| I'll be interested in seeing you try to turn that into me advocating only 25 ships |
Vags, you have repeatily advocated being emotionally attached to every one of your combat ships in GC. You have stated repeatily that you should and would form an emotional attachment to about 25 ships, and that should be the norm, in your view, of the GC game play experience. According to your earliest statements, the game should limit the number of ships to 25. When multiple people have called you out on the issue of how having only 25 ships would affect gameplay, you have elaborated that you are in favor of allowing more ships, up to 100, but stated that you'd only care about 25 or so ships, and that is the upper limit of combat ships that you felt should be allowed, as it would be all that should be needed. The other ships would be throw away or non-combat items like colonizers, unarmed scouts and drones, transports, freighters, and constructors. If you really want to hunt for it, look for the thread where I stated that most people would only be able to become attached to between 12 to 24 ships. AIR, that is the thread where you first stated your magic number of "25" as being how many ships you could get emotionally attached to.
My point to you is, and has always been, that at any hard limit you've suggested, it's going to be too small for people that play on the larger sized maps. I know from experience that a 100 hard limit on my ship numbers would completely destroy the later gameplay on Large maps with Rare worlds, in GC1. I believe it is best to not limit set a hard limit on the ship numbers other then what the base code architecture (ie, MAX_INTEGER which is quite large number for ships in the current MS architecture being used by Star Dock) or memory space imposes, so that even at the maximum size settings, players still won't bump up against it.
So what should we use to limit ship numbers? Money. Plain and simple economics. Each ship has some cost to maintain, and the game's economics will limit the total number of ships any empire might support. That allows larger empires to afford more ships then a smaller empire. This builds in an effective scaling factor, both for play time in game (early game, you cannot afford a huge armada because you have few worlds generating significant income to support the ship costs), and by empire size (the more worlds generating cash, the more ships you can afford). It also would allow players to tweak their empires to be better money generators, at the cost of production and research capacity, if players need to support more ships for a particular span of time. For instance, for a big slug out with your main, cross galaxy rival. Does that not sound more strategic then just building the biggest ship you can because you have some hard limit that you are going to bump against? That's what hard limits that players hit to easily cause. It forces players to build the biggest combat ship possible at all times, as they need to maximize their fighting capacity. And when you players are forced to do a particular thing, that take away their choices. And that reduces their fun.
As for your cited refitting issues, let's examine those, as they are about pertainent fun with the game.
#1 - Costs: In reality, even a modest refit will often cost more then just building new. This is a simple reference point, as we can choose other models for GC2. What are the game effects of choosing to make it cheaper to refit/upgrade (versus using a realistic upgrade model)? Players will upgrade rather then retire their old units and build new units as their replacements. Is it more fun to upgrade old units? Upgrading a unit is neither fun nor unfun in itself, although the UI and MM involved can make upgrading
unfun. Should upgrading be free? I believe not. Why not? Because if upgrading was free, it would encourage micro-management upgrading of all your ships whenever you got a new tech, and would lend itself to serious cheese exploits. I'd personally find a cost to upgrade being cheaper then building new to lead to a faster game experience, which would permit more games to be played. More games, more fun.
#2 - Time: It is realistic that it should take some amount of time to perform an upgrade. However, if you allow upgrading "in the field", this is unfun. It does add strategic concerns to the game (should I upgrade my units here, or retreat them to better observed/defended area?). However, the net effect on most players game play is that they would just not upgrade line combat units while action is deemed likely. This has the effect of making a game take longer to play. Anything that makes the game take longer, encourages players to find a more efficent alternative.
#3 - Location: Having to take a ship to a facility to upgrade is a well understood game mechanic. What effect does this have on game play? Again, front line units won't be upgraded while action is deemed possible. This will make the game significantly longer, as ships will have to traverse from their current station to the upgrade facility and then back to the front again.
This mechanic makes it faster to (rush) build new and ship the new units to the front. This impact is further aggravated if the facility has some production value that it applies to the time it takes to refitting, so that less industrially developed worlds take longer to refit a ship then heavy industry worlds.
The question is, where do people think the balance point of what is acceptable, versus what isn't? Between the delays and dealing with the MM of upgrading (whether its just clicking an "Upgrade at..." menu choice and then clicking on a location on the main map (and then, what to upgrade to)), it is easy to push the point of dealing with the details to "unfun". GC2 isn't exactly heavy on the details and MM, although it is headed that way with the new planet tile management and the design your own ship functionality. Too much MM may become a real issue with the GC1 customer base, and I know Brad has stated that he wants to avoid adding in too much MM into GC2.
Those are my concerns. I don't see refits mattering much on the larger maps (large, huge, and gigantic), because the travel time will become too great for getting older ships back, upgraded, and returned to the front in a timely fashion. On smaller maps, refitting will be highly efficent, as travel time will be very small factor in comparison to the gains of improved ship capacity. I believe this is the reason that Brad has decided you should be able to instant upgrade anywhere you have influence, at a cost. To make upgrading an option on the larger map, cut down on MM, and keep the gamer on track and focused on his strategy, rather then worrying over rotating out older ships while trying to maintain an effective border guard and getting ready for the next territory annexation.
