Custom Ship Design

 

The key to designing a good ship is understanding what you want out of that ship before you begin designing. No one ship can do it all... you cannot have a ship with great sensors, loads of weapons, impenetrable shields and armor, and fast maneuvering.

In truth, the first question you should ask yourself is to design a fleet concept.  What type of fleet do you intend to use?  Will it be a generic fleet, with a number of ships in every class (scouts, fighters, cruisers, and destroyers), or will it specialize? Do you want to just use capital ships, capable of inflicting a massive damage very rapidly?  Do you want nothing but fighters, hard to hit and maneuverable.  Do you want only one or two ships, or do you want a massive fleet? will they need to be able to travel quickly? Will they need to cloak?

Once you have answered these basic questions, you need to choose a race for your fleet.

• Human:  High Energy ships (useful for long-range attacks, high-speed and maneuverability, and the ability to do more than one thing at a time).
• Karpian: Combat Oriented ships (multiple, high damage weapons)
• Vortian: Maneuverable / Cloaking Ships (great for players who like to take their time, scout the map, plan strategy, and get players to attack THEM)
• Thonisian: Jack of All Trades (a flexible race, but dependent on that flexibility. They should never go Toe to Toe with Karpians, Try to over-power Humans, or out maneuver Vortian ships)

Pick a race in which best suits the strategy you already decided upon.  Then begin building the appropriate ships to fill out your fleet.

if you follow this procedure, you should already have a pretty good idea of how big your ship should be, and how much you want it to cost.  Always keep ships size in mind as you design your ship.  It is very easy to begin adding weapons and let your ship expand the wildly out of control.

Power: The first thing you want to look at is your ship's power.  Start out by giving it a reasonable amount.  We can always tweak this number later, but it's a good idea to start here so that you know roughly how much power you'll have to work with.

Grids: Next, fill out your grids.  These you likely will not have to tweak. Make sure you only have the grids you think you'll need or use. if they ship is solely intended to be a scout, will it need a shield or weapons grid?  If it's a space station, intended to go it to one place and then stay there, do you need a large warp grid?  Remember, if you don't think you will be needing the grid for the duration of the game, only put a couple of points into it.  Sure, a cloak grid with only three points and it may be destroyed very quickly, but if you don't plan on getting the ship into combat, who cares?

Weapons: Now, put on your weapons.  You need to decide whether or not you're going to go for long-range weapons (in which case you will probably want missile weapons with high power and low to moderate damage), or low range weapons. If your ship is intended to stick around for awhile, make sure you use beam weapons, or missile weapons with greater amounts of ammunition.  If, however, your ship is intended to be a "one shot wonder", give it a single missile weapon with tremendous power and damage.  With this technique, even small ships can take out a single space station.  Remember, the more weapons you have, the less chance they will all be damaged and you'll find yourself without weapons.  One weapon in a single for it might be able to hit every ship around you, but it can also be hit by every ship around you.  Consider whether or not you want you were weapons on multiple arcs, or more weapons on fewer arcs.

Emergency Procedures: Consider these carefully.  If your ship is a command ship, you'll probably want a greater number of emergency procedures available to you.  However all the emergency procedures are used by computer players as well. if your fighter runs out of ammunition, the "self-destruct" procedure can turn him into a flying bomb.  Keep in mind that while most of these procedures do not take up a considerable amount of space, there are space becomes greater when combined with cloaks and shields (if you had an emergency became to a ship, you don't pay just for the space of the Beacon, but for the space of the extra shields having to protect it as well).

Shields and Armor: While it is tempting to put Shields on first, this isn't particularly effective.  The size of the shields depends on the size of the vessel, as to the maximum amount of shields you can put on.  The bigger your ship, the more shields they can support.  If you put shields on first, you won't be able to put on as many as you could later. You can have shields totaling [2 x the square root of your ship size]. A ship of 100 size can have 20 shields. A ship of 2000 size can have shields up to 89.  And remember, while you are adding shields, you're also adding ship size!  Once you get your shields up to pay high number, the chances are your ship will have expanded amount that you can support even more shields.  Just remember well your adding shields that you did have a target size.  While it may be tempting to set your shields to the highest that they can go, remember that the bigger your ship gets, the easier it is to hit.  The more shields you have, the greater the chance you'll need them!