The Quickfire Initiative: Rebalancing StarMade.

[SchnellBier]

Maybe you guys enjoy blockspamming 30+ layers of armor, but fact is; game assets, almost all community content, and casual players do not build to this codex.

This config is fine for MP-servers that want to play like this, but Forcing it on the entire community (singleplayer included), is BS.

I do not doubt the quality or intention.
The intention is clear, it is all about elite hardcore Pvp...

I recall reading something about hopes that the current code-limits will be lifted so that more than 32 layers of armer are possible.

This was not just "balancing", everything has been re-written to fit accordingly to the elite PvP agenda (of this small closed group), and as far as I can tell; balance issues are still prevalent.

... and it is a very restrictive config, it's that simple.

~ transmission end ~

You have a really confusing mindset.
Do you think we want small npc ships with 30+ layers of armor in front? Do you think it is possible to make armor work without putting armor on a ship? Do you think buffing thin armor layers wouldn't make small ships unbearable tanky?

Your posts don't make any sense. If you want to tank with armor you need armor. If you want to fill your ship with systems then do it but as soon as your shield breaks people will rip through all your systems in no time. That is called shield tanking and armor tanking. That is not a high and mighty pvp concept, just general ship building concepts. Also I'm not sure why you want to limit balanced combat only to pvp. At some point pve will happen in starmade and you want interesting fights and a variety of ships there.

Out of your statement I read that you want that only shield tanking is viable (or killing small ship combat entirely) which makes me think you want to downgrade and restrict building options we opened back up which will also work on pve ships.

Your so called 'pvp agenda' you accuse us of is in reality a combat agenda and combat is a essential part of starmade since a very long time. Even without other players you can fight pirates and npcs. If fights are not interesting there is no reason for that whole feature and we could simply downgrade starmade to a ship voxel editor.

 

[GnomeKing]

Thanks for the work and updates StarMade team !

 

[klawxx]

Thanks everyone.

I read the document and it was exactly what I was looking for.

One final question, tho, regarding to properly activating this config system:
I've heard (read actually) somewhere that there are some issues where the wrong (vanilla) values are kept when using this QF config. Whats the proper way to start using it and are there any expected issues by keep switching between the latest prod and QF versions of the game?

 

[Zoolimar]

When you say: "stabilizers that must be placed close don't seem to have any point to their existence", then offer an alternative to the original idea, What exactly is there to take out of context?

The fact that thread you are dragging out was made in hope of Schine making changes that are not possible to do through a simple config edit. And QF, for the most part, was just config edits. There were 2 changes made by Schema - adding new armour formula that uses all the checks and values from the old one, and optimising missile explosions which is not even a combat balance change.

Regardless of what you say here, you saw and pointed out a legitimate problem with that idea and even offered a counter/alteration to it. ...and rightfully so, as you ultimately were correct in your assessment; stabilizers do not have a point now. There were other ways to fix this system but the team settled on this one rather short-sighted resolution. ...one that Schine does not agree with.

Yes, and? They never had a point. People pretty fast showed what results stab distance gives. Which resulted in a lot of additions on top of it. Which, frankly, I think was a waste of time. I still think that in no iteration did stabs ever serve any good purpose. With which other people disagree. Including you.

 

[Terramex]

It is not about Quickfire "or anything other" being good or bad.

It is about a player or a group of players or even the game creator saying. From now on you have to do things like this and that that you were doing is no longer allowed. Whether you liked doing that or not has no value to me/us YOU will now do it this way because I/WE say so. No choice just accept it or be gone like sooo many other things in the development of StarMade. Little wonder practically nobody plays this game anymore.

Someone please counter with the this game is still in ALPHA mother of all arguments. Since no debate is complete without that being smacked around a few times.

Oh yeah and the this or a future update is going to fix everything so we have no need for you. After full release we will get all the players we need. Right now you are just an ungrateful person who is playing a free to play game that is still in development.

 

[Crashmaster]

I think the current stab iteration has one benefit; it increases the combat profile of the reactor assembly but also allows you to essentially split the reactor assembly into two discrete parts if needed to fit some designs.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Dr. Whammy Beams are currently bugged against armor. They sometimes do much much much higher damage than they are supposed to, the reason is currently unknown (I don't have time to test atm). It's super random, so 1 tick might do normal damage, and the next 10 do stupidly overkill damage. From what I can tell this doesn't apply to normal system blocks. That could explain why armor feels "useless" in your test. Try a cannon based weapon with the same block count, it'll probably destroy less blocks (I say probably, because the bug doesn't occur all the time).

Regarding beams: Are you sure it's a bug?

The reason I ask is because all my tests with beams produce consistent results so I was under the impression that they are working as intended. If I had to make a guess as to why they are so effective vs armor, I'd say it likely happens when the first beam tick destroys a block layer; thinning the armor and allowing subsequent tics to deal more and more damage, as overall damage reduction is lowered with each layer that is lost. This happens with all beam combos, powerful enough to defeat the first layer. The only bug-like issues I saw with beams were as follows.
- Sector changes during a fight sometimes negate all damage for a beam tick. The larger sectors in QF's configs help with this somewhat.
- Releasing the trigger during a beam burst will negate all damage for a tick and sometimes, the rest of the burst.
- Sweeping the beam across the target will result in the loss of the penetrating effects I described above.
What is your interpretation of this? Do your tests show similar?

My tests with cannons showed that a significantly powerful shot (usually CM) can defeat armor up to a certain thickness; after which, it becomes extremely ineffective; to the point where BM or missiles are the better option. To be fair, they did nerf CM so I suppose that's to be expected somewhat. I tried all other combos; in different ratios. In the end, at my scale, I saw no real incentive to use anything besides CM or BM; with a preference for BM. Are there other combos you recommend?

As always, thank you for being civil and constructive. You are always a big help and I appreciate that.

Smaller ships are naturally more maneuverable, meaning it's inherently going to be harder to land a hit. Do you really want corvette/FAC or fighter battles to take an hour because defenses and 'damage sponge scales' are scaled perfectly to how they work with face-tanky capital ships? Also from the looks of it you're mostly complaining about /M weapons, which aren't that easy to hit another small craft with in the first place. If those were nerfed, not only would they be pretty useless, but there would be no counter to small ships that are basically giant armor blobs with minimal systems except for having a bigger ship. Now that would encourage gigantism ._.

Regarding maneuverability; At my scale (25K mass and below) I find maneuverability is at best, "tolerable". Anything above that scale starts to become unusable for me unless I use turrets and is still annoyingly slow. If I use armor at this scale, I lose even more speed and maneuverability. If I add thrust to compensate, it eats up all my power; forcing me to nerf my weapons (so I can't effectively penetrate armor with anything besides CM/BM) and shields (so they barely charge at all), while adding more mass, which negates the purpose of adding thrust in the first place. Setting thrust to low priority had did not help the situation. So I just forego the armor in favor of speed and turn rate.

Regarding CM/BM; I have ZERO complaints about these systems and I would never suggest nerfing them. My concern is that other weapons feel quite underwhelming in comparison. I've found no use for C, CC, B or BC, as they fail against all but the thinnest armor and tend to result in that 30 minute battle you just mentioned. CB and BB are decent vs armor but I find them ineffective against heavy shield regen due to low ROF (CB), damage falloff (BB). Others may have different results but in terms of the combos I can most effectively use at my scale, it always comes back to BM and sometimes, CM.

Do you have a different recommendation for ships at a smaller scale?

Also, thank you, as well for keeping this civil and constructive.

As i said earlier, you ARE comparing ships based on looks. NOT SYSTEMS. To compare two ships they have to have the same SYSTEMS. Stop comparing based on volume. Volume is worth nothing in starmade. Decoration blocks and hull are worth little to no mass on your ship and unless you have your ship made out of 60% of interiors it won't perform so badly that you cannot win vs someone not doing any interiors. IT CAN EVEN BE USED AT YOUR ADVANTAGES as several users and more pvp players did and proved it. And don't tell me that minimalist interiors are not realistic. Today's submarines are very minimalists. You could look at the u-boats plans online if you want to get some idea how minimalistic interiors can be. They even share beds and sleep in shifts to gain space.

This whole rp ship vs pvp ship is nonsense. This is just the Pygmalion effect going over and over and the people believing it spreading even further the misinformation. I'm not a pvp player, i do not play enough to consider myself one however i want my ships to be the bests engineered ones. As such i take time, trials and errors to get the best of my ships. Looks is part of it. If you do not want your ship to be on par with people that build with efficiency in mind then it's not a problem. It is fine. But do NOT call out others if you do not want to. It just make it look like you're asking for YOUR build style to be the meta. I know from the little discussion we had on our discord that you are not that stubborn and can understand when you care to listen compared to some others. So please try to listen before doing a tsonak and rejecting any sort of changes. But from your message i guess you made already your choice regarding anything. Might as well tell me why you even bother coming here if you do not care to listen to anyone besides starting a war against qf ? Besides you four i'm having some good feedback on the starmade discord server concerning qf changes.

Copy of QF notes

Quickfire Systems Changes- Full summary and notes - First of all, this part won’t include a full list of all the changes made by the QF team - the reason being that it is impossible to describe in detail every change, as almost every aspect of the game changed. Plus, there is no point going ove...

docs.google.com

At the end of the document are some general guidelines to build with intended qf configs. Please note that eveything is subject to context. For example high rof weapons are not good against armor (and so some claim that they are useless) but they are good if you fight non-heavy armored ships. On the contrary if you use low rof weapons you'll be good against armor. But said weapons are much easier to dodge due to low fire rate. And so it's better to use light armored ships to dodge more easily.
Again, QF configs encourage specialized ships, which enhance even more the chamber system. And so there is no jack of all trade ships good in every aspects. Everything turning in circles.

Why wouldn't you be able to peacefully build your ships in solo ? Fleets and balance doesn't prevent you from doing so.
If you just want to build, disable npc's and pirates then build. If you want survival use the fleets functionnality, adapt yourself to your ennemy or just build big enough so that you win vs npc's.

If you know anything about a BUG you would be of nice help to fill out a bug report and help track down this issue. If not then this is not relevant to the balance of the game. Beams were not that bugged when we set up the numbers for them. Now they're even worse.

Maybe you don't but actually some people here do. THAT'S CRAZY RIGHT ? I've even met people whoose smallest ships are 300k mass. Let me take an example. Your friend, troll82 here, do not build anything smaller than several hundreds of thousands of mass. And he's not alone. So i guess, because you don't like this way of building you disaproove their ships too ? Or is that just so you can tackle a bit QF so you take anything you can get ?

Anyway. Why armor needs to be so thick has been explained countless times. And it has been done so that SMALL SHIPS some people complain about here can be balanced. Or y'know. I can make it so that armor blocks are the equivalent of 5 but with 5 times the mass and so he cannot even consider putting armor on his beloved ships because too damn heavy. Welp, your choice. We tested both and people complais about both. So we keep the one giving more freedom.

Regarding looks: Actually no. ...and Zoolimar , please take note of this as well, since it relates to our exchange on stabilizer distance. My concern is block spam vs open interiors and the notable performance diference between the two. I just gave you guys an example of a Pathfinder with open space and one filled with systems. There is no comparison between the two in terms of power and performance. Schine set out to reduce the number of system blocks needed to make a ship run effectively. Under QF, we need far more system blocks than ever before, just to move/turn a ship at a reasonable speed and make a dent in armor. You can argue that above a certain size, open space is of defensive benefit but provided the ship isn't moving/handling like a brick, more systems is more systems; which by and large, means, larger shield buffer and better guns. i.e.; a Pathfinder that gives love taps and can barely take 'em vs a Pathfinder that has double the shields and hits like a truck with similar maneuverability.

Regarding submarines: Have you ever served on a submarine Scypio ? No offense but I have and you don't seem to have a realistic understanding of what they are like. Space is limited but it's not like being in a tank. We can move around in there and other than the reactor and the generators, there were no impassable solid chunks of system like what this config promotes. Just keep your head low so you don't hit it on a pipe and you'll be fine.

Regarding RP vs PVP vs PVE: Like others in the past, you're so intent on trying to "class" me that you completely missed the point. ...which is, that you've focused so heavily on combat engineering that players now have to build a certain way. Regardless of what your PVP consituents may tell you, that is not everyone's idea of "fun". and as has been mentioned before, it is the polar opposite of what Schine intended. Despite what you believe, I was originally onboard with your efforts but now, you're basically telling us; "META is all that matters. Build your systems exactly like this and use only these weapons and only these tactics." Believe it or not, I don't want my ships' shapes, sizes or system layouts to be META. What I want is for there to not be a META at all; as METAS are the exact opposite of game balance and build diversity.

Think about that for a second before assuming that I simply hate PVP or Quickfire.

Bottom line; If you work to create a setup that is usable by virtually anyone in virtually any way, I will support you. If you try to force everyone to build/play in one specific way; to the exclusion of all others while using "the clique" as your justification, I will not support you. My position on this matter really is that simple.

 

[Tsnonak]

You have a really confusing mindset.
Do you think we want small npc ships with 30+ layers of armor in front? Do you think it is possible to make armor work without putting armor on a ship? Do you think buffing thin armor layers wouldn't make small ships unbearable tanky?

Your posts don't make any sense. If you want to tank with armor you need armor. If you want to fill your ship with systems then do it but as soon as your shield breaks people will rip through all your systems in no time. That is called shield tanking and armor tanking. That is not a high and mighty pvp concept, just general ship building concepts. Also I'm not sure why you want to limit balanced combat only to pvp. At some point pve will happen in starmade and you want interesting fights and a variety of ships there.

Out of your statement I read that you want that only shield tanking is viable (or killing small ship combat entirely) which makes me think you want to downgrade and restrict building options we opened back up which will also work on pve ships.

Your so called 'pvp agenda' you accuse us of is in reality a combat agenda and combat is a essential part of starmade since a very long time. Even without other players you can fight pirates and npcs. If fights are not interesting there is no reason for that whole feature and we could simply downgrade starmade to a ship voxel editor.

This post is a perfect display of: Most Effective Tactic Available "distraction" posting.
Your post has absolutely nothing to do with what I said, no statements have been made regarding any of the arguments you present.
Either you did not understand a single word, or you are META posting... typical and simple.

It would be nice if this "Initiative" would stop arguing and distracting from "feedback" not in-line with thier views.
Fact is; every bit of feedback not in compliance with the views of "QF", has been denied.
This behavior ceates the "barrier", and well... "we can only move forward by behaving as adults".

I understand the intention; to improve combat, however, the extreme restrictions placed on systems revolve around PvP-combat and the battle to fix the "META", there is no denying that.
I do not doubt that this Config is a good starting-point to balance PvP-combat, however, the extreme restrictions on systems punish players not interested in elite PvP / Faction warefare, (not just singleplayer, this also includes average players young and old, looking for a little fun on public MP-servers, and private-servers).

Which basically leads to the final questions:

Were such extreme measures even really necessary and was it really a good idea to force it on the entire community?

Consider the following scenario...
I will limit this to one prime-example to keep it short, one that has been brought up on several occasions and not only by myself...
Thrusters:
If players want to galavant through the universe in a 1-km long freighter at top speed on a privat-server or singleplayer, should this Combat-Config prevent it?

I don't think so, but thats just my opinion.
It doesn't really matter, everything is debatable and the config has already been released...



"As the modding possiblities open up to us, servers and single-players will have the choice of what mods and configs to use."
I have taken the first step in this direction with my '"vanilla-block-extension" and "customBlockBehaviorConfig".
As a server-admin; I would like to have a choice.


So, it would be nice to stop the childish hostilities, and META distraction posting, as I have no interest in fruitless discussions.
This was my way of saying "good job", (even though systems are nerfed to hell & balance issues are still prevelent).

... bet nobody noticed.

 

[Scypio]

One final question, tho, regarding to properly activating this config system:
I've heard (read actually) somewhere that there are some issues where the wrong (vanilla) values are kept when using this QF config. Whats the proper way to start using it and are there any expected issues by keep switching between the latest prod and QF versions of the game?

The best way is going to our github available on the first page or here :

GitHub - alterintel/Quickfire: Settings for Starmade Quickfire Testing Server

Settings for Starmade Quickfire Testing Server. Contribute to alterintel/Quickfire development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Then downloas the server.cfg + all of the files in data/config and overwrite the existing ones (do backup, just in case).

There may be some things to do with the chambers hash but i'm sorry i don't know the full manipulation to do so.

And then, well i can only suggest you to start anew. And the issue by switching versions is that numbers might change. For example a chamber using different rc costs and so on... The best should be to always keep up to date with the latest version.

The reason I ask is because all my tests with beams produce consistent results so I was under the impression that they are working as intende

They are consistent in their inconsistency. ;-)
If that's even a word. My guess with beams is that the first tick destroys a block and the second ticks has its hit registered against a destroyed block. Which means no armor formula for the poor blocks affected by the next tick. But that's a blind guess and only schema can tell for sure.

Regarding CM/BM; I have ZERO complaints about these systems and I would never suggest nerfing them. My concern is that other weapons feel quite underwhelming in comparison. I've found no use for C, CC, B or BC, as they fail against all but the thinnest armor and tend to result in that 30 minute battle you just mentioned. CB and BB are decent vs armor but I find them ineffective against heavy shield regen due to low ROF (CB), damage falloff (BB). Others may have different results but in terms of the combos I can most effectively use at my scale, it always comes back to BM and sometimes, CM.

Do you have a different recommendation for ships at a smaller scale?

I agree that i struggled to find good behavior and situations for each weapons. And i agree that we could change for better some combos because they are very similar. I have heard many suggestions but none seems interesting and/or feasible without coding from schema. If you have some i'm more than happy to hear that out.
However, theses weapons are good if you fight non armored targets. Everyone uses plenty of armor because it's new and all but you can keep the armor light and invests in more thrusters and power for them to dodge. That's where high rof weapons can more easily catch them and destroy them. Then there is the missile slave that is the lowest range variant and absolutely destroys everything. That's intended. Lowest range weapons so a lot of risks to use but then high rewards.

 

[Scypio]

Regarding submarines: Have you ever served on a submarine @Scypio ? No offense but I have and you don't seem to have a realistic understanding of what they are like. Space is limited but it's not like being in a tank. We can move around in there and other than the reactor and the generators, there were no impassable solid chunks of system like what this config promotes

But you don't have crazy large open bridge like most sci fy has. Which is normal, a small crampy space is no good for filming scenes and not pleasing to the eye. I haven't served on submarines but got the chance to visit old ones that are decommissionned. I know exactly how it looks like. There is some sort of comfort but to a certain extent. Because space is scarce. You see what i mean ? There is interiors but not too much. ;-)

Regarding maneuverability; At my scale (25K mass and below) I find maneuverability is at best, "tolerable".

Can you define "tolerable" ? Because i find very much flying tolerable since our changes to make ships feel way less sluggish. They might not move fast but they don't feel so.

Regarding looks: Actually no. ...and @Zoolimar , please take note of this as well, since it relates to our exchange on stabilizer distance. My concern is block spam vs open interiors and the notable performance diference between the two. I just gave you guys an example of a Pathfinder with open space and one filled with systems. There is no comparison between the two in terms of power and performance. Schine set out to reduce the number of system blocks needed to make a ship run effectively. Under QF, we need far more system blocks than ever before, just to move/turn a ship at a reasonable speed and make a dent in armor. You can argue that above a certain size, open space is of defensive benefit but provided the ship isn't moving/handling like a brick, more systems is more systems; which by and large, means, larger shield buffer and better guns. i.e.; a Pathfinder that gives love taps and can barely take 'em vs a Pathfinder that has double the shields and hits like a truck with similar maneuverability.

The thing is : it didn't worked. Players built spaghetti ships, made out of 99% of air. Exactly what you get if you want to force interiors. If not then they'll build thin sticks. Or even better, floaty things that are not atrached in any ways.
You cannot force a player to put internal space if he has no benefits in doing so. Your savior will be the crew system, if done right.
What qf did was just balance systems together. Reducing the number of systems needed to function doesn't stop you from putting more in your ship. And so your ship outperforms even more. All of that doesn't work and the configs before qf proved it well enough imo.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

They are consistent in their inconsistency. ;-)
If that's even a word. My guess with beams is that the first tick destroys a block and the second ticks has its hit registered against a destroyed block. Which means no armor formula for the poor blocks affected by the next tick. But that's a blind guess and only schema can tell for sure.

That's not what I observe. Adv. armor has low hitpoints per block. Just as you can wear away a single block with a CC over time, if you use a powerful enough beam weapon, you can overcome the armor's damage resistance to eliminate the first block's hitpoints. The first block layer breaks in the first tick. The second tick now has less armor resistance to deal with so it does more hitpoint damage to the next block layer(s). The process repeats; with each subsequent tick doing the same high damage to an increasingly thin and decreasingly resistant armor. Visually, the effect looks like a beam struggling to penetrate the first layer, but ultimately defeating it and then releasing a floodgate of damage (over subsequent ticks) that gets increasingly violent as the remaining layers cease to offer sufficient protection to resist the already high-damage beam ticks. The more ticks; the more severe the effect. This is consistently reproduceable in all my tests. Even the bug-like effects I previously mentioned (sector changes, for example) are readily observable and even predictable.

I agree that i struggled to find good behavior and situations for each weapons. And i agree that we could change for better some combos because they are very similar. I have heard many suggestions but none seems interesting and/or feasible without coding from schema. If you have some i'm more than happy to hear that out.
However, theses weapons are good if you fight non armored targets. Everyone uses plenty of armor because it's new and all but you can keep the armor light and invests in more thrusters and power for them to dodge. That's where high rof weapons can more easily catch them and destroy them. Then there is the missile slave that is the lowest range variant and absolutely destroys everything. That's intended. Lowest range weapons so a lot of risks to use but then high rewards.

I don't anticipate anyone running armor so thin that C, CC, B, BC can work well against it. Even my light-armor setups don't allow for that. There simply is no purpose for these weapons at the moment. Meanwhile BB and CB are only average at defeating thick armor and are negated by a target's shield regen between shots. If you're looking for a solution, you might want to consider the following options.
- increasing the duration that shields stop charging under fire so that CB and BB can actually hit the armor with the shields down.
- raising the overall damage of these other weapons so they can better compete with BM/CM.
- remove acid damage cones from weapons with a high rate of fire (if you haven't done so already).
- make the other weapons ignore part (but never all) of the damage resistance of armor. Make this damage-resist-ignore function scale with the percentage of secondary weapon system blocks up to a reasonable maximum.

But you don't have crazy large open bridge like most sci fy has. Which is normal, a small crampy space is no good for filming scenes and not pleasing to the eye. I haven't served on submarines but got the chance to visit old ones that are decommissionned. I know exactly how it looks like. There is some sort of comfort but to a certain extent. Because space is scarce. You see what i mean ? There is interiors but not too much. ;-)

Actually, on a 688 class submarine, the "bridge" (which we call "control" or simply "the con") extends the entire width of the upper deck of the ship and has plenty of room to house the captain, the navigation officer, the navigation team , the chief of the watch, the diving officer of the watch, the fathometer operator, the weapons officer, the fire control team, any mission specalists and several others as needed. We were always able to walk around with no issues. 688s are larger than "U-boats" (ironically the about same length as my pathfinder) but then again, so are their weapons and weapon control systems. Let's not waste time debating the tours you took of units that have only a basic similarity to a modern day or near-future warship. The fact is; this was my day job at one point in my life and I can tell you from experience that the two are more different than you think.

Can you define "tolerable" ? Because i find very much flying tolerable since our changes to make ships feel way less sluggish. They might not move fast but they don't feel so.

Sure.

By tolerable, I mean a ship that doesn't have a slow speed or turn rate and doesn't have to use speed/turn chambers to compensate for what is essentially a thrust/maneuverability nerf. The current configs make this much harder to achieve than ever before. At only 400 mass, even my fighters have taken a hit on this.

The thing is : it didn't worked. Players built spaghetti ships, made out of 99% of air. Exactly what you get if you want to force interiors. If not then they'll build thin sticks. Or even better, floaty things that are not atrached in any ways.
You cannot force a player to put internal space if he has no benefits in doing so. Your savior will be the crew system, if done right.
What qf did was just balance systems together. Reducing the number of systems needed to function doesn't stop you from putting more in your ship. And so your ship outperforms even more. All of that doesn't work and the configs before qf proved it well enough imo.

This is where you are missing my point. I'm not proposing that we "force" open space. I personally don't care if you use it or not. What I want is for your combat effectiveness (should someone attack you) to not be contingent upon cramming systems (block spam) into every nook and cranny of your ship, or exploits like islande-ships or spaghetti ships.

 

[SchnellBier]

This post is a perfect display of: Most Effective Tactic Available "distraction" posting.
Your post has absolutely nothing to do with what I said, no statements have been made regarding any of the arguments you present.
Either you did not understand a single word, or you are META posting... typical and simple.

It would be nice if this "Initiative" would stop arguing and distracting from "feedback" not in-line with thier views.
Fact is; every bit of feedback not in compliance with the views of "QF", has been denied.
This behavior ceates the "barrier", and well... "we can only move forward by behaving as adults".

I understand the intention; to improve combat, however, the extreme restrictions placed on systems revolve around PvP-combat and the battle to fix the "META", there is no denying that.
I do not doubt that this Config is a good starting-point to balance PvP-combat, however, the extreme restrictions on systems punish players not interested in elite PvP / Faction warefare, (not just singleplayer, this also includes average players young and old, looking for a little fun on public MP-servers, and private-servers).

Which basically leads to the final questions:

Were such extreme measures even really necessary and was it really a good idea to force it on the entire community?

Consider the following scenario...
I will limit this to one prime-example to keep it short, one that has been brought up on several occasions and not only by myself...
Thrusters:
If players want to galavant through the universe in a 1-km long freighter at top speed on a privat-server or singleplayer, should this Combat-Config prevent it?

I don't think so, but thats just my opinion.
It doesn't really matter, everything is debatable and the config has already been released...



"As the modding possiblities open up to us, servers and single-players will have the choice of what mods and configs to use."
I have taken the first step in this direction with my '"vanilla-block-extension" and "customBlockBehaviorConfig".
As a server-admin; I would like to have a choice.


So, it would be nice to stop the childish hostilities, and META distraction posting, as I have no interest in fruitless discussions.
This was my way of saying "good job", (even though systems are nerfed to hell & balance issues are still prevelent).
View attachment 55848
... bet nobody noticed.

As I see it you're distracting from your unlogical argumentation and lack of thought you put into them. I'm not even sure why I'm answering since you will accuse me of distracting again.

And that's why I just directly follow up with the answer to your question about the 1-km long freighter to proof this point:

Yes the config should prevent flying at max speed with a ship like that. And the explanation is easy. Big ships have to be slower than small ships or else they don't have any disadvantages. If you are playing a pirate and at some point npc cargo ships are big and roam the universe how would it feel if you can't follow them with a small agile ship? Would it feel good to never be able to attack a ship somewhere that is fleeing?

Think about it for a moment. The ability to fly top speed makes it impossible to catch up to anything. It destroys any type of engagement possibility so having a variety of speed across different ships is very important.

Even if you have the opinion that this should be possible that is not a good thing to be possible in any scenario where a player purchases a game and expects a game. Imagine the look of disappointment when someone trys to be a space pirate and notices that it's almost impossible to even engage a ship.

Your opinions are selfish and are trying to push your wishlist onto the game without seeing the consequences for all the other players that actually want to play a game at some point.

Also you have a choice by making your own config. Have a nice day.

 

[Tsnonak]

"Yes the config should prevent flying at max speed with a ship like that. And the explanation is easy. Big ships have to be slower than small ships or else they don't have any disadvantages. "

... this is your opinion and it revolves around your theoretical scenario.
... as if Schine is going to release your senario of super NPC freighters.
totally hypothetical bs.wasteoftimepost

You have missed the point.

~ transmission end ~

 

[SchnellBier]

"Yes the config should prevent flying at max speed with a ship like that. And the explanation is easy. Big ships have to be slower than small ships or else they don't have any disadvantages. "

... this is your opinion and it revolves around your theoretical scenario.
... as if Schine is going to release your senario of super NPC freighters.
totally hypothetical bs.wasteoftimepost

You have missed the point.

~ transmission end ~

Seems like you're bad at making points then. Maybe you have non?

 

[Zoolimar]

Regarding looks: Actually no. ...and @Zoolimar , please take note of this as well, since it relates to our exchange on stabilizer distance. My concern is block spam vs open interiors and the notable performance diference between the two. I just gave you guys an example of a Pathfinder with open space and one filled with systems. There is no comparison between the two in terms of power and performance. Schine set out to reduce the number of system blocks needed to make a ship run effectively. Under QF, we need far more system blocks than ever before, just to move/turn a ship at a reasonable speed and make a dent in armor. You can argue that above a certain size, open space is of defensive benefit but provided the ship isn't moving/handling like a brick, more systems is more systems; which by and large, means, larger shield buffer and better guns. i.e.; a Pathfinder that gives love taps and can barely take 'em vs a Pathfinder that has double the shields and hits like a truck with similar maneuverability.

I think that if one of the ships uses 20-30% more resources and mass it understandably will have more power even though it thrusters won't be as effective. That is absolutely normal. And it always will be like this unless you add extremely complex system design where layout and configuration itself could change system performance drastically. This will probably delegate most creative and replica builders to building only shells.

Open space is always a benefit as now not only missiles explode but all weapons have acid damage. Internal bulkheads made out of basic armour and gaps allow to redirect and soak up acid damage. Though in this case beams and high ROF weapons in general have advantage as they will lay multiple shots in the same spot partially or fully negating the effect from such measures.

My main point - You cannot reduce the number of system blocks as long as they are what gives the ship its ability to be, well, a ship. Looking pretty is good and with armour changes you are encouraged to have a proper shell, but ship must be able to fly and do other stuff it is intended for. And for that you need systems. Stabilisers are just another system block to add.

The only way to encourage interiors is a system where ships get decent benefits from them. Right now they mostly can be used as anti-missile defence and much less effective defence against other weapons. Let's hope crew system changes that.

Regarding CM/BM; I have ZERO complaints about these systems and I would never suggest nerfing them. My concern is that other weapons feel quite underwhelming in comparison. I've found no use for C, CC, B or BC, as they fail against all but the thinnest armor and tend to result in that 30 minute battle you just mentioned. CB and BB are decent vs armor but I find them ineffective against heavy shield regen due to low ROF (CB), damage falloff (BB). Others may have different results but in terms of the combos I can most effectively use at my scale, it always comes back to BM and sometimes, CM.

As a balance point we took 10 C outputs at 33% of reactor energy devoted to weapons and around 20% of ship mass in armour. The biggest problem is small ships under 1k mass where each block of armour thickness can swing the results pretty hard. For smallest ships you also hit a point where HP of individual blocks matters greatly.

Mix of C and CC turrets should be one of the best available AMS right now. And B and BC should be good on large ships as sidearms for block damage after armour is broken and to punch down - to shoot down fighters, bombers and the like that are too fast and agile to surely nail with CB.

And yeah long range weapons having lower DPS is absolutely intended. Otherwise in group battles ships will pop with ridiculous ease.

 

[Scypio]

Regarding RP vs PVP vs PVE: Like others in the past, you're so intent on trying to "class" me that you completely missed the point. ...which is, that you've focused so heavily on combat engineering that players now have to build a certain way. Regardless of what your PVP consituents may tell you, that is not everyone's idea of "fun". and as has been mentioned before, it is the polar opposite of what Schine intended. Despite what you believe, I was originally onboard with your efforts but now, you're basically telling us; "META is all that matters. Build your systems exactly like this and use only these weapons and only these tactics." Believe it or not, I don't want my ships' shapes, sizes or system layouts to be META. What I want is for there to not be a META at all; as METAS are the exact opposite of game balance and build diversity.

First thing first, no matter what is claimed, everything follows a META. A RP player will optimize his ship to allow him to build a story between him, his character and the ship. PVP players will optimize their ship to fight other ships. PVE will do the same. It's just that their opponent is a broken AI rather than a player with a functioning brain and ship. Every type of player build to optimize according to their goals, even you. I am sure we can both agree with that. META is not a bad word and it cannot be erased. Everyone wants to optimize whatever they use/have to squeeze out the better of it.
Then i think you misunderstood our intentions. Our guidelines for building in QF are what the title says : guidelines. But nothing stops you from building differently. We just pushed for specialized ships and choices over ships able to do everything. We are merely explaining how to optimize the systems and how it should works separately, for how to build your ship is up to you. You then do what you want with it.
I seriously don't call engineering choosing between thick armor and less thrusts or more thrusts but lighter armor. As of now, i hope there is no meta in our configs but that cannot be found unless tested by a large amount of person. The whole systems have been thoughts with counter to each. Which means the one ahead of another will have the counter. A rock paper scissor kind of mechanic, where the only way to be "meta" is to use a fleet.

Concerning beams : I understand what you say, however that is NOT what we have here. Their damage is way too high for their size and the armor. This can be easily checked by changing the configs and using a single tick beam and shooting twice at the same point. Then use same beam but with two ticks.

I don't anticipate anyone running armor so thin that C, CC, B, BC can work well against it. Even my light-armor setups don't allow for that. There simply is no purpose for these weapons at the moment. Meanwhile BB and CB are only average at defeating thick armor and are negated by a target's shield regen between shots. If you're looking for a solution, you might want to consider the following options.
1 - increasing the duration that shields stop charging under fire so that CB and BB can actually hit the armor with the shields down.
2 - raising the overall damage of these other weapons so they can better compete with BM/CM.
3 - remove acid damage cones from weapons with a high rate of fire (if you haven't done so already).
4 - make the other weapons ignore part (but never all) of the damage resistance of armor. Make this damage-resist-ignore function scale with the percentage of secondary weapon system blocks up to a reasonable maximum.

PS : I just added some numbers to reply to each points more easily.

First, i'm a big fan of current C- on my ships and use them on my ships until bobby using beams is fixed. And i tested them several times against my own ships or ships built by other players. They are pretty fine against armor, i don't know what size of armor you are using and what size of cannons you are using but my guess is that the cannon is just too small or split around. So yes, i expect people to not use too much their armor, unless they go for armor tanks. And in that case i'll take an armor drilling gun or use missiles. At worst theses weapons are relegated to hunting down smaller vessels.

1 - The under fire recharge rate is 100% when you're high in capacity and drops the more you drop your capacity. We could put the regen under fire quite low or even to zero but then it means you just need a small 1 size weapon shooting constantly at your opponent to keep him under fire. Everything concerning the regen under combat means that having a 1 block size turret to keep your opponent under fire is very much worth it. Not really fun to be abused, isn't ?

2 - Theses weapons have good damage overall, it is true that they are kind of bastard weapons with in-between ranges between the low range high dps ones and longest range ones. But as i said, i don't feel like normal cannon is a problem. The only meh weapon is the cannon slave for both weapons. But then people like to have their pew pew gun and never ending firing beams.

3 - It is not possible to remove the acid damage from beams. And high rate of fire weapons is cannon slaves... Is that what you mean ? Normal cannons and CC are both not using the cone. So did you misspelled and meant low RoF ? Then it is NOT a good idea. As both weapons are not high rate of fire weapons, they will only do a 1 block large hole in ships. With a shot only every 10 seconds for the BC, that's gonna take a while to kill someone. Actually removing the weapon from usability.

4 - Not possible. The thing with armor is that the damage of the shot is compared to the armor value. So if you have two weapons with the same and exact DPS but one firing 10 times slower than the other. Then for the hihgest rate of fire weapon you have X damage per shots. For the lowest rate of fire weapons, each shots are worth 10X damage. Of course, the X damage per shots are going to be way more reduced than the 10X damage per shots. The dps of the weapons is not a problem, the problem is the strength of each shots/ticks. The second problem is said in my answer to 2. People wants pew pew guns and never ending lazors.

By tolerable, I mean a ship that doesn't have a slow speed or turn rate and doesn't have to use speed/turn chambers to compensate for what is essentially a thrust/maneuverability nerf. The current configs make this much harder to achieve than ever before. At only 400 mass, even my fighters have taken a hit on this.

I'm sorry but this doesn't help me understand what you feel "right" and what you feel "wrong". To understand what you mean i need something that we can both agree together, for example an approximate time at which you are okay to do a 360°. Thrusts and rotations are both hard to balance because you need disparity for every mass of ships to promote smaller and more efficient ships but also not too harsh so your ship is sluggish. But to balance we need something we can all understand clearly.
I'll take a small personnal example, i upped the speed of cannons bullets to 4500 m/s. A lot of people were saying that this speed was broken and incredibly high. But then i explained that it was a 2 seconds delay between the gun and the target at max range. Then a lot (if not all) of the people acknowledged that this was in truth an okay speed. You see, when you start to put numbers and something logical on top of something that is at first "just feeling" then second thoughts appear.
Of course thrusters got nerfed, they were too generous in vanilla. You could fly thousands of k mass without using more than 10% of your power generation. It's also why we said that our systems were designed around an even distributed power consumption accross weapons, shields and thrusts. So people can relate to this and see if they just simply don't have enough thrusters. I still remember the guy crying he couldn't fly his titan sized planet eater like a fighter. I'm sure you agree that this is not healthy for the game to have such things available. So please, keep in mind that you may not like something but if it is healthier as a whole, then it'll stay as such.

This is where you are missing my point. I'm not proposing that we "force" open space. I personally don't care if you use it or not. What I want is for your combat effectiveness (should someone attack you) to not be contingent upon cramming systems (block spam) into every nook and cranny of your ship, or exploits like islande-ships or spaghetti ships.

The problem is the same : How do we do that ?
Your ships stats evolve around systems. Systems that scales linearly for most (except thrusts, thankfully). So the more systems you place down the more stats you gain. And the more stats you have, the stronger you are. What can we do for that ? That's an open question because i don't have an answer at all. This is the way the base game is made.
We had a kind of similar discussion with benevolant a few days ago. And we ended with the same status quo. He wanted something softer to keep ships on the LvD server under a certain size, like the old soft cap. The problem is the same : we have nothing to do that. Even thrusts have a minimal speed. Add empty space all you want in ships, people will have empty space then. But nothing stops them from placing more blocks to be stronger. The only kind of solutions i can see in the upcoming future is the survival balance of things where resource is scarce.

 

[klawxx]

Hey,

I was thinking something here... these issues you all have been discussed probably could be fixed rather easy with the help os Schine/Schema... If you think its worthy, please forward it to devs...:

1. After finishing the entity (ship), in some new way a player can declare the ship "finished". When this is done the game could calculate based on mass or some ration between system/weapon blocks in which "category" the ship should fit in. This could be declared by the player, but maybe this way it could be abused.

2. This "category" would apply diferent "weights" on specific systems, this way, some features would be more pronounced and direct the ship nieche. Let me try to give an example:

Imagine like In EVE Online each ship have bonuses to rate of fire, speed, etc. if you ship has proportionally 4x more thruster blocks than reactor blocks and has less than 100m in the longest axis it becomes an interceptor. If it became this specific "category", it earn a 30% bonus to top speed and weapon damage, so it is more dangerous to slow/ bigger ships. If it happens to use missile only it became a bomber which does 100% more damage to ships with a specific mass (ex. a cruiser or bigger). If it has 40% or more of it blocks as cargo space, it becames a "freighter" that have bonuses to Jump Drive charge.

These are just some minor examples i could think of. The dev could in this way limit the ships without limiting creativity, I think this could be more easily implemented and as easily balanced after QA.

Cheers,
- Ricardo.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

You guys are really pushing my Typing skills to the limit. Though I appreciate the return to constructive discussion. I hope you also see this as constructive and not an attack on your efforts.

I think that if one of the ships uses 20-30% more resources and mass it understandably will have more power even though it thrusters won't be as effective. That is absolutely normal. And it always will be like this unless you add extremely complex system design where layout and configuration itself could change system performance drastically. This will probably delegate most creative and replica builders to building only shells.

Open space is always a benefit as now not only missiles explode but all weapons have acid damage. Internal bulkheads made out of basic armour and gaps allow to redirect and soak up acid damage. Though in this case beams and high ROF weapons in general have advantage as they will lay multiple shots in the same spot partially or fully negating the effect from such measures.

My main point - You cannot reduce the number of system blocks as long as they are what gives the ship its ability to be, well, a ship. Looking pretty is good and with armour changes you are encouraged to have a proper shell, but ship must be able to fly and do other stuff it is intended for. And for that you need systems. Stabilisers are just another system block to add.

The only way to encourage interiors is a system where ships get decent benefits from them. Right now they mostly can be used as anti-missile defence and much less effective defence against other weapons. Let's hope crew system changes that.

Regarding 20-30% more resources: At my example scale, more systems is the more effective way to build. At larger scales, the benefit still exists to an extent and you will gain additional firepower from that larger power grid. An alternative system does not need to be complex. It simply needs measures to prevent exploits. That's where Schine comes in.

Regarding Open space: Below a certain size threshold, open space quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns; hence why I say the system promotes block spam. Example, 1-2 meters of open space may be better served by filling that void with shield capacity blocks as a buffer and then taking a loss on those blocks when your shields fail. My Pathfinder conversion is an example of why this works.

Regarding the number of system blocks: You could try "miniaturization"; essentially increasing the mass, power draw and effectiveness of all blocks, then using the original stabilizer distance settings as a way of "soft-governing" block spam. EDIT: you don't even need to make the setting as harsh as it orginally was; just use it as a guideline for ship size. System layouts would be much easier to plan and refit and you'd have smaller more size-realistic guns rather than the hulking monster guns we currently bolt to our ships nowadays. Fighters could use the unused physical space for more firepower, until they meet their reactor stability limit or start to slow down due to your thrust curve. Speaking of which; your thrust curves would remain largely the same since the ships' masses would remain the same and this will help with the "soft-governing" of space vs spam, as players who get power greedy become more severely affected by the thrust curve. You might even want to talk to Schine to see if we can get the structural HP system reinstated in some form. That was a good system.

Of course, bugs, spaghetti ships and other exploits would still exist (just as they do now) but that's more Schine's responsibility to address than QF's.

Let me know what you think.

As a balance point we took 10 C outputs at 33% of reactor energy devoted to weapons and around 20% of ship mass in armour. The biggest problem is small ships under 1k mass where each block of armour thickness can swing the results pretty hard. For smallest ships you also hit a point where HP of individual blocks matters greatly.

Mix of C and CC turrets should be one of the best available AMS right now. And B and BC should be good on large ships as sidearms for block damage after armour is broken and to punch down - to shoot down fighters, bombers and the like that are too fast and agile to surely nail with CB.

And yeah long range weapons having lower DPS is absolutely intended. Otherwise in group battles ships will pop with ridiculous ease.

Regarding small ships/armor: At that scale, I'm really not concerned about penetrating armor; as it's not hard to do in this small a scale.

Regarding AMS: Weapon type isn't the problem. It's the fact that the AMS guns have a delay before engaging incoming missiles. I've mentioned this previously in other threads. I use C, CC and combos of both, only to watch the guns hesitate for about 1.5 seconds; just long enogh to let the missiles get under their optimal range; at which point the missile's speed overcomes the turrets ability to track and destroy it.

Regarding ranged weapons. DPS isn't the issue, it's the fact that the firing rate is insufficient to keep shields down long enough to score a hit on armor. You basically have to get close and hit the target with something faster firing (and be weak against heavy armor) or get "knife-fight" close and use BM/CM or use fleets.

First thing first, no matter what is claimed, everything follows a META. A RP player will optimize his ship to allow him to build a story between him, his character and the ship. PVP players will optimize their ship to fight other ships. PVE will do the same. It's just that their opponent is a broken AI rather than a player with a functioning brain and ship. Every type of player build to optimize according to their goals, even you. I am sure we can both agree with that. META is not a bad word and it cannot be erased. Everyone wants to optimize whatever they use/have to squeeze out the better of it.
Then i think you misunderstood our intentions. Our guidelines for building in QF are what the title says : guidelines. But nothing stops you from building differently. We just pushed for specialized ships and choices over ships able to do everything. We are merely explaining how to optimize the systems and how it should works separately, for how to build your ship is up to you. You then do what you want with it.
I seriously don't call engineering choosing between thick armor and less thrusts or more thrusts but lighter armor. As of now, i hope there is no meta in our configs but that cannot be found unless tested by a large amount of person. The whole systems have been thoughts with counter to each. Which means the one ahead of another will have the counter. A rock paper scissor kind of mechanic, where the only way to be "meta" is to use a fleet.

I understand your intent, but if you truely believe there is always a META then you must concede that a true balance can never be achieved. And while this is in fact, true, the gap in effectiveness between the META and different types of builds should not be so great that no other options have any significant incentive for use. To use your analogy, I am wholely in favor of a "rock, paper, scissors" setup. However, you seemed to have created "rock, paper, shotgun" instead.

Despite our "surface disagreement" I will grant that my intent, is and always has been to use AI fleets since my AI units are specifically designed with complex fleet ops in mind. However, I find it unfortunate that my fleet will have at most 2-3 effective weapons out of a total of 12 different combinations.

Concerning beams : I understand what you say, however that is NOT what we have here. Their damage is way too high for their size and the armor. This can be easily checked by changing the configs and using a single tick beam and shooting twice at the same point. Then use same beam but with two ticks.

Sounds like Schine's turf. Is there an actual bug report about this?

PS : I just added some numbers to reply to each points more easily.

First, i'm a big fan of current C- on my ships and use them on my ships until bobby using beams is fixed. And i tested them several times against my own ships or ships built by other players. They are pretty fine against armor, i don't know what size of armor you are using and what size of cannons you are using but my guess is that the cannon is just too small or split around. So yes, i expect people to not use too much their armor, unless they go for armor tanks. And in that case i'll take an armor drilling gun or use missiles. At worst theses weapons are relegated to hunting down smaller vessels.

1 - The under fire recharge rate is 100% when you're high in capacity and drops the more you drop your capacity. We could put the regen under fire quite low or even to zero but then it means you just need a small 1 size weapon shooting constantly at your opponent to keep him under fire. Everything concerning the regen under combat means that having a 1 block size turret to keep your opponent under fire is very much worth it. Not really fun to be abused, isn't ?

2 - Theses weapons have good damage overall, it is true that they are kind of bastard weapons with in-between ranges between the low range high dps ones and longest range ones. But as i said, i don't feel like normal cannon is a problem. The only meh weapon is the cannon slave for both weapons. But then people like to have their pew pew gun and never ending firing beams.

3 - It is not possible to remove the acid damage from beams. And high rate of fire weapons is cannon slaves... Is that what you mean ? Normal cannons and CC are both not using the cone. So did you misspelled and meant low RoF ? Then it is NOT a good idea. As both weapons are not high rate of fire weapons, they will only do a 1 block large hole in ships. With a shot only every 10 seconds for the BC, that's gonna take a while to kill someone. Actually removing the weapon from usability.

4 - Not possible. The thing with armor is that the damage of the shot is compared to the armor value. So if you have two weapons with the same and exact DPS but one firing 10 times slower than the other. Then for the hihgest rate of fire weapon you have X damage per shots. For the lowest rate of fire weapons, each shots are worth 10X damage. Of course, the X damage per shots are going to be way more reduced than the 10X damage per shots. The dps of the weapons is not a problem, the problem is the strength of each shots/ticks. The second problem is said in my answer to 2. People wants pew pew guns and never ending lazors.

I have a set of targets I use to test for armor penetration; the most commonly used one being an armored wall, sampling all three armor types in thicknesses of 1-10m. I also have a "cube" with 15m adv armor on all sides and about 75K shield regen and a 50m thick crystal armor block. For weapons, I have both fixed and turret arrays starting at 2400 blocks and ramping up to 6000.

In all tests, my experience has been that C, CC, B and BB are useless against the thicker adv armor walls. I'll give CB and BB credit up to a point but at my scale, even they fail to defeat thicker armor. When using the CB on a turret with 6000 blocks, hitting for over 427K damage per round, I got a "crater" on the 15m thick cube, given the abysmally low firing rate, I was not impressed. It was not until I used CM (by aiming the turret manually) and BM (AI control) that I was able to effectively penetrate the block. With results like these and everyone talking about how they're going to slap 10-20 layers of armor on their ships, I'm just going to use CM/BM or bring a fleet of missile-boats and call it a day.

I'm sorry but this doesn't help me understand what you feel "right" and what you feel "wrong". To understand what you mean i need something that we can both agree together, for example an approximate time at which you are okay to do a 360°. Thrusts and rotations are both hard to balance because you need disparity for every mass of ships to promote smaller and more efficient ships but also not too harsh so your ship is sluggish. But to balance we need something we can all understand clearly.
I'll take a small personnal example, i upped the speed of cannons bullets to 4500 m/s. A lot of people were saying that this speed was broken and incredibly high. But then i explained that it was a 2 seconds delay between the gun and the target at max range. Then a lot (if not all) of the people acknowledged that this was in truth an okay speed. You see, when you start to put numbers and something logical on top of something that is at first "just feeling" then second thoughts appear.
Of course thrusters got nerfed, they were too generous in vanilla. You could fly thousands of k mass without using more than 10% of your power generation. It's also why we said that our systems were designed around an even distributed power consumption accross weapons, shields and thrusts. So people can relate to this and see if they just simply don't have enough thrusters. I still remember the guy crying he couldn't fly his titan sized planet eater like a fighter. I'm sure you agree that this is not healthy for the game to have such things available. So please, keep in mind that you may not like something but if it is healthier as a whole, then it'll stay as such.

Spoiler: My numbers. Posted on the QF Discord channel in December..

To clarify, none of the other flight sims I've played over the years had this low of a top speed or turn rate for ships in this size class. This is literally the slowest, clumsiest, ship control scheme I've ever used. This is probably out of your domain but another thing that severely sours the experience of flying these ships is the fact that StarMade's Joystick/gamepad support really sucks and does not save the settings I enter.

The problem is the same : How do we do that ?
Your ships stats evolve around systems. Systems that scales linearly for most (except thrusts, thankfully). So the more systems you place down the more stats you gain. And the more stats you have, the stronger you are. What can we do for that ? That's an open question because i don't have an answer at all. This is the way the base game is made.
We had a kind of similar discussion with benevolant a few days ago. And we ended with the same status quo. He wanted something softer to keep ships on the LvD server under a certain size, like the old soft cap. The problem is the same : we have nothing to do that. Even thrusts have a minimal speed. Add empty space all you want in ships, people will have empty space then. But nothing stops them from placing more blocks to be stronger. The only kind of solutions i can see in the upcoming future is the survival balance of things where resource is scarce.

Take a look at my response to Zoolimar; regarding "miniaturization". It involves a hybrid between the work your team has done and Schine's original balancing efforts. Let me know what you think.

 

[Zoolimar]

Regarding 20-30% more resources: At my example scale, more systems is the more effective way to build. At larger scales, the benefit still exists to an extent and you will gain additional firepower from that larger power grid. An alternative system does not need to be complex. It simply needs measures to prevent exploits. That's where Schine comes in.

It absolutely needs to be complex. Or players will just work around it. As happened with stabilisers and multiple output penalty previously.

Regarding Open space: Below a certain size threshold, open space quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns; hence why I say the system promotes block spam. Example, 1-2 meters of open space may be better served by filling that void with shield capacity blocks as a buffer and then taking a loss on those blocks when your shields fail. My Pathfinder conversion is an example of why this works.

We moved mass from reactors to systems. Filling all the gaps will lead to severe increase in mass and drop in thrust. If the gap is minor yeah, it's more effective to fill it with something. It also should be better for the game as it lowers the amount of exposed faces that no one will even see.

Regarding the number of system blocks: You could try "miniaturization"; essentially increasing the mass, power draw and effectiveness of all blocks, then using the original stabilizer distance settings as a way of "soft-governing" block spam.

You are suggesting to make spaghetti even more obnoxious. Small systems plus large main "box" size plus a lot of empty space. No.

It will lead either to small density builds made mostly of empty space or if stab distance is small enough the ships will just have more of your miniaturized blocks. We already danced through this with power 2.0 and I don't want a repeat of it.

Regarding small ships/armor: At that scale, I'm really not concerned about penetrating armor; as it's not hard to do in this small a scale.

Regarding AMS: Weapon type isn't the problem. It's the fact that the AMS guns have a delay before engaging incoming missiles. I've mentioned this previously in other threads. I use C, CC and combos of both, only to watch the guns hesitate for about 1.5 seconds; just long enogh to let the missiles get under their optimal range; at which point the missile's speed overcomes the turrets ability to track and destroy it.

Regarding ranged weapons. DPS isn't the issue, it's the fact that the firing rate is insufficient to keep shields down long enough to score a hit on armor. You basically have to get close and hit the target with something faster firing (and be weak against heavy armor) or get "knife-fight" close and use BM/CM or use fleets.

AI bugs and lags are a problem, yes. If you remember Schema talked before about reworking AI.
As for large gaps between shots try volley fire CB with 3-4 outputs per turret. Though it also related to AI and sometimes bugs out.

As for weapon sizes they are already really small. We cut them down almost 4-5 times there is nowhere else to go unless you want another full system rework.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

It absolutely needs to be complex. Or players will just work around it. As happened with stabilisers and multiple output penalty previously.

At the QF level, no, it doesn't need to be complex. Your team is not developing the game so no matter what you do, exploits will exist until those who are developing the game address them. Crew might help with the space vs spam governance issue but I really think you guys should have a more open discussion with Schine about how that's going to work. Otherwise, you're going to run into problems when the universe is released.

We moved mass from reactors to systems. Filling all the gaps will lead to severe increase in mass and drop in thrust. If the gap is minor yeah, it's more effective to fill it with something. It also should be better for the game as it lowers the amount of exposed faces that no one will even see.

You seem to have restated much of what I previously said. Are we in agreement on this particular detail?

You are suggesting to make spaghetti even more obnoxious. Small systems plus large main "box" size plus a lot of empty space. No.

It will lead either to small density builds made mostly of empty space or if stab distance is small enough the ships will just have more of your miniaturized blocks. We already danced through this with power 2.0 and I don't want a repeat of it.

Did you misinterpret my meaning? To clarify, your team cannot properly balance this system in it's current form. I HIGHLY recommend that you petition Schine to address these exploits rather than try to bandage them by trying to balance around them (in essence, creating more of them) yourselves.

Also, if you asked them to bring back the old structural HP system, and then built off of that you probably wouldn't have most of these concerns you just mentioned.

For anyone who's interested, Here is an example of how that kind of system could (and was starting to) work.

Spoiler

In addition to the miniaturization I described, all of the blocks that make up your ship would be assigned an HP value to determine how durable your ship is.

- Add up all the blocks in a ship to determine your ship's overall HP. When all HP are lost, the ship is destroyed.
- Different block types will subtract from the ship's HP pool based on their block specific value.
- Decorative blocks subtract 1HP when destroyed.
- Armor, hull, and decorative blocks subtract 3HP when destroyed.
- Weapons, shields, engines subtract 5HP when destroyed.
- Power-related blocks including chambers and conduits subtract 10HP when destroyed.

In this idea, how many blocks you lose is as important as where you lose blocks; since you can be destroyed either by sheer block loss as hull and armor are worn down or by taking too much damage to critical systems to knock out a large amount of structual HP at once.

You can obviouly tweak the HP values for balancing purposes but this a good starting point that alows for more size/system governance than anything we have now or that has been implimented in the past.

Elite dangerous has a similar system that works very well since you can add HP to your ship (hull reinforcement kits) at the expense of speed/maneuevrability, cargo space, passenger space, special equipment, etc. yet your ship can be destroyed either via direct hits to the reactor or by depleting all your hit points. At no point in the game are you ever invincible because (just like in QF) weapons outmatch shield regen and armor (hull integrity) is in itself, a system that can eventually fail as you keep taking damage; causing your ship to be destroyed.

The best part of all is that the foundation for this system was already created so much less is needed from a coding standpoint, than if we were building a new system.

Let me know what you think about this. I've put a lot of thought into this, to the point of being reluctant to even upgrade my game when that system was removed. I wouldn't even waste my time posting this sort of thing if I didn't already see it would work in both this game and other games.

As for spaghetti... Like I said before, umless you want to code the game yourselves, that's the developer's job to fix; not QF's. Besides, I can think of a few creative ways stabilizers can be exploited even now, with your current configs.

AI bugs and lags are a problem, yes. If you remember Schema talked before about reworking AI.
As for large gaps between shots try volley fire CB with 3-4 outputs per turret. Though it also related to AI and sometimes bugs out.

As for weapon sizes they are already really small. We cut them down almost 4-5 times there is nowhere else to go unless you want another full system rework.

Regarding turrets: not applicable. The turrets wait 1.5 seconds before aiming and firing; They miss not due to accuracy or coverage but due to a slow response time. Keptic fixed AI firing rate but the reaction time still causes them to miss; especially if being shot at from several angles. Mass enhancers do not fix this.

Regarding weapon size: In the pre-weapons-3.0 vanilla config one block of cannon did 10 points of damage. Last time I checked QF's config, they do about 13. That's not really "cutting down" since weapons still have to be pretty large to get any kind of relevant effect against heavy armor scaling.

If you don't understand what I'm talking about, with regard to "miniaturization" let me know and we can explore further if you like.