chief_chaman478
No, nothing was changed. Walking speed along the corridor is more, than speed through the rooms.
Building Academy
barsnik96 change of meta? i always thought they were usefull, especially in rail gun shield moudules
chief_chaman478
Corridors are situational, personally I find myself using double walkways when I need to move power around and only using corridors on smaller ships or to power ammo factories.
The rest of my comment:
No corridors or walkways to efficiently move power around.
I'm referring the logistics. For example: if you mouse over the small laser at the front, you can see that the nearest source of power is 50m away through corridor, four shield generators, three quarters, two missile storages, an FTL drive, and a large cannon. Admittedly, I'm picking the worst example I could find, but it does examplify the underlying problem.
Routing power through rooms is less efficient and more crewpower intensive then using a corridor, which in turn is less efficient then using a double wide walkway. Small reactor-based crafts can get away with no corridor or walkways by having the reactor touching everything or only going a short distance through a room, which saves weight in corridor at the cost of losing out on the cheaper power provided by larger reactors. Outside of some ion setups, mediums and larges can't do the same because everything they power doesn't fit next to them.
Oh, and also:
Hatter
15. Could consolidate bunks into corridors
I am basically going to re-do the pylons, but the center will be interesting.
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I'm new to the thread, so I'm not really sure where to start with this except post something and see where it goes... That being said, I GUESS I'll open up with an early design and work my way up from there? My earliest designs were already improved on as I went through multiple play-throughs, though I guess this one sort of stands out as one that stood out as... SORT OF a decent craft, if not for certain distinct flaws that I would go on to avoid later.
Capitol Destroyer - 1,785,000 cost, 362 crew, 1508.8 Tonnes
"A Capitol ship, very heavily armed and with some degree of defense. Be advised that while this craft has a very powerful initial attack, prep time is very slow."
This is a craft where I experimented mostly with crew assignment, but at some point, I lost said crew assignments. At the same time, though, I sort of lost interest in that sort of thing because of how involved it is, which just didn't seem worth it in the long run. This in particular is, I guess, where I could probably most improve on?
Edit: A couple of my more recent builds can be found here: https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/10586-a-strange-little-thing if that's something to go off of.
I_Am_Jarvis To cut a long story short: You ended up in the 'spam'-phase (everyone had that at one point), which basically represents a 'much helps much' mentality. However, that naturally increases the cost and actually decreases efficiency, so it's far from optimal. Apparently it's where most people end up before coming here, so you'll find similar lists of issues for other ships too:
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that ship is desperately overcrewed and has too many reactors
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engine rooms are rather inefficient when not used to the full extend
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all storage besides battery storage is worse than factories (with extremely few exceptions)
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the back is completely unprotected and the front as well as the sides are lacking in defenses too
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pd is rather bad at shooting down missiles, a craft of this size should use flak
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a proper thruster distribution is important for maneuverability and can add massively to survivability and damage potential
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missile/factory ration is 3 launchers to one factory, but 2 launchers fit better on a factory, so that's common and acceptable too
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crew is rather slow even with walkways, to try to place the factories and then the quarters as close to the things they supply as possible without exposing them too much
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placing explosive parts close together easily leads to chain-explosions dealing massive damage to your ship
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internal armor is the only effective way to protect from penetrating weapons like railguns and cannons and also adds to general survivability
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putting your control rooms close together will make it rather easy for the enemy to pick of the second after destroying the first, so it's better to distribute them over the ship instead
That's what I found until now, gtg for now, but I'll probably add a ship for you to test yours against soon.
CursedPh4nt0m Yeah, like I said, it was mostly intended for screwing around with crew assignment, hence why there's so many crew quarters. As for the design itself, I THINK what was intended was that if it ended up in a fight it couldn't win, there'd be the contingency plan of - once detonated - resulting in a light, thruster-heavy craft that could make a quick getaway, though I did learn later on that having that sort of mentality makes for crafts that are fairly ineffective in the long run. Take THIS most recent craft I made for example, which is basically my Cosmoteer rendition of the Death Star.
Now... I know it doesn't have a small hole as a glaring weakness, but other than that, I'd say it works well enough as a non-mod representation. At the same time, though... It's laughably short-range, which honestly isn't great for a craft of this size, which I do recognize, but last time I checked the Death Star doesn't have missiles... I also made sure to make this thing basically armor EVERYWHERE except for where the crew would need to traverse, so it IS completely functional... It's just also a wee bit underwhelming for the fact that it costs a whole 6.25M credits... And weighs 9,365 Tonnes... Speaking of contingencies, that I mentioned at the start, notice that this one has one as well, but in this case, it doesn't impact the overall effectiveness this time. Even so, this - I'm PRETTY sure - is more cost effective than the previous craft.
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I_Am_Jarvis
(standard not-a-teacher-disclaimer)
Have you alreadyread 0neye's guide to ship building in the guides section of the forum? If not, do so.
Anyways, problems with your ship:
Unnecessary reactors (especially the engine compartments, which could run off of one reactor), FTL cores are excessively armored, could consolidate small reactors into mediums, unnecessary doors, and reactor chaining takes out entire weapon batteries and all four control rooms are consolidated in the blast radius of a single reactor.
Also, by nature of the distributed weapons it can't effectively focus fire. But I consider this more a design choice then a flaw.
In testing, this dies fairly easily against three of your 'capitol destroyers' inspite of being worth ~3.6 capitol destroyers, credit-wise. I am dubious that it is more cost-efficient.
Could you test it against two (2) of these EMP-Cannonwalls with Normal AI on all ships? I'm assuming you know how to use creative mode's battle helper.
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Hatter
"In testing, this dies fairly easily against three of your 'capitol destroyers' inspite of being worth ~3.6 capitol destroyers, credit-wise. I am dubious that it is more cost-efficient."
Simultaneous or consecutive? There's actually a huge difference between the two, because simultaneous essentially MULTIPLIES the overall effectiveness, rather than stacks linearly. I can test this myself while I'm at it, though I have to say I'm having trouble figuring out how one copies other people's builds into Creative...
Also, the excessive armor is more-or-less intentional to sort of reflect the durability that the original Death Star had. I should make it a point that this build was essentially a mock-build with more purpose towards representation over effectiveness, though the latter was done to the best of my ability without losing the former.
That being said, there IS one craft that I'm currently working on that's more or less an attempt to make something that's really compact yet still very effective while keeping the cost... SORT OF low, but not hindering low:
Speaking of, trying my darnedest not to be annoyed at the hitbox for those Heavy Laser Blasters, with how that extraneous space ahead of them is obnoxiously where I'd want the armor to have connected for better protection... Actually... I JUST noticed that it's like a mini Capitol Destroyer, so I think I'll test one or two of these on it...
Edit: . . . YEP! Way more cost effective than the Capitol Destroyer. Two on one, they ate it for breakfast, lunch, AND dinner with surprisingly low damage to one (I actually kinda expected one to die to the C.D.'s initial strike) and that's with being collectively cheaper...
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I_Am_Jarvis
I tested simultaneously. For information on downloading ship designs, see here: https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/4-how-to-save-share-and-play-ship-designs
[Edit]
Taking a look at your 'croc-head', it still has a problem with reactor chaining (albeit to a lesser extent then your other craft), fire extingushers too centralized instead of spread out, your thruster arrangement can be power with one reactor, exposed side shields, and the lower most missile launcher hits the thruster 2/3 of the time. Also as Phantom stated, a single missile factory can supply 2.5 launchers
dodo_bear Better, but the ammo and missile factories still aren't directly connected to cannons/launchers. Try moving all of your ammunition factories as close as possible to the canons.
The electrobolters, point defense turrets, and small lasers inside are largely useless. The front reactors are undefended.
Also, for the front segment, crew can't pass through a railgun accelerator and you have a bunk with no doors.
You can put three huge thrusters around a single engine room.
Hatter Okay, yeah, that link was a huge help, thanks... Definitely was a need-to-know. Also, now that I was able to test it like you asked, yeah, it's soooo bad as a combat craft, especially against multiple opponents, especially ones of decent build quality... The cost effectiveness makes it about as bad as the time I made a TANK for the heck of it XD
About 1,075,000 in cost, but I'm pretty sure it couldn't kill a single craft of good build above 500,000, it's such a silly build, but it's one of those things that just had to happen once I thought of it... There ARE some points made about it in the thread I introduced this in, right here: https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/10586-a-strange-little-thing/8 and I do make my arguments for this while acknowledging that, yes, I am WELL aware that it is not a combat effective craft. It, like the "Stella Mortem" (The Death Star replica), are mainly just show pieces, made for the sake of it and not really anything else.
Anyways, on to the critiques about the Croc-Head... Like I said before, this is basically just a smaller, much more compact and significantly less stupidly made Capitol Destroyer. That being said, I know I can probably rearrange a couple things around and HOPEFULLY not alter the price in doing so (since that was the idea of this build), but other than that, it's honestly about where I'd expect it to be, just that it COULD have been better if not for a certain game property, but I MIGHT be able to work around that, honestly...
Also, I kinda figured as much with the thruster area, I can see if I can work something out with that as well. As for the case of the missiles, sure the factories could support 2.5 each ON PAPER, but in practice I find it better to consider travel time, and the fact that there's almost no corridor space whatsoever, I figured each for 1.5 would be good to stay on the safe side.
In the case of it being volatile like everything else, I get that, but at the same time, this scale of craft is cheaper, which means it's more expendable, so strategically speaking, it's no the worst strategy to go all out, if done correctly, and the Croc-Head is actually surprisingly hardy compared to the crafts I tested them against, for their cost, so I'll take that as a win in my book.
Saying that, I've still yet to see a craft that's anywhere near as cost effective as the Cegna Rei. I mean that thing is an absolutely godly design, to be in the game as a player build that made it in (Also mad respect for the fact that it also looks like an overpowered rendition of the Galaga fighter), I don't think I could ever come up with a design as good as that thing is without the price being at least twice over...
Disclaimer: still not a teacher since last time I said it.
I_Am_Jarvis The guide is extremely helpful.
If you want to see cost effective craft, I'd recommend trying competitive multiplayer. You will explode repeatedly, but you'll learn a lot doing it.
I disagree that travel time reduces the number of launchers a factory can support. I believe that an increase in travel time merely increases the amount of crew required to keep a launcher supplied, as ultimately the factory produces the same amount of missiles/sec and the launchers have the same consumption regardless of placement.
And since nobody else has sent out a test:
Would you try your 'croc-head' against this totally original, not at all based on anything, ship?
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Hatter
Hah! Oh yeah, so original alright XD Sure, I can do that...
Edit: ... Yyyep... At first it was surprisingly even, then the missiles from your version found their sweet spot and gutted it. The shield setups from both are so tanky, but yeah, it was more or less a matter of which one's missiles found their sweet spot first... I guess that's technically still a win, even if by chance, after I saw the cost difference XD
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I_Am_Jarvis Would you mind doing repeated tests?
Edit: The 4x speed might help
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Hatter
I thought about that... but then I gone and went through the trouble of then attempting to make a beefier version instead that could potentially out-pace it, and then that blew up very quickly... Literally. Then after I tweaked THAT, I realized why it blew up so easily. I forgot fire extinguishers XD Anyways, I'll get back to you on that once I've finished screwing around with testing this and THEN repeating the test from earlier...
But uhhh yeah, here's the utter failure:
And this is the one I'm testing right now (I found that the outer bits were actually at a distance where they cause problems for the missiles, so I had to ditch those):
Edit: Still blew up horribly, okay I'm gonna just stop screwing around and just refine the original XD
Edit 2: Okay, so... I'm starting to see what the sole reason of why that thing keeps whipping me. That giant chunk of armor at the front, with the reactor right behind it. I'm even retrofitting my design with EMP missiles, which isn't amounting to anything when the Laser Blasters can't even break through that chunk of armor XD
Hatter
I got one that finally works. It's a little over budget, at 724,000 but it's at least something of my own design that isn't anything overboard... or at least I'm pretty sure... At the same time, though, at least it's brutal, I'll give it that...
(Ignore the fact that it looks like a poorly drawn 8-bit Toad, but it least that way it doesn't look like something ELSE... This is why I shouldn't be allowed to be conscious after midnight.)
I've also made a modified version of YOUR modified version, ALMOST the same price (only 1,100 more than yours is), but it very easily outlasted your test version, and could have kept going. Heck, I did a 5v5 for the heck of it and four out of five of the modified Croc-Heads survived. Here's the final version:
Made a new ship that I'm honestly a bit iffy on, but I'm testing it versus the above ship, and so far it's scoring - in the Battle Helper - Tie (Both died to fire after being disarmed), Loss, Win, Win, Win, Loss, Win, and Win (just barely), so it's KIND OF better, but not by much, which I'm not too sure about being a GOOD thing, with the ~250,000 price difference. Either way, though, this IS a design that I know would be very good for PVE, so I'm just gonna leave it up to interpretation...
I made a slightly smaller version initially, but it just caved way too easily, which is why I then worked my way to this version.
[Disclaimer: not a teacher]
Odd. The only thing that looks different is the armoring scheme.
I_Am_Jarvis You have too many reactors. Note that you've exceeded the recommended maximum power bar, meaning the ship can't use all of the power the reactors are generating.