Tonnage and You

[EternusIV]

I was trying to explain ship design the other day to someone who doesn't play. He plays a lot of other games and we had a pretty cool discussion about ship design in general. Based on what I told him, here was our theory:

 

1) The more effective tonnage you have, the better off you are

2) Mk II tonnage is 20% better than Mk I tonnage

3) Mk III tonnage is 30% better than Mk II tonnage (etc etc etc)

4) Effective tonnage' does not include support tonnage (CBs, Fuel, nonessential equipment)

5) Maneuvarability is probably a multiplier of your cumulative effective tonnage....which is why its crucial (and essential not to build your fuel tankage into your warships etc)

6) 'Effective' tonnage can be enhanced/reduced based upon weapon/defense matchups

 

The 20%-30% figures are a rough estimate based upon how effective each jump in technology appears to be...basically its a WAG

 

There is a pretty easy way to test this.

 

Have similar designed ships with differnt tonnage and maneuverability duke it out.

 

I know some of you are doing this. Care to share for the common good?

 

Hehe....thought so....off to go test theories with the friendly neighbor

[MadMartinB]

nope

[woolfe99]

I was trying to explain ship design the other day to someone who doesn't play. He plays a lot of other games and we had a pretty cool discussion about ship design in general. Based on what I told him, here was our theory:

 

1) The more effective tonnage you have, the better off you are

2) Mk II tonnage is 20% better than Mk I tonnage

3) Mk III tonnage is 30% better than Mk II tonnage (etc etc etc)

4) Effective tonnage' does not include support tonnage (CBs, Fuel, nonessential equipment)

5) Maneuvarability is probably a multiplier of your cumulative effective tonnage....which is why its crucial (and essential not to build your fuel tankage into your warships etc)

6) 'Effective' tonnage can be enhanced/reduced based upon weapon/defense matchups

 

The 20%-30% figures are a rough estimate based upon how effective each jump in technology appears to be...basically its a WAG

 

There is a pretty easy way to test this.

 

Have similar designed ships with differnt tonnage and maneuverability duke it out.

 

I know some of you are doing this. Care to share for the common good?

 

Hehe....thought so....off to go test theories with the friendly neighbor

Your assumptions about 20-30% improvements from 1 generation to the next are arbitrary. Although jump engines improve by a similar increment, standard engines improve by 100% per generation. Also, the cost to research techs appears to jump by incremants way in excess of 20-30%, so you might assume the average gains to be higher as well or taking a vertical approach to research would be very ill-advised. OTOH, I have absolutely no idea. As you say, you'd need to test it out.

 

Maneuverability does not appear to be an essential combat function. Maneuverability only has a significant impact against ordinance based weapons. It may or may not have a small impact against other types. Furthermore, Pete has said that maneauverability is not as cost-effective against ordinance as point defenses are (I presume this means he's comparing adding engines to adding CIDS of an equivalent generation). The reason for this seems obvious as a design tradeoff: ships with more and better engines get more AP's and have a large advantage in strategic movement, whereas CIDS do nothing outside of combat. OTOH, CIDS should elimate fighters and drones while combat is in progress; maneuverability will not. My impression is that you can have lumbering warships that are packed with CIDS and do fine against ordinance.

 

Your concept of effective tonnage can create some grey areas. Jump engines do not add to a ship's capabilities in combat per se, or do they? Well, yes they do if you are moving through a warp point and being attacked by a fleet on the other side. Otherwise, they do zip. So are they effective tonnage or not?

 

I agree of course that fuel tankage should be relegated to a specialized ship.

 

- woolfe

[EternusIV]

Good points, Dave

 

Its hard to pin down. I thought I'd post the general theory. Yes - the jumps in tech are abitrary. There will be a much easier way to pin this down.

 

I still thing the great equalizer is effective tonnage.....from a GAME design standpoint.

 

I also think that maneuverability IS important for determining effective tonnage....but.....I'm not sure how anyone could prove me wrong or right at this stage.

 

The most important thing -- IMHO -- is to find a way to MEASURE the overall effectiveness of a ship in terms of effective tonnage and maneuverability.

 

I obviously have no clue on what the actual numbers are....I'm simply trying to fish for ideas to refine the methodology.

 

It will be one thing to win a battle.....quite another to figure out exactly WHY.

 

And about Jump Drives....I still would not consider them effective tonnage....yes they are crucial to GET to the show. But I'm more interested in evaluating the performance of a ship DURING the show. Those jump drives are a necessary evil from a design standpoint if you ask me. But they won't help in actual combat at all (again, aside from getting you there)...its dead weight from an 'effective' tonnage standpoint.

 

Am I mumbling again?

[Sakarissa]

If your ship survives and the other one doesn't, it's effective.

 

Sakarissa

[hobknob]

You hit the nail on the head when you said we need some way to test out the thoeries. With current battle results you will have virtually no way of determining anything other than what ship wins. If you can afford to spend lots of time changing a design one componenet at a time and then send it into combat against the exact same design at the same eficiency etc. etc. then you might start to see where some of the differences lie. As it sits today, it's a crapshoot since none of the feedback is at all relevant to making determinations on design concept and configurations. The solution of course is to just build drones and fighters.

 

Hopefully in the near future we will get some sort of a tool/report/order that will start to give us real information about our ship components. The only info we currently have is that the same generation weapons dish out about the same amount of damage/ton.

[Raja]

Well, if you design it right it will be effective. Since you're not a Cat, I can understand your problems with ship efficiency. Our ships are the most effective in space. Why? Because Cats made them! Cats Rule!

 

Khan Rending Talon

[woolfe99]

Totally agree with Hobnob's points. Determining how effective one design is vs. another based upon present battle feedback would require a horrific amount of patience. It's almost a practical impossibility. With the present battle reports, we might over the long haul get some intuitive sense of how generally to design ships, but it's going to be in very broad strokes. I think we'll just by default try to balance everything we put in and not go obviously too heavy or too light on any particular component. Boring.

[PhaseDragon]

Here's my 2 cents. I believe that the type of weapons you use versus the type of armor your enemy has will be the deciding factor. Victory will come in planning an assault specifically tailored to your enemies strengths and weaknesses. Any major battle will have to be well planned in order to take advantage of this tactical approach with lots of recon missions with disposable ships.

 

Not too fun for the pilots of those disposable ships though.

[Bloodletter]

Here's my 2 cents. I believe that the type of weapons you use versus the type of armor your enemy has will be the deciding factor. Victory will come in planning an assault specifically tailored to your enemies strengths and weaknesses. Any major battle will have to be well planned in order to take advantage of this tactical approach with lots of recon missions with disposable ships.

 

Not too fun for the pilots of those disposable ships though.

PhaseDragons approach is the best we have at the moment. The BR's seem to have a great deal of the Fog of War approach to them and makes any certainty on details very much an assumption on our part. The key to victory will be having good defenses against those things your enemy has and a good weapon type that you enemy has rather poor defenses in. The one with the better choices is going to have a huge advantage over the others. Some will compensate with huge numbers to make up for this problem, but in the end it will come down to having made the right choices in weaponry to face your enemies.

 

Bloodletter

T.O.M.A. (The One Man Alliance)

[hobknob]

In order to plan your warfleet to take advantage of your opponents weaknesses you have to have a wide variety of tech so you can choose. The way the tech tree is set up you are very unlikely to have a wide variety of tech. You are likely to have chosen a path and gone with it. So it becomes a game of paper/rock/scissors. Some times you will win other times you will lose. This brings into question the usefulenss of a complicated tech system when you have to guess at what you are spending a year to research.

[ShadowKitsune]

I wouldn't mind the rock/paper/scissors issue if I knew what all the rocks, papers and scissors were. On the flip side, whenever somebody who's Paper meets someone else who's Scissors - Paper's chance to retool to Rock is about zip, especially since you don't know what technology Rock might be.

[MadMartinB]

I know Pete has mentioned plans to expand the battle level to gives us details on: MadMartinBs MK IX Thunderbolt Generator fires and is somewhat absorbed by Eternus' MK III Engergy absorber but most gets through and blows holes in the Titanium Armor killing all...

 

One of the problems we have is that the ships are small.

 

Comments on weapons:

 

There is a base factor for each weapon. The ground ones show it pretty well (10 for poor, 30 for fair etc..). Space weapons are harder but Grapples can be used as an example for tug rating with: Poor = 5 tug per ton, Fair = 10 tug per ton and Adequate = 20 tug per ton.

 

If we extrapolate this then

Poor = x

Fair = 2x

Adequate = 4x

Good = 8x

Superior = 16x

 

Of course this assumes we are doubling...

[hobknob]

That is nice for simple firepower issues as compared to size or generation. My concern is a bit more complicated.

 

I see a couple of fundamental issues based on some assumptions that I have chosen to make. Each weapons system (or any system) is somehow different form every other system. Each weapon dishes out damage in a particular way, each shield protects in it's own fashionn etc.. Relative damage has been kept fairly constant according to Pete as the per/ton damage rating is supposed to be similar for each weapon of the same generation. This is so no particular weapon will out do another weapon of a given tech level. We know that some weapons affect ships in specific fashions and have specific defenses for them. What we don't know are the characteristics of each weapon system. I assume/hope they are not all the same for each system. Some systems may be very accurate at short range and mostly innaffective at long range, others may have constant damage through all ranges as accuracy falls off. For others accuracy may be about the same at all ranges only to have damage fall off etc...

 

There are several ways that we can determine these factors. One way is to have more detailed descriptions in the item description that indicate ranges, ralative accuracy, damage over range and other factors. Another way to get the information is to have better information feedback from battle reports. We don't necessarily need great volumes of dat, just useful data for this option to work. Yet another option is to generate some sort of report during a LFE that would indicate the various potential of the fleets involved. Kind of like the FOB but with useful data. This could be something like " ...the fleet is very effective (strongest) at the middle ranges, but lacks somewhat (is weakest) in the shorter ranges".

 

No matter the method implemented there is a need for more info on various systems. I don't advocate for hard numbers that would turn this into an accounting exercise, just some indicators of strengths and weaknesses. That way I know that the ships I am building to utilize a stand off tactic aren't mounting short range only weapons.

 

This basic lack of information isn't limited to ship systems. There are plenty of installations in the game that we still don't have any reall idea what they are supposed to do or how they could effect things.

 

... stepping off of the soapbox...

 

Now back to your regularly scheduled progam.

Edited November 18, 2003 by hobknob

[MadMartinB]

I believe that weapons (and generation) are factored on a X/Y/Z axis. Where X is the damage and Y is the distance. All First generation (poor) torpedos inflict the same damage to distance ratio (Long Range does less but goes further etc..).

 

The Z axis would be the base % chance to hit. Higher MK level would mean a better %.

 

I would bet there are several tables like this based on different defenses etc...

 

So the Defense for a Torpedo (say Point Defense) would have an effectiveness ratio based on the level of the weapon (Poor/Fair etc..) which would reduce the % hit ratio. Then the Deflector would have some kind of impact on the % to hit and the the Force Shields would have an absorbtion rating on damage etc...

 

A guess really. The LFE expansion would be nice. Or a combat summary article that explains it all...