Suggested improvements to Ship Design and Fleet Management

[dostillevi]

Spending any amount of time with manual ship design and fleet management reveals how much room there is to improve the system. Here is my recommendation:

Add in a player-defined concept of "Strategic Role" for ships. This is different than the tactical role behavior that determines ship behavior in combat, and represents a line of ships designed with the same purpose in mind. Strategic Roles would be specific to each ship class. Examples of Strategic roles might include "Long Range Interception", "Local System Defense", "Fleet Destroyer", "Boarding and Capture", and so on. The idea is that multiple roles can exist for a given ship class with specialized designs to meet player defined roles, and that each of these roles has it's own upgrade path, most recent design, obsolete designs, etc.

The two main benefits of this are first, that the player can define separate upgrade paths for ships of the same class, so they don't "cross upgrade" into a design that they weren't intended to use. They would only upgrade into newer versions that have the same role. Second, the player assigns roles to fleets, rather than ship classes to fleets. This way, the player can create fleets to serve specific strategic roles and maintain them easily without worrying that a fleet will be created with or backfill ships that have a different role.

1. When creating new ship designs, the player would assign the new ship both to a tactical role and to a strategic role. The game would have several out of the box strategic roles for common uses, with automated upgrade paths for them. For these OOTB (out-of-the-box) roles, the ship upgrade would include newly researched components as they become available, and upgrade according to pre-defined upgrade paths as exist currently, ensuring the ships are built for the intended purpose regardless of tech level and without player intervention. These OOTB strategic roles would probably fall along the lines of the existing ship specializations in the research tree.

However if the player defines their own strategic roles, the automated upgrade process would keep the same ratio of components and not add any new component types or switch component types (i.e. the automation would upgrade from one weapon type to it's direct successor, but would not switch from lasers to missiles, regardless of tech level, and the AI would never remove a component and replace it with one from a different tech path). The player could choose whether to turn on automatic upgrades for these roles, similar to how the functionality can be toggled currently. This way, ships with custom roles are ensured to be able to fulfill that role without the player needing to manually upgrade them at all times.

2. When creating fleets, the player would choose ships from the various roles to populate the fleet. For example, if a player wanted to create a fleet with lots of fuel reserves and speed for rapid, long range interception, they might create several roles such as "Long Range Destroyer" and "Long Range Cruiser". When the player creates their long range interception fleets, they'd select these roles and be confident that only ships that have been assigned to that strategic role will appear in the fleet. This is a significant improvement over the current system, where the player needs to either choose the most recent version of an entire ship class, or choose a specific version of the ship class to populate the fleet, which doesn't respect when those ships get upgraded.

A player would want a ship to cross-upgrade into a different strategic role. For example, the player might be fighting an enemy that uses lots of fighters and missiles, and wants to create a new set of roles designed to counter this and have their existing fleet cross-upgrade to those new designs, but preserve the old designs to return to after this particular war is over, and they might want to keep some fleets using the old roles anyway. In this case, the player would first create new designs with new roles for their ships. The player would also create a new fleet design making use of the new roles.

To convert an existing fleet to the new roles, the player would change the existing fleet's template as is done currently. During upgrade, the AI would match existing ships in the fleets to the new roles in the new fleet and automatically upgrade them AND change their role. If more ships are needed, they would be ordered for production, and if there are more ships in the current fleet than needed in the new fleet, ships would convert to new roles in their class in the fleet, even if that results in more ships in the fleet than required by the fleet design. The reasoning is that a given fleet would perform poorly if it contains some ships in roles that aren't expected within the fleet.

For ships outside of fleets, the player could select the individual fleet and change it's role, after which it would upgrade accordingly.

[dostillevi]

A second and perhaps lesser recommendation is to allow greater ship customization. This would be done by breaking the assignment of components into a two-step process.

Step 1 would be the introduction of a new concept of "bays", which are the spaces into which components are installed. To start, the player would assign bays to an empty hull with a maximum size and minimums/maximums for each bay type. For example a ship might be able to accommodate up to 5 engine bays (min 1), 5, sensor bays, 5 weapons bays, and 3 armor bays, and so on, but instead of these being fixed based on ship class, the player could create different ship designs of the same class where the ratio of bays in the ship is variable. Each bay would have a size (as components do now), and the maximum size capacity of the ship would dictate the maximum number of bays that could be installed.This somewhat aligns to the research tree's specialized versions of ship classes, but allows more flexibility. Instead of giving new, fixed designs, research would allow greater flexibility or increase maximum bays of certain types.

Benefits include: Greater flexibility in ship design within one class and more opportunities for specialized research that shrinks bays, or increases the number of a type of bay on a ship class.

Step 2 would be assignment of components to those bays. In step 1, bays would be able to accommodate components of certain size, for example a medium weapons bay could accommodate any medium weapon. In this step, components no longer have a numeric size, but simply a grade along a scale like tiny, small, medium, large, XL, XXL. As long as the component is in the same class and size as a bay, it can be assigned to that bay.

Benefits include: Much easier to swap out components when changes to bays aren't needed. It's guaranteed that any component in the same size and class will fit on the existing ship. Bay changes then typically are only needed when significant changes to the ship are desired, such as when creating new roles.

[Galaxy227]

Suggestion Thread https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 1&t=380513

[dostillevi]

Suggestion Thread https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 1&t=380513

I appreciate that you've created a "suggestion thread", but it's not an official means to make suggestions and I don't see any reason to bury this in that thread.

[Galaxy227]

I appreciate that you've created a "suggestion thread", but it's not an official means to make suggestions and I don't see any reason to bury this in that thread.

As an old Chinese proverb goes, "being in the right does not depend on having a loud voice."

[dostillevi]

I appreciate that you've created a "suggestion thread", but it's not an official means to make suggestions and I don't see any reason to bury this in that thread.

As an old Chinese proverb goes, "being in the right does not depend on having a loud voice."

Interesting. Any feedback on these suggestions?

[AKicebear]

I think adding a "Strategic Role" variable is unnecessary and excessive. It also requires UI changes.

Instead, just handle upgrading and retrofitting along Design Name lines. The game should recognize that design name "Heavy Escort v1" should upgrade to "Heavy Escort v2". The same if you choose to make a design named "Long Range Interceptor" etc. This provides ultimately flexibility without need for adding new variables and UI elements.

[murteas]

Definitely needed. However, I think we also need the Fleet Templates to allow us to assign multiple versions of ship to a fleet (i.e. I want to have 2 or 3 types of frigates in my pirate defense fleet template).

[dostillevi]

Definitely needed. However, I think we also need the Fleet Templates to allow us to assign multiple versions of ship to a fleet (i.e. I want to have 2 or 3 types of frigates in my pirate defense fleet template).

This would allow that. In your fleet, you'd simply choose from a list of all roles (instead of a list of all ship classes) and those would be the roles in your fleet. If for example you have a destroyer with a role for boarding, one for long range missile spam, and another for picketing, you could put all 3 in the same fleet by specifying how many ships from each role you'd want in that fleet.

And further, each ship would upgrade accordingly to the newest version of it's role, avoiding the current situation where you either can't upgrade ships (they need to be marked as obsolete), or every ship upgrades to the same design.

[dostillevi]

I think adding a "Strategic Role" variable is unnecessary and excessive. It also requires UI changes.

Instead, just handle upgrading and retrofitting along Design Name lines. The game should recognize that design name "Heavy Escort v1" should upgrade to "Heavy Escort v2". The same if you choose to make a design named "Long Range Interceptor" etc. This provides ultimately flexibility without need for adding new variables and UI elements.

The logic for what you're suggesting is potentially harder and less user friendly, since string parsing is generally unreliable. Further, it doesn't let you choose to add more than one ship of a given class to a fleet.

No doubt what I'm suggesting isn't trivial from a coding perspective, but it's also not conceptually hard either, even if it does require a small amount of UI work.

[SgtBootStrap]

What you propose in Post 1, #1 Paragraph 2 would simply put any Tech selection on a very tight Rail gauge and make having more than even 2 ships "roles" untenable in practicability.

How is the Player to create multiple ships, with multiple "roles" when Tech is a straight line progression, unless you only mean to allow ALL these various ship types and "roles" to not exist until "late MID" to late LATE" game?

It would be difficult, if not nary impossible early on, to have your Missile Boat, Barn Stormer, and Ranged bullet sponge to all exist at the same time. What time frame, in game, did you have in mind for this type of scenario?

Currently, given time, all the ships type, via Roles, can be had. Not to say that management of said Fleet make up would not be "a hassle", but trying to have more things, to simply say they are in the Game is often not practical for the Dev's. Oft times less, is in fact, more...

[AKicebear]

I think adding a "Strategic Role" variable is unnecessary and excessive. It also requires UI changes.

Instead, just handle upgrading and retrofitting along Design Name lines. The game should recognize that design name "Heavy Escort v1" should upgrade to "Heavy Escort v2". The same if you choose to make a design named "Long Range Interceptor" etc. This provides ultimately flexibility without need for adding new variables and UI elements.

The logic for what you're suggesting is potentially harder and less user friendly, since string parsing is generally unreliable. Further, it doesn't let you choose to add more than one ship of a given class to a fleet.

No doubt what I'm suggesting isn't trivial from a coding perspective, but it's also not conceptually hard either, even if it does require a small amount of UI work.

Fleet composition would be based on (latest version of) Design Name, not Hull type or Role.

I don't see how the logic is harder - perhaps you can elaborate. As for string parsing/matching, my optimism for the future of this game would diminish significantly if that was the real reason this approach couldn't be used.

[dostillevi]

What you propose in Post 1, #1 Paragraph 2 would simply put any Tech selection on a very tight Rail gauge and make having more than even 2 ships "roles" untenable in practicability.

How is the Player to create multiple ships, with multiple "roles" when Tech is a straight line progression, unless you only mean to allow ALL these various ship types and "roles" to not exist until "late MID" to late LATE" game?

It would be difficult, if not nary impossible early on, to have your Missile Boat, Barn Stormer, and Ranged bullet sponge to all exist at the same time. What time frame, in game, did you have in mind for this type of scenario?

I'm not sure I understand your concern, but I'll try to answer. Let's say the player is in the early game and has unlocked destroyers. As things stand right now, it's very hard to use more than one destroyer design at all, and if you manually design the destroyer for a special purpose, you then need to manually perform all upgrades to that destroyer, otherwise if left on automatic, it will revert to a "standard" destroyer the next time it upgrades.

In my proposed model, the player would be able to silo ships by role, so it become easy to have two different versions of the destroyer, by having two destroyer strategic roles each with their own set of components, tactical role, etc. Each strategic role could then have a limited version of the automatic upgrade process that isn't available at all today, where direct component upgrades occur automatically, but components aren't added or removed (eg if you had an early custom role without shields, the player would have to manually add shields to that role once they are researched). Whenever the player wanted, they could perform a manual upgrade and adjust what components are in a role.

Alongside player roles, I recommend that roles similar to the current OOTB automatic upgrade paths be maintained. If the player chooses to use these roles, they would add and remove and adjust component composition as per existing upgrade behavior. These strategic roles would be defaults that are akin to the current "automatic" upgrade process.

Currently, given time, all the ships type, via Roles, can be had. Not to say that management of said Fleet make up would not be "a hassle", but trying to have more things, to simply say they are in the Game is often not practical for the Dev's. Oft times less, is in fact, more...

The roles I think you're talking about, that are currently in game, are tactical roles - they define how the ship behaves within combat. They're completely different than strategic roles, which represent the kinds of tasks a ship is designed to accomplish at the strategic level. Many people would like to be able to define multiple strategic roles for a given ship class, which currently is very complicated and manual, bordering on impossible. The closest thing the game has currently to Strategic Roles are the specialized ship subclasses that can be researched, but even with these, it's still only possible to have a single design for each subclass, that's still very limiting, and also limits the design space for research since any new ship sub-classes added by mods, for example, would need to be integrated into the research tree and elsewhere, while adding a new Strategic Role would be far simpler once the core design is implemented.

[dostillevi]

I think adding a "Strategic Role" variable is unnecessary and excessive. It also requires UI changes.

Instead, just handle upgrading and retrofitting along Design Name lines. The game should recognize that design name "Heavy Escort v1" should upgrade to "Heavy Escort v2". The same if you choose to make a design named "Long Range Interceptor" etc. This provides ultimately flexibility without need for adding new variables and UI elements.

The logic for what you're suggesting is potentially harder and less user friendly, since string parsing is generally unreliable. Further, it doesn't let you choose to add more than one ship of a given class to a fleet.

No doubt what I'm suggesting isn't trivial from a coding perspective, but it's also not conceptually hard either, even if it does require a small amount of UI work.

Fleet composition would be based on (latest version of) Design Name, not Hull type or Role.

I don't see how the logic is harder - perhaps you can elaborate. As for string parsing/matching, my optimism for the future of this game would diminish significantly if that was the real reason this approach couldn't be used.

If I understand, you're suggesting that during fleet composition, instead of picking ship class, you'd pick ship type name, and the game would parse that, correctly identify what part of that name is meant to represent version, and then ensure that the remainder of the string (the true ship name minus the version) is the only ship type allowed in the fleet?

I suppose that could work, but again it's terrible from a usability perspective and string parsing is very unreliable (I work with string parsing frequently as part of my job. It's not a matter of good coding, it's a matter of controlling for user input). How do you explain to players that if they rename a ship type, it won't appear in their fleets anymore? Right now, a fleet looks for the latest version of any ship in it's class, regardless of name, so if you obsolete one destroyer design and create a new one, your fleets will use the latest design instead of completely failing to add ships to the fleet. There are too many challenging edge cases for string parsing to be used reliably, which is why you never see it used.

Regardless, at this point you've introduced nearly all the same backend logic that would be needed for Strategic Roles, without the UI to support it, and with some string parsing that would be opaque to new players. All for what, to save a little bit on UI design? Whether it's by a specifically entered Strategic Role by the player, or the game parsing the ship type name to establish the upgrade path, the game still has to maintain a list of all available options and present that in the fleet menu.

Now, your idea might be a little more practical if the version of the ship wasn't part of the ship type name, but a separate variable, but that's not how the game is built right now either. It also wouldn't let the player use any kind of automatic upgrades, since the current upgrade system won't maintain whatever is special about dedicated Strategic designs - the player would have to manually upgrade everything, as they do now.

[SgtBootStrap]

They're completely different than strategic roles, which represent the kinds of tasks a ship is designed to accomplish at the strategic level

Damn. Even my GPS said pls re calibrate...

We do...

Loss - Stable - Win - Loss

Design ships on other "rhetoric" and see how it goes. P.S. Destroyers(v3) will always be the answer... LOL!

Canada, ffs. We still need more Helicopters.

[maggiecow]

I think adding a "Strategic Role" variable is unnecessary and excessive. It also requires UI changes.

Instead, just handle upgrading and retrofitting along Design Name lines. The game should recognize that design name "Heavy Escort v1" should upgrade to "Heavy Escort v2". The same if you choose to make a design named "Long Range Interceptor" etc. This provides ultimately flexibility without need for adding new variables and UI elements.

If there's one thing the game desperately needs it's UI changes. The current version is obfuscated to the point of being useless. Honey is nice but you don't want to drive with it smeared on your windshield.

But, a checkbox to allow for advanced ship design and/or fleet composition would let people who are unfamiliar with the game concepts stick to the simpler system where EVERY frigate has a single automatic upgrade path. Those people will be using automation a lot so they're already doomed. Meanwhile people who've turned off most automation in pursuit of a working game will have the option for more design and fleet composition choices.

I do kinda like your naming convention suggestion though. It'd be better than nothing.

They could also just hardcode in multiple variations on the basic ship types. They're already there, we just need more of them for different roles, whether explicit or user-maintained.

[maggiecow]

I appreciate that you've created a "suggestion thread", but it's not an official means to make suggestions and I don't see any reason to bury this in that thread.

As an old Chinese proverb goes, "being in the right does not depend on having a loud voice."

Interesting. Any feedback on these suggestions?

That shut him up.

Don't see the point of a suggestions thread if someone actually wants to spitball ideas.

[Kielm]

Add in a player-defined concept of "Strategic Role" for ships. This is different than the tactical role behavior that determines ship behavior in combat, and represents a line of ships designed with the same purpose in mind. Strategic Roles would be specific to each ship class. Examples of Strategic roles might include "Long Range Interception", "Local System Defense", "Fleet Destroyer", "Boarding and Capture", and so on. The idea is that multiple roles can exist for a given ship class with specialized designs to meet player defined roles, and that each of these roles has it's own upgrade path, most recent design, obsolete designs, etc.

The two main benefits of this are first, that the player can define separate upgrade paths for ships of the same class, so they don't "cross upgrade" into a design that they weren't intended to use. They would only upgrade into newer versions that have the same role. Second, the player assigns roles to fleets, rather than ship classes to fleets. This way, the player can create fleets to serve specific strategic roles and maintain them easily without worrying that a fleet will be created with or backfill ships that have a different role.

I think I understand what you're trying to achieve, but roles are generally tactical at unit level. You may find exceptions in the naming of real-world examples (e.g. strategic nuclear submarines), but in most scenarios you would have say, an air defence destroyer, or a frigate, or a missile cruiser, or a battleship, that have loosely defined tactical roles. You may also have patrol craft to fulfil a wider scope of requirements, but again - by exception. Defining a "strategic role" for a ship is counter-intuitive to the way that most people would interpret strategy and tactics.

Fleet definitions on the other hand, can be strategic in scope.

I think this could be achieved by defining a fleet with a specific set of ships that contain the capabilities you want, like long-range, high speed but lightly armed patrol craft, or troop transports and accompanying ships with disabling weapons.

The issue with fleet definitions is that unfortunately, at the moment, player-defined custom ships have to be manually upgraded and we're limited in assigning specific ship types (e.g. fast destroyers) over just the best destroyers in a fleet - unless you want to constantly, manually update the design and re-define the fleet.

Could we not accomplish the same thing by allowing player-defined ships to co-exist (and, hopefully, be upgraded) with auto-generated designs, and allowing custom designs (and their upgraded designs) to be assigned to fleets, instead? There might be a need to improve the fleet tactics options as well, but it would save reinventing the wheel and adding another layer of confusing complexity.

[OrnluWolfjarl]

It's simple. Have two name boxes in the design window. One for the name of the general design (e.g. Tank), and one for its designation (e.g. Mk1). The Design Name gets locked in and doesn't change afterwards. The Designation does.

Then in the Fleet Template window have it blank and give us an Add Ship Type button.

When a player clicks that, the template adds a line of list boxes.

The first list box lets you choose the Hull (e.g. Fleet Escort, Fast Frigate, etc).

The second list box lets you choose the Design, among a generated list of Active Designs for that ship hull.

The third box lets you choose the amount.

When you retrofit, the game will already have the Design Name locked in. All it needs to do is to upgrade to the latest active Designation of that Design Name.

The basis is already there, because when you upgrade a design it doesn't just know to add a v1, v2 etc at the end. It also knows to look for numbers in the name and update those, instead of using v1, v2, etc. For example, if you write the name as Escort A1, when you upgrade, it will change the name to Escort A2, instead of Escort A1 v2. All it takes is the code and UI changes to expand the existing logic to more functionality.

[AKicebear]

It's simple. Have two name boxes in the design window. One for the name of the general design (e.g. Tank), and one for its designation (e.g. Mk1). The Design Name gets locked in and doesn't change afterwards. The Designation does.

The basis is already there, because when you upgrade a design it doesn't just know to add a v1, v2 etc at the end. It also knows to look for numbers in the name and update those, instead of using v1, v2, etc. For example, if you write the name as Escort A1, when you upgrade, it will change the name to Escort A2, instead of Escort A1 v2. All it takes is the code and UI changes to expand the existing logic to more functionality.

I rather like this idea of locking in the design name and the game auto increasing the version/mark number as a separate variable as a sure way to avoid String errors.

If they wanted to avoid a new UI element for the version, they could use the date. So you'd see "Escort (2750.01.01)" with the option to upgrade to the most recent version "Escort (2759.04.24)" for example.

While less intuitive in one sense (how many versions since last upgrade), the date everywhere would be a constant reminder of how many clunkers you have in your first fleet