Revert to System HP with reactors as Critical Zones

[Nosajimiki]

Maybe structure and reactor hp can both function side by side to determine whether an entity overheats. If the reactor is below 50%, the ship will always overheat, if the structurehp drops below 25%, the further damage will spread to the reactor whether it was hit directly or not, causing an overheat once it fails.

If it doesnt have a reactor, it automatically overheats when taking damage below 25% structure hp. This also would apply to s1.0 ships

How is this better than a reballence systemHP? Frankly, I feel like no one has ever answered the basic question of what makes rHP a better game mechanic at all.

 

[EricBlank]

The idea there is to register the reactor separately from the rest of the ship, actually. Theyre both measures of hp, so in that sense theyre identical. We could just make every ship component contribute to reactorhp anyway, and forget about system/structure hp.

With them being tracked separately you could also switch to a different reactor, so long as the ship itself is still viable for a time, to access the ship and possibly continue fighting during overheating, youd have to have a separate mechanic to prevent overheating destroying the ship while youre piloting it regardless. If you even have a backup reactor. So it does allow some additional flexibility in that sense. If your ship is structurally unsound (25% or less sHP) then that backup reactor isnt gonna help either, is it?

But no, what you call your hp is totally irrelevent, the question is what we're measuring as relevant to the hp. To me, it just doesnt make a lot of sense to continue measuring the reactors hp the same as the rest of the ship; it should be separate. What I was proposing is called a compromise in that way, because it allows both systems to coexist and feed off eachother. Your reactor becomes irrelevant if your ship is in tatters and vice versa.

 

[MacThule]

Thinking about the OP in conjunction with the suggestion by Dire Venom makes me think about Integrity.

It should actually be very easy to improve(?) the fragility of ships by -ugh- making Integrity a little more horrible. Lower the max protective value of integrity? Increase the badness potential of integrity loss? Flattening the curve at the high end could contribute and might even serve to de-incentivize going "full brick" with everything as well since the benefits would be marginal... These are complex and sensitive electronic and mechanical systems. We are all carrying volatile gasses, unstable metals and flammable liquids on board (all your capital ships all have wet bars too, right?). Systems really should be more prone to total failure and catastrophic failure.

Because Dire Venom is right: If you've managed to hit 4-5 different sub-systems for 20-30% damage each, there should be a damn good chance that one of them pops, further damaging surrounding systems and raising their chances of failure. At the very least, some of those systems should shut down completely and be rendered inoperative until the ship is "re-booted." Shutting down low-integrity systems on damage would be ideal compared to excessive chances of sweeping explosions though, because it would hard-cripple ships, but preserve their tasty system blocks for salvage. Vae victus - ad victorem spolias.

Properly tuned integrity on all systems, with the potential for system shutdown, would make ships eminently more "killable" without re-introducing an oversimplified, overpredictable system of direct math for people to gimmick and exploit.

 

[JNC]

I say get rid of ship/system HP all together until it can be done in a meaningful manner. If a percentage of a system groups blocks are destroyed (lets say 50%) than it doesnt function anymore. Now ships are less arcade like and are never "dead" per se, just different degrees of functional/nonfunctional.

First you just killed the core, lame. Then you just had to damage a certain amount of the ship, kinda lame. Now you have to kill the reactor (isnt this just a large ship core than??) LAME.

GET RID OF HP BARS *except shields :P*

 

[Zoolimar]

At the very least, some of those systems should shut down completely and be rendered inoperative until the ship is "re-booted." Shutting down low-integrity systems on damage would be ideal compared to excessive chances of sweeping explosions though, because it would hard-cripple ships, but preserve their tasty system blocks for salvage.

Isn't integrity being recalculated in real time during combat one of the main sources of lag? And you want to make it into one of the main mechanics?

 

[Nosajimiki]

Isn't integrity being recalculated in real time during combat one of the main sources of lag? And you want to make it into one of the main mechanics?

Integrity recalculation does not cause significant lag. Integrity explosions do. I believe he is talking about replacing integrity explosions with a simple "disabled" flag. That would actually go a long way towards fixing integrity to make it both viable and performant.
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I say get rid of ship/system HP all together until it can be done in a meaningful manner. If a percentage of a system groups blocks are destroyed (lets say 50%) than it doesnt function anymore. Now ships are less arcade like and are never "dead" per se, just different degrees of functional/nonfunctional.

First you just killed the core, lame. Then you just had to damage a certain amount of the ship, kinda lame. Now you have to kill the reactor (isnt this just a large ship core than??) LAME.

GET RID OF HP BARS *except shields :P*

Without a kill component, debris fields would choke servers and you could never force an astro out of his ship to finish him off or be able to salvage your enemy's ships. Also, in a "real" scenario, enough holes in a ship would kill all the crew due to decompression, or damaging the right part would cause a critical explosion vaporizing the whole thing... so yes, there does need to be something reflective of this.

 

[JNC]

Without a kill component, debris fields would choke servers and you could never force an astro out of his ship to finish him off or be able to salvage your enemy's ships. Also, in a "real" scenario, enough holes in a ship would kill all the crew due to decompression, or damaging the right part would cause a critical explosion vaporizing the whole thing... so yes, there does need to be something reflective of this.

Would you rather have HP bars or add something to manage debris fields so you dont need HP bars?
killing the ship core (or whatever the astro uses to fly the ship) would pop him out but not kill the ship, this happens now.
Why cant salvage beams work against active ships/stations? How about salvage beams cant penitrate shields, and do zero shield damage, done!
All players are equiped with helmets and unlimited air/food/water
Again, would you rather have HP bars or add "critical explosions" ?

Why say we cant do X because we dont have Y? Instead, say we want Y so we can do X.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Id much rather HP. Critical explosions kill the game, and salvaging "live" ships makes salvagers a very devastating weapon which they are not meant to be.

[edit]: Ideal world, critical explosions as a way to die may be cool if it were performant, but it should not happen every time since it removes the incentive to kill and salvage an enemy

As for cleanup? there is no automatic way to tell the difference between a damaged ships someone left in the void to be used again, and a crippled ship that's been abandoned. I would absolutely not want any system that tries to make that prediction for me any might delete my battleship I keep out in deep space so it does not lag my homebase, just because it got a few holes in it, or if it sees it as abandoned b/c I have not used it in a while.

 

[JNC]

Ha well... this IS the suggestions forum... so, you know.... suggest alterations, to be the change you want to see. If you WANT critical explosions, which is suggested in the title, but are afraid they "kill the game" than figure out a way to prevent that so you can have crits. I'd very much like to see salvagers work on live ships and dont think it would be overpowered at all; just gotta add some limitations because, as you say, they arent ment to be weapons.

FOR EXAMPLE:

- salvagers cannot penetrate shields
- salvagers are less effective vs armor (perhaps armor is salvaged at 1/3 rate)

In this way they arent "over powered" but could be an effective weapon IF you encounter an enemy without shields and very little armor, lol

I wouldnt want my ships to disappear either! Starmade currently remembers how a ship was built (and so knows what to replace at a shipyard when damaged) SOOOO perhaps cleanup could use that data? How about this:

- Any derelict ships (no crew) in faction claimed space are flagged on map for that faction
- Any derelict ships (damaged or not) in faction space will not ever disappear unless salvaged or marked to do so at appropriate faction levels
- Allow wrecks in neutral space to be "claimed". This would prevent them from being deleted by trash cleanup so they could be salvaged later (by anyone)
- As I suggested in my wreck thread, there could also be a server option to allow the automatic removal of wrecks below a certain mass. This would be applied to unclaimed space. Big wrecks are special and so would stay put regardless.
- Regarding ship damage status, the game knows how much of a designs blocks are missing so pick a number... i like 50% so if a ship is missing half its blocks it could be labeled as a wreck and be removed after a time, or claimed for salvage.

...I'll add these to my other thread, lol

 

[Nosajimiki]

Ha well... this IS the suggestions forum... so, you know.... suggest alterations, to be the change you want to see. If you WANT critical explosions, which is suggested in the title, but are afraid they "kill the game" than figure out a way to prevent that so you can have crits. I'd very much like to see salvagers work on live ships and dont think it would be overpowered at all; just gotta add some limitations because, as you say, they arent ment to be weapons.

FOR EXAMPLE:

- salvagers cannot penetrate shields
- salvagers are less effective vs armor (perhaps armor is salvaged at 1/3 rate)

In this way they arent "over powered" but could be an effective weapon IF you encounter an enemy without shields and very little armor, lol

I wouldnt want my ships to disappear either! Starmade currently remembers how a ship was built (and so knows what to replace at a shipyard when damaged) SOOOO perhaps cleanup could use that data? How about this:

- Any derelict ships (no crew) in faction claimed space are flagged on map for that faction
- Any derelict ships (damaged or not) in faction space will not ever disappear unless salvaged or marked to do so at appropriate faction levels
- Allow wrecks in neutral space to be "claimed". This would prevent them from being deleted by trash cleanup so they could be salvaged later (by anyone)
- As I suggested in my wreck thread, there could also be a server option to allow the automatic removal of wrecks below a certain mass. This would be applied to unclaimed space. Big wrecks are special and so would stay put regardless.
- Regarding ship damage status, the game knows how much of a designs blocks are missing so pick a number... i like 50% so if a ship is missing half its blocks it could be labeled as a wreck and be removed after a time, or claimed for salvage.

...I'll add these to my other thread, lol

Ah I see, what you meant, but critical zone do not necessarily mean critical explosions. Critical explosions infers destroying thousands or even millions of blocks all at once (realistic but causes massive lag). Critical zones, in the case of the suggestion means that they contribute to ship's HP death much faster than other systems.

As for marking for deletion, how is your idea different than current overheat mechanic, and how does a player know if his ship has met that point? More importantly, how do AI know when to stop shooting at the same badly damaged ship if it is say "mostly disabled". If they just keep shooting until there is nothing left, then you have decoy exploits or issues with AI spending 10 minutes trying to get that those last few reactor/weapon blocks that are too small to target. If they move on while it still has active systems, it could still have that one last annoying turret it just keeps shooting your ships in the back with. Without "Death", AI will be pretty borked.

 

[JNC]

As for marking for deletion, how is your idea different than current overheat mechanic

I've suggested a couple important features that arent currently part of the "overheat" mechanic, such as claiming wrecks, providing adjustable wreck removal criteria to the server and a variable block % for labeling something as "wrecked". :|

how does a player know if his ship has met that point?

How do you know your ship is wrecked? Well if you need the game to tell you it could just tell you, but I'd guess when it's full of holes and doesnt do what you need it to do anymore... hahaha

how do AI know when to stop shooting at the same badly damaged ship if it is say "mostly disabled"

That would have to be added as a "faction personality" for example, you can already adjust things like how expansive the AI is, how much mining it does, etc. Could be "does faction leave salvage? Y/N" or "what percentage damage does AI cease attack"... it doesnt have to be too complicated. A "borked" (no offense doggos) system, such as AI, doesnt mean we cant suggest improvements that depend on something being improved upon, lol.

 

[Nosajimiki]

That would have to be added as a "faction personality" for example, you can already adjust things like how expansive the AI is, how much mining it does, etc. Could be "does faction leave salvage? Y/N" or "what percentage damage does AI cease attack"... it doesnt have to be too complicated. A "borked" (no offense doggos) system, such as AI, doesn't mean we can't suggest improvements that depend on something being improved upon, lol.

A ship that is 50% dead may or may not still be fairly functional depending on what 50% is a dead, and shooting till nothing is left will lead to some very retarded behavior. Setting faction behaviors will not have a "sweet spot" like you think it will. A shipwide disabled status of some sort needs to be reasonably achievable so that AI flags match behavior.

 

[NaStral]

Right now, the strictly reactor based overheat model is leading to ships getting chewed up so badly they lose all computers and as a result will just try to ram enemies. This is extremely dangerous because of poorly opimized physics. We need more than just the damn reactor to determine when the AI gives up.

 

[MacThule]

As I mentioned elsewhere, it doesn't make much sense for a reactor to function in any way if 50% melted to slag. And Nosajimiki - you mention what would happen to crew. I think they can also either be presumed dead or as having abandoned ship if their power is done. This is probably a key to unlocking this problem, and relies on a dynamic (crew) that Schine has said they would like to implement later if practical.

Maybe there doesn't need to be a special marker or system for the game to remove derelicts. Once their power dies, they go on an short Abandon Ship timer (1-2m?) which could be overridden at any point by an active pilot with a single keystroke, including boarding an abandoned ship, entering the core and un-abandoning it. After the timer expires, a ship with a downed reactor could be salvaged by anyone.

Sure, keep shooting until they overheat if you want, if you want, if you don't like loot... or just let them abandon and turn on the rest until the enemy fleet is dead in space, then whip out a fast salvager after to scoop up all the bounty.

This turns debris fields into gold mines, and lets players handle the cleanup (for profit). It makes the notion of deliberately cluttering someone's base equivalent to Feeding.

Probably need a few details like a command for servads to wipe all abandoned, and a config like to set auto-cleanup of abandons after 48-120 hours or something to prevent long-term buildup of abandons in out-of-the-way places.

tl;dr: Make reactors shut down way before needing to be 100% erased. Allow ships with downed power to be salvaged.

 

[EricBlank]

I like the aforementioned idea (cant find where) of using negative integrity to signify a system has ceased to function. If the system is worth a # of system hp due to the blocks it is composed of, then when that system reaches negative integrity and ceases to function, we subtract its hp value from the structure hp pool. When this pool drops below 50% the ship is abandoned. Track the reactor separately, and then we can say if the reactor reaches negative integrity it shuts down/overheats, you either abandon ship or switch to a different reactor and try to stop that overheating process. If the ship overheats, it explodes, leaving behind no debris sans maybe some item blocks you can pick up (so the crew needs to abandon ship before this happens if stopping the overheat is failing). If it is abandoned, but does not overheat, it becomes derelict and can be salvaged, but will be deleted after a lengthy (configurable) period of time.

That way, the total status of all of the ships systems is taken into account, but without the integrity explosion mechanic that plagues servers processing power. The reactor is a critical component in that it forces overheating and the ship obviously ceases to function without it, and ships can be left derelict and thus salvageable via a mechanic that will help tie in with crew once thats implemented, but can still be destroyed and get deleted after a period of time so that it doesnt clutter servers databases and local sectors.

 

[Zoolimar]

I like the aforementioned idea (cant find where) of using negative integrity to signify a system has ceased to function. If the system is worth a # of system hp due to the blocks it is composed of, then when that system reaches negative integrity and ceases to function, we subtract its hp value from the structure hp pool.

There is just one problem - it would make most RP builds more or less unviable. To work with such a system you absolutely must build systems first and most RP builders work on the shell first and only then start to stuff it with systems. Even if the resulting system groups would have positive integrity there is almost no way they would be anywhere as robust as on those on ships where systems were designed and installed first. Unless we are going into hardcore engineering with spending months to create iterations of blueprints and designs on "paper" before you even place the first block.

 

[EricBlank]

Yeah, that would seriously suck for replica builders especially. Thats been the biggest problem in balancing the game overall in a way.

But if we continue to use straight hitpoints then wed still be turning ships into swiss cheese trying to knock out enough of those spindly little systems to have an effect. I always include roleplay elements and theyre often the focus of my attention, and i try to include roleplay into functional elements directly, where they both contribute to one another. It isnt easy by any means, but it is rewarding, and i do see where youre coming from wanting to just build for roleplay and not worry about the systems.

Theres also that stupid spaghetti meta that integrity was supposed to fix but doesnt really solve...

 

[Zoolimar]

Nah, for me it's not a problem. I always build the bridge first, then systems and only then all the other stuff. But many other people build a shell first, plus interior and only after that start to fill everything that's between a shell and interior with systems.

 

[Valiant70]

If you destroy half of anything, it should either quit working or explode depending on what it is. If it's particularly huge, destroy less than half just like old system HP. This way ships riddled with holes will end up dead in the water before long even if their reactors haven't blown. That essentially makes the ship a non-catastrophic kill.

 

[MacThule]

Nah, for me it's not a problem. I always build the bridge first, then systems and only then all the other stuff. But many other people build a shell first, plus interior and only after that start to fill everything that's between a shell and interior with systems.

Same. Cockpit, systems, defense, turrets, decor, in that order. I'm not religious about sticking to that, but it is absolutely the best way to get a ship that performs well in my experience.

Usually I have a pretty clear idea for the finished ship's general shape when I start, and that helps me lay out systems. Then when I finally wrap it, the wrapping process allows some additional shaping and sometimes I'll tweak a few of the systems to improve the finish if it doesn't substantially harm performance.

I do think shape shouldn't really affect performance, but I find it appropriate that someone building for style will probably get curbed by a player building for performance. I think about the lengths to which players go to fine-tune their builds (character builds, or skill tree builds, or empire builds) on other games and it seems reasonable.

In Starmade the ship is your build, and no one is being forced to PvP where build even matters, but for those who are doing PvP making all build decisions equal would probably result a very bland game. But it might not be all bad - the idea of encountering a giant, purple chicken then having it surprise me by stomping the snot out of me in the end is also appealling...