Sizemod and miniaturization

Regardless of some of the bugs inherent in the miniaturization research, they way its handled seems odd to me. Weapons, Defense, Engines, and Life support all get larger as your mini research advances. Or at least thats the way I think it works, based on vague recollections of gameplay and what I've been reading about modding.

This seems extremely backwards to me, the whole point of that research was to make those systems smaller so that I could fit more of them on the hull. You could argue that shielding, engines, and life support all need to be bigger in order to support or protect this much larger ship. And it is a larger ship from a capacity point of view, rather than the smaller subsystems implied by the name of the research.

I draw the line at weapons. When weapons are enlarged, they are enlarged only to enhance their power or efficency. This is not the case in Gal Civ 2. The Same weaponry on two different ships require different capacity, but have the same yield. Why? Weapons aren't a system that is based upon the size of the ship. Defense systems must be large because there is more surface space to protect, life support larger because there are more people to support, and engines because there is more mass to push.

As it is now you can't put too many more weapons on a larger hull than you can a smaller one. Which is part of the reason you wanted those larger hulls in the first place, for more powerful armament as well as hit points.

I'd prefer to see weapons with a fixed size instead of having the size based partly on the hull capacity. More powerful weapons would be larger than the less powerful predecesors, further tiers of research on those kinds of weapons would reduce their size somewhat, etc. EsseNtially the way I'd conceptualize it is each successive generation of weaponry is initally much larger but can be researched back down to a size that is almost the same as its precursor. This might also have the neat side effect of preventing you from putting doomsday weapons on small or tiny ships. Thus reducing the smaller ships cost and speeding their production. Being able to field consderably more weapons on larger hulls, with more costly weaponry will also increase both their cost and time to build. Thus widening the gap between the various hulls.

I don't know about anyone else but I often feel there is little difference between hulls of different classes with the stock technology.

Anyone else feel sort of the same? I've modified the hulls a bit so that you get more advanced hulls at every step of that branch of research. But that didn't have as much of an effect as I'd hoped. I'm planning on modifiying the weaponry along these lines as well though so I'm hoping for better.

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It's a rounding error that causes the sizemod weirdness, afaik. The only "fix" for it that I've heard of is simply multiplying the effected values by a factor of 100. While dealing with larger numbers, such as that procedure would create, probably makes things a little harder to keep track of in some ways; it also reduces the effect of the rounding error so that it makes less of an impact.

Someone has already done that x100 idea in a mod, although I have yet to personally try it. Honestly, though, unless you boost your minaturization beyond the levels attainable by default game tech (e.g. custom races, etc.), the bug isn't going to do much in the way of harm. I find that with no racial or external miniaturization bonuses that the bug is overcome once all the miniaturization techs are researched. In any case, by the time a player gets down to researching the last few miniaturization techs, the trp is almost always so high that taking an extra few turns to get them all isn't going to affect the outcome of the strategic situation...unless you have screwed up by the numbers. In the latter case, a few more points stowage will not a victory make.

Edit: One could also make modded components that simply omit the sizemod value. This would leave the piece uniformly sized no matter which size hull it's on. Be careful doing that, though. You could easily end up with an unbalanced mess.

Being a fan of the Honor Harrington series, I aspired to create whole broadsides of lasers and missiles at one time. It worked out ok insofar as the numbers were concerned. I had problems where the actual firing of the weapons were concerned. A given warship may be equipped with 4 missiles and 4 lasers, but in the combat viewer it's a crap shoot as to what and how many weapons actually fire. Hit the replay button and the ship will often display different weapons being fired from replay to replay (same battle, just rewind and replay). A boggling issue, to be sure. As they say around here...Ahh never could figger that 'un out.

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