The first thing to decide is what stats you will want included for the generator. I decided to use the ship class as the main property for determining which formula would be applied when generating stats. This might be different depending on your specific use. This guide will be written using the ship class as the main property.

So the first variable that will be needed is ship class. This will be used to sort and determine which formula to use in our generator.


We then decide which stats we want the generator to include. I used the following:


There are a few extra variables we will be using, so declaring them now will be useful.


There are likely a few variables I have missed and I will add them in here when they are encountered further into the guide. This should be a good starting point though.

To have the generator work, we need to set the variables used in generating the stats. I will break down each variable and explain how we figure out what the value should be.

• GEN_points_total
This is the total points available when creating a new ship. This mechanic will be explained later in the guide.

• GEN_points_current
This is the current points available when creating a new ship. This mechanic will be explained later in the guide.

• GEN_points_cost
This is the points required for adding a single unit to a particular stat. This mechanic will be explained later in the guide.

• GEN_points_multiplier
This is the multiplier used to calculate our values based on the current ship class. This mechanic will be explained later in the guide.

• GEN_points_range
This is the range that our values can vary. A higher range will result in a larger variety of stats per class of ships. A smaller range will result in a smaller variety of stats per class of ships. Be careful, if the range is too high you will have ships of one class having stats higher than the class above it or stats lower than the class before it. If the range is too low you will have ships that feel almost identical to all other ships in their class. This mechanic will be explained later in the guide.

Feel free to experiment with these variables, the one I would experiment with first would be GEN_points_range. This variable will have the largest impact on the generator and will be used when calculating the other variables. Through my own testing, I have found 0.15 to be a great starting point (15% plus/minus the average, or 30% total).

To figure out what our default values should be, we will use all the existing ship files and calculate the averages for each ship class and each variable for those ship classes. You can either do this manually, or you can use a script/program to do this for you. I personally imported each ship file into Excel then calculated the averages using formulas inside Excel. Another option is to have your generator do this, perhaps as a setup button.

I will go over including this in the next section.

If you are wanting the stat generator to adapt to the current ship balance, we can use the existing ships to calculate an average for each stat. We accomplish this by dividing all the ships by their class. We then take all the ships in a specific class and calculate the average for each stat.

For example, we want our generator to create stats for only the shield, armor, energy, cargo, active slots, and price. There are 3 ships currently in the game that we want our new ships to be balanced against. Their stats are as follows:


So we get the average of each stat. The averages for our example:


For the system I created, I used 10000 as my category multiplier. You can use any number you want since the math should still work out. For our example, I will assign 10000 points for each category and divide it by the current stat. For the price, I divide by the total points (GEN_points_total).


This will give me the cost per point when generating a new ship and the price increase per point used. So when creating a new ship, I will have a total of 50000 points (GEN_points_total) available to use. For each point to shield I will subtract 11.76 from my total available points. After calculating I usually round the number to the closest whole number. For example:


With the above example, I still have just under 5000 points still available. If I were to assign those points then we would have a "perfectly" balanced ship, but having all the ships balanced to an exact value does not create a balanced "feel". I will explain this further in the guide.

This will create prices that are similar to the other ships currently in the game. Simply apply this logic and use the values from the existing ships when calculating the values. This only creates the prices though, we want the generator to create all the stats for us. The next section will explore one approach to doing just that.

This section will add a new component to our stat generator. I referred to this variable as the GEN_points_range. This will add more variety to our generator and can be employed in more than one way. This first will employ this as a global that is applied to each stat. GEN_points_range is the percentage that a stat can vary when employing a random number generator. It will be used to find our upper and lower limits. We will continue with our earlier example:

We now have the generator working with some basic mechanics, though we might want the generator to be a bit more advanced with the calculations and variety of ships. Perhaps we want the stats to cost more per point as you add more points into that stat? Perhaps we want to calculate the cost for ship buffs or to get points back for adding a debuff? Perhaps we want certain stats to have more weight/impact than other stats?

We can implement any or all of the above by changing our formula slightly. We will start by changing the weight/impact of certain stats. Continuing with our 3 ship example, we have decided that there should be 3 main categories to calculate. We will have "Core Stats", "Auxillary Stats", and "Slots". We want the Core Stats to include the shield and armor, the Auxillary Stats to include energy and cargo, and finally, the Slots to include our active slots. We will still use 10000 for our category multiplier, but instead of 6 categories, we now have only 3 categories. So our GEN_points_total = 30000.


With this, adding an additional active slot still costs 2500, but we only have 30000 instead of our 50000 using the non-weighted formula before. This also makes our energy cost much higher considering our GEN_points_total of 30000.

Now if we want to have the points cost more per point used in a specific category, we need to decide how much each point should increase in cost. For this example, we will want each point to cost 0.1% more than the last point. So our formula will be:


As you can see, this new point cost increase modifier really changes how many points we can add to our stats. Feel free to play around with this number to see what kind of results you get, though be careful not to set this number too high. In my experiments, a number between 0.1% - 0.5% will work best.

As for the last scenario I gave above, dealing with ship buffs and debuffs, we can approach this in many ways.