Forked from the Ship Design Basics thread, the quoted questions pertain to detail of simulation and level of complexity in the combat system, which seems appropriate for this thread...
eleazar wrote:MikkoM wrote:Also maybe making this decision would be easier if we would now how detailed the damage model will be. Since I would think that choosing a more detailed ship design system, like a grid or slots system, would make a lot more sense if the damage model system would also be very detailed. This way it could actually matter where you place those inside components, like the bridge (if these will be in the game), since it could suffer damage and so affect the performance of the ship. However if these components will only suffer damage randomly, so their place inside the ship is not important, then maybe a less detailed system like a list system or Kharagh`s hybrid system would be better.
I'm rather dubious about having a damage model where individual components take damage. With only a few seconds per turn, i imagine it would be quite hard for the player to quickly evaluate the health of multiple ships. Can someone provide an example of a non turn-based game fleet game that successfully implements such a system?
Not all battles will necessarily involve so many ships that the player won't care about the details about any of them. Particularly at the start of the game, there might be single ships or small fleets fighting, or fighting space monsters. The player would care about each individual ship in this situation.
Of course, if there are dozens or hundreds of generic ships being ordered about, each individual one loses much of its significance... If this is a common occurrence at the middle or end of the game, then we'd want a complex damage system to work out so that the player can ignore the details when there are lots of ships.
However we presumably also want a variety of sizes or "roles" of ships to be involved in battles. There might be a few important ships in a large fleet that the player cares a lot about, and would want to keep track of subsystem status of, while the rest of the masses of more generic ships can be safely ignored.
MikkoM wrote:But then there is also the gaming experience to be considered. Now by this I mean that maybe even if the damage model can`t calculate every hits effect on all systems some people might find it enjoyable to make detailed ship designs and by so doing they can get more out of the space combat.
I don't think this project is in the habit of adding non-functional complications to the design. For nearly every finalized feature some players want finer control, or at least the illusion of it. But such pseudo-features haven't been added.
Much of the relevant parts of the design so far has been about planet / economy management. A common problem with such systems is that there is too much micromanagement, and things get tedious, and in particular, not fun.
With ship design though, the situation might be different. A number of people have expressed their particular enjoyment of ship design as an activity (whereas few have so-acclaimed managing planet build queues).
Perhaps analogously, GalCiv lets players do quite complex, but purely cosmetic, ship design. Given the apparent interest in this feature, it's inherent funness outweighs its practical irrelevance.
Now, if we can make a slightly more complicated, and thus hopefully more fun, ship design system in which the details actually matter to ship performance, it might be justifiable additional complexity.
We might want to do so carefully though... to tailor the complexity to the justification. In particular, if there are only a few important ships amongst many generic ones, then the design complexity of those important ships, and thus the detail of their status that is tracked and displayed, should be appropriately different. Perhaps that might mean something like the large important ships having more space/slots for parts to keep track of...