My first thought is that this is...
Thank you so much for such and elaborate and well tought trough response. It really helped and gave me some new perspectives. Its actually your LP that inspired me to finally getting around to designing warships. Its really good, and I hope you are gonna post more updates soon!
It seems by and large that your comments reflects my thoughts on the matter, I ended up designing too many classes, particularly in terms of cruisers.
I kept myself to beam weapons, because as you can see I tend to overthink things and try to think about every eventuality, so I forced myself to only consider beam weapons to reduce it. Might be stupid, but at the same time, hey, its an extra challenge. My design are largely based on the wiki article on beam weapons for the old Aurora as there is much less info on the C# page, so I am not sure the info I have is relevant. And also info I gleaned from varius LP's, issue is that it can sometimes be hard to evaluate what is roleplay and what is functional.
So yeah, some things are based on roleplay, and some on functionality. In terms of combat, my desgin does suffer from limited understanding on how combat works. In particular it seems that there is no way to possitions ships in fleet and have it have a impact on the battle. Right now, if I understand correctly, the fleet is effectively a single amorbus point and where the ships can invidually be targeted. Its a shame because it could be more interesting in that regard having placement and tactics matter. Like, buff shields, maybe give an ability to link up shields and have system to define fleet placement and make the game consider the direction an attack is coming from. This way you could possibly have system where heavily shielded ships could be placed up front to create a wall to protect more fragile ships. This then could greate interesting emergent gameplay as you would be forced to deal with that and be a better counter for misiles, stay at range and lob misiles hoping to whittle down the front line shields or charge in with beam ships? Flank them? Right now battles are basically decided in seconds, you break trough a ships defences and its destroyed or crippled, there is little opportunity for tactical play insofar ship placement is concerned. Its not a big deal, I mean, this what the game is like, but it would be enjoable to see it fleshed out more I suppose. But I can see that my thinking in that regard was pointless.
You ask how I arrived at so man ship classes, basically, its a 2d system where one axis is enemy ship classes and their expected speed which I already detailed but here is a copy:
3000 - Capital ships
5000 - Ships (Everything from frigate to cruisers)
8000 - FACS
125000 - Fighers
25000 - Missiles (Theoretical, as I can only make FC with a speed of 12.5k)
and then the other axis was engagement range, which was divided more or less into close range, mid range, long range, max range (and theoretically missile range, but I have no missile ships so its not relevant). Close range is basically on top of each other where any and all weapons can me used, i.e. missiles about to hit ships, fighers attacking larger ships (and maybe facs) and so on, Medium range is maybe a bit of a mislabel as it is basically brawling range, where they are not on top of each other but close enough brawl it out via close-medium range beam weapons like railguns. Long range would be effective ranges of lasers or Lances, basically where you keep your ship at distance and fight it out with long range weapons staying out of range of most enemy beam weapons. Max range is basically spinal lasers, staying as far as way you can hoping to completely avoid enemy weapons (aside from misilies) while sniping them at max range hoping to take them out while they can't respond to your potshots.
Then it was a simple matter of filling each crosspoint with ships. Then I reduced them from there by deciding that there where to much overlap in some cases (FAC/Fighters).
IF you think that is complicated its actually a reduced multidimensional system, I forced myself to only consider that, I had a 3D system where size where an axis instead of implied in the speed. I know what you mean with being a reckless maniac, its way to many ships, I spend days from morning to evening designing ships for every eventuality so I forced myself to limit my options (no missiles, only a 2 axis of consideration).
Taking your comment about designing fleets into consideration, I think then that the engagement distance is less relevant for ships, its a fleet level consideration. I can't have brawlers and long range ships in the same fleet, its either a long range fleet or a brawler fleet. Or I can, but its more that I should design to fit my fleet paradigm.
CruisersI think my cruisers are the one that needs most work yeah. They are heavily armored because I decided that I likely had no chance of out speeding my enemy, so I should focus on outliving them, i.e. I should be able to handle all the missiles they can throw at me and force them to come to me if and do battle once they are out of missiles. I am thinking maybe, surprising as it is, that I should reduce armor and up shields because if I want to slowly advance towards enemies under constant fire then the fact that shields recharge is important, as they might recharge while I advance, but armor is lost for the duration of the battle. Thing is, I am not completely sure how shields work. Like, does it recharge in increments or is a binary thing? Say, I have 300 hp (or whatever you call it) shield. I get 10 damage. It has 10 second recharge time. Do I get 1 hp back every second? Or is it, in 10 second, the shield with get the 10 points back in one go? And how does that work with multible shields? Are damage spread over them all, or do they get knocked of one by one? Do they only recharge if knocked of? Is few large shields better than many or vise versa, its a bit unclear at the moment.
I really need to think about it, but right now, based on your feedback, I might actually classify my ships in this manner with one axis being Non turret ship, Turreted ship and Escort ship and the other axis being long and short range.
So Non turreted cruiser being the main workhorse meant to deal with anything near its size or larger and/or near its speed or slower, your comment on speed gain from turrets of 2000km/s was great and changed how I think about that. I would divide it further into long and near, with Lasers, Spinal lasers and Particle lances dominating the long range Cruiser design. Although maybe I should keep the lances for destroyers and have the cruisers be pure laser? For close range brawler I am not sure if I should keep it lasers, go railgun or maybe even Coronade? Maybe I should just keep it at lasers, in fact, if I use only lasers for my long range cruiser then it could brawl too. Anyway, they all have some gauss for pd.
The turreted Cruiser is for dealing with faster smaller targets, Gunships, Corvettes, Frigates. I think maybe dual turreted lasers with some Gaus cannons? Although, I wonder if it would offer any utility that my escort cruiser can't deal with? Maybe I should let this work go to destroyers instead?
And escort, thinking mostly Gauss with some fast turreted lasers. If I roll the the turreted cruiser into this, they would have anti-fighters/FAC/Small ship responsibility to with those lasers. Maybe that is a good idea.
Okay, here is my thinking. Harbingers, Justicar/Stormwolf and Hammer Of Justice all get rollled into a Non-turreted Laser class, I leave the Lances to destroyers.
Firestorm as turreted ships for dealing with smaller ships, facs and Fighters.
And Vigilant for escort.
I might change up their design a bit, lets see.
I think I might upgrade the sensor on cruisers so they all have a degree of capacity in that regard instead of the absolute minimum. But specifically, I think I will spinn the sensors of to a separate sensor cruiser as sensors seems to make them giant targets. Then I think I will maybe give Overlord a jump engine instead so it can standard transit the fleet and I can keep the jumpers at home unless they are needed for a jump point assault. Might give the Overlord some hangar capacity to do the trick you mentioned with surrounding it with sensor fighters and maybe have small contingent of marines and a boarding shuttle since I want some soldiers on board anyway to defend it from boarding. And a big res-1 sensor if I can fit it. I really like the idea of having the command platform be the sensor platform also, like its a command ship, it hangs out in the back and gives orders and keep track of the battle, but I can see that making it a sensor platform just makes it a big target. So have a separate sensor platform with plenty of defensive measures. Although maybe a detachable destroyer group is better as a sensor platform? And of course just keep the Glyph. Or maybe instead of making the Overlord jump capable just keep one Glyph with the fleet always. Then I could have more fun in designing my command cruiser as such. What do you think?
So my current thinking my Cruiser designs will be (with some modifications:
- CA Hammer of Justice: offensive beam (Main cruiser of the fleet and the one to most of the fighting. think I will go with Stormwolf for name tough)
- CA Firestorm: anti-FAC defense beam (Well, maybe, in case I run into fighters, FAC and enemies that loves small fast ships.)
- CLE Vigilant: mixed defensive beam (Designed to deal with misiles)
- CJ Glyph: jump cruiser
- A sensor Cruiser
Tough maybe I should drop the Firestorm class and rely on my escort cruisers to deal with small and fast ship, fighters and FACs? Do you have any advice on optimizing the anti-missile work, I had a small test battle and was somewhat disappointed in performance, but maybe I did not set the FC up correctly. I am mulling over including a carrier cruiser design also altough fighter combat seems a bit annoying as it currently is, but I need to test it out, maybe that should wait until I reach Battleship sizes. My cruisers standards are set to about 25k tons give or take 5000 for light or heavy. Battleship, oh, I dunno, 50k?
DestroyersI am mostly happy with the designs here. I might give them another pass. For the destroyer leader, its halfway a roleplay thing, it was mostly conceived for the purpose of being part of a squadron of destroyers defending colonies in a system that did not justify a full fleet but still needed some movable defenses. They would lead a destroyer squadron in such a case. Or for specialized missions where I would take out specialized destroyers to hunt down a spesific type of target. Eh, Might not need it, but I will keep it around for fun.
I think I might consider moving sensor duties to destroyers and create a small subfleet whit several variants based on resolution with one large sensor for each variant. Res 100, 20, 5, 1 TH and EM, maybe? And then two jump destroyers.
Support shipsYeah, you are right, I was not thinking here, my goal was making support ships that could keep pace with the fleet and not slow them down. But there is no need for to take part of a squadron jump. i mean, they could just stay put and wait for the Overlord (if I put a jump engine on it) to come get it. But eh, I wanted them to be able to go fetch supplies on their own, and actually, maybe I should have two support sub-fleets so one can go fetch while the other stays for longe range work.
Also, among other things, I am working on a troop transport that can keep pace. Well, that is a lie, I think I have 8 variants by now. I need to reduce it somewhat haha.
You feedback is fantastic and deeply appreciated, I think I will return to the drawing board and work on it and see what I can come up with and then posts those. Tough I would like to hear what your thoughts are on my current ideas.
Oh, also, how does maintenance work actually? Like, does more engineering spaces reduce the amount maintenance supplies used? I am considering designing some tough thick armored/shielded defence stations with heaps of engineering spaces. Their goal is to provide the needed PPV as cheaply as possible while also being a credible threat to anything seeking to attack as possible. Basically set it and forget it, so I want to reduce the need of maintainance as much as possible. I kinda discovered that armies can have ship weapons as turrets, so I feel like I can have ship turret armies do the bulk of defence against ships attacking the planet but I still need PPV and I don'twant to waste it.
