Building a highfleet ship optimizer
Me and Altho built, essentially, a cogitator for your dieselpunk legos game.
Highfleet (koshutin.com) is a game by Konstantin Koshutin, of Hammerflight fame. In that game you have to bulid, peice by peice, huge rocket-propelled fleets to fight above a primitive desert society. The attention to detail is immaculate. Radio communications, electronic intelligence / warfare, and strike fleet management are just the tip of the iceburg. It’s great fun, for engineers especially.
view full postBuilding a highfleet ship optimizer
Me and Altho built, essentially, a cogitator for your dieselpunk legos game.
Highfleet (koshutin.com) is a game by Konstantin Koshutin, of Hammerflight fame. In that game you have to bulid, peice by peice, huge rocket-propelled fleets to fight above a primitive desert society. The attention to detail is immaculate. Radio communications, electronic intelligence / warfare, and strike fleet management are just the tip of the iceburg. It’s great fun, for engineers especially.
What gets most people addicted, however, is the ship editing. You can create and build ships from a suprisingly few number of modules that become highly individualized / specialized. This gif (from koshutin.com) shows the design loop perfectly:

Highfleet ship design from koshutin.com
But seriously, check out that page, the game is beautiful. The most challenging part of building a good ship, is keeping the number of extra modules low, and selecting the appropriate modules to keep the cost low and performance high.
I’ve been working on an optimizer to help. This codebase selects modules from the game Highfleet, such that desired in-game statistics are satisfied. It does so optimally and fast, using state-of-the-art solver library SCIP.
This project is free, and hosted on hfopt.jodavaho.io if you’d like to give it a shot.
Most use cases are one of the following:
- I have a number of weapons and sensor that I’d like to include, but don’t know the best set of engines and support modules to optimally include them
- I have a scout ship in mind, one that can go a certain speed and travel a certain range with a few sensors.
- I’m curious what is the cheapest ship that can accomodate a given weapon or sensor, given a speed, weight, range, or other constraint
As always, please feel free to file issues here with questions, suggestions, or bugs.
I especially need help verifying the stats of the output modules, once combined. The math behind the game is notoriously opaque, and all the stats used were compiled from reddit.com/r/highfleet, esp /u/d0d0b1rd
and /u/twiglard
.
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