Hi,

I'm a big fan of 4X games (Master of Orion, Galactic Civilization, etc) and I really like the experience that they provide.
I'm also a big fan of logistics/economics and how they factor into long-term warfare (as is the case of 4X games).
You'll notice that most, if not all of these games allow the player to customize their spaceships to some degree. In fact, its becoming a staple of this genre, and not without good reason:
Ship customization allows a player to plan ahead, define a strategy, and build fleets around that idea.

To the newcomer, this is a very complex set of rules, and leads to inefficient design, but through learning of the game, the player becomes able to build near-perfect ship designs for specific tasks/purposes.

While this is good gameplay, it does come with an alternative.

Games such as VGA Planets really established the genre decades back (1992). To this day, VGA Planets 3 remains my favorite of the lot. The UI was crappy, it required you to know the hotkeys, and the navigation and micro control was overall shit (it didn't quite take advantage of the mouse input).

More importantly, ship design was limited. There were 11 different "species" you could play, and each and everyone of them had these preset ships.
These "hulls" had preset settings: how many fighter bays, how many torp tubes, how many beams, cargo space, fuel tank size, number of engines, etc.
To a certain degree, you could customize these, such as you could choose to have beams that dealt more damage to crew rather than shields if you wanted to take over the ship instead of destroying it.
For the most part however, these ships are rather straightforward and end up in one of the key categories (freighter, explorer, gunship, carrier).

While this seems rather limiting, the community behind these games actually praised the level of customization this led to:
This created natural strengths and weaknesses for species as a whole, based on the distribution of ships that were available to them.
With clever ship designs, all races were able to attain their goals nonetheless, even if all they had were gunships/cloakers or the likes.
It allowed players to really embody the species they were playing with, and more importantly, adapt their strategies to the shortcomings of suchs plans. Only a few races could actual take enemies head-on, while others had to think outside of the box.

In the end, limiting ship customization really added to the game's fun and quality overall both in terms of feel and actual gameplay.

My question here is simply, what do you think are the pros and cons of adding more or less customization capabilities in a 4X game?

Perhaps you could customize your ships beforehand.

In VGA planets actually, the micro-management comes from logistics mainly: Moving colonists and resources from planet to planet as is required. I think they've captured Sun Tsu's teaching remarkably. Minimizing focus on ship design actually helped showcase gameplay elsewhere. I feel like de-facto ship design steals away some much needed design-space.
Personally, I'm not too fond of macro-games such as Galactic Civilization. I feel they are too much of an abstraction. Whenever the game replaces resource economy with 'points' and 'science points' I feel the game could do with more in terms of economy and logistics.

Basically, I like what you've said here:

I don't think it's in the interest of the game to have the player end up spending a significant portion of their time on a relatively small portion of the game if it distracts from the overall experience.

Actually I tend to disagree. I know a lot of people fancy MOO2 (I'm assuming you were referring to master Of Orion 2?) and I won't go against that: its a great game.
That said, the game's take on logistics is weak at the most, and the freighters are largely responsible for this weakness.
As a matter of fact, I believe that basic mindset and functionality between a ship don't necessarily go hand in hand:
If the game encourages it, your regular ships (warships mind you) may be required to double duty as freighters as well, if only to maximize your empire's efficiency, or insure they are both the freighter and the escort.
VGA Planets worked in such a way that every time you built a freighter, you ended up with a dedicated ship that could never assist you in warfare, so a lot of players willingly chose to have a less efficient freighter fleet and used their torpedoe&carriers as freighters (once depleted from their ammunitions and fighters).

The upside that I personally see with pre-defined ships and less customization is that the player needs to think through before building a ship, often ending up building what appears to be a non-optimal ship, but surprising everyone else by how they're using it (say, a carrier with no weapons nor fighters turned into a freighter).
Having too much customization feels like I could end up with so many narrow designs that I have an answer for everything, but they're never at the right spot, and it really changes the game:

When playing an opponent, there's a huge strategic difference between knowing or not the base ships they have on their fleet (or could have). By limiting this to 12 known types with a few permutations and tech upgrades, you're playing a strategy game much akin to playing chess ot SC2. Thers's back-and-forth, tactics change and evolve, etc. Because you have a basic grasp of the opponent's strengths and weaknesses, you can attempt to surprise, play around them. If each player can do "anything", you end up playing a game of information where you need to know as much as possible about the enemy fleet, and if there are no limits to how many designs are available to a player, then the game can be pretty random if your opponent makes no single ship like the other.

To me, what in theory gives the player more choice actually ends up decreasing the fun, but I might not be seeing the whole pic there...

Also, going into micro details is a waste. The player will not care how many weapons can fit on a ship. The answer is always as much as possible.

I think its best to think of this as "slots".
For example, you have 3 weapon slots, perhaps each of them is even limited in type (one can fire missiles, the other two beams, for example).
It goes without saying that, if this is to be a warship, all weapons will be loaded, but the player may choose different ones:
- 2 fast "cheap" lasers with a strong missile launcher
vs
- 2 Strong lasers with a cheap support missile launcher
vs
- Fullpower everywhere
vs
- 2 weak lasers and a weak missile launcher (cheap ship)
vs
- 1 fast laser (acting as point def) + 1 strong/slow laser and a decent missile launcher

You wouldn't approach these ships the same way, yet, they all fall under the light escort main design for example.
If main weapons are limited to "certain types of weapons" and secondary have a different set, it helps gauge expectations of the players as a result.

I think two very interesting things you've left out would be Generators & Engines.
Generators are still good because, ideally, they set a cap for overall ship functionality. Once you've purchased a certain generator, it limits what you can put in the ship (what weapons, what shields, what engine).
Engine is good because it allows to gauge mobility.
The reason why I think this is a good strategic element is because it lets you create fast scouts that are lightly armored by picking the topmost engine and the weakest beams.

I'm not exactly sure what you meant by hull, but one of the things I've seen working was dividing hulls not by size but by design.
For example, an "explorer" would define smaller amounts of weapons and more engines whereas a destroyer would have a lot more weapons onboard, secondary weapons and armor/shields but fewer engines (than say, the cruiser). A Science vessel might be filled with utilities in this scenario.

Your tag idea is nice. VGA Planets was too crude in that regard. Either you scanned right, or you didn't scan. There was no room for "error margin".

Hmm, I feel completelly opposite. To me the freighters (or to be more precise lack of logistics) in MMO2 was one of the most enjoyable parts. I think it's not about ship customization but about something more fundamental, micromanagement. I have low tolerance to micromanagement, I loathe it

That's the very reason why I wrote this thread I love micro-management, but I don't make games for myself solely, so I want to be able to provide a suitable experience to the "other players". Thanks for stepping up!

So, for me the primitive logistic (or "high level logistic" as I would prefer to think about it ) was a plus (when I think about it, I judge all games by this criteria so it might be highly subjective).

I think high level logistic allows to shift design space and gameplay towards a portion of the game you might enjoy more.
MOO2 is a game that is a bit about economy, but a lot more about ship warfare. You basically just colonize planets, shift a few things, build fleets and go.
I'm trying to find a suitable way to simplify logistics in a game such as VGA Planets while keeping the core gameplay (which is logistic-oriented) and I'm at a loss because, they simply are not the same kind of games.
In MOO2, your primary threat is your enemy. In VGA Planets, your primary threat is yourself, or more likely, your lack of planning. Your empire can die just because your planets are out of fuel, overpopulated, and over-employed (too many mines). Challenging your opponents can often be a distant 2nd threat, and by then, only the players with good empire crafting skills will stand even a chance of surviving: everyone else's planet will be ripe for the taking.
I really like the fact that VGA Planets is more about building that empire, and less about space warfare, but I can totally understand the appeal of MOO2 and similar games.

It could help you if you decide what level of micromanagement you are willing to accept in your game before proceeding.

The level of micromanagement I'm interested in is not necessarily intensive, but I'm looking for finite resources, fuel management, and resupplying. These are core elements to the idea of "space survival". I find a victory more satisfying when the reason for winning isn't that I brought my big ship in time, but because I brought sufficient missiles to back it up during the battle so that my ship could sustain a longer military campaign.
Logistics is something inherent to actual warfare. Sun Tzu, and generals from all eras have discussed the principles that won a war, and it is possibly the most important.
In WW2, the Germans were powerful not out of sheer firepower alone, but because of their train system which allowed them to quickly more reinforcements along the rails.
Without discrediting these games (after all, I do enjoy Gratuitous Space Battles a bunch!) I'm really interested in capturing this layer of strategy to make for a more complete and satisfying game. I fully understand you may not be part of my targetted user base, but I'm attempting to define whether I can make a few compromises on elements of the design that aren't core, and could potentially "turn you on" as a player.

As for slots I'm not a big fan of these. You always end up obligatorily filling up all weapon slots under such model...

Gratuitous Space Battles is a very clever system. If you haven't had a chance, have a look. There is a campaign system now which is pretty light, but other than that, its just fighting all the time. The ships have this neat rock-paper-scissor system where some weapons are good vs shields, other vs armor, and other vs hull. The ranges also vary.
My most efficient ships are very non-linear designs: 1 missile launcher there, a plasma canon and 2 beams, one of which is fast and short ranged (acting VS Fighters) and one is long-ranged and slow (to take down these frigates once their shields are down) for example.
I'm trying to capture something similar, on a simpler and more narrow level.

I've been assuming that people knew more about VGA Planets because it has been the most played play-by-email game (ever) and its been active from 1991 to now, but I understand its community size is limited.
What I meant by limited ship design is this (example in hand).

There are 11 species, and each of them have a roster of about 10 different ships (all freighters are common to all races, and everything else is custom with rare crossovers).
The "colonies of man" (based on battlestar galactica's original series) have several ships.
One of them:
Little Joe Class Escort.
Can only be built when you have researched Tech 2 Hulls.
Has 6 BEAMS weapons (can equip any one type of beams)
No fighter bays (cannot be a carrier)
No Torpedoe launchers (cannot fire torpedoes)
has a mass of 65
has a cargo of 20
can store up to 85 fuel
is operated by 175 crew
has 1 engine (which you choose)

This ship is fairly straightforwards: it can't be a powerful frontman, but with so many lasers, it can fire down fighters. It is good to use vs a Carrier if you want to reduce the amount of fighters for example, or as a scout since it is fairly light.
Since it doesn't have much cargo, it can't really be used as an armored freighter, but it can still carry a few things (supplies for repairs, crewman to create small outposts while scouting).
85 fuel for such a small ship isn't bad at all, here again, fairly good for a scout.

Basically, you wouldn't expect this ship to take you head on, no matter how it gets customized, but by midgame, your opponent might use it:
- as a very light/cheap but fast scout (with a quick engine and nothing fancy)
- as a light dropship which drops a few colonists on undefended planets to take them over
- as a freighter interceptor using its weak beams against your freighters to either destroy or capture them (once again, depending on the type of beam equiped)
- as a support frontliner with heavy blasters to damage shields of larger ships or planets
- to smoothen carrier fighters by using several cheap blasters (1-shots fighters anyway)

The amount of things you can do is limited, but it does give you room for innovation. A good player is one that can plan ahead, build certain ships for certain purposes in mind, but also with the understanding that this ship's role can vary. Personally, I build carriers with a lot of fighters but extremely weak blasters so as to cut expanses. My thinking is that I can never resort to my beams doing the damage: my fighters are there for that. But having 4-6 weak beams allows me to destroy incoming fighters, etc. Since resources and scarce and finite, this allows me to defeat opponents that go for that "omfg" ship that packs torps, powerful phasers, loads of fighters, kickass armor, but consume so much resource they can't field more than 2 or 3 by midgame.

I hope my intent is a bit clearer now.

On the other hand in MMO2 tonnage system I frequently was willingly sacrifacing weaponry in exchange for utility stuff. It was the only 4X game I ever did that.

Can you define why? and which utility?
VGA Planet's utilities are embedded in the ship design. For example, the PAWN has a bioscanner which allows 100% accuracy of planetary scanning. It simply can't be built on another ship. If you want to be able to have this powerful scanner, you'd better figure a way to make the PAWN a viable ship for any other objective. I personally use it as a light armored freighter, explorer, or dropship (on the outskirt of the enemy's empire, generally on the flanks).
Some ships are cloaked, others get their quick "warp" device, etc. I think it goes a long way to making each design unique, but it does cut off on ship customization.