Hey- yeah, I don't talk much on here, I don't really have anyone to GalCiv with, and I probably won't want to until I'm satisfied enough with the state of the custom race I've been faddling around with for the last couple of years.
However, I am compulsively organized about 4x games in ways I usually am not about any other game type. Which means, among other things, that I'm trying really hard to figure out as best I can an appropriate set of ships to build for the race. I've gone to a lot of trouble to learn the shipbuilder and plot out scales of equipment to place on ships (I like integrating the actual placable gear, so sue me). However, I'm running around on some intense frustration over weapons, armor, and engine masses, having only just now downloaded and installed Crusade.
Can someone help me out here? I can tell that there's a change in mass for lots of the equipment as the ship chassis changes size class, but I can't manage to figure out just what it is. I can see that in the 2.2 changelog from May that "Beam Weapon space usage reduced from 5% to 3%" happened. Given that Lasers have a mass listed in the tech tree as 17, and when I'm trying to design a ship in-game a Cargo hull mounts them at a mass of 20.5, a Small hull mounts them at a mass of 18.5, and a Tiny hull uses them at 17.3 mass, I can't see this working as a straight percentage of the base hull mass allotment.
This mass variance would indicate that a Cargo hull adds 3.5 mass to the Lasers, which is neither 3% of the 90 base mass, 3% of the lasers' base 17 mass, nor is it 3% of the 99 mass that is the minimum a +1 Dense race (such as the one I'm trying to craft) has for a Cargo hull. Additionally, comparing masses, if the 3% is directly aimed at the hull maximum mass, then the Small hull should add slightly more than half as much mass to the Lasers weapon as the Cargo hull does, and it doesn't- the 1.5 mass increase for the Small hull is less than half of the 3.5 mass added for the Cargo hull. By the same rubric, the Tiny hull's addition should be exactly half of that of the Small hull and it isn't (.3, which seems like it should stand in for .25 or .275 depending on whether or not Dense is taken into account, is not in any way, shape, or form half of 1.5. It's also not 3% of anything, instead rating at approximately 10% of the hull total mass.)
Presumably by this point someone somewhere has figured out how exactly these mass changes math out and to what degree (if at all) they are affected by technologies that alter the mass value of a hull (assuming that the technologies that reduce equipment mass always operate on the mass of the equipment AFTER taking into account hull size and hull mass altering technologies). If anyone has, or if anyone can provide me the necessary math to figure this out, I would adore the chance to simplify what I'm doing. I don't mind doing a bunch of math myself, but I can't for the life of me figure out if the hull sizes are actually applying consistent modifiers to equipment mass across the various hull sizes, nevermind what rubric that modifier is actually using.
Anyone?
Well, this is embarrassing. I misread my own notes here, the Lasers is 16 mass. That actually resolves the issue there, though this comes out pretty damn weird anyways.
I'm going to leave this topic here rather than delete it, because I can't convince myself for a moment that nobody else is going to want to know these values.
After a good break and then nearly an hour of copying data onto paper, then doing some rigorous head-math (and repeatedly double-checking it), here's what I came up with:
Every piece of ship equipment I've encountered so far in this first play of Crusade falls into one of the following categories:
Additionally, any values of .05 are always rounded up (hence all the .8s and .3s on equipment masses.)
Among other things, this makes the new mass/moves ratings of star drives in Crusade make a hell of a lot more sense (checked in the tech tree, Hyper Drive and Hyperdrive Plus appear identical at 8 mass and +1 move). Especially in the case of the star drives, this needs to be added to the tooltips somehow. Not having this explained is very user-unfriendly to a player who is either new to Crusade or new to the ship designer in GalCiv and trying to figure out how to build their ships the way they want.
It's very fortunate that I actually like doing math and puzzling things out, otherwise, I don't think I'd have bothered spending the time to figure out these mass percentages.
In the interest of keeping a reference online (since there isn't one in the wiki or apparently anywhere else that several search engines can find, and I'm not familiar with adding anything more complex than a bullet point to a wiki,) I'm going to try to remember to come back here and update this regularly as I explore the ship construction options, and would welcome any volunteered extra data, should anybody have a moment.
Very illuminating, thank you. So our focus should be on the hyperdrives. Maybe large ships should just be slow, lumbering hulks loaded with defense which rely on fleet support modules and favor particle beams? And the second and fourth drives are cheaper than the first and third? Interesting.
You're very welcome. I just hope it helps.
I'm not sure that's the right way to put it? The largest mass consumption is the hyperdrives on larger ships, though. Keep in mind that compared to a hyperdrive, a weapon has nearly twice the core mass, even though it's got at most a quarter the 'percent of hull base mass'. This actually gets really interesting when you think about it. Specifically looking at comparable tech levels (at a level that I can confirm my listing is accurate for), you wind up with a best observation when looking at the Hyperdrive Plus, the Lasers, and the Shield Generators/Point Defence/Titanium Plating level of technology.
On a Tiny ship, a Hyperdrive Plus is only 10.5- I call them 'tonnes' in my head because I play a lot of Battletech and its related stuff, but they're probably not scaling quite like that given relative ship sizes. But I digress.
A Tiny ship's Hyperdrive Plus is only 10.5 tonnes, which is considerably less than the 17.3 tonnes of a Lasers, and comparable to the 10.5 tonnes of Armor Plating. So on a Tiny ship a 8+10% drive is equal to a high-value defence object and thoroughly light compared to a weapon, even a ballistic weapon. This isn't good enough to allow a full set of equipment, but you can load up a Tiny frame with, say, one drive, one defence, and one weapon for a cheap patrol drone in an area where you know the enemy weapons/defences combo.
A Small ship's Hyperdrive Plus is still only 13 tonnes, still much less than the 18.5 tonne Lasers and barely more than the 11 tonne Armor Plating. With twice the base mass of a Tiny frame, this also means it's actually possible for a Small ship to mount two drives with a single weapon- and a suite of defences if with any single weapon if you can get enough extra mass- even a Sparrow and a full set of defences only requires 70 tonnes of space, so Storage Maximization/High Capacity/Hull Capacity techs combined will allow that. If you're really paranoid, the remaining 4.5 tonnes will combine with the sacrifice of one drive to let you double the shields and point defence.
Even on a Medium hull, a Hyperdrive Plus is still only 15.5 tonnes, so it's still noticeably less than the 19.8 tonnes of a Lasers. At this point it's almost heavy enough to trade for a Shield Generators (8.5 tonnes) and a Point Defence (9.5 tonnes) together, though. A Medium hull with any one space-improving effect (it only needs a to reach 78.3 tonnes) can carry two drives, one weapon, and a full set of three defences.
It's only on a Large hull that it finally gets close- the Hyperdrive Plus hits 18 tonnes, compared to the 21-tonne Lasers, 9-tonne Shield Generators, 10 tonne Point Defences, and 12-tonne Titanium Plating. But the Large hull is even better off- the heaviest set with two engines (Again, two drives, Sparrow, one each all three defences) only reaches 86 tonnes, which leaves enough space for some extras on the hull. Drop to one Drive and you can double-stack all the defences and still only be at 98 tonnes.
It's on Huge that things finally tip over- the Hyperdrive Plus hits 33 tonnes to the Lasers' 28.5. Again, though, the sheer total mass available fixes things pretty well- the heaviest base load with two drives only hits 132.5 tonnes, leaving nearly half the hull mass still free to assign.
Basically speaking, adding more movement speed is no longer essentially free with larger ships, and that makes a huge difference for prioritizing your designs- the best fast responders are actually going to probably be (stay?) Medium and with enough space boosts or equipment mass reductions, Small ships, thanks to Logistics costs, speed of production, and lacking enough space to coerce players into mounting support gear. Large and Huge ships will still make horrifying hubs for space fleets, though, and you can pump the speed up a bit on them- just not as drastically as before. This especially hits colony and constructor ships hard, though, given the Cargo hull's 90 mass size and the 45+5% mass value of construction and colony modules- on a support hull, just one of either of these is now 49.5 mass, and with engines for those ships massing 17 or 26 tonnes, and the use of reduced mass to make engines better without just stacking larger movement bonuses onto the engines, you can't really make the 20+ move colony/constructor ships that used to be possible. It definitely makes big maps feel even bigger.
Not really? Weapons are very heavy right now, and the most mass efficient ones seem to be Ballistics, not Energy. If it weren't for the Prototype Drive, I'd say Missiles seem to be the way to go, but... Well, I'll get to that.
The big thing I want to point out here is the specialization techs and the mass-saving or hull-mass-increasing options.
Since I'm trying to construct a core set of ship designs, I've been specifically eschewing the hull mass increase and gear mass reduction options on the hulls, and pre-Crusade I really wasn't feeling at all disadvantaged by restricting myself like that. Not only were the HP bonus options on hulls plenty- especially with levels offering a +% to HP scores that were already easily hitting 800 on a Large ship- but on larger hulls gear massed so little by comparison that I still just didn't care and got to mount kind of absurd weapons loadouts.
It feels like taking the right gear mass reductions and the right amount of hull mass increases is more of an impactful choice now- without something, you're not going to get very effective individual ships out when compared to someone with +30% hull mass and -20% ballistic mass. Especially with HP and damage numbers drastically lowered- resulting in defences offering effectively much larger pools of damage-type-specific HP that recover after every fight. That change has already made defence gear feel much more warranted (and alleviates to some extent the old complaint about how long it takes a ship to repair).
Because the percentages on the non-engine items are so low, larger ships are apt to be slower in the name of really absurd-looking weapons/defence/support loadouts, which feels very appropriate. It's also worth noting that the high mass of drives means that investment in drive-mass-reduction is really worthwhile- just a 10% reduction means that a Huge ship goes from mounting three Ion drives (+20% drive with +2 move) at 174 tonnes to doing so at 156.6 tonnes, and that right there is almost a whole Particle Beam of tonnage shaved off. If the Warp Drive follows pattern as a +10% drive, you're looking at only 99 tonnes for that speed and with a 10% drive mass reduction, 89.1 tonnes, which leaves you plenty of ship to terrify enemies with. It's only when looking past +6 move or so that things get truly prohibitive on a Huge ship, and a Large ship generally won't even want to consider such speeds without at least Hyperwarp Drives.
Unfortunately, the Prototype Hyper Drive provides a severe outlier here, with a massive +5 moves at 8+10% mass and two Antimatter. I wouldn't be surprised if Missiles become extremely unpopular in favor of spending Antimatter on Prototype drives, given how early they arrive and how ludicrously fast they make things in comparison to all the other engines available until Age 3 tech.
Remember that instead of the drives providing +1/2/3/4/5/6 and prototype at +5 speed, you now have +1/+1/+2/+2/+3/+4 and the Prototype is +5. Anyone who can't afford the spare antimatter is going to be moving much, much slower. Black holes just became hugely valuable, especially on larger maps. Which is kind of distressing; with the strategic speed changes and changes to resources, it feels like the Prototype drive really needs to be no more than a +3 speed.
At the end of the day, I wonder if this added complexity truly adds to the experience of the game.
As you pointed out, the engine sizes really don't start making an impact until the very large hulls. At that point, we could just give large hulls a -1 speed and call it a day. The largest hulls have a bias for defenses over attack, again could we just give them a 1 defense all and call it a day.
Could we just lower the amount of mass larger ships get, and keep all of the component masses the same. I think that would be a lot simpler system than the one presented.
it does indeed add to the experience of the game - as %hullMass vs Speed is a valuable asset
I understand where your coming from on this but it defeats why it was added in the first place. It was done to slow the late game down some by limiting your ability to make large and massive hull total speed demons. There other ways this could be done (you point out 1) and i agree it is a bit confusing but I am ok with the current implementation.
I am not seeing the second- and fourth-drive thing. I design a medium hull, and I see 15.5 for a hyperwarp drive. I double-click, and it takes 9 mass (evidently my hyperwarp optimization techs don't display). I double-click a second time, and it takes 9 more mass. A third time, 9 more. For a total of 27.
Second and fourth as in the drives, in order (excepting the Prototype) are:
The Hyperdrive Plus is, and Warp Drive should be, base 8+10% hull mass, where the Hyper Drive and Ion Drive are 8+20%.
Actually, my point is more along the lines of this-
With drives in smaller quantities not being too much of an issue, but larger numbers of drives adding up quickly (getting to +6 moves with even a Warp Drive eats up over 30% of the original mass of that hull size) it's much less likely that a larger ship will outspeed a smaller ship as it would with the old system of flat equipment mass. This encourages you to have ships of varying sizes with the same speeds, making mixed-size fleets more likely.
Your proposal of a flat penalty to the speed would create a 'drive tax', requiring the installation of a drive to make the larger ships go as fast as the smaller ones with no drives at all- an effect that would not only feel bad but is a kludgy, clumsy way to do it anyhow.
Engine masses absolutely do make an impact on larger hulls- but only when you start looking at high quantities of drives such as were mountable before. Previously, investing 100 out of a Huge hull's 250 mass in drives using Warp Drives would give you something like 8-9 drives for +32-36 speed, and you'd still have enough mass left to throw on about fifteen weapons. With the high HP of a Huge hull you could easily rationalize doing that . Now it only gives +6 speed to do the same thing with a trio of Warp Drives (which together occupy 99 mass). Trying to mount 8 or 9 drives would be a huge cost- and is completely impossible with the +20% mass drives.
Slowing down larger hulls specifically by that kind of a rate in some other way would involve either much more complex maths (such as extra drives having less effect, and there are already enough situations where a ship will have 8.3 moves or other such), or creating a 'drive tax' of some sort that leaves the larger hulls completely unusable without functionally turning them into smaller hulls.
Even something more reasonable like 50 mass of drives would have been a good +16 speed in pre-Crusade, whereas a comparable investment in a Small ship would have been about 13 mass for only +4 speed. Now, an investment of 13 mass in a Small ship for a Warp drive is +2 moves, and 66 mass (about the same percentage of the hull mass) in a Huge ship is only two drives- or +4 moves. This means larger ships are still going to be faster, but by a much much smaller factor. That makes the player's rate of expansion and travel much more stable across the different stages of the game. It also means that larger ship hulls don't completely supplant small hulls for utility- it used to be the only logical reason to use smaller hull ships was for cheap emergency defences, because they were always much, much slower than a larger ship and couldn't ever approach the same speed, damage output, or durability, even if the smaller ship was much higher-tech.
Achieving the same effect with a flat penalty, if we assume a player always invests roughly 20% of a ship's mass in drives pre-Crusade, would require inflicting a Huge hull with a -15 speed penalty, putting its base speed at -11. That's completely ridiculous. If we took flat-mass drives now (8 mass all drives), you're still looking at Large hulls having usually 3 drives (requiring a -4 speed penalty at Warp Drive level and leaving them inert with a -4 move penalty if no drives are mounted), to say nothing of the late-game when a Large hull would have +8 moves over a Small hull and a Huge hull would rate a massive +20 moves. Then you have to start looking at penalizing the movement speed of a hull based on the level of tech the constructing player has or the level of tech involved in building it, and then things get really wonky because what if you research ahead in Ballistic weapons, or you researched advanced drives but didn't install them on the ship you're making?
Even if you somehow make that work, then you have the one player who willingly invests 100 mass of their Huge ship in drives and then it's still impossible to catch up to them on the strategic map with anything but another Huge ship, and even Large ships are ridiculously faster than a smaller ship.
Some form of scaling was needed that wouldn't require excessive programming to make the ship designer take into account player weirdness and ingenuity, and %mass was the easiest way (and while not necessarily the best way, certainly a good way) to do this without somehow outright taking something away from the player.
Since acceleration depends on mass drive size should either scale more with hull size (mass, although mass of components is not taken into account this way) so the formula to calculate drive size should be more like <small base value> + <value strongly depended on hull size>, e. g. 5 + 20% of hull size.
But even better (imo) would be a system where drive output (in form of energy) and drive size are constant (or scale like it does now) and speed is calculated by <drive output> / <mass of hull + mass of all components> with drive size and output balanced so that the formula results in reasonable values.
For Antimatter, I am finding that, more often than not, by midgame you can trade with an AI for more for cheap (not a bug, BTW: this is a strategy). Get all you can from every AI at every chance, and the missile line can work out well.
This is exactly what we have right now- each drive is 8 mass +20% or 8 mass +10%- at least so far as I've been able to check to now.
Not "exactly" - what we have now is a quite big base value and a quite small value that depends on hull size. That is moddable, though.
You suggested: 5+20%
We have: 8+20%
The difference here is 3. What?
All numbers are subject to balancing
Apart from that it was an example off the top of my head, I didn't check the current numbers, last time I checked long time ago) it was more like 10% of hull size.
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