PBW Lg ship vs. Sm. ship

[Ed Kolis]

Isn't SJ making Gravitic Sensors in the next Version of P&N so they detect ships based on their size? Hmm, wonder when the next Version of P&N will be available...

[Baron Munchausen]

And just how is he gonna do that? By putting inherent gravitic cloaking on ship hulls? That's still going to be system-wide and unconditional once you get the right level of sensors.

[ July 17, 2002, 21:55: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Suicide Junkie]

Every ship gets grav cloaking based on their size.
Active and passive cloak require the armor components, while psychic cloak involves not having crew (master computers).
In this case, the cloaking devices overpower sensors at max tech.

In order to get undetectable grav cloak, you need frigate or smaller. When you try to apply the other cloaking devices to a frigate hull, you are left with almost nothing for engines and weapons. Larger ships can be detected by massive, base-mounted grav sensors.

So, tiny ships are the only perfect stealth craft, but can be fended off with mines.
Small to medium ships can't be detected except by a huge base, which makes a great target.
The heavier ships can't fully cloak, but can carry enough firepower and defenses to drive their way through with brute force.

[Baron Munchausen]

How many levels of cloaking are you using in your mod? Have you run across any arbitrary limit or does it seem that we can have 10 or 20 levels of cloaking and sensors?

[Suicide Junkie]

Currently, I have only used 3 or 4. But that is 5 separate areas, so it is either 4, 10 or 16, depending on how you look at it.

I currently see no good way to expand all of the cloaking areas equally (some based on master computers, & etc), so I am going to leave it that way for now.

I imagine it would be fairly easy to expand the active and passive to arbitrary depth, and I could have a separate grav cloak level for every hull size, but the racial scanners will still be quite shallow.

[PvK]

Baron, you can "program" the AI to build more small ships if you give them more designs. I do this in Proportions because the small ships don't become "obsolete" the way they do in the standard set, so AI's continue to build a mix of ship sizes even when large ships are available.

This also uncovered another advantage of doing this (which originally was done to get the QNP engines right on AI designs): it allows the AI to upgrade smaller ships. It turns out that the AI won't upgrade a small ship if it has a larger design of the same type that it wants, because it will design the largest ship available for each design type it knows how to make. So, if you have one design per size bracket, it will upgrade the ships even when their size is not the largest the empire knows about.

I also tried out the gravitic cloaking for small ships idea. I kind of liked it except for the need to order to "cloak" small ships. However I decided it was overly complicated to add to the standard Proportions mod. I agree though that it would be nice to add range into the detection formula, although there are higher things on the urgency list.

PvK

[Baron Munchausen]

How do you 'program' the AI to build enough small ships when it doesn't have the ability to build big ships yet, and still program it to build enough of the big ships instead of the small ships later on? You can't change the AI files in mid game. Well, you can but that's a bit outside the spes for the game. It's like turning on 'human' management and editing/altering the AI empire. A crutch, not a true option that the game supports in itself.

I can't see how you can have ONE Vehicle Construction file that can work through an entire game.

[Taera]

Very simple.
Two ways: First i hear Gold construction files no longer requie the class but the actual name of the design so it should not be a problem in gold.

Any way the simpliest way is to forbid from AI to research bigger ships by altering Research file and thus make them unable to build larger ships untill you want.

On the topic of the topic (lol):
I can say that smaller ships should not be counted out. I am not an expirienced SEIV player in any way but i am absolutely sure that several of the small ship strategies used against AI could work against human. Smaller ships are cheaper and have built-in defensive bonuses giving them an edge against larger ships that are more bulky.
Smaller ships swarm the enemy and give the advantage to lesser empire unable to support large ships. Later on large ships rule yet still a wize use of small ships, especialy if talking about point-blank escorts with seeker or max-range with WMG.

By that i want to say that i consider smaller ships to be just another tactical tool in the hands of SEIV players.