The new tech tree associated with the new ability to custom build ships implies a lot of balancing on the ships elements, which is not currently done. Let me explain.

When you build a ship, you get to choose:

- attacking weapons (number, type)

- defensive layers (strength, type)

From the offensive side of things, here is what you see:

As the tech tree stands now, you can pretty much ignore two of the three weapon paths and concentrate on one (say laser).

So, as the attacker, you can easily (and it does not take long) build a ship boasting a 6 in laser attack and nothing in the way of other attack types or defense factors.

As the defender here is what you see:

Unless you are custom building specifically against an opponent which strength you know, you cannot specialize your defense: it just makes no sense. Suppose that you get the idea of building a ship with a defense of 6 against lasers (maybe you know the ship above is coming at you), then your ship will be an easy picking for smaller attackers fitted with other weapon types. As a matter of fact, an analysis will tell you that the best defense you can have with the current scheme is to build a ship that is also powerfull on offense (just like your opponent) and if possible slightly faster so as to get the initiative in combat. Anything else is suboptimal.

This would already be true if getting a factor of X in attack carried the same cost (and ship space) than getting the same factor in defense. To get a serious incentive to build up ship defense would require to be able to pack twice the attack factor in defense both in cost and space. To be clearer here is an exemple.

I can get beam attack for a space of 6 and factor of 1.

I can get any of the three defences for a space of 3 and a factor of 1.

Given a ship with 18 space, I could be tempted to make it 3 (beam attack)/0-0-0(defenses). It would not be a bad ship.

I could also be tempted to make it a 2 (beam attack)/1-1-0(defenses); looks close.

If I'm lucky, and have information about what's coming at me, I might even decide to make it 2 (beam attack)/2-0-0(defenses) (likely better, but specifically built for a specific task, i.e. kill the 3/0-0-0 ships)

If I did not have a clue on what's coming at me, I probably would decide that making any 2-0-0/1-1-0 ship is better than a 3-0-0/0-0-0 ship. But hardly.

Now, maybe you can see where I am coming: as the game stands now, most techs being equal, the latest ship I put down was a 6-6-0/0-0-0. I only very briefly considered giving that ship any defense, but building only 1 point in defense was taking out 3 points of offense. Obviously not interesting.

Furthermore, It is too easy to climb up the ladder of weapons to get a decisive edge in one kind of weapon, and that's a winning strategy: either an opponent tries to match your weapon effectiveness by climbing up the corresponding defense technology tree. By doing so, he is still losing: a X defense doesn't cancel out the advantage of a X attack (it can be shown that if GC2 uses the same way to assess damage as GC1, then an attack of X vs a defense of X does an average of about X/6 damage)., and furthermore he still has no meaningful attack to field (all his reasearch went into defense, eh!)... not to mention that if his second neighbour's fancy was to develop another attack tree, he is just toast...

Hence:

Do not forget that

(1) any attack factor (even a 1) can kill any defense factor (if the defensor has no attack) and that

(2) having a 1000 defense in all three fields doesn't mean you'll win if you have no attack whatsoever, the reverse being false: If you do have a 1000 attack factor in any one attack field, you're on the right path to get the galaxy : The symetry between attack and defense is just an illusion.

The game should ensure that it is not too easy way to climb the weapon path (or actually any given path). This can be done either by changing the costs (Moo had an exponentialy increasing cost for each level, so that researching level l+1 at some point did not feel as good as researching level l-2 in 4 or 5 other fields) ; another way of achieving the same goal is to make the research tree non linear (a level l+1 tech depending on two or more level l techs). I understand that given the current interface, it may be better to stick to linear trees.

As an afterthought, the current military tech tree is much too dense. There really is no point in having a length of 20 or maybe more. Better reduce the number of techs and ensure that each tech really brings something new. This would make the tech tree easier to understand and manage. And each new level should take twice as long to research that the previous one (see above).

Attack factors from more than one weapon of a kind should not be additive. I tend to believe that a weapon having an attack factor of 3 should be more devastating than 3 smaller weapons with an attack factor of 1. A simple possibility could be to assess the corresponding defense factor against each individual weapon rather than on the sum of the wepaon factors. Displaying ships abilities on the main interface would be more difficult, though. This would also greatly help reduce the basic problem that this post attempt to tackle.

Yves