How do you build?

[Tamren Shade]

I start with a concept, fighter, frigate, destroyer, carrier, etc, and make a short list of design requirements. I draw a lot of concept ideas from WW2 and WW1 naval history, my most recent ship is a light cruiser loosely inspired by accounts I've read of IJN ships in WW2 mounting excessive amounts of 20mm cannons to boost AA capabilities later in the war. Take that as a starting point, mix in some of the ideas that became popular once missiles started becoming useful, and then make that work in a game like Starmade.

I want it to have around 350K blocks toal, mount 6-8 75mm cannon light turrets (250 Cannon, 250 Cannon, 250 Punch), all the turrets need to be able to engage a target off the prow while simultaneously providing full 360 upper and lower covering fire, and a T/M Ratio of 1.2+ would be ideal.

The next step is putting some rough sketches into a notebook, jotting down rough dimensions, and getting the shape roughly pinned down. Recently, my turrets configuration is the number one determining factor of a ships shape.

Then I build a shell out of hull blocks, figure out the turret wells, and mount the primary turrets. Next I got through and plan out and mount the AMS grid, and start doing a rough layout of the interior decks. Then install the white armor plating over the dark grey hull, and then wedge everything.

Then I'll do a rough detail pass from prow to stern, installing windows, figuring out where the RCS thrusters will go, installing the USD, and any other large details. Sometimes here, setting the details is just a matter of glueing a display module to the hull and making a note of what I plan on putting there.

Part of this process is what I call an efficiency pass. I'll replace all the dark grey hull I used with pink hull, and then go around the exterior of the ship and replace all the visible pink with whatever armor I'll be using for the ship's outer hull. Once no pink is showing, I'll do another mass block replacement and change out all the pink hull for shield capacitors. When I've done this on older ships, I usually net about a 5% gain in internal block count to devote to systems.

This is usually where I switch from detailing to filling in systems, before I go any further I want to see what kind of performance and final mass numbers I'll be looking at when the ship is finished. I need to figure out any major design shifts here, and once I'm done the ship is incredibly fugly, but functionally complete.

After that, I go back into detailing mode and I'll make another 1-3 detailing passes from prow to stern. This is where I finalize all my exterior details, make any other medium to large changes I decide is necessary, add grey blocks here and there to represent maintenance and access points, and finally hit the Engine Pron on the stern and my usual BFG Pron on the bow .

The final step is to add whatever "unit markings" I feel best fit the ship. Currently yellow stripes are for fire support, red for recon/skirmishers, blue for autocannon-heavy, orange for civilian/mining ships. I also add a unit crest and ship crest here. All ships of the same class will have the same ship crest, but depending on variant they will be given different striping and unit crests.

The last phase, and the one I have the most difficulty with, is detailing the interior. It takes me a while, and I freely admit my exterior detailing is far superior to my interior detailing. I'm slowly getting better, but I have a hard time getting past a militaristic take on the 90's-Sterile Star Trek: TNG Sci-Fi look.

Oh yeah, and I'll post my biggest secret on ship building. The hidden backbone of my entire building style, without which I couldn't play this game! A large, temporary, bank of display blocks,usually 5 to 7 wide and 3 to 4 high around 10 blocks forward of the core and completely filled with to-do notes. As I'm building, and I get a cool idea, I'll make a note of it.

As I'm doing chores around the house, or at work, if I get a cool idea I'll make a note of it in my phone and transfer it my cheat sheet ASAP. As I either implement, or discard, the ideas I have listed on the display blocks, I erase them, and as they dwindle, it kind of serves as a very slow visual countdown to when the ship will be complete.

I also use my display-block-virtual-notebook (DBVN) to keep track of what weapon mixes I've installed, numbers and types of turrets, potential class and ship names that occur to me, and so on. It's also very useful to have those kinds of details in a DBVN when I return to a ship I set aside for a few months for whatever reason.

 

[Scypio]

I've got a question: Do people figure that it's better for larger ships to have a smaller number of bigger turrets or a bigger number of smaller turrets? Also, reasons please.

There is no better solution. Let's see a quick example :
Let's say your turret does X damage and you have the possibility to place 2 turrets on that part of the hull. So you can place 2 turrets or a turret twice it's size, both doing roughly 2X damages. I'll explain later why it's not really the case but for the sake of simplicity, let's assume that point for now.
Let's take the first case, when you have 2 turrets. If both hit your target, you deal 2X damages, if one miss, it'll be X damage and if both miss it'll be 0. Simple as it is but, just look at it more closely. In order to do 0 damage you need both turrets to miss their target, wich is something that will happen less if only one turret is build here. Simple, but quantity sometimes rhyme with quality.
However that is not entirely true, it would be too simple. Because any builder know well that a large number of turrets in the same building aera are much much much smaller in term of total weapons bloc than any big turret build in the same aera. Except if you mess up completely your build so if we want to take our example above the bigger turret could be around 2.5 or even 3X damage.

So yes, in conclusion there is no magic formula in building a ship, it's up to you to find the good balance for your ship between quantity and quality. Bigger turret mean more rough DPS but if you miss your shot or if the turret is shot down you'll feel much more the loss in dps than a small one but small turrets all over your ship mean smaller dps overall compared to the big turrets.

Starmade is a terrible game, it force you to always make choices when building your ship and you can't always follow the stronger choices because there is none in some cases.

 

[Croquelune]

But most of the time it is a lot more wilder.

Is it a plagia from Conquest Frontier Wars "Harvester" terran ship or it's pure coincidence ?

 

[Panpiper]

You should always try to focus on DPS, damage vs shields is a much more linear calc & they can become much more problematic to shoot through than a bunch of armor, which is weak as hell vs metaprojectiles & piercing effect.

In my opinion, following this advice is every bit as dangerous as focusing solely on damage per projectile. I see lots of people who put out decent amounts of DPS that winds up being easily soaked by a well armored ship, because none of the hits can actually break armor blocks. Well armored ships rely on people who make this mistake.

The trick is to do both. Any ship that has the power and weapon blocks to output decent shield downing DPS can EASILY configure those weapons to do armor block breaking damage. There is absolutely no reason to not do so. You do NOT do less DPS because you have concentrated the damage output into discrete amounts that can break armor.

Doing decent DPS is simply a matter of having plenty of available power to put into weapons and actually having the weapon blocks that use that power. Breaking armor is a matter of not dividing those weapon blocks into so many small weapons that none of them can crack an armor shell. Take however many weapon blocks you can power, and assemble them into weapons that with each shot can crack a shell, then go to town. The DPS for knocking down shields will be there.

So you figure the HMS Dreadnought approach of an all big guns set-up is the way to go then?

I actually have three classes of weapons on my ships. I have point defense turrets that are there for shooting down missiles. I will have a LOT of them. I have main offensive turrets that are designed to both output massive DPS 'and' crack armor with every shot, and I will also have a third class of turret which is designed to defeat drones and other typically AI flown craft. Those turrets are usually cannon/cannon that have a DPS of 20K with each projectile doing 2K per hit. That is NOT sufficient for main battle cannon which should do 4K IMO, but it is more than adequate for virtually any drone. Cannon/cannon is also too short ranged in my opinion for big guns on big ships.

The large offensive fire turrets will be configured to all be able to engage a single target if the ship is optimally aligned. The point defense turrets will be well spaced all around the ship but with a fairly heavy concentration of them able to fire forward (note 8 of them on the nose above for instance). The anti-drone turrets will be evenly spread around the ship for an even coverage everywhere. The pictured ship above for instance has 22 offensive turrets, 20 anti-drone turrets and 48 point defense turrets.

 

[Az14el]

In my opinion, following this advice is every bit as dangerous as focusing solely on damage per projectile. I see lots of people who put out decent amounts of DPS that winds up being easily soaked by a well armored ship, because none of the hits can actually break armor blocks. Well armored ships rely on people who make this mistake.

Which is literally why i just said DPP is not reliable, because you don't know the threshold of damage required to effectively penetrate any given ship from any given angle, knowing how much a single adv or standard or hull block takes is nice but ultimately not an answer for how to build your guns.

The more DPS you do the more damage you have to break down into powerful individual hits & the more of it that can be spent on Ion to threaten even larger ships, if you build all your outputs too small to penetrate a realistic amount of armor then you've just stumbled over the absolute fundamentals, that's all, it's not a final answer to dealing good reliable damage by any rate, and if you stop with "kills blocks good enough for its size" then fundamentals is about all that's been covered damage wise.

 

[kikaha]

Is it a plagia from Conquest Frontier Wars "Harvester" terran ship or it's pure coincidence ?

Nope, didn't even know the game. its a plagia of the pic i've included in my post.

 

[The_Owl]

I just build shapes.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So here it goes.

This is a visual (metaphorical) representation of how I get most of the inspiration for my builds...



The star represents all military, aviation, automotive, architectural, nautical, NASA, and sci-fi imagery in existence; gathered from movies, books, real life, video games, toys, past builds, your builds etc.

The black hole is my tendency to absorb and retain whatever I see and crush it into an amorphous blob of "space stuff". Omm Nom Nom!!!

The vertical particle jets emitting from the black hole are analogous to the specific aesthetics I choose to create and show the community. This also explains why, while most of my designs look alike, they tend to have a style that is found both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In short; The United Star Axis is "uniquely generic" by design.

I have other ideas which are limited by this game's current capabilities. As such, like a true singularity; a lot of what I take in never sees the light of day again. That may change after the power update is finalized.

Nope, didn't even know the game. its a plagia of the pic i've included in my post.

P.S. Yours looks better.

 

[Nickizzy]

I think I used that video for a school project once.

 

[Dalen]

Which build will be suitable for a beginner?

 

[jontyfreack]

1:1 deathstar

 

[jayman38]

For beginners, I'd have a number of recommendations:
1. Pick something relatively small. Something under 50 m on the longest axis. (E.g. 50 m long or less)
2. Pick something you can be passionate about, so that you can rebuild it over and over, learning more about building in Starmade with each iteration.
3. Use lots of hull for building, instead of standard armor or advanced armor. Your first builds won't really be all that combat-ready, so it will be better to keep them more nimble, built with lighter hull blocks. Feel free to use standard armor for places where you want a seamless texture, such as floor carpeting.
4. Keep a single-player "workshop" where you can work out ideas on your own, or play with designs before bringing those better-developed ideas to a multiplayer server. This also helps for those frustrating times when you can't connect to a multiplayer server.
5. Try not to recreate anything too spindly or otherwise thin. The strength of Starmade is in its cubic-meter blocks, so build to its strengths and build bulky. You can experiment with spindly designs later, when you have more experience.
6. As an extension to the point above, feel free to re-design your favored design to be bulkier and to take advantage of more interior space.
7. Similarly, if you find the dimensions of your little ship, feel free to multiply the dimensions by 2 or 3, to give enough space for the ship features to manifest in Starmade's bulky, blocky universe. (E.g. If you find a design that is 15 m in length, feel free to build a double-scale model that is 30 m long.)

Edit: When you look at tutorials and videos to learn how to build, pay attention to the publish dates and try to avoid resources older than a couple of years. Building tips have a shelf life in Starmade.

 

[Non]

I start a ship by deciding on a very rough mass range, and deciding what I want for weapons based on that. I build the primary weapons systems, then I build the power I would need for it, and then fill in the rest of the systems to get into the mass range I had previously defined. Then I decide where i want my turrets to be, I build a hull around it, add pd and call it good.

Which build will be suitable for a beginner?

If you are building for rp style stuff, then literally don't worry about anything besides how long it will keep your attention. It doesn't matter how big or small the project is if you get bored after an hour and forget about it.

If you are building for pvp, then build something in the 30k range, so that you get used to aux, don't bother to make it pretty, and be ready to scrap it and redesign the moment you learn a better technique. Play around a lot with how much mass you dedicate to each system.

 

[wizerdwolf]

1:1 deathstar

Best beginner build 10/10 would recommend. Specifically the larger Death Star II and the entire Imperial fleet at the battle of Endor.

 

[nulitor]

I place random unconnected ship parts in space then I hope it will have enough guns.

 

[Brin]

I don't really build ships, I build factions. I start from an idea of a faction. What is it's philosophy? Defining characteristics? This general concept informs the design, strategic role, tactics, and aesthetics of the builds. I generally build similar-sized ships from a "blank slate" build. That is, I build an empty shell that lacks some details. It establishes the core position, dimensions, docking blocks and such to standardize things like hangars, carrier bays, and shipyard sizes.

In starting out on a shell, I generally start with a "bounding box" to define the maximum limits of the size and the relative location of the core. From there, I'll do a frame-wire outline, then fill in the sides with plain hull. Then I'll start shaping and tweaking the outside appearance. I try to leave it fairly easy to modify for different roles. I try to give it a faction-flavored look and feel with a specific color palate and common design features, which I'll save as templates for use across the faction.

I'll generally finish off a shell by just adding enough thrust and power to move it around as necessary. (In the current-soon-to-be-old power system, I'd lay in all the power generation I think most of my ships in that class will need, but for now, I'm just leaving it minimal.) I'll save that basic shell as a starting point for all similar-sized ships. Then, I'll start working on role-specific versions.

Right now, though, waiting for Power 2.0, I'm stopping at the basic shells.

I tell you what, though. I've gotten a lot of great ideas from reading this thread. I'll be using some of these techniques, now.

 

[GnomeKing]

i started by building systems - then completing them with hulls > i always always always start with the power, which defines basic shapes of ship. ... after getting familiar with the game i also refitted some older community posted ships, finding ways to improve power and systems, or other modifications...this was pretty useful > just like editing somebody else text gives different perspective to just reading your own ...

the worst way to build a new ship is to start with the hull - unless you don't care too much about final specific performance of the finished ship.

 

[JinM]

I was reading the devlog and I started to think about how different people approached designing and building a new ship.

• Do you sketch out a general concept or do you see it in your head?
• Do you build systems into a hull or do you build a hull around your systems?
• Do you sit down and crunch numbers to get a specific balance of power, shields, TWR, etc?
• Do you decorate the ship as you go or wait until the critical stuff is done?
• What other points do you feel are important in designing a new ship?

Myself, I see a rough design in my head. I mull it over for a little while to work out what the points of interest are.

Once I'm into the game, I lay down a core and proceed to use grey hull to create the outline of the hull. If I'm building a heavy ship, I do a complete hull in grey hull blocks first. I will then make the outer skin out of standard armour because I dislike the squares that regular hull shows. I've sworn off heavy (advanced) armour due to the mass and manueverability issues it brings to the table.

Once most of the shell is finished, I start putting in things like the citadel, the pits for the main turrets, and the engine porn.

Moving inside, I start with the observation rooms of the citadel. I then add a fighter or shuttle bay if I have room for it. I then add the transporter room, the med room, and the core room. With those in and corridors connecting them, I proceed to add power, shields, and other systems.

Next I add fixed forward guns and the main turrets. With those done, I add the secondary and point defense turrets.

I decorate to taste and the proceed to a shake-down cruise to test things out.

How does everyone else do it? No right or wrong answers here. I just want to get an idea of others' processes so as to potentially improve my own. I'm hoping others can get the same benefit.

Oh, I build for PvE if anyone considers that remotely important.

I do it roughly like you.

I often have seen a cool ship in the media, and then I seek for pictures of it. If I try to build my own ship that comes completely from my own ideas, I sometimes just build the outlining stuff first, or, in rare cases for bigger ships, I build a 1:10 scaled model of it first. Works great for any ship exceeding 50m in its diameters.

If I build for pvp I first build the rough hull, then turrets, often simulatenously with finishing the hull, then I add in as much power as possible after I finished the details of the hull. Then the weapons, then the rest. Putting in the turrets early on, is important, as they have a huge impact on the hull and outline design.

For rp or pve I have no real pattern. Last time I roughly laid out the floor plans inside my ship, and then I built the power lines around it. I often just put in the interior first for stations, and have the power inside some extra generators that can be quickly updated for the new power. On ships I still do the power first or simulatenously with the interior. And I don't build over 80 long ships, I only have built one ship that's longer than 40m.

On this point I have to add, that I will be so happy when the new power is out. Laying down the power grid mazes in smaller ships was really destroying the creativity. I often had issues with the interior construction, because any interior quickly overlaps with the grid. (If someone wants to disagree to the last 2 sentences, here my direct answer: I hope you drive directly to hell.) And I don't build over 80 long ships, I only have built one ship that's longer than 40m. And I don't build over 80 long ships, I only have built one ship that's longer than 40m.

For stations I have a long list of cool interior objects, and I often just build one object after the other, and then I need rooms for those objects. Last time I made a water tank, a smaller random liquid tank, and a liquid o2 tank. They all might go into a sort of maintenance area of my station. I have like 10 props for research and medical purposes allready, like surgery tables, beds, clone chambers, 3d-printers (two types, one arm laser top-down and 4 arm lasers vertically to a center object) and containment chambers (two types: a: only with a forcefield; b: with a bed and sanitation). You can imagine that all those props allready fill 3 rooms on my station.

For my station I have a big rule, that every system block has to be inside an object. And often the objects, like power generators, should be inside rooms too. I also put power easily accessible into extra cabinets, so I can walk into that cabinet in astronaut mode. That really helps for having a clean feeling on the station. I have no factory enhancers in big cubes, and no storage "room" that is just a big cube full of blocks. If you check out my last two shipyard posts you get a good example of what I describe.