Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up?

[Atrocities]

Imperator Fyron said:
You can easily limit the largest ship size a race will build in AI_Design_Creation.txt.

How?

[Fyron]

All entries have two fields for min and max size of the design class.

[Atrocities]

If you want to make smaller ships more practicle, give them the ALWAYS HITS ability.

[Fyron]

That sounds like a really dangerous proposition...

[Captain Kwok]

An easy way to make small ships more effective is to employ a QNP scheme, modify the large mounts so they don't give such an overwhelming advantage in terms of damage/kT and lastly make some balanced offense/defense modifiers.

[Rollo]

Depending on how you'd set up a mod, it would not be much of a problem to make the AI design different size ships or better versions of early hulls.
I'd be easy to make 3 ships-of-the-line, say, one destroyer class, one cruise class and one battleship class and get a mix of these ships.

You can restrict the sizes of each class in AI_designcreation.txt and use different design type (Attack Ship, Kamikaze Attack ship, and Boarding Ship) for each size class. You can then control the build ratio of the these designs in the AI_Construction_Vehicles.txt.

For more then 3 ship classes, it gets a bit more complicated, but it's also do-able.

[Rollo]

One question I often ask myself, though, when discussing this topic. If bigger isn't better, why reserch higher levels of ship construction?