Ship sizes and effectiveness

They fixed the ship size issue. I'm not sure if it was this patch or the previous one, but all that was changed was the +% to hit modifier on larger ships (except the base ship) were removed. Made a big difference, now larger ships aren't so crippled in a fight.

Actually these changes make baseships useless in stock, for they are much likelier to get hit than dreadnoughts, but aren't this much larger. And there is no sense in makeing them as likely to hit as a cruiser of half their size...
But back to your question: Neither BM bor IRM made these changes, but there wasn't the same problem there either. The defence panelties in both mods don't increase with the level of the ships like in stock. Furthermore, in BM frigates max out at 300kT and therefore aren't able to use any mount. And the big mounts for really big ships give you some nice advantange. Therefore you will find bigger ships useful.
For IRM, big ships are really big there...

Yes big ships in the BM can be very effective, but I find that as your tech increses in other areas such as armour, weapons, ecm etc so does the effectivness of big ship hulls.

That said, I don´t think it is a good idea to simlpy go for an empire that just uses the biggest hull its got...you need mixed fleets of small, medium and big hulls and the right tactics to do well...at least against other players.

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That's a very good question. During the final stages of WWII, the Germans developed plans to build 300.000 tons battleships, armed with eight 31,5 inch guns. Those plans were neither rational nor feasable - at that time. Slow like a drunken whale and vulnerable to the extreme they would have been nothing but expensive targets - for anyone caring to take a shot. Why? Because the (linear) increase in armor-thickness would not have been able to protect them from armor-piercing bombs dropped by small diving planes.
But what if they would have had shields or force field defences? A whole new ball game, in my opinion. If the defence capacity of shields/defensive screens grows with the volume, then the side with the biggest ships will prevail.

In this game armor do this too.
Only if armor protected onlz from some directions (corseponding with its placement) and shields protected with full strength omnidirectionaly, big ships would gain advantage from this.

Whether it should be this waz or not depends on pseudophysical explanation of shields (whether they divide their energy per area or not, in other way, whether you can protect one side better if you give up protecting other).

Shield Regenerators stack in all mods. It's hard-coded.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Shield regenerators are nothing magical. They are good only aginst armor skiping shield not harming weapons. Every normal weapon can do more damage per second than same weight of shield regens do.

They can be realy usefull if you manualy controll ships and if one of your ships has low shields, you break contact and regen and return to combat.
But if you let AI controll ships this will not happen so ship is usualy under fire too short to shield regens be worth their weight.

What you have to look at is the damage reduction potential of shield regenerators. Does the amount of extra damage required to destroy the ship with shield regenerators more than a ship with an extra shield generator or armor?

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

This may not answer your question Captian it might just turn it around...

Does the amount of extra damage your ship can deal by not having a shield regenerator/s and having an extra weapon or more, reduce the damage the enemy can do to your ship by destroying them faster?

I think that even with shield regenerators stacking it is not really worth putting more that two on a ship in a general combat situation.

Ships need to have all their spare space balanced between defense and offense...many times is it better to have an extra weapon or two than one or two more shield regenerators...because you are looking at being able to kill the enemy as fast as possible so that they have less time to do damage to you.

Lets look at an example... Full tech game in the balance mod.

Level 6 (max level) shield regenerators regenerate 10 shield points a second.

A max level APB fires every 2 seconds and at a range of 120 can do between 69 to 79 points of damage.

We will say that the APB hits and in order to block all the possible damage it does, we would need 4 shield regenerators at a space usage of 80k.

But I think most people would agree that their combat ships will have more than one APB or what ever weapon they like to use...This often does not give the ship with shield regenerators time to regenerate much at all...and even if we are talking a damage reduction of 80 points off 8 APB at 120 range could do 632 damage it is not worth the space of 80k on a ship.

And lets not go near incinerator beams and mounts and heavy hitting stuff like that.

Maybe the amount of shield points a regenerator can recover per second should be increased in the BM?

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Well...

I see your point Tak, but there are times I've seen sheild regens work beutifully...

I have a game I'm playing where my cruiser has a few stacked regenerators and plenty of ecm (stealth/scattering armor) where the ship is tough to hit (really tough) Since many of the shots sent it's way are going to miss, the regens have been able to keep up with the damage being landed...

Granted this requires that the enemy doesn't have sufficient sensors to ensure landing a majority of the hits... If this were the case, then I would need to re-org my ship designs to compensate... But in the meantime, I can build CA's with little armor, as the sheilds are more than sufficient to keep it safe, and spend that extra space on weapons and staying power...

It's all in playing your designs to your enemies weaknesses!

At least in my experience.

Tak, one fundamental assumption you're making is that every combat ship must be able attack as well as defend. Against default strategies, this is naive. Picket ships should have NOTHING BUT Shield Regenerators, with minimalistic but suitable shields, cursory weapons (so they're registered as a threat) and preferably a ton of armour too. Well, Crystalline Armour would be better of course, but that's not an option all the time.

Picket ships can afford to do this because 1cm behind them are fully armed ships that focus entirely on offense. So long as the pickets don't die, enemy ships won't change targets under default strategies.

Naturally this is something to only be done with fleets of sizeable numbers. Ships designed to solo patrol need balance. Fleet specialists don't.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE

Zen I do agree with you but by doing so we are limiting shield regenerators to special situations which will occure, but two empires of about equal tech would then be better staying away from them.

Psi, you know that strategies can be changed to say target ships with least shields or least armour or a whole load of other types...which if you play against the AI will not change, something you seem to naively assume I do, but against another person they are more than capable of changing their strategies so that picket ships will not be effective.

(Testing will prove this....X number of general combat ships set to target ships with least shields vs half X picket ships and half X offensive ships)

And by having two types of ships like that you are making each dependent on the other, so a fleet without picket type ships is an "easy" target and visaversa(if that is how it is spelt) Shipyards are also busy building two types of ships and then the time/upkeep of upgrading all these in a large empire once several new levels of tech have been developed.

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It's about cumulative damage reduction in the same way as emissive or organic armor might benefit a ship. If your ship is facing an average of 100 damage points per second, 2 shield regenerators will "reduce" that damage to 80, which is a 20% reduction.

Of course, more powerful weapons (or mounted) are more immune to this effect, which is one of their benefits and why their traditional dmg/kT ratios might seem to be relatively low etc.

Ultimately, your ship's configuration really depends on what you're facing. There's no magic amount of component A you should add. It's a case of what fits your circumstance.

What's a good lower and upper limit for Shield Regenerators in the Balance Mod? It's hard to pinpoint, if you go up too much, you reach a point where it's better to place 8 shield regenerators and a couple of shield generators and become almost invulnerable in anything but full scale combats. I figure that point is between 10-15 regeneration per second, but only pbw play will reveal the answer.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Of course, this assumes you planned ahead and prepared enough variety to enable such switches. Not always feasible nor appropriate, but not exactly impossible either.

After a point it comes down to balance in the mod's design and psychological warfare. Point I'm trying to make is: "all combat ships should follow the same design philosophy under all circumstances" is open to exploit. That doesn't make it 'wrong' though. That might be precisely the point - showing a particular weakness to bait something else, or trying to become so good at that one path that it no longer matters that there are weaknesses and exploits.

---- Edit ----

I've put some more thought into this. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all the targetting options in Strategies all about extremes? i.e. everything is "Most/Least X" of some sort.

After getting your opponent to compromise on "Closest Target with weapons" (the default), what do they do if you then build a ship with no armour, no shields, choke full of weapons and tell it to run away (without leaving the sector of course)? Or build other such ships which focus on being at the extreme end of your fleet in some way, such that your opponent's strategy 'cannot see' the bulk of the fleet since they don't have "nearest target" at the top of their priorities?

Getting back on topic, there is no "most/least regeneration" option in Strategies so the opponent cannot specifically react to a low-shields/armour, extreme regen picket/"meat shield" ship. Skipping the logistics details of assembling such a fleet, once it's there and your opponent has a fleet of equal strength but all-balanced ships, how should they to react?

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE

Don't you think things have got a bit complicated all of a sudden? To beat a general combat ship we now need a third kind of ship in our fleets apart from the picket ships and offensive ships...which we've obviously planned ahead for.

But yes you are right about the mentality of ship design or playing SEV, which is why I like playing against people...everyone has different ways of doing things, so you normally learn something new from each game...win or lose...and you notice other things too...like shield regenerators might need some balancing.

So why don't you join EOTU Psieye? Come on mate, show us what you've got!

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Ahaha yeah... I automatically build multiple kinds of ships (including a general one just in case) so doing this sort of variety play requires minimum change to my empire/fleets.

Before I can join EOTU, I need to get back on top of my RL - various paperwork and actual work are piling up around me which I've been neglecting for a bit too long. While I am around on these forums the actual amount of SE V I'm playing right now is next to none.

I'll consider it once RL looks better though ^^

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE

Well, I hope you get RL sorted out soon...and you decide to join us!

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