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Originally Posted by Ferretus
So constructive suggestions would be great thanks but only from people with half a brain cell towards doign this sort of thing.
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Well, first off, i must say that MS Excel is your friend when you are building ship stats. It lets you arrange ships and races in such as fashion to make comparisons quick, easy and accurate.
The way i usually go about building ship stats, is determine how many ships each race is going to have, then how many pods. Then i usually put 2 escorts in each of those classes (though not necessarily - the BA/Syren is a good example). Then i fill out the other classes with the remaining 6 ships. Then once that is done for all races, i usually tally up the number of types in each class for all races - classes with lots of types (usually meaning that there are two or more pods in that class) get more type of ships targeting them. Keeping this in mind i then distribute targets in an appropriate fashion. Its hard to describe what is appropriate or not, but it tends to include things like making sense (ie, FI tend not to target Battleships just out of tradition), but its also where you can add race 'flavour' (that, and the pod classes). From here, i go about assigning strength (ie, high or low reletive firepower), strong or weak armour, etc etc. I go through this process about five or six times, refining at each level, and assigning more firm values for firepower and armour, and the total cost of the ships. stealing/EMP etc are shuffled around in accordance with this overarching feeling of 'balance'.
This feeling of balance is drawn up by calculations like armour/cost and damage/cost, but i (more so than Appoco) am more of a fan of making certain combinations of ships, and then balancing each combination with another combination. ie, an offensive FR Cath combo may be strong compared to a DE Zik attack combo, but weak compared to a CR Terran. Similarly, i tend to look at how a combination compares to the array of possible defensive ships (both low and high [in-gal] ETA ships), how they are targeted, how hard they are hit, etc. This is where initiative is extrodinarily important, and indeed initiative is the only area of ship stat building that i have the most concern over. Unlike most (it would seem), mixing up one initiative level can make or break a race, and thus the balance between all races, simply because the Pegasus fires before the Pulsar, or the BW fires before the Peacekeeper, etc. Strange as it may seem, balancing combos of ships tends to be easier than balancing individual ships, as you can much more easily judge whether a combination of likely ships will be able to handle the likely amount of defence arrayed against it.
If you really want my opinion, then the fact that you have only spent 2 hours on your stats, and the fact that you havent done much in the way of calculations, makes it highly unlikely that your stats are balanced. Indeed, its still unlikely that it is approaching balance in terms of offensive and defensive power between races, attack combos and potential defence ships. You might be 3/4 of the way there, but believe me when i say that the last 10% of the way to finishing stats takes about 500% longer to do than the rest. A set of quickly knocked up stats still takes me about 4 days to do, and i have been building ship stats since R4 havoc, and i still take at least a week of deep thought about the relationships between ships, their combos, and Initiative (
) before i then give it to someone else
to have a look.
Building stats is alot harder than it looks, and if you think it looks easy then you arent looking hard enough, or thinking deeply enough, or doing enough calculations.
Excel is your friend.