Wyrdysm Games

I've only been on these forums for a couple of hours, and it is nice to see the way vets of ship design see the craft, etc, since I have only played with friends previously.

Now, I should point out, everyone builds ships with different purposes. Some like to turn their ships into an art form. I have never had the skill to do that, so I have always interpreted the ship maker as a tool to make the best Feasible ship possible. I say feasible, because every decision made has to at least somewhat correlate with what could be done in the sci fi setting (No spamming aegis, or weapons with 10000000 damage, then).

But since coming to the forums, even in this brief time, I have noticed that there is a general consensus that more guns are bad. REALLY bad.

That is unfortunate for me, as I have always operated according to a (Yes, alright, noobish) policy of "calculate the number of guns that can fit on the airframe and then multiply that number by three" In an actual game, capital ships with heavy armament are crucial to fleet success. (Or more specifically, heavy point defence. I have made ships with >200 flak guns before).

So, I just wondered if anyone wanted to say what makes guns so bad? Is it to do with balance, or is it purely an aesthetic decision? I, for one, have decided to change tack in capital ship desgn, focusing on just a few, hard hitting weapons, just from the "peer pressure"!

It's just ugly really.

Primarily aesthetics. A hull covered in guns is ugly, and it doesn't let you see any of the nice internal details... if there are any. If there aren't any, then it could be obvious that you're just trying to cover up poor sectionwork, in which case you need to reconsider your shipbuilding habits.

Additionally, piling on tons and tons of guns (and modules like deflectors) is, to be frank, boring. It just becomes an arms race to see who has the most guns or the highest damage-per-second to unleash when the enemy's shields spontaneously collapse. Fights go from short/moderate length and interesting (perhaps even brutal and bloody), to - and no, this is not exagerration - a terribly boring and nearly two hour long slugfest.

Having suitable weaponry is fine, but if you look at any ship anywhere else - and I mean anywhere, not just these forums? They don't have stupid amounts of it.

As I pointed out with your actual ship, its not even a matter of how many, its that you just layered them on in the same boring pattern across the whole thing. Be a bit inventive. Make mounting bases for them, put a variety on the vessel instead of 20 beams. Spinal mounts, multibarreled turrets, defense drones orbiting the ship, close in beam or flak spammers vs long distance missile lobbers... I love the slugfests with hundreds of projectiles or beams flying back and forth, but you've gotta have a beast of a ship worthy of that many weapons, not a spamtastic platform.

It's mostly aesthetics. Guns and modules should be used like sections, but they often clash with the overall design due to the fact that they are quite blocky and white. Most of the ships here concentrate on the layout of the ships itself; I don't know if there's a forum section for balanced armed spaceships other than the Metagame: (http://www.wyrdysm.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4610)

The ships in the metagame demonstrate that the light use of weapons can add to the aesthetics; most other times the weapons are placed behind other sections, giving the illusion of depth. And depth is gooood.

OK, I see. I have now adopted a new policy of guns, viz. lots of them, but shrouded behind sections. This makes more real life sense to me anyway: Why put a gun where it can be shot at?