Nerf shield curves so that shields scale appropriately for Titans

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Erm... If two pilots go into combat with ten thousand shield blocks and only 500 weapon blocks... They're nuts. Just absolutely nuts.

And yeah, on a more serious note, I wouldn't mind not having in-combat regen for shields. I don't see how that change alone would 'balance' shielding though. I view it only as a minor detail in a larger murder-mystery. My big concern at the moment is that shielding isn't gated by the same things that it's counter is gated by. Weapons have to worry not only about the mass and space they take up, but also about the energy they consume. When pit against each other, shields are only paying for their regen. The (on base minute and a half of damage) capacity is essentially free. Even with in combat regen completely removed, people would still have obscene amounts of shielding simply because they don't have to pay anything for it when it really counts.

You have to remember, Starmade is first and foremost a sandbox game, you can't punish those two pilots with an unwinnable situation because that's how they choose to build their ships. Everybody will build different ships so the game should be best balanced for every situation possible and not for some idealized build style.

If you remove in combat shield recovery you are guaranteed of one thing, the shields will fail, always. The balance then becomes how strong do you make the shields in order to make combat not long and drawn out.

Another thing I don't think anybody has taken into account is stations and fleets. Stations will always be tanks because you cannot put weapons on them so the more shields the merrier, should stations only be capable of being killed by a ship that has as many guns as it has shields? If ships can only be taken out by similarly balanced ships or larger ships than the is no incentive to build smaller specialized ships. Once fleets are added into the game the gigantism problem gets much worse as everybody will just fly around with their titan and 5 wing-titans.

Once again I'll also say I am not opposed to adding a power consumption to shields as a balancing factor (As long as it's not the only balancing factor). I'll just keep saying that it's a big task to adding a huge power drain to every ship in existence that wasn't there before. Adding this power sink upsets the balance of thrusters, weapons, defencive effects and should not be approached lightly.

 

[Admiral.Piett]

@[email protected] And how is it in star-made, so people instantly spawn ships as soon as they join a server? Oh right, ECONOMY hasn't kicked in. You are assuming every faction will get into a server, and instantly have everything they've developed available to them in the new server. And that is limited to how the factions interact out of the servers themselves (in the forums, for example).

When Dave spawns on space, all he has is a pistol, a helmet, and 25k plus a ship core and some other systems. If you play it like an adventure style game, fleets don't just spawn out of nowhere. If you play it like a sandbox, well damn son, you now have everything you can do as a player to interact with.

Right now, when you open your little tab before joining any server, there is a clear option: Sandbox mode and only that. This means insta-anything-you-ever-want-if-there-is-a-blueprint-and-you-have-the-cash mode kicks in, in literally all servers that allow it. And you can!! you totally can bring your fleets to wage war! As long as you:

a)Use vanilla config in every server your faction plays or
b)Wage war in a server with a similar configuration, thus making your ships usable in every server your faction is in or
c)Make adequate changes to your ships so you may conquer everyone in any server.


Edit:
Sven_The_Slayer I am working on examples for stations, too! not just ships. And stations do have weaponry, son. They have turrets. Otherwise it is just a shoot it until it is death station. I am also adding in calculations that cover Fleet combat, with mass as the common denominator between fleets (or the disparity between them!) My paper calculations are limited so that i cannot reflect combat skill, or design skill. Which literally is traduced into how much times I punch the other guy and how many punches I get in return, via maneuvers / design philosophy.

 

[Ithirahad]

Thanks for clearing everything up, Calbiri.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Sven_The_Slayer I am working on examples for stations, too! not just ships. And stations do have weaponry, son. They have turrets. Otherwise it is just a shoot it until it is death station. I am also adding in calculations that cover Fleet combat, with mass as the common denominator between fleets (or the disparity between them!) My paper calculations are limited so that i cannot reflect combat skill, or design skill. Which literally is traduced into how much times I punch the other guy and how many punches I get in return, via maneuvers / design philosophy.

Yes and turrets typically won't be as strong as the base station, unless you build a station that has turrets as big as itself. It still doesn't matter because combat regen is so high that only massive ships will be able to kill it so "shoot it until it is death station" does not even apply.

 

[timethatswasted]

One of the problems is that really. The BlockConfig only offers a chance to change the Base Value :u not the rate at which it increases, so its always gonna be Linear, hence the issue (I would like the option to change that -w- even after the Shield regen/capacity split).

Also, I experienced the issue with shields first hand yesterday o -o I was Flying around in my half-finished Battleship shell (with a mere 128mill shields) and Ran into 2 Corvette/frigate-ish sized ships :u They couldn't even dent my shields. Not quite sure if that was some kind of bug or something, but 128mill doesn't seem like a whole lot anymore, and these ships were useless against it o- o

Long Story Short; Something just doesn't feel right. That is all o/

Ummm.. Wrong? It is absolutely possible to achieve diminishing returns in terms of shield capacity and recharge. Math time!

Setting the "ShieldCapacityPow" and "ShieldCapacityPreMul" to .55 greatly changes the way shield capacity is increased. With a base shield value of 1000 the first 10 shield blocks give you 2553 capacity. The next 10 additional blocks give you a capacity of 3739, so an overall increase of 1186 shield points. The next 10 shield blocks added give you a capacity of 4673, which is a total increase of 934 capacity. The final 10 shield blocks added give you a total capacity of 5474, which is a only a 801 increase. That is a diminishing return. As you add more and more, you get less and less of an increase.

What I did was I halved shield load. 250 is sufficient. I increased active shield recharge cost to 25 (1 energy point/10 shield points, more than fair) and passive cost to 12, although 13 works just as well. I also reduced regen under fire to 15%, not 25%. I'm messing around with the under fire cool down time but I really like it between 45 seconds to a minute.

edit: I increased power regen soft cap to 1500000 too.

ps if u use this u better fukin giv credits

See this sounds like a good set up. There are A LOT of ways to to modify shields that do not mess up existing ships, but rather brings them in line. I read these post and I feel as if most people have not even tried to mess with the settings in the block behavior. There are 13 different values for shields that you can adjust for the love of god, move some numbers around people and see if you can come up with something you like!

Indeed, and such a thing would also divide the community apart, with people sticking around only the places where their ships work well, and not going anywhere else. We need to find an appropriate level of universal ship compatibility for everyone.

I completely agree with your OP that shields are currently absurd and that there needs to be a serious nerf. Some of the things you suggested are already possible to curb shield size that doesn't ruin the existing ship.

I also feel that dividing the community is not that bad of a thing, especially as the community grows. People have very different views on how different aspects of the game should work. Some want more realism, some want an arcade like experience, some want it to be more Sci-Fi. Now servers can be customized to fit those experiences and advertise themselves as such.

Just updating, I haven't ignored this post, despite my unpopularity in it, I do take note of the issues and points made.

• I've asked schema for a split in the Shield Regen and Shield Storage blocks.
• In the config I hope to have a "regen power usage in combat" option (this could allow lower regen % rates to have normal or even increased power costs) also having power usage settings for the Shield Storage blocks, so that an in combat and out of combat power usage rates can be set (to allow more detriment than just block space used.)
• The Storage block can have a considerably lower Capacity than the current combined shield block, leaving players to build in protection from alpha strikes, rather than having it something that's blanket protected by config settings.
• The power usage of shield regen in combat can be increased as well as the power usage out of combat (further discouragement from over tanking.)

*On a side note, their ARE more system updates that will affect defense. Ship HP, Thrust changes, improvements to AI, adjustments to turret mechanics. However these are only considerations when setting up good shield default settings, I'm not simply ignoring shields themselves in deference to unimplemented changes.

If I understand this correctly you want to separate shields into two different blocks? Would it not make more sense to add ways to adjust a ships shields via the structure menu? So you would allocate a percentage of your shield blocks to recharge and a percentage to capacity. Maybe even additional allocation options to make shields stronger vs missiles AMCs or beams.

 

[Admiral.Piett]

I've added here, my work so far.

It is a mess, but I have there developed 3 shield curves, and added comparisons vs ship mass (the way it is right now, no inventions of mine) vs
the current and previous shielding curves.

It has graphs if you don't want to see only numbers.... but do read everything. I know it is a total mess.

This has the following flaws:

a)Power balancing not implemented
b)I haven't studied the shielding code, if anyone can program this curves on the current code, please tell me how!
c)Only paper calculations.
d)It only compares different shield curve formulas.

And any other that you spot.

This is a WIP. Balance with weapons, mass, and energy coming soon!

 

[PizzaPress]

I feel like the 1mil cap is a patched-on solution, that places an arbitrary cap on ship size because the economy is shattered and you can only pilot one vessel. I hope there's not a limit on how many ships you can have with you to fight, or else it's another arms-race, with each player flying a titan followed by 5 AI dreadnaughts. Not quite sure how we're going to give small ships usefulness, without making them OP in block-equal swarms. Right now turrets can't hit the broad side of a barn, before they were deadly accurate. Plus too many of them could make for a lagfest.

 

[OverlordDarkWolf]

So Shields are going to be like power blocks for now? One for Regen and one for storage? Hopefully there will be a power balance for the regen blocks, as in, the more you have, the more power you need. Or will it be changed into a system like timethatswasted suggested:

Would it not make more sense to add ways to adjust a ships shields via the structure menu? So you would allocate a percentage of your shield blocks to recharge and a percentage to capacity. Maybe even additional allocation options to make shields stronger vs missiles AMCs or beams.

Because I'm all for timethatswasted's idea, as it seems to save on blocks and won't make titan class ships even bigger.

 

[Calbiri]

So I made a reply no another thread that I also felt would be appreciated here, there were a few previous comments that contributed to the context of the following link.

http://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-0-157-optimization-fixes.1535/page-3#post-23415
"I can't please both parties, we had to remove one of the stats from the existing shield blocks. We decided (partly based on comments in this thread) that moving the capacity to the new block was the better choice. I did ask schema to add some new features to help reduce the pain of this decision for those needing to refit their ships.

1. A block removal type selector in advanced build mode. When this option is selected (via a checkbox) then only the block type highlighted in the hotbar is removed when clicking.
2. A server option to increase the 10^3 advanced build mode maximum size. This has performance impacts on servers, so its best left with a server set maximum size to prevent trolling (although admins will be able to set this value as they see fit.)

The dev build stats have not been updated yet to reflect the new block (they are still set at 495 cap per block.) I'm updating this right now, and I've added a couple notes to my list of additional stats to control that I've asked schema to include (these require code changes.)

Try not to get too upset as these changes proceed, this is an ongoing process and yes, calm feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your patience!"

 

[Comr4de]

So I made a reply no another thread that I also felt would be appreciated here, there were a few previous comments that contributed to the context of the following link.

http://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-0-157-optimization-fixes.1535/page-3#post-23415
"I can't please both parties, we had to remove one of the stats from the existing shield blocks. We decided (partly based on comments in this thread) that moving the capacity to the new block was the better choice. I did ask schema to add some new features to help reduce the pain of this decision for those needing to refit their ships.

1. A block removal type selector in advanced build mode. When this option is selected (via a checkbox) then only the block type highlighted in the hotbar is removed when clicking.
2. A server option to increase the 10^3 advanced build mode maximum size. This has performance impacts on servers, so its best left with a server set maximum size to prevent trolling (although admins will be able to set this value as they see fit.)

The dev build stats have not been updated yet to reflect the new block (they are still set at 495 cap per block.) I'm updating this right now, and I've added a couple notes to my list of additional stats to control that I've asked schema to include (these require code changes.)

Try not to get too upset as these changes proceed, this is an ongoing process and yes, calm feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your patience!"

Do you plan on adding a regeneration softcap like power has now as well?

 

[Ithirahad]

So I made a reply no another thread that I also felt would be appreciated here, there were a few previous comments that contributed to the context of the following link.

http://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-0-157-optimization-fixes.1535/page-3#post-23415
"I can't please both parties, we had to remove one of the stats from the existing shield blocks. We decided (partly based on comments in this thread) that moving the capacity to the new block was the better choice. I did ask schema to add some new features to help reduce the pain of this decision for those needing to refit their ships.

1. A block removal type selector in advanced build mode. When this option is selected (via a checkbox) then only the block type highlighted in the hotbar is removed when clicking.
2. A server option to increase the 10^3 advanced build mode maximum size. This has performance impacts on servers, so its best left with a server set maximum size to prevent trolling (although admins will be able to set this value as they see fit.)

The dev build stats have not been updated yet to reflect the new block (they are still set at 495 cap per block.) I'm updating this right now, and I've added a couple notes to my list of additional stats to control that I've asked schema to include (these require code changes.)

Try not to get too upset as these changes proceed, this is an ongoing process and yes, calm feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your patience!"

Wow. This'll be great... Particularly the removal filter. Hopefully most servers will keep their setting at 10^3, though, because otherwise build block exploitation will become even easier.

 

[Borr]

1. A block removal type selector in advanced build mode. When this option is selected (via a checkbox) then only the block type highlighted in the hotbar is removed when clicking.

Now I will be able to refit my old, very complicated design. Thank you for this!

How new shield regen block will be affected by placement? They gonna work like power regen blocks?
But still I will stick to my opinion that this will solve nothing and complains will never ends... Maybe you think I'm criticizing only your decisions but I want to help make this game better. Shield behavior should be moved to hull, but not as it is right now, more like hp or armor value per block. This could add something like directional shield effect and make hull useful for once. And you can go even further with this. Armor value could be responsible for resistance to kinetic damage, and shield value to energy damage. Existing shield block could be used for hull hp regeneration, just a thought. Just think about it, this could solve a lot of complains, not only for shields.

 

[Stakhanov]

It might be worse than solving nothing. Capital ships would specialize on regeneration (since nothing but bigger capital ships could possibly damage more than 10% of their normal capacity at once) while smaller ships would be pressured to specialize on capacity instead , and stack volumes of shield regeneration blocks after combat. Resulting in a more awkward experience with less interaction between players.

 

[OverlordDarkWolf]

Gonna have to agree with Stakhanov here. Titans have the capacity to block spam and separating the shield blocks won't lessen that capacity.

Edit: All this will do is just force smaller ships to grow in size. We could see even bigger ships and fighters in the future.

 

[Ithirahad]

Power usage, regeneration, and capacity can be balanced so that people's shield generator / shield capacitor combined array would take up no more space than old shield arrays. HOWEVER, yes, shield generation needs to be both really expensive in credits and power, and needs to have diminishing returns.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

It might be worse than solving nothing. Capital ships would specialize on regeneration (since nothing but bigger capital ships could possibly damage more than 10% of their normal capacity at once) while smaller ships would be pressured to specialize on capacity instead , and stack volumes of shield regeneration blocks after combat. Resulting in a more awkward experience with less interaction between players.

Absolutely right, this enforces booth doomcubing AND gigantism, as now capitals can have both regen (doesn't matter if they have a 10 second
wait or not.) and capacity.

Here's hoping the devs make the right decisions.

 

[Comr4de]

In a perfect world that Regen won't be linear. If it was on a curve (in relation to mass) then I can see it working in favor of all ship sizes.

 

[ante185]

Might be a bit OT but shouldn't shields require power even if they are at full storage?

 

[ToyotaSupra]

Might be a bit OT but shouldn't shields require power even if they are at full storage?

No, it wouldn't. I really like this idea and have done for a long time. It would just make sense.

 

[Dark Kodiak]

Hey all, new to the forums but been playing Starmade for a little bit now.

Definitely agreeing that shields are a bit out of whack at the moment, however from the sounds of things there are a lot of changes in the works that can help nudge that issue back on track which I'll wholly support. There was one idea which was brought up earlier which was dismissed that I'll try to expand on, mostly since it followed closely along my own thoughts on the issue and could help add an extra element of strategy into combat if it was implemented properly.

I'll aim this question directly at the developers and the ones who are actually writing the code for this game; I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a programmer and I have no idea if this is actually feasible or not, so consider this as a hypothetical query.

Would it be possible to divide ship shielding into different Sectors on a ship? It's become a fairly common trope in a lot of Sci-Fi (ie: Aft shields down to 60%, etc...). Take a ship's total shield capacity and divide it between the 6 shield sectors: Bow, Stern, Dorsal, Ventral, Port, Starboard (also not sure if Sector's the right terminology or not but it's the closest I can find at the moment). This could allow for smaller ships to focus fire on individual Sectors and punch through to the hull. I honestly don't know how this could be implemented, however I think the basics are already in the game in the form of the docking area box that pops up around a ship when you try to dock. Just use the core as the focal point and draw the Sector borders along the lines connecting the focal point to each corner of the box.

Building on that, though, instead of simply dividing total capacity what about basing Sector shield strength off of the number of shield blocks in an individual Sector? Or perhaps some form of actual Shield Emitter block/array which actually needs to be placed on the outer hull to protect that Sector while the actual Shield Generators are buried inside the ship itself? It'd also be kind of interesting if you could connect modules like Overdrive to a Shield Emitter array and boost shields temporarily at the cost of burning out or otherwise physically damaging the array itself.


I realize this could result in both additional calculation time and possible lag time as well as more people building Death Cubes. Mostly I'm curious if something like this would be actually feasible and functionally implementable in game without causing a significant drag on processing power. Unfortunately, I think Death Cubes are going to happen no matter what, though. Some people just like basic geometrical structures. Personally I wouldn't be caught dead in one, I find they lack any kind of imagination to build even if they are tough as hell.