Maneuverability and Power

[Zygot]

I dunno, in some cases you can really pack a LOT more into a ship, at significantly lower cost, using a lesser warp engine. Like 25%-50% more guns AND the ship costs maybe 15%-25% less, if you are willing to drop from say warp 6 to warp 3. A lot of the good specials and the regular/heavy beam weapon variants have hefty power requirements. Fusion beams are pretty bad in this regard.

If you zip around the AI and cleverly mass your swarm at just the right times, fast ships are great, you can really run circles around slow AI fleets. But I've had good success with cost-efficient juggernaut fleets too, you can get a lot of value for your dollar.

[Reformations]

Maybe I've been thrown off by the selector screen but why are slower ships significantly cheaper? Better power ratios -> more space -> more stuff -> more cost. Are engines that expensive as to make up the difference?

I'm really curious about your success with large, slow ships. My experience has always been out speeding (both warp and combat) the ai. Maybe could try a special challenge where players can only build large/huge that are 3/2 speeds behind best available.

[Zygot]

The benefits will be situation dependent, but compare your just-researched, full price, fast engines vs heavily miniaturized older ones, whose cost miniaturizes even faster than their space does. If you've got a ship with components that have a high power/space ratio, like fusion beams, a surprising amount of the ship's cost and space might free up if you switch, and again, because engine cost miniaturizes faster, it's still cheaper once you fill back up with weapons. Stuff like missiles won't be impacted as much. I would say play around and see what happens, it's all about tradeoffs.

As for juggernauts, let's say you're playing a turtle strategy, with your planets essentially protected by missile bases while you tech. Then you design a nice medium-speed efficient design from scratch, turn over most of your planets to ships for a bit, and send your fleet out as a big single blob. Crush the enemy and fly over to the next enemy planet, slow-rolling them. In this scenario it's more about concentration of force, not catching the enemy unprepared. Not too elegant, but can work well. Taking a couple more turns of flight time in between planets won't matter much. I like to use warp 3 as a starting point.

I guess what I'm saying is I really don't like to design a ship, let's say a large one, and automatically throw on my absolute fastest engines, highest maneuverability, best computer and shields, etc. Sometimes it's like you can barely get in 10 guns on such a ship, and it feels like a waste. What if that ship were a bit slower, had a bit worse to-hit chance, and took a bit more damage? Sounds bad, right? But what if you could fit twice as many guns on it? Might that not outweigh the disadvantages? Depends....

[RefSteel]

Maybe could try a special challenge where players can only build large/huge that are 3/2 speeds behind best available.

I would love to try this as a Succession Game actually. Something like:

- Medium hulls have no engine restrictions
- Large hulls can only use retro engines or our second-best engine type
- Huge and Small hulls can only use retros or our third-best engine type

(Spaceship engines are tricky to design; propelling the enormous mass of a cruiser or especially dreadnought through space requires efficient engine designs that won't interfere with the enormous warp-field generators required, and it's just not possible to do that with engines that themselves are still state of the art, while fighters are too small even to carry and power the most advanced engine designs.)

I'd kind of want to go with Psilons to maximize the number of different types of engines likely to be available, but then we'd need another variant (or a ridiculous map) to make it really challenging. Alternatively, Alkari to speed up the propulsion tree (or Darloks to take stuff from other races) with Psilons (and Alkari, if 'Loks) as enemies?

Kind of close to the holidays to get a game started now maybe, but you never know....

[Reformations]

Maybe a reasonable first step is to better inform the player how the space and costs are split up across engines vs weapons vs rest. Doing this dynamically in the ship design screen would be amazing. It would also be cool to have info about how much space/cost would be freed up for the next 5 level improvement in propulsion, construction, or weapons tech.

I think this type of feedback would make us all better players and go a long way in fine tuning costs/space of toys to make for interesting ship design options.

[Reformations]

How about when selecting an individual weapon, device, shield, or computer the cost and size columns each display as x+y where x is the cost of the item and y is the prorated cost of the engines required to power it. Size would also be a+b where a is size of the item and b is prorated size of the engines needed to power it. The power column would remain as is but there would no longer need to be a space column as that value is the same as a+b.

Anytime the player changes the engine both y and b would change.