Thoughts on Gigantism

[Mered4]

And thank every thing holy for that.

Let's build a Borg cube!

*angry stares*

 

[Lidren]

A real Borg cube, being a porous hive of the rotters and riddled with corridors and equipment, not fit the definition of a brick in my mind. Especially not if the time is taken to do the fine and prolific detailing inside and out.

 

[Mered4]

A real Borg cube, being a porous hive of the rotters and riddled with corridors and equipment, not fit the definition of a brick in my mind. Especially not if the time is taken to do the fine and prolific detailing inside and out.

Yeah, but how many people do you know have built that thing correctly?

 

[Lidren]

Good point, none. Though I have heard that someone has been doing detail oriented borg ships.

 

[SomethingSlimy]

I'll just leave this here:

Eh, I rather like the idea that space-fighters are much bigger than atmosphere-fighters.

...to fit all that space equipment... or something.

That's all I got.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Eh, I rather like the idea that space-fighters are much bigger than atmosphere-fighters.

...to fit all that space equipment... or something.

That's all I got.

Sure they may be bigger, but I doubt single pilot fighter craft will be 50-100 meters long.

 

[Snk]

That's the size of some oceanic going vessels.

 

[Mered4]

That's the size of some oceanic going vessels.

Single-pilot subs are the size of sardine cans.

 

[Loadout]

Single-pilot subs are the size of sardine cans.

I would go almost as far as to say that is quite literal. 1m per block seems a bit much in terms of scale. It should honestly be closer to 1ft or 1/3 of 1m instead. I can't honestly remember the last time I cut a piece of glass that was 1m cubed or even heard of such a massive piece. Metal plates sure, but generally speaking they all come more commonly in a much smaller size. If one were to view it as 1/3 of a meter per block the scale would fit much more appropriately excluding the players themselves who are apparently garden variety space-gnomes.

 

[jorgekorke]

Don't worry. Gigantism is dieing very slowly, yet it will still die. I'll give it around 5 months. We can't see the effects today because the most powerful players spawned every single titan available with credits moments before the bp update release.

And I can't buy the idea of drone swarms working against a titan. If they did someday, I can only assume either this capital ship was poorly built or the lag prevented it to fire the turrets and weapons. Truth is, no matter how well organized and skilled your 6-man-team of bombers might be, they will never be able to take down a capital ship as of now, at least on EE, where the usage of Radar Jammers is not viable.

Gigantism needs to, and will end soon, hopefully. Because I'm sick of seeing people throwing their 1 mil mass titans against other players and therefore, making their clients to crash - they can't do anything to fight back, not even to flee - because they haven't got an alienware or intel i7 4k super expensive processor....

 

[Loadout]

Don't worry. Gigantism is dieing very slowly, yet it will still die. I'll give it around 5 months. We can't see the effects today because the most powerful players spawned every single titan available with credits moments before the bp update release.

And I can't buy the idea of drone swarms working against a titan. If they did someday, I can only assume either this capital ship was poorly built or the lag prevented it to fire the turrets and weapons. Truth is, no matter how well organized and skilled your 6-man-team of bombers might be, they will never be able to take down a capital ship as of now, at least on EE, where the usage of Radar Jammers is not viable.

Gigantism needs to, and will end soon, hopefully. Because I'm sick of seeing people throwing their 1 mil mass titans against other players and therefore, making their clients to crash - they can't do anything to fight back, not even to flee - because they haven't got an alienware or intel i7 4k super expensive processor....

Totally agreed except on the drone part. Drones are not meant to be part of a 6 man team. It's more like a 40++ man team. The whole idea of drones is to basically swarm the ship, confuse the turrets which can't possibly turn fast enough, and then destroy it with usually high damage alpha weapons. Unless we're talking specialty drones at which point the only job they have is something special like skoomdrones stop effect, which does prevent turrets from accurately targeting just about anything. If it can't turn, it can't aim, which sort of makes just about everything useless.

If you can't believe drones can take down a titan I suggest you try reverting to credits on single player, load up a titan and then spawn in about 50-60 heavy drones. You'll be surprised at how effective they are compared to said titan.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

Huh, I fully agree with both the "level of detail" bit, and with the "typically 1 block hull" bit.

And yet, I've never seen the problem with "titans".

but then, I was never so stupid as to play on a server where "buy with credits" was an option.
of course battlewagons are a horrific problem when you can buy 'em en-mass, due to the economy being borked.


As far as their firepower goes? It's about where it should be, especially so if it's designed for killing smaller opponents.

I mean, heck, think of it this way: if a Battleship could actually properly aim it's turrets at a Destroyer, given the sheer size of shell being fired out, any hit it lands on the destroyer [below the waterline] is going to kill it.
By comparison, said destroyer can only win if it gets a "good" torpedo hit to a sufficiently "floodable" area.
And that assumes it's an anti-capitol destroyer, rather than one made for killing PT-boats. [the PT-boat killers not typically carrying torpedoes]


The Titans were obviously more of a problem in the bad old days, when all they had to do was hit the core.
Now? Coring isn't a confirmed kill.
That right there was basically all the "balancing" that Titans themselves needed. "Fixing" the economy so that ship-building of any stripe is a bit more difficult? Icing on the corrosive exploding cake.

 

[Edymnion]

For me, a lot of the draw of really big ships and stations is that it lets me have the wow factor stuff that I want.

I like having things like elevators and sliding doors. I like automated docking bays. I like having things controlled by logic. All of these things require large amounts of space. A simple elevator car is going to be at least 5x5x5, not counting the rails it has to run on, and the logic to control those rails.

A sliding door with a keypad lock on it takes an entire room's worth of logic.

Gigantism is the name of the game in Starmade. If you want a good looking ship/station, you need a big ship/station. If you want a ship/station with cool gizmos, you need room for those gizmos.

The power of the ships in combat is really less of a factor in my mind simply because there is an upper limit to how much damage any single hit can do, so there is an upper limit on the size of any weapon.

 

[AtraUnam]

I like to attempt (never finish) big ships because I like the idea of mobile bases and epic cinematic space battles with highly detailed ships. Of course my end goal is to create something which is essentially apocalypse incarnate.

 

[KingofCalamity]

Please read the final sentence first, then start back up here:

I don't really see a problem with big ships. So what if some guy has a 4km ship that can drill holes through the sun. The chance of that ship seeing real combat in universe is slim to none as it's basically a massive target that can neither turn swiftly or move at any decent speed with such a size. I build fairly large battle cubes for weapon and other such testing on my singleplayer and when they start to reach certain sizes it basically becomes pointless as even with massive amounts of thrust and even sides it takes forever to turn.

In summation, Gigantic is a subjective term. A large ship for me is somewhere in the 600-800 meter range. A Gigantic ship would be anything over 1.2 km or so (that's on my desktop). On my old laptop, a ship of 500 was absolutely Ginormous because my laptop could barely handle a pirate battle.

Really it's a matter of preference. Most people I've seen who have a problem with larger ships is because they've had a bad experience with them. I for instance never fly anything over around 200-300 m.... because it's pointless... even if I build world ending doom machines. I've never had a problem getting my ships torn apart by enemy fire either.

I just rambled on and some of it makes no sense, some of it does. Please ignore the parts that make no sense.

 

[reptillianstew]

I definitely agree that gigantism is somewhat of a mixed bag and that while unbalanced, big ships shouldn't be removed/discouraged in the way of softcaps or outright size limitation. Like others have said, big ships are great from a design standpoint. I love nothing more than designing large interiors and its great that soon crew will give them purpose and bigger ships are usually some of the most carefully crafted and most impressive things a player can make.

The problem lies in the fact that these ships are easily obtainable given enough time, require no upkeep, and will always kill anything smaller than it. Battles in starmade, while fun, are little more than wars of attrition and since larger ships will always have an hp and firepower advantage, they win no matter how nimble or strategic their opponent might be. The other reason I believe these ships are so prevalent are that they require literally no effort to man. If I want to fly from point a to b by myself, i'm not going to grab a shuttle, i'm fielding the largest ship I have cause I can fly it myself, It doesn't cost me anything more to do so than the shuttle, and i'm at a less of a risk of dying in the large ship.

Hopefully, with the addition of crew, piloting titans will require a little more effort and put more at stake than just your resources (Although it sounds like crew will be pretty easy to find and replace). I want it to be such that when the extreme situation arises, I have to set aside some serious time and resources to ready my large ship and coordinating all of the systems and maintenance of such a vessel might even surpass the abilities of an individual.

I hope that this RP phase of development introduces some new diversity to ship sizes and roles and makes larger ships more complex/challenging to use to maybe lessen their current prevalence and dominance. Extremely large ships should only be seen on rare occasion and should require actual effort to wield for as much power they bring to the battlefield.

 

[doubleminus0]

Bigger is always better.

 

[KingofCalamity]

I hope that this RP phase of development introduces some new diversity to ship sizes and roles and makes larger ships more complex/challenging to use to maybe lessen their current prevalence and dominance. Extremely large ships should only be seen on rare occasion and should require actual effort to wield for as much power they bring to the battlefield.

I'm actually working on something that I'm going to post in the suggestion thread that might help mitigate the effect of big ships while not making them pointless. It's five or six different things going into it so it's going to take me a day or two to get it all typed up and edited before I post it. There will be a wall of text.

 

[lilheartless]

I thought this was a space game? why is the necro magic so strong?

 

[Loadout]

\

I thought this was a space game? why is the necro magic so strong?

Because this is still a relevant topic, albeit one which people are less likely to discuss with shiny new toys floating about.

That said it is a pretty old subject, and over the course of numerous updates has been somewhat slightly alleviated. Although not quite as much as it should be. I think the key component that is missing is some sort of upkeep. With an upkeep related to a ships mass, that would put a hamper on how large or numerous super titans could be. It'd even give players a goal to work towards when building, Keep upkeep <X faction points.

Unfortunately without such a measure it would be impossible to hamper ultra scale designs. Be they 1 million mass or more. Want to live without said restriction? Don't join a faction and it won't suck up your points. There needs to be a clear trade off here between just having that "world ending doom machine" and being able to use said doom machine. As is players have the pie and can eat it whenever they want it.

Lord_Greyscale

"Now? Coring isn't a confirmed kill. That right there was basically all the "balancing" that Titans themselves needed. "

Not true at all, I have to say that the hp system did nothing to "balance" anyone. If anything it made Titans stronger and weaker ships only slightly stronger. Titans are an issue because as mentioned;

• ease of piloting- one man controls the universe with his/her 4k doom machine
• ease of obtaining - there's NO upkeep, drawbacks, requirements, or other restrictions place on ultra large machines if you got the time then you got one or twelve!

Those are the two big ones, there are some other issues regarding server killing but functionally that's either a server problem or a player problem not a game one.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to play with Transporters and activation loops. Wweee! :D