I think theses changes goes in the right direction
Walt to favor more centralized ship designs
I would like to see more centralised designs too, but experience show that there is some major issues,
I want to share my experience from vanilla tests :
Crew cost :
10 crew members cost already as much as a 10k factory, so there is a strong incentive to place factories next to cannons to reduce crew requirements
Here an example, 7 crew are required to supply cannons 8 tiles away :
Max dedicated crew count :
An Heavy Lazer have 8 storages, so right now for it's supply it can only recruit :
- 8 crew for small batteries
- 4 crew for medium batteries
- 3 crew for large batteries
Also since large reactor produce 3x more power than Medium Reactor, distances may be 3x longer
Power storages can be used as relay, but requires dedicated crew
therefore increasing considerably the complexity of the supply line
Here is my experiment with a large reactor
It cost 495k, never run out of power but it's large reactor still get 1 shot by railfans
to compare, this is 339k, alrought it have less shield :
They all uses walkways mostly, so the corridors buffs does not affect them much
To resume, it seem that the obstacle to centralization is supply lines efficiency over production efficiency
Larges batteries sizes are great, but it reduce the max number of crew involved and the maximal distance traveled