Thruster changes

[Stakhanov]

It does make sense to apply diminishing returns on thrust. This produces a maximum thrust to mass ratio on large ships , effectively capping their acceleration. Agility differential can make a difference in combat , which means ship design will have other concerns than just adding more shield and weapon blocks for frontal engagements. Slowing , pulling or repelling enemies might give a critical advantage.

Because of the higher thruster ratio required to sustain high speeds at large scales , overdrive will also scale differently. This means that specialized small ships will hold an absolute advantage over capital ships in agility and top speed.

Note that friction is an important balancing factor - it allows larger ships to accelerate to half of their top speed quickly , but take longer for the other half. It will also decrease the effective top speed on ships with too few thrusters.

Overall , this system looks coherent enough to warrant extensive testing before further changes are made.

 

[Ithirahad]

Problem is, Stakh, it doesn't make ships "take longer for the other half" and only decrease top speed on "ships with too few thrusters." It makes many ships which had more than enough thrusters incapable of going faster than 20-50 speed.

 

[Yetimania]

It does make sense to apply diminishing returns on thrust. This produces a maximum thrust to mass ratio on large ships , effectively capping their acceleration. Agility differential can make a difference in combat , which means ship design will have other concerns than just adding more shield and weapon blocks for frontal engagements. Slowing , pulling or repelling enemies might give a critical advantage.

Because of the higher thruster ratio required to sustain high speeds at large scales , overdrive will also scale differently. This means that specialized small ships will hold an absolute advantage over capital ships in agility and top speed.

Note that friction is an important balancing factor - it allows larger ships to accelerate to half of their top speed quickly , but take longer for the other half. It will also decrease the effective top speed on ships with too few thrusters.

Overall , this system looks coherent enough to warrant extensive testing before further changes are made.

The problem isn't slow acceleration. I think we'd all be pretty okay with that. The problem is that friction imposes a very harsh top speed limit on ships with low thrust. In order for a 200m ship (again, big, but not super mega titan) to hit 80km it needs to have more thrusters than any other block, including shields. In order to hit 250? I don't know how much thrust it would need. I added sixty thousand thrusters without breaking 100.

Friction isn't needed to balance acceleration, simple thrust and mass would do that. With no, or lower friction while accelerating with thrusters (friction or something should be implemented to stop random things bumped into from drifting forever), all ships would have the same top speed, the only factor being acceleration and deceleration speeds. This is not only realistic, it makes for good gameplay. You don't want capital ships zipping about in combat (so low acceleration is good) but you don't want them to show up to the party two hours after the battle is over (low top speed is bad).

Harshly capping the top speed of larger ships also skews all battles in favour of the defender, as only smaller ships can reach the defender in a reasonable amount of time, but the defender, who doesn't need to worry about travel times, can have a titan waiting to receive.

The current thruster nerf encourages weird tactics that nobody forsaw. On the server I was playing on, a tactic used in raiding would be to fly a light overdrive ship to a shop a sector or two away from the target, buy a capital ship there, and cruise in at 20km/h the rest of the way. After the battle, the cap ship would be salvaged or self-destructed. I don't think that's how anyone wants the game to be, but its also the optimal strategy currently.

 

[Alpha_Squad]

Being able to buy ships at shops destroys any semblance of balance anyhow.

 

[Unnamed25]

Being able to buy ships at shops destroys any semblance of balance anyhow.

You don't need to be near shops..

 

[GaeasSon]

in .1584
PowTotalThrust was reduced from .9 to .8
UnitCalcMult was increased from 1.1 to 5.5

So if I read that right a .1 exponential decrease in base thrust per block and 500% increase in bonus per clustered block... at least in theory.
So a ship with many small thrust groups may see a decrease in thrust, while the ship with one big uber-engine may see an increase.

I have mixed feelings about the new system. It's murder on my existing ships, true. But maybe it should be. It was REALLY easy to build a ship that would hit the server speed limit in less than 10 seconds. Maybe behemoths SHOULD lumber.

I still think the game would benefit from multiple drive systems, playing off the different cost-benefit arrangements:

• Coil Thrust: Medium thrust, medium e cost, medium acceleration.
• Alcubiere/warp: Instant speed without acceleration or deceleration. No residual inertia. High e cost. Only works along Z axis.
• Ion thrust: low e cost. low acceleration Scales based on the number of thrust blocks with an unobstructed rear-view from the ship.
• Reaction thruster: High thrust. No energy cost. Groups only along Z axis. Requires rear view from ship. Damages front most block in the group as it fires. Thrust scaled by number of groups. Leaves glowy particle trail like a missile.
• probably more.

But then I like the idea of alternate energy sources and fuel too.

 

[Keptick]

I personally think that the only thing to affect top speed should be overdrives. The space friction is just ridiculous, thrusters should only affect acceleration, not top speed as well!!! No matter the thrust/weight ratio a ship should be able to attain top speed (set in the server config). This would not influence ship's abilities to evade enemy attacks since that's solely based on acceleration.

Actually, the space friction should only activate when zero direction imput is made by a ship user.

 

[Energywelder]

I like the idea of unlimited speed in space, but there is a big issue with that. People who play the game on computers or devices with low power processors will be unable to handle ships zipping by at 50,000 km/h, which people would be able to hit in a limitless universe. I have no doubt that would make my computer crash. I certainly think that from a real life perspective, a single large engine would make sense, because a larger engine would be able to do more on a per volume base than several smaller engines.

 

[Yetimania]

I like the idea of unlimited speed in space, but there is a big issue with that. People who play the game on computers or devices with low power processors will be unable to handle ships zipping by at 50,000 km/h, which people would be able to hit in a limitless universe. I have no doubt that would make my computer crash. I certainly think that from a real life perspective, a single large engine would make sense, because a larger engine would be able to do more on a per volume base than several smaller engines.

Keptick wasn't suggesting removing the hard speed cap. He was suggesting removing friction. Right now there are three factors at play deciding your ship's speed:
-Your ship's thrust-mass-ratio
-The server's Space Friction (linear damping)
-The server's top speed

Nobody is suggesting we change the server's top speed. Different servers pick a number and stick with it. However, the effective top speed of your ship can, and in the case of medium-sized or larger ships, is significantly lower than the server top speed because of space friction. Space friction dampens speed and acceleration, and means that if you don't have a high Thrust-to-Mass ratio, you can't achieve your server's top speed.

Currently, ships larger 80m or so have a very, very hard time hitting the server cap. Ships larger than 200m essentially cannot break 100km/h, and that's if they have more thrusters than any other block.

So what Keptick (and myself) are proposing is that "Space Friction" is removed when your engines are active. This means that your thrust-to-mass ratio will not affect your top speed, but the server cap will. Nobody will be zipping around at 50,000km/h, but, similarly, larger ships will actually be able to get around.

With Space Friction, it is impossible to design a ship that has low acceleration and high top speeds. Ships cannot take a long time to get going. They take a small amount of time to reach a very low top speed (if they have a low Thrust-Mass-Ratio) or a small amount of time to get to a high top speed (if they have a high thrust-mass ratio). This means that fighters are faster both in combat and in long-distance travel, which is actually against most science fiction. Remember Obi-Wan saying "A fighter that size couldn't get this deep into space on its own" in Episode IV?

Without Space Friction, top speeds of all ships are identical, but combat speeds (determined by acceleration) are lower for large ships, and higher for small ships.

 

[Energywelder]

You make good points. It is arguably a good tactic to reference works of fiction, but I'll make allowances for Star Wars, LOL. I feel that linear dampening is annoying, and that fix someone suggested earlier seems to work. I set it down from .09 to .01, can't wait to see what that does.

I think a system of diminishing returns in terms of engines could work, but it would have to be set really high because I know a lot of people like their titans, I know I do . However, peoples' fears about having to travel long distances now being a problem will undoubtedly be fixed when they finally release stargates, which were confirmed at some point. I found out when they mentioned it in some dev notes.

My last issue is, in this latest release, they mentioned you can now place more blocks at once than the now old 10x10x10 system. I'm wondering if someone could point out where it is that I can change that, I'm really interested in placing LOTS of blocks.

 

[Keptick]

You make good points. It is arguably a good tactic to reference works of fiction, but I'll make allowances for Star Wars, LOL. I feel that linear dampening is annoying, and that fix someone suggested earlier seems to work. I set it down from .09 to .01, can't wait to see what that does.

I think a system of diminishing returns in terms of engines could work, but it would have to be set really high because I know a lot of people like their titans, I know I do . However, peoples' fears about having to travel long distances now being a problem will undoubtedly be fixed when they finally release stargates, which were confirmed at some point. I found out when they mentioned it in some dev notes.

My last issue is, in this latest release, they mentioned you can now place more blocks at once than the now old 10x10x10 system. I'm wondering if someone could point out where it is that I can change that, I'm really interested in placing LOTS of blocks.

A system of diminishing returns has already been put in place since 0.158, look at where that got us. It's sort of annoying since everything else is linear. I even tested it:

1. Thrusters usally give one thrust each.
2. I made a big block of 100k (100,000) thrusters.
3. The thrust was only 38k (38,000).

This means that the total output of my thrusters was 38% that of a linear system. This is just an overly abusive nerf imho as the amount of thruster VS total block count ratio needed to achieve decent acceleration is WAY too high for anything bigger than an Isanth.

 

[Keptick]

It feels like this was a slap to the face for any dedicated starmade player only to satisfy the stupid whiner that stops playing after 2 weeks anyways. Sorry if this sounds harsh, but it's true.

Edit: This was said for the 0.158 thruster changes, they are fine now.

 

[GaeasSon]

You do sound harsh. It's true.

 

[Energywelder]

I think it is a bit harsh, but it might justified. However, there is something we all need to remember, if we don't continue to attract new players, this game will slowly die, so we need to keep as many new players interested in the game as possible, until they at least pass the game on to others.

 

[Keptick]

I think it is a bit harsh, but it might justified. However, there is something we all need to remember, if we don't continue to attract new players, this game will slowly die, so we need to keep as many new players interested in the game as possible, until they at least pass the game on to others.

True, but balancing the game on unfounded complaints about bigger ships isn't the way to go either. I personally haven't seen anything longer than 300m be used in combat so far. In all honesty, I don't get all the changes that are being made to thrust. If it ain't broke, why fix it?

 

[Creeper__God]

I quite liked having the box dim thrusters for a few reasons but the main one was that it made it posible to have a weapon that can be fired for more than 3 seconds in a small ship. with box dim thrusters you could have your thrusters take up very little space which gave you room for the masive amount of power tanks needed to satisfy the high (I think ridicoulsly high) amount of power that the new weapons use.

 

[GaeasSon]

OK, yeah. I don't think this is the intended effect.
This is for the total number of thrust blocks in the ship. It doesn't seem to matter if the blocks are grouped or not I got the same results whether I created a single large block group or made many individual blocks.

Where we used to have a Logarithmic Buff based on the dimensional sum for each group, now we appear to have a logarithmic Nerf based on the total number of blocks in the ship . Submitting a ticket.

Blocks Thrust Thrust/block
1 3.9 3.9
2 6.8 3.4
3 9.4 3.133333333
4 11.9 2.975
5 14.2 2.84
6 16.4 2.733333333
7 18.6 2.657142857
8 20.6 2.575
9 22.7 2.522222222
10 24.7 2.47
100 155.7 1.557
1000 852.9 0.8529

 

[GaeasSon]

OK, that's a bit better, here's the same results from the latest dev build:
Blocks : Thrust : Thrust/block
1 : 4.4 : 4.40
2 : 8.1 : 4.05
3 : 11.5 : 3.83
4 : 14.7 : 3.68
5 : 17.9 : 3.58
6 : 20.9 : 3.48
7 : 24 : 3.43
8 : 26.9 : 3.36
9 : 29.8 : 3.31
10 : 32.7 : 3.27
100 : 242.2 : 2.42
1000 : 1534 : 1.53

 

[Energywelder]

Nope, math has convinced me, I don't like how much thrusters have been nerfed. I was seriously looking forward to designing something bigger than a frigate that could have some acceleration. The destroyer I'm planning is going to be 200m long, and I wanted to design the whole fleet, admittedly all the way up to death star, but at that point I was willing to accept something like 1 km/h/s, but now it looks like that kind of acceleration will start at like cruiser range!

 

[GaeasSon]

Try adding "push" effect systems. They can be used for sudden pulses of acceleration when they aren't slaved to another system. I've actually built a small ship using push pulses as its primary drive. I'm not sure how well it'll scale.