Edge Cases

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Edge Cases

Post by countercheck »

I've noticed a few edge cases in the ship design system that create illogical results that I thought I'd share:

1. Carriers make the best transports: there is no reason you can't put cargo slots on a flight. That makes sense... it allows you to make lighters and assault shuttles. But it also creates a situation where you can have a ship spend one slot on Carrier, and in that slot carry a C$ 1 flight with three cargo holds. Now, the hyper-efficiency of flights is usually mitigated by the danger that the flights won't be able to launch in time, but for non-combat roles,that's a non-issue. Perhaps flights should be limited to only one cargo slot? I'm ignoring the possibility of flights recursively carrying other flights in flight mounted carrier bays, because that's just silly.

2. Big ships are stealthier: stealth has a flat cost, so large ships are able to carry more stealth. And since stealth effectively means 'more difficult to hit' as opposed to 'more difficult to find', dreadnoughts are harder to lock onto than zippy little frigates, which seems wrong. Also, does stealth affect flights, allowing them to get formation bonuses?
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MarkG88
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Re: Edge Cases

Post by MarkG88 »

2. Big ships are stealthier: stealth has a flat cost, so large ships are able to carry more stealth. And since stealth effectively means 'more difficult to hit' as opposed to 'more difficult to find', dreadnoughts are harder to lock onto than zippy little frigates, which seems wrong. Also, does stealth affect flights, allowing them to get formation bonuses?
In regards to this, stealth is as much electronic warfare (EW) as anything else and the bigger the ship the more EW it is able to generate to hide behind or block/break opponents fire controls and tracking weapons. A zippy little frigate isn't agile enough to dodge missiles locked onto it but a hulking battlewagon may be able to burn up the sensors on that missile salvo so most just "miss" is my thinking. As for the frigate being easier to hide vs. a battleship it's not a matter of physical size so much as the ability to see things and again, the larger the ship the greater its capabilities to see or hide itself.
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Re: Edge Cases

Post by countercheck »

No, I'm aware of all that. And I also understand that a frigate need not actually be more maneuverable than a dreadnought. But to get a 1 level increase in formation, a C$ 20, TL0 battleship needs to devote 7% of it's mass to stealth, whereas a C$3 frigate would need to devote 40% of its mass. This is mitigated partly by the increasing cost of protecting large ships with point defense fire, but it still makes me sad that swarms of stealthy corvettes are impractical =P
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Tyrel Lohr
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Re: Edge Cases

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

countercheck wrote:I've noticed a few edge cases in the ship design system that create illogical results that I thought I'd share:

1. Carriers make the best transports: there is no reason you can't put cargo slots on a flight. That makes sense... it allows you to make lighters and assault shuttles. But it also creates a situation where you can have a ship spend one slot on Carrier, and in that slot carry a C$ 1 flight with three cargo holds. Now, the hyper-efficiency of flights is usually mitigated by the danger that the flights won't be able to launch in time, but for non-combat roles,that's a non-issue. Perhaps flights should be limited to only one cargo slot? I'm ignoring the possibility of flights recursively carrying other flights in flight mounted carrier bays, because that's just silly.
Gah, the Russian doll syndrome rears its ugly head. I think the only really good way to fix this problem for all manner of basing is to say that a unit can't be based aboard a unit that is itself being based aboard another unit. This would however make Assault or Cargo shuttles an impossibility, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.

Another option is to go back to having Carrier, Cargo, and Tender all cost 2 MU instead of 1 MU. Coupled with a proposed change to the unit mass formula (C$ + CC = MU, +10% per TL above 0) this would balance things out slightly at low levels, but it still doesn't address the problems that can happen as the TL increases.

Another possibility is to simply halve the number of mass units that flights have available. This does nothing to correct the problem for tenders and gunboats, but it would make these units less effective (possibly prohibitively so). All in all, setting the cost of the "carrying" abilities to 2 MU would probably make the most dent in the problem. It would be perfect, but at that point the 1 Carrier would cost 2 MU, and your 5 EP CC 1 flight would have 6 MU... which would let it have 3 Cargo or 3 Assault if they cost 2 MU, too. Still 3 times as effective.

I suppose that is another way of handing it: make special abilities cost 2-3 times normal when applied to flights. That isn't a great answer, either, but it would uniformly limit the non-combat capabilities of flight units.
2. Big ships are stealthier: stealth has a flat cost, so large ships are able to carry more stealth. And since stealth effectively means 'more difficult to hit' as opposed to 'more difficult to find', dreadnoughts are harder to lock onto than zippy little frigates, which seems wrong. Also, does stealth affect flights, allowing them to get formation bonuses?
The problem is that Scout and Stealth are opposite sides of the same coin in the game, and you can't have Stealth be incredibly more costly for bigger ships without making Stealth much less useful. The only "fix" I can think of would be to have Stealth costs be roughly equal to command cost, which would make it very cheap for small ships but more expensive for larger ones. That would average out with Scout through CC 3, but would make it very impractical to have larger stealthy ships.

This is another case where a blanket increase in mass costs for flights would be helpful, as it would help prevent special ability spam aboard these smaller units.
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Re: Edge Cases

Post by countercheck »

One option would be to have Flight Cargo/Assault capacity be capped by Command Cost. Command cost is equivalent to physical size, yes? That way, as tech improves, the combat power of assault shuttles improves, but carrying capacity remains the same.
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