from my experience a ship with 100 entities causes more lag than 100 single ships. however a lot of drones adding up to the mass of a larger ship will cause more lag than that larger ship on its own.
I love the dangerous reactors, but I would still like them to be able to function as a docked reactor. If the explosion occurred briefly after getting hit, perhaps 5-30 seconds, the chain reaction explosive quality would mean that it would rapidly self destruct removing lag problems, which I understand to be the main reason to remove/nerf power supply. If the radius of the explosion was sufficient to damage surrounding systems this would encourage interesting design choices to between: logic push systems setup to push damaged reactors near the surface out of the ship, deeply buried & armored reactor areas, and perhaps small distributed reactors which would damage but not trash your ship as they are inevitable detonated. Or simply sticking with the current safe, but less powerful reactors (I assume that's the role they will have.)
On the other hand, the game could be optimized to handle a variety of different ship sizes working in tandem, and designed in a way to encourage fleet diversification etc instead of making the game about who can bring the biggest ship. The explosive reactors are a part of that.
I'm all for diversity, but I'm against killing each and every way of modular ship building.
There are other ways to solve this. If an internally docked entity gets undocked and there is no place for it to move anywhere, no collision checks would be necessary. Also, externally docked modular ship parts like armor plates surely don't cause more lag than turrets.
The point is that it's better and easier to either disable internally docked systems (shield injectors) or give a better, easier to balance real system (docked reactors and batteries). I'm pretty sure the only reason docked thrust exists is because so many people have moving rail engines, which are almost always external.
It's moreso that docked armor plates in COMBINATION with turrets causes more lag than just the turrets would. We shouldn't ENCOURAGE the use of it (like some current bugs do.....) but it should be allowed, like how docked thrust is.
Why is there the syndrome "the biggest is the strongest" ? Because everything is linear. Then, why should i get 2 ships with a gun if i can get one ship with a gun twice the first one ? The best thing is that until your shields are down you won't have damage and block to repair so the most shield you got the best it is. It's a summary but it's basically why. I'll never understand why some things are linear while some others not.
I definitely won't miss power/shield injectors, I'd just like to keep other modular stuff, if possible.
Er, what?
What i point out is that i don't find anything logical in the starmade formula. Like encouraging smaller ships instead of bigger ones. If you want to do so then it's the whole gameplay mechanic that need to encourage that, not one thing.
A 100 000 damage shot isn't as good 10 000 shots at 10 damage each, since a lot of damage will go to waste if the former hits unshielded blocks. I agree on the power cap.
If you would make it a logarithmic curve, peoples would build checker-board guns.
If you have less shields per entity, you can't sum up the hit-points of your fleet into one single pool.
Pretty much the only thing that scales linearly is weapon size. Even then it's a bit deceptive, as it's only really shield damage that's linear. Penetration has some diminishing returns, and multiple outputs have a power penalty that can add up on larger weapons. Shielding, armour (well, sort of, armour dips and peaks at various sizes), thrust and handling all diminish as you get bigger. Power storage, and to an extent power gen, get better as your ship gets bigger.
Another thing to bare in mind with it is that lots of little projectiles are pretty much neutered by armour if they're not hitting the same spot.
I took shield damage as example because it's the true damage the weapons do, without armor and so on.
Right, except shield capacity, power generation, weapon penetration, thrust, amount of SHP you can lose before overheat, and the cost of the same thickness of armor?
