Ships

I played SCO a lot for the first time this weekend, probably about 6 hours. My posts today are the notes I took while I did that.

Ships are not to scale, they all appear to be about the same size. Only health hints at size difference. Actual scale might make some ships too small, and others too big, but there should be a visual difference in size of the ships in relation too each other. Most gamers judge a ship's capabilities mostly by how big or small the ship is, it is the first thing they are looking for in evaluating a ship... “how big is it”. There should be a scale too the ships in the thumbnails and in the game that allows the players to tell the difference in size between them. For example, it just seems strange for two ships to be the same size while one has 20 hit points/crew and the other has 2... and they appear too be the same size. This is also important tactically in the game, it is a property of ships in a “dumbfire” (player/skill aimed weapons) game. Even standing still, a small ship is hard to hit and a big ship is easy to hit. Size is tactically relevant in this type of game and is a primary property of the ships just like speed, energy, and hit points are.

If you are wanting an editor that allows players to create the widest range of ships, then you need to establish what I call the “baseline” ship classes for that editor to work within. I've mentioned doing this before, but I didn't really fully explain what I meant. I'll use the United Federation of Planets as an example because they are familiar to everyone. If you were creating Star Fleet within SCO you would first establish the “baseline” classes of their fleet. Shuttlecraft/fighters, gunboats/fast patrol ships (the PDU's “Military Patrol Craft”), Frigate, Destroyer, Light Cruiser, Heavy Cruiser (Enterprise), Heavy Battle Cruiser, Dreadnought, Heavy Carrier, Battleship. There might be two dozen variants of each of these “base hulls”, but at first all you care about are the “base hulls/pure warships” and the combat balance between them by themselves. A “Destroyer” is “half of a Heavy Cruiser”, a “Battleship” is “two Heavy Cruisers”, a Dreadnought is a “Destroyer welded to a Heavy Cruiser” (or, said another way, 50% bigger than a CA)... “mass-based proportional movement” is intimately related to how the points work. Once you have these base hulls down, the variants pretty much design themselves. Anything reasonable within the balance of the base hulls is going to wind up being reasonably balanced, really without much playtesting needed just to confirm that there are no “unusual and unexpected interactions”. This is also a part of how you establish the point system, each class falls within a range of points. These are “weight classes” for ships, just like in boxing.

This is how you can arrive at the ability to have an editor that allows players to make anything they want, from a shuttle/fighter to a battleship, and have it work out to being reasonably balanced. You don't need the entire Federation Star Fleet's range of base hulls to do this (I actually even left a lot of classes out to simplify this), you just need to establish a range with a few of what you programmers call “data points” along the way. You need to established some defined benchmarks such as fighter, destroyer, heavy cruiser, dreadnought, battleship. Those five would work well for SCO, just conceptually for the developers. This provides a framework for how you think about balancing the vastly different ship classes against each other in a 1v1 fight. You have a frame of reference from which to contemplate a fight as being “between a single fighter and a freaking battleship” or a “heavy cruiser and a battleship”. These are both big mismatches, but obviously completely different kinds of fights. This really is the key to creating the editor you want in a way that allows players to create any type of ship they want, and in helping you to balance the combat between wildly mismatched ships. This is also another reason I think the ship point range is currently too low, you are trying to allow the player to create anything from a fighter (Shofixti) to a battleship (Ur-Quan).

 

Also, I assume you aren't currently using the “Range” rating on ships since they are all set to 2. Scryve's weapon reaches the edge of the screen and Trandal's is very short range and they are both rated at 2. This should be an attribute of the weapons/secondaries and not the ship itself. You should also add “damage” and “energy usage” as weapon stats so players see a rating for range, damage, and energy usage. It has to be by weapon, and not ship, because some ships have two “weapons” instead of a secondary device. Also, right now there is no middle ground in health, ships either have a lot or very little. Establishing “classes” to work within will solve this issue all on its own, right now it is as if there are no “cruisers” (“middleweights”) and only a couple “battleships” (“heavyweights”). The boxing analogy works very well because just like ships, boxing also has “hybrid classes”... like a “dreadnought” (“light-heavyweight”) or a “war cruiser” (“light-middleweight”). You can start to see how important defining classes is in making this all work.