Modding Space Empire IV Gold

[brianeyci]

I can't get the invincishield trick to work for some reason... I put on 30 PD guns, should soak around 60 damage, when I put 40 it should make it immune to everything but the 500 damage BFG, but doesn't happen for some reason.

Brian

[Nephtys]

I can't get the invincishield trick to work for some reason... I put on 30 PD guns, should soak around 60 damage, when I put 40 it should make it immune to everything but the 500 damage BFG, but doesn't happen for some reason.

Brian

'Shields' represent point blank PD and flak and such. If you overwhelm them, the ship is vulnerable to damage. It regenerates fully every turn though, and some weapons do double or quad or bypass shields, or do half to shields, based on their effectiveness in penetrating these defenses.

There are no invincishields.

[GuppyShark]

Secondly, the weapons are just a box of confetti with no organization whatsoever. There doesn't even need to be half that many weapons in the game in the first place, as I fail to see the need to include every weapon that's ever been seen in the show.

They're all in different tech trees. I don't want to see all the weapons boiled down to "Generic Directed Energy Weapon", no matter how much cleaner it would be. I like that the tech trees have a little flavour and variety.

Fifth, antimatter and gravitic engines should not be more expensive than fusion, since right now it's optimal to use all fusion and then 1 prototype gravitic stuck on the end for the bonuses. This makes no logical sense.

Jesus Arthur. With the baseships you could at least make the argument that they had overcompensated for tonnage. Were you planning to list all the mod design flaws you were taking advantage of so we could duplicate them too?

Can't believe I'm going to have to redo all my ship designs over and I didn't find out about this until a hundred turns in. The biggest expenses in the game are the damned engines.

If all of this was done, I'd say we'd be looking at a pretty decent mod.

I agree with the rest of your points.

[brianeyci]

'Shields' represent point blank PD and flak and such. If you overwhelm them, the ship is vulnerable to damage. It regenerates fully every turn though, and some weapons do double or quad or bypass shields, or do half to shields, based on their effectiveness in penetrating these defenses.

There are no invincishields.

There is still the ability "2 damage is channeled into the shields" I assume you took that out? I guess the description isn't accurate anymore .

As for B5 fusion engines, I'm using fusion engines right now. I noticed the light reactors too, and that massive reactors were expensive and that adding a single engine could give me bonus move. But like I said I didn't give a damn. If I was going for the kill I would have turned on my brain, but most of the time I was just randomly clicking, and early on B5 aggravated me since I had to make hundreds of clicks to fill my queue so it was mostly do the turn as fast as I can and submit it, and worry about Zargat conquering the galaxy.

Brian

[Nephtys]

I'm pretty sure a small gravitational won't do that effect. In stock, mixing engine types doesn't give you their bonuses so I thought it was hardcoded that way.

Either way, yeah. I've got hyper-advanced gravity drives but I don't use em for price reasons. Although it may be better for the ancient races.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Secondly, the weapons are just a box of confetti with no organization whatsoever. There doesn't even need to be half that many weapons in the game in the first place, as I fail to see the need to include every weapon that's ever been seen in the show.

They're all in different tech trees. I don't want to see all the weapons boiled down to "Generic Directed Energy Weapon", no matter how much cleaner it would be. I like that the tech trees have a little flavour and variety.

Can't argue with that, but wouldn't you agree that the sheer number of different weapons, 95% of them completely useless, probably contributed to the unbalanced nature of the weapons?

Fifth, antimatter and gravitic engines should not be more expensive than fusion, since right now it's optimal to use all fusion and then 1 prototype gravitic stuck on the end for the bonuses. This makes no logical sense.

Jesus Arthur. With the baseships you could at least make the argument that they had overcompensated for tonnage. Were you planning to list all the mod design flaws you were taking advantage of so we could duplicate them too?

Would you prefer that I discover them and not tell you? Besides, I haven't built any ships that use it anyway. I designed such a ship, but if people decide it's gamey, then I won't build it. My explanation is that gravitic engines create a localized field effect that helps movement, and you only need one to create the effect, but I admit that's pretty hokey.

I'm pretty sure a small gravitational won't do that effect. In stock, mixing engine types doesn't give you their bonuses so I thought it was hardcoded that way.

It won't give you the bonus move, but it will give you the bonus combat move, which is really like having another 2 move points when you think about it.

[brianeyci]

I agree about the engines Guppy. Making a crab move 8 instead of 12 makes a big difference. 2.8k damage, a thousand of these babies on a warp point and you'll be invincible. Or even a couple hundred. Usually when you get into the high hundreds or thousands the ships kind of bunch together and block each other's way, it's why torpedoes are better for really large fleets in stock over phased polaron beams.





You could build five of these for every battleship I make. Small is better for a warp point defense I think.

Combat sensors and multiplex are expensive, I don't think it's necessary on second thought. Instead an extra weapon and your ship's nearly 2k cheaper. You really need a lot of them though, like 500 of them.



Brian

[GuppyShark]

They're all in different tech trees. I don't want to see all the weapons boiled down to "Generic Directed Energy Weapon", no matter how much cleaner it would be. I like that the tech trees have a little flavour and variety.

Can't argue with that, but wouldn't you agree that the sheer number of different weapons, 95% of them completely useless, probably contributed to the unbalanced nature of the weapons?

Definately. It looks like the weapons were reverse-engineered from B5 Wars, but B5 Wars doesn't have a way to create your own ship designs from what I remember, so there was no cost mechanism to balance these weapons against.

Jesus Arthur. With the baseships you could at least make the argument that they had overcompensated for tonnage. Were you planning to list all the mod design flaws you were taking advantage of so we could duplicate them too?

Would you prefer that I discover them and not tell you?

Besides, I haven't built any ships that use it anyway.

That's a relief. Had you thrown out a hundred baseships with twinked engines, I wouldn't be able to give you the benefit of the doubt. I know you dislike the way this game has gone but I'd like to think you'd not go quite that far to fuck us all.

I designed such a ship, but if people decide it's gamey, then I won't build it. My explanation is that gravitic engines create a localized field effect that helps movement, and you only need one to create the effect, but I admit that's pretty hokey.

Yeah, and on my old Neverwinter server there was a sect of throat-singing undead dragon-worshipping drow, but that didn't make Bard/Pale Master/Red Dragon Disciple a balanced build.

Although I have to admit, it was damned funny watching them try to justify it as RP.

[GuppyShark]

You could build five of these for every battleship I make. Small is better for a warp point defense I think.

Those are awesome. They're so specialised for warp point defence they can only fire three times before running out of Supply.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Definately. It looks like the weapons were reverse-engineered from B5 Wars, but B5 Wars doesn't have a way to create your own ship designs from what I remember, so there was no cost mechanism to balance these weapons against.

That's the danger of converting. What works for one game system might not work when you rip it out and stick it into another. Better to come up with something completely original.

That's a relief. Had you thrown out a hundred baseships with twinked engines, I wouldn't be able to give you the benefit of the doubt. I know you dislike the way this game has gone but I'd like to think you'd not go quite that far to fuck us all.

Actually I'm not looking to end the game anymore. Not that I could, anyway. My moment of being unstoppable only lasted a few turns, not enough time to take advantage of it. Now I'll have to get scheming and find a new way to crush all foes

Yeah, and on my old Neverwinter server there was a sect of throat-singing undead dragon-worshipping drow, but that didn't make Bard/Pale Master/Red Dragon Disciple a balanced build.

Although I have to admit, it was damned funny watching them try to justify it as RP.

Well, not to derail this into d20 bashing, but when the system is so disjointed and broken that a carefully tweaked design is many times better than a straightforward one, things like Bard/PM/RDD's are the designers' faults. The players are just trying to make good characters. Expecting people to knowingly make sub-optimal choices is, IMO, not reasonable. I see the B5 mod as similar to d20. Very large with no use of templates and pre-determined organization, leading to an unbalanced patchwork that requires one to use nonsensical designs to be competitive. What this mod needs is planning and consistency. If it had that, people wouldn't be maxing out their best weapons (which don't usually seem to be their most "advanced") in 10 turns, using fusion engines, etc.

[brianeyci]

You could build five of these for every battleship I make. Small is better for a warp point defense I think.

Those are awesome. They're so specialised for warp point defence they can only fire three times before running out of Supply.

Well if those survive more than one round I'd be surprised. One shot from any gun pulverizes it because there's no armor. Three times is more than enough .

Brian

[Covenant]

'Shields' represent point blank PD and flak and such. If you overwhelm them, the ship is vulnerable to damage. It regenerates fully every turn though, and some weapons do double or quad or bypass shields, or do half to shields, based on their effectiveness in penetrating these defenses.

There are no invincishields.

There is still the ability "2 damage is channeled into the shields" I assume you took that out? I guess the description isn't accurate anymore

Actually, the small amount is there, but it's oh-so very small. I've recommended removing it, as this will allow guns that normally are absorbed by shields to be more effective. It unfairly penalizes these weapons, since these are also generally the fast-firing ones, and since shields regen to full each round, unless a weapon can bypass or bring a shield down in a single round, it never will be able to do any appreciable damage. While increasing the bulk of lasers will help to offset this problem, one laser is still nearly more effective than 2 pulse guns. My dreadnaught battles between 16 Pulsegun and 8 Laser vessels often turned up with the 8 lasers as the late-game victors due to component kills. I am, however, an ideological fan of lasers. Pulseguns do shine when shields get dropped, so they have a purpose. Slightly. Even when I do a combination of particle beams (2x damage to shields) and pulse guns to follow up, half it's tonnage in lasers wins with no losses.

Even when comparing 160 tons of lasers against 390 tons of plasmas, which ignore armor, the lasers win with seven survivors. The ability to cleave off armor early and often trumps any other ability.

Problem is, in groups larger than two, the ability to crunch through someone's shields and armor goes up fast. And lasers, which ignore shields, get to ignore one of the primary reasons for a ship's survivability. The one saving grace is that PD's, due to their high numbers, are some of the first systems to go, leaving a ship that is weakened, and increasingly easy to damage. It's a nice simulation of the wearing down of a ship's defenses. This is one of the biggest balancing issues of the general weapons, and I think bulking them up will help in part.

Decreasing their accuracy will also help, since right now they're super accurate. Instead of giving them a high accuracy bonus, give them a consistantly high accuracy even to their maximum range, so they are good for standoff range battleship confrontations, but little ability to hit small escort craft. That fits the intent you had for them better, and allows armor to be the counter to lasers--as you intended. Big ships will naturally gravitate towards lasers, since they are brutal and unfazed by a big ship's heavy PD's, and big ships will naturally bulk up on armor to avoid laser damage. You could even make them reload of 3 and keep the damage high--their inaccuracy against small vessels will be a better balancing factor than anything else. You'll want to mix your arms well. Dreadnaughts with nothing but heavy cannons will be good cap-killers, but might find themselves meeting the Yamato's fate if they didn't pack any coilguns to shake off fighters.

Pulse weapons, on the other hand, will be good small-vessel weapons. They fire fast and do high damage and are accurate, allowing them to track and damage enemy ships well, but not to the point where they'll become as serious a threat to a big capship as another big lasing-array battleship.

Plasma weapons seem like the sort of thing a bomber would carry. Armor penetrating attacks are almost useless against small, lightly armored vessels. And if we want to think realistically, they suffer from the steamgun effect. However, a magnetic arc of channeled plasma could make for an excellent lightning gun (conducts electricity) or a magnetically-locked plasma cutter. Both are close range, armor-ignoring weapon types, so they fit realism and the intent of the weapon.

If we scale plasma weapons up to 60kt's and have them to 100 damage on impact--IE, doubling them--then they now have the ability to churn through low shields and grind a big hole in things. It's also small enough for a small vessel to have a few, making them able to carry something effective against capital craft. Plus, they only fire once every other turn, so even with armor-ignoring their damage output is really damn low.

Particle beams still have no use, as far as I can tell. They don't outpreform anything. Maybe once these changes are made they'll have a more emergent role, but as it stands, they are mostly without merit. 2x damage to shields isn't very useful, really, since the guns are so weak. Sure, they do like 90ish to shields. Once they're down they do like 40 while pulses are doing 50. When it appears the maximum shield count of a dreadnaught is around 525 (gotta have lots of armor or the lasers will eat you!) the extra times a pulsegun vessel needs to fire to bring down a ship's shields is like 3-4 times more than a particle beamer. If it did like 3 or 4x shield damage, maybe then it'd be more useful.

But as it stands, 5 less pulsegun shots doesn't matter. 10 ships with 15 pulseguns, minus 10 to bring down shields, means 140 pulsegun hits at 50 damage each. 7000 damage. Same ships with particle beams fire, and hit 145 times. We'll be nice and round up. 145 at 40 a hit is 5800 damage, a crippling 1200 less damage dealt. Now, however, you could make them do 4x damage to shields and ONLY shields, and make them shield-defeating weapons. However, shields in this game are actually scatter from point defenses, so I'm not even sure why that's necessary, or why particle beams would even interact with them--afterall, lasers don't. It's understandable that coilgun rounds and plasmoids are easily broken up by the banging of flak, but a particle beam?

Besides, we already have an effective shield killing device that'll do 360 damage to shields in a single hit--anti ship missiles. Sure, they can come under flak attack, but destroyers and other escorts could carry lots, and sit out there around the periphery. Penetration missiles also ignore shields and armor, making them great gut-busters. Plus, we don't want it to be easy to completely evaporate a shield, just balanced.

Sorry for the long post, just wanted to bring some ideas to the fore.

[Nephtys]

Thanks for the long article! It's darned helpful!

And thanks to Dalton for setting up the account.

[GuppyShark]

Heya Covenant! Now we can PM our machinations, rather than trying to work through game messages!

So, here's what we'll do... first, I scout her territory...

Oh crap, this isn't a PM. Abort!

[Nephtys]

Heya Covenant! Now we can PM our machinations, rather than trying to work through game messages!

So, here's what we'll do... first, I scout her territory...

Oh crap, this isn't a PM. Abort!

You treacherous fiend! Nobody.. I mean NOBODY out-treacherizes me!

[Covenant]

If we make these changes to lasers and plasmas, we may not even need to remove the 2-regen-on-hit effect, since all that does is allow bigger vessels to shrug off lots of little hits. That's just fine by me, though you could make that a function of some sort of emissive armor.

Because even if little ships can't dent a big ship with their 5 pulse guns very well, a little ship with missiles or a plasma cutter could. The real problem with the pulse guns is that they're nice and small and good at everything. They're lovely weapons, but we want to avoid letting them be too effective. I think, as always, the extra garbage space of a small ship (devoted mostly to engines and bridges rather than cannons) will save ships from that though, and it's clear lasers are better than pulses against big ships.

You could, you know, dump particle guns as they stand now and turn pulse guns into particle guns. There are no natural 'pulse' weapons, so it's an artificial designation just in the vein of Star Trek, which itself is just denoting a special type of phaser. Lasers are pulse weapons of a sort, but you could make Particle guns into Pulse guns.

Particle weapons are generally shorter range than lasers due to EM blooming, but have a high damage output with a similar amount of space. This distinction would allow us to have both Laser AND Particle beam weapons, with the particle beams firing short bursts of something, probably electrons or protons or neutrons, that slam into enemy hulls and bleed off all sorts of awful radiation, blowing stuff up and frying machinery after vaporizing your armor.

Particle beams are also notable that they are effected by charged fields, IE, any sort of energy shield. While the point defenses are currently of indiscriminate sort, it's not terribly unlikely they could emit some sort of charged field. For all we know the point defenses are just powerful magnets that rip things apart via magnetic shearing effects and block incoming projectiles with force. That would actually make some sense.

So it's quite a reasonable idea if you ask me! Reduces the bloat just fine. If you want another shield-bursting small munition, I'm still in favor of making Swarmers 2x damage to shields and make all missiles efficent anti-shield weapons.

And yes, now I can PM. This is truly the reason I wanted to get the SD.N profile, but it's also useful for occasionally adding frustrating input into other people's discussions about Wookies.

[brianeyci]

Welcome Covenant. Good that there's another person like me with as much time to waste making huge posts, now I know why you're friends with Nephtys lol .

There's size, cost, damage, range, research, type of damage, ability to target. I guess those are the main things, but it's really complicated. A spreadsheet would really help like Tux said.

And you don't have anything to worry about. I didn't get Defiant Cloaking until a few turns ago in ST Mod .

Brian

[brianeyci]

Shadows can make some great defense "bases"... who says they need to add engines.





And you can use the Ancient -75% on ships and not bases... they end up half as cheap with maintainence than using a base. So bases are for losers.

Brian

[Covenant]

And you don't have anything to worry about. I didn't get Defiant Cloaking until a few turns ago in ST Mod .

Brian

If Defiant Cloaking is the extent of my worries, this'll be a rather short game.

The spreadsheet idea is a good one. I'm no big fan of spreadsheets in general, but they do have their uses, such as making these cross-comparisons easier. I'd throw one on here, but I'd rather save Neph the trouble of appeasing me and just change the .dat files until I'm satisfied. Then I'll share my results, my reasons for doing thus, and let her mull it over before she makes her final decision. I do want to collaborate more than just adding shipsets afterall, but I think I'll post one of my Vree defense guns, just for laughs. -edit- Actually, I don't like that pic, I'll just post the panoramic view.



Here's a closeup on one of their shippies. While it's never explained in the series from what I can tell, I have decided to assume the glowy buzzsaw is actually a heat radiator of some variety. I also removed the topmounted guns, not only for aesthetic and uniformity reasons, but because I figured that not all ships of that size would necessarily mount two large cannons, and it'd be silly to model it as such. It's to scale, so you can locate it on the big panoramic view right below the small station on the left. See that little disc with the orange outsides? Yeah, that's him. You can also look in and see ships of various sizes landed inside the space stations, and those cargo tubes on their decks are the same ones used by the transport class vessels just behind the disc you see. I also have a cool Slylandro probe--was thinking about making them a nomadic energy race for Adamant, but reconsidered. I've already made a Starcrafty Zerg one for Organic Nomads, and have yet to find a good adamant game to join! ;p



Anyway, this weapons discussion brings up the sister issue of hull sizes. In conventional games they rise fairly, well, conventionally. 300. 400. 500. 550. 700. 850. 1050. 1300. They do make little leaps and bounds, but the changes are so MINOR as to not do my very favorite thing--make both shipsizes useful.

Imagine you had two ship classes, 500 and 1500, and that's all. Now you need to decide what you want to use, the small ship with it's 50 percent dodge or the big ship with it's -10 percent to hit but 3x the internal storage space. Let us assume they requrie the exact same engine and such requirements. The choice is clear for a killy ship, you want big. It's a better weapons barge. But for dodgy ships, small is better. And you might want dodgy ships to fight big ships, since big ones hardly ever hit smaller ones. And thus the debate continues. People probably build masses of small or masses of large until some schmuck builds 90 percent small with a few large artillery platforms and just creams everyone else.

The point being that small ships need help. Neph is going a good route by giving small classes defined bonuses. Scout classes carry sensor mounts to improve their stuff, or something similar, making them useful throughout the game. Destroyers or Frigates will be able to carry more extensive number of flak guns, or maybe less (bigger) but longer range ones. Or something. They become effective screening vessels. Cruiser classes are self-sufficent, allowing them to operate far outside of your supply lines (which are now the lifeblood of a fleet on the move), with light cruisers being similar to destroyer/scouts and heavy cruisers being similar to destroyer/battleships. This makes cruisers effective vessels, but in a purely offensive-minded assault fleet, they won't have as much of a place as a real battleship would.

This allows people to mix and match their forces to create interesting and effective synergistic navies, and makes it so you don't always need to kill their biggest ships to win--sometimes you'll be able to screw 'em by taking out their destroyers, and then in a few turns, running down their battleships with swarms of fastmoving missile boats. Or you could send cruisers far out beyond your supply lines and harass their transport convoys, cutting off the supply of fuel to the enemy, making them unable to risk wasting all their supplies on an attack before clearing their lines agan. Etc.

And this is good, but it depends on a little more than just some bonuses. We also need to differentiate between classes due to large gulfs of scale. I've mentioned this to neph, but something more like 300, 500, 700 for scout, frigate, destroyer. Then we hit 1000 for light cruiser and 1400 for heavy cruisers, 3000 for battleships and then arrive at that last level. These can either be 5000 kt dreadnaughts of expanded but not ridiculously larger size, 7000 kt super-battleships that exist as a sort of Yamato or Iowa class flagship, or 10000 kt planet crushing monsters that are so much larger than any other ship of the navy that they exist in few numbers, like SSD's or Culture GSV's.

The differences are rather important. They allow us to set up a tiered structure so that no ship is ever truely turned worthless. Instead of making 100 or 1000 battleships of around 1.3k capacity you could make 30 of them at 3k or go for broke and make 10 planet-munching ultra-ships. This not only looks badass in combat, but keeps the battles dynamic. A giant ship like that may be more than worth it's weight in smaller vessels, and could cost a truely ridiculous amount, but it would require the support of a vast number of smaller vessels, not only to feed it's massive weapons consumption requirements but to keep it from being torn apart by missile barrages and swarming fleets of other vessels.

And, best of all, it keeps fleets much more manageable in size. When you have such massively large fleets as your B5 game seesms to have, mobility is restricted, making ships--any ships--slow lumbering idiots. Keeping numbers smaller helps people use mobility to a greater advantage. Kiting is something I'm not terribly worried about unbalancing things, but there's really nothing more smirk-worthy than building small little ships that dance away from the giant hammer-fisted battleships and plink away at their defenses.

Afterall, the difficulty in using small ships is making them offensively and defensively efficent. The difficulty in big ships should be making their excellent offenses and defenses hit the enemy. I think we have a good chance here to make a game that really emphasizes mixed fleets all the way until the end, and doesn't force specific designs for ship hulls, but does make it so there are favored weapon types for various ship sizes, leading to a rather exciting, ever-shifting landscape of fleet composition and weapon layout that needs to adapt to your playstyle and the playstyle of your enemy.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

One idea is that, at the beginning of the game, you can only build small ships. As the game progresses, you not only get larger ships, but the same size ships get bigger bonuses to offense, defense, less engines required per move, etc. So if you had 4 different sizes of ships, let's call them frigate, destroyer, cruiser, and battleship, you would have 4 progressively better versions of frigates, 3 versions of destroyers, 2 of cruisers, and just 1 battleship. A level 4 frigate would still be useful in a fleet that has battleships, while a level 1 frigate would not. This allows for a size progression while still keeping smaller ships useful, without the small ships you start out with being too good.

[Covenant]

The equipment they'll be capable of mounting won't be impressive enough to make them overpowered. Also, I like the idea of having ship progression through the tech tree move more like this...


Scouts first, then Destroyers, then Battleships. At this point you have the basis for a very low-level sort of fleet without the finesse of a late-game fleet. Scouts can be armed to do light picket duties, and keep up with the fleet as recon. Destroyers are your beginning game ship killers aith Battleships having access at the beginning only to very limited equipment, making them large, expensive, and not inherently more threatening than it's mass in destroyers. But this is good practice for your expanding fleet.

Since the next classes are advanced ships, they all have extended cruising capacity, self sufficency, low maintaince costs, and begin to fill-in your ranks with support and patrol vessels, allowing your Destroyer and Battleship groups to dedicate themselves to warship combat instead.

Frigates first, then Light Cruisers, then Heavy Cruisers. Now you can build a variety of support vessels, experiment with cruisers as part of the navy, and work on making frigate and cruiser raiding vessels to dash ahead and cut up enemy supply lines. At this point your three original classes have matured into their roles as combat ships and your advanced vessels compliment them well with their sexy support capabilities. Destroyers and Battleships are still the backbone of your navy, but they've gone from carrying lots of little BB-guns to mounting huge energy weapons and being coated in point defenses and armor. Light cruisers are starting to hammer on your destroyers and heavy cruisers fitted for fleet combat are making life hard too, so the hulls envolve into more specialized roles as Carriers and Assault Ships begin appearing.

Then, once you've researched all of those 3 basic classes and the 3 advanced classes you get access to that final big badass. When he rolls out, everything takes a back seat as you struggle to figure out how to adapt to it. There aren't many, that's to be sure, but when they do show up it makes things dicey. Eventually things settle down, and people begin using these huge hulls for all manner of interesting roles, with few people using them solely as a weapon platform. I don't even think it's really necessicary to have that last level of ship, and would happily make it an opt-in racial perk you pay for in chargen.

And that's how it goes. Much better than get a new ship, upgrade to that bigger hull, ad nauseum until you find that one single hull that best matches your production capacity, and you make nothing but that. The way the hulls come out allows even early navies to feel more like a real fighting force than a silly bunch of rowboats with lazors. This encourages combat from day 1, and makes it so the new ships you get don't crush the opposition themselves, but allow you more flexibility in your strategy. I think it's smarter, fairly intuitive, and easy to do.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Sounds like a workable idea, but I'm not sure what you mean when you talk about supply lines and raiding them. As far as I know, SEIV contains no such concept.

[Covenant]

It actually does in a roundabout way. Resupply ships carry big supply thingies that can go and refuel dudes. The way Neph's mod is shaping this up is that supply will be much more limited than in current mods, leading your ships to require travelling between resupply points throughout your empire on normal transit runs, and to make supply convoys to resupply ships that are entering enemy space, otherwise they'll quickly run out of fuel, get stranded, and have no means of attack or defense and be blown away.

So instead of being able to race your ships through someone's space, you'll need to do some island-hopping to capture worlds or set up small bases to use as resupply depos. And while you're on your way to the planet your enemy might send flights of fighters or small frigates to harass you, forcing you to burn off more and more supply. Small ships are hard to hit, so your big boats will be flinging huge, expensive beams at hard-to-catch little ships and wasting supplies. A well timed raid could leave you so low on supply that when their main fleet hits, your ammo boxes will be empty.

So what you'll want to do is establish a supply chain of transport ships to continually bring supplies to the front lines, keeping their tanks topped off even while moving through enemy space. As you advance you'll want to stop, invade, create a resupply depo for your transports to refill at, and then send the fleet ahead to the next target. So the advantage of cruisers and frigates is their long cruising range, making it so they can move far ahead of your fleet and gun down some convoy vessels, hampering your enemy's offensive capacity. Defenders will have an advantage here, but that's as it should be. We'll be giving enough potent blockade-breaker toys to the offense to keep aggression in-style.

[Nephtys]

Sounds like a workable idea, but I'm not sure what you mean when you talk about supply lines and raiding them. As far as I know, SEIV contains no such concept.

I'm thinking as a fuel concept, that travel costs very little in terms of supply usage, but fighting eats it up quickly. So maybe after 10-15 turns of shooting combat, a ship will need some resupply, which means that'll be ok for probably 3 or 4 skirmish level engagements. After that, one must resupply them with a transport loaded in supply elements, which will then need to go home for more.

So thus, if you can intercept enemy fuelers, their fleets may be winchester for some time.

[brianeyci]

One thing is in SE:IV once you have one big battle it's game over. Though I like the Battle of Midway analogy, I'd rather not commit to total war and have a lot of skirmishes. I have no idea how to promote that though, and tanker and fueling ships seem to force that decisive battle concept that I personally don't like in SE:IV because once you set up a supply line or destroy the other guy's, its total commitment. And once you have that one big battle--no need for fuelers anymore, you've crushed their fleet and they have nothing to hit your fuelers with.

It might be less realistic, but somehow I'd prefer wars not to be total annihilation. A lot of skirmishes, small battles.

My only possible suggestion is many very cheap very fast easy to maintain shipyards that can construct many small ships quickly that act as fueler escorts or raiders. The equivalent of a submarine in space somehow with cloaking. Maybe there is no way to detect raider ships at all until they decloak, so you're forced to escort them all the time and it's a balance between escorts and fleet.

<edit>Bigger is usually almost always better because there are a less percentage of components used for propulsion and vehicle control. QNP fixes this a little, but there's still vehicle control and bigger ships can mount more armor and last longer. It's like microing in RTS games--you always focus fire on one guy because damaging a lot of guys at random is really stupid because more damage doesn't mean they deal less damage to you, you have to go for the kill shot. Leaky armor kind of fixes that, but I think weapons and sensors should be extremely vulnerable, simulated by making them very large kT wise so they're the first components to be destroyed. I honestly see no real way to make smaller ships better except to make them faster, unless you restrict certain components to smaller ships only. And because of warp points, it's really easy to stop maneuver warfare because there's no real advantage to getting there faster if you can't take damage. I was thinking of tier 0 warp point openers, but that might be too much.</edit>

Brian