Ship size vs. weapons

[Spoo]

I'd LOVE to see an escort wipe the floor with a dreadnaught... sigh, one day...

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Assume you have a 1kg squirrel
E=mc^2
E=1kg(3x10^8m/s)^2=9x10^16J
which, if I'm not mistaken, is equivilent to roughly a 50 megaton nuclear bomb.
Fear the squirrel.

[Puke]

quote:

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Originally posted by Spoo:
I'd LOVE to see an escort wipe the floor with a dreadnaught... sigh, one day...

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give your race max defensive bonuses, throw on some ecm3 and a piece of stealth armor. nothing will hit that escort. sure one of them might not take out a dreadnaught, but if you can produce 10 in the time it takes the enemy to produce a dread, your escorts will take 'em out.

[jowe01]

Or do what I did in my mod:
Reduce the targeting of larger mounts by -10 for each level and reduce combat sensors and ECM to 15/30/45. This way, the evasive capacities of smaller ships become much more valuable. The big, bad ships can still be used for the purpose for which they were used in WW1, WW2 and maybe even the Gulf War: to attack heavily fortified, but imobile positions (starbases, planets) and other big bad ships. However, they would have a harder time hitting small agile ships. The mod is quite realistic, balanced and leads to some interesting "Shark against Piranha" battles...

[Weson102]

What I am looking for is not only advancements in weapons but in quality of the ship itself. The F-22 of today is smaller than a B-17 but there is nno comparison in ability

[Barnacle Bill]

The problem here is that, unlike real life in WWI & WWII, the different sizes don't have different tactical roles in SE4. So, you would need to add more than just a series of improved hulls, or at any given level bigger would still be better.

To work like WWI/WWII, you would need three general size classes: capital ships (BB+), cruisers (CL, CA, w/BC sort of a hybrid)& escorts (DD-). Capital ships pound other capital ships at a distance, but have a hard time hitting small & fast & maueverable escorts with their main weapons (they mount secondary weapons for that purpose). Escorts have "guns" so small that they can't hurt capital ships. This requires more than just big shields on capital ships & small damage on escort "guns". You would need something like resolving each weapon shot separately and any hit below a certain % of the target's current shield strength does no shield damage. What escorts would have is a big damage, very short range, long reload time weapon that bigger ships can't use effectively (torpedoes, historically). So, they have to get in close, surviving fire on the way, to hurt capital ships. Cruisers screen your capital ships to try & kill the escorts before they get in range of the capital ships (your own escorts act defensively in this way as well), and act as "capital ships" in secondary theaters.

You could probably do most of that with mods. You would have some beginning level of all three categories right from the start, and they would just kleep getting bigger & better but at any level the roles are the same. The problem is that the tactical AI would probably have to be reprogrammed to fight that way.

[Aegis]

Cool Idea.
I'd implement it under the present system as follows:
Escorts, Frigattes and Destroyers are 1 Engine per move, but 2 less Max Engines than now (i.e. 4).
All Cruisers are 2 Engines per move, with Max Engines of 6.
Battleships and Dreadnoughts are 3 Engines per move, with Max Engines of 6.
Ship Construction stays as is, and allows for the building of level 1 ships. It is also a prerequisite for advanced hulls as follows: (Examples for each 3 Category light, medium and heavy)
Escort Ships(New tech area)
-requires Ship Construction level 1
- 3 levels
level 1: Allows Escort Ship II (Cost: 20000)
Max of 5 Engines
50% Defence Bonus
Bonus Movement of 1
155 kT Size
level 2: Allows Escort Ship III (Cost: 40000)
Max of 6 Engines
60% Defence Bonus
Bonus Movement of 2
160 kT Size
level 3: Allows Escort Ship IV (Cost: 80000)
Max of 7 Engines
70% Defence Bonus
10% Offence Bonus
Bonus Movement of 3
170 kT Size
...
Cruisers (New tech area)
-requires Ship Construction level 5
- 3 levels
Level 1: Allow Cruiser II (Cost: 30000)
Max of 8 Engines
510 kT Size
Level 2: Cruiser III (Cost: 60000)
Max of 10 Engines
520 kT Size
Bonus Movement of 1
5% Defensive Bonus
5% Offensive Bonus
Level 3: Cruiser IV (Cost: 120000)
Max of 6 Engines
1 Engine per Move
Bonus Movement of 2
10% Defensive Bonus
10% Offensive Bonus
530 kT Size
...
Dreadnought(New tech area)
- requires Ship Construction level 8
- 3 levels
Level 1: Allows Dreadnought II (Cost: 40000)
Max of 9 Engines
5% Easier to hit
1025 kT Size
Level 2: Dreadnought III (Cost: 80000)
Max of 12 Engines
Bonus Movement of 1
1050 kT Size
Level 3: Dreadnought IV (Cost: 160000)
Max of 10 Engines
2 Engines per Move
Bonus Movement of 1
5% Bonus to hit
1075 kT Size
I wouldn't allow Baseships to be upgraded, but that's just me.
Hmm, cool. I think once the next patch is out I'll mod the tech and vehicle size files and see how it plays.

-Aegis

[apache]

Here is what I think we should do to make ship classes more useful. Based on the theories that the larger the weapon, the less useful it is on a smaller ship, I think we should have to-hit penalties based on ship sizes. These would be assigned to the different mount sizes. For example, large mount weapons would have no to-hit modifier for hulls 300KT or greater, but once you start shooting at the smaller vessels, you get a 50% negative to-hit modifier. Huge mounts would get a -50% modifier on ships less than 600KT. Massive mounts would get a -50% modifier on ships less than 1000KT. This way, you must use appropriately sized weapons to attack different ship classes. Of course the AI would need a major overhaul with this, so it definitely would not be easily done.
Now, something that would be possible with this modification is to extend range bonuses to the larger mounts, but still have the best bonuses on the bases. This way, a Dreadnought with huge PPBs would outrange an escort with normal PPBs, but it would have a very hard time hitting that ship with its big guns.