Re: SE 4 Gold
 

A 25% advantage is unbeatable.

A 2.5% advantage can be overcome by tactics, strategy and even some luck.


PS:
Charging more for aesthetics is a very lame idea. Looks are completely irrelevant.

Re: SE 4 Gold
 

Modding allows one to change many aspects of the game, from what facilites do, to the components you can use, to the types of planets and systems on the map. Check out Data folder.

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2.5% isn't even a strategically relevant advantage. Resource production being equal, that means you can support 102 ships for every 100 (of the exact same tech level and configuration) that the enemy can. If that is all that is determining victory, there is not much of a game at hand.

I'd love to see the business that goes into bankruptcy for no reason other than a 2.5% cost of production disadvantage against its competitors... such a trivial difference is easily overcome by other factors, such as brand, functionality, and marketing (marketing is the bulk of business success in the first place).

Re: SE 4 Gold
 

For an Empirical Example, see the attachment.

Consider the following:
- This is early endgame, with max-tech, but plenty of old ships still around.
- The blue-grey Pandorans had 400 ships and carriers.
- The yellow Nausea Heap had 300 ships and carriers.
- The two forces started at point blank range, with lots of fringe placement.
- The Pandorans got the first shot.
- The pandorans lost more ships, and averaged about 65% damage on their surviving ships.
- The heap lost a couple ships, and averaged about 65% damage on their survivors too.


Pandorans had:
- A 30% numbers advantage.
- First shot from point blank.

The Heap had:
- Slightly better strategies.
- Position (attacked in a pincer move, pinning the Pandorans in a small area near the warppoint)
- Better fighter deployment (smaller stacks - 5 vs 15)
- Transports with spare fighters to restock the carriers.
- Supply tankers to restock the missile ships.

If the Pandorans had only a 2.5% numbers advantage, they would have been wiped out already.
Instead, with a 30% advantage, they have just had half their navy taken out of commission.


The "Schooling":
Nature's way of reminding you that a 25% advantage is not unbeatable.

Re: SE 4 Gold
 

One battle does not a war make.
I am picking up the recommended patchs and will start soon on learning the game. 4X games are mostly economic. I see youse guys are all focusing on the shooting part. In any 4X game I've ever tried, the less shooting , the better. War is wastefull and to be avoided whenever possible. If you had used your 2.5% advantage over the course of the whole game, it would have been 4,000 to 300. Ever hear the term "Compound Interest"? The Main reason I'm ditching MOO3 is that if you build your empire thru skullduggery, deceit and bribery, as an empire should be built, the Program drops as many ships as needed on you to destroy your empire.
You are looking at the trees and not seeing the forest.

Re: SE 4 Gold
 

Yes. How, exactly, does this 2.5% advantage make use of that mechanic? 2.5% cheaper ships translates directly to 2.5% more ships for the same cost. I don't have the slightest clue how this advantage might compound without being used in combat, so when the first battles happen it will still be a mere 2.5%. SJ has posted proof that even a 30% advantage can be overcome by other factors, at least in his mod, and I sincerely doubt any real-world historical battle was decided by a numerical advantage that small. Yes, if everything else is exactly equal, then that 2.5% difference may decide the victor. The odds of that ever actually happening are so tiny as to be practically nonexistent.

I agree with you that MoO3 is a bad game. Your opinion of how an empire "should" be built, however, is just that - an opinion. An empire forged through deceit, political maneuvering, etc. WILL eventually have to back it up with force unless its maneuvering and deceit is truly SPECTACULARLY well done, preferably accompanied by copious amounts of luck.

Re: SE 4 Gold
 

You are aware that you pay maintenance on ships? And that 2.5% cost difference never provides any build time difference (simply remove a cheap component and add it in retrofit while training the ship if you can save an entire turn by it)?

Re: SE 4 Gold
 

You are seeing that 2.5% as only applying to ships. Think of it as a production efficency that can be transferred to any part of the system. You can transfer it to research, non-ship production, what ever you feel will give you the greatest advantage. I'm not far enough into this particular game to check that yet, but if you cannot switch resources between needs, then this will be the first 4X game I have ever seen that didn't allow that. It is such a fundamental point that the whole game would be bogus if it wasn't allowed. It seems as if the number a ships that can be built is limited within a time slice by the number of shipyards. So if that 2.5 percent was used to build more shipyards then you would end up being able to build more ships over a given period of time. Compounding interest was an anology and an example NOT an event. I used it in an attempt to illustrate how a small advantage can be leveraged into a huge advantage over time.
The whole thing is a SYSTEM; imput->processing->output.
I also think my 25% was a LOT closer to correct then 2.5%. the Saving in Hull metal alone would be on the order of 3.141 times the radius squared, over a given length. Note, I have switched back to the real world. So on bigger ships the savings would be several hundreds of times. So for any given ship size you could produce several dozen (prehaps humdreda) open ships to each hulled ship using the same amount of metal. The cost savings wouldn't be as much for all the other bits, but they wouldn't cost more either, or at least not much more for those parts that required atmosphere.

Re: SE 4 Gold
 

You, sir, are going to be schooled if you ever play against humans on PBW.

Theory is one thing, but as we are trying to tell you, empirical evidence is overwhelmingly against you.
As in real life, superior forces can and do get overcome by better generals with smaller armies.

Re: SE 4 Gold
 

You can certainly scrap and replace facilities to your heart's content.

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I'm not sure what you mean by an "open" ship. Having no hull whatsoever? Just a bunch of components loosely cabled together, like a modern day space probe or satellite? Why would anyone build warships like that, rather than having an armored, protective hull? To me, it sounds like a bad idea to make such a spindly ship and have no protective armoring at all, taking only one hit to blow the whole thing up (or at least, in half, making useless wrecks)... Why do you assume that the presence of an armored hull is wasting material? It is making your ship capable of sustaining damage, thus making the ship worthwhile to build. I'd rather have 50 ships that can take more than half a hit from weapons fire without blowing up than 200 ships that fall apart at the first hint of weapons fire.

Re: SE 4 Gold
 

As for your system, you're forgetting about maintenance.
Having a 2.5% advantage means that you can maintain only 2.5% more ships. You can replace losses slightly faster too, but those values are insignificant compared to tactics and strategies and terrain.

If you spend resources building BSYs, then you'll have less available to build and maintain ships. Bases cost maintenance too.
In some mods, BSYs are important. But you still have to balance your Yard investments with expansion and defense.

You will learn these lessons if you play against the experts.

***c_of_red said:
One battle does not a war make.***
In that particular case, I'd say one battle doth a war break. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif
With half our respective navies now crippled, neither of us could scrape together enough ships to breach the other's warppoint fortifications. At least not for a year or two, and without leaving other areas of the empire dangerously unprotected. Once we've had time to regroup, things may heat up again.




PS:
It sounds like you might want to write yourself up a super-gritty-tech mod, in which armor and shields are absurdly expensive, and naked ships are the norm.

However, such a mod would make strategy and tactics even MORE important, since the first shot wins.