no refitting of ships doesn't make sense

intrigue · March 9, 2003, 02:18

I think a refit of ships option should be in the game...
I realize that its probably ommitted for game-play balance... so make it cost more to upgrade a ship than build one from scratch. I don't care - it just seems illogical to me to make ship brand new, even if I have a new engine or whatever.
I can think of numerous space stories which half of us think about when playing these games, where refitting the ship of the story is a big theme.
I want refitting because it only makes sense, and I want refitting cuz re-enacting my favorite story seems more hollow without

vmxa1 · March 9, 2003, 05:06

I do not see any reason why refits should be play balance issue. Moo2 had and yes the AI often was tardy about doing it, but it would if it had money and humans do not allows upgrade all ships at all times.
I think they had an implementation issue as well. Balancing with upgrades can be a problem, but not insurmountable. Now I fear that the amount of effort is too great to implement it. (sigh)

Harry Seldon · March 9, 2003, 15:47

I found a great way to refit your ship! Take an enormous fleet and send it against a guardian because you know you have the tech to crush it. Be sure not to look at what exactly you're sending because you know you are the Master of Orion! Then watch in horror as your Eagle Attack/Level 20 Tech armada w/ Troop Transport support detail gets destroyed in less than thrity seconds! Rebuild, and viola! Your newly refitted fleet will be ready to go. Just allow fifty-one hundred turns for delivery.

duodecimal · March 9, 2003, 16:32

An obvious enough idea is to have reserves automatically upgrade once you've approved a new design.

An old ship with an obsolete design in the reserves will be upgraded to a current design with the same mission and same hull class, if one exists. If a current design exists, the mainenance cost for those reserves gets bumped up to 50% of the PP cost - or whatever - while a box for 'allow reserve upgrades' is checked.

It would fit in with the macromanagement philosophy. Now all we need is a usable ship design interface, as opposed to the nightmare we have now.

Of course, who knows what this would actually take, programmingwise.

One constraint would be you would only be allowed to have one ship of each hull class and mission. Otherwise, you'd need rules on which design is selected for auto-refit if you have multiple versions of the same hull/mission.

Harry Seldon · March 9, 2003, 16:54

It would be very nice if you could choose a design from the fleet screen and refit with the newest technology instead of having to dry dock individual fleets/ships. I'd like to have the AI take care of it, too.

duodecimal · March 9, 2003, 17:13

Well, realistically, ships on active duty don't undergo massive refitting. Doing it in the reserves makes some level of logical sense and - since the ships are already 'hidden' and in a single massed pool - may be easier to code.

Also, since going into and out of reserves entails a turn-penalty, ship refitting can be nestled inside that as well.

It goes without saying that the Shipyard and Fleet screens need massive refitting themselves.

vmxa1 · March 9, 2003, 17:22

Not sure what you mean by active duty. I was on several ships in the Navy that when into drydock for refitting. Work was done at varing levels, and some ships in the yard were massively upgraded as they did to the BB for vietnam. IOW it has been done in life, but it required time and money. That stops a lot of it. You do not get muchin the way of new guns, but you can get new radar, ECM, ECCM, fire control computers and the like. No armor replacements either. OTOH it is only a game so let us have are fun.

Epistax · March 9, 2003, 18:43

I think refitting on some levels make sense.

1) change armor level between light, medium, heavy, etc.
2) replace missiles/torpedoes with different models.
3) add new special systems.

However all of this should come at very high cost compared to regularly fitting with such items.

duodecimal · March 9, 2003, 18:50

Here's the slightly-more-thought-out version I posted to the "Reasonable" thread over on IGMOO/Bugs:

Quote:

Refit Suggestion
Kalbear already made some suggestions, and I'd been thinking the same thing over at apolyton this morning. Here's probably the easiest way to add Refit to MOO3, since we were both thinking along the same lines and, may I say, brilliantly so.

1) Refitting to occur only for Reserves. The time penalty for disbanding and re-forming task forces fits perfectly. Fleets on active duty don't get cleaned out and upgraded with new engines and hull armor, so it's realistic as well.

2) This might be a bone of contention, but might be needed to keep things simple. Allow only one non-obsolete design for each mission, hull size, and class. Creating a new design of the same parameters will trigger a "Do you want to make the old System Lancer Long-Range Attack Design to be Obsolete?" question.

3) Create a new toggle/check box for "Allow Reserve Refits" on the appropriate screen. Not sure if this is Fleets, Budget, Shipyard, Empire, or what.

4) Maintenance costs for ships eligible for refit (i.e., are of an obsolete design and a design of the same class, size, and mission exists as current) are increased to some X% of the PP cost of the new design. This higher maintenance cost is only in effect for the turn(s) that an upgradeable obsolete ship is in the reserves.

5) Make sure that toggling and un-toggling the "Allow Refit" button updates the maintenance cost line item on the Ledger.

In the interest of keeping things simple, and since this is occurring in the reserves, shipyard sizes and production capacity may not need to be considered - only the AU cost of upgrading from #4.

If, for the sake of some semblance of realism, we want it to take some time to upgrade ships, we can take the total PP cost of the upgrades (the equivalent of the X% cost in #4), divide that by the empire's total PP output (or a set fraction thereof), and have that determine the amount of time it takes to upgrade obsolete ships. Ships in the process of being upgraded are marked with an * or something on the Reserves list and are not available for task force formation (but may still be scrapped if desired).

Overall, this fits into the macromanagement philosophy, and happens enough behind the scenes that, compared to other refitting methods, may be easier to code.

As far as new features go, this is probably the most important thing that needs to be added (as opposed to the things that are broken and need fixing).

vmxa1 · March 9, 2003, 22:35

I think the biggest draw back will be the means to implement any refits, but I would sure like to see it done in some fashsion. Of course if they did they would soon be gettign blasted for some aspect not suiting all needs, oh well.

habadacus · March 10, 2003, 21:20

Wasn't it the case in MOO2 when you discovered a new drive/fuel cell it went into effect automatically? I don't know how realistic that was, but it happened for all players in the game so it was relatively balanced, and streamlined the process so much compared to this model. I really find that I make tech improvent in the various ship systems so quickly that I am never happy with my current designs. Now obviously it would be too far-fetched and powerful to apply that rule to armor/weapons, but the ship design screen in MOO2 was actually fun to play around in until you found the right mix, I remember spending lots of time tweaking different designs. Now I find I'm spending lots of time just adding new drives for every ship type in the civilian and military fleets. QS did such a good job reducing MM hell in the rest of the game, I wonder why they made it so much worse in certain areas?
Also, although the different ship missions is a cool idea, I'm thinking if I want a Point Defence ship, I'll build a ship and put lots of point defence weapons on it. If I want a missile ship, well, I'll build a ship and put lots of missiles on it. I think the mission types should have just been "Stand-off" "In-close" "medium range" "avoid-contact", etc, and let us build the ships to fill those task forces. This way I'm not juggling 18 different ship types in addition to the 9 different hull-sizes for each ship type every time I discover a new whizz-bang shield or whatever. Put another way... I'll design a few different ships , and then I'll determine what they are gonna do. No artificial task force rules, good task force design is it's own reward, and I can build less, more balanced designs to fill multiple roles, so I have less designs to have to go in and rebuild every 10 minutes. But if the design interface were given an overhaul the same way other processes in the game were, I could live with the artificial limits, because a new discovery wouldn't be such a mammoth chore to actually use. Does that make sense?

duodecimal · March 10, 2003, 22:10

The difference though is that this isn't MOO2. In MOO2, it was obvious when a specific weapon fired from a specific ship and hit another ship's defenses, and what those defenses are.

In MOO3, such analysis is difficult, if it's possible at all. You don't know (at least, not without memorizing all the weapon visuals/sounds, if they're all different) what weapons are firing from which ships, and which ships are taking the hits and what defenses work against them. Using Autobuild for each class/size/mission is pretty much the only worthwhile option for now.

I'm not even sure why they bothered allowing us to manually configure ships at all, except perhaps to get a colony module in a destroyer hull by lowering system speed. What may have been a more consistent approach would have been to set a slider at 'obsolescense level', and the computer would automatically generate new designs to replace the outdated ones.

Of course, most of us would hate that, so we get a ship design philosophy incompatible with the overall game design. Streamlining task force formation, cleaning up the shipyard screen, and implimenting the refit option in my earlier post is probably one of the better ways of resolving this bit of mess.

vmxa1 · March 10, 2003, 22:38

Quote:

Originally posted by habadacus
Wasn't it the case in MOO2 when you discovered a new drive/fuel cell it went into effect automatically? I don't know how realistic that was, but it happened for all players in the game so it was relatively balanced, and streamlined the process so much compared to this model.

Ships had three classifications or states. 1) built 2) designed 3) yet to be designed.
Drives and fuel cells were automatically add to all classes.
Armor was automatc for class 2 and 3. You need to refit class 1 ships to get it.
Shields and armor are not applied to class 1 or 2, but will be to class 3 as soon as you goto design it. This can cause you to not be able to still fit all of the weapons or specials you had before the new discovery.

Arnelos · March 10, 2003, 22:45

This thread is beating a VERY dead horse...

People have been talking about the pros/cons of this for months on end...

At some point, the devs had been considering having some tweak-like refits to ships (minor modifications within a few levels of tech or something like that), but certainly not unlimited modification and many things wouldn't be removable or add-able to a ship/design.

Apparently, at some point they decided to forgo even that limited level of refit/modificiation and make you build new designs.

:shrug:

As I said, people are beating a dead horse. It's been argued over since that decision was apparently made months ago.

duodecimal · March 10, 2003, 22:52

Thank you, Arnelos. Now we never need to talk about this again.

I am sure that, without your keen insight, our time would have been endlessly misspent here.

Our eternal gratitude is yours, oh lordly Discoverer and Purveyor of All Things Obvious.

habadacus · March 10, 2003, 23:15

Quote:

Originally posted by Arnelos
This thread is beating a VERY dead horse...

But hey, beating a dead horse is FUN!!! (unlike certain other games on my shelf). I got it Arnelos, why don't you be the publisher of "Beating a Dead Horse" and we'll have QS do the production. Give them 4 years and they'll manage to blanch out all the fun of that one too. But they'll tell you the delays are for your personal oh-so-bug-free pleasure. And then when we beaters of dead horses go out and buy it the first day, and findout that it's actually an armadillo, and it's not quite dead yet, and we have to make our own stick, then we can all gather here and praise it.

But really, like the title says, no refitting of ships doesn't make sense. I don't care who made the desicion, or when, it's lousy, it doesn't work well within the game, and it's not impossible to add if enough people want it. And if anybody reading this hasn't gotten the game yet, they would be more informed on what was missing than I was, blindly trusting QS to deliver the quality I expect from this series. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Think I wouldn't rather be writing about how cool this game is? I would. Actually I wouldn't I'd be playing it right now instead. But I would want to.

Arnelos · March 11, 2003, 03:38

* Arnelos decides that becoming the publisher of "Beating a Dead Horse" doesn't sound like such a bad idea...

I agree that no-ship refit is ANNOYING, I'm just saying we've been complaining about it for so f***ing long that I'd long since given up hope on that feature...

So it wasn't so much of a shock to me when the game shipped w/o it. We'd been warned well in advance.

But hey... the more people that complain about it, maybe QS will find it in their hearts to change it...

(all things are possible... even if they seem exceedingly unlikely...)

be0wulfe · March 11, 2003, 12:00

If you don't complain nothing get's changed.

Now, what's wrong with Using a savegame editor to somehow point your Eagle Attacks to Eagle Attack2 designs in the fleet design page ...

Yes, it's cheesy, yes there's not cost or control (aside from suddenly higher maintenance), and no way to enforce upgrading only reserve ships ...

intrigue · March 11, 2003, 13:59

I thought about it... I like the idea of refitting only reserve ships... kinda simulates bringing a ship out of commission for its upgrades

And since we have no real control over what changes are made, the only thing we can do is keep bringing up what we want to see changed. Maybe the designers will notice how we keep beating "dead horse" issues, and do something about it. I hope so anyway.

SINISTER1974 · March 12, 2003, 15:43

yes i agree not being able to refit does suck. For example:

Have a nice battle ship design. Great weapons great armor. But lack good engines. Instead of just upgrading the engines i have to do a complete design of same ship just to add engines. Then rename it and have to obsolete the others. Its a waste of time really having 300 obsolete designs just to add a few extra parts

But i started not making a good fleet until late in game were i have some of the better weapons, engines, etc....

But refitting ships wopuld have been a nice feature.

CharlesBHoff · March 13, 2003, 06:19

I remember reading somewhere it cost the navy more money to refit some old sudmariene from ww2 to fire than IRBM missile while builting the BMSUB . It only carry two missiles and it have to surface to fire them. This show there are limit to how much refitting than ship can take.

duodecimal · March 13, 2003, 06:26

I remember reading somewhere that faster-than-light travel is impossible, and wormholes wider than a quark's probable location collapse in attoseconds. I've also read that there's no sound propogation in space.

vmxa1 · March 13, 2003, 14:22

Quote:

Originally posted by CharlesBHoff
I remember reading somewhere it cost the navy more money to refit some old sudmariene from ww2 to fire than IRBM missile while builting the BMSUB . It only carry two missiles and it have to surface to fire them. This show there are limit to how much refitting than ship can take.

Yes but money is not the first concern in many cases.
The first concern may be that you could refit the cruiser to be a jeep carrier and get some planes out to the action faster than you could if you wait to build a new carrier from scratch. Not to mention that the refit may be done without slowing down the new construction. IOW I will get more machinery out the door sooner with refits. I do not care about the cost, by life is at stake.

CharlesBHoff · March 13, 2003, 17:20

All I was saying that refit are not alway practical as those missile carrying sub we make from ww2 sub have more accientical and more mishap than the sub we built from the start to carry then IRBM. In one ww2 sub they cut it in half an put in than entire new midsection which threw off the balance of the sub .
I can make than automatic rifle with than built in TV and micro-wave oven but will it be practical to do so.