Genius idea for making small ships useful

[Deathball]

ORIGINAL: DWA86

Id like some blank classes I can define the behavior on. Maybe I want some battle cruisers, heavy and light cruisers moniters, corvettes and so on.

I made that suggestion already *blatant plug* but it seems it didn't get much attention. It could definitely spruce up the ship designing a bit.

[DWA86]

I would want Blank Classes and blank Fleets. You define the behavior of the ship and which fleets it joins and how the fleets act. I want my high speed big gun battle cruisers in my raiding fleets and my slow "Omen of Doom" world takers in my invasion fleets ect would be cool if you could define fleet composition too. like fleet size 15 5 capital ships (insert class) and 10 cruisers (insert class)I liked your other thread pity no none has been posting in it.

[DWA86]

ORIGINAL: Canute

Good posting DWA86 !!!!!
Like i said, people need to create their own class and class-abilitys.

US did with the Fletchers in WW2, they were the size of light cruisers and called destroyers must have made the Japanese furious.

The player will create new designs with EMP weapons, no shields and extra armor/engines and call it Mistbuster once they encounter Silvermist.

Maybe some battleship grade cannons are what's needed and some kind of torpedo analogue.

Maybe like at MOO2, you have serveral mount posibles. Heavy with extra range,damage,size but min. fire range.

Here's my observation as a very new player. There will be naval analogues to space combat because that is the closet thing we have to reference to. Their were for tank combat in the early years because it was something new and blew everyone's mind before people figured it out.

That said there's kind of an age of sail model going on, what I mean by that is age of sail warships generally mounted similar weaponry regardless of ship size what made a ship a ship of the line of Capital ship was the amount of decks and thus the amount of guns. like the game my escorts and cap ships mount the same guns the difference is amount.

An escort is the equivalent of a sloop of war rather nicely same role. Also like in history of rather little importance, its there to do mundane tasks.

The size of ship that Age of Sail powers started caring about were frigates (frigate literally means built for speed, some ships of the line were frigate built) and they were often times similar length to the Ships of the line sometimes faster they were built for speed and endurance while ships of the line were built to sit in port and engage in massive relatively short range from base glorious battles (Trafalgar) while the Frigates were out patrolling commerce lanes raiding commerce and making their presence felt.

So in this model the bigger ship matters the smaller ones are for chores because your using the same guns more equals better.

If you move to late 19th century you have the advent of the torpedo and torpedo boat. This results in the destroyer a ship slightly larger than a torpedo boat called a torpedo boat destroyer that morphs from that to the arleigh burkes of today the modern one type fits all major surface combatant.

This finally created the relative recent ability of smaller ships to be a threat to larger ones was because of things like torpedoes which weren't effective against smaller ships and such. These asymmetrical weapons don't exist don't in DW. Additionally the role for specialist ships like anti submarine or anti aircraft platforms don't exist either really negating the need for smaller specialized combatants.

If you went with a 1914ish model you might get what people are asking for. You would need to tweak shields so the current under 10 or so size weapons aren't effective against larger ships add a large capital grade uber cannon with a large size then add a weapon effective against large ships but not against small.

But still small ships swarms aren't really how sea battles were fought.

Id much rather have custom classes give me like ten more and let me decide which fleets they join and how those fleets act and you might see some smaller ships show up.

[Canute0]

And don't forget the advance of weapon systems too. Thats the main reason why the USA retiere their battleship. No real use anymore of their big gun. Smaller automated guns with computer aided targeting shoot faster, more exact and with other ammunation they can penetrate armor. Ok these guns dont got the range like the old big guns but for that they got now missiles. Long range ones with precision of a few meter on a longer distance. Other faster missiles to hunt down faster moving ship.
All this change and add new ship class.

And at DW new movement system who made Escort for civilian pointless.

[DWA86]

ORIGINAL: Canute

And don't forget the advance of weapon systems too. Thats the main reason why the USA retiere their battleship. No real use anymore of their big gun. Smaller automated guns with computer aided targeting shoot faster, more exact and with other ammunation they can penetrate armor. Ok these guns dont got the range like the old big guns but for that they got now missiles. Long range ones with precision of a few meter on a longer distance. Other faster missiles to hunt down faster moving ship.
All this change and add new ship class.

And at DW new movement system who made Escort for civilian pointless.

And the armor disappeared. The Brits were very nervous in the Falklands if they Argentine ship the Bel Grando or something like that was able to close. Ships now have glass jaws, may be a result of there not being a major naval engagement in some time. We could be, Im sure were are operating under false principles that are waiting to reveal themselves.

[Galaxy227]

ORIGINAL: Gizuria

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

It comes down to the economy. If Dagestan could afford 10 super carriers they would build them instead of fishing boats with ak47's.The economy in DW is just poorly scaled with bloat mid game onwards so small ships are pointless.

This is what I think too. IMO, Construction and maintainance costs are too low for these monsters.

Yep, this is it. This is the key issue as to why bigger ships are better.

I hope that DW2 works to scale the economic costs of ships alongside their size and power more equally. For example, in my current DW:U game, I've got a "frigate" with a size of 300, and a "destroyer" with a size of 400. The frigate has 64 firepower and costs 3250, whereas the destroyer has 160 firepower and costs only 4500. In this instance, I've nearly tripled my firepower for an additional cost of only 33%. I'll repeat: my firepower increased by nearly 300% with an increase in cost of only 33%. (To add, other than reactors, habs, and life support, both designs have the exact same type/amount of components).

Therefore, economic costs are by no means a limiting factor to the construction of more massive ships, (which is quite an awful implication, considering how integral of a part the economy is in Distant Worlds), as the gains of having bigger ships far outweigh the costs of constructing them. To make matters worse, this is an indefinite relationship between cost and firepower. At no point does big become too big, leaving technology as the only "true" limiting factor on this bigger-is-better conundrum (where size 1500 is the hard-cap for ships). Costs for ships should at the very least work to scale more proportionally with the size & firepower of ships. By no means should a 300% gain in firepower cost only an additional 33%. This will very quickly make smaller ships redundant.

If more proportional costs are too difficult to implement, or even turn out to be a poor solution, then perhaps toying with resources is a better alternative. Maybe some of the larger ship components could require rare resources, preventing even the most powerful empires from being able to start an assembly line of death stars on a whim.

I don't know. Another solution might be to implement various tasks across the galaxy that are simply better-suited towards smaller ships, preventing them from ever eventually becoming redundant. I'm not too sure. All I know is that I dislike how little I'm incentivized to ever go back and construct smaller ships in Distant Worlds. My whole fleet shouldn't be death stars. It just shouldn't.

Edit: I am going to detract from my criticism above—I've spent the past week or so reading into systems within DW:U and the development of the game as a whole, and no longer feel the need to criticize DW:U over the above topic. For one, after finally playing through a full game of DW, I've found that smaller ships actually still have their uses in the mid/late-game lol (yes, I was being dumb and just trying to find things to criticize, I apologize). I trust Elliot, Erik, and the rest of the development team to put together a worthwhile playing experience. I'll be more careful with my words in the future.

[RogerBacon]

So this thread is super old and came out before my mod.

1 A large ship can only be on one place at a time VS. two smalelr ships. If you have slow movement speeds you may not have enough "big" ships where you need them.

2 The Bacon Mod has gravity wells where small ships jump sooner. A lumbering huge ship will spend a long time slowboating it out of the gravity well where as a small ship can jump in and out quickly.

3 Bacon Mod also has settings to alter ship cost, although it is still linear.

When I play I always try to keep my ships as small as possible. After the first two tech levels I almost never build a ship greater than 50% of max size.

[Whiskiz]

while this would be great for us and i can see you're very excited - the AI wouldn't be able to handle the tactics that could be done with it nearly as well.

The more technical you make movement the more cheats and ship bodies the AI are going to need to keep up in challenge and the more cheese/exploits will be found in said technical mechanics.

Not sure what the point of component miniaturization is, i think i missed something there. earlier access to later tech?