Maneuverability and Power

[Reformations]

Can someone explain to me the connection between power costs of maneuverability and overall cost/size?
It seems to me that maneuverability is extremely cheap compared power draws of other items.
Table 9-7 says the power cost of larges increase by 100 for each level of maneuverability. However, in practice it seems the highest maneuverability costs 100 and everything less that that is interpolated lower.
In fact, figure 9-8 on the same page shows the contradiction between the chart and in-game values.

[Reformations]

Doing a bit more data collecting.

Inertial specials seem to be the most popular. I'm assuming these are put on already the fastest ships possible because movement is incredibly strong against AI and the extra defense is gravy.

How often do you guys try and build slow ships to save space on power? I love the concept, I just think it hasn't been implemented correctly.

[RefSteel]

Doing a bit more data collecting.

Inertial specials seem to be the most popular.  I'm assuming these are put on already the fastest ships possible because movement is incredibly strong against AI and the extra defense is gravy.

Movement is strong, full stop.  AI fleets are many times more dangerous to the human player when those fleets have good speed.  Also the AI loves inertial stabiilizers at least as much as most players do.  It just doesn't realize which ships want them and which do not.  (Some ships can get away with being tactical tortoises, typically by just carrying a huge weight of firepower and being impossible to kill.)

How often do you guys try and build slow ships to save space on power?  I love the concept, I just think it hasn't been implemented correctly.

If by "slow ships" you mean "below max combat speed," there are definitely times when space outweighs speed on a larger design.  I certainly don't put stabilizers on all my ships even once I have the tech.  (Under normal circumstances.)

If by "slow ships" you mean "without state-of-the-art engines," the answer is "only when absolutely strictly necessary to get a repulsor or dissipator to fit on a medium hull, and only when this is necessary to successfully defend a world."  Strategic speed is of (obviously) strategic importance, which outweighs any considerations of extra space.  Also, and perhaps most importantly, strategic speed makes the game more fun, by getting ships where they're going with less slider management and hitting "Next Turn" in between.

[Reformations]

You seem to be confirming some of my thoughts on converting warp speed to a empire wide tech (like range increases) instead of ship specific.

This lets the player make more meaningful decisions on the power-space ratio by selecting lower combat speed in ship design. As it stands now, warp speed consistency dominates engine selection. This essentially negates the entire power mechanic which is unfortunate.

[RefSteel]

You seem to be confirming some of my thoughts on converting warp speed to a empire wide tech (like range increases) instead of ship specific.

This lets the player make more meaningful decisions on the power-space ratio by selecting lower combat speed in ship design. As it stands now, warp speed consistency dominates engine selection. This essentially negates the entire power mechanic which is unfortunate.

Perhaps, but I think this misses a couple of good things about the system as it currently stands:

1) The fact that one can design an otherwise-suboptimal ship especially to cram a desperately-needed system or weapon on a small-enough hull, and sometimes need to, is pretty cool when it comes up, even though it doesn't happen very frequently.

2) RayF recently wrote a pretty cool post [EDIT: On his website, specifically in the post linked here] about the six-design limit, pointing out the interesting and meaningful decisions the player has to make about when to swap out old fleets and designs for new ones. Ships that auto-upgrade their engines would remove an important factor in the decision-making process about when it's safe, and when it's necessary, to scrap old fleets in favor of new designs.

[Reformations]

But point 1 very rarely happens. Not only is faster warp speed important for strategy but even more important is warp speed consistency across ships. This consistency trumps all warp engine decisions whenever I'm designing ships. There's no way I'm slowing down a ship by a couple warp speeds--I don't care what the space savings is--it isn't worth crippling rest of my current and future fleets.

For combat speed, conditioned on already choosing an engine type, the space savings for slower ships is laughable. It takes 15 power to maximize movement of a medium ship (and 100 for a large). This is less than a single neutron pellet gun. (Note: the OSG and game disagree here. The table in the OSG say it is 15 power PER maneuver which makes a bit more sense. In game, the fastest speed is 15 power and all slower ones take less).

What all this means to me is that the power mechanic is simply ignored.
"Fast warps are strong (and they should be). Consistency >>>>> variety due to fleet groupings. Therefore choose the either the fastest available engine or whatever speed my current ships have." Either way, that logic has just bypassed the entire point of having power ratings.
I understand people here have played this game longer and better than I have. Am I missing something??


As for point 2, I may be a bit unique in that I would rather have fewer ship designs available in exchange for actual variety among designs. 6 has been enough to cover my generic beam, missile, bomb designs with room to spare for colony ships.

By actually letting combat speed influence ship space through the power mechanic, players will have a reason to add a tactical tortoise (stealing that phrase by the way) or 2 to their fleet. Yes, the automatic warp upgrades makes new designs less necessary but I think there is a strong argument that players will be making better use of the 6 design constraint due to INTERESTING ship design options.

[Zygot]

Very interesting. Regarding your initial question, I looked into this and there's definitely something odd with the way the maneuverability item selector displays the stats when designing ships. The bottom line seems to be, don't trust what the selector shows the cost/power/space amounts to be, but rather look at the actual bottom-line overall ship cost and space remaining as you choose.

I think Table 9-7 correctly lists the power requirements. That power is generated from engines that are automatically added to the ship, with their cost and size determined by Table 9-6 (adjusted lower through miniaturization per your propulsion level). Sargon0's spreadsheet seems to calculate this straightforwardly and match up very well with the game.

As for the interpolated "Power" numbers in the maneuverability selector, it seems like it's percentage based. The max available maneuver is 100% and the rest are Table 9-7's values as a percentage of that max. The selector's cost and space don't make much sense to me right now though, it's not readily clear how those come about. Seems to me we should disregard that until someone figures it out.

[RefSteel]

Automatic warp upgrades would make the AI easier to program at least: One problem with MoO's AI is that even when it designs dangerous, fast-moving ships, it often groups them with slower-moving ships and thus slows them all down to a strategic crawl. For a player (or redesigned, competent AI) it's a different story though: I commonly have ships with different warp speeds in my fleet just because I had (say) a significant sublight-based fleet that I'm not prepared to scrap yet, and it doesn't slow down my new (say) impulse-based fleets because I know to group the different ships separately so the old ships aren't slowing down the new ones. Older dreadnoughts are especially likely to stick around in spite of their low strategic speed (and therefore tactical speed as well) as even when they're relegated to crawling up behind the main, speedy fleet and sitting in orbit to defend new holdings that haven't yet had time to build up their own defenses, they can often handle that job for a long time, while building up-to-date replacements would be expensive and time-consuming.

I agree that strategic speed is (and, as you say, should always be) better when designing new ships, outside of the rare circumstances I mentioned, but I think when you have some older, slower fleets floating around, it can lead to more (and more interesting) strategic choices about when and whether to scrap them for new designs. Obsolete ships have a much longer effective shelf life if their engines upgrade automatically; it's kind of a specific case of the general argument RayF was making in the post I linked above.

(You are naturally welcome to use the term "tactical tortoise" - glad you like it!)

To your final point, I agree that making maneuverability (tactical combat speed) more costly in terms of effective space has interesting potential. On larger ships, I do sometimes give up maneuvers for More Weapons already, but of course not always, and speed is important enough in enough circumstances that unless maneuvers get really expensive, the tactical tortoise isn't likely to become a "one right answer." So that's pretty intriguing!

[Reformations]

Essentially, my rough plan is to have players select maneuverability only from ship design screen. The maneuver levels available will be based on current available engine tech.

It is this choice of maneuverability that determines the power-space ratio of the rest of the ship (whereas in moo1 it is choice of warp speed that determines ratio and maneuver is an afterthought). Of course the faster ships would have smaller ratios and therefore less room for goodies.

Essentially we would recreate appendix B in the OSG but base columns on maneuver rather than warp. We would also smooth out the odd floating point artifacts.

[Reformations]

Very interesting.  Regarding your initial question, I looked into this and there's definitely something odd with the way the maneuverability item selector displays the stats when designing ships.  The bottom line seems to be, don't trust what the selector shows the cost/power/space amounts to be, but rather look at the actual bottom 

Thanks for looking into this!  I'll try and let Ray know about this because rotp is currently coded to emulate the selection screen (i.e. Very cheap maneuverability). 

100 power PER maneuver level is getting to be a bit more interesting of a trade off. However it still seems that the overall power space ratio should be a function of combat speed rather than warp speed.