Ship Stat Balancing

A consistent approach to ship stats is one of the last remaining pieces of the pre-0.6.0 rebalance.

One of the primary goals of the core slots rebalance was to divide ships into distinct size classes. For example, light fighters and heavy fighters both use small slots are are heavily cannon-focused. However, they now have separate sets of core outfits, and it's difficult to make one behave like the other.

So, with ship stats, my goal isn't to differentiate differently-sized ships from each other, it's to differentiate similarly-sized ones. Heavy fighters and bombers are similar in mass, yet should have radically different purposes. Another goal for ship stats is to make ships unique within their classes — A player should have compelling reasons to fly an Empire Admonisher rather than a Dvaered Phalanx, or vice versa.

That said, I intend to use ship stats sparingly. Comparing two ships with half a dozen ship stats each can be confusing, and a long list of +/- 5% bonuses isn't really worthy of note when the performance difference between civilian and military equipment is often several times as large.

I intend for ships to have stats based on three things: Their class, faction, and any special attributes they might have.

To use the Dvaered Vendetta as an example: In my mind, it's a fairly sluggish fighter bristling with weaponry. It's a Dvaered design, and their ships are technologically antiquated, making up for poor regeneration with large energy reserves and heavy armour. So, the end result might end up being: +20% energy, +15% armour, -15% speed, -20% energy regeneration.

My current goal is to come up with a list of traits for each ship class and faction, from which individual ships will inherit most of their stats. I plan for civilian versions of faction ships to retain milder versions of the faction-specific stats.

One final note, for the time being: I'm wary of using ship stats that affect overall ship mass or CPU, as those two attributes are the cornerstones of our balance scheme.

Classes
For the moment, I'm ignoring carriers. In the fullness of time, the better fighter bays will required a restricted bay slot which will only be found on carriers, and carriers will have a variety of resupply-oriented bonuses. At present, though, we're lacking too many things for carriers to function properly — fleet AI, resupplying, ship stats oriented towards escorts, et cetera.

There are also a number of minor classes I'm not going to bother listing, because they have obvious ship stats associations, e.g. scout ships will have enhanced EW detection and hide, merchant ships will have more cargo space.