EatThePath wrote:
It's true that it won't always be relevant to have back-tech available, but it becomes an issue of whether the UI/decision clutter it causes is worth getting rid of it in favor of a "smart" system. Personally, for a strategy game it feels like my options are being artificially limited which really grates. I'm sure lots of people feel the same way. (In fact I've seen several posts about it.) The biggest selling point of a smart system, for me, is the fact that is simplifies ship creation in multiplayer where you don't want to spend 5 minutes clicking to design a new ship. Best cast scenario: why not have the smart system be a preference you can set?



Probably my biggest disappointment with Disharmony so far is the ship design feeling dumbed down. I have a hunch this was somewhat intentional in order to play up the new fighter and bomber and "special slot" mechanics. Same for only 3 weapon tech levels.



From my perspective, the game presents all of its aspects as being fairly complex and extensive, even if the upshot of some of the mechanics is rather simple. When you go into the fleets screen, and then enter the ship building screen, it's clear that you have some work ahead of you to wrap your head around all your choices, or at least it appears this way. While simple is good, I don't think it should be oversimplified for its own sake, since the player already perceives that it's not a simple system and will be ready to tackle the ins and outs instead of being overwhelmed when they encounter complications.



Basically your system would be fine more or less and an improvement for sure but why not go all the way to mollify players like me too?

Autocthon wrote:
Because a choice that you never choose isn't a choice. See terraforming pre-Disharmony. T1 planets or bust, because everything below T1 sucked across the board. Just because there are "choices" doesn't actually mean you'll ever make an actual choice.



there are already enough moving parts for ship combat, having a contrived (because it WILL be contrived) module level system to "choose" different modules is really just design bloat. Either you'll be using the best weapon/defense tech you have... OR you don;t have the resource to use the best. There isn't enough of a cost overhead to make using weaker tech in any way better at any time.

Tiggy wrote:
i am of the feeling that maybe it would be a good idea to compleatly re-invent the ship building system into something a bit more streamlined and logical, maybe having a more slot based system with engineering/propulsion/ offensive/defensive/special subsystems to adjust slot amount and stats for different modules instead, or at least something along those lines, weight seems just like a silly thing to make a limit since these ships are in space... where they dont "sink" or " fall out the sky" or anything.

Autocthon wrote:
Weight is hyperexpensive in space. It takes massive amounts of energy to handle momentum in a frictionless environment. That's ignoring the expense of generating enough lift to get a ship skyward.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
While it's true that weight plays a huge factor in space (more weight = more inertia), I think there's something we're all forgetting.



These ships we build don't weigh the 800 kilos (let's assume they're kilos) we add to the ship. They're probably WAY heavier than that. There's an entire hull and infrastructure of a ship around our weapon and fighter bays. The bridge, crew quarters, medbays, life support systems, and ignore the presumably superdense and insanely heavy outer hull needed to protect your ships from tiny asteroids impacting the hull and flying straight through. These are weight factors we do not need to bother with. And, in the grander scheme of things, those 800 kilos for weapons and shields are probably relatively negligible relative to the overall cost of the ship. Thus, why ships with less tonnage don't actually move faster - the differences in weight don't matter as much.



With that said, I agree with everyone arguing that %tonnage should at least come with a %effect. I can agree with the idea of a larger ship needing more tonnage to support more armor, but that's also MORE armor - the effect should be inflated.



However, I don't agree with the idea that going back to older tech is bad. It's not the industry costs that matter, it's the Tonnage. Having higher tech modules means having heavier modules, which basically makes the smaller ships utterly useless. Instead of having some of each defense and some lasers/missiles, you can barely get a scout that has armor for each different weapon type. What's the point in using a 1CP ship if it can't have even a minor amount of defense, without having zero attacking ability?

Autocthon wrote:
1) Tonnage. Those weapons you add weigh between 7 and 11 Tonnes. That's 7000-11000 Kilos. So unless the ship itself is on the order of 1m Tonnes to begin with you WILL always be adding real weight to your ship.[/quotes]



I wasn't sure how much a tonne was because I'm an ignorant American. And who's to say the ships aren't 1m tonnes or more?

Autocthon wrote:
2) Newer tech in all circumstances except special siege modules weighs the same as older tech right now. So saying "having higher tech modules means heavier modules" means you're ignorant of the system. And probably also means hyou're not qualified to comment on the state of the system (roughly equivalent to an art major talking politics).

Really? I was certain they got heavier, or maybe they just increased the base weight. If so, my bad, and I agree with the idea of never teching back.

Autocthon wrote:
1 Metric Tonne ~= 1 Ton (american) which is 2000 pounds. I doubt the ships run at 1m tonnes or more simply because this:



Displacement: 100,000 to 104,600 long tons (100,000–106,300 t)



Is the weight of an aircraft carrier (displacement in water). Those ships are HUGE at a fifth of a mile long (three football fields). Even a dreadnought class cruiser wouldn't be that much bigger than that realistically simply because once you start getting bigger it becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain and crew.



The only reaosn later techs ever get heavier is if they are Bomber/Fighter/Troop/PointDefense or you increased the tonnage of the ship itself through tech or modules.

Antera wrote:
I don't know that it really matters exactly how much a ton weights in ES universe. But the key issue here is that adding mass to any spacecraft has what's called the "snowball effect", which is exactly like it sound. For example, increasing your thruster size by 10% may sound negligible on paper when you compare it to the total mass of the ship, but then you'll find out real soon that 10% extra mass means you now need 5% more structural support, 10% more thermal management system, another 7% more armor plating to cover the thruster, and so on so forth. And then you out that extra 5% extra structural require you to run another 8% extra cooling/power conduits and yet more armor plating. And then you find out you need a bigger power plant, which requires even more thermal management. And so on and so on. At the end of the day you find out, your spacecraft is now going only 3% faster but is 20% bulkier. That is what real spacecraft design is like. The bottom line, mass matters, A LOT. And every kilo makes a difference in the final design.

Ail wrote:
In the current Beta of the next Patch everything except Armor, Support, Engines and Defense-Modules is flat-tonnage.

TheFrozenOne wrote:
To make dreadnoughts even more worthless.

Autocthon wrote:
Power, Engine, and Armor modules make sense to require % Size. A larger ship requires more tonnage to do use those modules. The problem is that the modules use a a constant % of space without being more effective on larger ships.



Hence Dreadnaughts sucking more and more.



Armor should grant more HP on larger ships.

Bomber/Fighter/Troop bays should have greater power (damage and invasion power) on larger ships.



As it is Larger ships cost 2/4 times the CP of smaller ships for a net LOSS in effective MP using them. On top of that Tonnage modules make the difference even smaller, and need to be refactored for larger ship sizes. For instance by making the a +% base tonnage modifier (multiplicative with tech tonnage passives)

Igncom1 wrote:
Well fortunately defence and offence modules have no % tonnage, leaving the smaller ships to have more effective support roles and dreadnoughts to be the brawlers.

Bad213Boy wrote:
Not really. Size (LxWxH) determines what you can have inside any space. Weight should be the last thing you worry about when designing. I use to be a Civil Engineer until I went into CIT, and we use to design everything by dimensions first. You can always use lighter materials to help limit weight. Most engineers should know this and this is probably why 99% of games do not use a tonnage system to determine what you can fit inside a car, city, ship, boat, etc... It's like trying to reinvent the wheel man. There's a reason why car designers don't use weight to determine how fast their car can go. Ya sure, it's all cool and dandy we can design a limitless number of ships this way, but it's simply not practical.

Another reason why this whole tonnage system needs a reboot. You have one thing the standard and another thing not IMO. That's just half @$$ing it. It sounds like it started out as a great idea, but then after designing the game and actually understanding your own system, went to hell.



This is what I think happened. If you change tonnage % with the weapons, then maybe you have to change the damage, and then you have to change the defense. It's a complete fraking nightmare for a game designer IMO. Which is why the tonnage system should have never been used. If you are going to do it, then do it right and fix everything so it's based on a % tonnage and worry about balancing later IMO. And we can all be honest here and agree, you can't really know what if something is imba until you test it.

Autocthon wrote:
What really needs to happen is that the % weight modules need to be BETTER. And they need to account for ship size.

• Fighters, Bombers, Troops, Bombs: Makes no sense at all. It's not like they are any more effective on larger ships, and historically, size has been good for carriers.
• Armor: I actually don't completely disagree with this one. If both defenses and armor were flat weight, Dreadnoughts would be crazy OP, far more than the advantage small ships have now. But perhaps making defenses % weight and HP flat weight (and flat HP---important!) would have made more sense.
• Power, Engine, Repair: % weight is fine for single-ship effects, though Power modules don't do enough for their weight now. Though perhaps the fleet modules should be partially or fully flat weight since in that case the effect is independent of the ship size.
• Scout: I agree with EatThePath, 50% weight is ridiculous for anything except the least CP possible. Should be 50 + 2% or something thereabouts.
  
  

Autocthon wrote:
99%of games aren't simulating space travel. Weight is hyper expensive on ship. the fuel NASA uses in a year to launch their ships would bankrupt a small nation, and they're using the lightest materials we can.



Ships are not cars. They are not building. they must overcome gravitational forces, they need to be able to fly. That's why jet fuel is an order of magnitude more expensive than gasoline, it's that much harder to make. It's also why (military) planes are ridiculously compact, and why commercial flights are expensive.



There's a reason ships in the water are measured in tonnage. There are just some things you can't get around in terms of material.

Autocthon wrote:
Removal of lower tech use on modules was a deliberate change to prevent abuse cases. If you think that abuse cases don;t matter for single player you probably don;t understand what an abuse case is.



If anything modules just need to be smarter about when you can build them.

Autocthon wrote:
That's the point of the new system, you can't abuse exploitative cases. And since there aren't abusable exploits why would you ever need lower tier tech as an option?



The only thing currently wrong with the system is resource screw. Which could be fixed simply by smart assigning modules based on available resources.