Shipbuilding - Game design flaw

[Slippery Jim DiGriz]

In a recent pair of CGs I worked out that there must have been at least 100,000 ships destroyed every day - This is absurd, it would require 100 planets each with 10 shipyards each turning out 100 ships a day just to keep the attrition rate stable.

Basically destroying ships is too easy and too common and not a realistic mechanism. Destroying a ship should be a rare and unusual event, instead the player (or NPC) who is losing a fight would and should run away and the victor should get merit based on the de-facto victory and the damage inflicted.

This is a product of taking a solo game and expanding it to a multi-player game without considering the scaling factors - If a solo game player destroys 100 ships it makes little difference to the overall NPC population, if 10,000 players each destroy 100 ships then it's a very different situation.

Also I certainly understand the visceral pleasure of seeing another ship go boom! but that is an arcade game feature, Elite is supposed to be a space sim, not an arcade game.

But the horse is out of the stable and I cannot see how this can be changed now and I suspect any changes to this would be less welcome than a Vogon poetry recital.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

If they made it more limited and more realistic, there would be hardly anyone to kill. Also players when they lost their ship would possibly have to wait weeks for a new ship to roll off the factory floor.

Sometimes realism has to take back seat to gameplay, even in a sim.

 

[Spanksh]

This is absurd, it would require 100 planets each with 10 shipyards each turning out 100 ships a day just to keep the attrition rate stable.

Factories TODAY in the real world produce up to 100 cars a day already. If factories before 2015 were capable to satisfy such a demand, futuristic, highly efficient and probably fully automatic factories should laugh about such a pity amount.

 

[Slippery Jim DiGriz]

If they made it more limited and more realistic, there would be hardly anyone to kill.

That's my point, kills should be rare. If in combat my shields drop and I start taking damage I'll bid a hasty retreat and would expect my opponent to do the same but here the NPC players are suicidal lunatics who almost always fight to the death, their deaths.

Sometimes realism has to take back seat to gameplay, even in a sim.

Sad but true.

Factories TODAY in the real world produce up to 100 cars a day already.

An Anaconda closer to an aircraft carrier than a Ford Focus, there is no way any factory could turn out multiple aircraft carriers a day, it currently takes years to build just one. Yes manufacturing can be scaled up and future manufacturing will have techniques we cannot even imagine now but even still the attrition rate is far too high

 

[Stoo]

I see no problem... this is a game after all.

 

[who?]

Think of Elite ships like today's cars - a Sidewinder is just ~32K credits - everyone would own one. If you have a planet with 1 billion people on it, chances are there would be several hundred million ships "based" on that one planet alone. If you want ridiculous, you need to look at Elite insurance companies - how the hell are they still in business?!?

Seriously though, I would like to see more nuanced combat. Instead of flying to a RES and destroying dozens of ships per hour, how about a few, more difficult targets which last longer. Which require you to use your scanners to monitor their systems and re-target subsystems accordingly. Maybe you get a reward even for scaring them off. Maybe they can surrender and you get to escort them back to a station and keep their ship.

 

[Blackpine]

An Anaconda closer to an aircraft carrier than a Ford Focus, there is no way any factory could turn out multiple aircraft carriers a day, it currently takes years to build just one. Yes manufacturing can be scaled up and future manufacturing will have techniques we cannot even imagine now but even still the attrition rate is far too high

Wrong. Aircraft carriers are so expensive and so hard to build because demand for them is very low. If somebody would order 1 000 000 aircraft carriers - it would be worth to build fully automated factory and robotic assembly. Carrier price then, could be reduced nearly to the price of materials.
Why it can't be done? Because:
1. Carriers have limited demand
2. Carriers have to be pinnacle of high end tech, so ship is more work of art, rather than something for mass production.

Anaconda? Welp, it's been in production for 300 years. It's a low tech product. Everyone can build one. It's price should come mainly from materials costs.

 

[Karakhian]

I worked out that there must have been at least 100,000 ships destroyed every day - This is absurd, it would require 100 planets each with 10 shipyards each turning out 100 ships a day just to keep the attrition rate stable.

Looks at galaxy map.

Looks at human inhabited space.

Looks at number of stations.

Er... yes?

Let's say there's 1000 stations (not planets, Earth has three stations around it alone and each one has a shipyard) each with 1 shipyard, to make it simpler. Now let's say each is only producing 1 ship a day. Just because they're incredibly lazy. So that's 100,000 shipyards. I'm pretty sure there are still enough stations available to do that. And they're not even trying.

I think pretty much the complete opposite. I think the Elite universe is nasty, profligate and ships explode all over the place all the time in pointless crashes as much as combat - and there are literally thousands of cheap ships being produced at a fantastic rate, thrown together and sold off in prodigious quantities. They aren't limited to Earth's resources - they have an entire galaxy. They can be as wasteful and polluting as they like, and they don't care. I've always seen ships in Elite as being like cars today.

I'm not sure you have a complete handle on the scale of the game world yet.

 

[Slippery Jim DiGriz]

Looks at galaxy map.

Looks at human inhabited space.

Looks at number of stations.

Er... yes?

Let's say there's 1000 stations (not planets, Earth has three stations around it alone and each one has a shipyard) each with 1 shipyard, to make it simpler. Now let's say each is only producing 1 ship a day. Just because they're incredibly lazy. So that's 100,000 shipyards. I'm pretty sure there are still enough stations available to do that. And they're not even trying.

I think pretty much the complete opposite. I think the Elite universe is nasty, profligate and ships explode all over the place all the time in pointless crashes as much as combat - and there are literally thousands of cheap ships being produced at a fantastic rate, thrown together and sold off in prodigious quantities. They aren't limited to Earth's resources - they have an entire galaxy. They can be as wasteful and polluting as they like, and they don't care. I've always seen ships in Elite as being like cars today.

I'm not sure you have a complete handle on the scale of the game world yet.

I suspect you have some confusion over the word "Shipyard", on each planet it is where you buy ships, it's not where ships are built. There are just a few manufacturers - Lakon etc and their ship building yards would be significantly fewer than the number of ship selling yards.

Then there is the amount of resources used per ship, yes there are pretty much infinite resources available but they need to be gathered, refined and formed in the the necessary shapes, this takes time, money and effort.

As for my getting to grips with the size of the playable area, well I'm an Elite explorer, I've been around a fair bit and played the original game back in '84 and all the successors and many other similar games (Privateer, Freelancer etc) so I think I'm pretty au-fait with the scale of the galaxy here.

Maths fail: "Let's say there's 1000 stations each with 1 shipyard <trim> So that's 100,000 shipyards." er, no that's 1000 shipyards.

"I've always seen ships in Elite as being like cars today." - I'm only Deadly and in about 6 months of play I've already destroyed over 10,000 ships - If every driver on the roads was to do even 0.1% of that much damage there would be no cars left on the roads.

 

[Muss]

Factories TODAY in the real world produce up to 100 cars a day already. If factories before 2015 were capable to satisfy such a demand, futuristic, highly efficient and probably fully automatic factories should laugh about such a pity amount.

2015 shows 73 million car sales per year this is 200,000 per day for a average ELW in a system with less than 10 billion ppl

 

[Soopyyy]

Who gives a crap? It's science fiction...

 

[Karakhian]

I suspect you have some confusion over the word "Shipyard", on each planet it is where you buy ships, it's not where ships are built. There are just a few manufacturers - Lakon etc and their ship building yards would be significantly fewer than the number of ship selling yards.

Then there is the amount of resources used per ship, yes there are pretty much infinite resources available but they need to be gathered, refined and formed in the the necessary shapes, this takes time, money and effort.

As for my getting to grips with the size of the playable area, well I'm an Elite explorer, I've been around a fair bit and played the original game back in '84 and all the successors and many other similar games (Privateer, Freelancer etc) so I think I'm pretty au-fait with the scale of the galaxy here.

Maths fail: "Let's say there's 1000 stations each with 1 shipyard <trim> So that's 100,000 shipyards." er, no that's 1000 shipyards.

"I've always seen ships in Elite as being like cars today." - I'm only Deadly and in about 6 months of play I've already destroyed over 10,000 ships - If every driver on the roads was to do even 0.1% of that much damage there would be no cars left on the roads.

Yup, my bad with a horribly confused and messed up sentence - I meant to say that if they only produce 1 ship a day, there'd be 100,000 shipyards required to meet the needs of 100,000 ship destroyed, and there are more than enough.

And no - no confusion. A shipyard is where ships get built. That's what shipyard means. If they could build a station there, it seems perfectly reasonable that they could incorporate basic ship-building facilities in it, whether the station mainly acts as a tradeport for agricultural goods or high tech.

It's not just the size of the area, or the amount of resources. It's the number of people doing the collection, refining and manufacture, as you yourself state. Yes, it takes time, money and effort. There are billions upon billions of humans now, on thousands of worlds. That's a truly ridiculous amount of potential time, money and effort available, compared to Earth today. 100,000 ships is just a fraction of a drop in the ocean.

And I meant ships in Elite are as disposable as cars are today (at least). You're actually comparing to Earth-scale, again. I have no idea how the number of cars Earth today can produce in total can relate to the unimaginably vast number of ships that the humans in Elite's galaxy can produce almost without trying. You're assuming that all drivers destroying 10 cars each in 6 months on Earth today (as an implication for the total destruction of all cars) is scalable up to the Elite universe by a factor of 1000 (0.1%) - when the production of ships is thousands upon thousands of times more than Earth's production of cars today. It wouldn't surprise me if the level of ship production outfactored present Earth's car manufacture by millions.

You tried to make the destruction of 100,000 ships sound significant - I really don't think it is.

 

[Han Brannigan]

2015 shows 73 million car sales per year this is 200,000 per day for a average ELW in a system with less than 10 billion ppl

and not a single good RES

 

[tarragon]

These ships are a commodity mass product, just like cars. They are large, but mostly hollow and there is no problem churning them out really fast. There are enough raw materials in universe to keep this wasteful rush forever.

 

[Karakhian]

2015 shows 73 million car sales per year this is 200,000 per day for a average ELW in a system with less than 10 billion ppl

Which means if we take ships in the Elite universe to roughly equate to cars today in terms of ease of manufacture, then Earth today by itself can already match the level of losses described in the OP, and then produce that many again in the same time frame. How many shipyards are there in human inhabited space again?

 

[JeffRyan]

If they made it more limited and more realistic, there would be hardly anyone to kill. Also players when they lost their ship would possibly have to wait weeks for a new ship to roll off the factory floor.

Sometimes realism has to take back seat to gameplay, even in a sim.

I fail to see why the argument proceeded past this point.

 

[M00ka]

Unfortunately you are applying current day manufacturing processes with a system set 2,000 years in the future. For all we know, entire planets could just be one big factory churning out ships as fast as the robot minions can make them. If this is the only thing troubling you in the game, then ED is in pretty good shape

P.S. Love the name, great books, still pull them out for a read once a year or so.

 

[Parmo]

Ship production in WW2:
Liberty ship ~ 42 days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv_u5DkxU6c
Modern ship: https://vimeo.com/62085613
Carnival Dream: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_Dream; 130,000 tonnes
Laid down: February 4, 2008
Launched: October 24, 2008
Maiden voyage: September 21, 2009
[]
Battleship Dreadnought 1906, 366 days, 18,000 tons
[]
Cobra MKIII 1/3rd scale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQXgcV3JMrY
Time unknown.
Modern 3300 techniques - 24hrs?

 

[Thanewright]

If all this was true, of course, flying into SOL your scanner would be flooded with millions of contacts, coming into a big station and you must queue for an hour as it deals with the 10,000 ships waiting to dock.
To say nothing of the fact that a ship is fully repaired, refuelled, reloaded, 100s of tons of cargo offloaded, and loaded again... in seconds, when they didn't know what cargo you would be asking for in advance.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. And if you do... may I recommend Traveller:
http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/rpgs/traveller.html

 

[KaizoMK]

I suspect you have some confusion over the word "Shipyard", on each planet it is where you buy ships, it's not where ships are built. There are just a few manufacturers - Lakon etc and their ship building yards would be significantly fewer than the number of ship selling yards.

Then there is the amount of resources used per ship, yes there are pretty much infinite resources available but they need to be gathered, refined and formed in the the necessary shapes, this takes time, money and effort.

As for my getting to grips with the size of the playable area, well I'm an Elite explorer, I've been around a fair bit and played the original game back in '84 and all the successors and many other similar games (Privateer, Freelancer etc) so I think I'm pretty au-fait with the scale of the galaxy here.

Maths fail: "Let's say there's 1000 stations each with 1 shipyard <trim> So that's 100,000 shipyards." er, no that's 1000 shipyards.

"I've always seen ships in Elite as being like cars today." - I'm only Deadly and in about 6 months of play I've already destroyed over 10,000 ships - If every driver on the roads was to do even 0.1% of that much damage there would be no cars left on the roads.

You might have missed such zone events as "we need tons of metal to make ships yo".