Stellaris Dev Diary #17 - Ship Designer

[B_P]

Being honest the ship details are hardly state of the art visually.You look at old games ships like EmpireTotalwar way back in 2009 and they are massively detailed.SOTS2 are also a much higher level.It looks a bit like Sins of the Solar empire era.

Its not that sort of game.
Accent made on economics, political and social details. not on visual one. XD
Tottalwar games is an eye-candy for me.
PDS games - ... brain-candy.

 

[ashbery76]

Also, I hope we can design fighters and bombers, and manage fighter wings. Those pea-shooter fighters in SOTS really, really sucks like hell, and even in Distant World they are treated like disposable ammunition.

As I said in the fighter topic.These games seem to add them because of Starwars cool and not because of the fighters reason for being.They also bring massive balance issues.Games like GC3 added them,so did EndlessSpace and it added nothing interesting to the game apart from issues.These games should be ship battles without silly fighters.

 

[Axe99]

Cheers for the DD Zoft, ship design looks good .

On the fighters issue, I think the trick would be to make them not auto-replenishing. Once they magically reappear after each fight, they're a huge buff. If you can deplete a carriers' fighter wing such that it has to return to base to have more, then fighters and bombers would be far easier to balance.

 

[ashbery76]

Cheers for the DD Zoft, ship design looks good .

On the fighters issue, I think the trick would be to make them not auto-replenishing. Once they magically reappear after each fight, they're a huge buff. If you can deplete a carriers' fighter wing such that it has to return to base to have more, then fighters and bombers would be far easier to balance.

Another thing that makes me laugh about space 4x fighters logic.If being a fighterpilot was 100% certain death who the hell would be one.

 

[B_P]

Another thing that makes me laugh about space 4x fighters logic.If being a fighterpilot was 100% certain death who the hell would be one.

Drones...?

 

[Boops]

You can have multiple saved designs.

Apologies if this has already been asked, but looking at the screenshots, you have, of course, a ship design, and also a space station design. How will you be prompted to design a station - Is it once the station is deployed you can start modifying it, or can you access station designs through the standard designer interface? Are you prompted of the type you want to design when you select "new design"?

Edit: To add, what is, if there is, the maximum number of sections a ship can have?

 

[B_P]

Apologies if this has already been asked, but looking at the screenshots, you have, of course, a ship design, and also a space station design. How will you be prompted to design a station - Is it once the station is deployed you can start modifying it, or can you access station designs through the standard designer interface? Are you prompted of the type you want to design when you select "new design"?

they mentioned Construction ships in prev DDs.
i guess that's the answer.

 

[Polarisan]

Well since we are on the topic of ships, I wonder what scale of battles should we be hoping for in the endgame? hundreds vs hundreds? or just a few "supercaps" total?

 

[Boops]

they mentioned Construction ships in prev DDs.
i guess that's the answer.

That's how I imagine you would construct the stations, definitely, but I am more curious to know if we can access our designs for the stations through the ship designer, or design new ones through that same interface.

Having looked back at the screenshots, the "Defense Station" is listed in the designs list which I think confirms that modifying and creating new designs can be done through the ship designer.

 

[Boops]

Well since we are on the topic of ships, I wonder what scale of battles should we be hoping for in the endgame? hundreds vs hundreds? or just a few "supercaps" total?

Having looked through all of the screenshots, the maximum fleet size I've seen so far has been around 150. In one screenshot, there were three fleets of ~150, so I would imagine the more powerful you become, the more fleets you can command, and you could perhaps be seeing fleet battles in the hundreds or thousands.

Edit: Not sure why someone has "disagreed" with my post when all I did was state facts. Stellaris Dev Diary #10 - The Spaceport and rare resources contains the following screenshot which shows 59 ships spread out between three different fleets all with a maximum capacity of 140 ships per fleet.

As I have clarified in another post, and to counter the "command points" argument, the following screenshot from Stellaris Dev Diary #4 - Means of Travel shows that the (30|13|16)/140 counters do in fact represent individual ships in each fleet.

You can see that the fleet selected, has nine individual ships of various classes commanded by the Admiral Su-Pe. in the Outliner to the right and in the fleet interface, you can see that it states that the fleet is 9/45. Also, there are visibly nine ships in space, which is pretty cool, having the possibility of seeing hundreds of ships actually in space. The fights in this game should look absolutely epic.

I stick by my speculation. The more powerful you become, the more technologies you unlock, the larger your fleets can be. I'd imagine there are special admiral traits that modify the maximum ships possible to command per fleet too. Therefore, I'm fairly certain, as I said, you'll be seeing plenty of battles, especially in the later game, with hundreds or thousands of ships per engagement.

 

[kreissig]

Having looked through all of the screenshots, the maximum fleet size I've seen so far has been around 150. In one screenshot, there were three fleets of ~150, so I would imagine the more powerful you become, the more fleets you can command, and you could perhaps be seeing fleet battles in the hundreds or thousands.

I personally suspect that this mechanic represents command points, and that different ships will have different values.

 

[TheDungen]

Having looked through all of the screenshots, the maximum fleet size I've seen so far has been around 150. In one screenshot, there were three fleets of ~150, so I would imagine the more powerful you become, the more fleets you can command, and you could perhaps be seeing fleet battles in the hundreds or thousands.

Fighter not withstanding (those should be treated like more like ordnance than ships) I really hope we wont see thousands of ships. I much prefer the smaller scale star trek battles where 10 ships is a major incursion (the entirety of starfleet in ToS was like 30 ships).

 

[Ixal]

Fighter not withstanding (those should be treated like more like ordnance than ships) I really hope we wont see thousands of ships. I much prefer the smaller scale star trek battles where 10 ships is a major incursion (the entirety of starfleet in ToS was like 30 ships).

You haven't watched DS9, have you?

 

[TheDungen]

You haven't watched DS9, have you?

Half of it, it got to dark and depressing for me. It's like they forgot what trek was all about and started inducing darkness for the sake of drama.

And I said ToS era.

 

[AgentPaper]

Is there any cost for creating a new design and/or putting it into production? A common problem in games with ship designers is that since there's no cost, you're highly encouraged to design a ship for every situation, especially when it comes to things like colony ships where you want to build one with exactly as many engines and supply and such as it takes to get to a specific planet in a specific time frame. Which can be neat sometimes, but generally just gets annoying with how much micro-management it adds to the game.

The lack of turns does remove one of the major sources of this kind of optimization, so perhaps it wouldn't be as bad as in turn-based 4X games, but I think it would make the design and production of ships feel much more meaningful if it's something you need to commit resources to (whether it's a bit of cash, political capital, research time, or whatever).

 

[Red_warning]

In theory I love the idea of ship designing, but in those 4x space games that got it I quickly get tired of it as I am pretty much forced to redesign my ships every time I unlock some new and better module types. Might be something I'll look into in the later stages of the game, where I'm not constantly bombarded with new tech.

Edit: Also, terrible UI tend to be an issue with ship design in space games.

 

[Arkangilos]

The Space Empires games had an "Upgrade Design" button where you could automatically upgrade the design to have the latest version of each tech.

 

[AKicebear]

Is there any cost for creating a new design and/or putting it into production? A common problem in games with ship designers is that since there's no cost, you're highly encouraged to design a ship for every situation, especially when it comes to things like colony ships where you want to build one with exactly as many engines and supply and such as it takes to get to a specific planet in a specific time frame. Which can be neat sometimes, but generally just gets annoying with how much micro-management it adds to the game.

The lack of turns does remove one of the major sources of this kind of optimization, so perhaps it wouldn't be as bad as in turn-based 4X games, but I think it would make the design and production of ships feel much more meaningful if it's something you need to commit resources to (whether it's a bit of cash, political capital, research time, or whatever).

I like this idea. Maybe it could borrow the production efficiency mechanic from HOI4 - you can easily switch designs at a starbase factory, but it will reduce your efficiency back to zero...

 

[Boops]

I personally suspect that this mechanic represents command points, and that different ships will have different values.

In the Diary Stellaris Dev Diary #4 - Means of Travel there is the following screenshot...

You can see to the right on the outliner Pakkan-Ye Attack Swarm which has a number 9/45. If you then look at the selected fleet, commanded by Admiral Su-Pe, there are nine individual ships of various classes.

This is why, having, as I said, looked through all of the screenshots, I came to my conclusion. The absolute last thing I want to do is to spread false information, and any speculation I make, I ensure I can back up with as much solid evidence as I possibly can, otherwise I'll zip my mouth and not say a word.

 

[Tim_Ward]

Having looked through all of the screenshots, the maximum fleet size I've seen so far has been around 150. In one screenshot, there were three fleets of ~150, so I would imagine the more powerful you become, the more fleets you can command, and you could perhaps be seeing fleet battles in the hundreds or thousands.

Numbers in screenshots don't mean shit at this stage. For all we know, they could've just typed in "140" that day because they wanted to test how their engine responds to high numbers of ships.

I stick by my speculation. The more powerful you become, the more technologies you unlock, the larger your fleets can be.

This is true, though. There's a screenshot or video or something somewhere where you can get a tech that increases maximum fleet size.