Request: Crippling Overspecialization

[Longherin]

Alternatively, "What do you mean, 'a bad idea'?"
In much the same way that planets can specialize to do one thing really well, I kinda want ships to be the same way with components, so we can have stupid fleets armed in stupid ways for maximum amusement value.

Ship Design Patterns
Have so many slots that filling all of them would be a terrible idea, or else allow slot kitbashing at the expense of stats. Let me strap four L-sized weapons onto a Destroyer at the cost of it having basically no movement. Let me stuff so many torpedoes onto a Cruiser that it will turn into a second sun upon being hit by a single shot.

Weapons:
We currently have: Energy and Kinetic weapons that trade (in some form) range and accuracy for damage. For now I'm ok with this.

Support Changes (Components researchable without additional effort, i.e. having to kill a crystal dude to learn how to make hull like it):
Armor -> Give Armor, Reduce evasion.
Shield -> Give Shield, Reduce speed. Cost power.
Hull -> Give Hull, Reduce speed or evasion (two types).
Thrusters -> Give speed or evasion (two types). Cost power.
Computers -> Give accuracy or range. Cost power.

Basically, when ship design went from "and you need power generators" to "power generators are now standard on every ship" this is the kind of design paradigm that I had expected: ship design decisions that could skew to the point of insanity. The end result (where you could always fill a ship 100%) felt...lackluster.

So I'd like to be given the opportunity to create ships of insane types...y'know, just because.

 

[Incompetent]

I think the big problem here is the targeting algorithm. If ships actually chose targets based on how quickly they can kill the enemy's firepower, or even just at random, then you'd be punished for having all your weapons on glass cannon ships, as you should be. But with the current stupid targeting system where ships target purely based on comparing hull sizes (so e.g. a destroyer with L weapons will still prefer to target other destroyers instead of enemy capital ships), you could screen your glass cannons with decoy ships that are tough/evasive but have no firepower, and then the combination becomes overpowered.

Now you could make this kind of thing an interesting system, if the basic targeting algorithm was more sophisticated but you could invest in special abilities for your decoy ships to draw shots away from their allies. Think of how it works in World of Warcraft for instance, where characters generate 'threat' and this determines where an NPC's aggro is directed. But if it just happens automatically that the decoy ships get targeted due to stupid targeting, it's too easy.

 

[Longherin]

Yeah, but having the freedom to do make stupid decoy ships would be nice. If someone wants to make a fleet of half glass cannons and half glorified blocks of concrete, then they should be allowed to do that. Whatever happens afterward would be entirely their fault.

 

[anamiac]

It would be historical. In the battle of Jutland we saw German Battlecruisers having more armor, but less speed and firepower than their British equivalents. Turned out that this worked out better for the Germans, although most of the British ship losses could have been prevented with smarter ordinance handling.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Shield -> Give Shield, Reduce speed. Cost power.
Hull -> Give Hull, Reduce speed or evasion (two types).
Thrusters -> Give speed or evasion (two types). Cost power.

Not speed, acceleration, remember the ships move in vaccum. They reach a speed and keep going unless they actively decelerate or hit something, or get hit by something.

Advisable perhaps not to move too fast in combat because if you lose control of your engines or direction of movement you aren't going to slow down or change direction except by hitting something, being hit by something or being dragged into a gravity well.

 

[StormyStrife]

I feel the ship design being slot-based, instead of just a list of weapons and systems it has, where you can increase all the weapons to certain numbers, where weapons, systems, and framework items like computer and reactor types all take up a certain amount of space on a ship, the lack of this kind of design prevents truly "crazy" ship designs from being created without a truly stupid number of different components.

Sadly, the solution is to get Extra Components 3.0.

 

[Blurb]

Not speed, acceleration, remember the ships move in vaccum. They reach a speed and keep going unless they actively decelerate or hit something, or get hit by something.

Advisable perhaps not to move too fast in combat because if you lose control of your engines or direction of movement you aren't going to slow down or change direction except by hitting something, being hit by something or being dragged into a gravity well.

Not acceleration, speed. You're confusing Stellaris with reality, perhaps the vacuum is between your ears?
Acceleration is currently a constant across all ships, and the current gameplay would not be improved by introducing acceleration as a design variable.

 

[AlazkanAssassin]

I’d love to see some of this specialization allowed via new and unique/rare vessel sections.
For example, you could have an anomaly that grant you a tech for a corvette ‘section’ with only one defensive slot, but a lot more offence.
Or find a battleship ruin in the L-sector with a midsection that has a X sized weapon, and now you can build those too.

Make these fun and unique, and not something available every time you play. It would be boring if you could always do it.

Corvette that launches strike craft, found on a progenitor homeworld?
Destroyer rear with no weapon slots, just more defense slots that you can buy from caravaners?
Cruiser rear with 4 auxiliary slots but less other slots recovered from a fallen empire?
A complete set of “more defense, less gun” sections by taking a specific pacifist government policy?
Ascention perk that give a set of “all guns, no defense” sections?

Yes, please!

 

[Longherin]

I've just got another bad idea~

-Wartime Emergency Launch-
A shipyard can be (manually) told to launch the ship it's currently producing even when the production job is not complete. When a ship is launched this way, it suffers a penalty to its damage output equivalent to the amount of time it has left to launch (so a ship half built would have a -50% damage output). Or it could have more debuffs, I'm not picky.

When a ship has been launched this way, it will slowly be 'complete' (read: debuffs will go away) at a rate of ...what, 1 construction day per month while out of a shipyard and half a day per...day...while in a shipyard.

This way, you can deploy a fleet of half-built, sloppily nailed together Destroyers who have to share a functional gun with each other every Sunday while the core of your fighting force pretend to be more useful than they actually are.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Not acceleration, speed. You're confusing Stellaris with reality, perhaps the vacuum is between your ears?

Sp you simultaneously agree with me and insult me . . .

Acceleration is currently a constant across all ships, and the current gameplay would not be improved by introducing acceleration as a design variable.

If you think I was recommending "introducing acceleration as a design variable" then you have read intention into my post which was not there.

 

[Blurb]

Sp you simultaneously agree with me and insult me . . .

No. I'm making the opposite statement that you are ("not A, B!" vs. "not B, A!"), a textbook example of a disagreement.

If you think I was recommending "introducing acceleration as a design variable" then you have read intention into my post which was not there.

You replied to a post that suggested altering ship speed via component choices, and corrected it stating "not speed, acceleration", implying it's either a factual correction or you personally think acceleration should be changed instead of speed. In Stellaris, speed is an arbitrarily defined limit completely independent of acceleration, meaning a factual correction would be erroneous, and the latter would make acceleration a new number to account for when designing ships ("introduce it as a design variable").

 

[Tisifoni12]

@Blurb Naah, I was just being a revolting pedant . . .

I do have issues with how the battles are fought out on most PDX games. Ship design could be different and combat could be more abstract and faster.

 

[Longherin]

@Blurb Naah, I was just being a revolting pedant . . .

I do have issues with how the battles are fought out on most PDX games. Ship design could be different and combat could be more abstract and faster.

My problem with abstractions is that the entire purpose of varied design is to counter a spate of different problems, and when those problems are smoothed over or abstracted then the design feature that would have existed due to the issue would be gone.

For example: when logistics gets abstracted away (as in Stellaris), then a smaller empire would not be able to conduct fleet-based asymmetric warfare against a larger enemy. There would be no supply line to strike, no storage depots to raid. We'd basically get into the situation where the Empire would always win by virtue of it having more stuff it could throw against the enemy.
(Yes, the weaker player can surgically strike enemy planets, but the stronger player can hit more planets faster and can chase down a weaker player via needing to take less time to chew through the same defenses).

I want the design to err on the side of creativity if at all possible, because...well, because I think that's what makes long-lasting Paradox games long lasting. There's no reason why I would play as a 80 year old count in CK2 with basically every malady and no redeeming features whatsoever, but the option to do it is still there. In Stellaris, I feel like I should be allowed to have Engineers who go "if the emperor wants a Destroyer made entirely of bullets then who are we to question his infinite wisdom"?

 

[Tisifoni12]

@Longherin Or a ship with an outer layer of armour comprised of coffins . . .

Oh, hang on STAR TREK Discovery did that already. Seriously it's like STAR TREK Game of Thrones.

 

[Longherin]

"The Determined Exterminators are shooting what at us?!"
"The skulls of the humans they've killed."
"Oh, so not us?"
"Not us, sir."
"Carry on."