Resurrecting an idea: Consolidate Armor Block Resources

[Winterhome]

One of the biggest pains in the ass in all of Starmade is the factory system as it currently exists, right? You spend hours and hours and hours mining - days mining, even - and you have all the resources you need to make your ship.

Then you buy the blueprint and see that you need to make no fewer than 30 different kinds of armor blocks, if not more.

You start by trying to produce the most needed armor blocks, and maybe you get your Grey Standard Armor and such filled in with all the wedges and stuff. But it gets tiring and wearing after that. Eventually you just stop filling the blueprint and hope someone else in your faction is more patient.

After that point, you simply stop making ships with more than a tiny handful of types of resources and colors, because it's too much of a pain in the ass to produce your ships in a server.

Please, for the love of god, consolidate armor block resource requirements into Basic, Standard, and Advanced blocks. No shape requirements. No paint requirements. Paint's only a visual thing - we can use the rock capsules for carved rocks, which look fantastic on their own anyway. No need for an extra fifty steps to put a simple hull together when the total number of other kinds of blocks on your ship is less than the total number of different kinds of armor.

 

[Madman198237]

I agree up to a point--- I'd like to see shapes disappear, but colors can stay. However, they should really be easier to work with. So, no more "Thou shalt apply thine color to thy armor at the step of 2, but not the step of 3. For if thou shalt wish for color, thou must placeth thine color at the exact moment specified, but not later, nor earlier, or else thou shalt never be able to use the block thou hast created".
And yes, I know that that was a miserable failure of a Monty Python copy. Back off, critic.

Instead, allow the use of a coloring agent (Whether or not those remain the same I do not really care) at any point of production. As in, if I've salvaged some pink and purple advanced armor heptas off of a pirate loot drop, I REALLY want to be able to turn them into some decent, useful grey and dark grey advanced armor heptas. Or, if the suggestion is implemented, advanced armor, as opposed to an advanced armor hepta, which doesn't need to be produced separately.

 

[Valck]

I still hope that at some point, Schine will give the different shapes individual values for mass, hit points, and armour/structure hit point contribution, according to the actual volume the shape takes up. If not that, then at least keep them so that we can mod it in if we want, as we can now. It doesn't make sense in my opinion that you can multiply your effective armour by creatively docking multiple entitities to occupy the same block space.

What I'd like to see improved upon is the way colour is applied - like Madman said, I think it would make sense to apply any colour to any armour block at any step during production; I don't see why colour has to be an inherent, unchangeable attribute of armour, it is just an aesthetic thing and doesn't influence resistance or anything.

Also with the multi-shape inventory slots we have now, I don't see the big issue with having to produce different shapes; once a factory is set up, it is just one additional step to produce any shape.
I don't care too much about whether I have a few leftover shapes, they'll sit in storage until they are needed for another project.

It would be great if there were ways to recycle split armour into full blocks though. That could even work with different coloured shapes if it simply produced grey cubes which can be used as they are or put back in the production process again.

 

[Madman198237]

It's one additional step that is completely unnecessary. Just allow us to, like slabs, choose different shapes. With the minor change of keeping the present multi-block functionality, just with one number that stands for remaining amount of that particular armor/hull.

 

[Valck]

It's one additional step that is completely unnecessary. Just allow us to, like slabs, choose different shapes.

You dislike it as unnecessary, I like it as additional complexity, and you make a good point about slabs - why don't they have their own recipes... just saying. Not everyone thinks alike.

With the minor change of keeping the present multi-block functionality, just with one number that stands for remaining amount of that particular armor/hull.

As long as every shape has the same mass and HP contribution. I don't say it couldn't be changed to work that way, but that's something to keep in mind.

 

[lupoCani]

Yet again, I will argue that this is approaching the problem from the wrong angle. I always see these suggestions about bypassing factories in one way or the other- make shipyards use raw resources, make blueprints eat blocks regardless of shape, or whatever annoyed the suggestor the most at the time of writing.

If factories are a nuisance, we should fix them, not partially expunge them. Add suitable automation, restructure the system to be more practical, anything. Just don't patch over them, that's not sustainable game design.

 

[Malacodor]

No paint requirements. Paint's only a visual thing - we can use the rock capsules for carved rocks, which look fantastic on their own anyway. No need for an extra fifty steps to put a simple hull together when the total number of other kinds of blocks on your ship is less than the total number of different kinds of armor.

It should be possible to select the desired color in build mode. Whenever a dyeable block is placed 3 units of the respective paint(s) are removed from the inventory or storage. The color of a block should be changeable via a paint tool.

If the different shapes should ever get different stats according to their size, then slabs can simply be counted as 0.25, 0.5 or 0.75 blocks, wedges as 0.5, corners as 1/3, tetras as 1/6 and heptas as 5/6. We could just feed our shipyards with grey blocks and some paint and the shaping and painting would happen automatically.

 

[Nickizzy]

I agree about the shape freedom, like being able to scroll to change shape, but the paint I think is too nice of a feature to remove. Call it traditionalism. Maybe paint can be placed it's self by changing the armor, like the replace function but just changing all the colors, using one paint for each one. Not sure if there's some hidden programing issue, but I really like using different pigments to make different colors. When you delete blocks you'd get the paint back too. BP and Shipyard recipes would just take paint.

You'd need new recipes and items for colors like teal, tough, so we'd lose some block ID's though. If you need more of some color(Especially faction colors. Sheesh.) then you can mine and not sell them(like you should), but if you're to lazy or if it's something rare like lammar, shops usually carry a ton of asteroid guts, and you can always buy pure paint to start with. If you really exhaust all of those opportunities, you probably need to expand out, start afk fleet mining, or make a "Second Gen" with new colors.

 

[NeonSturm]

I'd like if you had kilograms of armour volume and square meters of paint in your inventory.

Perhaps you could link factory enhancers or slave factories which do the cutting and melting part to the shipyard.

 

[Nickizzy]

I'd like if you had kilograms of armour volume and square meters of paint in your inventory.

Wa? Just call 1 paint thing a full coat, and one armor block thing a full cast amount. I don't need new RF and MB madness.

Perhaps you could link factory enhancers or slave factories which do the cutting and melting part to the shipyard.

... Is this a new factory or something? That only does armor blocks and paints?
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If the different shapes should ever get different stats according to their size, then slabs can simply be counted as 0.25, 0.5 or 0.75 blocks, wedges as 0.5, corners as 1/3, tetras as 1/6 and heptas as 5/6. We could just feed our shipyards with grey blocks and some paint and the shaping and painting would happen automatically.

Yea... But you better do them both at the same time to avoid tesseracts in starmade. That'd be awsome.