no refitting of ships doesn't make sense

[intrigue]

I think a refit of ships option should be in the game...
I realize that its probably ommitted for game-play balance... so make it cost more to upgrade a ship than build one from scratch. I don't care - it just seems illogical to me to make ship brand new, even if I have a new engine or whatever.
I can think of numerous space stories which half of us think about when playing these games, where refitting the ship of the story is a big theme.
I want refitting because it only makes sense, and I want refitting cuz re-enacting my favorite story seems more hollow without

[vmxa1]

I do not see any reason why refits should be play balance issue. Moo2 had and yes the AI often was tardy about doing it, but it would if it had money and humans do not allows upgrade all ships at all times.
I think they had an implementation issue as well. Balancing with upgrades can be a problem, but not insurmountable. Now I fear that the amount of effort is too great to implement it. (sigh)

[Harry Seldon]

I found a great way to refit your ship! Take an enormous fleet and send it against a guardian because you know you have the tech to crush it. Be sure not to look at what exactly you're sending because you know you are the Master of Orion! Then watch in horror as your Eagle Attack/Level 20 Tech armada w/ Troop Transport support detail gets destroyed in less than thrity seconds! Rebuild, and viola! Your newly refitted fleet will be ready to go. Just allow fifty-one hundred turns for delivery.

[duodecimal]

An obvious enough idea is to have reserves automatically upgrade once you've approved a new design.

An old ship with an obsolete design in the reserves will be upgraded to a current design with the same mission and same hull class, if one exists. If a current design exists, the mainenance cost for those reserves gets bumped up to 50% of the PP cost - or whatever - while a box for 'allow reserve upgrades' is checked.

It would fit in with the macromanagement philosophy. Now all we need is a usable ship design interface, as opposed to the nightmare we have now.

Of course, who knows what this would actually take, programmingwise.

One constraint would be you would only be allowed to have one ship of each hull class and mission. Otherwise, you'd need rules on which design is selected for auto-refit if you have multiple versions of the same hull/mission.

[Harry Seldon]

It would be very nice if you could choose a design from the fleet screen and refit with the newest technology instead of having to dry dock individual fleets/ships. I'd like to have the AI take care of it, too.

[duodecimal]

Well, realistically, ships on active duty don't undergo massive refitting. Doing it in the reserves makes some level of logical sense and - since the ships are already 'hidden' and in a single massed pool - may be easier to code.

Also, since going into and out of reserves entails a turn-penalty, ship refitting can be nestled inside that as well.

It goes without saying that the Shipyard and Fleet screens need massive refitting themselves.

[vmxa1]

Not sure what you mean by active duty. I was on several ships in the Navy that when into drydock for refitting. Work was done at varing levels, and some ships in the yard were massively upgraded as they did to the BB for vietnam. IOW it has been done in life, but it required time and money. That stops a lot of it. You do not get muchin the way of new guns, but you can get new radar, ECM, ECCM, fire control computers and the like. No armor replacements either. OTOH it is only a game so let us have are fun.

[Epistax]

I think refitting on some levels make sense.

1) change armor level between light, medium, heavy, etc.
2) replace missiles/torpedoes with different models.
3) add new special systems.

However all of this should come at very high cost compared to regularly fitting with such items.

[duodecimal]

Here's the slightly-more-thought-out version I posted to the "Reasonable" thread over on IGMOO/Bugs:

Refit Suggestion
Kalbear already made some suggestions, and I'd been thinking the same thing over at apolyton this morning. Here's probably the easiest way to add Refit to MOO3, since we were both thinking along the same lines and, may I say, brilliantly so.

1) Refitting to occur only for Reserves. The time penalty for disbanding and re-forming task forces fits perfectly. Fleets on active duty don't get cleaned out and upgraded with new engines and hull armor, so it's realistic as well.

2) This might be a bone of contention, but might be needed to keep things simple. Allow only one non-obsolete design for each mission, hull size, and class. Creating a new design of the same parameters will trigger a "Do you want to make the old System Lancer Long-Range Attack Design to be Obsolete?" question.

3) Create a new toggle/check box for "Allow Reserve Refits" on the appropriate screen. Not sure if this is Fleets, Budget, Shipyard, Empire, or what.

4) Maintenance costs for ships eligible for refit (i.e., are of an obsolete design and a design of the same class, size, and mission exists as current) are increased to some X% of the PP cost of the new design. This higher maintenance cost is only in effect for the turn(s) that an upgradeable obsolete ship is in the reserves.

5) Make sure that toggling and un-toggling the "Allow Refit" button updates the maintenance cost line item on the Ledger.

In the interest of keeping things simple, and since this is occurring in the reserves, shipyard sizes and production capacity may not need to be considered - only the AU cost of upgrading from #4.

If, for the sake of some semblance of realism, we want it to take some time to upgrade ships, we can take the total PP cost of the upgrades (the equivalent of the X% cost in #4), divide that by the empire's total PP output (or a set fraction thereof), and have that determine the amount of time it takes to upgrade obsolete ships. Ships in the process of being upgraded are marked with an * or something on the Reserves list and are not available for task force formation (but may still be scrapped if desired).

Overall, this fits into the macromanagement philosophy, and happens enough behind the scenes that, compared to other refitting methods, may be easier to code.

As far as new features go, this is probably the most important thing that needs to be added (as opposed to the things that are broken and need fixing).

[vmxa1]

I think the biggest draw back will be the means to implement any refits, but I would sure like to see it done in some fashsion. Of course if they did they would soon be gettign blasted for some aspect not suiting all needs, oh well.

[habadacus]

Wasn't it the case in MOO2 when you discovered a new drive/fuel cell it went into effect automatically? I don't know how realistic that was, but it happened for all players in the game so it was relatively balanced, and streamlined the process so much compared to this model. I really find that I make tech improvent in the various ship systems so quickly that I am never happy with my current designs. Now obviously it would be too far-fetched and powerful to apply that rule to armor/weapons, but the ship design screen in MOO2 was actually fun to play around in until you found the right mix, I remember spending lots of time tweaking different designs. Now I find I'm spending lots of time just adding new drives for every ship type in the civilian and military fleets. QS did such a good job reducing MM hell in the rest of the game, I wonder why they made it so much worse in certain areas?
Also, although the different ship missions is a cool idea, I'm thinking if I want a Point Defence ship, I'll build a ship and put lots of point defence weapons on it. If I want a missile ship, well, I'll build a ship and put lots of missiles on it. I think the mission types should have just been "Stand-off" "In-close" "medium range" "avoid-contact", etc, and let us build the ships to fill those task forces. This way I'm not juggling 18 different ship types in addition to the 9 different hull-sizes for each ship type every time I discover a new whizz-bang shield or whatever. Put another way... I'll design a few different ships , and then I'll determine what they are gonna do. No artificial task force rules, good task force design is it's own reward, and I can build less, more balanced designs to fill multiple roles, so I have less designs to have to go in and rebuild every 10 minutes. But if the design interface were given an overhaul the same way other processes in the game were, I could live with the artificial limits, because a new discovery wouldn't be such a mammoth chore to actually use. Does that make sense?

[duodecimal]

The difference though is that this isn't MOO2. In MOO2, it was obvious when a specific weapon fired from a specific ship and hit another ship's defenses, and what those defenses are.

In MOO3, such analysis is difficult, if it's possible at all. You don't know (at least, not without memorizing all the weapon visuals/sounds, if they're all different) what weapons are firing from which ships, and which ships are taking the hits and what defenses work against them. Using Autobuild for each class/size/mission is pretty much the only worthwhile option for now.

I'm not even sure why they bothered allowing us to manually configure ships at all, except perhaps to get a colony module in a destroyer hull by lowering system speed. What may have been a more consistent approach would have been to set a slider at 'obsolescense level', and the computer would automatically generate new designs to replace the outdated ones.

Of course, most of us would hate that, so we get a ship design philosophy incompatible with the overall game design. Streamlining task force formation, cleaning up the shipyard screen, and implimenting the refit option in my earlier post is probably one of the better ways of resolving this bit of mess.

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by habadacus
Wasn't it the case in MOO2 when you discovered a new drive/fuel cell it went into effect automatically? I don't know how realistic that was, but it happened for all players in the game so it was relatively balanced, and streamlined the process so much compared to this model.

Ships had three classifications or states. 1) built 2) designed 3) yet to be designed.
Drives and fuel cells were automatically add to all classes.
Armor was automatc for class 2 and 3. You need to refit class 1 ships to get it.
Shields and armor are not applied to class 1 or 2, but will be to class 3 as soon as you goto design it. This can cause you to not be able to still fit all of the weapons or specials you had before the new discovery.

[Arnelos]

This thread is beating a VERY dead horse...

People have been talking about the pros/cons of this for months on end...

At some point, the devs had been considering having some tweak-like refits to ships (minor modifications within a few levels of tech or something like that), but certainly not unlimited modification and many things wouldn't be removable or add-able to a ship/design.

Apparently, at some point they decided to forgo even that limited level of refit/modificiation and make you build new designs.

:shrug:

As I said, people are beating a dead horse. It's been argued over since that decision was apparently made months ago.

[duodecimal]

Thank you, Arnelos. Now we never need to talk about this again.

I am sure that, without your keen insight, our time would have been endlessly misspent here.

Our eternal gratitude is yours, oh lordly Discoverer and Purveyor of All Things Obvious.