Please let us change ship size without hosing the design |
Okay. So you designed a ship, and you have concluded that it uses more Minerals and Radiactives than Organics. So you want to choose a hull type to best balance the resources. Considering that we really can't see the total until AFTER we have designed something, wouldn't it make sense to allow us to switch the design from, say, Baseship to Organic Baseship without wiping out everything? As long as the design that we are switching to has an IDENTICAL footprint and hull space, why delete everything?
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Well, since where you put your weapons and stuff doesnt really matter, besides inside and outside being destroyed at differant times, all you have to do is put the components on the ship, it doesnt matter if it's on the left wing or right, just thats it's inside or out.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
WHY SHOULD I FEAR WHAT WRONG I HAD NOT DONE?
~Ardius (me)
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
I wouldn't want to see the results of SE5 doing a guess-and-check on "identical" slot layouts. 
Really though, if you are actually frequently wanting to change from regular to organic (and vice versa) frigates for a few measly minerals and organics, you should probably take a step back and get some perspective. Construction point spillover makes the need to get build costs synched to build rates almost non-existent.
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Really though, if you are actually frequently wanting to change from regular to organic (and vice versa) frigates for a few measly minerals and organics, you should probably take a step back and get some perspective. Construction point spillover makes the need to get build costs synched to build rates almost non-existent.
There is no guess or check. The layout of a normal frigate is always exactly the same as an organic frigate, and it is always the same as a crytalline frigate. A small mine or fighter or satellite is always the same as the organic or crystalline counterpart. There is no checking necessary.
And I'd respectfully disagree that this isn't about just "a few measly minerals". If you build 200 mines or 500 troops then it is not a few. Changing one frigate to organic won't net you much, but if you have to build 50, then it certainly isn't insignificant. So the perspective is definitely there, not to mention that there is no reason not to be efficient. After all, when we first started playing we didn't always do things the most efficient ways, but as we learn, we improve. Seemingly insignificant things here and there added up -can- mean the difference between victory and defeat against good opponents.
We already know what benefit different racial hull type can give us. There is no guessing or checking, all the destroyers have identical layouts. All the DN, starbase, drones, troops are the same. We know what is an efficient way to run our empires, it is up to the interface to facilitate, not hinder it.
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
If you think you need to squeeze 1% more ships by micromanaging the crap out of it, you're doing it wrong.
Build rate should NOT be your chokepoint. Resource availablility should be your limiting factor. You are in the best shape when 100% of your budget is going towards maintenance of already-built ships. (Preferably when they are on the front lines, hurting people and breaking things)
And if you have the resources left over to micromanage, an extra spaceyard will be far better instead.
Things to fix:
1) Stop the suicide missions. "Nobody ever won a war by dying for his country"
If your ships aren't dying, maintenance will increase, SY demands will decrease, and your navy will gain experience bonuses as well.
2) Build more SYs! Von Neumann Base Spaceyards will solve almost anything. Build one BSY and have it building BSYs. Soon you have 2, then 4, then 8, and within a year you have added 1.024 million resource points per turn.
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
The scope of the benefit would be quite limited; players who take multiple racial traits, and mods which give many hull sizes the same layouts.
The cost would be in terms of Aaron's time spent implementing it, and the opportunity for new bugs.
It would be nice to have for free, but I for one don't see a very good ROI in this case.
If the game had not had slot layouts, but had used the SE3 or SE4 system instead, changing hull sizes while keeping the components would have been trivial to implement, but alas, it was not to be 
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Let's forget for a moment why people want to do this, and just assume that the desire is there. Then there are two questions to ask: does it make sense to take this action (however misguided it may be), and is it feasible to implement?
The latter question first: is it feasible? I think so. The main hassle with designing ships with the given UI is the repeated clicking. If I want my ship to have twelve engines and ten DUCs then there's a lot of back-and-forth involved. Even worse is if you want twelve engines, and then ten different kinds of weapons. Then you can't use the shift-click method, and have to mouse back-and-forth, scrolling up and down, to get exactly the combination you're looking for. A simple implementation with changing ship hulls would be to have the game copy the components slot-for-slot if the hull is identical (say, when moving from organic to crystalline of the same hull, which was already mentioned as a viable scenario), or to assign the components in a linear order. The game can collect all of the Outer Hull components on the current design, and then assign them to Outer Hull slots in the new hull. The game can start at the "first" Outer Hull slot, and assign the "first" component to that slot, and proceed from there. If the new ship hull would be too small to accommodate all of the current components, then a simple error message could be generated, and nothing would be changed.
I can't ever imagine caring too much about the actual layout of my components within the ship; what I do care about is how many of them there are. And this deals partly with the first question, of whether it makes sense to take this action of changing the ship's hull, however misguided it may be. The only real concern I've noted in the thread thus far is that
which is of course true, but in my opinion, irrelevant. It may be directional, but we have no way of controlling which way damage will be coming from, so it is completely randomized. That is, the element might as well not be in the game (from a Design point-of-view, although it makes things neat from a Combat point-of-view) since it cannot be accounted for when designing your ship.
It makes me wonder if perhaps the Design UI is just fundamentally not what it should be. Ideally, it should facilitate the actions that most people are going to want to take most often. I very frequently want to essentially "copy" a current, working design into a larger, better hull. I very infrequently want to micromanage the exact location of my Combat Sensors in one of a dozens slots, across three different decks. One of these actions the UI allows for quite easily; the other it does not.
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
which is of course true, but in my opinion, irrelevant. It may be directional, but we have no way of controlling which way damage will be coming from, so it is completely randomized. That is, the element might as well not be in the game (from a Design point-of-view, although it makes things neat from a Combat point-of-view) since it cannot be accounted for when designing your ship.
If you are designing a ship in Gritty Galaxy mod, for example, placement is important. And depending on your ship's strategy and weapons, you will have some idea of what directions will face the most fire.
GGmod has Directional Armor -
No armor slots, everything is outer hull. You stick armor around the edge so it gets hit first, most of the time.
Placement relative to the armor is quite important.
Placement relative to each other is also important, since the internals will take small amounts of damage long before all the armor is gone.
There are four main classes of armor placement.
- Coward's Armor -
For those ships which will be playing "don't get hurt", lots and lots of armor on the butt end, with some on the sides and a little on the front for safety against stray shots.
A more moderate version of this for ships which will be using long range weapons, and mostly falling back as the enemy chases.
- Flank Armor -
For those ships which will be circling the enemy with equal range weaponry. Lots of armor on the sides, moderate amounts on the front and rear.
- Plow Armor -
For those ships which will be charging straight into the enemy guns and drawing fire away from your other ships. Everything to the front, with minimal side and rear protection. These ships will eat a whole lot of fire with no ill effects until they die almost instantly when the last armor breaches. If they get flanked, you've got burned out hulks... but they were meant to be cannon fodder anyways.
- Dogfighting Armor -
This ship will be mixing it up at point blank right in the middle of the enemies, so the armor is balanced all around. Lots of turning and flybys helps to keep the enemy fire hitting from random directions.
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Ah yes, I suppose I should have clarified that I was only speaking to the stock data set, and not considering mods. You and Fyron are both quite right to point out that mods may (and in fact do) make good use of component placement.
Do tell! Where is this in Empire Options? I had a look, but found nothing - unless I've misunderstood you here, do you mean there is an option to have the components display as they did in SEIV?
Would you mind elaborating on how this is flawed? I'm not sure that I follow. To clarify my own thoughts: I'm suggesting that if a player were to try and change the hull size of their current design, the game would perform a test and one of three things would happen. If the new hull size is too small, the game will say so and nothing will change. If the new hull is the exact same size, then the game can copy the current components over into their respective slots. If the new hull is larger, then the game can copy the current components over into the new hull, respecting slot type (A/O/I) and deck number, but otherwise putting the first component in the first slot, the second one in the second, and so on.
Even if the player is using a mod, then all they are left with in the third scenario is perhaps having to shuffle their components around to place things properly to allow for directional fire, damage absorption, or what have you. But this is still less hassle than having to start over from a completely blank hull design. Worst case scenario: the player can click the "Clear Design" button, and begin from scratch if that's what they really want.
I realize this might not be a "common" desire, but having played SEIV more than :V or :III, I really miss this ability. There are often fairly rudimentary ship designs that I will always have in a game, that I will periodically want to just make "bigger and with more stuff". I can't do that in :V with any ease.
I'm not trying to flame either you or Suicide here; I know you both are hugely involved in the community. But it seems that questioning the motive for requesting a feature is short-sighted, since you're then sort of saying "you're playing the game wrong". I agree it might not be gauged to be a "priority" feature change, but I'd be content if it was even on the long-range radar for things to be added.
Thanks for the feedback, and cheers to you both!
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
The component sorting option is in the Empire Options under Display Options, I think, I know it's there somewhere. The options are called something like 'component sorting' I can't remember exactly. There's options for components, ships sizes? and weapon mounts? or something to that effect.
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
You can also disable component/hull alpha-sort in settings.txt.
-----
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Ah, thanks Innuendo and Captain Kwok both - I see what you are talking about now. The option changes the sort order for the list of all available components, from the default alphabetic sort mode to the (perhaps) more intuitive sort-by-category mode which groups weapons together, engines together, etc. This is useful, but I had originally thought this option would change how the components were displayed once added to a ship design, i.e., that it would do away with the component placement within decks, and return to the way components were displayed in SE:IV. Sorry for the confusion.
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Even in stock, component placement is an important part of ship design; for many sorts of ships, you *can* estimate where the majority of damage will be coming from, and allocate appropriately with an eye to the ship's underlying mission.
For instance, you might design a heavy assault dropship, intended to land troops on an enemy planet in the teeth of heavy weapon platform fire (perhaps because the planet has valuable facilities or population you want to capture intact without risking orbital bombardment ). However, much of the time, it will be in use as a general fleet transport / utility vessel. The primary mission involves movement (engines) and troop landing (cargo space), with the vast majority of the fire from the front; the secondary mission involves more cargo space and a variety of utility functions.
So, you place most of the engines in the back outer of the ship, with a few "emergency" engines in the back inner; and place several cargo components in the back inner. Center inner gets the "keep alive" core (bridge / computer, minimal crew, minimal life support). Front inner gets some of your close-in, rapid-fire point defense and some more cargo space. Front and some side outer gets everything else... shield generators, sensors, the rest of your cargo, the minimal fighter, satellite, and drone launchers (even one each allows non-combat launch and retrieval, a really good idea), a minesweeper, the rest of your point defense, supplies & ordnance, and so on.
Compared to a randomly slapped-together ship, this design will have a *much* greater chance of succeeding in its primary mission, *even with the exact same components*; and no worse performance in its everyday duties.
Contrast to a "Parthian shot" missile ship, designed to run away while firing missiles behind it, a "battlestar" designed to wade into the midst of a melee of mostly lighter craft, a deep survey craft expecting to take light damage occasionally that needs to keep forging onward, and so on.
Some useful tips:
* Many people (myself included originally) tend to put the shield generators in the protected core. For ships that expect to take light or moderate damage and have to fight again before repair, this makes sense. For ships that in a hard fight expect to die, it's not the best plan. Once the shields are down, they're not going back up ever again; the generators are now dead weight. Dead weight = ablative armor. Place the shield generators outside / in front of anything that might still be useful in doing as much damage to the enemy as practical before the end.
* Similarly, a survey cruiser might have rather a lot of supply and ordnance related components (storage, emergency generation, solar panels, etc.) for fighting occasional light battles far from home. When it does get into a fight for its life, all that extra supply and ordnance isn't going to mean squat if it dies; put those components outside / in front of components that will allow it to fight (or flee).
Conversely, a fleet oiler full of vital supplies and/or ordnance may still be useful even if the drive rooms are a smoldering ruin and the bridge is vented to space, as long as the fleet can resupply from it in time to meet the next turn's challenges; place the storage components in the most protected part of the design.
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Sadly, you can't design ships in that way in BM - the list of components you can place in Inner Slots is very short. IMHO it hurts gameplay.
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
That's a very good description of using directional damage in stock. It might not be necessary for every design, but you've certainly demonstrated that there could be very useful designs that depend on directional damage and hence, proper placement of components within each deck. You've given me some things to think about the next time I design a task-specific ship. 
That being true, I still think the ability to move a current design to another hull of equal-or-greater size would be useful, even if all it did was blindly move the components over. My motivation for insisting on this is that it is simpler to shuffle around existing components than it is to have to re-add components from memory. This problem becomes worse if the ship design is complex, with multiple types of components. If you've worked out a perfect balance of ECM/Combat Sensors/seekers/PDs/beams/etc./etc., then why should you have to memorize this balance and input it again once you research a larger hull size? Let's assume that whatever your situation, using "Upgrade" is not quite what you're looking for.
Bottom line: with the ability to copy over the current design into another hull of equal-or-greater size, there are two possible outcomes. The player may not care about the impact of directional damage for this design, and so does not care about where components are placed within the layout of each deck. In this case, the player has been saved a huge hassle because they do not have to manually re-select each component from their old design, and add it into the new hull. On the other hand, the player may care about the placement of components, maybe a little, maybe a lot. In this case, the player potentially has to shuffle components around to make things work in the new hull. However the player would have engaged in this placement even if they had started from scratch, and so "upgrading" the hull size is at most the same amount of work as starting with a blank slate.
I'm going to shut up now for a bit, since I feel that I might be starting to beat a dead horse.
*steps down off of soapbox*
*puts down horse-beating instrument*
Carry on. 
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Still, a ship without weapons, engines and launchers is not a really efficient ship anymore.
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
I was considering to allow seeking weapons to be placed on inner slots for v1.10...
-----
What's this about organic and crystaline ships?
I have been playing a organic + crystaline + temporal race in a full tech game with blanace mode and I still see only normal ships. I do see the other fighters, troops, WPs, mines and sats but no special ships. I have seen organic and crystaline ships used by the AI. What might I be doing wrong?
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
Potentially stupid question, but did you scroll down the list of available ships?
-----
Re: Please let us change ship size without hosing the design
That isn't really possible with the slot layout system. There is no way for the game to know where each component should be placed in the new vehicle layout. A "baseship" and an "organic baseship" are not necessarily identical.
SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki