So I was talking with some people about how 1600 meters are small for capital ships, especially some sci-fi references like Homeworld ships that are lengthy or flat, and truly massive.
My old thread about design size is a nice start to understand the problem.

I'll add some picture to make the problem more visible, but for example the Pride of Hiigara is supposed to be a massive mothership 2-3km tall. But once I reduced it down to 1600m, it feels tiny.



So here's the idea : add another spacecraft class, Capital or Titan or Mothership

This class would have bigger size limits (5km seems like a good max) and accordingly bigger file size limit.
It would be limited by an adaptive hard-cap (1 for each empire, 1 per 20 officers, 1 per something ?) to avoid spamming these beasts.
They would maybe replace cities if enough volume was allocated to commodities / ships production.
They would have some malus / limitations, like not being able to land on planets or high maintenance cost.

So if I summarize :

Features

• Bigger physical and file size limits
  
• Spacecraft manufacture
  
• [Commodities production]
  
• [Could maybe be "replaced" by another design after some long cooldown, for making it easy to improve the interior for example]
  
• Badass
  

• Huuuuge ships
  
• Can produce ships
  
• [Can produce commodities]
  
• Can make good warships or nice motherships, strategy choice
  
• More server-friendly as it would theorically be worth several warships / cities
  

• Some kind of hard cap limit to avoid spam
  
• - like 1 per empire or 1 per x number of officers
  
• Hard limit coupled with a high maintenance cost (money + parts + special ressources)
  
• Highest FTL signature
  
• Some longer warp cooldowns
  
• No planetary landing
  
• [Too big to use any wormhole except intergalactic ones ?]
  
• Would need a volume allocation ratio limit, to avoid huge glass cannons
  

A lot of programs are moving towards supporting glTF

As written:

Quote:glTF™ is a royalty-free specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models by engines and applications. glTF minimizes the size of 3D assets, and the runtime processing needed to unpack and use them.

Currently colors for bulbs are a dropdown of various pre defined colors, I'd personally like if that was just a color picker like some of the other stuff is.  I grasp the realism factor, but to be fair you can usually drop a color filter over just about any light source and get any color you want at a pretty low level of technology so I'd argue its reasonable.

I am maintaining a line of factory building blueprints that are identical except for intended purpose, it would be nice if that was multi select instead.

Just make ships immune to atmospheric burnup, radiation, and collision damage while being flown by an AI helmsman. Make sure to give those things new damage types that aren't used by anything else so that ships don't become immune to lasers or something while being piloted by the AI.

Occasionally getting stuck to the surface of something during a lag spike is a small price to pay for not hemorrhaging ships and time to celestial bodies.

Haxus, the ship designer is too complicated. I personally do not have the time to learn a new method on how to design ships. The old method was as easy as painting. My primary concern is the difficulty of designing the hulls and interiors and less so the internal modules like sensors and weapons.

I would suggest a secondary easy mode akin to the old painting style along side the 3D designer mode, with a choice between the two.

This is practically the only thing stopping me from playing the game because I used to love designing ships so much. Nowadays it is too much of a hassle. I could not in good conscience recommend designing things to anyone else in its current state.

A bug caused one or more servers to crash over the past few days. The bug was due to the noncombatant state of NPCs. That bug was fixed.

Load on the servers has continued to be my number one concern this week. I know there are other bugs that need attention but this one is the highest priority.

I made some giant strides toward smoothing out the servers today. Thanks for your patience if you waited through the many server restarts today. That should be all for today.

The largest contributor to the lag was due to a read/write lock on a data structure that was getting locked for write too often. The code was improved to be smarter about when to lock that lock for write.

Here is a little background about read/write locks. They are used to control access to a resource in a multi threaded environment.

Many threads can access a resource simultaneously when they lock the read/write lock for read access. The lock allows many threads to lock it for read at the same time.

However, when a thread must have exclusive access to the resource, the lock must be locked for write. Only one thread can lock the read/write lock for write at the same time. The locking thread waits for all current locks to be unlocked before the write lock is granted.

While a read/write lock is locked for write, any other thread attempting to lock the lock will wait until the write lock is unlocked.

Hazeron ships and Cities should generate and be required to manage heat.

Ships:

• Generate heat as a function of power usage per system with some systems have higher heat generation ratios than other ie Life support create "Negative heat" while ftl or sheild generate a considerable amount 
  
• Heat can be passively dissipated using the square cube law this will provide a system to penalize super massive ships while creating a niche for smaller ships
  
• The previous passive disapation would be impacted by the environment when the ship is in frigid atmo the most loss would occur with habitable being the middle and space the least amount of loss inferno would cause heat gain and liquids would have an even more pronounced effect
  
• Passive heat loss would not work when sheild were raised and instead a heat sink module would be required to store the heat when it becomes full the ship would start taking heat damage. Fuel or cryozine could be jettisoned to instantly delete heat from the ship
  
• The more heat a ship has the bigger it's sensor profile making it easier to spot from farther away this would be ships with super good heat magement or even negative heat accumulation would be hidden from sensors 
  

• Cities that are at 90% of the current world volume limit should start generating heat 
  
• Heat can be dissipated with special buildings that dump it into the ocean or atmosphere (if there is one) this would creat a hard limit for atmosphereless moons
  
• Each heat dissipation building should only cause a morale penalty (assuming changing a planets climate is impossible)
  
• The "hotter" a city the more visible on sensors (this would replace the power usage mechanic) it would make big powerful empires more difficult to hide
  

A few additions to the ship/designer for creativity would be nice 

• Animated weapon openings for when a ships weapons are powered on (these could be exactly like landing gear from a designer perspective) that would animate to their open/powered on/ deployed state. 
  
• Animated FTL bits these could function by moving through a a set of key frames at a fixed rate whenever the drive is active. This could work in tandem with the Wormhole texture or even replace it making for some really neat "Warp Cores" or other engine room furniture 
  
• Shield emitter work as a combination of both the weapons and the FTL with a deploying animation set and an on set 
  

Howdy there--Haxus and everyone reading this topic. I haven't been known to post a lot here, but I figured it's never too late to start working on a habit. As many of you might agree, the new designer redefined the rules of designing a warship, and not necessarily in a good way. It used to be that you had to be clever about optimising space in your ship to place components. Each component was an individual piece on your design, taking up a defined amount of weight, adding a specific degree of qualities to your spacecraft. Besides, there was TL limiting the max mass you could design your craft to have, and, henceforth, max volume remained very limited, which somewhat prevented the creation of literal Death Stars.

Things have changed.

Designs can now have much more potential than they ever had back in the days of the old designer. Which also means balancing is going to be more delicate. But it's not necessarily for the worst, of course. We have never had that much creative freedom in SoH before the 3D designer, and although I too would be one to argue it is overly concept for the average player, this isn't the point I aim to debate in here, so I will refrain from discussing it in this thread, and invite each and every reader to do the same.


"So what's your point?" you may ask. Volume. The way volume is addressed in Shores of Hazeron has never really been balanced in itself. It is pure fact to say that bigger is better, and in my opinion, this is an issue for three reasons:

First issue, it unbalances planetary conquest quite greatly in the invader's favour. Buildings cannot take up as much volume as spacecrafts, and as a result, meta defence buildings are going to be extremely vulnerable to meta warships. This shouldn't be the case: a well-defended world should not be vulnerable to single warships. Fleets can retreat. Cities cannot.

Second issue, it creates a single viable meta design for warships: as big as possible. And since more faces mean the design is going to be more costly in terms of time (and resources? Not sure about that), and that the design's boundaries are a giant square, the best and biggest design possible is going to be a gigantic cube. Let's be real, Borgs are badass, but battles of giant, untextured cubes don't really sell much in space operas. To sum it up, it creates bland military fleets, since there is no real need for lighter ships, and, henceforth, no need for diversified rosters in your navy.

Third issue, it's pay-to-win. Hear me out: as far as I know, giant ships can take more than a month to build, and by the time your fleet is completed, your current subscription month will have ended, if your empire has not been ended first. This means the ones who cling to the game and renew their subscriptions are the only ones who really get to enjoy actual space battles in which they get to rival strong fleets. Of course, being more invested in a game ought to be rewarding, but in my opinion being able to even have a fighting chance in war shouldn't be something locked behind a paywall.


Now, to the solutions I suggest, which I consider to be rather easily feasible--but I could be wrong.

The first suggestion I would like to submit would be to make volume have more significant effects on the HP, armour and systems of military buildings. By systems, I mean weapon systems, shields and whatnot. Since buildings cannot be as big as spacecrafts, they should require less volume to achieve similar stats. This would make planetary conquest a bit less of a joke, and more of a serious matter for the invader to consider before acting upon it. Defenders would have a fighting chance if they bothered building a decent defence grid in the first place, and invaders would be forced to commit more forces in such a fight, making the overall battle all the funnier.

Second suggestion would be to implement buff/debuff factors linked to ship volume. Smaller crafts should have slight acceleration bonuses to make them more manoeuvrable without hindering the ship's other systems, as well as armour bonuses to represent the effect of a compact hull. On the other hand, a speed and armour debuff would be linked to increasing your spacecraft's volume, rendering them more vulnerable to damage, and less practical for sublight travel. Vessels that have more acceleration could also have a higher chance of dodging shots, that heavier crafts would be unlikely to have. All of this would give lighter ships some degree of purpose in space warfare, and bring a whole new diversity of meta designs, as building huge would no longer be ideal for combat. The ideal size of warships would not only get smaller but also more diversified. It wouldn't only be about which empire has the most resources, but also which one makes the smartest mix of ship classes to optimise their fleet in the long run.

PLEASE DO NOTE that I am in no way advocating for a suppression of fitting slots such as armour, gravity/rocket drives, and so forth. I am simply suggesting including effects produced by your ship's volume, which would act on the design's stats. Hypothetically, if you built a huge cube and got all those debuffs, but still wanted to compensate the armour debuff by adding more armour than usual, you definitely could, but you'd have to sacrifice space otherwise beneficial for weapons, shields, engines... it's all about making "big" less OP and overall perfect for spacecrafts, and forcing the player to make choices, which is often where things get interesting.

EDIT Third suggestion that I came up with in the comments below, would be aligned to the second one to some degree; giving smaller ships some degree of evasion from weapon locking systems, according to range. The smaller the ship, the closer you'd have to be to lock it and fire at it, or at least fire at it with acceptable accuracy, which would make more sense. A delay for locking any target in a spacecraft could also be another idea, something like "the smaller the target and the higher its acceleration in design stats, the longer the lock." Small frigates would be able to play on that to harass big ships, without causing an alarming rate of damage, but still being able to get some good shots on the big ship, and withdrawing before being caught in its range or locked and shot down, thus forcing the enemy fleet to dispatch their own interceptors in order to chase down yours. The big-ass ship in itself would not be useless, as it would still be a solid countermeasure against medium-to-large enemy ships, and military buildings planetside, but they would be dependent on a more diversified fleet (medium, tanky warships like destroyers, light, speedy interceptors like frigates, and so on), just as any genuine capital ship should be.


Please note that these suggestions are presented as complementary rather than in a "either one or the other" scheme.

I'd like to hear what y'all think about that. Honestly, I feel like right now, SoH does not invite players to design a diversified navy. Civilian fleets (explorers, cargo ships...) still call for some variety in designs, but whenever it comes down to war, the fact there is only one meta, and that spacecrafts are overall stronger than defence buildings, greatly hinders war gameplay as a whole in my opinion.

Anyway, thanks for reading all of that, and be well, all of you!