Nerf shield curves so that shields scale appropriately for Titans

[ante185]

-snip-

I think that if they decide to add directional armor that it will be similar to the planned change for thrustsers where you can allocate power to front/Back/left/right/top/bottom but well in this case with shields, but i ain't calling the shots around here.

 

[jath]

If you've read Sun Tzu, you'll know that war is all about gaming your opponent, taking advantages of his weakness, and your strengths. In an early post, someone made an example of 4 ships 1/4 the size of a larger ship being at a disadvantage. If you're a weak player, this is true, even in real life. The advantage to disadvantage difference is in the weapons and defensive capacity, and the maneuverability.

Yes, the larger ship could PLAN to focus on a single target, etc... but in practice, the smaller ship could simply move out of range or behind the larger ship, while an ally of the smaller ship could block for him to ensure the smaller ship escapes.

In this manner, the small ships actually have the shielding advantage because they are able to leave battle momentarily to generate their shields, while the larger ship is not.

As for a large turret, personally, I don't think this should be the issue it is either. Larger turrets should also take longer to turn, and cannot shoot to the opposite side of the ship it's attached to.

The smaller attackers would simple have to focus on one turret at a time, and use the side of the ship with destroyed turrets as a safe zone. to escape attack long enough to regenerate shielding (hopefully) once the turrets are destroyed, simply sit on the larger ship's rear, (or rotate around the larger ship in case they have multidirectional camera systems and weapons) It'll be a tough fight, but the smaller ships will have the advantage.

A swarm of 12-20 fighters with skilled pilots against a ship 100-200 times their size would have an even better advantage as they could potentially get in even closer and avoid pretty much all incoming fire as well. You could build bombers with lots of dumb-fire missiles (large targets are easier to hit) that have a really high damage to block count ratio so they can still outmaneuver the turrets and big ship.

The only potential issue I'm seeing here is the extremely fast movement of turrets compared to their size. But again, turrets aren't shielded by the main ship, so they are potentially easier to disable. I've been able to get underneath a turret with a fighter and shoot out its core while it was targeting another ship. Using shield piercing effects, you can make quick work of pretty much any turret using this strategy.

 

[max stripe]

You misinterpreted my post; I was referring to actual combat, not theoreticals. That smaller ship does not have the spare time against that titan to drop its shields before the titan's larger and superior guns finish them off.

so you are saying a single tiny fighter should take out my massive titan?
now why would you want a single tiny fighter to do that?
titans are meant to only be taken out by a fighter if there are lots of them

 

[Megacrafter127]

so you are saying a single tiny fighter should take out my massive titan?
now why would you want a single tiny fighter to do that?
titans are meant to only be taken out by a fighter if there are lots of them

This isn't really necromancy, but you can still see this thread is supposed to be dead.

 

[max stripe]

accualy i didnt even notice lol

 

[Valiant70]

I'm tired of hearing "DETH STARZ OP! PLZ NERF!!!!" Gigantic ships will always be powerful. It make sense and they are not invincible.

Shields and weapons both scale linearly now. Therefore, a swarm of smaller ships that collectively equal a titan's mass will always have an advantage because they can maneuver while the titan can only move, and cannot turn worth cardboard pizza. The titan loses its turrets and can only fire forward, rendering it largely useless against smaller vessels even if it is not destroyed.

People really need to get more creative in building "mega bombers" to take out titans. Basically, you should build several battlecruisers equipped with full-ion pulse torpedoes and one or two with extremely powerful piercing or punchthrough beams to core it once the shields are down. Use ion for your mega bombers rather than overdrive because they will gain greater damage per second on shields for the amount of power they have. To prevent the Titan from going into full reverse, a ship or two should use pull or stop effect weapons to hold it down while it gets worked over.

Bottom line, you need as many resources to kill a titan as make one, which is what I would hope.

 

[Lecic]

I'm tired of hearing "DETH STARZ OP! PLZ NERF!!!!" Gigantic ships will always be powerful. It make sense and they are not invincible.

Shields and weapons both scale linearly now. Therefore, a swarm of smaller ships that collectively equal a titan's mass will always have an advantage because they can maneuver while the titan can only move, and cannot turn worth cardboard pizza. The titan loses its turrets and can only fire forward, rendering it largely useless against smaller vessels even if it is not destroyed.

People really need to get more creative in building "mega bombers" to take out titans. Basically, you should build several battlecruisers equipped with full-ion pulse torpedoes and one or two with extremely powerful piercing or punchthrough beams to core it once the shields are down. Use ion for your mega bombers rather than overdrive because they will gain greater damage per second on shields for the amount of power they have. To prevent the Titan from going into full reverse, a ship or two should use pull or stop effect weapons to hold it down while it gets worked over.

Bottom line, you need as many resources to kill a titan as make one, which is what I would hope.

We're not asking for a giant ship to be weaker than a small one. We're asking for it to not be the end all to end all. Which, currently, beyond heavily specialized bombers, is it.

Also, if you even read the OP, you'd know that a swarm of equally massed ships can't take out a larger ship. The smaller a ship is, the higher percentage of it is hallways and external hull and decoration.

 

[max stripe]

We're not asking for a giant ship to be weaker than a small one. We're asking for it to not be the end all to end all. Which, currently, beyond heavily specialized bombers, is it.

Also, if you even read the OP, you'd know that a swarm of equally massed ships can't take out a larger ship. The smaller a ship is, the higher percentage of it is hallways and external hull and decoration.

asuming the pilot of the small ship knows how to fly they are already at an advantage
they can outmanuver the main ship and pick off the turrets one at a time
ive made small fighters capable of mass destruction. so the fighters have no interior its a small ship who cares

 

[Keptick]

Ugh, this thread was created from before the current shield balance.... As it stands now, shields scale linearly and the time it takes to drop 1 shield with 1 weapon block is around 4-5 seconds.

Oh, a swarm of fighters that has a cumulative mass of about a fifth of a capital will win without suffering major losses. So I really don't see what the problem is.

 

[Asmael]

 

[TwoNiner]

Am I still the only one who thinks weapons should be more powerful than shields for more fast paced less draggy combat?

 

[Lecic]

Right.... because a post 10 days after the last one is a necro.

 

[Valiant70]

We're not asking for a giant ship to be weaker than a small one. We're asking for it to not be the end all to end all. Which, currently, beyond heavily specialized bombers, is it.

Also, if you even read the OP, you'd know that a swarm of equally massed ships can't take out a larger ship. The smaller a ship is, the higher percentage of it is hallways and external hull and decoration.

A swarm of smaller ships has an immense tactical advantage over a titan. You are simply incorrect. I'm not trying to be rude here. That's just the way it is. Please note that I am assuming the smaller ships are controlled by competent pilots, not AIs. This does not necessarily hold true if the small ships are AI controlled.

Also, the idea that a smaller ship is crippled by its decorations is inaccurate. If this is true, the ship is most probably either badly designed or not meant for combat, and the titan is probably quite boring, hopelessly ugly and lacking any interior besides a core room and entrance.

 

[Byamarro]

Currently on Starmade, with the new shield mechanics, ships have a very large amount of shields. Obviously this was done to make space battles longer as well as giving smaller ships a better chance. I agree that such a goal is something we should strive toward, as longer combat, if done appropriately, can mean more fun and survivability for everyone.

Unfortunately, the way the new shields work, it also comes with an absurdly-high flat rate of 495 shields per block. This may sound fine on paper, but it works absolutely terrible in game.
Here is some evidence for you:

This is my ship (275m long, not even a titan) with three dozen or so 10x10x10 shield block chunks slapped on for 100 million shield capacity. The ship previously had only 25 million. Yes, those blocks you see on the outside added 75 million shields alone. I spawned in 12 of my heavily-armed 100-meter assault frigates to attack my ship. The picture you see is the result after roughly 100 seconds of combat, with only a fraction of the shields drained. This is even worse than how shields were before the big update.

I don't know about you, but I think this is ridiculous. I left my ship mostly unarmed as I havent developed the proper turrets for it, but knowing that turrets are extremely well-shielded now with the shields the way they are, I don't even want to imagine the defensive ability and destructive ability they would have now.
Overall, titans still are just really overpowered in terms of shielding and they need to be made actually fightable. Smaller ships still don't stand a chance except in massive swarms.

Comr4de and I have repeatedly reached out to several of the devs about this for many weeks now, but most of the time they have either dismissed us or denied that this is a major issue. One proposed solution was to possibly split shield tankage and regen between two different types of blocks, but that does not solve the issue one bit; the issue is tankage itself needs to be changed to curve more appropriately with the more blocks you add.

I had thought this update was supposed to fix the issue of giganticism, but i see that's not what happened at all. There is no incentive to use a smaller ship when the other factions around you are using giant behemoths that your ship cannot hope to de-shield before it gets obliterated itself. So what do you do? Play along in this stupid arms race and build the biggest ship you can, and after all, it's the only way to win.

So how can this be fixed?
The shield flat-rate needs to be significantly weakened. They need to be put on a continuously-decreasing curve. This works well considering ships scale exponentially in useable space the bigger they get. This way, a 200-meter ship with 20 million shields scales well and has a better chance against an 800-meter ship with 100 million shields. Say (and I'm just throwing this out there as an example; I don't necessarily agree with these numbers), a 10-shield-per-block flat rate (10x less than what it currently is), and have it hit its flat rate after around 20 or so million shields, which is roughly what my ship (a capital ship a fair distance below titan tier) has.

I don't mean to insult the devs or anyone else with this, but, I find it very appalling they have let such a big issue go so untouched for so long. If they REALLY played the game against REAL military factions, like the DFN, Vaygr and Tartaran Empire, there is no way they couldn't see the obvious issue that the ships are for all intents and purposes invincible! I deal with some of these factions and their very large 300-to-600-meter warships almost on a daily basis, and the only ships that can really beat their titans in online PvP are other titans.

This is a HUGE problem. And I want schema to see it too, and I want him to fix this so that titans are still useful but not the ends-all, wins-all means to Starmade combat.

If I will build titan I don't want to make it fightable for 50 meter single ship. If You want to fight with titan using small ships then make swarm of drones. That how it should work. Really.

 

[Keptick]

Am I still the only one who thinks weapons should be more powerful than shields for more fast paced less draggy combat?

They already are, A LOT!!![DOUBLEPOST=1410832289,1410832159][/DOUBLEPOST]

A swarm of smaller ships has an immense tactical advantage over a titan. You are simply incorrect. I'm not trying to be rude here. That's just the way it is. Please note that I am assuming the smaller ships are controlled by competent pilots, not AIs. This does not necessarily hold true if the small ships are AI controlled.

Also, the idea that a smaller ship is crippled by its decorations is inaccurate. If this is true, the ship is most probably either badly designed or not meant for combat, and the titan is probably quite boring, hopelessly ugly and lacking any interior besides a core room and entrance.

I still does even if they are AI controlled. I know, cause I tried. I took out two different 6k mass ships with 2.5k mass of drones, which was epic XD. Drone swarms also have the advantage of completely negating the effects of high alpha long reload weapons which could nuke a similar sized ship, but will only destroy a single drone. So yes, there's actually ADVANTAGES to using small ships, as long as you've got the numbers :P . I honestly can't wait for the actual AI fleet feature to be implemented.

^ That ship died.

 

[NeonSturm]

 

[Lecic]

View attachment 4437

wow, 9 days. What an insane necro.

Anything under 30 days is not a necro. Get your dirty necro accusations out of here

 

[jath]

I think he's talking about me, I'm apparently the necro. Jun 25th to Aug 23rd. almost 2 months. Sorry, I thought the thread was interesting and replied with my opinion. Didn't look at the dates, and I've never been on a forum where the dates mattered. If someone had some input, it was usually welcome.