We don't even know if titans will provide a sufficient return-on-investment to be worth building.  They may end up like capital ships where a fleet of 16 capital ships would get owned by a fleet of two capital ships and 700 fleet supply worth of Long Range Frigates or bomber spam.  If your enemy can throw 5 titans at you then he could probably also throw a large well-composed fleet against you too, instead (unless it's the AI, in which case your opponent is incapable of strategic thought).

I've never understood why people think this way.

We don't need limits on ships.  As Sanchez said, just throw the same supply worth of smaller ships at the Titan, or if Titans are actually cost-effective, just throw the same number of Titans.

Of course, if you sit back and let a player build that many titans in the the first place then your probably doing it wrong.

As Whiskey said, 3 or more will probably cripple most of an empire for a fair while. Blast them to bits in that large window of opportunity or suffer the consequences.  

In contrast, your quoting skills fail. rowanlad did not say that, I did.

It happens from time to time Whiskey144. I have seen it a few times myself.

[quote who="Whiskey144" reply="11" id="2948655"
Quoting gamerlamb, reply 9Wow, epic fail by forum software lol. I went to your comment for the quote lol.

Ah.


Quoting Ryat, reply 10It happens from time to time Whiskey144. I have seen it a few times myself.

Hmm. Well, that's news to me that that happens. Could be very fun to do if you figured out how to do it on purpose.[/quote]

Change the name/reply number in the quotes.

Example

lol, sometimes though it will happen on accident.

Yes. Yes it does.

to be honest I think there will be a limit, the whole thing reminds me of empire at war: forces of corruption, which had a similar situation with the super star destroyer, that thing was so powerful that you were limited to one at a time so I cant help thinking that there will only be one titan at a time.

Which if you think about it makes sense. In terms of the fiction they are obviously going to be practically bankrupting to build so building fleets of them would be dumb and in gameplay terms if someone makes more than one get more than one you might well be doomed so a limit of 1 makes sense. Plus it forces you to be careful and think about how you go about deploying it.

Either way there will be a mod ot allow you to do anything you want with the titan so either way its win win

And I feel the need to point out you do need to keep in mind that cap ships arent meant to be used as lone be-all-end-all kill everything ships ... ive never lost one in such circumstances since I use them in fleet actions as part of a fleet (which is what they are for!!!)

Imo there are a few ways of balancing this sort of ship.

The most common approach would be simply to make it's supply cost so high that you have to weigh the investment "IE is it worth having 250 of my fleet supply taken up by one ship that can only respond to one situation at a time?" That can be very impractical given the potential variation on "map" size.

Another option would be to simply have a hard limit on how many you can field. IE 5 per empire. However that has the biggest disadvantage for the same reason the previous one did. On small maps you could have 5 titans ruling the map. On larger maps you would have to pick and choose. Also it has a annoying problem of forcing players to try to proactively reach/maintain that "limit" of titans. IE I can field 5 so I should to compete.

Then there is the concept of simply making them cost so much that losing one would be in itself an economical hit. But again if it doesn't scale that can be largely mitigated by a booming economy.

Imo one of the best ways of doing a ship class like this would be to have a straight maintenance cost with fielding the ship. Make it cost a lot and cost say an addition 1-5% "tax" to field them. That would allow the cost to essentially scale regardless of the map size and regardless of your economy and it would force players to choose their trade off. For example if you had already reached the logistics cap of 75% and you wanted to field 3 titans you would have an additional 15% tax raising your 75% to 90%. That could be done so that there simply is no limit on how many you can field but if you are logistics capped and you have 5 titans you have basically dropped your income to 0% you could even go further if you stockpiled to the point that you'd be losing money but that could carry the effect that if you reach 0 money your excess titans start taking damage until they blow up.

The thing I am trying to get across is that if Titan's are going to be as powerful as they are (And tbh I think the idea of the titan's probably came from Eve's version of Titans) then they really need an ongoing cost associated with them otherwise they will simply be another unit... albeit more expensive and more powerful. If any of you have played Supreme Commander you'll get sort of what I mean. In a late game of Supreme Commander experimental units simply become the main force because you can push them out in rather high quantities and having smaller units isn't as practical considering you can push 50 smaller units out only to have one of the enemies experimentals completely waste all 50 in seconds.

One other possibility would be to simply make all the Titan's costs/build time double each time you build one. So say it costs 5000 credits 2500 metal and 500 Crystal and takes 300 seconds to build with a 250 supply the next one you'd build would be 10K credits 5k metal 1k crystal take 600 seconds to build and a fleet supply cost of 500. Next one would be 20k credits 10k metal 2k crystal 1200 seconds to build and 1000 fleet supply. That would basically stop anyone from going overboard on titans but would make it a viable strategy for someone who was willing to spend the resources/time/supply. Again though that would have different impacts depending on how big your game is and how late in the game you are and how good your economy is.