Salvage Beams As Weapons

[Tempest]

I vaguely remember a thread like this on the old forums, pre-weapons update, so, at least an argument could be made at that time. IIRC, the answer was still a resounding no.

 

[amimai]

I can get behind using Salvagers as an Effect (ie: current salvage setup is a "defensive/utility" effect). It would be very interesting to see if the system could remotely support a computer both being able to be used as a primary (ie: with slaves) AND as a tertiary, albeit not at the same time.

+1 I would actually like to be able to carpet bomb things with planet eating salvage nukes!

 

[Gasboy]

I vaguely remember a thread like this on the old forums, pre-weapons update, so, at least an argument could be made at that time. IIRC, the answer was still a resounding no.

And it is still likely to be a no. It's like trying to use a bandaid as a weapon. :P By quickly ripping it off the person's arm.

 

[Mork2]

Salvagers do not use normal damage mechanics at all.

For salvagers every block as 200 salavage HP regardless of which type of block it is. mesh and hardened armour etc.... Each salvager with slaves has a different amount of damage per block for a salvage/cannon system its 1 salvage damage per block, if I remember correctly has a ROF of 40 per second 4 times faster than any cannon/cannon. a salvager/cannon system with 100/100 will salvage 40 blocks per second of anything. For giggles my current titan build has a 31 set array of these. That's a massive 1240 blocks per second salvaged far better than any gun/beam weapon. Impossible to stop, easy to target and uses vastly less energy than the guns and chews through hardened armour just as fast as it chews through alloy mesh. This salvage array is only 6200 blocks big. If you used guns or beams that would give you 62,000 dps enough to kill 62 hardened armour blocks a second instead and requires 620,000 e/sec. Way OP compared to guns/beams even with effects and the penetration available now unless you were hitting something with 5hp.

If you allowed salvage to work against a ships in combat even if you needed to knock down the shields first, all combat ships will be reduced to.
Ships with large waffle salvagers causing massive lag, with anti missile turrets and ion weapons. You can't hit me with missiles, I drop your shields with large ion weapons backed up by ion turrets to keep the shields down then I salvage you to death. I not only get to kill you I get to keep every single block since none of my other weapons destroy a single block.

I am however not saying salvaging weapons would be bad exactly but you would have to make a lot of changes to them usually in the area of nerfing them a lot before it would be close to balanced. Which would probably nerf mining.... which people think is slow enough as it is.

I do however like the idea of a missile/pulse/salvager. To use against inactive objects like asteroids.... Might cut down on lag but it would also be somewhat OP for salvaging.

 

[Jaaskinal]

Salvagers do not use normal damage mechanics at all.

For salvagers every block as 200 salavage HP regardless of which type of block it is. mesh and hardened armour etc.... Each salvager with slaves has a different amount of damage per block for a salvage/cannon system its 1 salvage damage per block, if I remember correctly has a ROF of 40 per second 4 times faster than any cannon/cannon. a salvager/cannon system with 100/100 will salvage 40 blocks per second of anything. For giggles my current titan build has a 31 set array of these. That's a massive 1240 blocks per second salvaged far better than any gun/beam weapon. Impossible to stop, easy to target and uses vastly less energy than the guns and chews through hardened armour just as fast as it chews through alloy mesh. This salvage array is only 6200 blocks big. If you used guns or beams that would give you 62,000 dps enough to kill 62 hardened armour blocks a second instead and requires 620,000 e/sec. Way OP compared to guns/beams even with effects and the penetration available now unless you were hitting something with 5hp.

If you allowed salvage to work against a ships in combat even if you needed to knock down the shields first, all combat ships will be reduced to.
Ships with large waffle salvagers causing massive lag, with anti missile turrets and ion weapons. You can't hit me with missiles, I drop your shields with large ion weapons backed up by ion turrets to keep the shields down then I salvage you to death. I not only get to kill you I get to keep every single block since none of my other weapons destroy a single block.

I am however not saying salvaging weapons would be bad exactly but you would have to make a lot of changes to them usually in the area of nerfing them a lot before it would be close to balanced. Which would probably nerf mining.... which people think is slow enough as it is.

I do however like the idea of a missile/pulse/salvager. To use against inactive objects like asteroids.... Might cut down on lag but it would also be somewhat OP for salvaging.

Or you know, schema could re-balance it so normaly salvaged blocks have 200 health and everything else has 10,000.
The actual numbers/partly the mechanic don't really matter. It's an interesting concept.

 

[kiddan]

I would rather see break-off get a revisit and have people able to salvage broken off chunks instead of having salvage beams as weapons, it would make a lot more sense.

 

[Edymnion]

That doesn't invalidate the fact that all things being equal, the dedicated warship will beat the ship that isn't. If I have 100 blocks of weapon, and you have 50 blocks of the same weapon plus 50 blocks of salvager, I will out damage you, you will out salvage me.

Except that this isn't a zero sum game. You can always add more. Heck, for anything bigger than a shuttle you'll often end up with empty space inside your ship anyway. Why not use that empty space instead of just letting it sit there because you have some weird notion that giving a combat vessel some bare bones utility is going to somehow make the weapons stop working right?

 

[Gasboy]

Except that this isn't a zero sum game. You can always add more. Heck, for anything bigger than a shuttle you'll often end up with empty space inside your ship anyway. Why not use that empty space instead of just letting it sit there because you have some weird notion that giving a combat vessel some bare bones utility is going to somehow make the weapons stop working right?

Once more, this doesn't invalidate my point: With all things being equal, the dedicated warship will beat a non-dedicated one.

You want to shove a salvager onto your ship because you have five blocks worth of space left? That's fine. But personally I'd rather have a dedicated salvager that I can bring after the battle, or perhaps a friend who can follow in my wake.

 

[Edymnion]

Once more, this doesn't invalidate my point: With all things being equal, the dedicated warship will beat a non-dedicated one.

You want to shove a salvager onto your ship because you have five blocks worth of space left? That's fine. But personally I'd rather have a dedicated salvager that I can bring after the battle, or perhaps a friend who can follow in my wake.

Assuming you have a faction member who wants to do nothing but play mop-up, and that all of your battles are short enough where the overheat timer doesn't run out on the first kills before the last ones are done.

I mean, I get the point you are trying to make, but my point is that the idea of being forced to have equal mass ships is so arbitrary and artificial as to not be valid in a real world scenario. No matter how big of a gunship you build, the space and power requirements for tacking a smallish salvage array on there to eat a few ships while your turrets work on things is vanishingly small.

If you're talking about small fighters, yeah, you don't need to have a salvage array on there because space is actually an issue. But for anything bigger its not taking up any useful amount of space. My current main gunboat has deep recessed turrets all along the front half with just enough room for an 8x12x50 checkerboard salvage array. That space wasn't going to be enough for a meaningful amount of shields or weapons, it was just going to be gap filler. Why not put a salvage array in there?

 

[Jaaskinal]

Once more, this doesn't invalidate my point: With all things being equal, the dedicated warship will beat a non-dedicated one.

You want to shove a salvager onto your ship because you have five blocks worth of space left? That's fine. But personally I'd rather have a dedicated salvager that I can bring after the battle, or perhaps a friend who can follow in my wake.

Yes, we've established that minmaxed ships win battles, you don't have to reject something because of it. It's technically a hindrance to have decorative blocks on your ship, but schema's taken up dozens of precious block ID's for them.

 

[Gasboy]

Yes, we've established that minmaxed ships win battles, you don't have to reject something because of it. It's technically a hindrance to have decorative blocks on your ship, but schema's taken up dozens of precious block ID's for them.

True, but I'm arguing with the original post in mind. From the OP's suggestion, you'd need a massive salvager to be able to start slurping off blocks AND you have to have down their shields. So you are not a dedicated salvager if you have weapons big enough to deal with a serious threat, nor are you a dedicated warship because it'd be nuts to go salvaging with a salvager that's just thrown into the ship to take up the last few spaces.

That is the point I am trying to establish, the idea of the salvager being a weapon would not be useful. Unless your salvager ship is on the level of titans. Otherwise you don't have the weapons to down the shields of an attacker to be able to use your salvagers or you've got guns big enough to take out your target, but a dinky salvager that probably won't save many, if any, blocks at all.

As for things being equal, it's not artificial or enforced at all. If you get jumped on by something many times your mass, are you sticking around or running? It's generally a bad idea to stick around if you're at a serious disadvantage. And if you're attacked by something that can't even down your shields, how likely are you to swat it out of space like the annoying bug it is?

An equal fight is one of those ones where you get to decide if it's worth it, the two above scenarios are pretty much decided from the get go. So in that situation, where the ship masses and pilots are roughly equivalent, the guy who brought more weapons/defenses/effects generally wins, even if the differences are only a few blocks.

And yeah, Schema put in many decorative blocks because there are many ways to play StarMade. He acknowledges that some people want to roleplay and others want bling.

A salvager weapon, idealized in the OP, is for minmaxers, and that's the standpoint I'm arguing from.

 

[Parameter]

That is the point I am trying to establish, the idea of the salvager being a weapon would not be useful. Unless your salvager ship is on the level of titans. Otherwise you don't have the weapons to down the shields of an attacker to be able to use your salvagers or you've got guns big enough to take out your target, but a dinky salvager that probably won't save many, if any, blocks at all.

As for things being equal, it's not artificial or enforced at all. If you get jumped on by something many times your mass, are you sticking around or running? It's generally a bad idea to stick around if you're at a serious disadvantage. And if you're attacked by something that can't even down your shields, how likely are you to swat it out of space like the annoying bug it is?

An equal fight is one of those ones where you get to decide if it's worth it, the two above scenarios are pretty much decided from the get go. So in that situation, where the ship masses and pilots are roughly equivalent, the guy who brought more weapons/defenses/effects generally wins, even if the differences are only a few blocks.

You don't always get to choose your participation in a fight. If, in the current game, my asteroid salvager gets ambushed by a larger warship with jump inhibitors, I'm very likely going to die. That's OK, that's the trade-off of being in a non-combat ship during a fight with a combat ship.

Since I know I'm going to die, the most optimal thing to do is to begin deconstructing my expensive ship components in build mode before I'm inevitably overheated. That's the best win I can eek out, and it's one of the most optimal ways to still deal a loss to the enemy (they get less booty). It's also very boring and unfun to do.

Those kind of lopsided encounters really resolve to whether the losing player has any feeling of agency or not. No one likes to be defeated and know that there no decision they could make that would have an impact on the situation. I'd much rather have an option, even an unlikely one, to escape, or at least do some degree of damage to secure a token victory before my eventual demise. Instead, really all I can do is cheese out a win by destroying my own ship.

If salvagers could be used as an ineffective weapon, one thing it would do is provide an option to players in the above situation. It's not optimal, and I would never seek out a fight in a salvager, but it gives me some gameplay options, instead of a situation where there's nothing I can do. There's perhaps a way I can have fun even if my ship is toast, instead of AFK'ing.

Let's take a hypothetical situation where salvage arrays ignore shields, but do 0.05 DPS per block to entities with power. They have a normal salvage power consumption of 40e/sec/block. No weapon penetration, but any block destroyed is salvaged instead. That's 100x DPS less than conventional weapons, ignoring shields but still affected by armor. Vaguely like a modified astronaut torch writ large. My 10,000 block waffleboard mining setup does 500DPS at a cost of 400,000e/sec. This is pitiful damage at the size we're talking, even ignoring shields. You could scarf 5 system blocks per second, or 1 advanced armor block in a couple seconds.

However, this terrible weapon gives an ambushed salvager options, even in a highly disadvantageous ambush situation:

• I can "sting" even if I die - Maybe I take out a turret or two before I go, or give it some light damage it will eventually need to repair.
  
• I might can create a weak point and ally or I can exploit later- maybe I strip a hole in its hull. If it sticks around, a faction mate or I can come back in a warship and exploit the chink in its armor.
• If it's not full health (say it took some hits rolling other salvagers) I might can hit enough exposed blocks to dissuade it from attacking.
• Maybe I know the ship design and know where the FTL inhibitors are housed. It's just possible that I could knock out enough of them to allow my Jump drive to recharge before I'm entirely toast.

I'm still most likely going to die as the warship rips my ship apart, but at least I have a reason to be engaged in the battle. Removing my ability to retreat with Jump Inhibitors is good play for the warship. It virtually guarantees a kill on a non-combat ship. It should rewarded for both it's good ship design, and good planning in closing with an unprotected ship without backup. However, good play on one player's part shouldn't totally remove another player from gameplay. Good games make it fun for the losing player, too, even if the odds are stacked. I could see "salvagers as weapons" being a way of to help maintain that player agency in Starmade.

 

[Edymnion]

Yeah, sorry man, but no.

If you decide to make a ship with no offensive weapons, then that is a decision you made, and you have to accept the consequences of that decision. My argument earlier about warships having rudimentary salvage arrays works the other way around. The cost in space and power for sticking some cannons on your miner are negligible as well.

Heck, on my server I'm one of the big dogs, so I try to help new people to the server by giving them free starter mining ships if they simply come to my station to claim them. Its not big, its not pretty, it has no shields, but you know what it has besides salvage arrays? A pair of cannon turrets so that it can at least do some return damage while it runs away.

Give your mining ship real weapons. If its an RP decision to not give it weapons, then you have made the RP decision not to have weapons, you don't get to waffle out of that by trying to make the salvager into a weapon.

 

[Parameter]

Yeah, sorry man, but no.

If you decide to make a ship with no offensive weapons, then that is a decision you made, and you have to accept the consequences of that decision. My argument earlier about warships having rudimentary salvage arrays works the other way around. The cost in space and power for sticking some cannons on your miner are negligible as well.

Heck, on my server I'm one of the big dogs, so I try to help new people to the server by giving them free starter mining ships if they simply come to my station to claim them. Its not big, its not pretty, it has no shields, but you know what it has besides salvage arrays? A pair of cannon turrets so that it can at least do some return damage while it runs away.

Give your mining ship real weapons. If its an RP decision to not give it weapons, then you have made the RP decision not to have weapons, you don't get to waffle out of that by trying to make the salvager into a weapon.

So, I get your point (my mining ships have weapons stock, too), but what exactly about my suggestion is unbalanced or upsets the game? Is it just the idea alone that offends you, but nothing mechanically? I can't really see anyway that it can be abused, and it adds flexibility to the game. More flexibility in a sandbox game is a plus in my book.

Am I missing something?

 

[Tunk]

Salvage is for picking up scrap.
Weapons for making scrap.

Want to make scrap?
Use weapons.

Want to pick up scrap?
Use salvagers.

Want to do both?
Put both on your ship, nothing stopping you.

But that doesn't look pretty!
Poor baby, next you'll be asking for salvage missiles or nuclear lasers or armoured shield blocks?

 

[Parameter]

Salvage is for picking up scrap.
Weapons for making scrap.

Want to make scrap?
Use weapons.

Want to pick up scrap?
Use salvagers.

Want to do both?
Put both on your ship, nothing stopping you.

But that doesn't look pretty!
Poor baby, next you'll be asking for salvage missiles or nuclear lasers or armoured shield blocks?

Yawn. I looked for something constructive, but became bored. Good attempt at a non-civil discussion, I guess.

On topic, though, have you ever swung a pick-axe? Or used a shovel? Those can be pretty effective weapons, for something that just makes holes in the ground. One would think from a setting standpoint that giant lasers that make holes in the rocky, metallic ground would also be able to damage other metallic things. The reason they don't damage ships right now, is because if they had the same effect on ships as they did asteroids they would be far stronger than the traditional weapons. This breaks game mechanics, and game mechanics generally trump game setting.

However, other games with mining or utility equipment (Minecraft, Terraria, Half-life, practically every fantasy MMO, etc.) provide the ability to use them as weapons. These other games have figured out how to have a more sensible setting without breaking their gameplay. Astounding. How is it that the humble Half-life crowbar is allowed to deal damage, and not just break open creates and planks?

The obvious answer is that the Half-life crowbar isn't as effective a weapon as Gordon Freeman's alternatives. What's cool about Half-life, however, is that the game developers took some time to define a niche for the crowbar as a weapon, and provided some interesting trade-offs to using it in certain situations.

There's no reason Schine couldn't make similar game mechanics decisions for the salvage beam. Certainly the meta could use a little bit of development at some point in the future. But then again, why should the community ask for interesting new ways to use existing blocks in the game? Salvage is for picking up scrap. Weapons are for making scrap. No, strike that, cannons are for making scrap. Why do we need any weapon besides cannons?

 

[Tunk]

Alrighty, you want me to waste time on constructive?

Here, we don't use shovels, pick axes etc as weapons because they are tools first and not suitable unless no weapons are available.
Majority of the time they are too heavy and not fit for that purpose if a weapon is readily available, hell try swinging a pick at someone, they'll knock your block off unarmed in the time it takes you to get it in position for a swing.

As for other games, half lifes crowbar is primarily a weapon first with edge cases for causing more damage to scenery or headcrabs.
Majority of games completely separate resource/utility tools from weapons, the few games that allow it either have the damage significantly reduced or cause unarmed levels of damage, usually with a large downside (eg attack speed).
It's possible, but no, you wont do it because again its not fit for purpose (aka the devs don't really want you to do that, but they let you).
99% of the time you'll switch to a suitable weapon, unless you panic and fumble like a screaming teenage girl.

From everything I've read it basically boils down to 'I want to make a combat miner without weapons'.
You've already got the tools for a combat miner, its not a 'oh I don't have enough space in my inventory' thing, its a 'im too lazy to put weapons on it' thing.

 

[amimai]

Here, we don't use shovels, pick axes etc as weapons because they are tools first and not suitable unless no weapons are available.
Majority of the time they are too heavy and not fit for that purpose if a weapon is readily available, hell try swinging a pick at someone, they'll knock your block off unarmed in the time it takes you to get it in position for a swing.

this starmade player has obviously never met the legendary berserker Urist McMiner... or even Urist McAdministrator for that mater considering the last time my one went berzerk she killed an entire treehugger trading convoy and was later given a medal for bravery and services to the fort

 

[Parameter]

Alrighty, you want me to waste time on constructive?

Here, we don't use shovels, pick axes etc as weapons because they are tools first and not suitable unless no weapons are available.
Majority of the time they are too heavy and not fit for that purpose if a weapon is readily available, hell try swinging a pick at someone, they'll knock your block off unarmed in the time it takes you to get it in position for a swing.

As for other games, half lifes crowbar is primarily a weapon first with edge cases for causing more damage to scenery or headcrabs.
Majority of games completely separate resource/utility tools from weapons, the few games that allow it either have the damage significantly reduced or cause unarmed levels of damage, usually with a large downside (eg attack speed).
It's possible, but no, you wont do it because again its not fit for purpose (aka the devs don't really want you to do that, but they let you).
99% of the time you'll switch to a suitable weapon, unless you panic and fumble like a screaming teenage girl.

From everything I've read it basically boils down to 'I want to make a combat miner without weapons'.
You've already got the tools for a combat miner, its not a 'oh I don't have enough space in my inventory' thing, its a 'im too lazy to put weapons on it' thing.

Ah, constructive criticism with marginally less vitriol - not perfect, but I'll take it :D

I could care less about jack-of-all-trades combat miners. I don't have any miners with more than nominal weapons because they aren't front line ships. If I want a combat miner I'll stick a salvage array in some empty space on a warship as was suggested earlier, and go to town. My argument was that damaging salvage beams adds believably to the game setting, doesn't have to unbalance game mechanics, and can provide a platform for more variety in combat. Instead of addressing those points, your primary argument seems to boil down to "hur hur, <strawman about fighting without weapons>, <personal attack>" That's weak.

Majority of games completely separate resource/utility tools from weapons, the few games that allow it either have the damage significantly reduced or cause unarmed levels of damage, usually with a large downside (eg attack speed).

<citation needed>

• Most RTS games with resource gathering units let them attack for mild damage.
  
• You don't often gather resources in FPS games, but utility items often have combat purpose, as well (Half-Life crowbar/Gravity Gun, TF2 Engineer Wrench, Natural Selection's Welder)
  
• Humorously, the Dead Space franchise centers around using futuristic mining and utility tools as primary weapons.
• In Portal, you only have a utility tool, but using it and the environment to disable or destroy enemies is part of the game.
  
• In the Legend of Zelda franchise, a good number of utility items serve double-duty providing combat effects.
  
• In Mario Sunshine, one of the few Mario games where there is a utility item, the water gun has both combat mechanics and puzzle/utility mechanics.
• TV Tropes has a whole page devoted to items used as both weapons and tools in games: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UtilityWeapon

Here, we don't use shovels, pick axes etc as weapons because they are tools first and not suitable unless no weapons are available.
Majority of the time they are too heavy and not fit for that purpose if a weapon is readily available, hell try swinging a pick at someone, they'll knock your block off unarmed in the time it takes you to get it in position for a swing.

Sure, if I have to choose between a shovel or a gun to fight an intruder in my home, I'm not choosing a shovel. But that's not my point. If I'm out digging a hole and I see a dangerous snake, I can tell you from experience the shovel does just fine at killing that snake. If I have a shovel out in the field and incidentally have to chop a tree root, or pound a stake, or lever a branch, or brain a varmint, I can do that. Implements in the real world are versatile, but come with trade-offs that make them most useful in certain situations.

If I know I'm hunting grues I'll get a fighter with real weapons to kill them. If I'm mining and a giant grue pops out of my asteroid and attacks, wearing it down with my salvage array might be a more entertaining option than 1-shotting it with my cannons. Alternatively, if salvage beams had a unique, but small, niche in combat, it might occasionally be advantageous to use a salvage beam over other weapons.

Example: Salvage beams ignore shields, deal 0.1 DPS straight damage per block to ships, but reduce armor and do 10 DPS per block to creatures. Space worms infest asteroids and feed off them. Their bodies become impregnated with rock and metal as they feed, becoming increasingly dense and hard to damage with age. (game mechanic - high armor, additional armor with larger sizes) Elder space worms are so heavily armored they have been known to survive direct hits from battleship main cannons. Regular ship weapons could wear a space worm down, but a salvage array might be able to down it more easily, and harvest ores from it. Not game-breaking, but adds some variety to both combat and mining. Mining right now is a little boring, and mechanics like this could be a platform for making it more interesting.


I know I type a lot, and it's easy to TL: DR, so I'll boil my stance down to a few simple bullets in case you decide to be constructive.

• Salvage beams should never out-damage a traditional weapon system in straight, normal ship-to-ship combat.
• Salvage beams should do some amount of damage, both for setting coherency and as a platform for interesting weapon mechanics.
• Salvage beams should have some interesting mechanic that gives them a niche, probably support, role in combat.
• Salvage beams could provide additional combat trade-offs and a deeper meta-game by giving them the above. Examples could include, but aren't limited to, a ship-scale cutting torch for boarding, a "vampiric" block HP-stealing beam, etc.

Weaponized salvage beams as outlined above could make the game more interesting. I'm interested in variety and engaging gameplay here, not phat-1337-munchklin-pwning.

 

[StormWing0]

What it boils down ti is what we've been saying, Salvagers salvage things but don't blow them up, weapons blow crap up but don't salvage them, if there was something that'd do both we'd all be using that to levels that would make you change you tune rather fast. The only reasonable combo of the two would be letting secondary weapons come in as effects when used on primary weapons in their combos. So you could do say Mps and make a Missile + Pulse + Salvager combo and salvage and nuke at the same time.