Step 3 - Designing Fleets

This section of the guide is pretty detailed. This page will explain the entire details of designing a fleet, from the armor to the weapons. However, as most systems are not required for a ship, the design we will be using will only utilize a few systems to make the ship affordable and disposable.

Before reading on, we need to inform you that when designing a fleet, do not use commas or decimals. Decimals will be rounded up or down to the nearest whole number, and commas will be treated as decimals.

To get to the design screen simply click on the button designated, "Design". Once on the design screen, you will notice a few options. The top two options are if you wish to design a new hull, or view your pre-existing designs. In the "View/Delete Designs" screens, you will be able to delete pre-existing designs.

When designing a fleet, we will need to first determine what the fleet is going to be used for. Some examples would be if the fleet will be used for raiding, or defending. Maybe the ship is a decoy you send to scout the hidden caves of other players? Is the ship a heavy vessel, or is it a swarm ship? Whatever the design, it is all created here. Because our goal is to complete missions, we are going to make a raiding ship. Also, because we are just starting, we are going to make a swarm ship. Swarm ships are meant to be used in large groups. The larger amount of ships the better due to swarm bonus.

Designing ships is a tedious process, but a necessary step in becoming a top captain. We don't yet have a custom hull designed, so lets build one. Select Design Ship. On the screen you will be taken to, you will notice 2 options for the new hull. Name and Space. Put in any name for the new ship you wish to design.

The space of a hull is how much weight the hull can hold. Systems you add to the hull will take up weight and/or supply. Each space costs 165 credits. For our ship design, we want to stay as close to 10,000 credits per ship for all systems and the hull. For this example, we will design a ship with 60 space.

Excellent! Now we have our new ship named, and we have determined how much space we will use. Go ahead and click view design. The cost of our new ship is 9,900 credits. Go ahead and confirm the design. When you confirm the design it will be added to your list of ships to buy. You will notice a Buy Fleet button and a Design button. The Buy Fleet button, we will get into in the next section of the guide.

Now that we have our hull design, we need to think of what goes next. Because weapons and other systems require a supply core, let's design the supply core next. Click on the Design button. You will be brought back to the design screen. Now we get into ship systems, which is the bottom 3 selections. 

The drop down lists all available systems you can design. We will only be using a few of these systems, but with what you learn in this guide, we encourage you to "fiddle" with the other systems and the systems we will be using to create a truly unique design of your own. The other 2 selections are the Design System button and the View/Delete Designs button

Select "supply core" from the drop down menu, and click "Design System". This will take you to the supply core design screen. You will notice the 3 options. Name, Weight, and supply Gen(erated). Designing systems is a lot like designing ships. Just a tad more complicated in the mathematical aspect. 

For the name, it is wise to use your ships name, and append the system type after it. When I designed my ships hull, I named it "Tutorial", so I will name the supply core, "Tutorial supply core" For our supply core, we will use half of our ship hull's weight. Set the supply core's weight to 30. Now we need to find how much supply the supply core will generate. Here is where it gets tricky. I have determined that if this supply core were to generate 6721 supply, with 30 space, the system will cost 3 credits. Confirm the design.

The tricky part of designing systems is tweaking the system. Tweaking system designs is simply the act of modifying designs for the least amount of cost. To tweak a system, you start with a number. For the supply core, I first tried 5000 supply and the price would have been 1,000 credits. A system will cost 1,000 credits if the requirements are more then needed for the stats the system will have. The trick is balancing the requirement to the stats produced. Since the cost is 1,000 credits, and I am working with a stat, increasing the value will "increase the cost". If the value we were editing were a requirement, I would be lowering the value. The second number I tried was 7000. Too high, the cost was 700 credits for the system. To get the correct value, I just repeated this process until I got to the balanced number.

Now that we have our ship's hull and supply core designed, we now have 6721 supply, and 30 space left to use as we wish. A bare ship isn't a good thing. This ship needs some protection. There are 3 systems that offer protection. Armor, Special, and plates. Armor gives us hitpoints. Special systems give us hitpoints, defense points, and defense bonus percentage, and plate gives us absorbance percentage. While the tracking system gives an addition to defense bonus percentage, some ships do not have defense, making the tracking useless (minus the accuracy bonus).

Since we are designing this fleet for the purpose of raiding, we will use a combination of one armor system and a plate system. Because we still need to add a weapon to the ship, a good suggestion is to reserve at least half of the supply core's supply for your weapon(s).

After confirming the design of the supply core, you should be at the final confirmation screen that informs you that your supply core design has been added. On this screen, click Design. You may also use the main Design button you first used. Select "Armor" from the drop down list, and click "Design System". On the armor design screen we need to decide on how much space and hitpoints we want to use/gain. Because armor only uses space and not supply, we will simply use 10 space. Try figuring out on your own how many hitpoints the system can have while keeping the cost as little as possible...

The correct number of hitpoints would be 444. With 10 weight, and 444 hitpoints, the cost of the system will be 160 credits. Quite pricey for a system, but because of the very small size of this ship, it's to be expected. For example, a larger ship that can handle an armor system with 100 weight, can handle 5567 hitpoints and will only cost 10 credits. However, the ship's hull will need to be 10 times larger, making the ship cost around 100,000 credits instead of a measly 10,000 credits. Remember, We are designing this fleet to be disposable and easily replaced. We are to expect some loss with these ships. To be blunt, these ships are cannon fodder with weaponry. Now that we have our armor systems weight (10) and hitpoints (444), we can now view and confirm the design.

The next design for us is the plate. As said before, at least half of the supply should be reserved for the weapon. Half of our supply core's supply would be 3360. Since we had 30 space remaining before we designed the armor system and we have a total of 3 systems to add to the ship, we should use 10 space for the plate and weapon systems like we did with the armor. So now we have the space and the supply to use for our plate. We now need to set the absorbency percentage.

What is strange with plates is how the absorbency percentage effects the cost. The price goes up exponentially with each percent. With that being said, we can only get 5% absorbency which alright because these ships are meant to be disposable and purchasable in mass numbers. The good news is, we get to reduce the supply used for the plate, and we can put that towards our weapon! With 10 space and 3360 supply, 5% will cost 1,000 credits. Go back and change the supply required to 2766. The plate system will cost 2 credits with 10 weight, 2766 supply required and 5% absorbency.

Fantastic! We now have our ship's hull, an armor system, and a plate system designed. Our final system to design is the weapon! Go to the weapon design screen. As we did with the armor/plate systems, we will use 10 space for the weapon. Our supply core generated 6721 supply and we used 2766 supply for our plate, so that means we have 3955 supply left. Let's use the rest for our weapon, so set the weight to 10, and the supply Required to 3955. Now we need to set the damage and accuracy. Here is where tweaking yet again comes into play. Let's start with a base of 10% accuracy  and 5000 attack. If we view the design, the design will cost 1,000 credits meaning we can increase either the attack or the accuracy. Let's increase the accuracy to 20%. Once again, the cost is 1,000 credits. Now we know that we are still a ways to go, so this time, increase the attack to 10000. Still too low, let's try 20000 attack. No dice! This time it's way too high. The cost would be 53,035 credits. As you can see, tweaking designs will take some time, but is very important if you wish to save credits when you resupply fleets.  The correct value would be 14697 attack.

Your weapon system now takes up 10 space and uses 3955 supply but gives us 14697 attack with 20% accuracy. Not bad for the size of the ship. View and confirm the weapon design.

The other systems we did not get into are the tracking, sailor, and special systems. The tracking system is used for increasing accuracy, and defense bonus percentage. The sailor system is basically a cargo hold for more sailors. It allows more sailors to fit per ship. We read earlier that special systems are used for hitpoints, defense points and defense bonus percentage. While all you essentially need is the hull itself to have a fleet, it is wise to at least equip a system that adds hitpoints, and a weapon. This way the ship stands a chance of victory against an attack.

Ok. so we designed some systems. Now what? Well, we now need to buy the fleet, then upgrade it. Let's move on.

Click here to proceed.