Power System Overhaul Proposal

[The Judge]

I kinda stand with Zyrr and Lecic on the issue (With much less Shitposting however), perhaps a minor balance to the Power currently? Or a RP/PvP tag for servers on the browser? The communites related to RP and PvP are vastly different, trying to merge the two won't work at all.

 

[Valiant70]

So why was fuel discarded as an idea? Curious as to why the simplest solution was overlooked.

Everyone is SOOOOO SCARED that it will turn Starmade into a game of micromanagement.

 

[ChibiMushi]

All systems are in the rear bit that looks like a docked ship.
Edit: Also, this is just an example, and not a specific one. My only point is that the proposed change by schine is restrictive, and potentially exclusive to that sort of build, and I personally don't believe it needs to be. Again, my concern is with restriction of creativity/choice and as I said, I prefer the proposed system over the current one, I just believe that there are better alternatives as well.

I think that is a bit close minded as it does count areas outside of the ship as essentially power blocks now. If you put a powerful reactor on the nose, that whole neck cube area(inside and outside of the ship) would be considered generating power. It may even generate more power and take up less system space than the current power system that is restricted by number of blocks used. Until we see actual outputs, no one can say. Of course it will have limits, but I am inclined to believe it will be so much less limiting vs the current system, that all ships designs used in game now will still be just as effective in running their current level of systems.

I believe this new power model will ONLY open up more designs and make the current ones more impactful, on scale with equivalently sized doom cube designs. I feel ALL ships will only find that their power takes less blocks and they'll only have extra empty space. Doom cubes included.


My only concern as of now is, what is the impact of using system blocks in interior designs within the heat blocks. Like lets say, upside down thrusters lining the halls. Does this negatively effect the reactor, those thrusters, or both?

 

[Raiben]

I would hope that logic and cargo wouldn't be counted as "cargo."

No, because that just changes the mechanics around without changing the meta. The point of the heat areas is to exclude systems from an area, moving Starmade away from a meta that is "stuff everything with blocks"

It's not. The point is to stop the block-filling meta.

See Valiant70's post below:


There are two concerns I have about this system: One is how this system will handle non-boxy hulls. The other is the fact that I like using system blocks in my room decorations, I don't want those blocks to blow up and/or disable my reactors.

I get that it's to fix the block filling meta, I get that 100%. The question is how to fix it, for instance does it make more sense to use the power system to fix that, or the crew system. Personally I think using crew to promote interior building etc, would be a better choice. Make it so that the more space your crew get for living quarters etc makes them more effective or something. To me this is like trying to drive a nail into a wood plank with a baseball bat, sure you can do it, but it's not necessarily the best tool for the job.

 

[Valiant70]

The communites related to RP and PvP are vastly different, trying to merge the two won't work at all.

Agreed, but that doesn't mean a ship designed for one must not work in the other.

 

[The Judge]

Agreed, but that doesn't mean a ship designed for one must not work in the other.

Well, the PvP community (Or specifically FCM and Vaygr) are completely set on maximising the efficiency of their vessels, no matter the appearance. (See Vaygr's Centipede Cruiser)

 

[Comr4de]

I posted five minutes ago how the fuck are there already six more posts

 

[Neon_42]

The more I read about this the more I think it is a bad idea. There are so many issues that the game currently has that need to be fixed and features that need to be advanced. We're talking about breaking probably the most fundamental mechanic in the game. This will require extensive testing and probably many new bugs will be introduced. I don't think the solution proposed is a good one yet. But one that can be simplified using features from both the current and proposed systems.

On Forced design choices:

Filling your ships with systems is a bit of a problem one that the "Heat boxes" might fix. But this forces players to make other design choices. There are zero ways to make every ship do everything that a player wants. There must be trade offs no matter what.

On Lack of complexity:

I think this is ridiculous. This game is not accessible by any means and takes hours to enjoy. Do not add more complexity. The player base is too thin as it is. Making it more complex makes it harder to enjoy and harder to learn. I don't see it as tedious to make big ships because the build tools are so well developed. If you were to do this I made a post earlier about how it might be made simple and easy to understand.

On Too many blocks involved:

This can be fixed by making blocks do more per block and cost more per block. For example if you wanted a 100 dps cannon. Currently that costs 10 blocks doing 10 damage per block at a cost of 100 energy per second for 1000 energy per second. To reduce the number of blocks make cannons do 20 damage and cost 200 energy per second. That way you only need 5 instead of 10. The same can go for shields, and thrusters.

Power is almost the same, but we do need a way of making it less efficient, because it is always possible to just add more power. The heat boxes are a good idea, or maybe just require a certain amount of empty space for( insert sci-fi reason here : wireless power transmission, heat boxes, radiation,...) That way a ship will automatically be filled with fewer system blocks. That and change the scaling factors on power.

On Focused on regen:

I seriously don't understand this one. It is a realistic solution to the problem. your needs are x and you must supply y to meet those needs. It makes sense even in the real world. I don't understand why AI would have a problem using this or why a new system would be better.

Also this discussion has put a hold on my starmade time. I don't want to invest any more time into this game until my creations will have purpose.

 

[Valiant70]

I get that it's to fix the block filling meta, I get that 100%. The question is how to fix it, for instance does it make more sense to use the power system to fix that, or the crew system. Personally I think using crew to promote interior building etc, would be a better choice. Make it so that the more space your crew get for living quarters etc makes them more effective or something. To me this is like trying to drive a nail into a wood plank with a baseball bat, sure you can do it, but it's not necessarily the best tool for the job.

The thing that crew will not do is make ship internals less tedious. Moving smaller pieces of machinery around to accommodate bounding boxes is less tedious than squashing everything into a solid, nigh-incomprehensible mass. I find the idea of the new system more appealing, and think it would be more fun to build and operate ships within it than the current system.

 

[Raiben]

I think that is a bit close minded as it does count areas outside of the ship as essentially power blocks now. If you put a powerful reactor on the nose, that whole neck cube area(inside and outside of the ship) would be considered generating power. It may even generate more power and take up less system space than the current power system that is restricted by number of blocks used. Until we see actual outputs, no one can say. Of course it will have limits, but I am inclined to believe it will be so much less limiting vs the current system, that all ships designs used in game now will still be just as effective in running their current level of systems.

I believe this new power model will ONLY open up more designs and make the current ones more impactful, on scale with equivalently sized doom cube designs. I feel ALL ships will only find that their power takes less blocks and they'll only have extra empty space. Doom cubes included.


My only concern as of now is, what is the impact of using system blocks in interior designs within the heat blocks. Like lets say, upside down thrusters lining the halls. Does this negatively effect the reactor, those thrusters, or both?

Again, I'm not necessarily talking about only this ship, I'm speaking about ships like this. Again, my point is that the system is restrictive in a way that it doesn't have to be, and using the crew system to combat block filling meta, in my opinion, would be a better option than using the power system.

 

[SparkyInAus]

No, it will be less viable. There's 1, maybe 2 possible places to fit power into a shape like that with the heat system, and after that there's basically nowhere left to put the systems.

It has been stated a number of time that the proposed overhaul won't be limited to power and is intended to significantly reduce the total amount of systems required. In theory the ship shown by Raiben may not even require more than a power core to run all it's systems.

I think by now most people can see that your voluntary ignorance about this being a discussion on an idea is because it's a sign that the developers are looking for ways to do away with min-maxing as much as possible.

As I have detailed in a previous post, this is absolutely NOT 'necessary'. ALL the reasons given for this change are either not problems at all or easily dealt with using much simpler means than destroying everything we've built and learned so far. This will indeed however cast a chill on a lot of player's enthusiasm.

I have not played Starmade for the last two months, ever since it became clear that a server reset was 'immanent'. Now that I know that all built ships and any knowledge gained is going to be a complete waste of time, I have absolutely zero desire to play the game right now. When they do their wholesale abandonment of everything we've tweaked for the last four years and essentially created a completely new build system that will itself also need another four years of balancing just to get back to where we are now, maybe, maybe, I'll give it a look.

Starmade is dead. Long live Starmade?

This game is still in alpha, you need to accept that there are still lots more changes to go and you're going to have to completely rebuild ships until the game reached beta at least. So stop holding on to what it is/was.

I'm actually really excited that the Schine is prepared to consider overhauls as complete as this and I like this particular idea. It will certainly make ship building more interesting than current building methods, a generator room may now actually be the ships power generation. What about doing something similar with the weapon systems?

 

[Gasboy]

I can't find the post now, but it was stated that the penalties are severe enough that empty space is more efficient.

Regardless of the purpose of a ship, removing 25% of its shield capacity makes it less capable. The only reason this is currently LESS of an issue (it is still an issue) against pirates is that the pirate AI is woefully insufficient to pose any real threat to players who have a clue what they are doing.

That is illogical. Regardless of a ship's purpose, more function is always better.

Be careful not to equivocate a yacht with an RP warship. I'm not asking for enough room to build a yacht with a zen garden and a party deck. I'm asking for room to stuff in a few bunks, a cramped mess hall, and the basics that real life warships have. Currently, adding a few bunks and a mess hall results in an objectively worse ship no matter how you do it. The best you can do is minimize the nerf to your systems.

The only reason to miniaturize systems is to make room for things other than systems. However, if nothing else changes, you will still see ships crammed with systems. The systems will just be more powerful.

According to the OP, only reactor chambers need conduits, and thus only reactor chambers would have efficiency problems. It seems unlikely that a ship of that size will need chambers, however. It is a very light ship.

Okay, more function is better. So why should the person who has built more function into his ship be inferior to the person who decided to build more pretty into their ship? As I stated earlier, when the full system plus the crew come in, then RP and PvP will become the same, essentially.

The reactor chambers will be less effective if they are built at the "corners" or far ends of a ship, that was hinted at in follow up posts by the devs. And seen partly in the images in the original post. And people have suggested that in order to defeat a "chandelier ship meta", making it so you have to run conduits here and there will make putting the power in the back and everything in the front less efficient.

As for adding bunks and messhalls, yeah, that's the whole point, the ship that fills everything is objectively better.

You can't fix that with a block system.

And by forcing people to build a certain way is defeating Schine's intended purpose of not forcing people to build a certain way.

I'm not arguing that changing how power works is a bad thing, just that the proposed system is not different from the current system, except some numbers are higher. Which could be done right now by any server admin or player, if they wanted to fiddle and figure out what number to change to get more power out of the power blocks. Schine could do it right now, easy peasy, and no one would have to gut their ships and redesign it.

Basically, you are losing more than you gain with the system. It's basically the same thing, but you have to change everything on your ship.

For a change this massive, there needs to be a purpose other than changing power for heat. A purpose other than forcing people to have some spaces in their ships. A purpose other than changing the power-cross-brick-ship meta for the "chandelier ship" method.

 

[Valiant70]

Filling your ships with systems is a bit of a problem one that the "Heat boxes" might fix. But this forces players to make other design choices. There are zero ways to make every ship do everything that a player wants. There must be trade offs no matter what.

Quite right. The hope is to make the required design choices more pleasant and less frustrating.

On Lack of complexity:

I think this is ridiculous. This game is not accessible by any means and takes hours to enjoy. Do not add more complexity. The player base is too thin as it is. Making it more complex makes it harder to enjoy and harder to learn. I don't see it as tedious to make big ships because the build tools are so well developed. If you were to do this I made a post earlier about how it might be made simple and easy to understand.

I believe this is referring to the very-high-end, very-end-game aspects of starmade. Ships composed of millions of blocks are underwhelmingly complex for their size and are full of large masses of the same kind of blocks, which is boring. Small ships should remain just as simple as they are now. I believe that was specifically stated in the OP.

On Too many blocks involved:

This can be fixed by making blocks do more per block and cost more per block. For example if you wanted a 100 dps cannon. Currently that costs 10 blocks doing 10 damage per block at a cost of 100 energy per second for 1000 energy per second. To reduce the number of blocks make cannons do 20 damage and cost 200 energy per second. That way you only need 5 instead of 10. The same can go for shields, and thrusters.

Power is almost the same, but we do need a way of making it less efficient, because it is always possible to just add more power. The heat boxes are a good idea, or maybe just require a certain amount of empty space for( insert sci-fi reason here : wireless power transmission, heat boxes, radiation,...) That way a ship will automatically be filled with fewer system blocks. That and change the scaling factors on power.

We still need a method to combat block stuffing, and heat boxes should do the trick.

On Focused on regen:

I seriously don't understand this one. It is a realistic solution to the problem. your needs are x and you must supply y to meet those needs. It makes sense even in the real world. I don't understand why AI would have a problem using this or why a new system would be better.

You're right to some degree. This could have been worded better. The issue is that most ships avoid using power capacitors as much as they can, meaning there's a whole system that shipwrights just hate.

 

[Raiben]

I don't have much more time tonight, however I'll leave what I have to say at this: I think miniaturization of systems is a good idea for the most part. If what you want is block count to go down, then heat exclusion zones will just be packed with the interior block, so same block count. I understand that the block filling meta is a potential problem, however I think there are better ways to tackle the problem, IE crew, as opposed to power etc. The proposed power system replaces the X-Y-Z power mini-game with a new one, and doesn't seem to increase creativity or options for the player, and switching to "heat" as opposed to "power" is relabeling the mechanic with no appreciable difference. In my first post I outlined what I believe to be a potentially better system to allow for more creativity and player control, and I stand by it.

I do prefer the schine proposed overhaul over the current power system, I just believe that there are better options, so for those wondering, no I'm not against the overhaul, I just think there is a better option beyond that.

 

[Criss]

So why was fuel discarded as an idea? Curious as to why the simplest solution was overlooked.

Fueling every ship in every fleet for the entire game would be tedious. Unless the process is inherently automatic, in which case we would be adding what is sort of already present. Power regen could just be called automatic fuel generation but the name doesn't change the mechanic.

 

[DukeofRealms]

This isn't Schine's official statement, but my personal opinion.

I think this is ridiculous. This game is not accessible by any means and takes hours to enjoy. Do not add more complexity. The player base is too thin as it is. Making it more complex makes it harder to enjoy and harder to learn. I don't see it as tedious to make big ships because the build tools are so well developed. If you were to do this I made a post earlier about how it might be made simple and easy to understand.

This is a misconception. As others have mentioned here, we should be aiming to simplify early game, avoid complexity that provides no strategy or "fun" factor to it, and make sure that there's a wealth of variety in late game to make building maxed PVP ships incredibly hard to master. I'm not alluding to the fact that I think this proposal would achieve that. In fact, I have no opinion on any of the suggestions and criticisms made here.

The issue with thinking an entire game set needs to be simple is that it's ignoring valuable late-game mastery. I personally think that ship design should get considerably harder to achieve mediocrity the larger the ship is, but at the same time, ensuring that the mastery of all ship types is equally as hard.

It's not one or the other, development should be aiming to achieve a system that's easy to get into for beginners, but takes time and skill to build better and bigger. I don't think someone should be able to master shipbuilding in a small amount of time, equally, I don't think it should take a new player very long to create an ok small craft. I don't think we should sacrifice one playstyle for the other, I don't think anyone at Schine thinks that.

 

[Top 4ce]

I'm too leaning on the side of changing what we have but not included this heat boundary.

I love Raiben idea of a systems computer, and using it to a similar effect as weapons. It's familiar.

To balance "fill everything" crew makes more sense.

And finally, the heat mechanic could be the limiting mechanic where power of all blocks are increased, including power, and having heat management the limiting factor. Where the more something needs power, the more heat it generates, the more is needed to deal with the heat. The trick is how is heat managed.

How about the surface area of a ship?

The larger the ship, the larger the area but you'll have a lot more volume. If you fill the volume with power hungry systems, and use a lot at once, you create a lot heat into your ship. However the 'drain' of the is limited to the surface area of your ship. Sure you can make large sails to dump the heat, but you decrease maneuverability and increase your profile. Added that with a "signature" mechanic where the size of youre ship dictates how far away is spotted, you have an other balancing factor.

All this without heat areas and FTD "engine" building.

 

[DukeofRealms]

The more I read about this the more I think it is a bad idea. There are so many issues that the game currently has that need to be fixed and features that need to be advanced. We're talking about breaking probably the most fundamental mechanic in the game. This will require extensive testing and probably many new bugs will be introduced. I don't think the solution proposed is a good one yet. But one that can be simplified using features from both the current and proposed systems.

This is not an issue either, this is a proposal that's sitting here for feedback. It doesn't mean we're working on it now, we're actually currently working on features that aren't related to this proposal at the moment. What a proposal that changes something massive like this needs is time, and that's what we're giving it.

 

[Criss]

Personal opinion time!

I don't agree with heat boundaries either. It is a spatial / placement restriction and I fear it will be difficult to control exploits or meta designs. The goal is to allow any ship shape to be viable. I think there are better solutions. I will present some ideas to the others soon.

 

[SparkyInAus]

And by forcing people to build a certain way is defeating Schine's intended purpose of not forcing people to build a certain way.

I'm not arguing that changing how power works is a bad thing, just that the proposed system is not different from the current system, except some numbers are higher. Which could be done right now by any server admin or player, if they wanted to fiddle and figure out what number to change to get more power out of the power blocks. Schine could do it right now, easy peasy, and no one would have to gut their ships and redesign it.

This proposal won't necessarily force people to build in a set way anymore than the current system does. For all we can speculate the system, if implemented, may allow for single block thick discs of core and coolant chambers. Having to deal with a heat boundary adds needed complexity to large ships, I'd just like there to be ways to shape the boundary so you still have design options.
And people need to stop fixating on having to overhaul their existing ships, that shouldn't and likely won't be a consideration in regards to any development of the game.