Gigantism - Why build better when you can build bigger

[Bkwrm]

This is actually one of the things driving me away from multiplayer. I don't mind a few epic capital ships, but most fights boil down to whoever has the bigger ship wins (assuming they're both relatively competent designers). They just have more space inside their ship to pack in ungodly amounts of shields and weapons in return for a bit more sluggish movement. There's also very little room for strategy inside the fights themselves, need some more active defenses or whatnot.

One possible option is mass tiers. Just a basic example:
Tier 1 - Small fighters - Shield and power % bonuses. So have more room to build various weapon systems.
Tier 2 - Destroyers - Power Bonuses, shield penalties. Focused on powerful weapons at a cost of shields.
Tier 3 - Motherships - Shield and power penalties in addition to longer reload times. Plenty of interior space so this would help with the kitchen sink approach currently in the game as well as giving slightly smaller ships a chance.

Lots of balancing can be done at that point that can target specific mass ranges encouraging people to build specific ship sizes for more reasons than roleplaying. My 2 cents anyways.

 

[Mork2]

Just some of my thoughts and ideas that may effect this or for you to think about.

Server settings actually play quite a part in whether or not a small ship can avoid bobby AI directed fire.
If you setup a bobby AI to fire at a stationary target you can see how it generates the error in its random shots. It generates a filled in square around the target core around 10 to 15 squares out. When the bobby AI fires at a moving target it shifts the centre of its aim point to the projected point the target will be by the time the round gets there then adds that random factor of 0 to the other error limit to the left or right and up or down. To completely avoid the weapons fire you need to shift your entire ship from the core to over 10-15 blocks to one side before the weapons fire gets there. The problem with increasing the server speed limit is while you can go faster your acceleration rate not your top speed determines if you can avoid cannon fire. Also by increasing the server speed limit you increase the flight speed of cannon rounds making it even harder to avoid since it reaches you before you have time to change direction. To avoid bobby AI fire you need high enough lateral acceleration to avoid cannon fire. This also means keeping your distance as the closer you are the quicker the cannon rounds get to you and the less time you have to dodge.

Since beams are instant I assume your just going to have to stay out of range of those and use longer range weapons.

Setting change to favour small ships
So having higher thrust output would increase the acceleration rate of small craft and the large engine systems for capitals still has a capping effect so while they would get slightly faster acceleration the small craft will get all of it. It should be modifiable somewhere in one of the xml files.

Overdrive Idea
Hmm just had a great idea make overdrive defensive effect not only increase max speed but increase thrust and thus acceleration. Large ships still have thrust capped so the overdrive effecting acceleration would fall off with size.

You also need the overdrive so you have a higher to speed to move around a larger ship that took longer to hit max speed.

You also need some kind of missile point defence since there should be some missile - beam turrets missiles that should catch up to you. Or preferably perma jamming so that they won't be homing fired at you. You shouldn't have to worry about any of the other missile types as they are either dumb fire and max out at 2 x server speed limit or slower than the max server speed limit (fof shotgun missiles) which you should be overdriving.

But no matter what unless there is a large number of smaller fighters or drones the capital ship can tank you. If we had some kind of AI squadron where you could setup AI wingmen to fight with you it might be possible or some way of configuring the drone AI. Doing that will be difficult to program I imagine.

Large ships are painful to turn around at no point should a player controlled fighter pass in front of a capital ship. As a small ship you can just run away the capital ship doesn't have enough acceleration change directions and catch up. Generally a capital ship can't outturn or out accelerate anyone and has to use a jump drive to get away.

One capital ship facing two half sized capital ships should be in trouble. As long as both the half sized ships split up and orbit in separate directions. The one that comes under fire should jump away when its shields are dropped. This should leave the other outside of the firing arc of the one large capital. Of course at this point either can probably jump away unless some kind of jump interdiction is enabled.

Capital ship design
Also considering design options available its possible to make very dangerous capital ships compared to just large masses of blocks with many turrets all over it. Effective weapons combinations are very important. You can build bigger and better it is doable. I can usually add perma radar jam to my capital ships usually multi million block affairs but getting the 60% ion defence is a bit tricky but doable. On the other hand I should really finish one of these and not just the get most of it done and stop.