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How we could warheads right now with the current game's possibilities:
My thought on warheads is, that they allready could be used right now with some raised server side settings. But only for a certain size of ships and smaller.
Just assume a ship can carry 5 warheads. They are 1x1x7m. So ships of a maximum of 1500blocks are fine for this battle setting, because a ship of 1500blocks really feels, if it uses 50 blocks (7x5 blocks =35 plus 15 blocks tube and containment) just for warheads.
And what damage should do one of them? Well a ship of 1500 blocks has a really small size, not longer than 25m. Those ships are very agile and can target stuff very fast. Why not make the warhead damage to a radius of 10m? So 2 hits of warheads would totally destroy your ship. But with ships this size, dont forget that they can easily outmaneuver and also target those warheads. And if a ship of this size manages to outmaneuver those, and didn't waste space for warheads themself, they have a huge system advantage of the opponent that used and wasted they warheads.
Above this ship size, warheads are again shit, because they would only complicate ship building with an additional anti warhead turret clutter. Even if you spam warheads, there are enough possibilities to add defences against them. But spamming warheads is only possible with bigger ship sizes as they cant carry only so much.
Suggestion for Gamemechanic changes (just theorycrafting and nothing practical or readworthy
):
Warheads are a cool thing, you guys are just not clever enough to think how they could work:
First of all a 1x1x7m long miniship might be a well realistic size for the real world, but in Starmade, given we assume a buffed warhead damage, this small size is a little too beneficial.
Warheads should do 30 m (50m is too much in the current overall size of the game) radius damage, but they also should limit ships that carry them.
First of all you need a special "warhead" AI setting, that does actually what a warhead is supposed to do.
Secondly, and here comes the special, you need to balance them. Or not! Why balance warheads, this is a sandbox. But i run into walls inside of heads from pvpers when I say that.
Anyway, to balance warheads a little bit I would say:
-They should take up 2x2x10m of space, not 1x1x7m.
-They should be indicatable via the AI warhead setting and maybe behave slightly different, maybe not run in a straight line but try to make some evasive maneuvers when approaching a target.
-With that AI flag there could be turrets that target those warheads.
-They should be able to travel a long way, but should be slower than normal missiles, normal ship speed is totally fine.
-They should add exponential mass to a ship, so a ship of 60m size, that would get devasted from one warhead, should also only be able to carry 5 of those, and a ship of 20m size upwards should be able to carry one warhead.
-Small ships should be able to easily avoid warheads (everything below 80 length).
-But why make your day hard? If we are able to have a "warhead" flag on our docked entity, why not just chain down some variables to the mothership, that limit a number of max docked warheads to a certain ship size. (Oh and all of a sudden you would like to have bigger mothership sizes and stuff like docked hull could be nerfed, because all the docked entities would not raise your mothership size that's used for the warhead limitations).
But for all of this, and to make warheads feel balanced one thing is indispensable:
We need to assume a different battle setting in Starmade. Battles often happen around 1vs1 or at maximum 5vs5. In this scenario buffed warheads are totally overpowered. But what happens, if we have a bigger number of participating ships? Exactly, if a warhead takes up some space in a ship, they suddenly would have an impact on the ships perfomance, as you took away a huge space for a one time bullet. And one time bullets get less and less effective, the bigger and longer fights get.
I don't want to proof, that warheads will ever be totally balanced. I wanted to proof, that there are ways to balance them. A nice theory, but too hard too implement for a too low benefit, and a setting of battles we don't have because of the playercount.
If we had battles with a size bigger than 5v5 buffed warheads might be totally fine.
[doublepost=1492435540,1492434564][/doublepost]
After all the guys who play this game for rp purposes have a legit point too. They want to feel the immersion of nukes without having to use 90% of their space for system blocks, what the typical rp builder allready never does. A rp builder only uses like 50% or less of his space for systems in some cases, and often enough those systems cant even do a 5 block radius hole into an enemy ship. Ofcourse they want some substitution for that problem.
My thought on warheads is, that they allready could be used right now with some raised server side settings. But only for a certain size of ships and smaller.
Just assume a ship can carry 5 warheads. They are 1x1x7m. So ships of a maximum of 1500blocks are fine for this battle setting, because a ship of 1500blocks really feels, if it uses 50 blocks (7x5 blocks =35 plus 15 blocks tube and containment) just for warheads.
And what damage should do one of them? Well a ship of 1500 blocks has a really small size, not longer than 25m. Those ships are very agile and can target stuff very fast. Why not make the warhead damage to a radius of 10m? So 2 hits of warheads would totally destroy your ship. But with ships this size, dont forget that they can easily outmaneuver and also target those warheads. And if a ship of this size manages to outmaneuver those, and didn't waste space for warheads themself, they have a huge system advantage of the opponent that used and wasted they warheads.
Above this ship size, warheads are again shit, because they would only complicate ship building with an additional anti warhead turret clutter. Even if you spam warheads, there are enough possibilities to add defences against them. But spamming warheads is only possible with bigger ship sizes as they cant carry only so much.
Suggestion for Gamemechanic changes (just theorycrafting and nothing practical or readworthy
):Warheads are a cool thing, you guys are just not clever enough to think how they could work:
First of all a 1x1x7m long miniship might be a well realistic size for the real world, but in Starmade, given we assume a buffed warhead damage, this small size is a little too beneficial.
Warheads should do 30 m (50m is too much in the current overall size of the game) radius damage, but they also should limit ships that carry them.
First of all you need a special "warhead" AI setting, that does actually what a warhead is supposed to do.
Secondly, and here comes the special, you need to balance them. Or not! Why balance warheads, this is a sandbox. But i run into walls inside of heads from pvpers when I say that.
Anyway, to balance warheads a little bit I would say:
-They should take up 2x2x10m of space, not 1x1x7m.
-They should be indicatable via the AI warhead setting and maybe behave slightly different, maybe not run in a straight line but try to make some evasive maneuvers when approaching a target.
-With that AI flag there could be turrets that target those warheads.
-They should be able to travel a long way, but should be slower than normal missiles, normal ship speed is totally fine.
-They should add exponential mass to a ship, so a ship of 60m size, that would get devasted from one warhead, should also only be able to carry 5 of those, and a ship of 20m size upwards should be able to carry one warhead.
-Small ships should be able to easily avoid warheads (everything below 80 length).
-But why make your day hard? If we are able to have a "warhead" flag on our docked entity, why not just chain down some variables to the mothership, that limit a number of max docked warheads to a certain ship size. (Oh and all of a sudden you would like to have bigger mothership sizes and stuff like docked hull could be nerfed, because all the docked entities would not raise your mothership size that's used for the warhead limitations).
But for all of this, and to make warheads feel balanced one thing is indispensable:
We need to assume a different battle setting in Starmade. Battles often happen around 1vs1 or at maximum 5vs5. In this scenario buffed warheads are totally overpowered. But what happens, if we have a bigger number of participating ships? Exactly, if a warhead takes up some space in a ship, they suddenly would have an impact on the ships perfomance, as you took away a huge space for a one time bullet. And one time bullets get less and less effective, the bigger and longer fights get.
I don't want to proof, that warheads will ever be totally balanced. I wanted to proof, that there are ways to balance them. A nice theory, but too hard too implement for a too low benefit, and a setting of battles we don't have because of the playercount.
If we had battles with a size bigger than 5v5 buffed warheads might be totally fine.
[doublepost=1492435540,1492434564][/doublepost]
I understand this statement from a pvpers point of view. But this is a sandbox game about creativitiy besides being a pvp game. It's somewhat paradox to tell a man to stop dreaming inside a game about creativity, isn't it? =)
After all the guys who play this game for rp purposes have a legit point too. They want to feel the immersion of nukes without having to use 90% of their space for system blocks, what the typical rp builder allready never does. A rp builder only uses like 50% or less of his space for systems in some cases, and often enough those systems cant even do a 5 block radius hole into an enemy ship. Ofcourse they want some substitution for that problem.
