Revamping SEIV Ship Hull Sizes & Features

[Atrocities]

How do we make smaller ships more useful in the long run.

I have come to the firm conclusion that the only noticible differance between and Escort and a Baseship is the amount of supplies and weapons it can hold and how many engines it can carry. Oh ya the mounts too. The bigger they are the more powerful.

Am I wrong in believing that there should be more here? I have looked at a most of the mods before posting this in the slim hope that this may have already been addressed. But I have not found a mod that does address this.

What I want is a reason to keep building Escorts, Frates, Destroyers, and Light Cruisers later in the game. A purpose for having them. As we all know that once you get the Dreadnought design, the rest of your designs are almost worthless.

So I asked myself the simple question, why does the military still use Escorts, Cutters, Gunboats, Frigates, Destroyers, and Cruisers as opposed to Battleships and Dreadnoughts. The answers are obvious, cost and practicality. Why build a Dreadnought when it would cost so very much to use and maintain.

Well in a game such as SEIV, you NEED these larger ships therefore you build them. But what I want to do is make the smaller ships more valueale in the long term by giving them bonuses or special weapons that only work with a specific class of ship size.

As you gain the ability to build say Battle Cruisers, you gain an extra engine mount for Escort giving them two more engines. This will make them faster.

As you gain shipyard III or IV, depending upon what mod you play, you gain new mounts and weapons for your Frigate and Destoryer Class.

Things like this.

One thing that does seperate a Battleship and dreadnought apart from their smaller counterparts is the amount of armor they have. The amount of energy that is required to run them, the amount of supplies they consume, etc.

What I am thinking is that supplies are actually fule, and the Q-Reactor is actually a nuclear reacter. That the big guns such as the Wavemotion Gun are the 16" so to speak guns of the navy. That the PPB's are the current standard guns that are on most ships. PDF are of course the Vulcans and Phalnix (sp) systems that are on most vessles now too.

What I want to do is say make the Light Cruiser a Guided missle cruiser. That would mean that I would have to design new missels specifically for it, and or revamp current ones to be more effective than they currently are. Not all missels fired at a ship are shot down.

Using Drones as Cruise Missles is an obvious choice as they self guiding and can be launched a system or two away from the target. I love drones now.

I have been considering this subject for a while, and really want to make the Hull sizes of SEIV more involved and true to nature than they currently are. I realize that this will entail a lot of work, and I know that others have already made a few advancments in game play that might work well here. I was hoping that there are a few of you out there that will actually read this long post and agree. Ideas are very important here and I would seriously welcome any.

Ideas on how to make smaller ships more useful in the long run.

[oleg]

I do build small ships in late Proportions game: they are faster and have substantial combat bonuses. Combine it with to-hit penalties on large mounts in Proportions and it is not uncommon to have a situation where smaller ships are actually better ! For example, it is VERY hard to hit Proportions fighters and the best anti-fighter ship is a destroyer with special point-defence mount ! (unless you have talisman of course)

[Captain Kwok]

The key to balancing ship sizes to keep the ratio of weapons and defence to hull size the same for all ships.

In the Star Trek mod, each ship has approximately the same proportion of space needed for engines, weapons, etc. Any gain that larger ships might have with weapon mounts should be balanced by defense modifiers for smaller ships. Of course, this system has been tested in game, but I think it works toward keeping all ship sizes useful.

[Suicide Junkie]

P&N's QNP goes a long way towards that.

Since the engines scale up directly with ship size, the large ships only get economies of scale (Less % devoted to one-shot items like B/LS/CQ, and ECM/CS, and and special equipment such as scanners)

Large ships:
+ economies of scale as above
+ larger mounts
+ more damage must be done before you take hull damage. (A battleship has about the same shielding as two LCs, but a pair of LC's can be taken out one at a time)
- Defense penalties due to large sizes
- Really large ships can't move as fast.
- Easily crippled by penetration weapons, such as null space.
- larger ships are much easier to detect with grav sensors (ES and FG are the only ones that can be totally undetectable, DS & LC require very expensive grav sensors to find, and so on)

[Katchoo]

Giving the smaller class of ships a speed boost would be the biggest reason to keep using them. This could make the Patrolling option in the game more worthwhile to use (at the very least I don't use it myself).

Creating Engine mounts specifically for smaller hulls that provide greater speed over the standard engine mounts would probably be the easiest way to incorporate this. You could either have these Special engine mounts become available after reasearching Engines up to a certain point, or, you could have a whole new Technologly Tree develop just for smaller hulls (say under 350kt) after you research Battleships or Battlecruisers. The new tree could provide newer engines (call them Parallel Ion Engines, wherby for every 1 boost in speed you used to get with each Ion Engine, you get twice the boost with each of these Parallel Engines (2 for 1 so to speak). As you keep upgrading to Parallel Photon Jacketed, and so forth, the ratio keeps doubling over the original ability. This way you could end up with an Escort or Frigate that can move in 20 or more spaces! If you wanted to, you could even triple the ratio to make them even more valuable.

The Technology Tree could also open up smaller missle pods (a cross between the stantdard mounts and fighter mounts) and Solar Collectors, to name a couple.

Some of the stuff above has already been built into Proportions, but without any major penalties, other than space.

Out of curiosity, is it possible to specifiy a "squares filled" limit for ship design as opposed to a "kt" limit? If possible, this may be another way to provide new mounts.

[Suicide Junkie]

With high propulsion tech, you can get an escort flying at 20 MP, while still having 20-40 kt (depending on what kind of C&C you use) of space left over for miscellaneous components.

Most excellent as a scout or medical relief ship.

[klausD]

in standard game there are several reasons not to use the small ship hulls.

1. a small ship is NOT that much cheaper in construction and maintenance, but it is much more vulnerable. Solution: increase cost of big pots dramatically. (so they are only for big empires)

2. Mounts - they should be graded down. They are a bonus for big ships and ruin the usage of small ships. In standard game they cost in about 1.5 the tonnage but are x2 times so good. (the samll mount) This is odd. If we assume that the "normal" weapon is the standard weapon, then every change to x2 damage of this standard weapon should be x3 or more cost expensive. (in size and production) This is IMO a big problem in standard game. There is no need to use the standard sizes of a weapon, because with a mount they are better and cheaper if built in a big ship. MOO2 does this better.

In todays real naval combat there are high tech missiles which can destroy whole battleships with a single hit. And they can be fired even by an airplane. So there is not much need for big ships anymore, as long such an imparity in weapon efficiency and armor value exists.

Of course all the above mentioned deficiencies could be modded if anybody has time.

tsch�ss
KlausD

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, increasing hull costs for larger ships is a good way to help balance the game. Also giving smaller ships a movement bonus and defensive bonuses in combat. Or even giving larger ships defensive penalties.

I think 'QNP' (Quasi-Newtonian Propulsion) is a good way to help make ship size classes reflect real-world limitations. The other obvious way, with turn rates and weapon arcs, is not available in SE IV. Hopefully this will be available in SE V.

[Slick]

I agree with statements here and I rarely use small ships and would also like to see them more useful in late game.

Contrary to some, and using real life examples, larger ships are generally faster than smaller ones, but less maneuverable. An aircraft carrier is usually the fastest ship in the battle group.

I totally agree that larger ships should cost more. Again in real life, the cost is more like exponential than like linear with respect to ship size (displacement).

I would recommend expanding the idea of larger hulls costing more and smaller hulls getting combat bonuses (to represent maneuverability advantages).

I would also modify the larger ship mounts to be longer range, but less accurate. It makes sense that you could mount a larger Version of a weapon on a larger ship, but larger weapons would be harder to train on small targets. Larger weapons in real life are used against larger targets. This change would also make the mount choice less of a no-brainer. It would still make sense to use smaller (or no) mounts on larger ships.

One caveat, though. Again from real life: Larger ships ARE better, so they should BE better in SE4. If the end result is to make all ships somewhat equal, this goes against real life. The main difference should end up being cost.

Just my $0.02

Slick.

[PvK]

As Oleg said, this is one of the things Proportions mod does. QNP, Scale Mounts, the armor system, and changes to mount effects, as well as the changes to fighters and drones, tend to make all sizes of ships, and fighters and drones, valuable in their own way throughout the game. Large ships are the most powerful but also most expensive, and the weapons that are best against large targets are not good against small nimble targets, and vice versa in most cases.

PvK