Why aren't smaller ships harder to hit than bigger ships? It's a pretty basic idea, and I think it would add some interesting balance and need for combined-arms in mid to late game if balanced right.
Larger ships already are at an advantage value-wise since you get more HP per manufacturing point, and putting all systems on a single ship means you get 100% of their effect as long as the ship is alive as opposed to if you spread them out over multiple ships, you lose effectiveness as ships are destroyed. Yes this is balanced somewhat with logistics and the fact you have to research them first, but the discrepancy remains. plus it just makes sense that smaller ships would be harder to hit.
I was thinking along the lines of: smaller ships get intrinsic jamming + accuracy based on their size so they can still take out eachother while the bigger ships would miss them more often.
I've looked through the code, and I think I could implement it pretty easily, but I'm asking for input for balance.
My initial thought was
Tiny: +60 jamming
Small +40 jamming
Medium +20 Jamming
Large +10 Jamming
Huge no change
and half as much accuracy as they get jamming, just so that small ships aren't ridiculously accurate and fleet jamming modules still have use. And I think I would also give stations either +15 or +20 accuracy so they can't be overrun by small ships too easily, but are still plenty easy to hit (they are large and stationary after all)
This would enforce a need for combined-arms since if you have all larger ships, they would get overrun by a group of smaller ships, but you would still want to have larger ships for the fact that you get more value out of them plus for taking on starbases, since you don't need extra accuracy vs starbases and the starbase extra accuracy won't help much against large ships with no jamming
This would also be packaged with a change to BattleBehaviorDefs.xml where things would try to target things their own size first
So: good idea in general? bad idea? more or less jamming/accuracy? your thoughts?