About the S M L XL Ship classification business

[Killjaeden]

This S/M/L/... classification that they mentioned appears to me as severely lacking in usability.

Yes i'm used to the M-system from the old X series and i see the limitations of it. It has naturally grown over time and isnt really good for adding stuff in-between in logical manner.
However, the system had one beauty: You just needed to mention "M3+" and everyone (TC and AP Players) was on the same page about what they where dealing with - Intended role, aproximate size, armament, speed, etc.

The SML System does not allow this, because its just a description for docking class. However, in the grand scheme of things you do not need to be reminded constantly what thing you can dock where. Not if you have a functioning classification system. Furthermore, it has been mentioned, that ships inside one class (e.g. L) can vary greatly in size. So this system seems illsuited to be used as primary classification system.

So to get any idea what a ship is doing you not only need to mention it's role specifically, you also need to specify if it's a "smallish Large" ship or a "larger Large" ship to gauge the capabilities. Especially with growing ship count this is a necessity, as it becomes increasingly difficult to remember each and every ship's capabilities.

Personally i can say that the class system in X3 gave me new ideas, be it making new ships "to spec" for that class, or creating a new subclass to fill in blank areas - for example the "TS+" armored transport class ships. This idea (which i got by the classification system) made their appearance first in XTC mod and then made their way into X3:AP.

In X3 it was common knowledge (but not explained anywhere...) that there are 3 main docking classes - Fighters, Medium ships and Capital ships. It was never explained anywhere or indicated - which is a UI/communication issue imo. However, that's something you can figure out relatively easy. Since the classes in itself where consistent you didnt have to relearn it for individual ships. Although mistakes where made with some ships beeing to large for their class - but thats a result of poor model design to not pay attention to possible size and shape restrictions.

So bottom line - there needs to be a better classification system for X4, that can give us a good idea about what to expect from a ship under this class, including a short and memorable acronym ("TL").

[Tamina]

The only reason the "M" system worked that well was because every race had exactly one ship for every class.
Size, weaponry and performance were just slightly different and of course appearance.

The XL, L, M system allows them to give different races a high variety of different ships and this is where your confusions comes from.
Because a M1 is a carrier - an abbreviation. An XL on the other hand can be either a carrier, big trading ship, a destroyer or whatever.

Those two systems are not even comparable.
A general classification system among all races would be limiting, that is why it isn't there anymore.

[ArtilleryWhore]

Edit: The guy above me beat me to the 1st reply. and i agree with him.

To be honest, i like the XS, S, M, L, XL system they are using now in XR and X4. I Like it ALOT more than the older M system.

the old M(insert random number here) rating system always confused me.

it was like saying. "you're fighting a Hippafaralcuss" Ok... what the hell is that? you get no sense of size of the ship, and size is normally (not always, but usually) related to how powerful a ship is.
while its true that the sizes inside each class can vary quite abit. for example in XR the https://roguey.co.uk/xrebirth/ships/eterscel-sentinel/ was tiny compared to you, but the https://roguey.co.uk/xrebirth/ships/get.php?id=drostan was 2x the size of the skunk, even though they were both S class ships. It didn't really matter all that much. M class was always Magnitudes larger than S class, and so on. You got a clear sense of how well they would stack up to other ships.

The point is, the new system is an easier to understand system than the old system in my opinion. Which i think is what they were going for.

[JSDD]

maybe a "classification" isnt needed at all
what we know from X3TC / AP, there were about 400 ship types (if i'm correct), so no one really can keep all the details of each type in mind, thats where classes were useful.

the new game wont have for example all the "variations" of a type, like:
-- nova (default)
-- nova raider
-- nova vanguard
-- nova sentinell
-- ... freighter
-- ... super freighter (XL or not)
-- ... etc

once that stuff is gone, there wont remain that many ship types.
those who remain can be modified componentwise, but that doesnt change the main type. for example, if you want to know if a ship can dock to another, check its bounding box (ingame available info). then check the hangar size or internal docking port size.

all those ships that are too big cant dock internally, but maybe externally (like freighters / capital ships in X3). and labeling a ship "M1", "M2" etc are just problematic if you want to add something new in between, like "drone carriers M7x" or so.

[linolafett]

We also took care, that the biggest s ship is still much smaller than the smallest m ship and so fourth. This is caused by the possibilty of having s ships dock on m ships.
How exactly the sizes/classes are presented to the player is not set in stone, stuff may change. The underlaying "developer language" to describe ships though is fixed.

[Zetoss]

I have no idea how anyone who's played both X3 and XR can think S/M/L/XL is a bad classification system, it's possibly based on docking because that's the only time you actually have any sort of practical use for a classification like that anyway. Ever seen the ship symbols on the map and stuff? Those tell you if a ship is a tiny fly that will get swatted the moment anything fires at it, or if a ship is a massive slab of metal wallpapered with powerful turrets, no need to give them a million extra names/groupings/systems. That entirely aside, even if two ships would be those "M3+" or "L" the ships can still have such different loadout that one is far stronger than the other when in a fight and you end up having to check the specific ships in question regardless. The only time you really need to break it down to some form of broad grouping is for docking purposes, "everything below this size can dock here" or "you must be this tall to dock"

Just noticed several replies stormed the castle before I had time to post this. Anyway ferocious vote for keeping the simple and efficient S/M/L/XL system, thanks for your time and see you next week.

[Killjaeden]

The only reason the "M" system worked that well was because every race had exactly one ship for every class.

I'm not sure why you come to that conclusion. It's a classification system. A Shipclass. You can have multiple of each class per race, that doesnt stop it from beeing usefull. We had multiples of each M type per race in XTC and there was no problem with it. That's why the M-system is a classification of role and size primarily from which you can gauge the other characteristics of the ship aproximately.

I didnt mean that when somebody says "Split M3" = automatically implying "Mamba".

If somebody says "M3" you know it is a heavily armed heavy fighter, that can get dangerous to M6 in numbers of 3 or more, is a big threat to TS, but has no real hopes of trying to catch a M4 or M5.

In X4, all fighters would be S class. So you have no idea if its a scout or a fighter that is armed to the teeth.

An XL on the other hand can be either a carrier, big trading ship, a destroyer or whatever.

Which is THE problem i mentioned. It is usefull in some context, but incomplete for most other uses. Because you always have to mention what role it is after mentioning the size. XL ship. That could be anything. XL carrier - aha, now we're talking.

The point is, the new system is an easier to understand system than the old system in my opinion. Which i think is what they were going for.

I am aware - like i already said. However, size is not everything. Role is really important. When you get the information "Enemy XL ship spotted" - should you panic or not? Well you dont know. You first have to go check on the ship what it is before you know. If it has no other classification than "XL" and you dont know the Ship already you would actually have to go into the stats to see if it can land ships and what armament it has, to be able to gauge what it can do. If there was a classification system that can tell you both, it is XL AND it is a Transport ship - you know you can rest easy.
This is why a new classification system should be implemented that combines both informations of size and role and is logical and easy to use. Thats my suggestion. Yes new, not "M-System but reshuffled".

Sometimes i have the impression that people read someone mention something they dont like, and skip reading the rest to immediately reply to the thing they dont like

maybe a "classification" isnt needed at all

Oh that would be extremely shortsighted - especially when looking at the future of X4 and follow up titles in the same universe/engine. Not only that, it would mean that people would have to remember Shipnames to know what they do.

[Kitty]

Well, there are two questions that each call for a different answer.

The first question is technical : how to classify ships so that docking, maintenance, and these sort of things are efficient. Look for standardization in car sizes, weels, etc.

The second question is marketting : how to classify ships so that customers can easily find what they are looking for ? or, how do I cut my overall ship market in niches I can address separately and efficiently to generate the maximum of profits ?

Since X games are economic games, it would make sense to have both !

M system is nice, because it is simple and efficient, and covers both needs. It is not perfect, though, but no classification system can be perfect.

S/M/L/etc system does only answer the technical question. It lacks the marketting question. Having only this system would be a shame for an economic game. But it may be a very good classification for the technical question.

What I would suggest is to have 2 classification systems: size and usage. Size class would be immutable for a ship design. But some ship designs should be adaptable for more than one usage: as a car can be for a familly or for a taxi, or you have small trucks that can be used for merchandise delivery or for mobile home depending on internal modifications.

Just my 2 cents, anyway. I would love to hear that this post have been read by EGOSOFT team and to have their feeling about it, but it's not like this question was very very very important. M system worked very well.

[rulerofallcheese]

I've seen other posts talk about different ships for each race, but I haven't seen many people talk about this yet.

I'd really like it if different variants were brought back - even they still had the exact same cockpit and physical ship layout. Maybe make one faster, or the drone capacity being slightly higher.... Things that can be tweaked by adjusting stats for the ship without being too time consuming to implement.

Very few things were more satisfying in the old games than coming across a ship variant that complemented a race's ship design. I remember the extremely rare Teladi Falcon Sentinel was a real treat because their ships already favored high shield capacity and the "sentinel" variant ramped this up to a wopping 400mj or something.

(here's some links for newcomers for the different variants in x3)
https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=2096614
https://roguey.co.uk/x3ap/ships/

[Silla]

I think we should get one thing straight. The classification used now is only for the purpose of "size classification" and not "type classification" . The suggestion that we should start using a mixed classification as in older games is beyond my understanding. If at all one should suggest that ship will get some sort of additional "type classification" like fighter (F) corvette (C) battle cruiser (BC) battle ship (BS) depending on a non arbitrary factor like number of gun slots and turret slots and number of type of turret slots ... the question so is what this would be good for besides making a differentiation between ships. But if you know the ships you already have an understanding of their capabilities so I don't see much of a reason to make this distinction...

[Kitty]

Silla, one good point of a secondary classification is that if you don't understand it, you can ignore it.
Since this is a "target market mark" and not a technical definition, the game impact could be low... but, look. In X2/X3 we have missions that require TP class ships. This requirement is clearly not a question of size: the passenger requires to be in a ship adapted to tourism, and refuses to be in the cargo of a military ship. Does this make sense to you ? For me, it is important. I don't want to fly a ship that makes everything very well and makes every other ships useless. I love the complexity of X universe, with ships adapted to various usage (designed for them), and I'm ready to see a client refusing to get onboard because my ship is not of the right standing.
Still a marketting classification is just that: the declaration of a purpose. As you probably have noticed in the current games, the frontiers between subclasses of cargo (TS) ships are blurred. That's life, and it's cool too.

As a side note, it could help the AI to manage its own ships.

You write "once you know your ship, you don't need its class". Yesssss ! But will you know by heart on hundred ship ? Or do you expect to have only a dozen of different ships ?

[Killjaeden]

Yeah thats a good point, for mission design and also scripts you need to classify ships to certain roles, otherwise you will run into many problems.

What if i want to spawn a destroyer in my script for some reason? Without classification system that gives roles, i would have to make my own rules for deciding what a destroyer is and what not, so i could end up with a station transporter that just has one turret too much as a destroyer. So a classification must be conducted by the designer of the ship, otherwise it can't be used properly by scripts.

[JSDD]

What if i want to spawn a destroyer in my script for some reason? Without classification system that gives roles, i would have to make my own rules for deciding what a destroyer is and what not, so i could end up with a station transporter that just has one turret too much as a destroyer. So a classification must be conducted by the designer of the ship, otherwise it can't be used properly by scripts.

do you know how the "OBS system" in X3 works ? if not:

-- first depending on mission difficulty, current fight rank (and other player stats), it calculates "combat points" (just a number).
-- while (combat points > 0): it creates / selects ship classes according to the remaining "combat points"
-- these numbers are set once in "director/constants.xml" for each "class".

what they do is they "map" numbers to classes and classes to shiptypes (director/SRST.xml aka "SelectRandomShipType").
=> which means they effectively map "numbers" to "shiptypes"

... from "a number" to "a bunch of enemy ships", just by looking up in tables

if you have ships like "megalodon" which is really a hybrid of 2 other classes, which one does the modeller take to "label" it ? why not just use an "abstraction" (for scripting), a number that thescribes strength, another that describes other properties like trade efficiency (or whatever is needed), i dont bother if a ship is M3 or M4 as long as it is able to do the task i want it to (and fits into my carrier). another thing: hyperion (M6) is perfectly capable of docking into big shipyards, but manually undocking isnt possible because its bounding box is too big (regardless of class).

[Sandalpocalypse]

What if i want to spawn a destroyer in my script for some reason? Without classification system that gives roles, i would have to make my own rules for deciding what a destroyer is and what not, so i could end up with a station transporter that just has one turret too much as a destroyer. So a classification must be conducted by the designer of the ship, otherwise it can't be used properly by scripts.

There's two additional classifications in XR, the generic role classifier and the behind the scenes shipgroups. The generic role classifier is something like Fight or Mine, and you see it when you are buying ships. The AI also uses these, for example pirates will specifically target Trade ships.

The shipgroups are behind the scenes and are extremely moddable buckets that customize spawns for jobs and missions on a very specific bases. For example, Albionmetals and other corporations all have specific shipgroup buckets for their spawns. These shipgroups can be weighted so some vessels are more common than others. So on the mission editor level all you do is tell it to use a Heavy Fighter or a Frigate.

[Cornflakes_91]

we could also just merge all the size, class, subclass specifics etc into one big system.

for example

M - T - S would be a Medium Transport for Solids
S - F Small Fighter
S - F - M would be a small missile fighter, a (light) bomber
XL - C would be a capital carrier ship

and so on.

the individual pieces of information would be sorted by how critical they are when in a pinch.
for example you dont need to know instantly that theres 5 light bombers in that fighter group coming at you (the -M subclassification) but its important that you know that there are 25 fighters coming at you (S-F).
the more detailed classifications also are further back because a new player doesnt have to learn them as pressingly because they are only more detailed descriptions of the ship class and not what defines the whole ship.
the detail descriptions is also where letters could be reused if necessary because theres less chance of confusing stuff with different classifications.
eg there can be multiple
M - x - C
pattern ships which could be completely different
(one could be a cloaky corvette, the other could be a crystal specialised mining ship)

a M - F - C and a M - M - C ship could/would be very different (fighter and miner)
but M - M - C and M - M - O ships would be relatively similar and no other class would be allowed to have a similar M-M designation when its a completely different purpose.
all M-M ships would be medium miners
all M-F ships would be corvette-ish ships
and so on


for some purposes multiple tags in a "category" would be useful to have.
eg XL-MC could be a very large mining ship that also has a fair amount of hangar space and thus also gets a classification for Ccarrier.

or the freighter i used at the very beginning could have class variations that can transport multiple classes of cargo
so there could be a M-T-SLG variant that can transport Solids, Liquids and Gasses

(of course the exact letter coding is up to more detailed looks from ego but its just about the general pattern/idea)

[Killjaeden]

why not just use an "abstraction" (for scripting), a number that thescribes strength, another that describes other properties like trade efficiency (or whatever is needed)

Yes i'm familiar with spawntables. X3 OBS uses shipclasses for this. XR does not have these. Means you have to assign the numbers per ship, or assign a shipclass anyway "behind the scenes", or hardcode each ship into spawntables. In which case i dont see the point of not having a classsystem that defines the role for the player and interface, but still use one behind the scenes because you couldn't do it otherwise... I think thats a pretty good indicator that you do need to classify ship roles.
The number per ship thing means that you are tasking the creator to use a totally abritrary number system to classify his ship - however, how he interprets the numbers and system does not mean that you interpret the numbers in a similar way. This is simply bound to result in inconsistency and issues.

The whole OBS stick is very questionable anyway. Is a M6 worth 3 M3, or more, or less? For just slapping random enemies on the screen in a mission thats not really that relevant. But its a one-way road. If you need it more precise- for example you need to pick a single ship that can deal with a selected enemy for whatever reason, this will not work, unless you spend a loooong session of trial and error to figure out the arbitrary numbers. And once shipstats change you can redo that all again. You would be better off relying on shipstats than to use this arbitrary number approach. It might work somewhat if only one person does all the balance, then it could be consistent. Introduce more people and mindsets and it will all come apart. Especially when mods are introduced.

Idk who did the stats for megalodon in AP, in XTC it was a seperate class basically (handled differently by scripts) because of size and strength, compared to regular M1 and M2. All the M2+ (as we called it) had docks like a carrier. And it was more M2 than M1, so thats what the pick would be. Primary class, essentially.

i dont bother if a ship is M3 or M4 as long as it is able to do the task i want it to

But how DO you know that it is able to do the task you want it to? X3 vanilla TC/AP ships where all over the place in terms of balance and weapons had high damage output, so it didnt matter so much if M4 or M3. In XTC for example things are much more finely tuned where M4 are good against fighters (and have a high chance to win against single M3 1:1), but nothing else really, whereas it needs M3 to engage larger ships successfully.

hyperion (M6) is perfectly capable of docking into big shipyards, but manually undocking isnt possible because its bounding box is too big

I'm repeating myself - thats a bad job on part of the modeller. Something Egosoft are now aware of (as indicated by their size system) - it wont happen again, at least i would assume so.

all have specific shipgroup buckets for their spawns

That's the standard way that also has been used in the X3 job system for spawning. You are essentially hardcoding what ships they get to use. If someone models a ship for this faction, it will simply not spawn unless its manually put into every spawntable where it would make sense. Very inflexible system. And again, one-way street. What if i need to assess how to spawn an equal ship to one that is already floating around? I would have to check a load of different arbitrary spawntables to get an idea what this ship is and which other ships are similar. That just seems really nasty.

the question so is what this would be good for besides making a differentiation between ships. But if you know the shipsyou already have an understanding of their capabilities so I don't see much of a reason to make this distinction...

Why does it need a point besides differentiation between ships? Thats the whole point, to differentiate. And if you dont know the ship, what then? You have to check the stats and then with your knowledge of the game assume how the paper stats contribute to a given trait ingame. Anything but quick. So if you have a look on the map and see a bunch of ships, i think you might want to know first what classes they are and only then the type by reading in the map screen. Thought experiment - assume all ships of the same size class use the same icon, instead of an icon that represents their role. Do you think the map would be really usefull to you? I dont think so - certainly not in every situation, especially not in situations where you need to act quickly.

[Reprisal]

I liked the M designations as well, but the only option would be to completely reclassify all of the ships to have the sequence make sense. And changing the designations makes the entire exercise pointless anyway. It's just simply too unwieldy at this point.

[Kitty]

Anybody familiar with real military software ?

They classify units and there is a standard, APP6, for this. Do you think that they used it just for fun ? No. Understanding what's going on when reading a map, and quickly, and be able to build strategies with this, needs some knowledge. As our mind is limited, this knowledge is classification. There is many way to classify. Many are bad or poor. None is perfect. No classification is no knowledge at all, and leads to random decisions, or no decision at all.

[Vandragorax]

The old system had a very significant flaw: you cannot easily add new ship types without completely messing up the already existing numbering system. Case in point, when they added bombers they were added as M8 which didn't really fit in with the rest of the numbers in any way since an M8 was basically an M3 but with torpedo weapons: https://roguey.co.uk/x3ap/help/classes.php

Once you've already got M1 and M2, where would you add a new ship type that is somewhere in between? M1.5? lol

I think the new, current, system is actually fine - it only relies on the player learning what each ship name is but that doesn't really take too long (or you can always just quickly click i for info and see what you're looking at).

At the moment for example you may see "Arawn(XL)" the info you get from this doesn't tell you that it's a carrier, but once you have looked up information about the ship once or twice you will immediately know that an Arawn is a carrier anyway, and it shows you the hull size for convenience more than for tactical reasons.

In addition to this, the new map is great for distinguishing ships, I can easily tell I'm looking at an Arawn (and therefore know It's a carrier) by seeing the size and shape of the ship icon on the map. This will be even better and easier with the new updated 'RTS' style map that seems to be in development and is long awaited


If there was a dying need to, it could be changed to something like "Arawn(Carrier-XL)" which would give us more information at a glance, but it could potentially cause UI issues where names don't want to be too long and an abbreviation for "Carrier" might be more suitable.

This would probably benefit more for other ships like Traders since they can be a large variety of different hull sizes, but at least this new system allows for more additions and flexibility without the limitations of a direct numbered system.

TL: DR - The new system is WAY better and perfectly understandable for a player, the old numbered system is too limited for adding new ships and somewhat arbitrary which doesn't make as much sense.

[BmB]

Idea:
Add numbers to the classification.

S1
S2
S3
M1
M2
M3
L1
L2
XL1
etc.