One example of the above formulae in action dealing with the experience gain of 1 ship of both a winning and losing force, each of which did equal damage to a destroyed enemy vessel worth equal amounts (for comparison's sake).

G = ship experience gain
V = enemy ship experience value = 100
D = damage dealt to enemy ship = 50
E = total hitpoints of enemy ship = 500
S = total shots fire at enemy ship = 10
H = total shots which hit enemy ship = 8
A = accuracy baseline (to be set by ship's experience rank) = 0.6 (60%)
SL = simulated losing fleet's suriviving point strength = 15,000
AL = actual losing fleet's suriviving point strength = 10,000
SW = simulated winning fleet's surviving point strength = 12,000
AW = actual winning fleet's surviving point strength = 20,000

Winning Fleet Ship (WFS):
g = v*d*h*sl*aw / e*s*a*sw*al
= 100*50*8*15000*20000 / 500*10*0.6*12000*10000
= 12,000,000,000,000 / 360,000,000,000
= 33.33 xp gained

Losing Fleet Ship (LFS):
g = v*d*h*sw*al / e*s*a*aw*sl
= 100*50*8*12000*10000 / 500*10*0.6*15000*20000
= 4,800,000,000,000 / 900,000,000,000
= 5.33 xp gained

If only considering the xp gain based upon %age of damage inflicted on destroyed vessel, each of the above ships should have gained 10xp.

Therefore, the WFS benefitted very well from its higher accuracy (80% in relation to experience rank baseline of 60%) and from the overall victory costing less losses and inflicting more casualties than the averaged simulations suggested. Meanwhile, the LFS lost some of the potential experience due to the greater than predicted losses, but gained a bit back from improving accuracy. For the LFS, I feel the xp penalty incurred on the LFS is a fairly justified one considering he both lost and retreated (instead of having the grace to die fighting).

Actually, considering that last bracketed comment ... a further penalty might have to be considered for Klingon and possibly Dominion ships which retreat from combat - due to the action showing signs of cowardice and lack of honour ... hmm ...

Could we impliement something similar to the ship experiance setup used in Sins of a Solar Empire? For any one not familar with the game you can build regular ships that are just cannon fodder and a small number of large capital ships that gain experiance through combat. Each class of ship has different upgrades that it can 'spend' this experiance on once its got to a particular level.

How we could impliement it: so you have your Galaxy class and its upgrades would reflect its function, maybe Expert Diplomat, Engineering teams, Wicked Cool Holodecks or something. Whereas an Excelsior class would focus on experimental warp core designs (improved speed/range) and a Defiant class would be all about the weapons. The point in each case is that the player would be able to chose one over the other when a 'level' is reached in experiance. So if you have two Galaxies one could be specialised as an Engineering support ship (improved repair rates for all ships in it fleet) whereas the other could have an Expert Diplomat aboard (boost to relations if the ship makes first contact, relations trickle if the ship stays in orbit of minor race). You could have this for all ships where the larger command ships would have more options to pick from whereas smaller ships would only have 1 or 2 to choose from (Oberth class: improved science or improved running away).

What do people think?
(Does anyone else like Sins as much as me!?)

Oh i'm familiar with Sins all right. God I love that game.

The upgrade system you mention sounds a <little> like what the BOTE team have done. You can select the stats of each of the ship designs by implementing upgrades to the shields, hull, torpedoes, and phasers. But the downside is that upgrades cost more resources, or a different type of resource. (There are different resources for different hull armor types, Eg. Duranium vs Tritanium)

I don't think Mike wants to have an upgrade system like that in his game, although he's not around at the moment for us to ask. He's jetting off around the world on some work conference thingy. He'll be back in a few weeks time.

Still, I know that he is intrigued by some of the ideas from Sins, so its' entirely possible he might make a u-turn on this particular idea and implement it or a similar system. I'll send Mike a nudge PM so he at least has a link to your post when he returns. You'll just have to wait and see what his reply is, but like I said, it could be a few weeks.

Sounds interesting, I'll have to go back and load up Sins when I get back from China.

Oh, hey Mike. I wasn't sure if you'd be able to pop up or not til you got back. Since you've not got Sins with you at the moment, i'll try to describe the upgrades system that Sins uses for you and those that don't have the game.

Your capital ships are your biggest, most powerful ships, typically having three different weapon types (The game has a lot of weapon types, ranging from Lasers, to Rays, Flash Rays, Plasma, Missiles, Autoguns...), the best firing arcs, heavy shields, heavy armor, lots of hit points, and some of the capitals can also act as carrriers for fighters and bombers.

Each capital ship class also has four unique special abilities. Each race in the game has six different capital ships, and there are currently three playable races, so that makes 72 special abilities in total. Each of the special abilities can be upgraded three times, and their effects vary considerably; they could allow your capital ship to colonise recently conquered planets (So you don't need to wait for slow, defenseless colony ships to do it); some grant your ships special weapons, such as a massive cannon that does huge damage to enemy ships, or a special nuke that kills off huge amounts of planetary population, or a powerful flak cannon to kill off enemy fighters and bombers; they could grant your ship with special defenses, such as a shield recharger, or the ability to create a missile launching platform, or the ability to create fighters and bombers with extra armor and hit points; whilst others have area effects, such as allowing you to steal the income of enemy planets that your capital ship is visiting, or your advanced computers increase the range and accuracy of the weapons of friendly ships in the area.

When your capital ships destroy an enemy vessel, they gain a set amount of experience depending on the class of ship destroyed. Capital ships are the ONLY ships that gain experience. If they gain enough experience to level up, ALL of their stats improve. Weapon damage, weapon firing rate, shield strength, shield repair speed, hull armor, hull hit points, hull repair rate, and possibly even the amount of fighters or bombers they can carry. The stats typically upgrade around 5-10% per level, so level ten ships can be seriously powerful. Capital ships also get one upgrade point to upgrade one of their abilities by one level. Each capital ship can level up ten times - but as there are twelve special ability levels, (Four abilities x three upgrades is twelve) no capital ship is able to fully upgrade in all areas. For that reason, you have to specialise your ships (Albeit not by much).

The very first time you choose an upgrade, you activate it. Capital ships are not built with any of their special abilities activated. Once they've been activated, the upgrades will do different things depending on what the ability did. It's a really effective system, and it forces players to make decisions. Capital ships are powerful, and can turn the tide of a battle, so you will want to upgrade their weapon abilities and throw them into battles. But at the same time, you don't want to risk them, so you need defensive abilities and will often end up sacrificing small fleets of weak ships just to protect your damaged capital ships. Repairing is also a slow process in the game; even if your ship is fully upgraded, you've researched all the repair rate technologies, and your ship is near a repair yard, it can take a good few minutes to completely repair all damage, so damage is not a good a thing.

God I love Sins.

For those of you who are lost by everything i've just said, here's a video. Sorry it's 42.56mb, but that's a lot less than the original 125mb that it was before I optimised it. You can see one of my capital ships fighting, levelling up, and then me choosing which abilities to upgrade. Download

If I can jump back in here this is roughly how I would modify the concept for Supremacy.

First of all the leveling system would (like in Sins) be limited to a few ships out of a larger fleet. I would class these ships as 'Flagships' and they would be the ships of the largests most powerful class in a given era (so NX class to Constitution to Exclesior to Ambasador to Galaxy to Sovereign for the UFP). Maybe we could limit the upgrade trees to 3 per class and 3 levels each with a maximum of 6 levels per ship (just for ease of development if nothing else ). That way we would get the essence of Sins without turning it into a Sins clone IMHO.

Just as a side point, would it be possible to limit the number of ships of a given class that you can build and have that limit increase with tech level? My thinking is this: the larger Flagship classes represent not only the state of the art but also a huge outlay of resources. Early in the classes lifespan only a small number are built (a prototype and a handful of sisters), after they have been in service for a while they enter mass production after the design principles have been proven in the field. That way we could represent a NX-01 or an NX-2000, the first ship in the Flagship class is the prototype and has to be in service for a given number of turns before anymore can be built, and during this time the player will have it on the frontlines so it can build up some xp and level its upgrades. This also means that obsolete Flags become the grizzled veterans of the next generation as their numbers can be realistically restricted and it encourages the player use them tactically (you want to field them but not waste them).

I'm just thinking how well this would work from an atmosphere standpoint - it could really capture the essence of the Star Trek franchise in that your first new Flagship would be your 'Enterprise', the top of the line that you use for all the important missions, the ship that the player invests time and emotion in. Listen to me now I'm gushing ...soppy monkey

Actually, prototypes are something that have been mentioned before, and it's an idea that I personally like, although i'm not sure how it would work in practice; it would probably be a nightmare.

The *old* prototype idea worked like this:

You research until you gain access to a new ship class. The first ship that you build would by default be named after the class of ship (So the prototype Sovereign would be the USS Sovereign). The class would then be removed from your production queue for x number of turns or some other condition had been met. Once the condition had been met, the ship would be re-added to your production queue.

Flagships have also been mentioned many times before - usually involving some sort of special abilities. I suppose this could essentially be a modification of that system, applying to flagship classes rather than a specific player-selected ship.

As for limiting the number of ships of a particular class, that's a little more difficult. The game would have to track the number of ships of each class - and the game already tracks a ton of stats. Yet another would mean an impact on performance. Then again, most of the ideas in the game already do.

There are already limiting factors on your ship building efforts though - ships not only need raw materials, but they need Deuterium fuel, Dilithium, and a crew. All of these resources are hard to come by, although acquisition gets easier as you progress, due to new technologies and buildings. Then again, this is offset by ever-increasing requirements as you advance. If you lack any of a particular resource, your ship building efforts will gridn to a halt. If this isn't enough though, it may be possible to tweak it in some way, if you have any suggestions on that please let us know.