Removing engine limit on hulls - Ramifications?

You won't see change in battle times (since fast ships will cause chase scenarios or you'll both use high speed ships with no speed advantage like normal games) - but it will lead to different possibilities for small ships and scouting, particularly in simultaneous movement games.

Also note you can modify the combat speed of fighters independent of their system movement speed in VehicleSizes.txt...

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

That isn't a bad idea or may just double or triple the max engines on hulls. Which would allow you to create a rapid reaction fleet. But this would be a very week fleet as far as fire power goes, but this would be made up for the speed.

The problem is that the weak fast ships will always flee from the enemy player - so then they'd have to make faster ships with weak firepower and you'd have the same situation where the ships are the same speed. At least in PBW-type applications - the AI wouldn't be as reactionary.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

speaking of reactionary, i wasa wondering if there was a way to mod the "sentry" setting to include a'reaction' move or reserve move of some kind?

http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/2249#comment-14088

I know you're the busiest of the busy, mod moderator, btester,
and don't have time for reading ALL hte posts, but i htink this si one of my better ideas, and ties several threads together that keep floating.

Part of it of course is the old arguments of turn vs. simulataneous, but thats just part of gaming in general.

The Sentry command isn't in the realm of modding possibility unfortunately.

should we shop it around and see if there is enough interest to ask for a fix?

...I sure can't program modern stuff!

...i just think these several related concepts would enable not only a reactive defense, but alot of the pirate / pillage / monster functions, as well as perhaps help with the simultaneous move issue that was being discussed with fleets "missing"- the auto-updater targetting in strategic level, that is.

I read that story!
and tried to make my pacifist stepDad read it!

in the story, Terrans have finally become a peaceful race and so the ship is unarmed..
The problem is that:
Pacifism is no defense against the Merciless (or the barbarian)

they run across the NotPacifist Kzinti...
and trust me, those Kzin are mean! Just read some of evilGingers posts, that big orange...

But...

what about the reaction/reserve move?

Hmm... I can think of one way to make sure we don't get an endless "woo, I'm running away forever" abuse of removing engine limit: Give it minimal supplies. Maybe this is best implemented by either:

1) Delimit the number of Solar Sails you can put on and modify them in a way for balance. Or maybe make a new component with Solar Sail properties. That way, you get lots of speed without increasing supply capacity.

2) Make a new type of engine that can only barely store supplies, eats a ton more, takes up more space, is expensive and generates a lot of movement points. Preferably make it such that you can't mix this new engine with regular engines - or maybe that's not such a bad idea... Either way, this would force really really fast ships to spend even more precious tonnage on extra supply storage. Maybe even make these engines give a debuff of say, -50% Hit chance.

I'm leaning towards Option 2 at the moment. Using BM's standards for Supply requirements on Seeker weapons, it would make really fast ships impossible to shoot seekers for long and direct fire would be extremely impractical - heck it'd even fail to shoot down regular seekers at times. It could run away, but it'd eat up so much supplies doing so that it's impractical to have this ship be in contested zones alone for long. Heck, with the new "can't retreat into a sector with a visible enemy ship/planet" feature of v1.25, it's easy to kill this thing if you catch it (in sequential turn-based) with a small handful of ships.

Either way, the biggest ramification I see from delimiting the number of regular engines you can put on a hull is how much supplies that thing can carry. Especially if they're all Ion Engines as I'd do it - cheap, efficient supply storage and some extra movement as a bonus.

Other consequence would be colony defence, but that kinda balances out if you make sure all important colonies have a small amount of basic defence.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Ah in which case, sure go for it. Make sure Seekers require lots of supplies too as a countermeasure to "lol, I can kite you all day" (aka Parthian ships). I shall leave it to you to figure out the exact numbers required to balance the "you must have supply/ordnance storage components now" feature.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

I've been messing around with the data files myself, trying to solve this engine problem, and my current one is pretty decent... instead of removing the engine limit, which quickly leads to extremely fast ships (making transports particularly overpowering, and literraly impossible to catch), I've increased the engine size by 3 times, increased supply usage and reduced their supply storage (forcing supply pods), and then gave bonus movement to ship size smaller than cruisers. This leads to faster, but lightly armed destroyers and frigates (due to the engines and supply storage taking up all the space), or moderately armed ones that moves normally. (Note that I've also slightly increase ship size for various other reasons, including trying to counter fighters.) I've noticed that my "hunter frigates" (full engines) are doing pretty well against running targets, and am pretty happy with it. The larger size of the engines makes me pause to consider what else I could put on for all the space, although not so much for larger ships, it works well for smaller ship sizes that already have bonus movement to keep up with the fleet. Plus it makes those ships size useful even after you've gotten dreadnoughts.