Could anyone use a design analyzer?

[Ed Kolis]

Say, I had a thought... what if there were a program to analyze your ship designs - you select all the components you want before going to the Design window and entering your final design, and it gives you a report of all kinds of stuff, much more detailed than the design window does - chance for a shot to penetrate leaky armor, projected maintenance cost, combat speed, average/peak damage inflicted by weapons per turn, refueling range, and other such miscellanea. Or you can use it on known enemy designs (too bad you can't export them from the game as text files ) since the game's view of enemy designs is even less detailed than the view of your own designs - you can't even see how many movement points there are!

So would anyone find this kind of program useful? If so I'll try to continue working on it... not at work though, I shouldn't even be posting on this forum now but I just can't focus on my work right now without thinking of SE4 or something!!!

[Alneyan]

I would find an use to such a tool, especially if including the following data: hitpoints of the ship (can you tell I am too lazy to launch the simulator every time for every single ship in my armada?) and the value for 150% of its total cost. (Same reason here, but this time with retrofitting) So in short, I will use it if you make this program, as it would make checking known designs less of a problem.

[Tampa_Gamer]

If it works, might not be a bad idea to send it off to Aaron. It would be great if the AI used some sort of analyzer for its designs.

_TG

[Ed Kolis]

Glad to hear people are interested... now keep bugging me, otherwise it'll never get done!

Alneyan, what do you mean by "value for 150% of its total cost?"

[Baron Munchausen]

What would be really useful is a program that loads and analyzes AI-design creation files, letting you make global changes to all ships of a given class (all attack ships, all cargo ship, etc.) and save them to the file. This would dramatically ease the process of tweaking AIs.

[ May 21, 2004, 23:19: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Suicide Junkie]

Tally up the costs for all three resources, and add 50% more.

This is an important number since you can only retrofit the ship to designs which have a lower cost than that.

It would be really really neat if you could have it generate an SE4-style graphical result too...
Something like I did for these ships:
http://www.geocities.com/hohoho611ca...ml#ubernaught2

Manually counting component abilities and drawing those with MS paint was a chore, but it turned out so nice.

[ May 21, 2004, 23:40: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]