[power 2.0] Docked Armor (not shields) solutions and ideas

[Lecic]

"Docked" hull no longer needs to be docked with the new bubbles. It's just part of the ship that isn't under the protection of one of the bubbles. Making docked stuff explode does absolutely nothing to fix the problem when nothing is docked to begin with.

Docked armour/shields is not overpowered, unless your opponent is using 100% ion slave or hull damage weapons with 0% shield damage. Its a countermeasure to use against people using those types of weapons. Its your choice to use optimised weapons in which case your going to have some difficultly against docked armour/shields. If you use normal weapon damage the docked armour/shields don't really do much. Its a rock paper scissors thing.

With the new shield system its possible to setup a similar effect without docked modules its just a bit trickier to setup.

Docked hull is still extremely effective as an ablative. It is extremely powerful regardless of what weapons your opponent is using, it just happens to be extra effective against 3 of the 5 offensive weapon types in the game.

**** Edited by alterintel to be less inflammatory ****

 

[Zyrr]

GnomeKing Lecic Dire Venom

could you explain why you gave veilith's post a disagree? it's correct in all respects

 

[Lecic]

GnomeKing Lecic Dire Venom

could you explain why you gave veilith's post a disagree? it's correct in all respects

Orbital turrets are a symptom of the spaghetti meta. They allow for the wide distribution of systems over empty space, which I why I believe the game should prevent them through some sort of physical connection requirement, like crew needing to access the turret or conduits leading to the turret being required for it to receive power and chamber benefits. While he is technically correct in that the "most powerful ships" people currently fly on servers do not use orbital turrets, this is a disingenuous argument. It is not because orbital turrets are not inherently better than turrets connected to the main hull, but because people have been choosing to not fly those kinds of ships. His argument is basically the same as Lancake thinking spaghetti ships aren't a problem because "well no one is using them on servers!"

 

[Non]

Does this cause you physical pain?

 

[Zyrr]

They allow for the wide distribution of systems over empty space

Not exclusive to free-floating or gyro turrets

It is not because orbital turrets are not inherently better than turrets connected to the main hull, but because people have been choosing to not fly those kinds of ships.

Don't know what this sentence was supposed to imply. Free floating turrets aren't any better than colliding turrets besides in server stability, which is a good thing...?

Orbital turrets are a symptom of the spaghetti meta.

So do you mean like gyro turrets or turrets that just float off the hull a bit? Neither of those are broken and people use both of those fairly regularly. I think you mean gyro turrets, which don't get used on really big "meta pvp" ships much anymore. Sure they can rotate all the way around the ship, but a well designed normal turret can do the same thing... gyros are really just us being lazy.

I don't really understand why there needs to be a physical connection between turrets other than some nonsense aesthetics reasons lol. Right now especially, a turret that doesn't actually collide with a ship hull is way more server friendly than one that does.

 

[kulbolen]

While he is technically correct in that the "most powerful ships" people currently fly on servers do not use orbital turrets, this is a disingenuous argument. It is not because orbital turrets are not inherently better than turrets connected to the main hull, but because people have been choosing to not fly those kinds of ships.

aethi ships use orbital turrets. my strongest spaghetti ship uses traditional turrets. move along.

 

[Dire Venom]

GnomeKing Lecic Dire Venom

could you explain why you gave veilith's post a disagree? it's correct in all respects

Who's Veilith ? Please reference their forum name plse XD
If you mean the one on the first page (I think), I dissagred because I feel that dislocated turrets purely gain benifits from being free-floating.
I don't dislike the fact that they exsist, and I like the options they present, I just feel that they need some consideration, so that they are implimented as a fully functional feature rather than just a quirk of the game.

 

[Zyrr]

Who's Veilith ? Please reference their forum name plse XD
If you mean the one on the first page (I think), I dissagred because I feel that dislocated turrets purely gain benifits from being free-floating.
I don't dislike the fact that they exsist, and I like the options they present, I just feel that they need some consideration, so that they are implimented as a fully functional feature rather than just a quirk of the game.

veilith = kulbolen

They don't gain any exclusive benefits from free floating that a colliding turret can't have. The ONLY exclusive benefit it has is that it's way less laggy, which is the opposite of a bad thing? That's a really good thing.

Firing arc, spread out systems etc can be accomplished on a traditional colliding turret too. There's nothing inherently wrong with not wanting your turrets attached to your hull.

 

[Dire Venom]

veilith = kulbolen

They don't gain any exclusive benefits from free floating that a colliding turret can't have. The ONLY exclusive benefit it has is that it's way less laggy, which is the opposite of a bad thing? That's a really good thing.

Firing arc, spread out systems etc can be accomplished on a traditional colliding turret too. There's nothing inherently wrong with not wanting your turrets attached to your hull.

I don't disagree, you can make some pretty cool designs with them imo, I like them too.
Maybe the more explotive builds I think of (turrets spaced out a few hundred meters apart, docked chain being spun, resulting in in the turrets being near impossible to hit etc) are just fiction and players wouldn't actualy build them.
Probably all this spaghetti messing with my head :/

 

[Mork2]

Admittedly I was mostly talking about under the old power system which is actually off topic, my bad.

While you can use the new shield bubbles to do something similar there are issues with it when you use high recharge levels you end up with +3km shield bubbles. Since they protect all docked entities down the chain.

You can still use the following theory since the shield bubbles only protect the entity it on and within radius as well as any entities down the docking chain also in radius. But not up the docking chain.

Use the same method I mentioned in a previous post.
Main ship hull has a full shield bubble. Good enough to hold off npcs.
Shield entity docked to main hull and completely surrounds it. Has full shield bubble and has all turrets attached to it.
External hull docked to main hull. Completely surrounds the shield entity and main hull.

The external hull will be protected by the main shield bubble till it drops. At this point the external hull will negate ion hits for the shield entity, since the shield entity is in a different docking chain it won't be protected by the shield entity. The shield entity will protect the main ship and all turrets until its shields collapse since it also surrounds the main ship. This way you can have a shield bubble of 3500m from very high shield regen on the shield entity and still have unshielded entities blocking ion damage.

In the end this allows you to add in docked armour that is not protected by shield because of the massive areas covered by the shield bubbles due to very high regen.

So even under the new mechanics there is still ways to use it to your advantage.

 

[Zyrr]

I don't disagree, you can make some pretty cool designs with them imo, I like them too.
Maybe the more explotive builds I think of (turrets spaced out a few hundred meters apart, docked chain being spun, resulting in in the turrets being near impossible to hit etc) are just fiction and players wouldn't actualy build them.
Probably all this spaghetti messing with my head :/

What I'm saying is that's not exclusive to a floating turret. You can do the exact same thing, this turret being way off in the distance, with a traditional turret docked to a mothership that's spaced out. There's inherently no difference between a floating turret and a traditional turret EXCEPT the fact that floating turrets are way less laggy, which is inarguably a good thing.

 

[JinM]

Please stop the turret talks and spagetti stuff. ^^ Seriously...

> Docked hull. Thats my only issue why I have written here. I know you guys see other problems with the pvp but maybe they don't belong into this thread...its just confusing to read that stuff.

Anyway, to talk again about docked hull.

Let me quote the Starmade wiki:

Because AHP takes damage based on incoming damage, not block destruction (Like SHP), it can often be depleted far in advance of all armor blocks on a ship being destroyed. When AHP reaches 0, it will no longer be able to absorb any of the damage dealt to armor blocks.

So first thesis: If my armor hp drops to zero, every armor block that gets shoot now does not block so much damage anymore and gets destroyed faster? Right?

Now my second thesis:
We have armor hp of a ship right? Lets say we have 100 ahp.

Ship 1 has 100 ahp right on its mother (M), and nothing docked. If I shoot down 50% of that armor, the rest of the armor blocks don't tank damage so well anymore.

Now I have ship 2, where I put 50 ahp right in the front of it with a docked armor hull, and I have 50 ahp on the mother. Now 50% of this docked armor can get shoot down, and after that it doesn't block the damage so well anymore. But the mother is still at 50 ahp of its total 50 ahp, and I have to shoot through 25 ahp again to get the ship to zero armor. Docked armor doesnt make sense here.

Now ship 3, and my actual problem: I have the mother, 20 ahp, and the docked armor with 80 ahp at one side of the ship, where I know that it will get shoot down in every case. The 80 ahp get shoot down to zero - and then I still have the armor hp on the main entity intact. I can loose 40 armor hp plus force the enemy to plow to the rest of my docked armor, until the enemy can actually damage my mother entity. You get it? I can dedicate 80 ahp to be a shield, and if that shield gets destroyed it doesnt impact the mother ships stats at all. In fact, if I undock it, I even gain mobility and thrust...

I mean yeah it's not a big advantage, but for me it made sense.

Or did I understand it wrong? Will the docked armor overheat after it lost 40 of its total 80 ahp? And if so - what would happen, if now Schema decides to let overheating entities stay docked to a ship?

 

[GDPR 302420]

There is one way to fix docked hull.

Remove all benefits associated with it, if a docked hull is hit by a stop weapon it should stop the main ship, you should not be able to "double ion" your ship with docked hull you should not be able to get any benefit from it.

Simple as that, docked hull is an exploit and like all other exploits docked hull needs to be patched.

 

[Zyrr]

Remove all benefits associated with it, if a docked hull is hit by a stop weapon it should stop the main ship

It does, that was fixed months ago

you should not be able to "double ion" your ship with docked hull you should not be able to get any benefit from it.

It's not double ion it's more like 60% and then another separate 60%, but yeah agree

There's a bunch of other good things about it, some of it is easy to fix some of it isn't. Separate passives are a big one

 

[kulbolen]

Remove all benefits associated with it, if a docked hull is hit by a stop weapon it should stop the main ship, you should not be able to "double ion" your ship with docked hull you should not be able to get any benefit from it.

i encourage you to test both of these statements.
[doublepost=1511052133,1511052008][/doublepost]

Please stop the turret talks and spagetti stuff. ^^ Seriously...

> Docked hull. Thats my only issue why I have written here. I know you guys see other problems with the pvp but maybe they don't belong into this thread...its just confusing to read that stuff.

Anyway, to talk again about docked hull.

Let me quote the Starmade wiki:

So first thesis: If my armor hp drops to zero, every armor block that gets shoot now does not block so much damage anymore and gets destroyed faster? Right?

Now my second thesis:
We have armor hp of a ship right? Lets say we have 100 ahp.

Ship 1 has 100 ahp right on its mother (M), and nothing docked. If I shoot down 50% of that armor, the rest of the armor blocks don't tank damage so well anymore.

Now I have ship 2, where I put 50 ahp right in the front of it with a docked armor hull, and I have 50 ahp on the mother. Now 50% of this docked armor can get shoot down, and after that it doesn't block the damage so well anymore. But the mother is still at 50 ahp of its total 50 ahp, and I have to shoot through 25 ahp again to get the ship to zero armor. Docked armor doesnt make sense here.

Now ship 3, and my actual problem: I have the mother, 20 ahp, and the docked armor with 80 ahp at one side of the ship, where I know that it will get shoot down in every case. The 80 ahp get shoot down to zero - and then I still have the armor hp on the main entity intact. I can loose 40 armor hp plus force the enemy to plow to the rest of my docked armor, until the enemy can actually damage my mother entity. You get it? I can dedicate 80 ahp to be a shield, and if that shield gets destroyed it doesnt impact the mother ships stats at all. In fact, if I undock it, I even gain mobility and thrust...

I mean yeah it's not a big advantage, but for me it made sense.

Or did I understand it wrong? Will the docked armor overheat after it lost 40 of its total 80 ahp? And if so - what would happen, if now Schema decides to let overheating entities stay docked to a ship?

have you used ships that take advantage of this in pvp or are you just theorizing about stuff other people have already done?

 

[GnomeKing]

have you used ships that take advantage of this in pvp or are you just theorizing about stuff other people have already done?

... and your point is ? JinM is trying to get back to the OP...and obviously theorizing, to highlight why docked armor is exploiting fundamental assumptions of the game and making a mockery of what a 'ship' should in fact be. I am not going to spend my time building these things either, let alone dedicate effort to min-maxing them.

Anyway, what PvP insights do you have to add on such builds k/v? does docked armor need to 'go' ?

 

[Mork2]

By the looks of it with the new power system all the defensive effects are being removed and replaced with reactor chamber abilities or whatever there really called.

Armour HP Pool explaination
Okay the armour HP works like this. Under normal circumstances with no passive bonuses or reactor chamber bonuses. When a block which contributes to armour HP takes damage it is reduced by the damage reduction first. Blocks include all hull, doors, faction block and probably a few others. So for advanced hull you have 100HP with 90% resist. So the damage hitting the advanced hull gets reduced to 10%. Half of the damage is taken by the armour HP pool until 100HP damage is done to the advanced armour block. So to kill an advanced hull block while there is a remaining HP pool is 2000 damage. It gets reduced to 200HP and half of that damage 100HP goes to the pool and the remaining 100 kills the block. If there is no remaining armour HP pool then the armour pool can't share the damage so you just need to kill the block. So 1000 points to kill the advanced hull.

Armour HP pools are separate per entity and are reduced separately. Hits on system blocks don't affect the armour HP pool.
Also the entity won't overheat if entity is out of armour HP.

Armour HP pool absorption
Now under the power 1.0 (punch) and under power 2.0 there appears to be a defensive effect or reactor chamber bonus that increases the amount of damage that gets shifted to the armour pool while it lasts. This can increase the effect up to 75% so that 3/4 of the damage gets shunted to the armour HP Pool. So at max it would then take 4000 damage to kill a advanced hull block. The damage resistance drops it to 400 damage and 300 of that goes to the armour HP pool and 100 to kill the block. These effects shunt more damage to the armour HP Pool which makes the armour hit harder to kill but runs the pool down faster.

Armour HP pool reduction
Under both power 1.0 (pierce) and 2.0 there is another pierce effect that reduced the armour HP pool damage up to 25%. What happens then in the 4000 damage example is damage is reduced to 400. Of that 300 gets diverted to the armour HP Pool but is reduced by 25% to 225 damage and 100 damage wipes out the advanced hull block.

Armour regen with power 2.0
In power 2.0 there is an effect which apparently regenerates armour at 1%, I think it will be armour HP Pool (not sure over what time period 1 second maybe?).

Old docked armour usage
Now what the docked armour plates are used in conjunction with the docked entity rules to negate 100% ion damage. What happened under the old system is that hits to a docked item if its shields couldn't handle it the damage would go up the chain to the next entity and check if its shields is above 25% and can take the damage, if it could it took that hit to shields. So if the entities the docked plate is docked to has less than 25% shields or can't take the hit then the damage goes onto the docked plate. When that weapon is a 100% ion weapon, because it can't transfer the damage to the main ship as its shields are under 25% it hits the docked plate but because its 100% ion it does 0 hull damage and does no damage to the docked plate. Basically the docked plates stop 100% ion weapons from dropping your main shields due to the shield/docked entity mechanics.

Under power 2.0 shields work differently and while still under development work in different ways with docked entities. This is a whole other wall of text that ill refrain from typing unless asked. And the thread is about docked armour.

Power 2.0 reactor HP instead of system HP
In the new system there is no system HP only reactor HP so wiping out large swathes of blocks won't kill a ship under the new system. You have to kill the reactor. Though under the dev build weird things happen when it doesn't have a reactor so they still have stuff to sort out. Anyway under power 2.0 if they make it so you can't overheat something that doesn't have a reactor which is likely then your not going to have overheating docked plates anymore. The only thing that should cause overheating is when the reactor is damaged enough and that should only happen on the main ship, since only the main ship can have reactors active. So as long as the docked plate is connected it should be impossible to overheat and break off. However if you shoot the docking system and it breaks off I'm not sure what happens. The entity probably doesn't have a reactor so there is nothing to overheat it. Currently it does on the dev build but I'm not sure their going to do.

I hope this post helps explain things.

 

[Zyrr]

I was going to ask you the same thing, since you don't understand the concept and just said you don't intend to figure it out either.

Docked armor doesn't make a mockery of any game concepts and what you think it can do versus what it actually does is much, much different. As it stands right now docked armor is a great stand in for the nonexistant usefulness of armor in this game and besides a few changes, namely being able to activate ion across multiple entities (fixed with chambers) and the lag issue (schema said he's addressing this), there isn't a ton about it that is explicitly broken. If you can't shoot through it your guns need to do more damage. 100% pierce and 100% ion is for suckers regardless.

We can't simultaneously argue that we need to nerf weapon scaling as well as nerf the only effective way to defend your ship. That's illogical and lands us back at square one. Until Schine decides to properly address traditional defense I see no reason to remove this unconventional but nominally effective defense.

 

[GnomeKing]

sigh...

the conceptual issue is "what is an entity?" + "what is a Main entity (ie a 'ship' ?"

it is clearly daft that i can add 100 armor blocks to my Main entity at 100m distance and loss HP when destroyed, but place same armor on nominally separate-but -permanent-docked element and lose no 'armor' from the 'Ship' when it is destroyed.

I do not think that such constructions are intended by the fundamental mechanics, nor the concept of a 'ship' in the game.


But lets try a more productive approach:

>> make armor / HP of any docked entity additive to the the cumulative total of the main entity it is attached too (while it is attached).

in that way docked armor just becomes pointless, as it is identical to actual armor on the ship (as i believe is intended in the concept of ship armor/hp in the first place)

 

[Mork2]

The docked armour plates are there to negate ion 100% hits so you have shields on your main hull even if reduced to 25%. Power 2.0 will change how it works but its can be done again to reduce shield damage from 100% ion weapons by having 100% ion weapons hit something that isn't protected by shields and thus do no shield or hull damage which results in leaving the remaining shields protecting critical systems to stop the non ion damage.

It was never about making armour better.