same role. That's a balance issue.Are you sure about this? I have never noticed that Gauss cannons require a larger percentage of their size allocated to turret gearing. They're larger than most other turreted weapons, sure, but percentage wise I thought everything worked the same. There's the rounding problem, yes, but that just means you pick the mount multiple that rounds the best and work with that. I can't understand how you're getting from 40% to 60% turret gear for the same tracking speed with two different weapons.
Of these systems the railgun should not be turreted. If it was then it would become the single best pd weapon, even better than the gauss cannon as two 10cm railguns get 8 shots and only the highest tech gauss cannon could get more than that.
Are you sure about this? I have never noticed that Gauss cannons require a larger percentage of their size allocated to turret gearing. They're larger than most other turreted weapons, sure, but percentage wise I thought everything worked the same. There's the rounding problem, yes, but that just means you pick the mount multiple that rounds the best and work with that. I can't understand how you're getting from 40% to 60% turret gear for the same tracking speed with two different weapons.
One thing I would like to see is turrets not round to the nearest HS. We have plenty of other components that work on the 0.5, 0.1 and even 0.05 scales (although that's just one slightly odd component of size 0.25). If turrets rounded to the nearest 0.1 HS, the rounding problem is essentially a non-issue.
Laser Meson Gauss | beam hs 3 3 6 | # beams 4 4 4 | subtotal beam hs 12 12 24 | 10% 2 2 3 | turret base speed 1250 1250 1250 | turret speed 5000 5000 5000 | turret hs multiplier 4 4 4 | total gear hs 8 8 12 | gear % of beam hs 67% 67% 50% | total turret hs 20 20 36 |
I think we can all agree that a rounding function should not play such a large role in ship design decisions - I know I base all my turrets on the most advantageous rounding situation, and that's kinda odd. I would very much like to see 0.1HS rounding on turrets, that would be awesome and save a lot of headaches!I often add a little extra tracking speed to my turrets to get them to the next full hull space. Sometimes this is not much, but early in the game I find it is often around 1/2 way to the next tech tracking speed. This way the ships the turrets are mounted on can have a fairly small upgrade of just the fire control and this will allow for an upgraded tracking speed. While not as good as replacing the turrets also, it is usually doable in a short time frame, and does not cost as much. In addition the extra tracking speed on the turret is a fairly small increase in the cost wheras replacing the entire turret is much more expensive. This has been my way around the rounding issue.
In addition to an all around failure rate increase, we could have a failure rate penalty for multiple engines. Say two small engines on a ship gives both of them a 20% increased failure chance, etc etc. I'd probably cap that value though, say a five-fold failure rate at ten engines or more.
Heck, if you wanted to you could also give a single exploding engine a bonus chance to spread to other engines.
My two cents:Maybe instead of a better chance for the engine to explode with damage, up the maintenance cost of the engine above the actual cost of the engine. This would have little effect on fighters as they are going to be in hangers a lot and their base failure rate is so low. For bigger ships using these engines it makes them very short ranged in general time wise as well as fuel wise. Currently it is not a problem to put small ships on sentry duty near jump points if they have good mainenance on board. If the engines take up a significantly larger portion then they will not be able to stay on station anywhere near as long, or they will have to put more tonnage into maintenance suplies which detracts from their combat ability.
>>>snip<<<
What I would do it increase the failure rate of the smaller engines. It should bother the existing ships too much, because they aren't high endurance craft anyways. Fighters especially spend most of their time in hangars without increasing their maintenance clock.
the code to calculate the % should only round nearest whole hs (minimum 1hs) not roundup.
If we stick with the concept that trans-newtonian particles are limited to Einstienian physics for speed then the suggestion is moot.
If I understood your explanation earlier, the rounding is done for every weapon added to the turret. Perhaps only the final turret size should be rounded? Every weapon would still have additional mass, but the rounding would add at most 1 hs instead of 4.
With the sole exception of hyperdrives (technically also sensors and communication), motion in Aurora is limited by light speed. Also, most beam weapons (exception: the unspecified Particle Beam) use ordinary non-TN particles like photons, mesons, presumably ordinary plasma, and metal slugs for rail/gauss. Those slugs are assumed non-TN because otherwise they'd probably have a mineral ammunition/firing cost and might ignore atmosphere (the latter because ships already ignore it :P).
| Laser Partical Beam Meson Cannon Railgun Plasma Carronade High Powered Microwave Gauss Cannon | 20,160,000 1,200,000 10,080,000 1,800,000 1,680,000 10,080,000 60,000 |
Besides, your suggestion would greatly penalize large ships, and I don't see the need to only apply a penalty to GB/FTR engines, either, since they're already more than balanced by fuel usage IMO.
Sorry, I meant that this maintenance penalty would only apply to fighter/FAC engines, military and commercial engines would be unaffected.
It's possible that the fuel usage already balances them, but I don't know. Since Steve hardcoded in a single one of those engines per craft it's possible that he didn't think multiple ones would be balanced, which is why I'm trying to come up with alternate ideas that would penalize a large ship with a bunch of fighter engines.
Jumping in here around fighter weapon size, I think steve made the mistake that reload factor is the thing impacted by reducing the size of the gun, what should of happened is the range and accuracy should of been reduced. The reload factor should have no bearing on reducing the size of the gun for firing, perhaps even damage down 1 point.A couple of thoughts in response. Your analogy to shortening the barrel of a gun is not what is going on here. Missiles fly at the speed the missile has and the launch platform makes no difference. The size of the launcher is more about the mechanism for moving the missile from the magazine. The larger the missile the more space it takes internally, and the more you need to do to get it to the launcher quickly. The miniturization is more about reducing the mechanisms that move the missile from the magazine to the launcher. Hence the box launcher which is only slightly larger than the missile it contains, but it has no real method of reloading it without outside help.
My other thought is manuvuerability, starships cannot rolls, zig and zag to avoid fire and missiles, I think in general fighters should be harder to hit, not just based on Speed like other starships but based on an additional maneuver bonus and also perhaps commander bonuses, I think its just as easy to hit a fighter now as it is to hit a starship travelling at the same speed.
Making a smaller version would reduce the trail or power density of that pulse of light, which would reduce damage and range.The option already exists to do this. Just use a lower calibre laser and you get less damage and less range.
Adding a normal 6cm laser could make early to mid game point defense too strong. Depending on stats they could compete with medium level gauss cannons for best point defense beam weapon.
On the agility what if fighter and gun boat engines gave the ship an agility rating. It could either reduce the hit percent like ecm does to beam weapons but for all weapons or be a multiplier to the speed in the chance to hit formula.
I think agility/maneuvering is already implied in the "speed makes you hard to hit" calculation. If gunboats/fighters need an extra dodge bonus (and IMO they don't), their size should be the reason. Maybe add an accuracy penalty against ships below a certain size? That size could be, say, 10-20% of the firing ship's size. But then specialized anti-fighter turrets/fire controls (you know, with high tracking speed) would perform poorly. This would also make PD horrible, since missiles are in some sense tiny ships (20 MSP = 1 HS).
Personally, I'm satisfied with the way it's handled now. Fire controls with high tracking speed are heavier and probably don't have the same range (since range and speed scale independently, and you probably don't want 16 HS fire controls). Your tracking speed is the minimum of your FC and your weapon. Standard weapon tracking speed is the maximum of ship speed (high for GBs/fighters) and base tracking speed tech (the FC one, not the turret one -- either way, it's poor against GBs/fighters). Turreted weapons with high tracking speed are heavy. So full size warships shooting at small craft have heavy weapons, low accuracy, or both.
The only defense a fighter needs is high speed. I like the OP's suggestions here: x5 mult instead of x3 and/or no engine limit. They make fighters more competitive against GBs speed-wise (but not firepower- or armor-wise), and heavy fighters (10 HS) become viable. GBs/fighters do not need a magic agility rating to add moar evasion. Remember: They're cheap and quick. Cheap means they shouldn't match a larger ship's firepower and durability. Quick means they're great for pursuit, harassment (hit-and-run), and keeping your larger, more expensive ships out of harm's way.
*SNIP*
I don't think its magic. I look at like the engines of some modern fighters that can change the direction of the thrust to improve agility. I agree fighters and facs should go down easier then normal ships but currently they are slow missiles with a bit of armor making them fairly easy targets for PD.
And this ("slow missiles") is the thing that you have almost zero chance of getting changed. One of Steve's core principles (which has led to some very good game effects) is trying to develop as set of "physical laws", and then pushing them to their logical conclusion. This means that GB/FTR are small ships with reduced crew requirements because they don't have to stay on station longer, and missiles are really small ships with no crew requirements because the computer can handle their limited tasks. This means GB/FTR are caught between a rock and a hard place - Steve will insist that any "hard to hit because they're agile" bonuses applied to them also be applied to missiles, and that will wreck PD. That's why there's hope of getting the single-engine requirement removed - it's breaking the "one set of physical laws for everyone".
So the trick is to figure out a way to justify why GB/FTR should get a bonus that neither ships nor missiles get. This will obviously be very difficult, since missiles are smaller/more agile than ships. Just about the only factor I can think of is that there are humans on board GB/FTR and not on missiles - if you can think of some hand-waving that will take advantage of that you might get a change through....
John
Well part of the way I look at is any counter measures I can come up with will be ineffective vs PD beams and coming up with hand waving to say why they work would be no worse then the agility. Now that may not be the greatest reason to support agility but it is a valid point imo.Your overlooking a critical point, Aurora engines are not thrust/DeltaV/interia drives so the afterburner analogy doesn't apply. Brian's point is that if an option is added for smallcraft to use agility/advanced manouvering/etc to degraded targeting them then it has to be added for all ship types for internal consistancy. This has been something that Steve, and a lot of the orginal core players, have not wanted to introduce to the game and the code.
Like you said the missile are computer controlled and for now no computer can be truly random. Given computers that can instantly process all the sensor data you would be getting I don't think it would be far fetched for them to quickly brute force the algorithm the missile is using to dodge so it mostly becomes a problem of hitting a small fast target with a bit of uncertainty on where it will go.
Also I said earlier the fighter and fac engines could be designed to improve agility. As to why missiles would not have the same engine design it could be a size issue or to keep costs down or that missiles are replaceable and humans are not. Normal ships would not use said engines to keep costs down, reduce wear and tear, and conserve fuel. As for what the designs would be to improve agility would depend on how strongly you want to stick to how the game is implemented. If you go purely by game rules the only real option I can think of is something similar to after burners that increases the ships max speed for a short burst. If you are willing to relax on the infinite acceleration that opens up the ability to improve the ships ability to change direction. Also with the one engine limit a fighter and GB engine could actually be several smaller engines setup in such a way that they improve agility. This would not be possible at the engine design level for normal engines as they are used in different numbers depending on ship requirements.
Hopefully that shows that extra agility is not that far fetched. In the end all I'm looking for is a way to make beam armed fighters/facs harder targets to kill now that they can be seen at much longer ranges by the sensors that are used for either PD or seeing normal ships.
*SNIP*
Hopefully that shows that extra agility is not that far fetched. In the end all I'm looking for is a way to make beam armed fighters/facs harder targets to kill now that they can be seen at much longer ranges by the sensors that are used for either PD or seeing normal ships.
The agility bonus is to the missile chance to hit its target. Base agility is 10% times the missile speed and compared to the target speed. If the missile is ten times as fast then it has a 100% hit chance. If it is four times as fast then it is only a 40% chance to hit, ect. Additional points put into agility give the missile a higher chance to hit. The points are however divided by the size of the missile so it is hard to get a big missile to be as agile as a small missile. An agility score of 20% would give you twice the chance to hit of an agility 10 score assuming the same speed missile. At no time does the agility bonus of a missile make it harder to hit the missile itself. It is strictly an offensive bonus not defensive.
If I recall Missile Do currently have an evasion/manuverability bonus, with the Agility score already, whereas a fighter does not have this bonus that I can see, or ability to modify this bonus, unlike missiles. The argument missile code would have to change is flawed as the code is already in for missiles.
Smaller craft like the space shuttle can be moved with thrusters faster and easier then a large ship, which creates a harder target to hit. Simple physics.Trans-Newtonian drives are inertia-less, so large craft can jink just as well as small craft. Steve made a concious design decision to abstract away jinking by assuming that fast ships are better at jinking than slow ships, with an effect proportional to the speed ratio.
Fighters have a smaller cross section, making it harder to hitFor a moment, I thought this might be a winning argument (at least for beam fire), but then I realized that it would kill point-defense beams. The problem is that a 5HS fighter is ~16x larger than a size-6 missile. Even if you throw in a power of 2/3 to take area vs. volume into account, this means that anything you do to significantly reduce the odds of a weapon hitting a fighter will completely kill the odds for that weapon hitting a missile. The same argument applies for missiles.
If I recall Missile Do currently have an evasion/manuverability bonus, with the Agility score already, whereas a fighter does not have this bonus that I can see, or ability to modify this bonus, unlike missiles. The argument missile code would have to change is flawed as the code is already in for missiles.As Brian said, this is an offensive bonus - defensive agility is considered to be already taken into account because of speed. Any change to this would probably imbalance in favor of missile agility.
On follow when it slows down the speed of the fighters is where the target enemy has the best ability to shoot down the fighter, whereas in reality it is the opposite close into the guns the fighters buzzing around are harder to hit with minimum windows of opportunity to target as it crosses the in and around the vessel.
Trans-Newtonian drives are inertia-less,
On missile my apologies, I thought they were both attacking and defensive benefits, if that is the case that rating is fairly useless as you put the same points into speed which increases the hit ratio anyway.Agility gives a significantly larger bonus to hit than increased speed does. For ASMs it is a tradeoff - hit more vs be harder to hit with AMMs. For AMMs, though, agility is great, as raw speed is less useful than to-hit chance.
3)Removing the beam fire control range 5 light second limitation and having each tech level of beam fire control range be 50% of the max range of lasers for that same tech level(beam fire control range is actually the 50% tohit range and actual max range 2x that)
2)Changing the Turret tracking speed from matching the same tech level baseline beam fire control tracking speed to matching the 4x tracking speed.As I said before: If turreting a weapon only adds about 10% to its mass, all weapons will be turreted. There will be no reason not to do so. That would be terrible for game balance and ship design diversity. This suggestion would be even worse for game balance than removing the 5 light second range cap.
On missile my apologies, I thought they were both attacking and defensive benefits, if that is the case that rating is fairly useless as you put the same points into speed which increases the hit ratio anyway.Also at higher tech levels the benifit of the agility really does get to be huge. By the 6 agility tech I am starting to see agility ratings around 40-45%. By the 10th tech it is more like 100% and still having a decent speed, warhead, and range. Like a lot of things in the game the lower tech levels have less effect but the cumulative reasearch really does make a difference.
I believe this one is in place because otherwise your weapons are firing at speeds greater than c.
As I said before: If turreting a weapon only adds about 10% to its mass, all weapons will be turreted. There will be no reason not to do so. That would be terrible for game balance and ship design diversity. This suggestion would be even worse for game balance than removing the 5 light second range cap.
A much more interesting suggestion was made up thread: Add the ship speed to the turret speed to determine total tracking. It's sensible, realistic and seems balanced. Also, rounding turrets to 0.1HS rather than 1HS. These two proposals address the same issues as your ideas, but seem less unbalancing.
Quote from: NarmioAs I said before: If turreting a weapon only adds about 10% to its mass, all weapons will be turreted. There will be no reason not to do so. That would be terrible for game balance and ship design diversity. This suggestion would be even worse for game balance than removing the 5 light second range cap.I'm not sure you understand how beam weapons tracking speed is determined. Non turreted beams have max potential of the ships speed or the baseline beam fire control speed, whichever is the greater. Turrets are the means to use the fire control speeds that are greater than baseline. With turreted weapons the lesser of either the fire control or the turret is used. Fighters have specialized fire control available that starts at the 4x the ship type fire control.
A much more interesting suggestion was made up thread: Add the ship speed to the turret speed to determine total tracking. It's sensible, realistic and seems balanced. Also, rounding turrets to 0.1HS rather than 1HS. These two proposals address the same issues as your ideas, but seem less unbalancing.
In response to your comment about how hard it is for a pure beam pd to work against missile attacks. I have done this. If you put the points that would otherwise be going into missile reasearch then you can do it. The key is to push the beam tracking speed, and to have all of your ships mount decent point defense. Either lasers, or mesons in turrets, or alternately lots of 10cm railguns. I prefer an all laser armament for this as this keeps my weapons research down to 1 track total. I even turreted my big lasers (35cm iirc) to help in thickening up the point defense. Also use shields heavily as these will recharge between salvo's. If their math is off and the use to few missiles to take a ship out then by the time they come back to shooting at you, your shields will be back to full strength. The only thing that worked against me was being either massivly outmassed, or mass salvo's from box launchers. In this case they are giving up any future attacks until they get back to a planet for one massive salvo. Even then the couple of times that this happened I was able to shoot down enough that they didn't kill many of my ships. I won't say it was an easy setup to play, but it is doable, and has its own rewards - not having to build munitions reduces the cost of my fleet in a big way.What did you do for planetary defense? Lots of orbital platforms?
I'm not sure you understand how beam weapons tracking speed is determined. Non turreted beams have max potential of the ships speed or the baseline beam fire control speed, whichever is the greater. Turrets are the means to use the fire control speeds that are greater than baseline. With turreted weapons the lesser of either the fire control or the turret is used. Fighters have specialized fire control available that starts at the 4x the ship type fire control.
I don't understand why you think Narmio's post indicates a lack of understanding of tracking speed. I believe that the point he is trying to make is the following. Let's say you've got 4000kps turret tracking, and a ship that has a speed of 10000kps, and a fire control with a tracking speed of 16000kps. This setup will have an overall un-turreted tracking speed of 10000kps, limited by the ship's speed. In order to get an overall tracking speed that matches that of the fire control, you'd need a 40% turret. The point is that the first 25 of those 40 percentage points are "wasted" - all they're doing is catching up with the 10000kps ship's speed. The proposal changes the trackings speed of a turret to be (ship speed+speed from turret percentage), so in this case you'd only need a 15% turret (with no wasted mass). Your proposal effectively cuts the turret mass penalty by 4x, so in your case this would be a 10% turret, even for a lumbering (e.g. 4000kps) behemoth. The differences between the two proposals are 1) that yours is more aggressive (10% vs. 15% in the example, even more so for higher speeds) and 2) the overall tracking speed of the same turret on the behemoth is only 10000kps (4000 speed + 6000 from the turret) - it would require a 30% turret to bring the behemoth up to 16000kps.
What Narmio is saying (I think) is that, with your proposal, it would be VERY cheap to turret the main battery on a BB, so effectively you've removed ship's speed from the tracking speed equation - it's almost no cost to put enough turret mass in to beat the ship's speed. This means that all turretable beam weapons effectively become dual-use turrets, because the dual-use penalty is too small. The (ship+turret vice max(ship,turret)) proposal, in contrast enhances the "faster ships have a better chance of hitting fast targets" effect, especially when coupled with bumping up the max possible fighter speed by removing the single-engine restriction (I don't think Steve will go for a change in the power ratio). This fulfills the stated goal of giving fighters better tracking speed, while having a much smaller effect on slower combatants. BTW, this "wasted points" issue has been something that's been bothering me for a loooooong time.
So in summary, I think I agree with Narmio:
1) Turrets add to ship's speed, rather than replacing it for tracking calculations.
2) Round turret size to the nearest 0.1 (or even 0.05). Steve said he was planning to rework weapon design, so I assume he'll do this.
3) Remove the single-engine restrictions from GB/FAC, or even better allow variable mass engine designs (with no max size restriction).
John
PS - It feels like these proposals might be intended to correct a perceived imbalance. At present, I think it's very difficult to design a fleet that can go up against a missile-armed opponent with only beam point-defense. Is the goal of your original suggestions to shift that balance so that beam-only PD is an effective strategy?
The problem I see is that you don't know the speed of the ship you intend to mount the turret at turret design time.I don't think that is necessarily the case. I know what fleet speeds I'm shooting for when I'm designing components, even if I haven't designed any hulls yet. Any competent R&D office is going to know that sort of stuff. Some players may have to adjust some habits, maybe even design more turrets than they currently do to equalise tracking speeds across different speed ships, but that's certainly not a significant point against the idea.
Yes, I think there is an imbalance where turrets are concerned and not driven by a beam only tech track. I've had a suspection for quite a while that turrets were too large in hull space cost for their game effect, and until a couple of weeks ago I hadn't done any analysis of what the real calculations were. My assumptions of what the calculations were vs what I found matched what the programs results are significantly different.
I have to agree that changing the turret baseline to 4x for a tech level is too aggressive...if the gear calculation is changed to eliminate the 2 internal roundup functions to a single external (to the gear hs portion of the turret calculation) roundup. In this case the turret baseline speed should be equivalent to 2x the fire control tracking speed.I am still missing the reason why turrets are too large for their effect. The rounding situation is one thing, but you keep saying that the base speed needs to be increased. I haven't seen an argument for significantly increasing the effectiveness of turrets. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that this thread jumped straight into massively boosting turrets without explaining why.
I don't think that is necessarily the case. I know what fleet speeds I'm shooting for when I'm designing components, even if I haven't designed any hulls yet. Any competent R&D office is going to know that sort of stuff. Some players may have to adjust some habits, maybe even design more turrets than they currently do to equalise tracking speeds across different speed ships, but that's certainly not a significant point against the idea.
I am still missing the reason why turrets are too large for their effect. The rounding situation is one thing, but you keep saying that the base speed needs to be increased. I haven't seen an argument for significantly increasing the effectiveness of turrets. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that this thread jumped straight into massively boosting turrets without explaining why.
Effectiveness is not being changed, only the mass dedicated to the gimble/gears to support the turret. When I talk about weapons effectiveness I'm referring to hit probability only and the hull space requirements have an indirect impact here.Smaller gears = smaller turret = more turrets per ship = extra hit probability and extra damage per second. To me that sounds like a change in effectiveness.
Smaller gears = smaller turret = more turrets per ship = extra hit probability and extra damage per second. To me that sounds like a change in effectiveness.
Correct, the effectiveness of the individual turret is not being changed. What the player uses the freed hull space for is wide open.OK, this is kinda a silly semantics debate at this point, but it's important to understanding why you're proposing these changes. A ship component that performs a certain task and takes a certain hull space has a certain effectiveness. An component that performs the same task and takes less hull space is more effective! The ship can be lighter, or can have more of that component, or more other components, or whatever, but that freed hull space is of value whatever you do with it. Having that free space is tangibly better than not having it.
OK, this is kinda a silly semantics debate at this point, but it's important to understanding why you're proposing these changes. A ship component that performs a certain task and takes a certain hull space has a certain effectiveness. An component that performs the same task and takes less hull space is more effective! The ship can be lighter, or can have more of that component, or more other components, or whatever, but that freed hull space is of value whatever you do with it. Having that free space is tangibly better than not having it.
To use a bit of reductio ad absurdum, would a 100% accuracy gauss cannon that only took one hull space be more effective than one that took 6? What about a 1HS jump drive for a 20,000 battleship? Smaller parts make your ship more effective.
This is not the discussion that we should be having. You want to make turret-bearing ships more effective than they currently are. Let's talk about why, rather than talking about what "effective" means. A HS-to-HS comparison of AMM systems versus beam PD systems, perhaps? Show us why PD turrets are so much worse.
Reduction to absurdity or proof by contradiction is a waste of time, the game is not modelling to a detail level to make the effort worthwhile.I didn't mean for this to turn so cold... I was just saying you're proposing making something better and I don't feel you've explained why it needs to be better. Forgive me the reductio ad absurdum, that was a little flippant on my part, but I really wasn't expecting you not to concede that making something smaller = making it better.
At this point if you've read all the posts in this topic and followed and read the links to previous discussions and still do not understand what I'm driving at, further detailing will not help.
Steve will either act on the suggestions or he won't. I don't expect him to implement any of it whole cloth. Never have, never will.
Reduction to absurdity or proof by contradiction is a waste of time, the game is not modelling to a detail level to make the effort worthwhile.
At this point if you've read all the posts in this topic and followed and read the links to previous discussions and still do not understand what I'm driving at, further detailing will not help.
Steve will either act on the suggestions or he won't. I don't expect him to implement any of it whole cloth. Never have, never will.
I am still missing the reason why turrets are too large for their effect. The rounding situation is one thing, but you keep saying that the base speed needs to be increased. I haven't seen an argument for significantly increasing the effectiveness of turrets. I'm not saying there isn't one, just that this thread jumped straight into massively boosting turrets without explaining why.Here's what Narmio probably should have said:
I haven't seen an argument for significantly increasing the effectiveness of an equal mass of turrets.
Can we assume Narmio phrased it that way and go from there?Thanks, sloanjh. Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant. Also, I'm on board with the "Add turret speed to tracking" and "round to 0.1HS" suggestions. As an aside, they will improve* turrets quite a bit anyway - both suggestions make the turret you need smaller. Probably by about 5-10% depending on fleet doctrines, but fast escorts could, for example, be saving about 50% of their gear space. Gunboats could add turrets with only 10% gears and do PD duty. I like it, but I'd also like to see what people do with it before we do anything else.