Weapons, engines and mods, Oh my!

[PvK]

Thanks. I haven't really absorbed much of what P&N does, though I think it's really a wonderful mod. I haven't yet studied much of Adamant mod either, though I will one of these days. What you say demonstrates that yes, unlimited QNP engines can avoid some of the issues I mentioned, with certain values.

Certainly that sort of system has some advantages, but I think using engine limits also has some of its own, as I've rambled about enough.

I still like the trade-offs and limits created by Proportions. I'd probably sooner add more engine types and variants, or go to a scale-mounted engine system, rather than unlimited QNP, because that would allow me to retain more appropriate to-hit modifiers for engines. Scale-mount engines is a cool alternative, but not entirely perfect either. Ah well.

PvK

[Fyron]

Well, P&N and Adamant use small numbers for Standard Movement (3-7 or so), whereas Proportions uses big numbers. Engines per move for a ship size is equal to tonnage structure / 50 (which you have in Proportions). If you double (or triple) both of these sets of numbers, you can get slightly more precise movement scales for ship sizes, but you hit the 255 cap on max standard movement points much more quickly. Basically, it boils down to whether you want to require a handful of engines to go "fast" or if you want to require a lot of engines to go "fast".

[Suicide Junkie]

I have 1800kT colony ships available from the start, but I don't think that includes the ability to build a 1700kT propulsion system for a 100kT command module, and have it be linearly efficient compared to a more reasonable design.

Of course it dosen't... after putting on the colony module, and all the required cargo bays, how much space do you have left?
40%? ... 20%? How much will you use for engines, supply tanks, defenses?

Most basically, if a ship design has enough of a speed advantage over its enemies, it can do silly things in combat compared to weapon ranges. This can cause imbalances with unrealistic tactics that take advantage of the lack of opportunity fire in the combat engine, such as ramming or hit-and-run without the enemy being able to fire back at all.

The thing to note is that, yes, speed should be an advantage! In tactical, it may be abused vs AI, but not vs humans. In strategic its AI vs AI, and thus perfectly valid, IMO. The second thing to note, is that in order to get a really good speed, you will have to strip out almost all of the armor/shields and guns...

Sure, you can fly circles around the enemy, but you can't do much damage, and your ships will drop like flies as soon as the enemy gets a chance to fire on you.
PS: Don't expect super-speedy rammers to be very effective, since you'll have no armor to bulk up your impact damage, and you just spent thousands of radioactives to build those precious engines.

In any case; I played many games like this at home with two other people... Each liked their own tactics, and are solidly convinced theirs is best.
(Me = big on defenses - if you can't kill me, I can't lose)
(Brother = Big on Weapons - boom, you die, I win)
(Father = Big on engines/speed - weak attack, and no defense, but if you can't hit, it don't die.)

[Taera]

this topic deserves a rename

[Fyron]

In Adamant, colony ships are 3300 kT and the colony module is 3000 kT. I treated them as roughly 900 kT mass ships for purposes of engines per move, mostly just to make them slower than if they were 300 kT mass (without having no chance to move, as 300 kT is not enough to move much with a mass of 3300 kT).

[PvK]

Again, from what SJ says, it sounds like it is possible to get around most of the issues I anticipated with unlimited-engine QNP, if you use different sorts of values from the ones I used in Proportions. P&N seems like a great mod - I'm really hope I get more time so I can give it more of a shot (I've only started one game of it so far, though I've been tempted by the mentions of replacement players needed for PBW games).

I wouldn't say either system is better - they're both good and interesting (way more so than the unmodded system).

I still rather like the results of the Proportions QNP. I wouldn't change Proportions to unlimited-engine QNP, although it might make an interesting racial advantage. Proportions offers a nice range of propulsion designs possible with different combinations of engine types, with interesting trade-offs in cost, speed, fuel consumption, and combat mods. Those things could still exist without engine limits, but the engine limits add some baseline abilities to ship classes which give the classes themselves performance differences to consider. I like that small ships can go quite fast with just a few low-tech high-output engines (but can't go insane speeds by tripling the number of engines, even though they have "room" to do so), while massive ships take a lot to keep up to speed, and usually can't keep up with the fastest small ships. If you really want a fast large ship, though, you can spend a lot and develop gravitic drives (which isn't as efficient for smaller ships, so there is an interesting backwards efficiency effect there if that tech is developed) and/or deploy scale-mount emergency propulsion (which can be a nasty surprise for enemy light ships if mounted on a heavy interceptor ship).

PvK

[Fyron]

Again, from what SJ says, it sounds like it is possible to get around most of the issues I anticipated with unlimited-engine QNP, if you use different sorts of values from the ones I used in Proportions.

That is what I was hinting at.

Also, I never said that either system was intrinsically better, just that I prefer unlimtied QNP. I think that all resulted from a word being taken differently than it was intended (proper-QNP).