[28th of April] Schine Q&A Answers

[DukeofRealms]

Apologies for the delay, here's the answers to our last QA We are behind by 2 QAs, due on the 12th and the 26th, if we're able to get enough questions for the next QA fast enough, we'll do two QAs over two weeks to catch up.

Questions are open for the next one here: [12th of May] Schine Bi-weekly Q&A

What are the plans for scaling armor better on large ships? Are you going to stick with the current linear model, or adopt a more exponential-based one?

A: We would like to try a linear model first, but if we see that it won’t fit our requirements, we will likely switch to an exponential one. - schema

Do you plan for middle term (before 2019) to implement features for players who don't focus on fight ?

Because actually aside fight, there is only creative aspect but no in game relation/utility (aside host a MP faction).

Actually i play with logics and rails, but same finding...

I don't speak necessarely about full/complex features but some draft to play with waiting better...

A: As we move on with the universe update (which is affecting all play styles, especially players that don’t fight), we will release milestones as dev builds along the way - schema

Will the game allow players who play as a nomad to access features reserved only for empire building factions?


For instance could players build a fleet of ships and treat these ships as a mobile space station? Sort of like a migrant fleet where either one or more ships will have space station like functions. Such as respawning, shipyard, factories, ect.

A: These features are on our list, but I can’t say yet with certainty if it will be exactly that way. We always wanted to make some kind of hybrid of space station and ship, and if it fits within our balance and our new universe, we will definitely go forward with it. - schema

Have you had a chance to skim the suggestion to allow 'reactor' chambers to double as functional, navigable interior spaces directly, rather than making interior spaces compete with system bricks inside of hulls? Is it possible that we might ever see development of ship systems head in this direction, will chambers and other systems likely remain as solid masses, or is this just a notion to examine at a much later date after the universe update has been released and stabilized?


Systems 2.0 is still going through development and things haven't been completely set in stone, so it's not too late to consider and I thought I should ask, though the notion of 'integrity' seems utterly incompatible and probably torpedoes this option at this point.

A: We already have some plans that overlap with the crew part of the suggestion quite a bit. I can’t say yet exactly what our crew system is going to look, because implementation can always go in a different way than originally planned. It might be a good idea to tie in functional crew with chambers somehow, but I can’t promise anything in that regard. I will definitely think about the possibility. - schema

I've spoken with a few casual players of Starmade who haven't touched the game since pre-power 2.0, and I've found that for people who only know the old system all of the new mechanics are a bit confusing at first, and many of the new features and equations are a bit hard to comprehend or figure out. Aside from the wiki, what other plans do you have for informational/tutorial-type help? Some options include built-in interactive tutorial worlds (think of it as being like Elite Dangerous' tutorial that involves a short sequence of missions in a world that automatically resets upon exit), downloadable worlds with examples and explanations of specific features, and the classic tutorial video.

A: We noticed the same problem. We are currently working on ways to teach players the mechanics without them having to read a wiki or watch a tutorial. However, those options will still be available. We are just waiting for the weapons update to finish to do new tutorials, so they are up to date.

Along the way, we would like to do more contextual help to teach players. Little hints and GUI elements that tell the player exactly what to do, without being obstructive. Since I can’t play the game with the eyes of a new player, these things are often hard to find, so If anyone has an idea about those kinds helpful elements, I gladly listen to it in the discord. - schema

 

[Raisinbat]

A: We would like to try a linear model first, but if we see that it won’t fit our requirements, we will likely switch to an exponential one. - schema

What requirements? This is a REALLY bloated way of saying maybe... Couldn't you just have answered every question with "We'll see"? No clue what you're doing as usual, great QnA

 

[MacThule]

They are testing a linear model. If that doesn't work they will test an exponential model.

I don't understand how is that an unacceptable response to the question that was asked. Particularly if it's the truth.

There are two more Q&A posts coming fast though - maybe you should ask a more precise question about the methods being used to evaluate the linear model and what standards they expect it to meet. I would be keen to read more into that line of inquiry.

 

[Briaireous]

Yaaaa.... I started playing two and a half weeks ago and I did notice it was very hard when I first spawned in. There a very steep learning curve.

I believe that the the adjustment was easier for me due to my experience with playing voxel games and other games that require analytical approach to initial gameplay (beseige).

Personally I think it would be better to have tutorial to be have it's own option in the main menu. Sorta like how many games would have tutorials placed in a predetermined envirnment and once they pass it, the tutorial will send them back to the main menu. But that's my idea of a tutorial.

 

[Blodge]

What requirements? This is a REALLY bloated way of saying maybe... Couldn't you just have answered every question with "We'll see"? No clue what you're doing as usual, great QnA

I'm going to guess the requirement will be "Whatever prevents large ships from becoming so under-powered that no-one wants to build them" .
I agree most of this QA is a bit vague though, apart from the answer to the tutorial question.
I presume Schema will be able to give better thought out answers on the long-term future of the game once he's finished the mechanics of the construction aspects.

 

[Raisinbat]

They are testing a linear model. If that doesn't work they will test an exponential model.

I don't understand how is that an unacceptable response to the question that was asked. Particularly if it's the truth.

The problem is how you quantify "Don't Work", which has also been the problem with everything else they do; they never specify, or flat out dont know, what the system is supposed to accomplish so things just float around in indecision limbo forever until they lose interest and patch the system out entirely.

some examples:

• If ship A is 100x the size of ship B, and A is an average PvP design, ship B should never be able to penetrate A's armor in one hit.
• A beam weapon should be 10x larger than a cannon weapon to achieve the same penetration against armor

You know, something quantifyable you can actually test for during implementation.

 

[Zoolimar]

I can't see how a linear model could work.

Weapon power scales with mass.
Armour thickness scales as power 2/3 with mass.

So unless the point is for armour to be irrelevant as direct defence on bigger ships it probably won't work. Spaced armour and some skinning to counter very small ships will be useful but anything in the same weight range would just plough through armour like it isn't there at all.

 

[Raisinbat]

I can't see how a linear model could work.

Weapon power scales with mass.
Armour thickness scales as power 2/3 with mass.

So unless the point is for armour to be irrelevant as direct defence on bigger ships it probably won't work. Spaced armour and some skinning to counter very small ships will be useful but anything in the same weight range would just plough through armour like it isn't there at all.

The problem isn't armor, it's penetration depth; ships can pile all of their dps into a single block thick hole. Total armor HP scales the same as DPS, giving exponential HP to armor just creates a new problem armored ships are obnoxiously durable.

To fix it:

• give higher damage weapons wider area of impact so the depth of the shot becomes logarithmic
• stop output stacking by adding a defense value to armor increased by a passive system like shield rechargers, but instead of recharging they reduce the damage of all projectiles/missiles/beams hitting your ship by a flat amount per block, like 3. Only applies once per projectile.

 

[Zoolimar]

The problem isn't armor, it's penetration depth; ships can pile all of their dps into a single block thick hole. Total armor HP scales the same as DPS, giving exponential HP to armor just creates a new problem armored ships are obnoxiously durable.

You said it yourself. You can't pile up armour at a single point. Even using tricks with sloped armour and partial armouring just adds a coefficient to your armour thickness but doesn't remove the inherent difference in scaling speed. And at larger sizes the difference will be very big.

give higher damage weapons wider area of impact so the depth of the shot becomes logarithmic

That has the same result as non-linear scaling of armour HP just makes it work from the other end.

stop output stacking by adding a defense value to armor increased by a passive system like shield rechargers, but instead of recharging they reduce the damage of all projectiles/missiles/beams hitting your ship by a flat amount per block, like 3. Only applies once per projectile.

Won't it be easier to just move it to armour properties? Something like instead of having 250-5000-12 HP or whatever each armour block has 4 HP but you need to deal different amount of damage to remove 1 HP from different armour blocks and otherwise they would just ignore it.

For example let's say Advanced Armour needs 1000 damage to be actually, well, damaged. Anything less and it just shrugs it off.

The flat reduction is more dangerous due to the fact that it shafts the smaller ships hard. Even harder than non-linear armour scaling, because unlike with armour you can't whittle the target down.

 

[Raisinbat]

That has the same result as non-linear scaling of armour HP just makes it work from the other end.

No because the DPS doesn't go up. There is currently no problem with total ship HP but if exponential armor HP is implemented ships will have millions of times more HP. You are very rarely going to kill a ship by penetrating its armor once, any halfbaked pilot knows to roll your ship to prevent multiple shots going into the same hole, so if the amount of damage you need to get through armor is raised by such a huge amount, you'd never kill anything.

This also avoids losing the damage, it's just going into a ton of armor instead of easily getting into systems.

Won't it be easier to just move it to armour properties? Something like instead of having 250-5000-12 HP or whatever each armour block has 4 HP but you need to deal different amount of damage to remove 1 HP from different armour blocks and otherwise they would just ignore it.

This wouldn't scale. 1.0 you put 20 outputs of 5k damage each right behind each other and that combined shot can go through 3-400 blocks on most builds. Raising the damage required for a block by X just makes you waffle the outputs at 5000+x. It would also make small fighters extremely dificult to deal with.

The flat reduction is more dangerous due to the fact that it shafts the smaller ships hard. Even harder than non-linear armour scaling, because unlike with armour you can't whittle the target down.

You mean this would shaft CAN/CAN fighters hard, but in return we could actually see the rise of dedicated bombers armed with alpha weapons for piercing armor. It would also give fighters a HUGE advantage in survivability because currently weapons that are good against fighters are perfectly fine against other huge ships. This would require huge ships to have dedicated anti-huge-ship guns that would be slow firing and terrible at dealing with fighters so you could no longer dedicate your entire loadout to weapons effective against fighters if you also want to fight cruisers.

Sure a 5mass trashdrone will never be able to damage a 500.000 mass cruiser, but why should it be able to? Fuck gameplay communism, ships don't need to be equal.

It would also let schine raise the damage of small weapons so they're relatively stronger which would help fighter gameplay since accuracy sucks so much when dogfighting, raising DPS for small weapon groups while cutting their max range would make it much easier to kill other fighters and get rid of OP sniper drones.

 

[Zoolimar]

You mean this would shaft CAN/CAN fighters hard, but in return we could actually see the rise of dedicated bombers armed with alpha weapons for piercing armor. It would also give fighters a HUGE advantage in survivability because currently weapons that are good against fighters are perfectly fine against other huge ships.

It would be good if you actually could customize weapons so much. Say if you could cut range below standard for additional damage and so on.

 

[MacThule]

It would be good if you actually could customize weapons so much. Say if you could cut range below standard for additional damage and so on.

There may be a good chamber type suggestion in this...

 

[Zoolimar]

There may be a good chamber type suggestion in this...

Please no. It would be one of the most horrible things.

 

[HerrColonel]

There may be a good chamber type suggestion in this...

Not that I dislike this suggestion. But bind it to the reactor chambers systems does not seems appealing because it gets more costy if you operate with a high power regen for the exact same effect. That's the whole flaw of chambers if you ask me, but I'm def not the one with the most knowledge on 2.0 reactors.
That kind of effect should be tied with how you build the weapon. But just opinion

 

[Raisinbat]

Not that I dislike this suggestion. But bind it to the reactor chambers systems does not seems appealing because it gets more costy if you operate with a high power regen for the exact same effect. That's the whole flaw of chambers if you ask me, but I'm def not the one with the most knowledge on 2.0 reactors.
That kind of effect should be tied with how you build the weapon. But just opinion

This.

That would also make it apply to all weapons on the ship, not just the "bomber" weapon, but worse it's a tradeoff that still costs a huge investment, since it requires you to give up other buffs; a major flaw with the reactor system. You literally can never expand it to include new functionality because interacting with any new system comes at the expense of old ones. It also means a ship can be optimized for mining, transport or any non combat function but since the thing that would define them are the chambers they can dedicate just as much mass to weapons armor and shielding, or maybe slightly less if you count the mining systems/cargo.

 

[Kiithnaras]

A: We would like to try a linear model first, but if we see that it won’t fit our requirements, we will likely switch to an exponential one. - schema

I would actually strongly advise an inverse quadratic relationship (neither exponential nor linear); for a given increase in the total kinetic energy of a projectile, said projectile tends to penetrate through more of the same material by a factor roughly equivalent to the square root of that increase. Put more simply, in order to go through twice the armor, a projectile needs four times the energy. For three times the armor, nine times the energy, and so forth.

 

[Zoolimar]

Put more simply, in order to go through twice the armor, a projectile needs four times the energy. For three times the armor, nine times the energy, and so forth.

That was a case in previous version of weapons, no? Not with that exact formula but bigger weapons were worse at penetrating targets due to loss of damage on each penetrated block, no matter what the block was. Which lead to pillow like armour where girders or other light and cheap blocks were stacked in 20-40 layers on top of a single layer of advanced armour.

It also lead to people splitting their guns in dozens or even hundreds of outputs each with enough power to penetrate exactly 1 block of advanced armour and then layering them behind each other. This way they would hit after one another vaporising the target. As you got penalties for grouping weapons on a single computer that meant you needed to move these weapons to separate computers and either use logical controls to fire them or an AI turret. AI turrets of course were better.

As a result we got turret AIs with shitton of outputs on each turret. With multiple turrets per ship.

 

[MacThule]

That was a case in previous version of weapons, no? Not with that exact formula but bigger weapons were worse at penetrating targets due to loss of damage on each penetrated block, no matter what the block was. Which lead to pillow like armour where girders or other light and cheap blocks were stacked in 20-40 layers on top of a single layer of advanced armour.

It also lead to people splitting their guns in dozens or even hundreds of outputs each with enough power to penetrate exactly 1 block of advanced armour and then layering them behind each other. This way they would hit after one another vaporising the target. As you got penalties for grouping weapons on a single computer that meant you needed to move these weapons to separate computers and either use logical controls to fire them or an AI turret. AI turrets of course were better.

As a result we got turret AIs with shitton of outputs on each turret. With multiple turrets per ship.

Yeah, they might be able to pull it off it only affected armor and if they came up with a way to discourage sequenced turrets... but it may just be that armor isn't an ideal feature for "stopping shots" that way.

The dialogue around armor keeps coming back around to that, but Armor in most games I am familiar with plays a role of damage reduction rather than damage prevention.

Shields stop shots already, we don't really need to defensive systems performing the same role, particularly if getting armor to do that job requires twisting the whole game out whack (again).

 

[Zoolimar]

Yeah, they might be able to pull it off it only affected armor and if they came up with a way to discourage sequenced turrets... but it may just be that armor isn't an ideal feature for "stopping shots" that way.

It's pretty easy. Remove the binary check "shot through-not shot through" and add an incoming damage division dependent on the same data - armour thickness in the place that is hit.
So that you will get something like "Resulting Damage = Incoming Damage / (X*(Armour Thickness^2))

I think it should be power 2 for the penetration to be the same in percentage to the ship mass/size. But you could check it with school level math if I'm mistaken. X is just a flat modifier to get the desired result.

Using less than power 2 would just slow down armour irrelevance with size and using more than 2 would encourage big ships to rely more on armour instead of shields.

Anyway, with such a setup you want big enough gun that its damage will be able to penetrate armour and kill more than a few blocks. Ideally as big as you can fit if enemy is some kind of monitor type ship. Making your ship evenly armoured would make you also evenly vulnerable and you would probably want to instead have thicker bulkheads in critical places.

Shields stop shots already, we don't really need to defensive systems performing the same role, particularly if getting armor to do that job requires twisting the whole game out whack (again).

Frankly i don't like how shields work. They are just there and then they are not. I think I already described once a Warhammer like variant where shields instead of recharge have reboot. As in after they are shot down they don't try to slowly stand back up (or not if the ship is still under fire) but instead start a reboot cycle with X length in seconds and after the cycle complete they come back up at full strength (minus the damage of course).

To balance possibility of shields with very fast reboot make scaling beyond a balance point have diminishing returns.

 

[Qweesdy]

Yaaaa.... I started playing two and a half weeks ago and I did notice it was very hard when I first spawned in. There a very steep learning curve.

I also noticed that it was very hard to figure things out when I first started playing. I had to search through forum posts and try different things, and hope someone somewhere had provided good advice, or figured out and described the game mechanics and its formulas. Some parts of the game (manufacturing, logic) I completely ignored for about a month.

Of course I started playing years before "power 2.0" was being considered. As far as I can tell, "power 2.0" hasn't made it harder to learn - the game has always been hard to learn.

Sure, if you're lucky and the wiki and/or in-game tutorials happen to be up-to-date it'd makes things easier; but every piece of the game has been redesigned and replaced at least 3 times since I started playing and nothing is ever up-to-date for long. I think that (too much obsolete information floating around to confuse people, rather than no information) might be the only thing that's actually is making it harder to start now than it used to be.