Public min-maxing should stop somewhere at 80..95%

[JinM]

1. No matter how efficiently designed a ship from CC is, I would not want to use it. Because it's not my design and I just use them as inspiration or to teach myself. I need near to perfect ships to know what is possible as I design my own ones. I don't think people are getting a "made up mind" because they come to SM to life their creativity - so they don't look at the ships as "guidelines to play" but as "guidelines to design". People look up the ships, but it is a small amount of people and I don't think they get influenced a lot.

2. The question you raise should be expressed differently: There are a bunch of people out there, who make perfect ships without any RP-aspect. But for this math-driven quest I can tell you, that making your ship 5 blocks bigger in each direction, you only loose under 10% of your efficiency. Do you really have fun playing with such optimised designs, when you reconsider this math?

3. Your concern, that people are influenced by the designs in their own way to play the game, is partly legitimate (every content influences your way to look at gameplay). But is it okay to influence people into the RP direction either? In my opinion you can make your own ships and tell people, that these ships are at 90% efficiency and 10% are sacrificed for the RP. Maybe other people will join your movement. But you take away peoples fun of freedom in design, if you try to force people to design their ships in some special way or to flag them as maxed out design. And that freedom to design is the stuff you wanted to protect in the first place - so you run in circles: giving new rules or flag-words to enforce something that allready exists.

4. If you want to see more RP-ships: just make a new thread about it how to build them and write what your stuff does and how it deepens the RP. Oh well...you actually can't, because Starmade has no quest-system and other stuff that deepens RP besides from the oldschool multiplayer chatting. Or can you? If the RP is so great then write about how you enjoy your RP ship and designed it for RP. Or write a thread about possible RP-rules - then you will have discussion about what rules are increasing immersion and which one are only tedious tasks. Sadly Starmade misses this classical RP possibilites like in Minecraft: command-blocks that display chat messages and teleport blocks from creative, and mobs you can let spawn after a certain set of rules is met (I am not talking about the server-side stuff, I mean the possibilites you have as normal user).

5. I myself often tried to think up build-rules for Starmade and earlier on in Mincraft. For SM something like: max 2m thick hulls, after the hull there has to be free space that connects to the walkways- the reason: people can breach the ship after they shoot a hole into the body-problem: having doors in the ship destroys the possibilities to walk inside the ship when you are an enemy that tries to invade its inner systems and overtake lets say the power generator. For Minecraft something like: Don't light up a big perimeter around your buildings, only use wooden doors and only have mob-passable walkways and stairs (dont use ladders) so you are allways exposed to the danger and still have some survival immersion after the 2nd night.

The thing I notised when I thought up the rules: They are only fun a few hours, then I often felt that they take away my freedom and I reseted to the "no rules at all" sandbox gamestyle. It was more fun for me without rules. If you make RP-rules you really have to think them up carefully. This bland "90% efficiency" idea is a nice idea, but it is not ready to help improve immersion, creativity or the fun - but it is a nice beginning. I allways like to brainstorm about such stuff and liked the fact that you don't need to maximise space efficiency, because 5 blocks in each direction don't take away so much of the efficiency.

 

[NeonSturm]

Thanks JinM.

Freedom:

I have bad feelings about us pushing the believe that min-maxing is everything.
At the same time, we provide min-maxed designs to every newbie in the CC which creates a min-maxed environment for all players.

Newcomer will face a competitive environment in which getting something better is a lottery.
Right now you often win that lottery because StarMade does not have 6 billion players (population of real earth).

But soon there will be peoples which shit-down the value of others to make themselves appear better. 7/26 classmates were that way when I went to school and these voices are the loudest. These peoples failed at the lottery and make their own - at the cost of others.
At this point, there is no freedom anymore 90% of the crows will follow the common believe of "min-maxing is better" (if they are not on a RP-server).
​

Believe:

But consider the diminishing-returns curve (which makes following worse).
(with and without diminishing returns) more blocks can mean you need more system-blocks which increase the block-count again

ion effect is affected by this and thrust, but not weapons (weapons are dependent on the enemy size, not yours).
|
evasion is affected by this, thus shield-damage/strength in some cases

(in other cases not, where the ship is just a big target with or without 5% more size).
​

There should be an official story/believe which tells that 5% more size always works.
"6:4 eff matters in 5/100 cases" is (2*5/100 +4):4 = "4.1 of 4" – negligible!​

OK, perhaps I found something to explain it better:

1. Civilian vessels are dominated by those who believe that "6:4 eff matters in 5/100 cases"
2. And then you have the military/corp vessels with 10'000'000'000$ budgets which min-max everything.
3. Finally, you have Nerds which min-max certain aspects or use military/corp-quality.

RP tells about "how much empty space and decorative" is included.
1. 2. and 3. above tell how strongly min-maxed systems are, independent of what is around them.

Civilian may buy min-maxed reactors (and pay a fee to the cooperation) but they will not min-max their whole ship.
Corporations will min-max everything - that's the difference.
– how easy is it to build it?

Then, servers can choose whether to unleash the admin-inquisition's witch-hunt on corp/military designs or doom-cubes.
But that's easier if blueprints have a min-max/corp tag on them.
​

 

[Groovrider]

I really don't think most people really think to hard about it. As long as your shields stay up and you don't run out of power, you're laughing.

In my opinion I think you may be overestimating the degree with which CC influences players.

We may see something that looks cool but we all have our own secret recipes as far as ship capability is concerned. Ideas don't get exchanged through CC. It happen when your deep inside your friends deployable turret helping to fix the logic. It happens when your testing thrust profiles on your factions new fighters. In short, it happens when people actually get together and talk to each other, in game. I learned more about ship building and ship killing when I was on a server than I ever have from stuff I've downloaded or looked at here.

 

[Az14el]

Pretty much, the real strong stuff is mostly kept server side in the first place
Server communities have little to worry about from CC content so long as it's not a fashion pageant, it's just not a thing that's a problem for common sense reasons (people keep secrets)

 

[NeonSturm]

it's just not a thing that's a problem for common sense reasons (people keep secrets)

Not all. Not those who want to publish awesome things.
If someone has no real life and browses the forum exclusively, he will be influenced by the "min-maxing environment mostly" and make all his creations this way. If he then wants to show them in CC, he shares these secrets.

On sunworld, I won with a min-maxed layer-rotating 2-L shapes of power/thrust in the bottom of a pyramid.

It has RP in the middle and the core top, where most shots miss above/right/left - which worked well as long as you moved and have an optically invisible ship (block hack by uploading unintended block IDs I got offline via admin commands and paid with 1 credits at the server).

Until I run into someone who didn't have the server's texture pack and saw purple instead of invisible blocks - he outright killed me with a smaller min-maxed ship. When I spied on his ship using build-mode, I didn't saw any 1 block hollowing,

Later, I saw that ship in a shipyard-forum thread (not going into detail, I don't have the link anymore and it's outdated anyway).​

 

[Az14el]

If you could find us an example of such a ship on CC, you might convince one or two people.
The learning curve (cliff) in this game will get/is getting better (more tut vids being put out, features being finalised, bugs ironed out, exploits fixed, etc), which will naturally bring things into balance a little more, less outliers in both directions. But don't get it wrong, this is an engineering game, they're not going to homogenize the systems on us or censor creativity, and those are the only 2 roads to where you're going.

The problem is you're seeing a problem that just doesn't exist. There's nothing of the sort on CC, there's fancy, confusing & gimmicky things, but not a min/maxing problem lol.

Whether true or not, the running joke is that CC ships are generally all RP no function, even the "functional" ones. This attitude hasn't changed much in forever, because it's the nice looking stuff that people actually want to release.

 

[FlyingDebris]

People can and will minmax their CC ships whether you like it or not. I and others have uploaded ships that would absolutely stomp the 'average' equivalents and will continue to do so indefinitely. Banning better ships will go over like trying to ban alcohol in the 1920s. How will it be determined if something is minmaxed? How will it be determined what can stay and what can go? Why would someone want to not be able to get the best ships available because they're stronger?

Just because people have better engineering and a better understanding of the game, and endeavor to create more powerful ships doesn't mean they should be limited. And frankly, limitation in a sandbox game is almost a death sentence.

 

[Reilly Reese]

>_> The fuck???

Knowing how to operate and repair a powerful ship is not the same as being able to get it. Showing the capacities of the game is what inspires people. They look at these things and go "Hey that's really cool I want to be able to do that."

 

[NeonSturm]

New If you could find us an example of such a ship on CC, you might convince one or two people.

It was a shipyard-forum post, not CC.

Just because people have better engineering and a better understanding of the game, and endeavour to create more powerful ships doesn't mean they should be limited

Knowing how to operate and repair a powerful ship is not the same as being able to get it

Creativity should never be limited. Min-max able designs often rather kill creativity in other aspects of the game (my opinion).
Shipyards and recycling+respawning solved this issue.

Perhaps the best thing would be if every server randomizes the settings by 5% to de-min/max designs.
It would actually give ships from different servers if they are min-maxed a unique feature to them.
Foreign ships would lose to the home-advantage.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Can you prove to me that minmaxing kills creativity?

 

[NeonSturm]

If I spend 2 hours on min maxing, I think more about sleeping than finishing the design hull and all ideas have left my mind.
It takes longer to build creative stuff. You have to spend most of your time playing to learn min-maxing.

Is that reason enough?
​

I want to place 16x16x16 blocks which can be added and deleted with 1 click and 1 slider with the values (1,2,4,8,16) which reduces the time required to switch between scaling-levels.

having 16x16 grid to place that block on easily displaced it by 1x1. So working on that scale should align it to 16x16x16 positions.

After that, I want to build rooms in these 16x16x16 blocks which is easier if they are just wire-frames.
I thought about copy+paste presets which include edges out of hull and doors to make them opaque/wireframe-like.
​

But now I have lot of door-blocks which do not contribute thrust/power/shields and have to be removed afterwards.

((Has everyone thought about a crystal/glass-like shield capacitor which doubles to some extend as hull? ))​

 

[FlyingDebris]

So basically people building better ships will sleep from time to time and that means they're less creative?

No.

Some of us want to build ships as best we can instead of just slapping down giant blocks of systems and calling it creativity.

So no, that's not an acceptable answer, try again.

 

[NeonSturm]

So no, that's not an acceptable answer, try again.

Frustration makes me quit. when I quit I don't be creative and play mind-less Dota2 or "Idling to Rule the Gods" from Steam.

Or, I be more creative with Java/logic rather than building ships.

Quantum-ROM : infinite bits per block (or until SM runs out of mem)
it's not min-maxed
If I min-max it, I could store 1 Mbit in a chunk32 or 50Mbit in 64x64x64 blocks.
But then, I have to take care of

• the ship-core
• irregularly placed logic-blocks
• output-blocks enclosed by other blocks
• manually linking 1/50 million connections 60 connections a minute and 3600 a hour, 25'000-50'000 a day and a month for 1 million. Assuming I expand 32 to 64 and de-min-max it.

It's a tiring work and those who mindlessly do a "finite state machine"s work will get the best results here.
Alternatively it requires me to write something like SM-Edit for creating these connections.

 

[FlyingDebris]

That's not minmaxing, that's just a ton of logic blocks.

Minmaxing is engineering your ship to be the best it can possibly be. If someone wants to put that much effort into their stuff, they should be rewarded with the ship they make being better than the rest, else why bother?

Now if someone spends those hours working on their ship, they shouldn't be nerfed to the point where their ships are basically on par with someone who just slapped down some blocks. Not only will this kill people's interest in getting better, it'll seriously inhibit creativity due to the fact that joe schmoe's five minute doomcube is now equal to any superbly engineered ship which took days, weeks, or in some cases months to make.

 

[Groovrider]

Frustration makes me quit. when I quit I don't be creative and play mind-less Dota2 or "Idling to Rule the Gods" from Steam.

Or, I be more creative with Java/logic rather than building ships.

Quantum-ROM : infinite bits per block (or until SM runs out of mem)
it's not min-maxed
If I min-max it, I could store 1 Mbit in a chunk32 or 50Mbit in 64x64x64 blocks.
But then, I have to take care of

• the ship-core
• irregularly placed logic-blocks
• output-blocks enclosed by other blocks
• manually linking 1/50 million connections 60 connections a minute and 3600 a hour, 25'000-50'000 a day and a month for 1 million. Assuming I expand 32 to 64 and de-min-max it.

It's a tiring work and those who mindlessly do a "finite state machine"s work will get the best results here.
Alternatively it requires me to write something like SM-Edit for creating these connections.

This is not about you. If If so-called min-maxing makes you lose sleep and get frustrated then you need to address that. You cannot extrapolate your personal issues to the player-base as a whole. You cannot expect others to make ships in a way that makes you feel better.

 

[Master_Artificer]

What...

Oh this thread hurts my brain.

Can you guys define what a maxed ship is?
And I don't think humbling the design before uploading will change much, lots of starmade combat is down to dice rolls, expecially when opponents are evenly matched. Did that cannon hit, did the AA shoot down the missile, did the missile hit power lines or did it glance some bit of decorative fins... Lots of dice

I often pit my new designs against other people's and let the AI on both duke it out.
But I run several tests because often times it will be like a tug of war, with one side winning then the other side winning and you need to flip that coin enough to see which one is actually better.


Another thought: yes designs with exploits like docked ion armor will beat pubs 9 times out of 10, I am talking about normal-ish ships with just really good systems and armor, not exploity stuff.

 

[JinM]

I don't understand your main point. Do you want to talk about min-maxing and that with a bigger playerbase like in Minecraft normal RP style gets ignored? Or do you fear that in the future people don't want to build something new because they try to life up to the build hype some really big ships are inspiring?

Because the examples you give are really precise and partly I don't even understand what they mean or what they are. They are not making your main concern very clear to me:

(with and without diminishing returns) more blocks can mean you need more system-blocks which increase the block-count again

ion effect is affected by this and thrust, but not weapons (weapons are dependent on the enemy size, not yours).
|
evasion is affected by this, thus shield-damage/strength in some cases

(in other cases not, where the ship is just a big target with or without 5% more size).
​

There should be an official story/believe which tells that 5% more size always works.
"6:4 eff matters in 5/100 cases" is (2*5/100 +4):4 = "4.1 of 4" – negligible!​

Do you really fear new people are influenced that much from some big ships that look pretty?

Honestly I fear that there will be no new people at all because one day in one or two years Empyrion and Dual Universe are finished.

Another thought: yes designs with exploits like docked ion armor will beat pubs 9 times out of 10, I am talking about normal-ish ships with just really good systems and armor, not exploity stuff.

I hate this exploity stuff like docked reactors and the likes. Why do people think its fun? The playerbase of Starmade is really really really small. You can not have that big space ship battles with 30 combatants. And then some guy designs ships that are so overpowered that there is no gameplay at all. If I join a survival server and had some guy with this 5million mass ship dominating the universe that is even pimped with exploits I would have to play ages learning that exploit design and also gathering the millions of ressources. I mean what is the difference between a 5million mass ship duel and a a 5k mass ship duel? There is none! Its only 2 ships and 2 players! But if you use 20 of this 5 million mass ships you can't have the fight because the game just lags. But thats the thing: I play games for far too long and consider different stuff fun than I have when I started playing games some long time ago.

 

[Bladeriker]

After reading the Op's post. Either they were stomped by a ship that designed for war while in a ship they thought was designed for war, Or this is another casual verse hard-core players/builders rant thread.

Either way those ships I make public are 100% of what they are designed for by my standards, and then as time goes by I update and revise them.

 

[Lukwan]

OP is a fine philosophy suitable for poems and academic discussions. Like most fine ideals this concept won't survive in the 'real' world because it is fragile and does not compete well.

It also a red-herring. There were two guys in my calculus class who had programmable calculators. They were only two who failed the class. They programmed their toys with the formulas from class but the test papers used variations of the given formulas. Everyone who bothered to learn the skills were able to adapt and solve the problems except for the slackers who used shortcuts to cleverly avoid 'learning'.

You can't save people from their own stupidity...and why would you want to? Why would you want to rob people of their opportunity to learn from their own bad decisions? That is also part of the learning curve for all of us.

Let people use those shortcuts and decide for themselves if that serves them or not.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Docked reactors and the like aren't exploits. They're not great, but they're not bad. Some sort of non-docked alternative would be very much appreciated, though it may be a while before that arrives.