Power System Overhaul Proposal

[Valiant70]

FIRST IMPRESSION: A system where I must space systems apart from one another sounds more enjoyable to work with than the current system where my ships are composed of hull, interior, and a solid mass of system blocks.

Problems with the current power system

According to our own experience and player experiences shared on the forums, we have identified the following problems.
Forced design choices
Lack of complexity
Too many blocks involved (number, not types)
Focused on regen

I agree with each of these. All systems are focused too much on block count and not enough on design choices. I would like to see that change. In general, spacing systems apart will allow more creative freedom. You can choose between void or pretty stuff rather than pretty stuff or more shield capacity. This will make building ships more enjoyable.

THOUGHTS ON THE MECHANICS FROM THE OP:
The logic of the "heat" system seems to be this: Reactors are a sort of power source so tremendous that they can output just about as much power as you want (zero-point, perhaps?), but they also output heat when they output energy. Small reactors produce more heat per power in return for being compact. Larger reactors are able to distribute energy more heat-efficiently, as well as house bulky cooling systems. The concept is unconventional, but I like it. Please keep this as-is. It is believable but not too complex.

An "auxiliary cooling chamber" that uses consumable coolant could be a good and sensible solution for a fuel-like mechanic that many players desire. It could simple take coolant from a linked cargo module as needed to keep the ship from reaching dangerous heat levels. The chamber's maximum cooling capacity would be limited by its design. Balancing parameters include: Coolant consumption rate, weight and bulk of stored coolant, and heat radius of the chamber.

This is a good opportunity to implement directionally-based shielding. Draw a virtual "box" around the ship. Whichever face a shot passes through is the shield emitter that will soak it up. Shield balance should be reconfigurable on the fly. "Stabilize your rear deflectors. Here they come!" --Red Leader, Star Wars: A New Hope.

Heat mechanics offer a good opportunity for a rework of stealth and detection. Perhaps...
Mass x Heat Percentage = Signature Size
your Sensor Strength / enemy Signature Size = Detection Radius
Signature size determines how far away something may be detected. Primary stealth systems may work by stopping cooling in return for dividing the "Heat Percentage" factor of the equation by a very large number, making your ship harder to detect until it gets very close or very hot. Cloaking (visually hiding) a ship could be a separate system with a flat heat generation rate. Advanced sensor systems increase the distance at which you can detect enemy ships, but they generate heat too.

Weapons are another important point. I would like to see fewer shots fired with much greater effect per shot. In most scifi, when a ship fires on another ship, stuff happens. They don't sit there pounding each other with many shots per second for several minutes. To accomplish this, first increase the effectiveness of each shot considerably. Second, ensure that all weapons generate a significant amount of heat so that they must cease fire for a few seconds to cool down after firing a shot or a few shots.

Weapons/drives/etc. should not have built-in cooldowns. Instead, the ship's heat level acts as a universal cooldown for all systems. Rate of fire when you hold down the button should be configurable. A larger, heavier weapon should output more damage for less heat (similar to adding a % of overdrive effect, or not). This will allow a great deal of freedom in weapon design, and potentially allow a ship to carry more variety in weapons. Weapons should be balanced mainly by heat output versus weight and heat radius. (And by the way, firing bullets out at odd angles needs to go. Completely. See this thread.)

Overall, I think this new system has a higher potential for enjoyment and game balance than the current one. I would like to see a test build implemented so that players can get a better idea of what playing with it will be like.

Are you sure? Are you actually open to the feedback, or are you all bent on doing this no matter what we say?
no, not really, only from people that want to build server-lagging big ships and hit soft-caps

...when has there EVER been a consensus in StarMade, or the internet?

Did you really? If you did, why haven't we seen some patches over the past ... 4 years... tweaking stats of reactors and capacitors, or the x-y-z dimensional reactor system? None of that has been done, so you can't honestly say you've gone through every possible way, yet.

You're not solving anything "right now" with this, you're just creating new bugs, new problems, breaking new things, wasting time on what seems a random distraction to redo part of the game and gameplay that most people have been adequately happy with for... 4 years... instead of focusing on fixing easier, more pressing bugs and issues.

It's not broken.

So, it's a good idea to you to continue to annoy the piss out of all your players by making us redesign our ships, constantly, which we've told you repeatedly in the past that it annoys the piss out of us, and... you're doing it again. Great idea?

...people whining because they're making bad decisions about reactor design and ship size.

...foolish players being too focused on titans and being too whiney...

...using a jackhammer to drive a tack into corkboard?


Every game forces design choices. It's part of gameplay and balance. Do you want a pretty RP ship? or do you want a doom cube? Let players decide, and server owners decide (by literally banning doom cubes if they so wish. It's been working fine, so far.


Complexity is not always good. KISS rule always applies to all of life - Keep It Simple, Stupid! Too much complexity frustrates players and creates a high learning curve. No one likes that. EVE is dying off for a reason ;p


.. again, this is only a problem if people are building ships that are "TOO BIG" and hitting softcaps. If you would finally rebalance the game to favor smaller ships, this wouln't happen. Even so, it's not a problem, it's a gameplay choice. Want a bigger ship? You need more blocks. Duh. Simple. You have to do more if you want more.



...not always. Again this is a gameplay choice that should be made by players, not devs. Lots of players choose to go for capacity over regen, because capacitors give a LOT more stats per block than reactors do. Especially on ships that rely on an alpha-strike, capacitors are much more useful than regen. For experimental servers that are using no regen and capacitors only like batteries, you've totally killed them and taken away very valueable gameplay choices.


Speak for yourself, not us. Lots of players get very creative with power placement and system placement, inside and outside the ship. Need we remind you of the external reactor fiasco? Schine is consistently taking away freedom and creativity from us players more than you're giving it with a few new pretty shiny blocks here and there.



Yeah, so ? If we choose to fill it up, then let us. If we choose to sacrifice stat porn for interiors, then let us make that gameplay trade-off choice. Plus if you're worried about the non-functional skin of a ship, then rebalance armor, not power. Some of the more creative server admins have already taken it upon themselves to create new armors, with more functions and gameplay value than the original. Are you listening?.... are you listening?



So...... what? What's your point? You don't want doom cubes? Too bad! Don't make a voxel game, then. Duh. Everything in starmade from 1 block on up is technically a cube. There are very, very, very few ships over the past 4 years that have EVER deviated from some form of rectangular solid/prism. Very few ships in all of sci-fi and art have ever deviated from this. So... what...! Let server admins decide if we want doom cubes or pretty ships. Server admins can choose to delete/ban doom cubes. You as devs stay out of it. Leave us alone and let us the players make our own decisions on form vs. function. That's what good devs do.



Again... so ? You're not making an arguement for your cause here. You're stating a well known and well accepted fact of the game. It's a positive trade-off and gameplay decision to make in the game. It is a way to challenge players, and it hasn't stopped ANY of us over the past 4 years from making pretty ships, or ugly ships, or whatever the F kinda ships we want to make with whatever interior we want. You. Cannot. Have. It. All. ....and, moreover, in a GOOD game, you shouldn't. Let us the players make our own choices.



...what game are you guys playing? Because it doesn't sound like StarMade. Of COURSE it matters how you place the 3 power blocks. Reactors must be in an x,y,z dimension pattern, or you can choose to checkerboard them, but you certainly don't want to lazily toss them down in a giant cube. You also certainly don't want to put the new power blocks near the surface or outside the hull, or they go volatile too easily when hit. There's TONS to do and decide upon with reactor design.

Tedious? The only tedium comes from ships that are "too large" and have hit the soft cap. Again, you should be looking at rebalancing the current system to encourage smaller ships. More soft caps. Harsher soft caps. Players are also mostly lazy / bad with weapon and power use design, moreso than it's too tedious to make a good reactor. Good designs will calculate power needs first, then create reactors/caps after that, and then finish with shields. If anything is tedious, it's not having an "autofill" option to use inside of our ships with a selected module.

How is there "no way to customize" our power systems? Power in any game is always 2 things: regen and capacity. We already have that. Job done. Players can decide between a balance, or all regen, or all capacity. We players can customize the regen, the cap, the dimensions of our power, the layout of our power. We can put power blocks inside or outside the ship. We can change the blockconfg.xml to make it animated, or glow, or whatever we want. We have tons of customizing power, already. We will decide for ourselves just fine. Give us the foundation (which you already have), then let us alone to build on it.



Well, thankfully we now have remove/replace functions in the advanced build menu. It really simplifies the process of removing one type of block and replacing it with another type. I'm surprised you devs don't know about it, since you probably were the ones that coded it into the game. Also, good ship designers for years have already been keeping a rough track of how many blocks their ships have, and can fit, so.... not sure there's actually any real problem here.



Hmmm... seems like a rational person right now would decide that 'maybe ships are too big' and we're trying to force the wrong kind of game upon players and cater too much to a vocal minority that wants to just build massive ships that the game engine and server can't really handle anyways. Hmmm? At least you've got one thing right here, because no, it's indeed not fine when your ship size becomes larger. Balance the game for ships under 200m.



Maybe your ship is just too big, then? Build something smaller that your brain and ADHD meds can handle.



Here's a novel (not really) thought (that players have been asking for, for years): selection options in advanced build mode that select or highlight all blocks of a certain type. Use the same selector drop down that's used for the remove/replace menu. Simple stuff. Don't know why it's taken so many players asking so long and so often. It's a lot simpler and shorter than coding this whole new power system you're proposing. If you're actually interested in helping players, then you have to agree that this might be a better solution to try first.



See above suggestion. Yeah, actually it _would_ be resolved so... um... no other way to say it than "you are wrong". :/ sorry if that's too blunt and insensitive.



Wait... surface area matters in this game for something other than how much graphic lag is caused by rendering a ship with tons of exterior detail and tons of interior? (yeah, that's right, you haven't optimized the engine yet) ... Why are we talking about surface area? AFAIK it doesn't matter. This is totally irrelevant to design and power discussion.


Wrong. Plenty of evidence already above about how we players make gameplay choices both ways between regen vs. cap

...so don't build big ships...

Wrong. Again, plenty of players decide to use capacitors to alpha-strike then bug out to regen, or simply tank while regen'ing power. Why do you devs thing it's a problem that players are making design and balance and gameplay choices? Not everyone wants to play the same way. Don't force us to do so.

It's not boring, because a good designer will often use different systems. Plus, it works, it's simple, and if you DO want to use the same thing on every ship and copy-paste it from a template, then ...so what? Let a player do that, and move on to some other system or exterior design that they enjoy doing more. Not every player may want to have some complex, intricate, mentally stimulating romp through reactor design every single time they start a new ship. I'd wager MOST players don't want to do this, but just want to move on to making sure they have the guns they want, a pretty exterior. It's a tradeoff they choose to make, and are ok with knowing maybe their ship doesn't have the most 100% optimal power use, but that's the choice they make. That's the gameplay they've chosen. Let . Them. Make. That. Choice. You as devs of a voxel sandbox are not here to dictate to us how we have to design ships.

What are you even talking about with this? AI use the same ships, the same way, as players do, except for having the privilege of firing all their weapons simultaneously - eg - without losing or waiting on missile locks while shooting cannons. If you're mad about your AI ships not having enough capacity, then just give them more reactor caps. Very simple solution. Don't waste time coding up a whole new power system to deal with that.

I will defer on quote-bombing the "Solution" segment of the original post, since the point of this reply is to prove false the original premise for overhauling power. Leave well enough alone. Focus on other, bigger, known problems and missing parts of the game first, before overhauling power, which isn't broken at all.
[doublepost=1486884719,1486882388][/doublepost]
Right now, it's actually the most difficult way for players to target your reactor system. If this is really your concern, then you will like the current system, and not this new system.

Plus, with the current system, players can make lots of design choices and tactical choices:
- disperse a checkerboard reactor
- centralize an x,y,z reactor
- bury a reactor to protect it, and sacrifice shields or thrust near a ship's surface, or vice versa
- gain more regen/cap by putting reactors near the surface, but sacrifice it first in a big fight
- focus on regen
- focus on cap
- generalize by having both regen and cap

...and this is just merely thinking for a minute. There's many more customizations and possibilities with the current power system, but the problem is that most builders just simply don't take the time. They're not even trying, then they come to the forums or to the council and whine loudly about wanting something else. That's not right, nor fair, to the silent majority.

Rebalance the system first, then we can all talk about an overhaul once that fails.

Speaking of conduits... how about an easy and first fix being to make more decorative blocks actually be functional as well? Give players more ways to customize and mod blocks; to add other stats and functions to blocks. Let us choose to give conduits and charged circuits power regen and capacity stats, or endow them with a %bonus to power regen/cap that is calculated after / outside of the soft caps.

Soft Caps: more of them, at lower levels.

Regen rate/block: increase it.

Capacity/block: increase it.

By doing these things, and extending these concepts to other systems and block types, we will boost the stats that are possible in small ships, we will limit the performance of very large ships, and we will increase the stats of RP ships with more decorations and interior space. These concepts can all be extended even further without any major game engine changes, without extensive coding, and without breaking EVERYONE's ships. This is a win-win situation for everyone. A total overhaul is a losing scenario, right now, with no proof at all.

I would like to read your post and dialogue with you, but your tone is too unpleasant to make it worthwhile. I am interested in your ideas, so please consider calmly restating most of this in a more conversational tone so that I can read it without getting a headache.

 

[terra mining corp.]

So the way I read this it will benefit the size of ships I use right now(drones/fighters/corvettes) but i'm wanting to step up ship classes.I may want to hold off on big builds for now, as I will have enough pita refitting small ships with 0 space now.Also nobody seems worried about the impact on stations, need more info before jumping to conclusions.

 

[Valiant70]

So the way I read this it will benefit the size of ships I use right now(drones/fighters/corvettes) but i'm wanting to step up ship classes.I may want to hold off on big builds for now, as I will have enough pita refitting small ships with 0 space now.Also nobody seems worried about the impact on stations, need more info before jumping to conclusions.

I doubt stations will have any NEW issues. Just like now, they will act like enormous, unmoving ships. Since they don't have to worry about moving, you can put massive reactors and massive shields on them. If anything, the update will make stations stronger than they were before.

 

[Thunder Cock]

Love this idea I like weapon size going down, makes turrets more viable also allows the concept of weak spots that you can try and focus

 

[Panpiper]

I would rebutt the entire logic leading to the proposed change.

Forced design choices

StarMade has a great build system with endless options when it comes to decorating your structures or creating complex interiors, yet making a ship functional with all our systems can take a while and is usually a less creative process.

It’s not only the power system that suffers from it, but every other functional system that follows its design principles. Currently, most ships have a non functional ‘skin’ and everything else is filled to the brim with systems.

Filling your entire ship with systems is the most optimal way to make a ship. Making any interior or extra decoration creates weaknesses on your ship. It also favours one ship shape over another, in order to fill it with as many systems as possible; Doom cubes.

More systems and power means a better ship, and there is no incentive or mechanic that would ever make a pretty ship with interior as good as one filled with systems.​

I find the existing build process to be a HIGHLY creative process that even after two years, I have in no way mastered.

The way to address the non-functional skin is to make it functional. There are two way to achieve this currently without breaking existing designs. One way is to make basic hull more useful than it currently is, without increasing it's mass. Give basic hull an armor factor equal to standard, and make the spread between standard and advanced more nuanced. Make adding a basic hull a no-brainer of a decision. The other way is to actually introduce a heat system, but make the basic heat dispersal a function of the quantity of hull exposed to exterior space. That one change alone would spell the end of doom cubes and confer a huge reward to anyone who spent the time to create a well textured hull surface.

There IS a mechanic that would reward a ship with interior space, again without throwing out the whole of the existing build mechanics, and that is to use the upcoming crew & quarters system. Have a minimum required amount of invisible, immaterial block space for each crewman. Confer a bonus upon the crewman's effectiveness for additional such space. Have crewmen confer bonuses to systems that are 'superior' to what would be gained by adding extra system blocks. Optimize the system such that the balance is on 50% system and 50% crew space, and with such a balance the two together grant a 20% bonus in effectiveness over a pure system build. That would be a 20% bonus to 'each' affected system. Pure system ships would still work, but be very much outclassed by ships with crew space.

Lack of complexity

Our current power system has only 3 different block types which would be fine if it mattered more in how you placed them. That’s not always the case and usually there’s little to do besides changing the amount of a certain block when necessary.

This gets very tedious at larger scales. Fitting a bigger ship with power blocks is just a matter of finding the space for it. There doesn’t have to be any thought about placement and possible consequences. Additionally there is no way to customize your ship’s power systems.

The current system makes power and systems purely a game of ratios, which doesn’t offer much complexity and increases the total number of blocks.​

I would like to point out that the vast majority of players spend weeks fully understanding the "lack of complexity" of the 'existing' power systems. Even once they start to understand the idea of length of power lines, XYZ dimensions and such, it can take a much longer time yet to fully understand how to optimize such layouts. Balancing power needs for all the various systems while still ascertaining that you have enough power storage for weapons fire has plenty of 'complexity'.

As for consequence of placement of power systems for larger ships, anyone who is NOT putting lots of thought into placement and possible consequences is building a seriously sub-optimal ship.

Too many blocks involved

As the system forces you to balance the amount of blocks placed on your ship between 3 power block types, you constantly end up removing one type to replace it with another unless you calculate the amount of blocks needed for each type. Even then you have to roughly know how many blocks your ship can fit.

This is fine for ships where only a few hundred blocks are involved. You usually remember where you placed them and changing ratios isn’t a long process. Each system block matters a lot more in this case.

It’s not fine when your ship size becomes larger. Most ships have more than 100,000 blocks and it’s impossible to know where you placed all your blocks down. Filling your ship with the correct amount of blocks per type is a tedious and long process. Not to mention that changing it afterwards is even more frustrating where you have to dig for specific block types and you end up with a complete system mess.

Although additional build tools could alleviate some of these issues, it would never be completely resolved and any new system we add here would inherit this fundamental problem.

The current system makes power and systems purely a game of ratios, which doesn’t offer much complexity and only gets worse with a higher total block count. Also, the volume to surface area does not scale favorably for balance, and there is no incentive not to fill up a ship with systems. The larger your ship, the more volume you usually have compared to your surface area.​

Filling your ship with blocks would be a heck of a lot easier if a few extra advanced build tools were added. 'Fill Available Space' would do the trick nicely. 'Hide All But' would make it very easy to remove unwanted blocks. 'Hollow Ship' would remove all blocks except those exposed to exterior space. 'Hollow Ship Interior' would remove all blocks that are surrounded on all faces by other blocks, so as to leave intact any interior architecture.

Focused on regen

Currently you will always care more about power regen than capacity, mostly because it’s scaled that way. In almost every case, you want to equalize your power regen with your total consumption during combat. Your capacity would be increased to have a small reserve that equals this consumption so that you can use all your systems at once and regen the power within a few seconds.

This results in a boring way of building ships since there’s little difference in power systems for any ship you create, it’s a simple equation and can result in a lot of frustration to achieve that goal.

Not to mention that it’s hard to make the AI use this system when their capacity is always too low to work with.​

We focus on everything, including regen. We do not care 'less' about capacity unless we have no need for capacity. Believe me, if I have need for capacity, I am focusing on that need every bit as much as I focus on regen. A chain is as strong as it's weakest link. We build ships sufficient to provide for all the needs of the ship. Removing power so we don't focus on that and replacing it with heat so we then focus on heat is NOT a solution.

If you want us to focus on more things, then give us more things to focus on. By all means add heat, but do not 'remove' power in so doing. You achieve nothing other than change for the sake of change only.

To get rid of the aforementioned problems, we need to turn the entire power system upside down. This will break most if not all current ships but to us, it’s a necessary step to continue on game mechanics without always having to find workarounds.​

This will indeed break EVERY ship in the game, and EVERY station. ALL of it will have to be redone, pretty much from scratch. All this to solve problems that are either in my opinion not problems at all, or that have other easy to implement solutions. Worse, it will take the iterative development that has been done to date on game balance and throw all of it in the garbage, to start all over again.

A short summation of what we’ll do:​

I think the game could benefit from a heat mechanic. It would give more range with which to differentiate weapon types and effects and create a lot more variety in build strategies. All that is a good thing. However I do not think it is advisable to remove power or the existing power mechanics from the game, just to add a heat mechanic. A heat mechanic should depend on heat radiation (exposed hull to exterior space), heat sink (total mass of the ship) and possibly active heat radiators (a new surface block) and perhaps heat pipes to rapidly move heat from heat sources to heat radiators/surfaces and/or heat sinks.

AI crews for meta players will consist of a 9x3 room in which all 100 crewmen live and die, it'll be the most compact room evah, and there's nothing you can do to stop it!

I don't believe you'll be able to ever get "pro" players to have an interior above what they 100% need.
I feel as if RP is being forced to hard, AI crews sound great, until you consider what I said above

With the crew and quarters system "I" would design, that would be SERIOUSLY sub-optimal, and probably not even possible (minimum required space blocks per crewman).

 

[Andir]

Heat boundaries seem likely a needless complexity... Why not just make a core require a cooling chamber to reduce heat at a quicker pace? The bigger the core, the more generation, but the more heat. The bigger the chamber, the more cooling. This way a small ship could have a 'mini reactor' with a small cooling chamber to cover it's power needs. You could also design tileable power reactor slices for expandable ship designs. the 'iconic' stick can still happen if you have the ship core have a cooling effect based on ship mass.

The heat boundaries worry me because I could imagine a ship design where 'engineering' has redundant systems for combat purposes. With heat boundaries those redundancies are forced to be put at different points of the ship. This forces the hand of the design.

 

[Madman198237]

In order to make this viable, we need a sort of nerf to weapons.

A ship with a weapon big enough to one-shot obliterate a small ship needs to be completely incapable of tracking that vessel, or at the very least an extreme glass cannon. Turret tracking, first off, needs a tremendous nerf. Otherwise, there's going to be reactor one-shots left and right.

I think, as I mentioned earlier (Never have I ever seen a post get lost so fast in the mess of new posts) that reactors should not generate this heat and maintain it, but rather they have a "natural" generation rate, where they will generate power without overloading, and an "overload" rate, where they DO generate heat. As in, if your systems draw more power than the reactor produces at its natural rate, it will generate heat, slowly. You can add cooling systems or sheer size in order to make the threshold of overheating higher, but you're still going to have to be aware of what you're doing in a fight in order to avoid burning things. Burning things you don't want burned. Like your crew, your

Also, weapons systems should have an included overload as well. Perhaps a system integrated with logic, where an activator block can "route" power from a reactor (Assuming you don't want to actually run actual cable blocks between systems, which might be an interesting mechanic), and also "overload" different systems. As in, a reactor slaved to an activator which is connected to a weapon and activated will power that weapon system. If you then connect an activation block to the weapon and slave three activation blocks with 1 off and 2 on, it's going to "overcharge" that weapon to 200% (Or whatever limit, if lower than 200%), charge twice as fast, and draw, say, 800% (2^3=8) more power.

Massive inefficiency, but if you build your reactors well, you could then run weapons, shield regeneration, thrusters, warp drives, whatever you need, faster. But you're going to burn the individual reactors used to power them. Or you can go the grand route, where one reactor powers everything and you only need activators to choose the overdrive percentage on your modules.

And while this may make overdrive redundant, well, sorry? Perhaps overdrive can simply be more efficient than this method, since this method uses less blocks and lets you retain an effect.

Another point: Heat areas should go away. ASAP. Like, now. Terrible plan. Make it based on the heat you generate. The more heat (Radiation, instead. Let's make that change as well. Nobody likes gamma radiation either, yet super-powerful power sources might produce lots of it) the more effects in a larger radius. Based on the reactor's bounding box, please, not the ship's. Gives more freedom in design in a lot of ways. Also, reactors that would radiate heat into space instead of surrounding blocks (Through a thin layer of armor to the surface of the ship, for example) should have that heat eliminated, not redistributed.

 

[entarlas]

I have an idea!/ concern. I LOVE building interior in my ships and pride myself in building full interior ships that are also feared in pvp it takes alot longer to design but its worth it and i enjoy the challenge. That being said I am concerned that the "box" will severely limit interior design. I like that I'll be able to build a functioning reactor core but as described it means that the reactor core MUST be in the center of my interior in order to have a combat effective ship...

My idea... make it so the box is adjustable not in size necessarily but in position. it must be in the max ship dimensions etc etc but I should be able to place a reactor (be it power or otherwise) at the edge of my interior and move the box to match the interior of my ship so long as the reactor itself is still in said "box" or circle or whatever. you mentioned that the area of effect radius shape would likely be adjustable in some way. <excellent idea . Furthermore... being forced to place my reactor in the center of my interior is not only restrictive, and unrealistic (generally building a reactor close to high traffic areas is a terrible idea) but mechanically speaking it breaks the whole point of implementing armor hp and ship hp into the game and making it so shooting a core doesn't kill a ship.... the reactor is the new ship core which is fine as far as I'm concerned but it should not have to be in a predictable location.

With my idea yes, you know my reactor is somewhere in my interior but you should have to find it not just shoot for the center of the hollow space you can see at a glance from build mode! I should be able to put a reactor anywhere in that area or reactors for that matter. I HATE the idea of rebuilding everything I've worked on for years and not working on new designs in favor of saving ones i love but I'll deal lol. But if there is no control on the location of these boxes it will break the game for me not just my blueprints.

possible implementation of this... the box must be so big/ reactor size yes? maybe be able to adjust the height width and length of this box and location again so long as the reactor is included and its inside the ship AND the selected area still takes the same amount of space prescribed to said reactor.... adjustable box dimensions was an add-on thought again to interior design restrictions in mind. what if i want a 1 deck ship? or its a tall thin ship? these should not be limited as b4 mentioned you will wind up forcing medium to large ships to be extremely bulky and thus actually encourage death cubes instead of stopping them. Also b4 mentioned cube ships are rare most people care about what their ships/ stations look like as half the game is building the things you use and the #1 reason I love it so much. I've brought many of my friends to this game and the main appeal is that you can build practically anything you can imagine if your willing to put in the time.

Sorry if this post is a long read but i put a lot of thought into it. Thank you for reading.

 

[Valiant70]

I have an idea!/ concern. I LOVE building interior in my ships and pride myself in building full interior ships that are also feared in pvp it takes alot longer to design but its worth it and i enjoy the challenge. That being said I am concerned that the "box" will severely limit interior design. I like that I'll be able to build a functioning reactor core but as described it means that the reactor core MUST be in the center of my interior in order to have a combat effective ship...

My idea... make it so the box is adjustable not in size necessarily but in position. it must be in the max ship dimensions etc etc but I should be able to place a reactor (be it power or otherwise) at the edge of my interior and move the box to match the interior of my ship so long as the reactor itself is still in said "box" or circle or whatever. you mentioned that the area of effect radius shape would likely be adjustable in some way. <excellent idea . Furthermore... being forced to place my reactor in the center of my interior is not only restrictive, and unrealistic (generally building a reactor close to high traffic areas is a terrible idea) but mechanically speaking it breaks the whole point of implementing armor hp and ship hp into the game and making it so shooting a core doesn't kill a ship.... the reactor is the new ship core which is fine as far as I'm concerned but it should not have to be in a predictable location.

With my idea yes, you know my reactor is somewhere in my interior but you should have to find it not just shoot for the center of the hollow space you can see at a glance from build mode! I should be able to put a reactor anywhere in that area or reactors for that matter. I HATE the idea of rebuilding everything I've worked on for years and not working on new designs in favor of saving ones i love but I'll deal lol. But if there is no control on the location of these boxes it will break the game for me not just my blueprints.

possible implementation of this... the box must be so big/ reactor size yes? maybe be able to adjust the height width and length of this box and location again so long as the reactor is included and its inside the ship AND the selected area still takes the same amount of space prescribed to said reactor.... adjustable box dimensions was an add-on thought again to interior design restrictions in mind. what if i want a 1 deck ship? or its a tall thin ship? these should not be limited as b4 mentioned you will wind up forcing medium to large ships to be extremely bulky and thus actually encourage death cubes instead of stopping them. Also b4 mentioned cube ships are rare most people care about what their ships/ stations look like as half the game is building the things you use and the #1 reason I love it so much. I've brought many of my friends to this game and the main appeal is that you can build practically anything you can imagine if your willing to put in the time.

Sorry if this post is a long read but i put a lot of thought into it. Thank you for reading.

The reactor may not need to be as large as you think. I really want to see a working build of this.

 

[entarlas]

The reactor may not need to be as large as you think. I really want to see a working build of this.

I hope your right, but going off of the dev post one of the main points of this it to basically force interiors as an advantage to building. If this is the case i'd say they will take a decent amount of space. But like I stated this could work as long as they don't force a perma box on our builds regardless of its size. Also they stated at one point that they are considering doing this for all critical systems not just power so now multiple boxes to contend with possibly even if small/ medium in size they will add up especially on a large ship. It would be ideal if you could tailor these to the interior dimensions/ location of interior rooms of your build.

 

[Jppaladin]

I am really liking what i see and the direction this is going, and have a few things to add based on what iv read here.

1. Overhauling the "power system" would take the game to the next level, however I agree with what someone else said in that by altering the exciting block from power regeneration and power capacity to power generation and heat distribution you could allow the "older" or "basic" ships to still operate. Then by adding in the "newer" or "advanced" core system into the game, which is smaller and more effective/efficient, new and retrofitted ship would be more superior. Basically make a well engineered ship you could have a ship just as powerful and a death cube but at half the size and cost, but only if you wanted to invest the time. This would have multiple effects, for example it would allow for existing assets to be used until they could be replaced and allow for a new players to jump in and play without having to learn so much to start out (remember Keep It Simple Stupid....lol)

2. A System Core block would allow for multiple levels of immersion, such as individual systems could be targeted and ships could be disabled without being "mostly" destroyed. This could be similar to the current Scanner / Radar Jammer / Cloaker system works, based on how many scanner blocks you have effects if you penetrate cloaking and radar jammer and what system you can see on scanned ships. The change would add the need for an effective scout ship or a command/sensor ship within a attack fleet. This ship would be a valuable target to destroy in a fleet battle. Again targeting the one or all "reactors" could only shut down weapons or shields or engine depending on how the ship was built. And for RP purposes it makes it easier to capture and sell enemy ships (Pirate: "send 'er a prize crew").

3. With the addition of an NPC crew system (depending on the level of complexity/detail) a "System Core" could be linked to a generic "work station" block and when a NPC is assigned to it they would add a bonus (less power used, any tertiary weapon system effect, more heat bleed off, better scanners, bonus to shields etc...) NPC's could have one bonus "skill" when hired and may or may not increase with time or "happiness".

4. The ability to scan and target specific areas / systems could be based on the data that is used in the advanced build mode, basically a view filter, systems can be toggled on and off. Turn off Armor, Hull, Interior hull and Decorative blocks and you now have a visual of all systems, Also add a colored overlay for system and Heat boundary ( two shades of the same color per type of system) Maybe all of this is available in Advanced Build Mode or only some is and the rest is only available in a shipyard.

and as a side note i would like to see a option when in flight mode to dump cargo blocks and have it added to NPC's. this could be a cool like RP thing when chasing down that rich fat trader ship and he doesn't want to fight.....instant score.....or maybe you can dump while running from pirates to gain speed and to distract them. Although you may be in debt to a crime lord and have bounty hunters searching the galaxy for you.....remember Han shot first!


All of this would help to increase the detail and quality of play and also ship build style. Love this game and the potential it has, some one mentioned minecraft mods, look what that game and its community accomplished since its release.

These are just my opinions and the ramblings of a mad spacer, take them for what they are and feel free to bash at will.

 

[Valiant70]

I hope your right, but going off of the dev post one of the main points of this it to basicly force interiors as an advantage to building. If this is the case i'd say they will take a decent ammount of space. But like I stated this could work as long as they don't force a perma box on our builds reguardles of its size. Also they stated at one point that they are considering doing this for all critical systems not just power so now multipal boxes to contend with possibly even if small/ medium in size they will add up especially on a large ship. It would be ideal if you could taylor these to the interior dimentions/ location of interior rooms of your build.

This just means your systems will be small machines surrounded by space you can leave empty or use for interior. There is no forcing interiors. If it is not done for all systems, some parts of your ships may still be block-crammed.

 

[DeepspaceMechanic]

FOR ALL IN NEED OF A FEW COMFORTING IDEAS:

More precisely, this goes for those like me who limit their gameplay to single-player building and sharing on the docks... If anything described so far will actually be implemented one day, and you feel bad about saying "goodbye!" to your current StarMade creations, you just have to keep a separate copy of the last game version before this potential power system update.

You will be able to retain that copy for many years, and if you will choose to continue making new ships and stations with the old system, you will still be able to share them too: just upload them with the note "Classic power system" and those who will be interested to check them out will know what to use to make them appear on their screens.

Nothing's over, no creative achievements will get lost, and no past engineering efforts will become useless. - I'm sure the future holds only fun building challenges / new creative possibilities in the realm of StarMade

 

[entarlas]

This just means your systems will be small machines surrounded by space you can leave empty or use for interior. There is no forcing interiors. If it is not done for all systems, some parts of your ships may still be block-crammed.

were getting way off topic to my original post at this point lol my main concern was restrictions to creativity on interiors to those that already use them when if done correctly this could in fact be the other way around. And second but no less important was the notion of regressing to the days of easily coring a ship and destroying it when otherwise it should be at least a challenge to bring down. It may or may not end up being an issue but if its not mentioned here the devs may not think of it and its more likely it will become a problem. I just hope they read what good ideas have been posted thus far and take heed the warnings as well.

 

[Valiant70]

were getting way off topic to my original post at this point lol my main concern was restrictions to creativity on interiors to those that already use them when if done correctly this could in fact be the other way around. And second but no less important was the notion of regressing to the days of easily coring a ship and destroying it when otherwise it should be at least a challenge to bring down. It may or may not end up being an issue but if its not mentioned here the devs may not think of it and its more likely it will become a problem. I just hope they read what good ideas have been posted thus far and take heed the warnings as well.

If armor is sufficiently reworked, we won't regress to core drilling. Mentions were made previously of reworking armor, so they've probably already thought of that.

 

[Groovrider]

I suspect the drawing the Devs gave us are not to scale.

 

[Ithirahad]

I largely support this, however this is obviously designed with some other changes in mind, and until I know about those, I can't really give a final verdict. I can see, however, that it addresses fundamental issues that I ran into almost as soon as I started playing the game, so... thanks. \o/

Is not an awesome idea, apparently all ships shapes of less 50 meters are going to be useless when that appears

What? Why? Simple reactors (probably just a reactor core) will be sufficient for tiny ships. With the weapon changes and stuff, they might actually become MORE powerful.

 

[JinM]

Chap. 1: Why I like the propossed mechanic argumented via looking at the bigger picture
I like the propossed new reactor mechanics, and you should do it. Don't hesitate.

I think you guys in the devs don't keep in mind, what your bigger picture of the game is. What I basically want to point out is, that you simply can't merge creative building and pvp efficiency focused building into one game, and having booth parts in a perfect state. From what I feel is, that you want to have booth. But you can aim for a higher target and achieve this one perfectly no matter if the other two lower targets are accomplished perfectly. What all the discussions atm. are missing out is, what you (and we maybe too) actually want in the end: The from each other benefitting gamemechanics of a complex sandbox game that gives you a sense of an alive world when they interact with each other.

In Minecraft placing water can have one thousand side effects: Grass popps, sheep run from it, squids spawn in it, lava becomes stone or obsidian, rails get destroied, aso. And that's where the hearth of a sandbox game should be: Giving a sense of a living world via many different gamemechanics.

Not the ability to build for fights or creativity, but the stories and actuall actions that happen when you fight or visit a trade station and talk to an NPC - Or even if you ask a pet dog to bring you that stick you just threw. The exictement when you dogfight with your small fighter around a big flagship and try to place your bombs onto its weak spots. Just don't be so focused onto the two "we must do it right for creative and pvp oriented building" argumentation lines, bear in mind what the picture of the game at the end is.

With the propossed system, you are going to make a huge step forward to this direction. Reactors could be made visible via scans and directly targetted, boarded ships have weak inside walls as long as you don't sacrifice stronger but heavier hull types. AI can all of a sudden decide what to target on a player vessel. You get so much more space to build creative because of the chamber and outer ship borders.

Chap. 2: Let me leave make a suggestion for the weapons to further expand your bigger picture about how the game could look at the end:

So one gamemechanic in Starmade I really love are turrets: No other sandbox game lets me build my own ones. This is a huge asset of Starmade and make the game unique. You can improve this one:

Divide Weapon-Modules into Ammunition-Generators and Barrel-Modules. So you have missile ammunition, cannon ammunition, missile-cannon ammuntion if they are linked to the same ammunition computer.

Atm, if I fire a turret, the turret has to be equally big the weapon damage. But if I can place the ammunition modules on the base of the ship and only have to place the barrels onto a turret, I suddenly have the ability to have strong but small turrets.

How to distribute the ammunition from the base ship? I have several propossals:
1 # Via logic linking to the rail dockers if you want the ammunition group be used from a turret, or link the ammunition group to the barrels placed on the same entity.
2 # A second distribution idea would be, to make all the ammunition groups, that are not linked to barrels on the base ship, available for all turrets on the ship. The size of the barrels compared to other barrels on other entities decides, how much ammunition you drain and what damage this turret does.
3 # (My favourite) Or you even work with a weapon computer block, where you input what the raw damage number for the barrels shall be, and if the damage is too high compared to the available ammunition points it just doesn't fire or even overheats. (haha the overheat effect you guys seem to like =) )

 

[Snowtiger256]

I suspect the drawing the Devs gave us are not to scale.

Yeah, its more of a "here let us show you what we're thinking of" diagram rather than an accurate depiction on the matter...

 

[Zackey_TNT]

With the crew and quarters system "I" would design, that would be SERIOUSLY sub-optimal, and probably not even possible (minimum required space blocks per crewman).

My point was not the minimum requirements, but rather, the fact that all players outside of roleplay will always do the minimum possible to get the maximum effect. At the end of the day, even a 15x15x15 room is still not very large when compared to the ever growing size of main line faction ships. My smallest ship is 100K blocks, in which I can fit that room.

Crews will do nothing to force interior design on Meta players, because they will just build the minimum allowed, or dock something to the ship with a bunch of box rooms on it.