Currently there's no tradeoff for building big, and with a lot of turrets. More mass on turrets, nerfed RCS, and exposed thrusters will fix it without an artificial 'you need to be this class size to do this' requirement. They need to add a ton of mass to turrets...especially the more advanced ones like Arty/Plasma/Rocket. They should even be heavier than thrusters (cause they got armor). i.e. 6 XL Thrusters (1 in each direction) is currently 3.6kt...An Arty should weight like 5kt, then you're going to need a ton of huge thrusters to have more than a few. Oh you want a 10 Arty bomber? Now you need 20 XL thrusters in one direction just to move the damn thing. Then they require thrusters to be exposed and all of a sudden you have a large bomber with an obvious weakness that actually needs small gunship or SV protection. It creates healthy balanced gameplay and semi-believable realism instead of the current 'one big ship to rule them all' with every different piece of equipment imaginable with no real drawbacks.
Those mechanisms are accounted for Here ---> computational-units-resource-proposal, which has received some attention from Staff, and may be worth you time to peruse. Mass really isn't enough on its own. Also just ignore the Equations for now. We are trying to get him not to lead with math.
I think turrets ought to have more mass anyway, even with the CU system in place; they're complementary restrictions in my view. Well, that and nerfing the thrust/power ratio for thrusters some too. It's just too easy in general to move a big ship stuffed full of weapons and armor.
So, 2 years and 10 months later, we have people referring to frigates, dreadnaughts, cruisers, freighters, etc. Are these just arbitrary, or is there, now, a schedule of how to classify ships?
Was just talking with someone in a discord about this - he has some quite logical classifications I think, however I dont think the current game and in particular the current game's CPU and device unlock progression facilitates this at all, so if you do it, its arbitrary. I tend to count T3 turret heavy vessels (ie near maxed out L15 turret setup) as light destroyers more on a size thing than anything else (as having only turrets, that isnt my idea of a destroyer TBH - maybe a mini cruiser?). In SE where didnt have these silly device limits or senseless progression, then yes we did have a bunch of different class designs that kind of correlated with most peoples idea of common sci-fi vessel classes. I do tend to consider a dreadnought as something you can only build with an advanced core (or CPU off) and limits off. Even a maxed out T4 CV with CPU and limits on seems more like a medium cruiser to me. We do have a bunch of sensible classification of the new vessels for polaris and zirax, but TBH that is a luxury for PV designers - not players who have Eleons arbitrary constraints to fight with. In the end, the only classification that matter to me are CPU tier, and combat / non combat, with the latter only coming in for T3 and T4 TBH - anything before that cant fight worth a damn anyway.
Thanks. I was just wondering. Homeworld had distinct ship classifications to build, but were prefabs requiring only resources and research to be acquired before building.
For me, classes is simply defined by cost. Like building a small, cheaper "corvette" as a starting CV. Mass and volume has at least defined freighters as a dedicated class of their own, I am currently building a specialised freighter because I actually felt I needed one for hauling massive loads over long distances. Maybe dropships could also be a viable class depending on how SV-HV docking works. The problem is, the player is still a one man show so there's no point for multiple military ships of different classes. Once I have my primary CV, SV and HV, there's no point in building anything else. They just sit there in port collecting dust and taking up fuel. If I build a new ship, the older one is usually scrapped. If we had AI control for our ships, then classes could play a bigger part. Like cheap, expendable corvettes and frigates patrolling around your BAs, destroyers to escort freighters, fighter wings, exploration vessels, AEW&C ships. But right now, warship, freighter (and possibly dropship) is the only useful classes for a one man fleet. If device count was determined by ship size instead of a global hard cap, then different classes could have been more of a thing as well. There's no real difference between a destroyer and a cruiser if they have the same firepower. EDIT: Scratch the dropship idea. No point of a dropship if it cannot fly back home after dropping you off.
Indeed - this is why regardless of all the attempts to restrict us and force into artificial specialization, all it does is to cause annoyance as we end up building what we actually need. Also, a lot of the lack of specialization on my part in this is because the core game mechanics are so primitive and unwieldy. In SE I used specialize a lot because the game mechanics mostly allowed it to remain convenient (barring some annoying side effects of merge blocks). In this it is best of your vessel can do everything to save you the annoyance of having to shuffle stuff around by hand so much (docking/undocking) and because shields dont protect anything being carried etc. When ships can remain docked inside a ship that is docking and passenger can stay seated and shields protect carried vessels and player can move around while a vessel is moving, and collected cargo transfers can be automated (like SE docking connectors) etc etc, then we can specialize with out is just being a full on in-yr-face exposure to everything that is lacking in this. I do wish we had an X4 like basic player ship AI so we could send orders to a vessel to fly from A -> B and dock, or set it to mine an asteroid etc. No chance of course!
And then the game still give us loading screen tips like "use a dropship to deploy troops on a planet"... If only!!
Thank you all for your input. The fact that, beyond using prefab BPs, ship design is extremely individual makes such classification rather difficult if not impossible. Works for me!
I believe Eleon thought they were implementing a PvP focussed game, but eventually a survey suggested they were a minority. It seems they like to follow the 80-20 rule - 80% of effort for 20% of players...
That usually happens when a dev breaks up a community into smaller chunks and scattering them across different platforms instead of keeping us all in the same pen here on the official forums and Steam. It becomes increasingly difficult to gauge what the community as a whole actually wants, especially when depending on social media stuff that tend to be breeding ground for extremely vocal minorities. It all happened before. Eleon actually made a lot of effort to satisfy both the PvP and PvE/singleplayer sides, and I really appreciate that. I think their problem is that they seem incapable of coding a properly working AI and they can't afford to spare time and effort to learn how to. I'm sure they would want to add such features into the game as well but, they simply can't manage it. Same with walking in moving ships.
