Hot posts in thread: ISG Dev Diary #2: Ship Design

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!

 

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.

 

That all sounds fantastic. Can't wait to see it in action.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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" )

 

Has there been anymore conversation / design development regarding the topic of ship slots?

 

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.

 

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

 

Totally agree!

 

Howdy!

This is Mezmorki from eXplorminate. I have a lot of feedback and I'm compiling in notes on many topics, but this topic was on my mind after the conversation picked up in the steam forums for eXplorminate:

From a pure design standpoiint, there is a fundamental problem with the 5-slot limit and the kind of decision space you're trying to make (e.g. make players think about when and how to make new ship designs).

The problem is this: with the ability to upgrade existing ships to new designs, in effect, players DO have as many ship designs slots they want ... so long as they are willing to tediously remake designs over and over, juggling which designs get produced where and what gets upgraded to what else when. See my steam post linked above for a longer example. The 5-slot limit isn't creating an interesting choice - its creating the illusion of an interesting choice that can be circumvented by players willing to waste time by "gaming the system." It's not good.

Fortunately there are solutions!

The easiest is to just ditch the slot limits entirely and rely on the depth of the ship designer itself and possible strategies and combined-arms synergies that emerge from player ingenuity and tinkering to carry the day. That's probably the most straight forward approach and will cause the least headache all around.

Anything beyond the above is going to add more complexity to the game design, and the team will have to evaluate whether the complexity is worth the trade-off in terms of making interesting choices. As I said at the onset, the 5-slot limit with retrofitting is neither interesting gameplay nor thematic - so it fails all around. You can mitigate that somewhat with making old designs more expensive to maintain, but all you're doing now is obscuring the interesting choice behind more math puzzles to solve. It still isn't really interesting.

You could take a page from UltraCorps playbook where each star system's shipyard had to purchase a "license" to produce a certain design. Think of this as building the right kind of dock/infrastructure to produce a certain design. Ship yards never lost their licenses for older designs, but it did force you to make a calculated decision about when and where you obtained a license, because higher tier ship licenses were VERY expensive. Tooling up more than one ship yard to produce the most expensive ships was a terrible drain on resources and made you think carefully. Maybe something like that could be adopted here?

I'd also think carefully about the upgrade capacity of ships. The 5-slot limit kind of works if you take away the ability to upgrade ships - because then the decision of what you produce in the first place, irrespective of the design slot it used at the time, is all that matters. But that still doesn't solve the issue of obsolete ships running around - but if your choices will be more far reaching and if you make a terrible or useless design, you should plan better next time. Then the choice is whether you scrap your old ships for some recovered production value or use them to go raiding or whatever (which could be interesting).

I know this was long .... but I'd emplore the devs to think more about this. I totally get what they are trying to accomplish from a gameplay decision standpoint. But as implemented, it undermines itself and results in an unappealing situation.

There is a lot of brilliant design work in this game (yes really) ... but the 5-slot limit is not really one of them IMHO.

 

Yes, this gives you flexible control and can be cleverly tied into other parts of the existing game exactly in the manner you suggest,
The results would satisfy all the way around, be plausible and realistic.
For example, you could in theory offer more deigns but still know that the player will naturally be constrained by prototype costs (retool, retraining, procurement,etc) to effect the same results
In my opinion, it would be beneficial and remain flexible enough for the Devs to tweak easier if needed,(mostly if not all,change the math/ratios not the code) but would increase your chances of overall success.

 

Well I'm glad we finally got that sorted out. Either way it really doesn't matter, I'm sure there are many other 4x games out there with very limited design slots, but that doesn't even come close to making it good game design. The fact that so many 4x games are just terrible is the whole reason that so many people desperately wanted to get back to the basics of the old MOO franchise.

And yes MOO 2 also had limited design slots but then that was 20 years ago when memory limitations mandated such compromises. I doubt anybody would accept the same excuse today. And as you pointed out, no reviewer is going to criticize a modern game for allowing many ship designs. SOTS 2 allowed as many designs as you want and it was brutally criticized in almost every review, but one thing it was never called out on is the lack of a design limit. But the opposite situation would most certainly be a very obvious red flag for inviting criticism.