Shipbuilding ruleset. Complex, but maximum freedom.
Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 4:17 am
First of all i'd like to greet everybody on this forum.
I've downloaded the game only a few weeks ago and really loved the game's ship designing feature.
I know no other game where you could design your ship completely from scratch - not only the loadout, but the very shape of it.
Though after a few designs a pretty serious problem rose up - the shipbuilding sandbox mode.
No, i don't mean the game mode, i mean absolute lack of any limits in ship designing - you can build absolutely whatever you want, no such things as balance or realism.
Though that gives huge grade of freedom, i wish there was a way to turn that "free build" mode off and make some limits to ship's power, which would be universal for everybody, allowing people to compete at shipbuilding.
After not finding such button and just having some fun with free building, i decided to lurk the forums. There i found some shipbuilding turnaments, each with its own set of rules (which were pretty same though).
I didnt like all these rules though, because all of them had lots of flaws and many ways to bypass them (resulting in some unnaural rules like "no more than X deflecs per section).
So i decided to make some other rules, which would be A LOT more complex, but give players much more freedom, and minimum fixed values - everything should change gradually according to some formulas.
This is going to take much time and work, so ill make this post now and will then be fillng it with information as my ideas come. When it looks completed, ill try to set all the ideas and rules in some logical order, making some sort of "realistic balance ship engineering guide". Yes, engineering, because it will be needed to do alot of calculations to calculate ship's parameters.
Of course, the ideal plan woud be to make some program, which would read ship files and calculate their parameters/catch faults, but i don't have any idea how to work with the ship design files outside of shipbuilder, and the small .txt file with stats is completely not enough. Oh, and i don't even know any programming langauage good enough to code such a thing, heh.
Some ideas will remain just as ideas, but i will try to add needed formulas as soon as i..ehm.. compose them. All the numbers and formulas are subject to change, and im sure ill have to change them alot every time i meet some problem or exploitability in them.
The main parameters of all ship parts are mass, price and energy consumption/generation. These "virtual" parameter are calculated basing on the part's "real" ingame (inshipmaker, to be more correct) stats. Having multiple parameters insead of a single "price" makes engineering more complex and makes it harder to mathematically calculate some combination which would be completely better than any other.
Arright, there we go:
--Core--
Core is the heart of any ship, but though it is cimpletely necessary, its price is still non-zero.
Price=30+(hp/50)^2. Yep, i don't like small numbers. I prefer to operate with large numbers than rounding the small ones. Think of 200 credits as of 1 point in regular tournament..though it will not be very accurate in many situations.
Mass = Exp(sqrt(HP)/7)*50. The fighter-class small ships with 100HP core are extremely easy to maneuver, but if you build a behemoth, you'll get huge mass anyway, and core won't matter that much anyway.
Energy generated by core = 800+HP*2
--Sections--
What i disliked about regular tournaments, is that they deal with all sections the same - no matter the size, with the exception for section 26 which is just too large. Obviously, this has an exploitability - building a ship with the smallest possible sections to make it harder to hit, and then adding some big parts to put deflector fields on.
The actual parameters of the section should depend on their size. The best way here is to calculate the surface area of each section (measured in pixels), but thats hell of a work and im too lazy to do something that useless.
So i just decided to put all sections in 5 groups = Extra small:(6,7,8,9), Small:(1,4,5,13), Medium: (2,3,11,12,14,15,16,18,19,20,21,22,25), Large:(10,17,23,24), Extra Large (26).
Extra small sections' size is 1, S sections = 2, M = 4, L = 8, XL = 14.
Every resizing by one dimension changes section's size by 10%, the overall size of the section is its basic size*(1 +/- number of horizontal resizes*0.1)*(1 +/- number of vertical resizes*0.1).
I have made some experiments and it seems that with these basic numbers everything works fine. For example if you make section №09 2 times taller and 4 times wider (10 resizes + 30 resizes), its size will be 1*(1+1)*(1+3)=8. Now if you compare this oversized section 09 with any Large section, youll see theyre almost the same size - exactly what was needed.
All the parameters (mass, price, energy) are calculated basing on part's size, making people free to resize the parts as they want... the parameters will go rudiculously wrong if you do crazy oversizing though, but thats supposed to happen.
Price = 30*(size/4)^0.8+((4/size)^(0.8))*((hp/40)^2).
Yeah, its pretty hard, but thats the way i make it work.
with this formula you can set any hp to any of your secions. But the best price depends on the section's size - for extra small sections the optimal hp (highest hp per 1 credit ratio) is about 80, while for large ones its 400.
The section's mass is the same as its size*100, for non-resized medium section it would be 400, for example.
The energy generated be each section is calculated the same way - just multiply its size by 100.
--Ship movement--
Ship movement highly depends on speed - the heavier the ship is, the harder it will be to make it move fast.
Here are the formulas:
Price for speed = mass*speed^2/25
Price for turnrate = (mass/1000)^1.25 * turnrate*100
Price for acceleration = mass*speed*1.8
--Weapons and modules--
This is going to be the biggest and the hardest part of the guide. Also the most interesting one though. Lack of custom weapons was one of the main reasons i disliked current tournament rulesets after all.
The main problem here is great variety. though the number of weapons is not that high, many of them have special characteristics which affect weapons effectiveness at different rates. Im planning to divide weapons into groups, and after making good formulas for the most regular weapons (regular particle weapons and beams), ill get to special weapons and modules.
The mechanism of adding weapons to your ship is also going to be pretty complex. Every weapon, as well as any other detail, has 3 virtual parameters - energy consumption, mass and price.
Price simply depends on weapon's parameters, the better they are, the higher the price, obviously.
Mass also depends on the parameters of the weapon and usually is alot less than the mass of the sections. Im planing to make weapons contribute about 10-20% to the total ship mass. Other note about weapon's mass is that im planning to make it somehow connected to the limit of nimber of weapons per section. Prolly something like "overall weapon mass on the section cannot be higher than [some function of the section's mass]"
Energy consumption is going the most important parameter and it will be one of the most important ones when putting weapons on the ship.
The weapon can consume energy not only from the section it is located on, but also from all of its parent sections. This will make players have to put their weapons further from the core in order to utilize the outer sections' energy production - much unlike the current situation when players put all the weapons as close to the core as possible. If there is some spare energy on some section, it should be more cost effective to add another weapon, than double the effectiveness of the one already present at it. So, when you add weapons to the ship, first you add them up until the mass limit is reached, and then tweak their parameters to consume spare energy.
The same thing is going to be with the modules.
Some special rule is will be in effect about regular and aegis deflectors. since sections have no size limit, it would be possible to make a few oversized sections and put shields on them.
The energy parameters of the deflectors will depend on the weighted average ship part size, so if ship has many big parts, the energy consumption goes high.
the other cool thing about deflecs is that you won't be able to put them right at the core anyway - deflecs consume alot of energy (especially aegises), and to get that energy youll need a long chain of sections feeding them.
After i finish making this huge guide, i'll make an Excel file with all the formulas and comprehensive explanations, letting you calculate everything with relative ease.
But for now, if you want to check your ship's price (with all weapons and modules unmounted) you'll have to put all the formulas manually.
Heheh, hope some crazy people will really read this huge post and tell me what they think and maybe give some advice...
I've downloaded the game only a few weeks ago and really loved the game's ship designing feature.
I know no other game where you could design your ship completely from scratch - not only the loadout, but the very shape of it.
Though after a few designs a pretty serious problem rose up - the shipbuilding sandbox mode.
No, i don't mean the game mode, i mean absolute lack of any limits in ship designing - you can build absolutely whatever you want, no such things as balance or realism.
Though that gives huge grade of freedom, i wish there was a way to turn that "free build" mode off and make some limits to ship's power, which would be universal for everybody, allowing people to compete at shipbuilding.
After not finding such button and just having some fun with free building, i decided to lurk the forums. There i found some shipbuilding turnaments, each with its own set of rules (which were pretty same though).
I didnt like all these rules though, because all of them had lots of flaws and many ways to bypass them (resulting in some unnaural rules like "no more than X deflecs per section).
So i decided to make some other rules, which would be A LOT more complex, but give players much more freedom, and minimum fixed values - everything should change gradually according to some formulas.
This is going to take much time and work, so ill make this post now and will then be fillng it with information as my ideas come. When it looks completed, ill try to set all the ideas and rules in some logical order, making some sort of "realistic balance ship engineering guide". Yes, engineering, because it will be needed to do alot of calculations to calculate ship's parameters.
Of course, the ideal plan woud be to make some program, which would read ship files and calculate their parameters/catch faults, but i don't have any idea how to work with the ship design files outside of shipbuilder, and the small .txt file with stats is completely not enough. Oh, and i don't even know any programming langauage good enough to code such a thing, heh.
Some ideas will remain just as ideas, but i will try to add needed formulas as soon as i..ehm.. compose them. All the numbers and formulas are subject to change, and im sure ill have to change them alot every time i meet some problem or exploitability in them.
The main parameters of all ship parts are mass, price and energy consumption/generation. These "virtual" parameter are calculated basing on the part's "real" ingame (inshipmaker, to be more correct) stats. Having multiple parameters insead of a single "price" makes engineering more complex and makes it harder to mathematically calculate some combination which would be completely better than any other.
Arright, there we go:
--Core--
Core is the heart of any ship, but though it is cimpletely necessary, its price is still non-zero.
Price=30+(hp/50)^2. Yep, i don't like small numbers. I prefer to operate with large numbers than rounding the small ones. Think of 200 credits as of 1 point in regular tournament..though it will not be very accurate in many situations.
Mass = Exp(sqrt(HP)/7)*50. The fighter-class small ships with 100HP core are extremely easy to maneuver, but if you build a behemoth, you'll get huge mass anyway, and core won't matter that much anyway.
Energy generated by core = 800+HP*2
--Sections--
What i disliked about regular tournaments, is that they deal with all sections the same - no matter the size, with the exception for section 26 which is just too large. Obviously, this has an exploitability - building a ship with the smallest possible sections to make it harder to hit, and then adding some big parts to put deflector fields on.
The actual parameters of the section should depend on their size. The best way here is to calculate the surface area of each section (measured in pixels), but thats hell of a work and im too lazy to do something that useless.
So i just decided to put all sections in 5 groups = Extra small:(6,7,8,9), Small:(1,4,5,13), Medium: (2,3,11,12,14,15,16,18,19,20,21,22,25), Large:(10,17,23,24), Extra Large (26).
Extra small sections' size is 1, S sections = 2, M = 4, L = 8, XL = 14.
Every resizing by one dimension changes section's size by 10%, the overall size of the section is its basic size*(1 +/- number of horizontal resizes*0.1)*(1 +/- number of vertical resizes*0.1).
I have made some experiments and it seems that with these basic numbers everything works fine. For example if you make section №09 2 times taller and 4 times wider (10 resizes + 30 resizes), its size will be 1*(1+1)*(1+3)=8. Now if you compare this oversized section 09 with any Large section, youll see theyre almost the same size - exactly what was needed.
All the parameters (mass, price, energy) are calculated basing on part's size, making people free to resize the parts as they want... the parameters will go rudiculously wrong if you do crazy oversizing though, but thats supposed to happen.
Price = 30*(size/4)^0.8+((4/size)^(0.8))*((hp/40)^2).
Yeah, its pretty hard, but thats the way i make it work.
with this formula you can set any hp to any of your secions. But the best price depends on the section's size - for extra small sections the optimal hp (highest hp per 1 credit ratio) is about 80, while for large ones its 400.
The section's mass is the same as its size*100, for non-resized medium section it would be 400, for example.
The energy generated be each section is calculated the same way - just multiply its size by 100.
--Ship movement--
Ship movement highly depends on speed - the heavier the ship is, the harder it will be to make it move fast.
Here are the formulas:
Price for speed = mass*speed^2/25
Price for turnrate = (mass/1000)^1.25 * turnrate*100
Price for acceleration = mass*speed*1.8
--Weapons and modules--
This is going to be the biggest and the hardest part of the guide. Also the most interesting one though. Lack of custom weapons was one of the main reasons i disliked current tournament rulesets after all.
The main problem here is great variety. though the number of weapons is not that high, many of them have special characteristics which affect weapons effectiveness at different rates. Im planning to divide weapons into groups, and after making good formulas for the most regular weapons (regular particle weapons and beams), ill get to special weapons and modules.
The mechanism of adding weapons to your ship is also going to be pretty complex. Every weapon, as well as any other detail, has 3 virtual parameters - energy consumption, mass and price.
Price simply depends on weapon's parameters, the better they are, the higher the price, obviously.
Mass also depends on the parameters of the weapon and usually is alot less than the mass of the sections. Im planing to make weapons contribute about 10-20% to the total ship mass. Other note about weapon's mass is that im planning to make it somehow connected to the limit of nimber of weapons per section. Prolly something like "overall weapon mass on the section cannot be higher than [some function of the section's mass]"
Energy consumption is going the most important parameter and it will be one of the most important ones when putting weapons on the ship.
The weapon can consume energy not only from the section it is located on, but also from all of its parent sections. This will make players have to put their weapons further from the core in order to utilize the outer sections' energy production - much unlike the current situation when players put all the weapons as close to the core as possible. If there is some spare energy on some section, it should be more cost effective to add another weapon, than double the effectiveness of the one already present at it. So, when you add weapons to the ship, first you add them up until the mass limit is reached, and then tweak their parameters to consume spare energy.
The same thing is going to be with the modules.
Some special rule is will be in effect about regular and aegis deflectors. since sections have no size limit, it would be possible to make a few oversized sections and put shields on them.
The energy parameters of the deflectors will depend on the weighted average ship part size, so if ship has many big parts, the energy consumption goes high.
the other cool thing about deflecs is that you won't be able to put them right at the core anyway - deflecs consume alot of energy (especially aegises), and to get that energy youll need a long chain of sections feeding them.
After i finish making this huge guide, i'll make an Excel file with all the formulas and comprehensive explanations, letting you calculate everything with relative ease.
But for now, if you want to check your ship's price (with all weapons and modules unmounted) you'll have to put all the formulas manually.
Heheh, hope some crazy people will really read this huge post and tell me what they think and maybe give some advice...