Ship Scaling

from GalCiv3 Forums

I find that the way the game handles the various ships sizes to be very counter-intuitive.

 

1. Engines are fixed size and provide a fixed movement bonus (and fixed cost and maintenance). So it is easier to make a fast, large ship than it is to make a fast, small ship.

2. Thrusters are also fixed size, though different ship sizes have multiplicative bonuses or penalties to tactical speed, so the case here is not so clear-cut.

3. Life support is fixed size with fixed bonus to range. So larger ships with larger crews apparently don't consume any more life support.

4. Weapons are also fixed size with fixed damage, though it is unclear to me what how or whether the damage from separate weapons stack and how they interact with stacking defenses. Assuming some level of stacking on both the attack and defense side (like in GC2), then the question of how weapon and defense effectiveness scales is going to be pretty complicated.

5. Ship space doesn't scale anything like in proportion to the names. 

 

I feel as if all these factors are sort of pulling in different directions, and maybe the end result sort of makes sense, but the decisions used to get there feel a bit kludgy?

 

Like, the game encourages you to load up tiny ships with a lot of weapons and not much else, to try to do a lot of damage quickly before you are killed. The ships are mostly going to be a local threat with low strategic speed, low range and low sensors, but benefiting disproportionately from some addition bonus techs. I guess that sort of feels like defensive fighters, but the cost relative to a larger ship feels pretty high.

On the other hand, larger ships don't really feel very big when you are designing them, but it can become worthwhile to bother with a lot of specialist equipment, and they are probably pretty tough in terms of the number of tiny ships they can take out.

Given the other game systems, I can see why they don't want a huge ship to be hundreds of times the size (and cost) of a tiny ship. The UI and build queues would have to work very differently to make that viable. Still, the end result just seems very confused to me. There don't seem to be very clear roles for different ship sizes, and going for maximum hull size and maximum miniaturization seems like a winning combination all the time.

 

I'd like a game where there was a huge difference in scale between the largest and the smallest ships. Where you have swarms of small ships. Where the weapons that can hit the tiny, agile ships have a hard time hurting the big ships and vice versa. 

33,257 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

A couple of comments.

 

Bigger ships in the real world (warships), are usually faster. The fastest ship (not speedboat, but ship ship) in the US Navy is an Aircraft Carrier.

In WWI timeframe, Battlecruisers were about tops for speed.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top


1. Engines are fixed size and provide a fixed movement bonus (and fixed cost and maintenance). So it is easier to make a fast, large ship than it is to make a fast, small ship.

this actually sounds about right to me i picture the larger ships having a larger and more robust power system meaning that it can divert more energy to the engines 
while the smaller ships have better acceleration and maneuverability 

essentially the small ship can win a short race but in a long haul the bigger ship should win 

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Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting ClaytonHollowell, reply 1

A couple of comments.

 

Bigger ships in the real world (warships), are usually faster. The fastest ship (not speedboat, but ship ship) in the US Navy is an Aircraft Carrier.

In WWI timeframe, Battlecruisers were about tops for speed.
Yeah, U.S.S. Enterprise CV-65 just after the 9/11 attacks. Forget how fast it went, but I remember that it messed up some of its own hull.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Um... no.

Atomic-powered ships accelerate quickly and can maintain top speed for long periods of time, but throughout naval history the 'small boys' have been more maneuverable and faster. Speed is pretty much their reason-to-be... doesn't do any good to have escort ships that can't keep up with what they need to escort. A good rule of thumb for WWI-WWII period is for cruisers to have a 4-8 knot speed advantage over battleships and destroyers to have a 9-12 knot advantage. Speeds pick up steadily from the introduction of turbines up to the end of WW2, but after aircraft came in a high top speed was no longer an advantage in battle - maneuverability (including acceleration) was.

From the mid-1940's on, naval designers shifted to emphasizing cruising range and high cruising speed. That's the reason big ships like carriers have atomic reactors and task forces always include tankers for the cruisers and destroyers. Many of those now have steam or diesel engines for cruising and gas turbine engines for acceleration and top speed.

There are a lot of stories about carriers running away from their escorts, and one old yarn about the 'Iowa' class being able to outrun destroyers. The truth is the nuclear carriers can accelerate quickly but top out at about 30 knots and the 'Iowa' hull form and power plant give a max top speed of 31-32 knots.

A classic cruiser or destroyer (1900-1945) is thin, long, hydrodynamic and devotes a huge percentage of its mass to engines. This gives a 'typical' WW2 DD a top speed of 35-39 knots (some of those high top speeds are, um, 'inflated' for national prestige reasons), a cruiser of the same vintage 32-33 knots, a battleship 26-30 knots with a few exceptions.

So, sorry - but big ships have a wider, blockier hull form optimized for carrying tonnage of guns, armor, shells and crewmen. Smaller ships typically have a higher top speed and less armor and armament.

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Navies frequently put out, um, 'optimistic' numbers on ship speeds. A number of French and Italian ships were supposedly able to attain 36-39 knots at sea trials before WW2; left unsaid was that no guns or ammo were aboard, and that the final loaded ship speed was as much as 6 knots less. The US also put out that its nuclear submarines were capable of as much as 42 knots when in reality they could make a bit over 30; silence is much more valuable to a sub than speed.

Nuclear carriers can steam at high speeds for long periods of time. They no longer have to use high speed to launch aircraft (though the breeze over the flight deck doesn't hurt) and instead need strategic speed - the ability to run from California to Japan, or Virginia to the Middle East, in a short period of time.

Last information I saw was that the later generations of nuclear carriers had thicker lines (to carry more stuff like bombs and fuel) and therefore could run in the 30-32 knot range. There just isn't any tactical need for higher speed, and tonnage not spent on engines can be used for jet fuel, bombs and planes.

With any steam-driven ship you can exceed the suggested limits and work the engines harder, at the risk of catastrophic failure (steam lines go boom; turbines shed blades) or serious wear-and-tear, and for little gain. Because of the rules of hydrodynamics, a ship can usually reach 75% of its rated speed at half-power (that's a very loose approximation and should be taken with a bag of salt, but it will do). It is the last little bit of speed that needs huge amounts of extra power. Battlecruisers were able to steam like a cruiser (their intended prey) but at a high cost in tonnage:

Ship type         Ship name    Tonnage   Engine SHP   Speed     Armament   Armor Belt

Battleship        Iron Duke      30,380     29,000         21 kts     10x13.5"     12"

Battlecruiser    Lion              29,680     70,000          27 kts     8x13.5"       6"

Battleship        Koenig          28,200     31,000          21 kts     10x12"        12"

Battlecruiser    Seydlitz         25,200     67,000          26 kts     10x11"        10"

Cruiser            Arethusa         3520      40,000          28.5 kts  3x 6", 4x4"  3"

Destroyer        Paragon            900      22,500          29.5        3x4"           -

 

Fast Battleship Hood             47,500   144,000          31 kts     8x15"         12"

'Destroyer'       Le Fantasque  3400       81,000          45 kts     5x5.4"        -

These ships are all rough contemporaries, built around 1909-1912 (Arethusa and Paragon from 1912-13, Hood from 1920 and Le Fantasque from 1933). This not only shows some differences in British and German theories as to what a capital ship should be, it shows the immense extra power needed to achieve a small amount of extra speed. (Not shown is the superior German subdivision scheme or the British practice of piling propellant and shells in the turrets). The German engineering plant used 3 props instead of 4; the middle shaft was pretty much wasted and usable only as a spare or for full power. Note the extreme high speed of Le Fantasque - three times the tonnage of contemporary destroyers, and the huge size and power of Hood. 

Now admittedly, space maneuvering must be different from steaming over water. It may well be that a hyperdrive (or whatever we use as thrusters) works better for bigger ships than small ones - I have no way of predicting any of that. But on the water, very few navies built small slow ships - big ships needed guns and armor, small ships needed maneuverability and speed, and above all ships were built to work at specific jobs. Cruisers and destroyers defended against subs (and aircraft), or made high-speed runs to get in close and attack with torpedos. And ships of a given generation all had the same range of speeds so they could efficiently work together.

 

35 mph is about 31.5 - 32 knots (a knot is 1.1 mph roughly).

 

Sorry for the lecture - naval history is a long-time passion.

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Endless Space is a game that scales up engine and other system types per the hull size.

Just as somebody who's experienced that kind of system in actual gameplay, I'd like to make the comment that it kinda detracts from the fun of large ships. When you're struggling with hull size limits with large ships in almost exactly the same way you were struggling with hull size limits on small ships, they end up being virtually identical aside of arbitrary stats like hitpoints. With a larger ship there should be room for engines, weapons, defenses, and the occasional special combat system.

Perhaps Endless Space is a bad example; the scaling of engine sizes and such to hull sizes is almost linear, and that should not be the case.

I just personally prefer what Gal Civ is doing already - giving inherent speed bonuses to smaller hull sizes and hit-point bonuses to larger hulls. Rather than constrain the ability to design inside larger hulls, it feels like it rewards the player more.

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I supported the GalCiv2 model that basically limited ships to 2 engines unless they paid a very high price for the extra speed.

 

For my part I like making fast ships - they get to the front quicker and can engage multiple enemy targets per turn. But I have found that warship classes should all move at the same speed - otherwise the faster ships lose the advantage if grouped with slower units.

 

Something as simple as giving +1 speed to small and tiny hulls would be a step in the right direction I think.