Forums » Suggestions
Advanced Ship Design
I was thinking about how to make ships more configurable and it hit me! Have it so ships are just an empty 3d hull. Componets would have 3 dimentions and fit into grid slots inside a ship. Lots of heavy componets and you have low acceleration. Un-balanced mass distribution and you have slow turn rate and wobble. Armor would be a mass takeing stat that could be adjusted with a slider.
Then their would be 10-20 hulls of variring dementions and a load of componets.
What do y'all think?
Then their would be 10-20 hulls of variring dementions and a load of componets.
What do y'all think?
me indicates at all the fuss about the balance between ships now or in the past.
Imagine balancing out 100000 possibilities :(
Imagine balancing out 100000 possibilities :(
I know it would be hard to balance but if you can balance the underlying components then an infinite number of possible ship will be balanced.
I KNOW that it is a lot to ask but this would be an awesome feature and would allow everyone to have their own ship. Sure ppl will probalby flock to whatever config appears to have the upper hand but how will they even figure out what that config is?
I KNOW that it is a lot to ask but this would be an awesome feature and would allow everyone to have their own ship. Sure ppl will probalby flock to whatever config appears to have the upper hand but how will they even figure out what that config is?
"I know it would be hard to balance but if you can balance the underlying components then an infinite number of possible ship will be balanced."
This is simply not true. You might think it is true but it is not. If you have played any pen and paper RPG's you will probably have had some experience with the problems. Things which are intrinsicly balanced by themselves, or as part of a random selection of features, can be broken when placed in particular combinations. Take D20. A bonus like +2 to DC from Spell Focus isn't broken in most cases, but as part of design to maximize the DC of your spells while maximizing the number of 'save or die' spell you can cast can quickly become uncontrollable and unpredictable.
Or perhaps you have some experience with the game of Magic. Cards like High Tide or Lion's Eye Diamond might appear 'balanced' or even useless. But placed in unexpected combinations with other equally innocous cards and you can create with those same cards very degenerate combos that break the games underlying design. A card like Thoughtlash can languish in obscurity as an 'unplayable' card, and then a card like Shared Fate can come along and suddenly its drawback becomes a feature.
In short, you can't necessarily balance alot of combinations by balancing the components. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
The closest thing we have come to that in Vendetta is with the Railgun and the Sunflare. If noone had ever mounted more than one of those weapons on a ship, we might never have had to change them. One sunflare isn't broken. One Railgun, even the original 10 energy railgun, isn't broken. But because you can stack virtually any number of Sunflares or original Railguns and not hit a limiting factor (unlike say stacking adv. gatlings) the weapons had to be changed to make them strictly worse than they needed to be. Which isn't to say that we've got the balance exactly right yet (or that we haven't), but just to say that its alot more complex than that.
This is simply not true. You might think it is true but it is not. If you have played any pen and paper RPG's you will probably have had some experience with the problems. Things which are intrinsicly balanced by themselves, or as part of a random selection of features, can be broken when placed in particular combinations. Take D20. A bonus like +2 to DC from Spell Focus isn't broken in most cases, but as part of design to maximize the DC of your spells while maximizing the number of 'save or die' spell you can cast can quickly become uncontrollable and unpredictable.
Or perhaps you have some experience with the game of Magic. Cards like High Tide or Lion's Eye Diamond might appear 'balanced' or even useless. But placed in unexpected combinations with other equally innocous cards and you can create with those same cards very degenerate combos that break the games underlying design. A card like Thoughtlash can languish in obscurity as an 'unplayable' card, and then a card like Shared Fate can come along and suddenly its drawback becomes a feature.
In short, you can't necessarily balance alot of combinations by balancing the components. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
The closest thing we have come to that in Vendetta is with the Railgun and the Sunflare. If noone had ever mounted more than one of those weapons on a ship, we might never have had to change them. One sunflare isn't broken. One Railgun, even the original 10 energy railgun, isn't broken. But because you can stack virtually any number of Sunflares or original Railguns and not hit a limiting factor (unlike say stacking adv. gatlings) the weapons had to be changed to make them strictly worse than they needed to be. Which isn't to say that we've got the balance exactly right yet (or that we haven't), but just to say that its alot more complex than that.