Hi Mez and welcome aboard, I 've enjoyed your posts in the past as I lurk at steam at times, it's good to have you here. To get straight to the point, I agree with you but could only hit the agree button once, otherwise I would still be hitting that button. Practically, it really gets tedious in the early game where a Frigate is the most viable option. Turn one, I design a new Frigate slightly better than the default, Auto laser and heavy structure, designated FF-g Some time down the road I acquire missile tech and design another Frigate, FF-m, it has missiles instead of lasers, I start producing those. Then If I want more gun Frigates I re-design. Waste of play time and breaks immersion. Furthermore, the tech to gain another build slot is useless, research is slow so I ignore that. Plenty of room for improvement. Edit This topic was actually discussed heavily in the past. One way to get a temporary quick fix in place is to replace the tech that allows for an extra design slot with a tech that allows variants of each design. Once researched the player could keep 3 active designs (variants) for each hull type. It's not a perfect solution but could eliminate the issue and make the research relevant at the same time. The variant tech, should be low level research
Yes, it was a good idea then and its still a very good compromise solution to the problem which I'm sad was not looked at more seriously at the time. I know ISG is just sticking close to the MOO 2 design formula by having a 5 slot hard design limit, but honestly if there were ever a clear and obvious time to stray from MOO 2 for the sake of modernizing gameplay and drastically improving immersion then this would have to be it. Forcing artificially contrived 'game choices' for the sake of generating some sort of gameplay - whether it makes any sense or not - is really not good game design.
No, there hasn't been any development in that area. There have been other pressing matters in the meantime in our road to Alpha that have absorbed all of our time, namely the UI revamp and the ground combat and bombardment systems, which are now finished, or at least their first iteration is. We're looking forward for your feedback on these new systems. Now, getting back to the ship slots issue, I feel it will only be a matter of time until we find a solution that is found to be satisfactory, if not very good, by everybody. There could be many solutions. We could increase the number of slots, or even have no limit whatsoever. Nothing is set in stone yet regarding this matter. We've been listening, reading all that has been said about this and we're confident that we'll reach a good solution. As always, we count with your support to implement the best solution, which is what the VIP program and pre-orders are for. Now, to avoid being too easy, and therefore not terribly interesting to upgrade your ships everytime there's a new toy available from research, we may go with a high-cost first prototype solution instead of limiting the slots, as some of the members of the community have suggested. In that regard we wouldn't need to create penalties for old designs that are lingering around. As someone has also said, the old ships are already pretty useless as they are, so there's no need to add more complexity to that part of the game. We see that now more clearly. A very expensive first-prototype would make you think twice before you design a new ship just to get one more toy, to make your decision of when to create a new design matter more. You wouldn't be able to upgrade/refit ships immediately to a new design either. A first prototype would need to be built first. It would be realistic and thematic. We could even have a ceremony for when the first prototype of each class is produced, for extra immersion. Then there's the issue of upgrading ships. The refit mechanic. As you have said, this matter also ties in with the slots, or whichever design limitation, if any, is to be used. This is also something we'll have to think about carefuly. In principle, there will be refit. The advantage of being able to upgrade may not be just because it's faster to do so than to build ships from scratch, but more because ships accumulate experience via their crew (already designed but not implemented), so you'd be interested in upgrading old ships to newer designs, to keep the experience and help with the characterization factor we're after for ships. Refit would need to be expensive though, which would be another good use for money in the game. As said above, perhaps we'll not allow refitting to new designs before a first prototype is produced. The system specials (ship special modules) are only being added now. This will also have an impact on the amount of ships players will end up making or wanting to make at one time. So we'll have to see how that works going forward. Another possibility is to allow people to increase ship design slots via modding, as another member from the community has said. So, all of these factors have to be considered so that ultimately we end up with a cohesive and interesting ship building and design system. We will address this head on in a next opportunity. It may be sooner, or we may tackle another issue next. Remember that nothing is set in stone yet regarding this matter, and rest assured that we will have a good ship design system in the end. We're in pre-alpha. Pre-orders are available with instant access for eveyone who wishes to participate and voice their opinion. So, please feel free to let us know your thoughts and we'll make our best to handle them and improve the game the best way we can.
I suggest the following for ship construction. Either you do it like MOO2 - like a modern copy of a working system. Alternatively you could something new which was never in any 4x game before. example: -there are no shipclasses or designations, only linear hull sizes.(eg. increments in slots or so) -player designs blueprint and assigns 12 slots to the hull. So the player does not design a "cruiser" or a "destroyer" like in all other 4x games, he designs a "hull 12 ship".The program says each such a ship costs eg 12 metal. (maybe the 1st prototype costs extra +50% or a whopping 18 metal) -he assigns 2 slots to the superfast tactical drive and 2 slots to the hyperdrive. Ship has 8 slots left -he assigns 3 Lasguns, 2 shields, one advanced combat computer, 1 troop bay for planetary landing and 1 point defense gun worth 1 slot each and fills these remaining 8 slots. Ship is ready. -The player assigns one or more a shipyards which builds the ship. Each shipyard in his empire can build "x" amount of hull points per turn. (the higher the naval construction tech the higher is "x" )
Adam - thanks for all your thoughts. I'll try to be brief: I've been pondering this from a design standpoint and trying to come up with something that creates the gameplay trade offs you want while also being more logical from a thematic standpoint. What about this: What if you have a certain number of design slots that are "free" (5 or 6, etc subject to balance). You can't scrap a design unless you decomission any built ships. BUT here's the tweak: you CAN go above your design slot limit, but doing so increases the maintenance cost of the whole fleet (or consumes some of your fleet capacity). Make it so that you can retrofit to a new design of the same hull type/size (to retain crew experience etc). Thematically, this escalating maintenance costs reflects the added overhead cost of having a bunch of old designs hanging around that need to be maintained. It will encourage players to upgrade or scrap ships and face them with that choice, but does so in a slightly softer more organic manner. I've never liked prototype mechanics. Ship take long enough as it is to build and presumably the act of having to research new tech in the first place covers some of that prototype cost. From a gameplay standpoint, it just slows down the excitement of retooling ships and rolling new modes off the line and makes counter play less dynamic.
Absolutely agree. Something similar was discussed but I see an unfavorable scenario here. If the player is at war and doing poorly he/she could be heavily researching military tech in the hopes of evening the odds by fielding better designs. (happens quite a lot to me on the harder levels). Once research is completed this would penalize the player as introducing a new design would either require scrapping ships or gaining a penalty by going above the design slot limit, that would be a wtf? moment I think. Look gents, the design slot limit was not received favorably months ago and it is not being received favorably now. No need to re-invent the wheel, simply get rid of the limit. You could fill up the tech tree with hull design instead (you start with FFs but can't build DDs till you reserch the hull, etc.) You can address it in other ways as well that are not labor intensive. I know there are other priorities now but as so many have said this artificial limit is not making ISG more attractive, quite the opposite. In my opinion, keep your solution simple, clean, fun and easily understood.
Yeah, I'd be totally fine with ditching the slot limit as well. To step back, I think it's worth asking a higher level question here. That is: do we want the player to have to make a tough decision regarding when to make and deploy and new ship design, whether that be by just making new ships or upgrading older ships to a new design. If yes - what specific trade-offs are we asking the player to make? In this whole discussion - I don't know if the above questions have been asked and answered. I raise this point because there may be approaches to create interesting decision points that don't have any thing to do at all with design slots. For example - how are ship upgrades handled? Are you restricted to upgrading within a given hull size only? Is there an option to completely scrap ships for bonus production to apply towards new ships (ala Starbase Orion)? How long do upgrades take? Are they instant and require no production to complete (like Endless Space 2) or does upgrading require use of planetary production queues? If upgrading a whole fleet will consume a lot of production across your empire, that would be a big opportunity cost to weigh against other production outputs. Can you upgrade anywhere or do you have to pull ships back from the front line? What happens with experienced crew (a great idea BTW to prevent just suicide-ing obsolete ship designs)? I really think the above factors can provide a more nuanced and interesting means of facing the player with interesting choices over upgrades than the design slot system - which really does feel arbitrary and archaic on all levels.
Agreed. We've been discussing this issue internally today and I think the world, well, ok perhaps some people, will be very happy to know that we've decided to ditch the slots limit completely. We will give it a try and go with unlimited ship design slots. I totally agree, it doesn't need to be tied to how many design slots you can have. We see that more clearly now. We're thinking in going with a retrofit function. Yes, that's the idea. Not at the moment, but it's an interesting idea. Upgrades will take a while and require the use of planetary production queues. Agreed. You have to pull back ships from the front line and upgrade on colonies. Starbases will probably also be required for that. If you scrap the ship the crew and their experience is lost. If you retrofit the ship, the experience is kept intact. Agreed. Yes, that's the issue at hand. When to build new ships or upgrade existing ones when new equipement is available. It shouldn't be obvious to always go after upgrading all ships as soon as possible or build new ships right away. Regarding upgrading ships that requires you to send your ships to "dry dock" for some turns, from 2 up to 10 (depending on ship class), where they are unavailable and you'll possibly need a starbase for that. Pulling forces from the front line, making them unavailable for some time and consume a lot of production across the empire should be enough tough choices on their own. Building new ships would be possible as soon as new equipement is available, but due to the tough ship support requirements and the time ships take to build in ISG, it probably is enough to make the player decide if it's really a good time to make a new design and build a new ship or if that could wait. So, what do you think of this solution?
I like this direction more for sure One additional thought. Let's say you have 1 ship sitting in defensive orbit at a planet where it can be upgraded. I think the key to making this interesting is what the time/production costs are for doing many incremental upgrades versus bigger comprehensive upgrades. If it isn't very expensive to do a small upgrade, you'll be incentivized to continuously upgrade everytime you get a new tech. I think you want to avoid that situation. There should be an economy of scale to upgrading so that upgrading to a new design with 10 different things all at once should be cheaper than upgrading those same 10 things incrementally one at a time. This will start to make a more interesting choice about the right moment to upgrade that's gets in enough changes to make economic sense in consideration of other pressures you might be facing (i.e. The need to use these ships). As an extreme example, imagine if upgrading a design always took X production depending on hull size regardless of the amount of modules that are changed. You be highly incentivized to wait for a more comprehensive upgrade at all once versus it being X+X+X+... turns of production doing it incrementally. Also - I could see something like crew experience loosing a level and/or have a period of operating at a lower level when on an upgraded ship until X turns have passed or they have fought in at least 1 battle or something.
Good. I feel that we're doing good progress in the right direction. If others agree, I think we could go ahead with this solution. Agreed. The player has less pressure to upgrade, because it's not always the best solution to do so. So, the decision is more meaningful. Yes, that's the way to go. Upgrading will not be strictly related with the blueprint "diff" but more about the hull you have when upgrading. So, ultimately the time you could take to upgrade would be mostly about the hull you have, which represents a big overhead. Having more new components to upgrade to may have an impact, but it shouldn't be very big, I agree. This so that the player is incentivized to wait and think when is the best time to upgrade, and do a more comprehensive upgrade instead of having the constant incremental upgrade, and hassle, as always the optimal solution, which is what we all want to avoid. This is a good idea and could be considered, especially if we think we need more penalties to decentivize constant upgrades. We could start without this perhaps, because we also want to incentivize people to keep the same ships, if possible, for characterization reasons. That said, 1 level penalty in crew experience is not too much and makes sense since it's not the exact same ship anymore and the crew needs to learn the new systems.
I love where this is heading, you could also perhaps consider the introduction of a new civilian ship type, "Mobile dock" It would be used to upgrade ships at the front line (or close to it) rather than pulling units back. It should be expensive to build and maintain, just another option to consider.
OH man I am loving what is being said/discussed, I think you are spot on, I really like that you sticking with making ships personable. and the review response to the review toward future upgrades/rep points for leaders and their ships really has me stoked! I still think the remote exploration is the shining aspect of this game and I was really happy to see so much of the game play still being tied in to this ......Please don't skemp on graphics for that screen!
Thanks for your enthusiasm and support Thrangar! I'm glad to hear you're liking the direction the game is taking. We really wanted to get the core right first. After that is accomplished, and we reach Alpha, there will be plenty of time to polish the game and to enhance the graphics as time and budget allows So, the more people pre-order now and then buy on Steam Early Access, the better the game will be at release. So, please spread the word to any 4X-loving friends you may have.
