Just measured the new skins pixelsizes. They aren't exact, but at least a good appraisal. Also I assumed width and height to be equal.



Smallest hulls: ~215 length x ~40 height x ~40 width = 344 kPixelVolume

Medium hull: ~400 x 60 x 60 = 1.44 MPixelVolume

Large hull: ~770 x 115 x 115 = 10.18 MPixelVolume (Didn't count the wings as volume)



So the medium sized ships should have roughly four times the volume of the small ships and the large ships even 30 times the volume (assuming energy supply, engine space, crew quarters, waste disposal and whatever support structures you can think of scale 1:1).



Right now the scale is more 1:2:3 than 1:4:30 which is on the one hand nice, because all ships are equal, but on the other hand bad, since no ship is really epic and modificators like -x% on weapon module tonnage for the destroyer is overpowered.



Therefore my suggestion: Make the tonnage of the larger shiptypes reflect their size.



Resulting problems with balancing can be taken care of by other modifiers later on. I'll limit myself to a single suggestion in this post.

Hm, yeah I always tend to use the biggest ships available and I like to know that they are actually bigger than other ships, apart from just looking like that. I totally agree.

I think this should somehow be linked together with some other ship suggestions so they can be considered and implemented relatively close to each other, makes balancing easier when more new changes are implemented at once instead of putting in one thing at a time.

KNC wrote:
Hm, yeah I always tend to use the biggest ships available and I like to know that they are actually bigger than other ships, apart from just looking like that. I totally agree.

I think this should somehow be linked together with some other ship suggestions so they can be considered and implemented relatively close to each other, makes balancing easier when more new changes are implemented at once instead of putting in one thing at a time.

I think those things should be applied in sequence. Something like:



Level 1A: Vary ship tonnage for the three sizes

Level 1B: Give evasion bonuses and maluses to ship sizes

Level 2A: Vary weapon tonnage, maybe nonlinear scaling like some people suggested

Level 2B: Vary weapon stats

Level 3A: Vary defense tonnage, maybe nonlinear scaling like none suggested, yet

Level 3B: Vary defense stats



You'd severely unbalance the system with level 1A. With level 2A you could try to balance this slightly for the ship sizes with respect to some value like (damage+health+absorption[maxof1kind])/industry cost and keep this flat for all ship types.

Then you do the same for level 2A + 2B, then for 3A and 3B.

Repeat until you've hit some kind of equilibrium.



Just my thoughts on that matter. There's possibly a better choice of optimization variable, but balancing should consist of a sequence of corrections. Multivariate tuning is just too complicated to have any hope of working out, in my opinion.

Well it was something remotely like that I thought of, that sounds like a good plan. I hope to see this tracked by the devs soon.

KNC wrote:
Well it was something remotely like that I thought of, that sounds like a good plan. I hope to see this tracked by the devs soon.

That's actually the general way we're doing jet energy corrections.

If confronted with a scarily complex problem -> cut it apart in manageable parts and calibrate/tune them in sequence.

Nosferatiel wrote:
That's actually the general way we're doing jet energy corrections.

If confronted with a scarily complex problem -> cut it apart in manageable parts and calibrate/tune them in sequence.

That's a way of approaching the problem I should keep in mind I think

Yeah, a greater difference between the hulls would be great addition.

Definitly like to see that. Big ships don't really feel that big right now. I Like them being an object of prestige.

+1 to this idea. Big ships do not seem menacing enough the way it is.

TheVulture98 wrote:
+1 to this idea. Big ships do not seem menacing enough the way it is.

I think they "seem" menacing enough, they just aren't. Currently ships seem to be more vacuum than mass, which is a bit confusing, considering their size.

Nosferatiel wrote:
Just measured the new skins pixelsizes. They aren't exact, but at least a good appraisal. Also I assumed width and height to be equal.



Smallest hulls: ~215 length x ~40 height x ~40 width = 344 kPixelVolume

Medium hull: ~400 x 60 x 60 = 1.44 MPixelVolume

Large hull: ~770 x 115 x 115 = 10.18 MPixelVolume (Didn't count the wings as volume)



So the medium sized ships should have roughly four times the volume of the small ships and the large ships even 30 times the volume (assuming energy supply, engine space, crew quarters, waste disposal and whatever support structures you can think of scale 1:1).



Right now the scale is more 1:2:3 than 1:4:30 which is on the one hand nice, because all ships are equal, but on the other hand bad, since no ship is really epic and modificators like -x% on weapon module tonnage for the destroyer is overpowered.



Therefore my suggestion: Make the tonnage of the larger shiptypes reflect their size.



Resulting problems with balancing can be taken care of by other modifiers later on. I'll limit myself to a single suggestion in this post.

Added to summary list under Game Play > General > Hull Weight Ratio

Thanks to Evil4Zerggin for pointing out to me that there's actually a concept art with a meter scale.

Evil4Zerggin wrote:
I didn't calculate it, it says so directly on the concept art, e.g. http://i.imgur.com/z2ted.jpg .

Nosferatiel wrote:
Nice. Then taking your Bismack example it had a volume of roughly 250*36*20=180000 m[SUP]3[/SUP] and a weight of 50 kt. That's, rounded, a density of 0.28 t/m[SUP]3[/SUP].



Taking my pixel measurements of the dreadnaught skin and all dreadnaught-lengths as roughly equal, 770 pixels are 1 km. So it's 1.3 m/pixel.



With the same density, the ship types would then have roughly:



Small hull = 125 kt

Middle hull = 524 kt

Large hull = 3.7 Mt



That is remarkably heavy...

In fact, I cannot build small ships in middle end game because hey explodes too fast and you lose ships all the time so you cannot take the siege of a system.

The problem is that a big ship fire the same ammo than a small one and with the same accuracy.

So build bigger ship give more chance to keep it alive and the end of the battle.

What about an hunter/hunted system like, big ship afficient against middle, or small depending the module equiped ?



And finally, I think the weapons are not well balanced, missile are very powerfull and bullets are too poor and efficient too late in combat.