Actual Canon?

[Questionable Morals]

I found Battleships Forever and browsed the forum for a good day's worth, (which is, in my terms, around six hours) and decided to register and join the craziness and "energy" of this forum. Somehow I find that when compared to a more major forum, forums with an active userbase around a freeware game along with beauty pageants (I applaud the person who implemented it for BSF, regardless of their personal tastes), tend to be a lot more active.

That being said, I'm done making obscene vacuum sounds.

As I browsed the forums, I basically lost all hope of submitting any ship design since I would be inevitably dwarfed by hundreds of excellent designs.

That got me to wonder if there are any set canon rules or boundaries that this community followed; for example, people say "ablative" armor plating.
Ablative armor is interesting enough in real life, and is when, say, a beam weapon rakes across the hull. The ablative layer melts or reacts off, creating a cloud or becoming consumed because of the beam. As a result, it basically dramatically decreases the actual damage inflicted.

Reactive plating is an outer layer, a layer underneath filled with a type of explosive, so when a projectile hits, instead of penetrating the armor, it blows (explodes) away, directing the force away from the inside of the plating.

Does that mean the ship designs, specifically sections and stock parts are layered on top of another so that if one explodes, another is right there?

I've read the general rules, but they only seem to cover forum etiquette and behavior, which is rather general.

Assuming from th15's words, everyone's thing is their own thing, right?

[Squishy]

Reactive plating is an outer layer, a layer underneath filled with a type of explosive, so when a projectile hits, instead of penetrating the armor, it blows (explodes) away, directing the force away from the inside of the plating.

Reactive armor tends to give you less mileage because:

1. Is short lived, and tends to be set off by not-so-dangerous weapons, thus wasting it.

2. A good chance of crashing back into the ship.

3. Neutralized by your own PD guns.

4. Blocks your own shots

5. Enemy GravBeams flinging it around (removed in 90d for some reason).

This is why designers tend to opt for ablatives, if they are trying to avoid using Aegis and Deflectors.



By the way, welcome to the BSF forums.

Everyone has shipbuilding potential. It just takes time to bring it out.

[Questionable Morals]

Makes sense. I suppose you'd only take reactive armor in if you were sure of it's ignition or reaction threshold. The USSR had something going when it made some reactive armor, although I don't think any country uses it today. I guess shaped charges will still be ideal antitank weaponry.

By the way, welcome to the BSF forums.

Everyone has shipbuilding potential. It just takes time to bring it out.

Thanks for the welcome. I was looking around the forum and saw a lot of brutally honest feedback to ship designs, even so much as to say hostile feedback/flaming.
I am trying to make something of a decent design; I think I'll just release something bad and have advice given (ahem, force-fed) to me so I understand what exactly to do.

[Sponge]

You're welcome to make whatever kind of ships you want. I'll go over some rough guidelines, as that seems to be what you're asking.
Balance
It's generally frowned upon if you "godmod" all of your weapons/modules, but there's no real set balance standard. Some common balance schemes are "stock balanced," where your ship is roughly as powerful as a stock ship of the same size, and I suppose "metagame balance," which would indicate that your ship is made to metagame standards. There are quite a few rules and regulations behind this one-- as a new designer, you're probably better off going with stock balanced or your own balance scheme. A while back, someone had the idea of "grinder balancing" ships. This involved spawning your ship in the grinder game mode and letting the AI fight off the enemy as long as possible, and then reporting the final wave the ship made it to. Multiple trials are encouraged. This method lets you know how your ships would hold up against someone else's, but no one does this anymore, and so it's not too useful. The most common, by far, is to arm ships suitably and call it done. No real balance as, after all, aesthetics are the primary focus.

Building Standards
These are my personal preferences. I'm sure most would agree with at least a handful of them, but still, build how you want to. Just expect to see this kind of criticism if you do a crap job.
-Try not to stretch sections. This includes shrinking them. If a section doesn't fit, import a custom one. This takes much longer, but will generally result in a much cleaner product.
-Don't use the same sections over and over again. Vary section choice a bit. Use custom sections where needed.
-Don't force a section where it shouldn't be. Find a more compatible section. Make one if you have to.
-Spend time on your color scheme-- don't implement it as an afterthought.
-Use aegis/faux aegis and other glow effects only where needed. They're meant to highlight a ship, not dominate it.
-Keep level of detail consistent throughout the ship. Having areas of high detail surrounded by areas of low detail looks crappy.
-Use triggers only if you need to use triggers. Transformers are neat and all, but the fact that your ship can camouflage itself as a dinner roll is really pretty dumb.
-Don't go all gung-ho with weapons and modules. We want to see the hull. Layer your weapons between armor plates thoughtfully, or place them on turret mounts of some sort.
-Use slight color variations to indicate depth. Generally, darker colors mean a section is lower than a more lightly colored section. This makes ships "pop."
-If you ask for criticism, be prepared to implement common suggestions. If you argue with people who are trying to help you, you won't make many friends.
-Have fun, and experiment. New styles are always interesting, even if the ship using them sucks .

Also: welcome to the forums.

Edit was for grammar. Second edit was to add this line.

[Questionable Morals]

I'm seeing a warmer welcome than I had anticipated.

I'll post a small design just in this thread.
Then I'll probably open one up in the Custom Ships thread.

[ArcaneDude]

Posting a design here isn't really advized, it's probably a questionable thing to do. Custom ships forum is for custom ships, this place isn't.

[SHAD0Wdump]

I've had my own opinions of balance classes.

Stock:Equal or very similar power related to stock ships.

Metagame:Very new,I assume they are more powerful but I don't have much info on them.

Minifleet:If you can find them there were some minifleets on these forums several months ago. These ships tend to have more powerful weapons than stock and more hitpoints.
For me,balancing at this level is quite easy,projectile weapons usually set with damage in multiples of ten. Hit points in multiples of hundreds usually topping off at 1000+ on the largest of ships. Once you get a 'feel' of balancing with this,you might find it a staple balancing method,I have.

'Galactic':Extremely powerful ships,hitpoints in the thousands. Massive numbers of sections. The time of these old beasts has mostly passed due to the advent of .90 and it's many features hogging up most of the code. At this level there feels as if there is no limit,but there is just enough to balance out these titans.

Wank: Lucky 9 and other such ships made only to make everything boil and explode. As well as look pretty while doing it. Some might think Anna's classic monstrosities classify here,but I think they were more along the line of the Galactic scale.

[Arcalane]

Meta balancing is very loose and rough, as the whole idea is fun rather than perfected function, I should point out.

[Questionable Morals]

I tend to like aesthetics mixed with actual function; Darkship's designs seem sound to me.

Then again this is a game, so the definition of function would be rather hard to define.