A few approaches to Ship Weaknesses/Integrity, Cargo Framework and Resources

[Psy_commando]

So, I'm going to be one of those guys that brings in suggestion/food for thoughts for the game. Sorry, but I really had to do it. Especially now with the dev build featuring parts of the new HP/Armor system, which I'm still a bit skeptical about.

Even though its in the suggestion sub-forum, Its all up to discussion. Its just that I wasn't really sure it was good idea to put this in the general discussion sub-section or here.

What I'm going to suggest is going to be pretty flexible, and mostly builds upon what we have, instead of changing everything from the ground up. I don't claim to have the perfect answer, nor do I claim that all of this is worth implementing. Parts of this post also merely suggest focusing on some of those aspects sooner rather than later.

Oh, and I'm very aware that a lot of these things were brought up separately, or that those will probably be addressed in the future. So, if you're only here to tell me about that, don't waste your time reading this, or telling me. Thank you.

The devs might have their ideas on how to do this, but that's why I'm throwing in this suggestion. Its possible that some of the things here weren't considered by them yet. But there isn't any way to really be sure of that.

But I digress.

( If you don't feel like reading too much, I suggest quickly reading the list of issues below, skip the observations. Then read section 1.2, section 1.3, and section 3.1. Those contains the most important bits, and most have pictures that explains things much better. )

First, what are the game's most annoying balance issues right now ?
There are a bunch, but lets take a couple of generic ones that comes up often:

- Larger ships are always better.

Smaller ship do nothing better than larger ones. While larger ships do everything smaller ship do and more. Besides not being laggy, and being small.​

- Weapons are unbalanced and missiles are almost without contest the king of the battlefield.

Module to effectiveness ratio is tremendous for missiles. And some other weapons are limited by the game's behavior and bugs themselves. Some others have no reasons to exist, no practical purpose.
Since all weapons are just generic damage dealers, offering little perks on their own, there are no reasons not to use the most effective one. The ones that can't miss, and deal the most damages, aka missiles.​

- No scarcity, no implicit cost, no value, to most things.

No value to planets or sectors, because their resource can be obtained anywhere else, at no extra costs for anyone. No cost for travelling around in space, shops and “shipyards”(build mode) are everywhere, climate and environmental differences between planets cause no issues to anyone or anything (basically all planets are habitable, and exploiting them and building bases isn't more complicated on any of them, unless they're in the star's killzone..).
That means, no resource/territory wars, no real worth in trading, less value to maintaining alliances with other factions economically.
Transport and storage in large quantities has no costs, or doesn't require much “effort” or planning, or specialized tools/ships. A single storage container can contain an entire planet's worth in blocks.
Shops spawn like flies, and stock up on everything.(and they have strange and random quantities of items available)
No reliance on supplies, so a fleet can camp a sector indefinitely, without having a forward base or supply chain, or having to head back to base to resupply.​

- Ships lacks weaknesses.

One has to find and destroy the core block with pinpoint accuracy to truly defeat a ship. Internal systems are so spread out, thanks to the game implicitly forcing the player to spread things out, that it takes a while to disable a ship this way. And that's not a “good difficulty factor”, because the only reason its taking so long is because of the size of the target to hit. Not because of the design or combat prowess of the ship you're facing !

Low output per individual system blocks means you need to destroy more of them to even cripple another ship. And the way power blocks need to be laid out further complicate things. On medium-sized ships, they're most often spread into lines, which makes it hard to cripple the power system of a ship in as few shots as possible, not factoring the armor or shields. And on large sized ships, because of the post 1 million e, limit, builders can spread the power blocks further with no restrictions, which complicates things even more so..

Thrusters can be put anywhere, and will be, because they do not need to be exposed to space to work. And also because you can't customize how they look. This means that, often shipbuilders prefer to cover them up with something prettier, and/or just put them in some random places.

Weapons systems arrays have to have each of their groups separated from eachothers, which is fine in itself, but it furthers makes disabling weapons complicated. Not to mention, that, sometimes if you manage to ruin one weapon system, and its slaved weapon system wasn't nearby, it can still be used against you.. So in essence, destroying a weapon system doesn't guaranty you're actually going to reduce the other ship's firepower..

Example:

You have a sniper beam or cannon array. And you made sure the modules for the beam/canon and missile are far apart. If they somehow managed to destroy your canon/beam computer, or all your modules for it, you'll still have a pretty potent and powerful unguided missile system at your disposal. (perhaps even more powerful than the canon/beam was actually..)
Of course, power could be an issue in this example, but, I doubt I'm alone when I'm building ships that produce more power than they need..
​

So, from a player point of view, ships have no other serious weaknesses that could put them out of commission nearly as fast and as reliably as destroying the core. You even know about where the core is thanks to the HUD. Which makes it even more the target of choice on a ship!​

This is of course, relative to each player's own reality. And is aimed mainly at the sandbox / survival game mode. But you gotta start somewhere, no ?

Considering those issues, here are a few observations:

• Focusing on scarcity/economy, and taking advantage of those, would mitigate potentially a lot of those issues. Along with other issues that are directly or indirectly connected. (see below)
• Establishing a proper resources tiering system, and spreading “high-tier” resource density, and availability around more thinly would give more worth to some planets and systems over others. While more basic, omnipresent resources could be found more commonly everywhere.
• Diverting from the current way of how systems blocks calculate output would do much good. Something that wouldn't implicitly reward people as much for filling everything with modules, leaving no empty space.
• Going with the classic “smaller ships are generally faster” model would be a simple, cheap, yet tried and true and very effective method of helping balance thing out. At the cost of some backyard “realism” of course. (actually, we have no ideas if structural constraints, technical issues related to scale, and other unforeseen factors, wouldn't limit the mobility and top speed of larger ships, regardless of whether there is no real counter-force to hamper them or not..)
• Going towards more of a more rock-paper-scissor influenced kind of approach to combat could implicitly keep in check some of the more implicitly effective weapons like missiles, while still being simple and easy to grasp on the surface.
• Adding more weaknesses to a ship than its core, like an actual complex system would, would open up a range of strategies and building constraints and approaches. More so than the current model, or even than a typical 1 hull, 1 HP bar model.

Based on these observations here are some suggestions:

1. Ship Systems

1.1. Effectiveness Coefficient:(Need some re-thinking)

Spoiler

Given the current system is implicitly biased towards larger ships, I suggest as a first line of defense against the problem, a simple counter. Its already more or less implemented in a way for a few blocks, but this would make it a little more “even”. This counter could work with the current systems only, but it was mainly thought to be used in conjunction with the “Multi-blocks tiered systems” described below, or any other systems not based solely on proportions.

It consists in simply determining a coefficient, a little like the angular acceleration coefficient that's used for the ship's turning speed. But based on the ship's total size on all axis and the amount of blocks used in the ship. This coefficient would increase as the ship gets bigger/gets more blocks. And affect the ship overall, in goods and in bad ways instead of only a few things here and there.
It would primarily represent the ship's system efficiency losses and the ship getting bigger/more cluttered. Considering that, longer wires and cables means more power is lost through increased resistance. And also considering that a lots of systems tends to scale up badly in the “real world”.

We'll refer to it “Effectiveness Coefficient” in this article, for a lack of better name.

It could be used differently on a per system basis, on various aspects of each systems, as seen fit. For example, as the coefficient increases and the ship becomes bigger, it could get an armor bonus, while raw power output would be diminished. But in most cases, using it to affect the raw output of a system would probably be the best approach. It would also affect docked entities, pulling anything from the parent ship, such as turrets.

This would kill two birds with one stone, serving as incentive to build smaller, and giving a buff to smaller ships on most things. Additionally, it would also encourage most people to build within the limitations of the engine, without forcing them to. So people would just go overboard when they really want to. And it wouldn't leave large ships at a complete disadvantage either, thanks to a few perks that could be computed from that coefficient.

Here's a little example on how this could work:

If you'd build a really really huge ship, the biggest you can think of, crammed with weapons systems shields and armor, with barely any empty space, its coefficient could be say, 50%(0.5).
And so, your ship's individual reactor groups output would be cut in half. Your ship's weapons could perhaps deal only 50% damages, or just use 50% more energy, or even just fire 50% slower. But that ship would get a large armor buff, lets say each armor block would be 50% more durable.
Or even something more cumulative, depending on how the devs' newly announced/rumored armor system will work. Thus the ship would need less armor, and get more free space for other things.

While if you'd build a tiny ship, you'd get a coefficient of say, 1%(0.01). You'd lose only 1% of your reactor output, and so on..​

This is over-simplified of course. It would need some fine-tuning to get it right, and perhaps need to be calculated non-linearly, using a curve. Of course, this would imply there would be a “sweet spot” on this curve. A size where the amount of systems and ship size would be optimal. And that's why the next section will bring up something to potentially help with this.

1.2. Multiblock Tiered Systems: (Pictures)

Spoiler

In order to supplement/complement the current more or less proportion based system, and transition towards something a little more flexible for players, I'd suggest adding 2 tiers to the basic single-block system used currently.

Those would involve building a shaped structure using certain blocks, a little like the portals in minecraft, or maybe a little like the thinker construct's smelter. They would go from simple tier 2 made up of maybe 2 to 3 different block types, to more complex tier 3 structures that could be made of perhaps 3 to 6 types of different blocks.
Those tiers would use the current system's block as core, and build around it, to facilitate upgrading. All 3 tiers could be used together on the entity ship too.

Here's an example (Shapes and designs are just for demonstration purpose):

Customization of a System.
Changing the proportions of each block types used in assembling a multi-block system would affect the way it work, depending on the system type. Like for example, adding more core blocks in a reactor system could possibly increase the power output and possibly fuel consumption (if fuel happens), but in turn would need more of the other blocks.

Another very interesting trait of this system would be that, you could substitute blocks in the design for others that might add different properties to the system overall.
For example, if the system was a canon, you could replace half of one block type used in building the structure with one that makes projectiles explosive. And then half of what's left with something that makes your projectile penetrate more armor. Then you could replace half of another block type used in the structure with blocks that makes the weapon shoot faster.

The result would be a canon system that shoot 50% faster than the base one, has 50% of the explosive effect applied to its projectile, and got 25% of armor penetration effect applied to it. The proportions of the system would implicitly balance out combined effects in the end. Moreover, each isolated group, within a weapon array sharing a single computer could each be customized differently, since each group is isolated from eachothers. So you could have a few EMP canons with a few fast-firing machine gun explosive canon.

So, you'd be able to tweak your weapons just like it is possible currently, and even further, using as much, if not less space, and on a much more versatile(combining several effects together) and compact level than the system linking made it possible before.
And, that also leaves the possibility of using this approach to change the weapon's behavior, instead of slaving systems together. Thus, no bad surprises when destroying an enemy's weapon system, and finding out it was linked to a huge missile system, which is now being used against you and basically nullifying your efforts invested in destroying the opponent’s weapons..

Here are a few examples of blocks proportion and types variations (designs are again only for demonstration, choosing shapes that can be better customized/covered up by player will have to be done by the designers themselves as I have no insights into the engine structure, or the team's short/long terms design goals ):

Dynamically Tweaking a System.
If the rail system ever allows it, it could even be possible to dynamically change the system's output/behavior by sliding blocks next to the core blocks ! Which for example, in the case of a power reactor, could mean that short burst of power in exchange for possibly higher fuel consumption (again if fuel is implemented. Its just a convenient example) would be doable with this system. (It could also be made to look a little like an actual fission reactor's control rod system, which is pretty cool )

How it All Works Together.
Higher tier multiblocks systems would be superior to the single block system in terms of raw output, something that is more desirable for larger ships if using the “Effectiveness Coefficient”, and they'd bring in the bonus of being customizable too. But in turn, they would create a weaknesses in requiring to be centralized more and more(more vulnerable to weapon fire), they'd be more expansive, and require slightly more space for their “smallest possible design”. A single block is always more compact than several..

Another big advantage here is that, since you could chose not to be relying on a system requiring a significantly larger proportion of the ship filled with blocks, you'd have more room for other things, such as decorations, hangars, weapons, cargo space(see cargo system below), shields, cockpit, escape pods, etc.. The “Effectiveness Coefficient” would take care of good part of the size balancing issue transparently without having to deal with what feels like useless filler blocks that are only there as some kind of penality.

And to top it off, if you'd want to slap a tier 3 system in your fighter craft design, you could. You'd have to make trade-offs to fit that within the design, such as assigning more space to those systems, dealing with the additional vulnerability to weapon fire, and ensuring the requirements of the system are met. But you'd benefit from a better “Effectiveness Coefficient”, and higher raw system output, and potentially more customization and maybe even dynamically changing your system's output.
This would balance itself out, thanks to the higher tier systems being also reliant on their individual size to provide output(a little like the current power systems, but this way you can't cram nearly as much individual systems next to each-others given the structure are more complex, and terminator/wrapping blocks could help isolate systems implicitly), and thanks to size reducing system efficiency. It would balance things more so if bigger ships are slower than smaller ones in the future, as ship builder will have to keep in mind many more variables to make a good ship.
For example, fighters with a large tier 3 reactor would need more blocks, be larger, and slower than if they hadn't a tier 3 system. And if not larger they'd have less room for other things than fighters of a comparable size.
For larger ships, using all 3 tiers to optimize the entire setup would probably be a plus in order to reduce total size/block count and get the best “Effectiveness Coefficient” possible.

Going further with this, and throwing a little extra idea:
Maybe tier 2-3 systems could be the only ones requiring resources to consume, such as fuel or ammunition, while Tier 1 would still work mostly as it does right now ?

1.3. System Weakness

Spoiler

In order to make ship combat less based around exploiting the fact that a ship's only real weakness is its core, I'd suggest turning some of the mandatory systems into bigger weaknesses than they are right now. Not radically though.

In the real world, you do not obliterate an entire ship to destroy it, or any other vehicles. You hit its critical systems/parts, trigger an explosion inside by hitting its ammunition stores or fuel tanks, or you disable the crew. Those are the fastest most reliable ways of disabling/putting out of commission an opposing vehicle. And they're especially relevant to consider in starmade, considering voxels works a little like real-life objects, that can be broken in parts.

Right now, in StarMade, the quickest way to put out of business another ship is to destroy its core. That can make it unfair/lame however, as its a single block amidst potentially thousands upon thousands of others. Most other games avoid all this by turning the whole ship into a single entity with a set HP rating, which addresses completely the issue of needing weaknesses. But that's not really such a great solution, especially for a voxel based game, where a good chunk of the point of using voxels would be thrown out the window.. ( pun intended :p )

A way to address this is to make systems more vulnerable to weapons. This solution is tightly linked with the Multi-blocks system's tendency of inciting more vulnerable designs on large scale vessels, and also from the dependency on fuel and ammunition for some weapons, as brought up later in section 2 and 3 below.
But its also possible to have systems explode, or burn, or malfunction temporarily after being hit. Some systems could also be vulnerable to being disrupted at least temporarily after being hit by certain weapons. Such as EMP weapons for instance.

Having more weaknesses would encourage players to get a little more creative and avoid pretty much using module blocks as a damage sponge layer between the armor and the core more or less. And instead separate systems for optimal protection and based on their vulnerability.
So for example, if whenever the power system is hit you'd get some kind of debuff, you wouldn't put your power systems right under the most exposed part of your ship. Given that if a shot comes through, and hit it you'd be penalized. Since its a critical system to your ship, you'd probably put that it in the hardest to hit spot. You'd probably opt to expose less vulnerable systems instead. And you wouldn't put single blocks variants of that system in exposed positions either considering you'd run the same risk. Additionally the tier and the size of a system could determine the severity of the debuff.
But then, if there are other systems that are also just as vulnerable on your ship, you might have to make a hard choice, and have to expose a little more at least one of your weaknesses.

Those compromises and the way they're made would open up opportunities for pilots and opponents alike.

More weaknesses, along with the “Effectiveness Coefficient”, would help keeping in check the tendency of wanting to fill up every nook and cranny with modules. And it could be backed up with the Multi-Blocks systems having the potential for freeing up more space on large ships, and leaving more room for strategic placement of each systems.

2. Ship combat

2.1. Counter-Measures

Spoiler

Something that could possibly work well at keeping in check the missiles problems, would be more specialized and varied missiles counter-measures. For example, active and passive counter-measures.

Chaff/Radar Jammer for radar based missiles, aka homing missiles, would allow to counter the tendency of players to counter point defense and players shooting down missiles by firing an enormous quantity of them at the same time.

The Jammer is already in the game, even though its a little glitchy. But the thing is, if the people who corrected me in the past are right, the radar jammer is too effective, and its counter, the scanner, is likewise too effective.
This in turns means that the radar jammer, no matter how effective it is, is essentially not very useful because its easy to to counter it by having several ships with scanners. Not to mention that using your own scanner disables your own jammer... If the jammer was a bit less effective, and if there was an active countermeasure to pair it with, or use as alternative, this would mean people would have a little less reasons to put a jammer counter on their ships. And thus the jammer would gain some strategic value, as its not as likely to be used on a ship.

The radar jammer's counter shouldn't be a radar however. Especially considering the scanner might actually be required on a spaceship at one point for other reasons. Maybe having to install a backup optical tracker instead of a radar one ? Like a camera block ? The missiles could switch to laser guided mode for the next shot. And that tracker could be countered with the cloaking system. (The cloaker would possibly need some kind of “overheat” meter though. And juggling with both of those using the current hotbar interface wouldn't be easy at all..)

Chaff would be an active counter-measure, and the most efficient missile counter compared to the radar jammer. However, it would require that the operator trigger chaff grenades when missiles are nearby, in order to fool them into losing the target. The cooldown would increase the bigger the ship is, considering the bigger the target the harder it gets to hide, even temporarily. Which would mean, large ships would be much more susceptible to missiles in large quantities, and in turn more reliant on their escort fleet's own counter-measures and coverage.

Flares / Cloaking would work for IR guided missiles, aka heatseeking missiles. It works in a similar way to the radar jammer and chaff grenades, only with the flares replacing the chaff grenades as active counter measure, and the cloaker as the “passive” one. And cooldown on the flares would work in a similar way to the chaff.

If heat-seeking missiles are going to be just a niche for swarm missiles, it might be better to just combine both radar guided and heat-seekers countermeasures together.

It would also be possible to recycle the damage pulse weapon into a kind of effective missile counter-measure system with some tweaking. It would give the weapon a use. For example capital ship escorts could mount those, or the capital themselves, with the above limitations for counter measures on larger ships included. It would need to act over a short period of time, instead of being nearly instantaneous, to account for lag and collision issues.

2.2. Weapon Balance:

Spoiler

2.2.1. In General

The current design philosophy of StarMade is to allow people to tweak weapons however they want by slaving systems and such.

But, there are some issues to keep in mind here.
Whatever they do, our weapon systems will always be limited to the few variations they've planned. Only some variables change, but their overall working principles are always the same.
Currently, weapon types are too generic and similar in functionality, with only marginal differences. And those that differ significantly, like the damage pulse, are not really capable of finding a niche because they are not practical enough within the constraints of the game.

Considering this, I believe it would be a good thing to come up with weapons that works in different ways. Some that don't work nearly exactly the same way as all the others.

In order to create a sense of variety, some weapon systems could require to be built differently than others.
Or they could induce damages in a different way.

For example, local temporary area of effect warheads/bombs, ramming “stakes”, streams of burning hot hull melting liquids, etc..
If there was a weapon for which you could design a projectile, you could do even more.

Giving most weapon types a niche, or innate advantage in certain situations, beyond range, projectile trajectory and speed, and accuracy, could also spice things up. For example, beams could have a basic bonus against shields, canons against armor, something like a 25% bonus. Canons could also just have an all-around bonus, like 12% shields, 12% armor. Or maybe even just penetrate armor further by default. It doesn't have to be a huge advantage either. Just something to make some weapon a little bit more suitable in some circumstances.

This isn't anything really new to the game, missiles have an innate explosive and penetrating ability, its just not applied to other weapons. It just so happens that currently that niche is the most useful.
​

2.2.2. Missiles (Need some re-thinking !)

Missiles could use a few tweaks. Namely, introducing an ammunition cost would greatly help with their balance, without requiring nerfing their offensive power too much.

Requiring ammunition would serve several purposes:
Missiles becomes something you want to save up on, instead of spamming constantly.
Large missile arrays are less desirable, for their higher ammunition costs.
The amount of missiles carried is dependent on available limited cargo space. (see section 3 below)
It rewards players that invests in missile defenses and countermeasures, by ultimately paying off, instead of being a temporary “lucky charm”. (point defense turrets can be eventually bopped, and countermeasures avoided, but an infinite flow of perfect accuracy missiles can't be stopped easily )
The other weapon systems become a more interesting choice.
Specialized missile crafts have a niche, instead of being omnipresent.

I could suggest 2 courses of actions here. Of course there are probably others.

1. Ammo Cost + Systems Scale Up Worse:

This one is fairly simple. Missile systems needs generic “missile parts” items to fire. The quantity of items used up is proportional to the size of the missile system. So while a 1 block missile launcher might use up a single item, a 12 blocks long tube could use say 12.
Then, as the missile system get bigger, and the damage output increases the missiles gets slower, turns slower, gets bigger/longer.(could be calculated from the launcher tube group's size) But it would also get a sufficient HP buff to go along. The slow speed of the missile could be mitigated by being fired by fast ships. Their velocity would make the missile go faster until the natural “drag” of the physics engine brings it back down to its top speed slowly.
​

2. Ammo Cost + Ammo Determine Power and Speed

For this one, the missile system would also use up ammunition, but the damage output, and the missile speed would be calculated differently, and would depend at least in part on the ammunition used.
Instead of using generic “missile part” items, the systems could use craftable warheads with special attributes. Better warheads would cost more to produce and require a higher tech level, and higher tech level/rarer resources.
“Slaving” weapon systems would still determine how the missile is fired.​

This could be pushed further by having optionally the missile systems use up a “missile engine” item as well as the above warhead item when fired. This would change the way the missile flies to its target. Possibly making the missile faster, tougher, or have a particular flight path.​

3. Scarcity, Cargo, and Economy

3.1. Cargo System (Pictures)

Spoiler

In order to make the cargo system dependent on an amount of storage blocks, I'd like to suggest the following approach. Its also meant to look decently good, and give immediate visual feedback on how much space is used up for storage.
I originally was going to suggest just making a boring storage modules + storage computer combo. But then, it occurred to me, while reading a StarCitizen update, that it might be nice to have some kind of visual feedback as cargo space gets filled up. Nothing nearly as fancy as they're going for though. And it also encourage people to group things together, which is another plus in that it creates a weakness.

So, why not designate a volume, using blocks to draw a bounding box, that would get filled up proportionally with universal "boxes" blocks, as the cargo bay gets filled up ?
The boxes are easier to handle than individual blocks representing the content. And the cargo boxes' capacity can be fine tuned during development without ever needing to change the model, or the amount of blocks displayed in the volume.

In cases where the system is damaged, items that were inside destroyed cargo box blocks would be expelled, and others unharmed boxes would stay there, with their content safe.
Some boxes could be orphaned if the system is damaged enough, but their content wouldn't be lost, and it would still be possible to re-assign them into the repaired system by merging them back with the system's volume.

What I meant about the system getting damaged, and the orphaned blocks getting re-assinged:
- = cargo volume delimiter block
B = cargo box block
O = orphaned cargo box block

Original (The volume is full with cargo boxes):
-------
-BBBBB-
-------

Broken ( Two cargo boxes are destroyed, and some of the cargo modules forming the system's bounding box were destroyed. Leaving the system in a disabled state, and a block orphaned ):
- ---
-O BB-
- ---

Fixed (the lone orphan block is re-assigned, and the boxes are re-organized within the volume[a little like defragmenting a hard drive]):
-------
- BBB-
-------

It would also be possible to just break the boxes which would just drop their content, like a "piggy bank".
Using a salvage beam on a box would just put its content into the salvaging entity's inventory. The box block itself would not drop a block item upon salvage, to avoid anyone exploiting those box spawning at will.

The interface to this system would work nearly similarly to an improved shop interface, and allow transfer between docked entities or other cargo systems easily with a few clicks, without having to consider item stack issues. And it would be easy to just drop items into the cargo system from the player inventory, and take them back too. ( The shop interface could be massively improved by simply adding a quantity box next to each items, so you can get more than a single thing at once if you wish. And of course adding a drop area on the menu to drag and drop item(s) into the system. )
It also means, that the AI would probably be better able to carry freight between ships/stations/etc, given the system would be very straightforward and centralized.

Moreover, to provide access to the storage systems across a stations or ships, access nodes blocks could be made. And various logic blocks along with a jettison port block could also be thrown in to allow greater control on the system.

Mass and size of each items wouldn't be taken into account, simply because the player's grid inventory doesn't, and so it wouldn't make much sense..
Though, it could certainly be changed very easily in the future if needed, thanks to the way the system works, given everything is handled "behind the scene", with no need to consider a fitting stacks in a grid.

Additionally, this means that, any new resources that can't be represented in a grid inventory could be easily be stored in this system. Fuel, ammunition, captive fauna, etc.. Separate systems meant for each of those could also be made, based around the same framework.

For example, a separate cargo system for storing fuel could be implemented. Its “piggy bank” blocks could be made to have a chance to explode when shot at. This would make it easier to create a potential weakness out of fuel storage containers on a ship, given its guaranteed to contain fuel, and not have to deal with checking the content of the container that was hit.

With a system like this it would also be possible to make dockable item/fuel/ammunition containers. And those would be taken in charge readily by the system. This would open up a lot of possibilities for trade ships and the like. Not having to dock to transfer goods from ship to ship, and using small crafts to move containers around.

3.2. Resource Dependency

Spoiler

As you all probably know, having players depend upon a steady flow of certain resources, renewable or non-renewable, would help with several aspect of the game:

• Requiring a “fuel” source to cover great distances would put a cost on traveling in space. Which in turn would mean that locations where fuel is processed and mined would gain significant value. Trade of fuel would be profitable. Expeditions to distant places could be more costly. Jumpgates would become even more meaningful than they already are. Fleets would require resupply after a while, it wouldn't be as easy to camp the same spot, and cutting their fuel supply would be a mean of repelling an enemy siege. It would also mean, possibly having to bring/protect supply ships along with a fleet, or use them to resupply a forward base.
• Requiring ammunition for certain weapons, such as missiles, means that sustaining a constant barrage of those would have an actual cost in terms of logistic. There would be a need for ammunition factories, and a market for ammunition. It would also help balance missiles, and make them a little less common.

Adding resource dependency is a big part of the survival aspect. So I'm assuming that there is indeed a lot of these things planned. However, I'm writing this merely in order to put emphasis on how it could help with balance right now, and actually making the game a bit more playable/complete, on the way to release.

3.3. A Word on Resource Spread

Spoiler

Spreading around resources is a good thing. And you know why ?
Progress. That's why.

Silly one word magic answers aside, when the first explorers came to america, for example, they were looking for a shorter way with less obstacles to get to the east and trade spices and etc.. This was so important economically that more effort and resources were put by competing nations into developing better tools for exploring.

For example, the Caravelle was developed to make that trip easier. But then other things were developed as well. All those somehow branched off from transportation and exploration.

Essentially, when you need to figure out how to go from point A to B, in order to get something precious, to make it worth your troubles, you're more likely to figure something out. Spreading resources and putting the rarest in hard to get places will motivate people to overcome the obstacles however they can.
And in a game with emergent gameplay like starmade, that's ideal.

This is also why a resource tiering system is urgently needed, along with some harsher terrains and locations. With tools to overcome them of course.

3.4. Resource Exploitation

Spoiler

As of now, the only way to gather resources is through using salvage beams, and building “planet eaters”. Planet eaters have proven to be an issue performance wise, so maybe making them a bit less important could help, while not ruining anyone's fun ?

I'd suggest basically allowing people to build mining platforms on planets. Which would return a constant income of resources that wouldn't be minable by using a salvage beam. (The main downside though would be that some kind of “away” system would need to be worked out. Like a chunk loader in minecraft. But since the core of a planet isn't made with voxels, it migth be easier to just “register” mining platforms into the planet core object, and have them accumulate resources while the planet is unloaded. And once a player is in range the accumulated resources for each platform is sent through the storage triggering logic blocks and etc if possible. )

The minable resources and the amount available in one planet, would vary depending on the planet. Since these details would be most likely stored in the planet's core, this would mean people wouldn't be able to just mind their own business on their own plate. And thus they'd need to interact if they live on the same planet.

Different mining platforms would be able to mine only certain resources, and adding more platforms would mean faster mining. (Those could make use of the multi-blocks systems mentioned above too! )
Possibly that, this kind of mining could eventually destroy the planet's core, if all the mineral is gone, without exploding it, but still releasing the plates.
This would mean direct visual feedback on whether a planet is emptied out or not. It would also mean its probably not to wise to mine your homeworld to the last rock, unless you really need to.

That's pretty much it. I tried to keep it short, but I've re-written this thing at least 4 times now, over a month, and I can't shorten it anymore.. Especially since the game is changing faster than I'm writing this..

But anyways, the point of all this is to bring ideas, and feed discussion. So I'd like to hear some feedback, and possible improvements to these. I suggest specifying what point you're commenting on, to make discussion easier.

Also, congrats if you read it all !
I'm predicting this won't be the case for most.. Which is somewhat understandable at this point ^^;

 

[CyberTao]

This is one of those mega threads that I look at and think to myself "Has he gone and checked similar topics and seen the arguments?".

1.1. Effectiveness Coefficient:

This would be impossible to do without pre-determining class sizes basically. A bigger ship should not have more armour because it is bigger, it should have more armour because it has more armour. Arbitrary buffs and nerfs are weird and only really say "We could not find a proper solution" in a sandbox game.

For example; Everything depends on power, and power is harder to obtain on larger ships, which also rely on large stores of power. Buffing the EMP effect would be an effective counter versus that.

1.2. Multiblock Tiered Systems:

I can see people having issues sticking fixed arranged templates onto their ships, some of the more unique and inspiring ships would not exist if they had to follow this. It's interesting, but very limiting and heavily dependent on the rest of the thread, which is bad because it makes it hard for devs to pick out key good ideas.

2.1. Counter-Measures

Things like Chaff and Flares are already player-made and used ingame, I see no reason to tack onto the game a new system that does what we can already do. Scanners are actually useless as well, since Jamming can just be re-enabled immediately currently. Jamming and Cloaking need a rebalance and possible design changes, but this is known and we are more or less just waiting for it.

Weapon Balance:

Weapons are currently setup in a way where you can build specialized weapons, I would rather not be forced to play with pre-determined special weapons (like extra shield damage for beams) because that would ultimately reduce the amount of options that could be added due to balance concerns.

There is also a physical/ammo based Missile ingame, it's called Torpedo most times and is basically a small ship with a warhead. That shit is dangerous as hell if it gets up to speed.


Also, if you have skeptism about the HP system, get on the Dev build and try it. It's really very well put together, and definitely would be a benefit to the game. http://starmadedock.net/threads/development-build.7834/

 

[Valiant70]

I'll be back later to read the entire OP.

 

[Kaamio]

Cargo system and resource ideas seem pretty decent. EVE style resource distribution is pretty good I think, asteroids have diffefent amounts of stuff refined from them and different types of asteroids are spread in different areas of galaxy.

Basically you can find everything everywhere but you end up with exess in some materials and very low on some others, and rarest materials are only found in larger quantities in rather dangerous areas.

 

[friendofvampires]

I'm liking the storage idea alot, and also the scarcity, though maybe some weapons don't use ammo, like beam and pulse? I'm usually a miner/explorer/builder, so having an actual economy for the stuff I mine would be great.

 

[Psy_commando]

This is one of those mega threads that I look at and think to myself "Has he gone and checked similar topics and seen the arguments?".

I actually did. But I found only very few things. And, I don't know about you, but I think its a little excessive to have to read the full backlog of the forum, before making a post here.

Also, that's why I added that "disclaimer" at the top. I just don't have the time to read everything around here. But I held off posting this for weeks, trying to read as much as possible. So, I'm sorry but that's literally the best I can do..

This would be impossible to do without pre-determining class sizes basically. A bigger ship should not have more armour because it is bigger, it should have more armour because it has more armour. Arbitrary buffs and nerfs are weird and only really say "We could not find a proper solution" in a sandbox game.

Why would you need to determine ship classes ?
In real life ship classes were pretty much all over the place for a long while. And they're still shifting. Frigates, corvettes, cruisers, etc.. They were very similar in certain periods of history in terms of size, weapons and armor.
The sizes for ships were pretty much adapted as needed by the various navies. And some classes disappeared because they were no longer practical/didn't have a niche in the new "meta" of naval warfare.

The point of this isn't to balance out based on set ship sizes and armors. Its just meant to give a reason not to just make a big box of advanced armor, cram it with shields, guns, thrusters, and powerblocks, and just win.. Its only one possible tiny element in a sea of other changes that are going to be needed to properly balance things out.

Also, the example with the increasing armor buff as the coefficient increases, that was just a way to demonstrate buffs could be applied based on that coefficient.

While its just an example, its however not as arbitrary as you seem to think.
Larger ships take much more fire for longer periods of time, its much more logical to give them an endurance buff, than something else..
And considering buff are multipliers in general, the amount of armor block would still strongly matters in the equation at the end. The idea was never to truly replace armor with that :/
Maybe the way I put it might have been a bit confusing..

What's a proper solution to you anyways ? A big part of the game currently runs on buffs, no ?

For example; Everything depends on power, and power is harder to obtain on larger ships, which also rely on large stores of power. Buffing the EMP effect would be an effective counter versus that.

Not really. The EMP effect is situational at best. Not everyone will run it, because you cannot realistically completely permanently disable/cripple another ship that way. The damages the EMP attacks do are too little.

While in the example above, an armor buff is logical and practical in all combat contexts for larger ships. But, really, that wasn't the point here. I don't know the specifics of the final form of the armor/hp system. That's why it was just an example, and didn't necessarily had to do with my suggestion.

I can see people having issues sticking fixed arranged templates onto their ships, some of the more unique and inspiring ships would not exist if they had to follow this. It's interesting, but very limiting and heavily dependent on the rest of the thread, which is bad because it makes it hard for devs to pick out key good ideas.

I think you might have missed the point here. The way I understood your argument is that you're basically telling me looks is better than functionality, because art. I assume I'm mistaken however.

But regardless, keep in mind that you already have to follow a certain template/layout for power blocks, weapons, and such. Checker patterns, fancy power blocks layouts, etc.. You have a set of rules on how to place blocks together so they work like you want them to. Yet builders just integrate those in their design, and work with them.

This isn't really any different, except its all in all more compact, and would allow more fine tuning than a comparable attempt using multi system slaving would yield, while still allowing to be reshaped as needed. It would also delimit groups from eachothers implicitly, and thus remove the need to link things module per module for tier 2-3 systems, linking an entire group at a time instead.
And that's pretty much a good chunk of my point.

I'd like to know how its so dependent on the rest though ? The way I see it, everything in here could work on its own, if the devs would like to. Sure, in the way I presented them here, all those would work best together. But its not a requirement or a huge obstacle. Besides, its really just up to them what they do with this.

Things like Chaff and Flares are already player-made and used ingame, I see no reason to tack onto the game a new system that does what we can already do. Scanners are actually useless as well, since Jamming can just be re-enabled immediately currently. Jamming and Cloaking need a rebalance and possible design changes, but this is known and we are more or less just waiting for it.

By player-made flares, do you mean you have a dude throwing out cores at the back of your ship ? Or maybe have them undocked at the push of a button ? I hardly see how that would be practical on anything but corvette sized ships and bigger.

And yes, changes are coming. That is why I'm suggesting things. Things related to those upcoming changes.
Granted, those things I suggested about the scanner are pretty uninteresting ideas on their own. But I was mainly focusing on active counter-measures. I guess I ended up extrapolating a bit too much..

Weapons are currently setup in a way where you can build specialized weapons, I would rather not be forced to play with pre-determined special weapons (like extra shield damage for beams) because that would ultimately reduce the amount of options that could be added due to balance concerns.

What about missiles ? They got penetration and an explosive effect by default. Besides, ranges on all weapons are very limited. I wouldn't call them truly generic.
Anyhow, the point is not to make them massively different. Just give some perks to those that uses them, just like missiles. Missiles that currently demonstrate the effectiveness of giving extra little perks over other weapons, might I add.

From what you're saying here, about the devs limiting the options for balance concerns, I think you may have balance a little bit wrong here.
Its not about making all weapons absolute equal in terms of maximum power. Its about making them all equivalently useful/efficient within each their ranges of scenarios. A little like the saying goes "The right tool for the right job".
I mean, obviously, by making everything the same, you'd obtain a form of balance, but it would hardly be any fun at all.

But, the rock/paper/scissors approach that's pretty popular works more or less this way :
Take any WW2 games ever. Bullets are bad against tanks, but great against infantry, and a lot of non-armored enemies. Does it means bullets are overpowered ? No. Because they can be countered. Does it means bullets are worthless because they're not useful against tanks ? No, because they're very effective within their context.

There is also a physical/ammo based Missile ingame, it's called Torpedo most times and is basically a small ship with a warhead. That shit is dangerous as hell if it gets up to speed.

Have you ever tried firing a torpedo and hitting something ? Latency causes a lot of weirdness when they do hit. Weapon collisions and ship collisions aren't managed by the same system, that's why ironically, creating a specialized "torpedo" entity would be a good thing, now that you bring it up.

I tried to make some tandem warheads torpedoes, but depending on the server load the second charge might not trigger, or just explode at the same spot as the first. Or even just teleport away..

But that's besides the point. Would you give up the missile module for those clunky torpedoes ? Honestly, I wouldn't. Its not practical, and the current way docking works would make firing and reloading missiles an absolute pain in the butt.
The missiles using ammo would still be just as convenient as they always were. Its just that, it would limit their role on the battlefield to something a little more tactical, rather than spam-tical :p While not needing to nerf their raw damage potential.
I thought it was a fair tradeoff, considering the ammo would still be manufacture-able. There are other ways of course.

Also, if you have skeptism about the HP system, get on the Dev build and try it. It's really very well put together, and definitely would be a benefit to the game. http://starmadedock.net/threads/development-build.7834/

I did actually. I played around with it for a good couple of hours. Blowing up ships I made.
And like I said, I'm not really thrilled this far. My opinion could change later however, but I don't really like where this is going..

 

[Valiant70]

- Larger ships are always better.
Smaller ship do nothing better than larger ones. While larger ships do everything smaller ship do and more. Besides not being laggy, and being small.

I can think of only one reasonable way to fix this and diminishing returns aren't it. We need to maximize effects that make large ships inefficient at killing small ships. In an ideal world, small ships and large ships would have a hard time killing one another. However, enough small, fast ships can gang up on a large ship to kill it eventually, so turrets and smaller escort ships would be needed. A large, lone ship would then be most vulnerable to a fleet containing one ship of similar or slightly larger size and a number of small assault ships. The big bruiser would take down shields and attempt to missile off some of the turrets, then focus on avoiding the victim's fire as much as possible while the small ships add DPS that can't be easily shot down. This works to a small degree now, but if you fly past in the pilot's view in a smaller ship, the only thing sparing your life would be the enemy pilot's aim.
[DOUBLEPOST=1433819458,1433818159][/DOUBLEPOST]

- Weapons are unbalanced and missiles are almost without contest the king of the battlefield.
Module to effectiveness ratio is tremendous for missiles. And some other weapons are limited by the game's behavior and bugs themselves. Some others have no reasons to exist, no practical purpose.
Since all weapons are just generic damage dealers, offering little perks on their own, there are no reasons not to use the most effective one. The ones that can't miss, and deal the most damages, aka missiles.

Agreed. Lock-on is overpowered and imbalanced and blast radii are too large, especially with explosive effect. Explosive should do something like split the explosion into several smaller ones around the point of impact rather than double (or more?) the volume of block destruction. Missiles that miss initially shouldn't come back around for another pass, especially if they're heatseekers. Also heatseekers shouldn't be able to just fire in any direction and lock onto EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE, because it's overpowered and stupid. Real life heatseekers don't work anything like that.

- No scarcity, no implicit cost, no value, to most things.
No value to planets or sectors, because their resource can be obtained anywhere else, at no extra costs for anyone. No cost for travelling around in space, shops and “shipyards”(build mode) are everywhere, climate and environmental differences between planets cause no issues to anyone or anything (basically all planets are habitable, and exploiting them and building bases isn't more complicated on any of them, unless they're in the star's killzone..).
That means, no resource/territory wars, no real worth in trading, less value to maintaining alliances with other factions economically.
Transport and storage in large quantities has no costs, or doesn't require much “effort” or planning, or specialized tools/ships. A single storage container can contain an entire planet's worth in blocks.
Shops spawn like flies, and stock up on everything.(and they have strange and random quantities of items available)
No reliance on supplies, so a fleet can camp a sector indefinitely, without having a forward base or supply chain, or having to head back to base to resupply.

Agreed as well. This will be fixed (hopefully) with increased universe diversity (see the roadmap) and the eventual implementation of an actual economy.

- Ships lacks weaknesses.

Avoid analyzing this until the HP system is finalized. It will drastically alter the entire meta. Coring will no longer be a thing and ships will be killed by trashing everything instead of nicking off one block.

3.2. Resource Dependency

I smell hate mail. For some reason people hate the idea of resource dependency, even if the resources don't even require much effort to get. I honestly don't understand it. I've played Minecraft (vanilla and modded) for a long time, so I'm just used to the idea and enjoy it I guess. I've also thought a lot about the effects of fuel source mechanics on gameplay, and practically wrote the book it. http://starmadedock.net/threads/a-manifesto-on-fuel-balancing-and-various-play-styles.5130/

3.3. A Word on Resource Spread

This is very true, and hopefully (again) this will come with an update that makes star systems more unique and valuable.

NOTE: I will edit this post tomorrow when I have time to finish. Good night.

 

[CyberTao]

Larger ships take much more fire for longer periods of time, its much more logical to give them an endurance buff, than something else..
And considering buff are multipliers in general, the amount of armor block would still strongly matters in the equation at the end. The idea was never to truly replace armor with that :/
Maybe the way I put it might have been a bit confusing..

What's a proper solution to you anyways ? A big part of the game currently runs on buffs, no ?

A big ship can withstand more because there is more armour to dig through to reach the insides. It's density is it's advantage defensively, and you would be giving it more defense for having more defense.

The buffs that the game currently uses is effects, which require both space and power. Closest we will get to subsystems probably, and are balanced by those 2 factors.

Not really. The EMP effect is situational at best. Not everyone will run it, because you cannot realistically completely permanently disable/cripple another ship that way. The damages the EMP attacks do are too little.

EMP is currently set to damage*11, meaning you cause more damage to the enemy ship's power than you have to use. One of the reasons it's unused is because of how short battles are, but EMP would be advantageous to use in fleet battles to keep the heavy alpha ships from firing.

Effects are suppose to be situational though, hence why they are used for specialized weapons.

But regardless, keep in mind that you already have to follow a certain template/layout for power blocks, weapons, and such. Checker patterns, fancy power blocks layouts, etc.. You have a set of rules on how to place blocks together so they work like you want them to. Yet builders just integrate those in their design, and work with them.

I don't build in checkerboards. There is no real advantage to do so for me, since I mainly concern myself with substained DPS and modular silos. People use Checkerboards because they choose to, it isn't a requirement and not everyone does.

Power is an exception, because how power is set up, you can bend it into any shape. Nesting is a glorious thing, and most people just spam lines with shields inbetween them. That's a lot less of a requirement than a 5x5x5 specialized arrangement of blocks that demands that you have a 5x5x5 cubic area to stack it into. All people would do is save templates of them and spam it and end up in a roughly cubic shape overall.

By player-made flares, do you mean you have a dude throwing out cores at the back of your ship ? Or maybe have them undocked at the push of a button ? I hardly see how that would be practical on anything but corvette sized ships and bigger.

keptick is building a titan-class chaff system, does that count? Do you even R&D m8? But yes, players do use chaff systems to help deal with missiles, because a core will attract missiles even after it overheats, they distract all kinds of turrets, and when running away it would clog up the radar of players trying to aim their Lockons. Core spam is perfectly viable, and more interesting since we have rails.

What about missiles ? They got penetration and an explosive effect by default. Besides, ranges on all weapons are very limited. I wouldn't call them truly generic.

Missiles are also the only weapon that has a active countermeasure, it only fails because of inadequate server settings, or due to bugs (They have a leading problem last I checked). You also forgot to mentioned that Punchthrough and Piercing do very little for missiles, limiting what options you have for them. If anything, that just screams to nerf missiles and differentiate Cannon/Beams a little more. People need to stop trying to bring all weapons up to missile's level of absurdity and think about bringing missiles back down into line, because missiles are retarded in their power, and I don't want every gun ever to cause that kind of chaos.

Have you ever tried firing a torpedo and hitting something ? Latency causes a lot of weirdness when they do hit. Weapon collisions and ship collisions aren't managed by the same system, that's why ironically, creating a specialized "torpedo" entity would be a good thing, now that you bring it up.

I tried to make some tandem warheads torpedoes, but depending on the server load the second charge might not trigger, or just explode at the same spot as the first. Or even just teleport away..

But that's besides the point. Would you give up the missile module for those clunky torpedoes ? Honestly, I wouldn't. Its not practical, and the current wait docking works would make firing missiles an absolute pain in the butt.
The missiles using ammo would still be just as convenient as they always were. Its just that, it would limit their role on the battlefield to something a little more tactical, rather than spam-tical :p While not needing to nerf their raw damage potential.
I thought it was a fair tradeoff, considering the ammo would still be manufacture-able. There are other ways of course.

Have you ever hit anything with a properly constructed torpedo? Due to issue with how the game works, the faster it goes the more damage it does. Strap a push-pulse engine attached to a logic and a bobby AI to a single warhead and you can get between 60 and 200 thousand damage to shields easily. The variation is wide, but on average the DPS is nothing to sneeze at.

I smell hate mail. For some reason people hate the idea of resource dependency, even if the resources don't even require much effort to get.

Because some people find it boring, unneeded or just gkljerhgoiur worthy. I'm personally of the belief that it can be good if done right, i.e., in a way that it can drive established players but not impede starting ones. It's that weird topic that everyone has opinions on but doesn't really know what to do about it, since it is so easy to get wrong (like MC).

 

[Psy_commando]

Cargo system and resource ideas seem pretty decent. EVE style resource distribution is pretty good I think, asteroids have diffefent amounts of stuff refined from them and different types of asteroids are spread in different areas of galaxy.

Basically you can find everything everywhere but you end up with exess in some materials and very low on some others, and rarest materials are only found in larger quantities in rather dangerous areas.

I'm hoping the idea of the cargo system could be fleshed out more. I really simplified it in here, but I wrote a huge essay about its inner workings in depth, but I doubt anyone would ever want to read it XD

I never played EVE. But, its nice knowing its at least somewhat a popular solution.

I'm liking the storage idea alot, and also the scarcity, though maybe some weapons don't use ammo, like beam and pulse? I'm usually a miner/explorer/builder, so having an actual economy for the stuff I mine would be great.

Of course. My main target for ammo dependency is missiles. Because, it seems that limiting them in most other games via ammunition does wonder.

And same here, I love exploring, building and mining. And blowing up the occasional pirate. But right now, I don't have much left to explore XD

Avoid analyzing this until the HP system is finalized. It will drastically alter the entire meta. Coring will no longer be a thing and ships will be killed by trashing everything instead of nicking off one block.

Well, ships will still need weaknesses. Unless, they're going to throw out a good part of what's interesting about voxels and make the entire hull a single entity.

I'm aware core drilling is going away, but, I wrote all this a while ago. And I haven't seen anywhere the details on how the HP/Armor system would end up working.

I smell hate mail. For some reason people hate the idea of resource dependency, even if the resources don't even require much effort to get. I honestly don't understand it. I've played Minecraft (vanilla and modded) for a long time, so I'm just used to the idea and enjoy it I guess. I've also thought a lot about the effects of fuel source mechanics on gameplay, and practically wrote the book it. http://starmadedock.net/threads/a-manifesto-on-fuel-balancing-and-various-play-styles.5130/


This is very true, and hopefully (again) this will come with an update that makes star systems more unique and valuable.

NOTE: I will edit this post tomorrow when I have time to finish. Good night.

I'm not the kind of person that cares about hate mail. I already occasionally get some anyways. XD

I think its really a big misunderstanding. When you talk about things depending on resources, some people will think it implies grinding resources and tiresome repetitive harvesting. But in reality, there are ways to make it work and avoid giving more chores to the players. I mean, potentially if you're the fighting type, maybe you could just refuel once in a while at a space service station in exchange for money won from bounties and etc.. Minimal grinding is required.
Or maybe just having different ways of powering a ship that could be sustained by the pilot's actual fighting performances could even be worked out. There are a lot of possibilities.
And well, fuel isn't the only way to create a cost for traveling.

I'll try to take a look at that thread, but no promises. I got a lot of stuff to work on lately ^^;

And good night!

I can think of only one reasonable way to fix this and diminishing returns aren't it. We need to maximize effects that make large ships inefficient at killing small ships. In an ideal world, small ships and large ships would have a hard time killing one another. However, enough small, fast ships can gang up on a large ship to kill it eventually, so turrets and smaller escort ships would be needed. A large, lone ship would then be most vulnerable to a fleet containing one ship of similar or slightly larger size and a number of small assault ships. The big bruiser would take down shields and attempt to missile off some of the turrets, then focus on avoiding the victim's fire as much as possible while the small ships add DPS that can't be easily shot down. This works to a small degree now, but if you fly past in the pilot's view in a smaller ship, the only thing sparing your life would be the enemy pilot's aim.

Are you referring to my suggestions, or just trying to address the issues on your own ? :/

I'll assume you're speaking of the effectiveness coefficient, I guess.
There isn't really any "diminishing returns" involved. Those disadvantages ships get when getting bigger would be offset by the implicit advantages and the possible buffs that could be computed.
Essentially, the point is to make large ship have their place, and small ships have theirs too. Not to punish larger ships, because they're larger.

What you're suggestion here is basically a battle plan. I'm suggesting how to implicitly favor such scenarios, through providing limitations and strengths that players can harness.
Roles on the battlefield come from a need, well pretty much like in everything else. Planes were mainly used for recon, and carrying mail at first. And when bomber appeared, actual fighters appeared. Looking at how those particular inventions came into existence is a good way to determine how to emulate that in a game I'd say.

A big ship can withstand more because there is more armour to dig through to reach the insides. It's density is it's advantage defensively, and you would be giving it more defense for having more defense.

The ship's volume isn't completely armor. And I can't really debate on that, because I don't know how exactly the armor system will work, and it never really was such a concern for me to defend that armor buff, because its just an example I choose that made sense in that context.

And I disagree, its advantage isn't only in defense. Its in speed, firepower, etc.. Right now at least.
In the example, I was implying that the larger ships would have less effective weapons and perhaps speed. What's left in this case ? Endurance ?
But realistically, it wouldn't be something out of this world in terms of advantage. Considering many large weapon systems do way more that the toughest armor block can withstand regardless.

But yeah, it definitely would require more thinking to implement a buff like that.

The buffs that the game currently uses is effects, which require both space and power. Closest we will get to subsystems probably, and are balanced by those 2 factors.

You're forgetting a bunch. What happens when you order power blocks in a certain way ? You get a bonus that you wouldn't get when putting them one by one. That's power out of nowhere.
Same with power capacitors. Same with weapon blocks. Etc..

Not sure what you mean here. Everything in my suggestion still obeys the same power requirements, and have different space requirements.
If you're talking about the armor buff, it was offset by the proportional drop in firepower.

EMP is currently set to damage*11, meaning you cause more damage to the enemy ship's power than you have to use. One of the reasons it's unused is because of how short battles are, but EMP would be advantageous to use in fleet battles to keep the heavy alpha ships from firing.

Effects are suppose to be situational though, hence why they are used for specialized weapons.

Of course, but the point in that case is not that they're situational. Its that they're too situational on their own, in comparison to the armor buff. Thus your example was a little inadequate.
Anyways, not going to continue on this, because the armor buff is kinda beside the point. It has nothing to do with the actual suggestion, it was just an example.. :/

I don't build in checkerboards. There is no real advantage to do so for me, since I mainly concern myself with substained DPS and modular silos. People use Checkerboards because they choose to, it isn't a requirement and not everyone does.

Power is an exception, because how power is set up, you can bend it into any shape. Nesting is a glorious thing, and most people just spam lines with shields inbetween them. That's a lot less of a requirement than a 5x5x5 specialized arrangement of blocks that demands that you have a 5x5x5 cubic area to stack it into. All people would do is save templates of them and spam it and end up in a roughly cubic shape overall.

Yes, but the reason people build checkerboard is that they can't put modules from a single system next to each others. That's a building constraint.

As for power, you can't really bend it into any shape if you want maximum power per block. You get a power increase when you increase the size of the bounding box in a direction while keeping most faces of each blocks clear of other power blocks.

Also, I think you might have misunderstood how the system is meant to work.
Its not fixed to 5x5x5 at all.
If you use the design I made for the example, its not limited to that at all. You can make it 20W 10L 50H, or 5W 5L 50H if you want to. You can change the proportion of blocks that makes it up too. And that proportion decides of the way the system works.
Within a 9W 9L 5H, you could have 1 core block or 5 or even more. And same for the other kinds of blocks. That difference would translate directly into a change of performances. You generally wouldn't want to stack them, because you'd get better use of the space by simply extending one of them.
The result could indeed be contained within a larger cubic volume, but I'm not sure what's your point, as its implicit for anything else, because of the game using cubes to represent the world..

Not to mention, the regular 1 block module system is never replaced by this. The multi-block system just works as an upgrade or maybe more like a sidegrade. Thus, its possible to mix and match all tiers. As mentioned in my original post.

keptick is building a titan-class chaff system, does that count? Do you even R&D m8? But yes, players do use chaff systems to help deal with missiles, because a core will attract missiles even after it overheats, they distract all kinds of turrets, and when running away it would clog up the radar of players trying to aim their Lockons. Core spam is perfectly viable, and more interesting since we have rails.

What about that magnificent high penetration torpedo I mentioned earlier ? I got the idea from AT missiles warheads with 2 charges that detonate one after the other. One is for opening a hole, the other for blowing what's inside the hole. I totally R&D :p

And well, the point was that, fighters and bombers, which require the most a chaff system, considering a single medium missiles is almost certain death, couldn't mount a system like you're describing. Not enough space to store cores and docking blocks. Not to mention, cores are going to go, and we're not sure targeting anything will always be possible, or that missile lock will still have that quirk of picking whatever it wants under your reticule as target.

Missiles are also the only weapon that has a active countermeasure, it only fails because of inadequate server settings, or due to bugs (They have a leading problem last I checked). You also forgot to mentioned that Punchthrough and Piercing do very little for missiles, limiting what options you have for them. If anything, that just screams to nerf missiles and differentiate Cannon/Beams a little more. People need to stop trying to bring all weapons up to missile's level of absurdity and think about bringing missiles back down into line, because missiles are retarded in their power, and I don't want every gun ever to cause that kind of chaos.

Do you mean point defense turrets, or the jammer ?

Punchthrough and Piercing are literally disabled for missiles according to the wiki. Besides, they already got a better effect than those effect system provides to other weapons. Besides, having either of these effects alone on any weapon on which they actually work is not really worth it. And the canon not naturally having penetration is kind of paradoxical, given most ballistic weapons are implicitly about penetration..

And well, you can't really blame missiles for actually damaging stuff. And what would an actual nerf accomplish ? Only large ships with huge missile arrays will ever use them ? That would only make "big" damages even more out of reach of smaller crafts. Bombers are hardly really worth it right now. Well the AI is partly to blame, but I meant just in terms of firepower.
Missiles should just be limited, not nerfed. Having a powerful weapon to use when it counts, and only a few times before needing more ammo is great.

Have you ever hit anything with a properly constructed torpedo? Due to issue with how the game works, the faster it goes the more damage it does. Strap a push-pulse engine attached to a logic and a bobby AI to a single warhead and you can get between 60 and 200 thousand damage to shields easily. The variation is wide, but on average the DPS is nothing to sneeze at.

What's annoying with the bobbyai is that they're pretty lethargic, derpy, and unpredictable.
And I'm assuming you're playing on a server with collision damages enabled ? Because I didn't really notice any significant damages increases.. But I may be wrong.

Like I mentioned above, my torpedo design was mainly meant to hit the same target twice instead of only once.

Because some people find it boring, unneeded or just gkljerhgoiur worthy. I'm personally of the belief that it can be good if done right, i.e., in a way that it can drive established players but not impede starting ones. It's that weird topic that everyone has opinions on but doesn't really know what to do about it, since it is so easy to get wrong (like MC).

Vanilla Minecraft got a little better when they introduced charcoal though. And mod made so many things even better.

But, yeah you brought up a good point. Its harder when starting out to afford fuel and etc.. But I wonder if we'll always begin in space, with almost nothing when starting a new game..

I thought that maybe going with low-tier low power thrusters / reactors that wouldn't need fuel, while higher tiers would, could work decently. Because people would get a choice, and a fallback.

 

[CyberTao]

And I'm assuming you're playing on a server with collision damages enabled ? Because I didn't really notice any significant damages increases.. But I may be wrong.

I dont think anyone plays with collision damage. Warheads do damage when they collide with a block, and if you go fast enough, it clips into the other block slightly and goes through multiple collision checks before going off, causing the damage to be multiplied. The different is only in shields though I think, hull damage has little variation.

Its in speed, firepower, etc.. Right now at least.

Thruster are on a curved in terms of thrust generated, but power is linear. That means speed is more and more expensive as you get larger. Maneuverability is good point, however that would be covered by the planned thrust overhaul and thrust distribution system that was talked about before.
Firepower is a given, big ships have big guns. One way to fit that is to fix the cone of fire combined with turning speed fixes. Adjust turret turning rates and there is a nerf right there technically.

As for power, you can't really bend it into any shape if you want maximum power per block. You get a power increase when you increase the size of the bounding box in a direction while keeping most faces of each blocks clear of other power blocks.

Power per block increases as long as the group dimensions are increased with each block. It is actually very flexible and can be warped and shaped around any ship shape or interior. It's also additive with the dimensions, meaning that you can get the same bonus from a wide variety of ship shells.

And well, the point was that, fighters and bombers, which require the most a chaff system, considering a single medium missiles is almost certain death, couldn't mount a system like you're describing. Not enough space to store cores and docking blocks. Not to mention, cores are going to go, and we're not sure targeting anything will always be possible, or that missile lock will still have that quirk of picking whatever it wants under your reticule as target.

Swarm missiles are really slow and Lock on /beam missiles are essentialy anti-fighter missiles anyways (that's how I rationalized their speed anyways). Remember that you don't need a PD system to take down missiles, all you need is a cannon which can be player aimed, and if a ship has missiles strong enough to take out the fighter in 1 glup, then chances are you choose the wrong target or came early because your friends aren't here yet. I'd also recommend advanced hull on the fighters, just for the pure radius reduction it has for missiles.

I imagine locking on wont change much.

Do you mean point defense turrets, or the jammer ?

Punchthrough and Piercing are literally disabled for missiles according to the wiki. Besides, they already got a better effect than those effect system provides to other weapons. Besides, having either of these effects alone on any weapon on which they actually work is not really worth it. And the canon not naturally having penetration is kind of paradoxical, given most ballistic weapons are implicitly about penetration..

And well, you can't really blame missiles for actually damaging stuff. And what would an actual nerf accomplish ? Only large ships with huge missile arrays will ever use them ? That would only make "big" damages even more out of reach of smaller crafts. Bombers are hardly really worth it right now. Well the AI is partly to blame, but I meant just in terms of firepower.
Missiles should just be limited, not nerfed. Having a powerful weapon to use when it counts, and only a few times before needing more ammo is great.

Punch and Pierce are disabled for missiles because if they ever were made to work with missiles, they would ridikulass to the extreme, since it would basically remove the hard capped radius. They were nerfed on other weapons due to the sheer lag they could create in calculating destroyed blocks and the complete overshadowing of explosive. Weapons are getting a rebalance anyways, and I'm curious to see how they get setup.

Also, if the cannon fires using power, it's not a ballistic, it's a energy round.

There is more than 1 way to nerf a weapon. Speed is one, radius is another. Changing Exploive effect to work as a radius multiple instead of a flat addition would also help. Not everything is centered around damage.

Vanilla Minecraft got a little better when they introduced charcoal though. And mod made so many things even better.

Charcoal is fine, because it provides an option in the early game. However, fuel in SM would not be like charcoal/Coal/lava, it would be closer to the hunger system. Coal is only needed when you want to do a certain thing, fuel would be needed constantly, which puts it closer to hunger in MC's terms. I don't know about you, but hunger is one of the more annoying features of MC when you consider how easy it is to get lots of it, but so crippling when you don't have any of it. You also can't limit it to drive conflict, because SM is 'infinite' in scale, so there is always going to be plenty for everyone, except for the new players.

Starting on a planet would also not really help this, since unless you reset the planet, it would eventually run out, and if it does reset, would be farmed by more advanced players.

It's a hard system to properly setup.

 

[Psy_commando]

I dont think anyone plays with collision damage. Warheads do damage when they collide with a block, and if you go fast enough, it clips into the other block slightly and goes through multiple collision checks before going off, causing the damage to be multiplied. The different is only in shields though I think, hull damage has little variation.

I'm not too sure about that.. That's not really a mechanic you'd want to depend on, its more of an unpredicatable implementation issue..
As soon as physics are improved, or if there's an update for Bullet that fixes that, it might change everything :/

Thruster are on a curved in terms of thrust generated, but power is linear. That means speed is more and more expensive as you get larger. Maneuverability is good point, however that would be covered by the planned thrust overhaul and thrust distribution system that was talked about before.
Firepower is a given, big ships have big guns. One way to fit that is to fix the cone of fire combined with turning speed fixes. Adjust turret turning rates and there is a nerf right there technically.

Its not "speed" that's more expensive as the ship gets larger, its thrust. There is a big difference here. Your ship's power output, or amount of thruster module doesn't decide the top speed of your ship.

Power per block increases as long as the group dimensions are increased with each block. It is actually very flexible and can be warped and shaped around any ship shape or interior. It's also additive with the dimensions, meaning that you can get the same bonus from a wide variety of ship shells.

Do you have anything to show for that ?
I've seen plenty of people claim they had the most efficient reactor design, but then using the same amount of blocks and laying lines of reactor cores ended up working better. :/
At one point I thought I also had a miracle design, but then I took the blocks and made lines or "L"s and it worked better...

Swarm missiles are really slow and Lock on /beam missiles are essentialy anti-fighter missiles anyways (that's how I rationalized their speed anyways).

Remember that you don't need a PD system to take down missiles, all you need is a cannon which can be player aimed, and if a ship has missiles strong enough to take out the fighter in 1 glup, then chances are you choose the wrong target or came early because your friends aren't here yet. I'd also recommend advanced hull on the fighters, just for the pure radius reduction it has for missiles.

I imagine locking on wont change much.

You're thinking about an ideal situation here. Try spawning like a dozen of pirate Isanth with homing missiles. See how the missiles don't care about what they hit, and how much damage they do ?
Since all weapons are "generic" as you said so yourself, that means missiles can very much be used against capitals if you want.

Remember that :

1. You might not turn in time, depending on the ship you're in.
   
2. More than one ship may fire missiles at you.
   
3. Lock-on missiles are often fired in large volley to counter people shooting them down.

And it doesn't have anything to do with picking the wrong target.. Lock-on missiles have a huge range, beyond the default visual range even. And even if you had your entire fleet with you, what does it change ? Any capitals, or fighter that mounts missiles won't hesitate to take you out if they can. Especially if they mount missiles just for that.

Also, you're contradicting yourself now..

Lock on /beam missiles are essentialy anti-fighter missiles anyways[...]

[...]and if a ship has missiles strong enough to take out the fighter in 1 glup, then chances are you choose the wrong target[...]

If its anti-fighter, chances are ships that are up against fighter will have them, maybe ? Maybe even other fighters ?
I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish.

And its not really locking that might change, but filtering.

Punch and Pierce are disabled for missiles because if they ever were made to work with missiles, they would ridikulass to the extreme, since it would basically remove the hard capped radius. They were nerfed on other weapons due to the sheer lag they could create in calculating destroyed blocks and the complete overshadowing of explosive. Weapons are getting a rebalance anyways, and I'm curious to see how they get setup.

Also, if the cannon fires using power, it's not a ballistic, it's a energy round.

Apparently that its disabled on missiles because the way the impact craters are calculated is based on an old method incompatible with those. Or at least that's what I read in another thread about rebalancing missiles.
And anything that breaks blocks create lag right now. Salvager too. Its a game wide issue.

And yes, weapons are getting a rebalance. That is why I made rebalance suggestions. You know the first post of the thread you're posting in :p
But what is your point ? I don't know where you're going with this.

And, I can tell you about several weapons that uses power that are still ballistic weapons. Railgun, gauss gun, plasma gun, chain gun, gattling gun, etc..
"Ballistic" describe the behavior of the projectile, not whether it uses bullets or not. It doesn't matter what the projectile is made out of..

There is more than 1 way to nerf a weapon. Speed is one, radius is another. Changing Exploive effect to work as a radius multiple instead of a flat addition would also help. Not everything is centered around damage.

Of course, there are other ways. And how do you figure that reducing the explosive radius of something that can be spammed in huge volley would do to help ?
That's why I suggested the ammo requirement in the first place. You can't work around a nerf that way. Unless you earn it and spend resources manufacturing a ton of them. But even them you'd have a limit to how many missiles you can carry.

Charcoal is fine, because it provides an option in the early game. However, fuel in SM would not be like charcoal/Coal/lava, it would be closer to the hunger system. Coal is only needed when you want to do a certain thing, fuel would be needed constantly, which puts it closer to hunger in MC's terms. I don't know about you, but hunger is one of the more annoying features of MC when you consider how easy it is to get lots of it, but so crippling when you don't have any of it.

I never really had much issues with hunger personally.

But I disagree here. Its not really likely it would end up like hunger in minecraft. Its restricted per ship. Not linked to the player. Its much less crippling. There would probably be places to buy fuel regularly, unlike food in minecraft.
And, the burn rate of fuel could be tweaked, to be less of a concern. Plus, in this very thread I've been suggesting a variable size cargo system, which would allow you to make a ship with huge fuel reserve if you'd like to.

You also can't limit it to drive conflict, because SM is 'infinite' in scale, so there is always going to be plenty for everyone, except for the new players.

Starting on a planet would also not really help this, since unless you reset the planet, it would eventually run out, and if it does reset, would be farmed by more advanced players.

It's a hard system to properly setup.

Of course, but the key is convenience. The resource spread idea above would also take care of the resource overload in part.
If a faction has a system that got generated with like 4 planets rich in fuel, and not too far from spawn, don't you think it wouldn't be a quite valuable to said faction, and others as well ?

Starmade might be "infinite", but if you think you might get something better closer to your current location, relatively easily. You'll go for it instead of going on errands to the end of the galaxy in hope you'll find what you're looking for. When people want something, they'll either pay you for it, exchange something for it, or take it.
Besides, there has been many resource wars on earth, even though there is a lot of places with similar resources. Its just that it happened to be closer, and defended by an army one thought they could take on.

Its hard ? Again, what's your point ? The rail system was hard to make too. Making a voxel game in Java is hard too. How is that any harder ?

 

[CyberTao]

I'm not too sure about that.. That's not really a mechanic you'd want to depend on, its more of an unpredicatable implementation issue..
As soon as physics are improved, or if there's an update for Bullet that fixes that, it might change everything :/

Warhead need improving, but they are still our ammo-based missile alternate that deals higher than average damage. That is just what it is for, and would still be balanced around that after fixing. There is no other use for the block.

Its not "speed" that's more expensive as the ship gets larger, its thrust. There is a big difference here. Your ship's power output, or amount of thruster module doesn't decide the top speed of your ship.

Thrust determines Acceleration, and on servers with higher dampening or higher top speeds, you can notice the difference in top speeds. If a ship is forced to be slower just because someone said it should be slower, and not because it doesn't have enough engine power, then that is reducing design options just so someone can have their ideal fantasy ships.

Do you have anything to show for that ?
I've seen plenty of people claim they had the most efficient reactor design, but then using the same amount of blocks and laying lines of reactor cores ended up working better. :/
At one point I thought I also had a miracle design, but then I took the blocks and made lines or "L"s and it worked better...

If you are still trying to compare shapes and layouts, you don't understand power. A single group that expands the dimensions of the ship is most effective. Not once did I mention weaving power cords to be the most effective, I just brought it up because power allows for freedom of usage.

You're thinking about an ideal situation here. Try spawning like a dozen of pirate Isanth with homing missiles. See how the missiles don't care about what they hit, and how much damage they do ?
Since all weapons are "generic" as you said so yourself, that means missiles can very much be used against capitals if you want.

Yes, X can be used with Y if it's wanted, Starmade needs Asymmetry to fix that problem though.

Remember that :

1. You might not turn in time, depending on the ship you're in.
   
2. More than one ship may fire missiles at you.
   
3. Lock-on missiles are often fired in large volley to counter people shooting them down.

And it doesn't have anything to do with picking the wrong target.. Lock-on missiles have a huge range, beyond the default visual range even. And even if you had your entire fleet with you, what does it change ? Any capitals, or fighter that mounts missiles won't hesitate to take you out if they can. Especially if they mount missiles just for that.

Also, you're contradicting yourself now..

If you are a fighter, you can turn in time, otherwise the fighter is badly designed. A red blip on the radar is hard to miss and due to jumpdrives you will rarely see ships just drifting by and firing off Missile/Beam turrets into space because Target.

I don't play with missiles regularly, I mostly deal with logic concepts and shells lately. I often forget the fact that any weapon can hit beyond visual range because I don't hear about it often enough to remember the most retarded design decision SE.

And no, they are not fired in large volleys to counter them being shot down, they are fired enmass simply because lolmissiles. Even before PD was added they were spammed and used in bulk, so the reasoning if more than just to counter the shitty PD that we have.

If its anti-fighter, chances are ships that are up against fighter will have them, maybe ? Maybe even other fighters ?
I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish.

Anti-fighter is how I titled the missile, not how the game was balanced. The speed of them makes them ideal for use against faster targets and if asymmetry is used, you can get a good balance between speed and damage by playing with the support %.

Apparently that its disabled on missiles because the way the impact craters are calculated is based on an old method incompatible with those. Or at least that's what I read in another thread about rebalancing missiles.
And anything that breaks blocks create lag right now. Salvager too. Its a game wide issue.

True, missiles use the Pulse damage model, as they have always done. It has a few kinks that need fixing, but is also the least laggy way of doing missiles, so we are stuck with it.

And yes, weapons are getting a rebalance. That is why I made rebalance suggestions. You know the first post of the thread you're posting in :p
But what is your point ? I don't know where you're going with this.

Did you miss the part where I said your idea of re-balance was a terrible idea? Did the miss the part in other threads that used the exact same idea, where I said it was a terrible idea? I honestly choose to ignore it because I do not support it and never will, but am not a door-to-door christian that likes to shove my opinions in people's faces.

Of course, there are other ways. And how do you figure that reducing the explosive radius of something that can be spammed in huge volley would do to help ?

There is a nerf in power usage for having multiple outputs, and if they change it so that locks are lost when changing from a lock-on to a lock-on, people can not just spam computers either. Things are spammed because they are spammed, and will always be spammed because that is how people want to build.

Its hard ? Again, what's your point ? The rail system was hard to make too. Making a voxel game in Java is hard too. How is that any harder ?

This just proves that you fail to understand the problem with balancing it. Adding blocks is the easy part.

You don't seem to understand how the game is played. If faction A has 4 fuel rich planets and is at war with faction B, faction B will just destroy the planets upright. They already have a way of getting fuel, and it would only be benefiting the enemy.

• You can not limit fuel generation to only planets, because they are destructible.
• Adding fuel generation to asteroids creates a scenario where you need to balance the cost of getting to it with the return of harvesting, which often creates a surplus. More advanced players would easily be able to profit. Asteroids are not scarce.
• Thrusters are not the only form of propulsion, fuel can only be tied to power generation as a result.
• The universe is not limited for the most part, meaning that established players can just venture further and gets more fuel from rocks.
• The spawn is limited. New players that require fuel need a way to obtain it without advanced players farming it.
• If growing and harvesting is involved at all, the scarcity is removed entirely, due to Starmade being able to create square kilometers of fields easily. This means that either crops would have pitiful yeilds and be grindy at the early game, or ludicrous at the endgame.
• Consumption is important to balance, as will the method of consuming fuel.

Fuel would either be too common and just a pain to remember to stuff into the ship or too hard to find and optional to the point that most players would ignore it. How do you balance new versus established players?

The same problems apply to ammo as well, it would either become so common that it doesn't matter or is so rare that it would not be used due to "Not-yet" syndrome that applies to all rare and powerful consumables in any game.

I'm almost convinced at this point that you don't know the topics you are even suggesting. Just because people want X doesn't mean X is easy to add. If just adding blocks was all that was needed to balance a game, then might as well call crafting complete right now.


Suggestions is also not a place for you to platform your ideas either. I've been roaming these forums for long enough that I can smack head with people so they can notice things that are missed, such as what is pure opinion and what is play-style based. None of these are new topics, and a good part of it mirrors what I have already seen before. When I brought up looking at other threads, I did so because I was involved in a good chunk of them and it would have honestly helped you understand what I was babbling about.

 

[Psy_commando]

Warhead need improving, but they are still our ammo-based missile alternate that deals higher than average damage. That is just what it is for, and would still be balanced around that after fixing. There is no other use for the block.

But, I don't get this. Ammo is a disadvantage. Why would you want an ammo based alternative to a weapon that fires infinitely ? The whole reason I mentioned using ammo to limit missiles, is just for that, limiting them. Not because I think its cool to have ammo-limited missiles/torpedo..

Thrust determines Acceleration, and on servers with higher dampening or higher top speeds, you can notice the difference in top speeds. If a ship is forced to be slower just because someone said it should be slower, and not because it doesn't have enough engine power, then that is reducing design options just so someone can have their ideal fantasy ships.

I'm considering the default settings that ship with the game here.

"just so someone can have their ideal fantasy ships" can be used just as much against you, if I were that kind of person.. You're building a strawman here, that one person everyone hates because they think they're more important than everyone. Except, it was never about that person. Its about making a trade-off, a compromise. So that as much people as possible can be satisfied with how the game plays.

However, you gotta admit that, having a huge ship armed with death dealing beams of doom that could take nukes all week is suddenly a little bit manageable for everyone else in the sandbox if it wouldn't zip in nearly as fast as nearly anything else..

And, can you please elaborate on how making larger ship slower than smaller ones "reducing design options". How come ? It won't keep anyone from placing whatever they want on their ship, no ?

If you are still trying to compare shapes and layouts, you don't understand power. A single group that expands the dimensions of the ship is most effective. Not once did I mention weaving power cords to be the most effective, I just brought it up because power allows for freedom of usage.

You said this:

It is actually very flexible and can be warped and shaped around any ship shape or interior. It's also additive with the dimensions, meaning that you can get the same bonus from a wide variety of ship shells.

So, I assumed you meant it was more effective that way, because you brought that in response to the multi-block system idea, which already provide a better output than the basic power system that you're referring to.
The fact that its less flexible in layout and more localized is one of the argument I was using to backup the whole ideas of multi-block structures. Its a trade-off that make tier 1 still relevant too.. Did you only look at the pictures, or did you read the thing ? :/

Also the reason I'm insisting on shape and layout, is because at first you said that it was limiting to force a layout on people. I replied by pointing out the layout rules for the power system among others.

What does freedom of usage even means ? Because it seems to imply that you're free to use power how you want, which you always are anyways ?

Yes, X can be used with Y if it's wanted, Starmade needs Asymmetry to fix that problem though.

Can you elaborate ? What is asymmetry for you in this context ?
Because, Starmade is already asymmetrical within a certain measure.

If you are a fighter, you can turn in time, otherwise the fighter is badly designed. A red blip on the radar is hard to miss and due to jumpdrives you will rarely see ships just drifting by and firing off Missile/Beam turrets into space because Target.

I don't play with missiles regularly, I mostly deal with logic concepts and shells lately. I often forget the fact that any weapon can hit beyond visual range because I don't hear about it often enough to remember the most retarded design decision SE.

And no, they are not fired in large volleys to counter them being shot down, they are fired enmass simply because lolmissiles. Even before PD was added they were spammed and used in bulk, so the reasoning if more than just to counter the shitty PD that we have.

You mean, otherwise its not a fighter.. If you make a long bomber, it gets slower to rotate on the pitch axis quickly for instance.
But that's not the problem. The problem is that missiles are coming for you, possibly from several sources, and you cannot shoot them all down most of the time, yet you can't take many hits from them. That's one reasons why a more compact active countermeasure system with a cooldown instead of "ammo" or cores is much more appropriate.

Yeah, a single red blip possibly amidst a sea of red blips ? You're cherry picking cases.
What about single player ? Pirate squads come in bunch of 6, no ? Not to mention there are a lot more where taking on a station.

If you don't play with missiles regularly, why do you come in here and try to lecture me on how they work in the grand scheme of things ? And, no, not all weapons can. Only the sniper canon, and missiles truly can : http://starmadepedia.net/wiki/Weapon_Systems
And that's it ? You're going to brush this off with an excuse like that?

Of course, people shoot them in volley not because they're clever and its useful, but because they're really dumb and like fireworks..
And no, I didn't say it was to counter only point defense. Point defense and pilots share the same challenge when shooting down volleys.

In the end, it really doesn't matter if the person firing the volley intended that as a strategy or not, it still goes through point defense, and it still makes it hard as hell to take all of them out manually, especially when you're fighting several other enemies off.

Anti-fighter is how I titled the missile, not how the game was balanced. The speed of them makes them ideal for use against faster targets and if asymmetry is used, you can get a good balance between speed and damage by playing with the support %.

Why not just refer to them as missiles then ? That would avoid further confusion. Again, please define what you imply by asymmetry here.

True, missiles use the Pulse damage model, as they have always done. It has a few kinks that need fixing, but is also the least laggy way of doing missiles, so we are stuck with it.

That's not what the devs were saying. They said they were working on a fix for missiles. They never said we were stuck with it.

Did you miss the part where I said your idea of re-balance was a terrible idea? Did the miss the part in other threads that used the exact same idea, where I said it was a terrible idea?

No, in fact I saw you imply it over and over in your posts. And I'm terribly sorry for having better things to do than looking up every thread you replied to. Even though I might have disagreed with you anyways. And you could at least link those threads when they apply.

But you still haven't really told me why my ideas are terrible. Besides arguing on the completely irrelevant armor buff example at first, then the fact that I suggested not making ships of different size equals, then that i should care about torpedo instead of missiles or something like that..

AKA. you've skipped on almost every occasion of telling me why you disagreed with it. Go and read your own replies. You didn't mention a lot of things I wrote in my original post. You stuck onto very few points that did not apply to everything in there.

So please, by all means, tell me what's wrong with my suggestions. Or just don't post about it. But don't act as if I'm so dumb for not reading your mind please. That's not going to go anywhere.

I honestly choose to ignore it because I do not support it and never will, but am not a door-to-door christian that likes to shove my opinions in people's faces.

Of course, I totally shoved my opinion in your face when you clicked on it and read it. I'm such a terrible person..

Except, you knocked at my door(thread), even though I set up a message specifically telling I don't care about people coming in here and telling me its been done before.
And you preached, and preached and preached about your convictions, like a good door to door salesman would do, without explaining anything besides giving magic answers "That's the only good way !".

Then you admit you ignored everything in here solely because you don't support it, yet you do not want to explain me why.

Do you even want to discuss ? Or did you just came in just for trying to start a flamewar or something over literally nothing ? I came here for a discussion, not to argue with someone that isn't even interested in it.

There is a nerf in power usage for having multiple outputs, and if they change it so that locks are lost when changing from a lock-on to a lock-on, people can not just spam computers either. Things are spammed because they are spammed, and will always be spammed because that is how people want to build.

How can you keep spamming something you have in a limited quantity ? That's the logic behind the ammunition limitation.

Did you notice how in some game you get that really powerful gun, but you can't just spam it all the time on everything because you only get very little ammo ? That's the idea I brought here. Its been used in many games for years, and worked fine at preventing spam. Yet you tell me that, there is no way to prevent people from spamming ?
Of course, all these game devs were so wrong, and it only worked because they're just lucky.

And then you're the one getting all riled up at me..

Balancing is basically to prevent people for "buidling how they want" and beat everyone you know. Is it a terrible thing for that ? Absolutely not. If people that wanted to wallhack would convince a game developper with ideas like that, then that game would suck for everyone, even though you'd have more freedom. More freedom doesn't automatically equals a better game.

Besides, its bad reasoning to appeal to the majority. Especially when you can't prove you know what the majority wants. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/bandwagon

This just proves that you fail to understand the problem with balancing it. Adding blocks is the easy part.

Obviously.
Can you tell me how many blocks I suggested adding, because I seem to have a blank now, I though most of the systems I suggested re-used things that already existed.

You don't seem to understand how the game is played. If faction A has 4 fuel rich planets and is at war with faction B, faction B will just destroy the planets upright. They already have a way of getting fuel, and it would only be benefiting the enemy.

Of course I don't. I also cannot use forums either, or even go to the bathroom.

And blowing the planet instead of giving it up is totally a legit tactic too. It still doesn't contradict what I said about resources triggering territory wars. The point was simply that resources are a motivation for it. What happens after is up to the players. Moreover, destroying planets isn't a walk in the park.

You can not limit fuel generation to only planets, because they are destructible.

Adding fuel generation to asteroids creates a scenario where you need to balance the cost of getting to it with the return of harvesting, which often creates a surplus. More advanced players would easily be able to profit. Asteroids are not scarce.

Why not limit fuel to planets ? That's actually a nice idea you brought there ! Your argument earlier, that Starmade is "infinite" and people can go to other planets somewhere for resources:

You also can't limit it to drive conflict, because SM is 'infinite' in scale, so there is always going to be plenty for everyone, except for the new players.

And you even re-stated it yourself just now:

The universe is not limited for the most part, meaning that established players can just venture further and gets more fuel from rocks.

So, what's so problematic about destroying planets that have fuel ?

Thrusters are not the only form of propulsion, fuel can only be tied to power generation as a result.

Glad we agree on something at least.

The universe is not limited for the most part, meaning that established players can just venture further and gets more fuel from rocks.

Is there something wrong with that ? They earned that at least.

The spawn is limited. New players that require fuel need a way to obtain it without advanced players farming it.

Aka, fuel stations /shops ? Because the reason you'd harvest fuel is mainly to get it for free and sell it or use it, no ?

If growing and harvesting is involved at all, the scarcity is removed entirely, due to Starmade being able to create square kilometers of fields easily. This means that either crops would have pitiful yeilds and be grindy at the early game, or ludicrous at the endgame.

Scarcity of a resource isn't something that's meant to last forever. Also, why are you bringing up crops ? I thought we were talking about fuel ?

Fuel would either be too common and just a pain to remember to stuff into the ship or too hard to find and optional to the point that most players would ignore it. How do you balance new versus established players?

Why would you "balance" that ? New players don't need free passes.

I got no idea what base you're going from, so I'll go with my idea of tiering, with the first tier not requiring fuel and giving a lesser return. New players will be stuck at first with the first tier that doesn't consume fuel, but that isn't all that powerful either. They're only going to become more dependent on fuel if they want to use the other higher tiers, which are totally optional.
And so is fuel. But the gains from using higher tier system would justify it, not to mention fuel itself would most likely find more than a single use. It could even just be only required for the jump drive if you want.

There are a lot of way of making this work. And I'd elaborate if I didn't know how you're likely going to answer, if your posts this far were any indication.

The same problems apply to ammo as well, it would either become so common that it doesn't matter or is so rare that it would not be used due to "Not-yet" syndrome that applies to all rare and powerful consumables in any game.

You can manufacture it, so then its not rare anymore ?
And if there is a surplus, what's the issue ? The point is that, coupled with limited item storage of any form, you can only carry so much into battle. It never was about creating an ammunition economy first..

I'm almost convinced at this point that you don't know the topics you are even suggesting. Just because people want X doesn't mean X is easy to add. If just adding blocks was all that was needed to balance a game, then might as well call crafting complete right now.

Well, good for you I guess.
I don't understand what you're talking about here though. Did I say people wanted to add something I mentionned ? I can't find where I said that. And what did I say is easy to add exactly ? I haven't found that either.

What's that about adding blocks ? Point me in what sections I mention adding new blocks to solve a balance problem ?

1. Ship Systems

1.1. Effectiveness Coefficient:
1.2. Multiblock Tiered Systems: (Pictures)
1.3. System Weakness​

2. Ship combat

2.1. Counter-Measures
2.2. Weapon Balance:​

3. Scarcity, Cargo, and Economy

3.1. Cargo System (Pictures)
3.2. Resource Dependency
3.3. A Word on Resource Spread
3.4. Resource Exploitation​

The only explicit new blocks I mention are those for the Cargo System. And they're only needed for functionality reasons, aka determining a bounding box and representing items in the storage. You could re-use existing blocks if you'd really want to.

I'm not sure what you're trying to pull off, but I'm getting annoyed at your insistence at trying to discredit me for no apparent reasons, other than you not liking this thread or me.
If you'd at least attack my arguments instead of going on about how I'm not good enough to claim things, and that I don't understand things you're not even explaining, this chat could have gone somewhere..

Suggestions is also not a place for you to platform your ideas either. I've been roaming these forums for long enough that I can smack head with people so they can notice things that are missed, such as what is pure opinion and what is play-style based. None of these are new topics, and a good part of it mirrors what I have already seen before. When I brought up looking at other threads, I did so because I was involved in a good chunk of them and it would have honestly helped you understand what I was babbling about.

Its not a platform for my ideas ? Then how do I share ideas / suggestions ? And how come some people literally doing that were acknowledged by the devs ?

Look at the dictionary bro:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/suggest?s=t

suggest
verb (used with object)

1. to mention or introduce (an idea, proposition, plan, etc.) for consideration or possible action: The architect suggested that the building be restored.
2. to propose (a person or thing) as suitable or possible for some purpose: We suggested him for president.
3. (of things) to prompt the consideration, making, doing, etc., of: The glove suggests that she was at the scene of the crime.
4. to bring before a person's mind indirectly or without plain expression: I didn't tell him to leave, I only suggested it.
5. to call (something) up in the mind through association or natural connection of ideas: The music suggests a still night.

And I've been roaming around the net long enough to understand that discussing in a forum isn't about "smacking head" with people.. This is a discussion, not a nerd bitch slapping contest.(I'd have won already :p ) You bring points that you back up with something that can be verified by the other party, so they can understand what's wrong if they're wrong. Its not a dick measuring contest, you don't win a debate, you don't change people's mind by intimidating them or by being a patronizing jerk to them.

This far, all I've got from you was some really ambiguous explanations, some "no you're wrong", and some "no, you can't possibly know what could work out because you don't understand anything and didn't read all those other threads".

Look, I might be stupid, but I'm quite capable of understanding things when they're explained to me.
In particular things linked with programming and video games, because the former is basically what I do for a living, and the later is something I've been researching/working with extensively and still am. Most of what I brought up is inspired by stuff I learned, even from games like TF2, and various RPGs, post-mortems, developers articles, etc.. I can't claim its the only way, or that everything is perfect, but that's the best I got. Please, correct me and explain why its wrong. But don't act like its my fault if it doesn't suit your standards, and then avoid explaining anything.

And don't start with that whole "its been suggested before" thing. I explained myself quite a few times, and frankly, I don't care. There isn't a forum rule against what I posted.

Not to mention this :

Oh, and I'm very aware that a lot of these things were brought up separately, or that those will probably be addressed in the future. So, if you're only here to tell me about that, don't waste your time reading this, or telling me. Thank you.

..which was highlighted in color, and in the first paragraph..

And I saw at least some of those thread you're talking about, and I still disagree and do not understand where you're going to with all this.
Your insistence over a few particular details that apparently miss the bigger picture, the way you seem to change your mind over and over again, and the fact that you're not even linking me to those threads you're speaking of only lead me to further believe you have no interests in this thread other than disrupting it.

So either calm down and try to clear things up with me, or kindly move on elsewhere more suitable to someone of your high caliber please.

 

[FullMetalFox]

And, can you please elaborate on how making larger ship slower than smaller ones "reducing design options". How come ? It won't keep anyone from placing whatever they want on their ship, no ?

Some people would like to build slightly bigger ships that are actually fast, i guess thats what Tao means. Say like a very fast ship with turrets like an Inceptor in EVE Online.

Of course, people shoot them in volley not because they're clever and its useful, but because they're really dumb and like fireworks.

Well many people might be doing that for dumb reasons, but some of us actually calculate the grouping ratios for our missiles, including PD decoys, and if that ends in a huge swarm then it ends in a huge swarm.

How can you keep spamming something you have in a limited quantity ? That's the logic behind the ammunition limitation.

Limited quantity doesnt mean that you cant spam it. Say good example in many FPS, grenades, you may only have 2 to 5 or so of them, but you can still spam them, you might be out of grenades after doing so, but you did dish out quiet a lot of damage in a very short amount of time. In Starmade, Hit and Run ships would only requiere some added logistics to still work at their full potential, and bigger ships would propably just sacrifice even more of the current useless tissue paper called shield, to just carry more ammo, which in turn would also mean that people would need les ammo to destroy those ships. See were this is going? While i like the concept of ammo, its not viable as a unique weapon factor.

Moreover, destroying planets isn't a walk in the park.

For most medium size (25k+) and larger PVP ships, its nothing more than looking at it and pressing a few buttons.
So why do you believe that it isnt a walk in the park?

Also, why are you bringing up crops ? I thought we were talking about fuel ?

Many players got the idea of Biofuel and stuff.

 

[Psy_commando]

Some people would like to build slightly bigger ships that are actually fast, i guess thats what Tao means. Say like a very fast ship with turrets like an Inceptor in EVE Online.

I can't say I know about EVE much. But, I wish Tao would have brought it that way if that what he actually meant ^^;

How fast are we talking about ?
Because, the speed difference doesn't need to be huge. The idea is just to allow small craft to have some breathing room over larger craft. Just enough to escape, or make some hit and runs and etc..

Well many people might be doing that for dumb reasons, but some of us actually calculate the grouping ratios for our missiles, including PD decoys, and if that ends in a huge swarm then it ends in a huge swarm.

Honestly, what you quoted was just exasperated sarcasm.
The thought that most people shoot missiles in volleys just because its cool, is a little odd.. :/
I even ended up doing it on my own after a while playing, just because it would help with accidentally taking out my own missiles. So I'm guessing others found advantages as well on their own.

Limited quantity doesnt mean that you cant spam it. Say good example in many FPS, grenades, you may only have 2 to 5 or so of them, but you can still spam them, you might be out of grenades after doing so, but you did dish out quiet a lot of damage in a very short amount of time. In Starmade, Hit and Run ships would only requiere some added logistics to still work at their full potential, and bigger ships would propably just sacrifice even more of the current useless tissue paper called shield, to just carry more ammo, which in turn would also mean that people would need les ammo to destroy those ships. See were this is going? While i like the concept of ammo, its not viable as a unique weapon factor.

That's true. In Battlefield 1942 and 2, grenade spam was annoying. You had 2 grenades on you, but sitting next to an ammo box and throwing a bunch non-stop was quite effective. But, just surprising the spammer from behind was enough to end this in that case.

EDIT: But, wouldn't you agree that, between infinite missiles, and having a smaller quantity carried around would limit the total damage you can dish out ? That is of course in cases where you're not near a steady ammo supply. I think that's a good step in the right direction, even if as you've mentioned, its not a miracle cure on its own. I mean, big things are made out of many smaller ones no ? Why throw away something that helps just a bit, because it doesn't fixes everything ?

You're bringing up something interesting about logistic. What did you have in mind, supply ships ? Bringing a dependency for fleets upon supply ship is something I always though would be interesting. As destroying those by raiding from behind could have an interesting impact on battles. You seem to have had a lot of battle experience in MP. What's your opinion on those ? Have you seen any kind of support ships showing up this far ?

And, I didn't know shields were getting so useless on large ships. I usually tend to hear the opposite. And the ridiculous recharge rates and capacities I saw weren't really anything to hint at the opposite XD

EDIT: But, there isn't really a single possible way for things to unfold here. Its possible that some ship would indeed sacrifice shields for more ammo. But, maybe some other will opt for external support ships, or perhaps even just for other kinds of weapons, or just move the task of firing missiles onto other specialized ships ?

EDIT2: I also should have mentioned here that since the higher tiers multi-block systems are meant to be more compact while giving out a higher output. It would mean there would be more space for other blocks. So its less likely people would have to make significant changes to shielding on their ship.

For most medium size (25k+) and larger PVP ships, its nothing more than looking at it and pressing a few buttons.
So why do you believe that it isnt a walk in the park?

Well, for one, I read the wiki, and that's what they seemed to claim : http://starmadepedia.net/wiki/Planet
I never really attempted it, because I got bored before building a canon that could dish out that much damages in a single shot.
Also, most LP-ers I saw seemed to say it was pretty hard as well.
You're pretty much the first person I met that tells me this.

Are those "medium" sized ships very common where you're playing ?

Many players got the idea of Biofuel and stuff.

Yeah, that's what I thought it might have been about. But the only thing is that, he was countering my stuff, and I never even mentioned biofuel.
What was I supposed to do ? Concede him he's right about something I didn't even talk about that he discreetly slipped in his arguments against something I actually brought ?

Honestly, I have a really hard time following his reasoning. And that last post where he began making uncalled for remarks about me didn't really help..

 

[Darkkon]

I have to say first off that I love the Cargo System idea. I feel it would add a lot to the game's immersion to be able to see your cargo hold fill up as you actually gather stuff up. (Heh, immersion in a block game. :P)

As for the ammo idea, I'm not well versed in combat in starmade since I usually play in single player and just build stuff. That being said, ammo is a very common theme, at the very least for missile-esque weapons, in just about every space game I have played or seen. (Some of them even have ammo for the mass driver weaponry. The beams usually just use power.) I don't see how adding ammo would be something that detracts from the game. If you really don't like it, there could always be a section of the config for you to enable or disable it.

Fuel/Resource Requirements definitely are something that gets under everyones skin. I have a question for you all though. How many space sims do not have a fuel requirement? Probably tons, but none of the ones I have played. (Hell, even Mass Effect 2 and 3 had fuel requirements and they were RPG's) I definitely like the idea of a tiered fuel system though. If the lowest tier doesn't require fuel, then its basically starmade as we currently have it. Moving up a tier requires fuel, but you get better stuff as well.

So that's all I have to say now. I love the entire suggestion (although I would definitely wait on the judgement on the HP system until its actually released). So yeah! Have a good day all!

 

[Psy_commando]

I have to say first off that I love the Cargo System idea. I feel it would add a lot to the game's immersion to be able to see your cargo hold fill up as you actually gather stuff up. (Heh, immersion in a block game. :p)

As for the ammo idea, I'm not well versed in combat in starmade since I usually play in single player and just build stuff. That being said, ammo is a very common theme, at the very least for missile-esque weapons, in just about every space game I have played or seen. (Some of them even have ammo for the mass driver weaponry. The beams usually just use power.) I don't see how adding ammo would be something that detracts from the game. If you really don't like it, there could always be a section of the config for you to enable or disable it.

Fuel/Resource Requirements definitely are something that gets under everyones skin. I have a question for you all though. How many space sims do not have a fuel requirement? Probably tons, but none of the ones I have played. (Hell, even Mass Effect 2 and 3 had fuel requirements and they were RPG's) I definitely like the idea of a tiered fuel system though. If the lowest tier doesn't require fuel, then its basically starmade as we currently have it. Moving up a tier requires fuel, but you get better stuff as well.

So that's all I have to say now. I love the entire suggestion (although I would definitely wait on the judgement on the HP system until its actually released). So yeah! Have a good day all!

Thanks for dropping in, and sorry for the mess ^^;

And yeah, a config option for the ammo requirement sounds like a great idea! And it might be needed for the "Battle Mode" the devs were talking about.

The Fuel requirement certainly seems to irritate people a lot XD
Though, I'd say its pretty understandable really. I was around when they introduced hunger in minecraft and a lot of people didn't appreciate it at all.
But personally it grew on me, even though at first I stopped playing for a while just because of that.. But then when I played again, it helped me figure out what to do at first, and establish priorities from there, instead of just derping around. Its really interesting how it helped pace the game.

Oh, right, ME2 had a fuel mechanic! I almost forgot about it XD I guess the logic behind it was basically the same as it would probably be in starmade, put a cost on exploring/traveling.
And yeah, I didn't play many space sims with fuel requirement either. I know Elite : Dangerous uses fuel, but I never played it. And X3 used energy cells to power the jumpdrive only, flying around wouldn't consume anything. But since later in the game you depend a lot on the jumpdrive, you'd be often ending up needing a refuel. However, in that game you could command ships in another sector to jump to you and bring you energy cells if you wanted to XD (Wouldn't it be convenient if StarMade had a out of sector mechanic like that ?)

Its true its too early to judge the HP system. Right now, I have a bad feeling about it. But I'll probably change my mind about it in the end honestly.

But thanks for the nice comment! This thread needed some positivity ^^;
Have a nice day

 

[FullMetalFox]

I can't say I know about EVE much. But, I wish Tao would have brought it that way if that what he actually meant ^^;
How fast are we talking about ?
Because, the speed difference doesn't need to be huge. The idea is just to allow small craft to have some breathing room over larger craft. Just enough to escape, or make some hit and runs and etc..

If we are talking end result on Interceptors, well very fast compared to other ships. Interceptors on their own are just marginally faster than the frigate their based on, but the bonuses and attributes they have change them, if used right ofc, into extremly fast tacklers, they cant deal that much damage, but due to their speed they can orbit and tackle their prey at such speeds that anything larger than light weapons cant track them anymore. So in Starmade, say you want a 100-150m ship thats as fast as a tiny fighter, maybe even faster, to simply outmaneuver the enemies weapons, while shooting at them with turrets.

But, wouldn't you agree that, between infinite missiles, and having a smaller quantity carried around would limit the total damage you can dish out ? That is of course in cases where you're not near a steady ammo supply. I think that's a good step in the right direction, even if as you've mentioned, its not a miracle cure on its own. I mean, big things are made out of many smaller ones no ? Why throw away something that helps just a bit, because it doesn't fixes everything ?

It might limit the total damage a ship can dish out before needing to resupply, but whats the point of that if you already nuked the enemy with the ammo you had? After you destroyed them, they will need some time to come back, if they come back at all, thats enough time to resupply.

The bad thing about missiles its mostly their alpha damage and accuracy, aka missile+beam at 100% for example, thats 225 damage per block (45x5), compare that to the 110 shield per capacitor block (which then gets further reduced with the current shield calculations), so you need more than double the amount of shield blocks to even have enought shield to take a missile hit, and the bigger the ships get, the les shield they gain per block.

So say you have 5vs5 equally sized average missile PVP ships, well honestly it wouldnt make a difference if they have one or a few shoots, or infinite ones, as they alpha nuke each other anyways with just one shoot.

You're bringing up something interesting about logistic. What did you have in mind, supply ships ? Bringing a dependency for fleets upon supply ship is something I always though would be interesting. As destroying those by raiding from behind could have an interesting impact on battles. You seem to have had a lot of battle experience in MP. What's your opinion on those ? Have you seen any kind of support ships showing up this far ?

In starmade? Only shield supply ships sometimes, and those are pretty rare too, there is just overall to much damage flying around. In other games, ive quiet often seen Supply Ships, like in EVE, but you would have a hard time catching a cloaked blockade runner dropping ammo and cap charges to the fleet groups.

Also, as on every game design, you have to keep in mind something often called "the golden factor", Necessity vs Fun: Is it really necessary? Would a player enjoy doing this? If the answere is no, then you have a potentionally bad game design.

And, I didn't know shields were getting so useless on large ships. I usually tend to hear the opposite. And the ridiculous recharge rates and capacities I saw weren't really anything to hint at the opposite XD

Well even on small ships shields are rather underpowered against missiles, on larger ships the shield gain gets les and les per block, while power capacity increases due to the size multiplier, so the larger a ship gets the harder it is to keep a good shield, but the easier it gets to fire huge amounts of alpha damage.

And Recharge, well in combat you have 10x the energy need, and only 6% to 10% the recharge rate, so any decent recharge rate takes huge amounts of energy, i know this from building a 25k mass PVE Cruiser, for that i tested all known shield calculations. That Ships needs 2,5 million energy per second for its shield recharge and has full defensive Ion Effect, in the end it can only tank 62,5k DPS at around 11% shield capacity, or in blocks: 12500 Weapon Blocks constantly firing at it.

And for that it sacrificed a huge amount of firepower and other systems, its literally mostly a flying bulk of Power Reactors, Shield Rechargers, Shield Capacitors and Ion Effect Modules. In anything but PVE this is not viable.

But, there isn't really a single possible way for things to unfold here. Its possible that some ship would indeed sacrifice shields for more ammo. But, maybe some other will opt for external support ships, or perhaps even just for other kinds of weapons, or just move the task of firing missiles onto other specialized ships ?

True there are multiple ones, and certainly some oddballs, but the important question is how this will be used by the majority of the players? For example last time shields got buffed (which is still a joke), people quickly noticed that they are still not viable, and what did they do in the end? Les shield blocks, more weapon blocks, so that little buff actually made pvp worse than it was before. So its very likely that it will unfold the same way, or change nothing at all.

Well, for one, I read the wiki, and that's what they seemed to claim : http://starmadepedia.net/wiki/Planet
I never really attempted it, because I got bored before building a canon that could dish out that much damages in a single shot.
Also, most LP-ers I saw seemed to say it was pretty hard as well.
You're pretty much the first person I met that tells me this. Are those "medium" sized ships very common where you're playing ?

Well, 10,000,000 hp... you just need a missile+beam weapon the size of 44445 blocks to deal that much damage in one hit, and well 100 million power capacity. Most PVP ships ive seen fly with around 10% to 25% of their mass being weapon blocks, so its quiet common to see this on medium size (25k to 100k mass imho, aka 250.000 to 1.000.000 blocks). Which were quiet common on all servers ive played on so far, but i guess they are les common on RP servers and such.

 

[Mariux]

Put ships' systems on a curve again? How about no. It's been tried before (there used to be a softcap on how much an individual shield capacitor would add to shielding) but it didn't contribute much. In fact, people built even bigger to compensate for the losses. For big and small ship balance (if noone else suggested) you might want to read this: http://starmadedock.net/threads/a-manifesto-on-the-relationship-between-fighters-titans-and-ai.1686/

 

[Psy_commando]

If we are talking end result on Interceptors, well very fast compared to other ships. Interceptors on their own are just marginally faster than the frigate their based on, but the bonuses and attributes they have change them, if used right ofc, into extremly fast tacklers, they cant deal that much damage, but due to their speed they can orbit and tackle their prey at such speeds that anything larger than light weapons cant track them anymore. So in Starmade, say you want a 100-150m ship thats as fast as a tiny fighter, maybe even faster, to simply outmaneuver the enemies weapons, while shooting at them with turrets.

Interceptor is quite an odd name. I thought interceptor were usually short range all-weather fighters, used mostly for taking out bombers then ballistic missiles.

But whatever XD
That sounds a lot like a corvette.(Well, at least in several space games) 100-150m, really fast and nimble.

I can see how that could be an issue then. :/

The annoying thing in starmade is that you have only one thing you can use to make simple enough calculation and determine the ship's class. That would be the volume.
If we don't use that as our variable in our equations, we'd probably need the player to tell us what class the ship is. But that would be pretty limiting.

There is also however, something else that could be done. Or at least something I thought about.
This tiering idea for systems that I brought up earlier, was partly born out of a desire to make fast corvettes to take out bombers and fighters, just like they do in Sins of a Solar Empire, or well something like the SpringBlossom in X3 (love that ship :D ).
It revolves around having to install a larger higher tier multi-block system thruster on something that's barely big enough to have it, like the kind of ship you're talking about. That means, based on the tier and weight, and output of the system, it might be much easier to get a better approximation of the top speed the player is looking for. And the sheer size of the multi-block structure implies the ship will be of the right class automatically by fitting it. Think of it a little like ship Meta-data, if that makes sense ^^;
(I was considering adding that in this thread, but I thought that with the thruster update eventually coming I'd get even more flak, and well, I'm don't really know much about that update yet frankly..)

What do you think about something like that ?

It might limit the total damage a ship can dish out before needing to resupply, but whats the point of that if you already nuked the enemy with the ammo you had? After you destroyed them, they will need some time to come back, if they come back at all, thats enough time to resupply.

The bad thing about missiles its mostly their alpha damage and accuracy, aka missile+beam at 100% for example, thats 225 damage per block (45x5), compare that to the 110 shield per capacitor block (which then gets further reduced with the current shield calculations), so you need more than double the amount of shield blocks to even have enought shield to take a missile hit, and the bigger the ships get, the les shield they gain per block.

So say you have 5vs5 equally sized average missile PVP ships, well honestly it wouldnt make a difference if they have one or a few shoots, or infinite ones, as they alpha nuke each other anyways with just one shoot.

The more I read this the more I'm thinking its true that a one-size-fits-all solution won't work out very well.. But that's apparently what the devs are aiming for themselves :/

Would you think that making ammunition stores containing to scale missiles could help then ? And I mean by that, the missile tubes would be only that, tubes. And the missiles would be stored in a similar way as the cargo in the cargo system I mentioned, only the missiles would have to be full-size within the volume of the ammo store. So in essence, you could carry more less powerful missiles, but fewer really powerful ones, and you'd have to sacrifice space for it.

I know space might be an issue, and people can always build bigger. But a constraint like this is much more crippling because you'd need for each missile in stock a volume equal or lesser to your missile tube system, and the size would determine power more or less.

In starmade? Only shield supply ships sometimes, and those are pretty rare too, there is just overall to much damage flying around. In other games, ive quiet often seen Supply Ships, like in EVE, but you would have a hard time catching a cloaked blockade runner dropping ammo and cap charges to the fleet groups.

Also, as on every game design, you have to keep in mind something often called "the golden factor", Necessity vs Fun: Is it really necessary? Would a player enjoy doing this? If the answere is no, then you have a potentionally bad game design.

That's too bad.. :/
I always thought having something closer to a real naval fleet would have been interesting. They usually trail along supply and support ships out of necessity. Which in turn would make for some interesting strategy.

I guess the closest thing to a supply ship we'd get then, is a big cap with less guns and more utility stuff. :/

I'm glad someone mention the "golden factor" XD
That something I noticed a lot of people seem to forget really often. People trying to punish the player instead of rewarding them and use positive reinforcement.
However, I tend to wonder if simulators aren't an exception sometimes.. Lots of tedious stuff, but what's really fun and seems to keep people playing, is the payoff or all their effort and the chores they had to put up with. I'm not saying that's an absolute truth for everyone though.

Well even on small ships shields are rather underpowered against missiles, on larger ships the shield gain gets les and les per block, while power capacity increases due to the size multiplier, so the larger a ship gets the harder it is to keep a good shield, but the easier it gets to fire huge amounts of alpha damage.

And Recharge, well in combat you have 10x the energy need, and only 6% to 10% the recharge rate, so any decent recharge rate takes huge amounts of energy, i know this from building a 25k mass PVE Cruiser, for that i tested all known shield calculations. That Ships needs 2,5 million energy per second for its shield recharge and has full defensive Ion Effect, in the end it can only tank 62,5k DPS at around 11% shield capacity, or in blocks: 12500 Weapon Blocks constantly firing at it.

And for that it sacrificed a huge amount of firepower and other systems, its literally mostly a flying bulk of Power Reactors, Shield Rechargers, Shield Capacitors and Ion Effect Modules. In anything but PVE this is not viable.

True, I can vouch for that one by the sheer number of mining ships I lot to a single pirate ship with missiles.. <_<
But it might also have had to do with the core getting blown up easily.

I can see your point better about ammunition not being enough. I would usually just think its because I made crappy ships (didn't use an infinite shop at all), but if people putting actual thoughts in their ship design have issues with damages, that something else.

True there are multiple ones, and certainly some oddballs, but the important question is how this will be used by the majority of the players? For example last time shields got buffed (which is still a joke), people quickly noticed that they are still not viable, and what did they do in the end? Les shield blocks, more weapon blocks, so that little buff actually made pvp worse than it was before. So its very likely that it will unfold the same way, or change nothing at all.

Yeah, I guess its definitely not as effective as I thought. That even though I didn't expect it would solve everything..

Its annoying how there are so many things interfering with each-others right now. Its as if everything was put together without considering how it would mess with the rest.

Well, 10,000,000 hp... you just need a missile+beam weapon the size of 44445 blocks to deal that much damage in one hit, and well 100 million power capacity. Most PVP ships ive seen fly with around 10% to 25% of their mass being weapon blocks, so its quiet common to see this on medium size (25k to 100k mass imho, aka 250.000 to 1.000.000 blocks). Which were quiet common on all servers ive played on so far, but i guess they are les common on RP servers and such.

That's actually a pretty steep requirement IMO. 0_o
Well, for survival anyways..

I can't help but wonder if the average joe will really want to build into the 1,000,000 blocks ships, considering its so time consuming..
And I wonder if people playing the survival game mode, and having fleet battles either in PVE or PVP would have smaller ships than people playing something like battle mode or creative mode ?
Because that would really change everything about balance, because the costs and returns are different between survival and creative for example.. :/

The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if Schine would cap ship size eventually..
I truly wonder what modern science would have to say about ships being the size/weight of a planet or something bigger trying to move around within a star system. (In starmade scale, those huge ships are larger than stars.. And thus weight more, if volume==mass applies to everything else.. )
The physics issues linked to that gotta be interesting.. You'd travel with your own star system orbiting your ship? Or maybe the ship would collapse on itself, given the strength and density of the material used probably wouldn't be enough to hold its own weight.. ಠ_ಠ

Put ships' systems on a curve again? How about no. It's been tried before (there used to be a softcap on how much an individual shield capacitor would add to shielding) but it didn't contribute much. In fact, people built even bigger to compensate for the losses. For big and small ship balance (if noone else suggested) you might want to read this: http://starmadedock.net/threads/a-manifesto-on-the-relationship-between-fighters-titans-and-ai.1686/

How about you explain your PoV ?
Also, have you an opinion on anything besides the "Effectiveness Coefficient" section ? (That coefficient could absolutely be replaced with something that works better btw) Because there is much more than just that here.
Besides, what about anything else than shields ? How about only certain things ? There's a reason I'm fairly vague/generic on some of the system specific stuff, except in my examples. Because this is up to discussion and to allow shaping this into something that could works concretely.
And how about the shield adjusting attempt the dev made just not having been calculated correctly ? Do you remember the cubatoms ? The devs can be wrong too.

But, apparently "how about no" is the answer to all this! I might quote you :P

Oh and you might have missed this:

Oh, and I'm very aware that a lot of these things were brought up separately, or that those will probably be addressed in the future. So, if you're only here to tell me about that, don't waste your time reading this, or telling me. Thank you.

I know its been tried before, or at least something similar, but I need some kind of base to build upon/demonstrate anyways. Which would end up touching things that already were mentioned. And its much shorter than repeating "the coefficient obtained from the amount of blocks and the dimension on the X Y and Z axis" during the whole thing, no ? Plus, it keeps the whole suggestion modular, so that I can change what's the meaning of the "Effectiveness Coefficient" without re-writing everything !

The way you bring this sounds almost like "Maths won't work, because the dev tried and it didn't work a few times, lets just give up on balancing the game entirely !".
I mean, at one point, there's going to need some equations for balancing all this. Probably a combination of several of them. This is a computer simulation after all.
If you think this one doesn't work, then feel free to introduce/explain something better. I'd be thrilled.

And thank you for the link, but I already read that post. Its a nice way to put the problem, but I think some of the statements he made are a little too subjective, assume a little too much, and some are missing some of the technical issues. That's actually why I tried to tackle the issue myself, and partly why this thread was born..
Apparently I should have split the topics across threads because several people here seems to have a fixation on a few particular sections..