Proof that higher default shield capacitor values would be a good thing

[Keptick]

Well, you know what they say about assuming things.

Your entire thread seems to rely on this. If you multiply the shield count by ten, I'm going to cut down my shield blocks by ten, increase my weapon blocks and power storage, and annihilate things with alpha damage, just like people already do. A glass cannon isn't going to get into prolonged combat, so TTK doesn't matter for them.

We need to wait until the HP system before trying to balance heavily. No bandaid solutions.

To achieve that a ship would need more mass than the enemy ship, or have basically 0 shields left. I'm just trying to figure out a good balance for equivalent mass combat.

 

[Jaaskinal]

I wonder what the exact numbers should be. It could be made that they are exactly as useful as each other, i.e. each recharge gives 5 s/s because each weapon gives 5 d/s and give capacitors 5(45)/2, 112.5, because that's the cost of a missile/pulse weapon.

 

[Rohen]

Well i play on a server where much config values are changed.
We do run with 3 times the shield capacity than default.

But as much else is not on the default values and it is a RP Server with limited and strongly regulated PVP it is had to say if this actually fixed the mentioned issues.

Battles do tend to be longer than i remember them from previous servers.
Like already mentioned this can be attributed to several of the changes but one of the reason of the shield capacity increase was due to the high damage dealt by missiles.
To list some other changes that might be responsible for the longer and in my opinion more interesting battles are for example to make other weapons a useful alternative, beam and cannon damage were increased as well as the AI accuracy. Projectile speeds were reduced but range increased (also the sector size, which factors into weapon range, was increased by 3 times).
So on the Server i am playing the values are being experimented with and adjusted to give a different combat experience than on an unmodified and to prevent the one hit kills.

 

[jorgekorke]

Just wanted to point out that on like 90% of the Sci-fi franchises involves shields as a vital source - got no shields ? You are about to die. So, calling "damaging the shields is a dull part of the combat and it should not take long" is very... odd.

 

[Keptick]

Just wanted to point out that on like 90% of the Sci-fi franchises involves shields as a vital source - got no shields ? You are about to die. So, calling "damaging the shields is a dull part of the combat and it should not take long" is very... odd.

I agree. I personally try to avoid getting my ship ripped to shreds and prefer when it doesn't. I wouldn't mind nearly as much if we had shipyards or a ship repair system in place, but we don't.

 

[hzzzln]

Just wanted to point out that on like 90% of the Sci-fi franchises involves shields as a vital source - got no shields ? You are about to die. So, calling "damaging the shields is a dull part of the combat and it should not take long" is very... odd.

Yes, but those franchises probably create entertainment in other ways. For example, until the Enterprise's shields are down, we probably had a lot of running, screaming, lens flares and most and foremost, talking between the crew and their enemy. This interaction between the characters is what makes the show/films interesting. But we don't have that in Starmade. Like Vanhelzing said, one of Starmade's biggest strengths is that you can physically take out parts of other ships. I think the game wastes a lot of potential if 90% of the combat time is NOT taking out parts of other ships, but bringing their shields down.

A good counter example would be FTL. In this game, the fight is certainly not over when the ships shields are down. In fact, there are ships build around the fact that they don't sport a shield, but have advantages in other areas (cloaking) that even it out.

I agree. I personally try to avoid getting my ship ripped to shreds and prefer when it doesn't. I wouldn't mind nearly as much if we had shipyards or a ship repair system in place, but we don't.

I thought these features were announced and are being worked on? I'll try to find it.

 

[jayman38]

To achieve that a ship would need more mass than the enemy ship, or have basically 0 shields left. I'm just trying to figure out a good balance for equivalent mass combat.

Well i play on a server where much config values are changed.
We do run with 3 times the shield capacity than default.

But as much else is not on the default values and it is a RP Server with limited and strongly regulated PVP it is had to say if this actually fixed the mentioned issues.

Battles do tend to be longer than i remember them from previous servers.
Like already mentioned this can be attributed to several of the changes but one of the reason of the shield capacity increase was due to the high damage dealt by missiles.
To list some other changes that might be responsible for the longer and in my opinion more interesting battles are for example to make other weapons a useful alternative, beam and cannon damage were increased as well as the AI accuracy. Projectile speeds were reduced but range increased (also the sector size, which factors into weapon range, was increased by 3 times).
So on the Server i am playing the values are being experimented with and adjusted to give a different combat experience than on an unmodified and to prevent the one hit kills.

Just wanted to point out that on like 90% of the Sci-fi franchises involves shields as a vital source - got no shields ? You are about to die. So, calling "damaging the shields is a dull part of the combat and it should not take long" is very... odd.

This discussion has convinced me that there should be 1% shield bleed-through, but with effects nulled and missile radius reduced by the shields, so that the bleeded-through damage only effects a limited number of blocks (only 1 for beams and cannons). Because this is a block game, and because it would be immensely satisfying to see ships get picked apart, that tells me that 1% bleedthrough would be the way to go. In normal SciFi media, you don't normally see shield bleed-through, but you also don't normally see 1-meter-thick armor either, so StarMade will never be quite the same as what you see in the movies.

With debris flying off from destroyed blocks, I think this will make shields-up combat very exciting and interesting, because you still get the 99% shield protection, but block damage and debris gives an interesting visual cue that your hits are doing something other than making the shields flash, and automatically gives you a need to control which face you present to your opponent(s). This, in turn, may lead to new combat strategies, such as presenting the broadside to the enemy at the start of combat, and then switch to face-forward close combat after the side-armor has been mostly stripped.

 

[jorgekorke]

Yes, but those f
ranchises probably create entertainment in other ways. For example, until the Enterprise's shields are down, we probably had a lot of running, screaming, lens flares and most and foremost, talking between the crew and their enemy. This interaction between the characters is what makes the show/films interesting. But we don't have that in Starmade. Like Vanhelzing said, one of Starmade's biggest strength is that you can physically take out parts of other ships. I think the game wastes a lot of potential if 90% of the combat time is NOT taking out parts of other ships, but bringing their shields down.

That would make combat even more expensive, for even the winning side will have huge block losses. And therefore, disencourage even more combat on the game (the BP update already did a hit)

This discussion has convinced me that there should be 1% shield bleed-through, but with effects nulled and missile radius reduced by the shields, so that the bleeded-through damage only effects a limited number of blocks (only 1 for beams and cannons). Because this is a block game, and because it would be immensely satisfying to see ships get picked apart, that tells me that 1% bleedthrough would be the way to go.

Until we don't have repairing shipyards, I'll give it a no.

 

[hzzzln]

That would make combat even more expensive, for even the winning side will have huge block losses. And therefore, disencourage even more combat on the game (the BP update already did a hit)

That's true for the current state of the game, but I feel like it can be fixed with balance changes to the economy system, and the aforementioned repairstations/shipyards. It feels unintuitive to sacrifice combat mechanics because the economy is not working as intended (I feel like it's not working as intended right now). Besides, there is a config setting to go back to the old BP system, and I'm certain there combat servers out there that do just that.

 

[Panpiper]

The existing situation: Griefer's paradise. Victory goes to whomever fires first. The optimum PvP ship design is a glass cannon built to one shot kill any ship. The existing numbers permit this sort of build against which there is no defense.

There are those who wish to change this current situation, and those who argue that change is either not needed or futile. Those who suggest that change is not needed are likely those who simply enjoy the griefer dynamic, they live in a different universe that I shall likely never understand. Those who argue that change is futile assert that regardless of changes, they will simply change their build ratios to again create one shot kills.

The options are to either do nothing, to wait until the developers come out with the HP system (which mechanically will only add an extra layer of non-regenerable shields) , or to create server specific changes that can mitigate the imbalance in the mean time.

Those who desire no change are free to play on servers that effect no such changes. They need not campaign here against doing things. Those who are discontent can mod the game to make it more enjoyable on servers they control.

The question then is how to manipulate the existing game to rectify the imbalance. What can be done such that it is not possible by any ratio of systems to create a ship that can one shot kill another reasonably built ship of equal mass? Possible solutions are:

1. Increase shields such that a reasonable ratio of shields can absorb the maximum amount of weapon fire from a maximum glass cannon. The advantage is ease of implementation, a single change can have a huge effect. The disadvantage is that it can greatly increase the (boring) combat time of trying to reduce shields.

2. Reduce weapon damage. The advantage of this is that it also increases the durability of ship systems. The disadvantage is that it will certainly require some ship re-engineering, especially with things like point defense systems.

3. Increasing armor effects by upping the HP of advanced armor to 250 and increasing the armor value to 65% will permit a maximum pierce effect ship's armor blocks to absorb 5000 damage. Such a ship with perhaps three layers of armor (and sufficient system spacing) could probably absorb a missile alpha strike and still be able to strike back, especially with point defense actually working (upcoming update).

4. Reduce power capacitors to at least half their current value. Currently it takes less than half as many capacitors to store the power for a sniper missile alpha strike as it takes shields to absorb the damage from the strike. It is my opinion that more than anything, this is the source of the imbalance.

The ideal solution is probably a combination of the above. If I knew the first thing about server administration, I would start a server doing just that. Perhaps there is enough impetus amongst the posters here, and expertise, to do just that.

 

[CyberTao]

Those who desire no change are free to play on servers that effect no such changes. They need not campaign here against doing things. Those who are discontent can mod the game to make it more enjoyable on servers they control.

That applies to both sides on this argument, the difference being that some of the people against it have modded their game/altered the playstyle so that it does work for them, whereas those arguing for the change don't seem to have ever tried their suggested change.

2 ad 3 on your idea tend to clash, since lower weapon damage and higher armour values together would make fighter craft combat impossible, and while that might not the the norm on server, if applied to the vanilla config would ruin the early-game for new players, since they would need larger guns to do any damage. The only reason I can say I'm really against 3 is that it messes with small crafts in every sense, which doesn't befit a "default sandbox".

The problem is there is no server to test these ideas on. You could modify single player and try that for a couple weeks, but that doesn't really give much weight to any argument, since it is just what you would do. I say a couple weeks in order to see if it is just a short term bandaid, or a legit solution, since for the first while people would be using their old ships, which would benefit from the change. What s needed is to see what kinds of ships would be built afterwards, a continuous push for more weapons, less shields, and it working, would prove kep's idea a failure for example (with the reverse supporting it).

Other than that, people are just gonna argue their points at each other. The game has many playstyles, some work with the current config, some do not, but the majority of players don't come here, so we'll never know whether it is the configs or just a playstyle causing the problem. Could very well be the crafting system for all I know.

 

[jorgekorke]

I would add a mechanic to the game - Shields when broke, still nullify all remaining damage from a burst.
Example :

A missile (+beam) that does 500'000 damage is inbound to a ship that currently, it's on low shields (320'000 shields). The current game mechanics makes the damage go through the shields and already make a big hole on the ship. What I would suggest is, that this missile will take out the enemy shields, but all the damage will be absorbed by it.

 

[Lecic]

Just wanted to point out that on like 90% of the Sci-fi franchises involves shields as a vital source - got no shields ? You are about to die. So, calling "damaging the shields is a dull part of the combat and it should not take long" is very... odd.

Last time I checked, 90% of sci-fi franchises have the captain shouting orders, computers exploding, emergency procedures taken, etc, when shields are being hit. We don't have that. That makes shield combat boring. I'm not suggesting that our computers should randomly explode for no reason when shields are being hit, of course. I'm saying that shields shouldn't be the large majority of combat.

Reduce weapon damage. The advantage of this is that it also increases the durability of ship systems. The disadvantage is that it will certainly require some ship re-engineering, especially with things like point defense systems.

As already stated in the thread, this is impossible, as otherwise, a 1:1 cannon:cannon will do ZERO DAMAGE.

Of course, we could decrease the fire rate of cannon:cannon systems a bit to get it back up to 1. But you would not be reducing the damage per block very much by doing that. Also, you'd make the best part of rapid cannons less cool.

I would add a mechanic to the game - Shields when broke, still nullify all remaining damage from a burst.
Example :

A missile (+beam) that does 500'000 damage is inbound to a ship that currently, it's on low shields (320'000 shields). The current game mechanics makes the damage go through the shields and already make a big hole on the ship. What I would suggest is, that this missile will take out the enemy shields, but all the damage will be absorbed by it.

Currently, a 500,000 damage missile that breaks shields will do 500,000 damage to the hull, even if the shields had 499,999 HP.

Instead of your solution, I propose the missile does the left over damage to hull. So, in your number example, the shields take 320,000 damage away from the missile, so it does 180,000 damage to the hull instead of 500,000.

 

[PIE_OF_DOOM]

So I built a small aprox 33 thousand block ship.

As one of many weapons systems I install a Missile/beam/ion system.

I shoot 2 missiles per volley.

They are optimize to get the most shield damage but have max blast radius to Adv Hull.

The system has a little over 950 blocks and average damage per missile is over 100000.
With about 90% ion I get a little over 200000 per missile.

Total system damage per shot is over 400000 agents shields.

This ship has also 100% ion defense and a normal shield capacity of 172 000 with 30000 recharge.

The shield block R/C is 5502/3720.

This ship is also really fast and has a jump drive that is meant to be 10% of the blocks of a 40000 block ship.

The other weapons on the ship include a nuke and twin lock missiles that fire every 15sec.

This ship was made to be balance but my one weapon system is able to take out its own shields.
The number of shield capacitor blocks out number that weapon system by almost 4x.
This is not a dedicated glass cannon and I can down an larger balanced ship that has over 8000 shields capacitor blocks.

This dose not compute.

Now some math.

Missile/beam: damage per shoot per block in system: 225

shield capacitors: add 55 per block in system.

225/55 ~ 4

Conclusion: Need 4x capacitors to survive.

Considering that power regain helps the tank ship as much as the glass cannon I am not accounting for it.

Power storage can help a ship with Other systems besides just the weapons. So a Glass cannon will natural have room not only for its power but for monster thrusts and Jump drives and maybe some other weapons. :O

And I was not even considering ion in the equation which makes the missiles do even more damage with less if at high ratios.

I think that we are about at the min for nurfing weapons as cannons can not go much lower.
Also to fix the ratio we would need to cut weapons damage by more then half.

No matter how effective a Hp update would be we need 4x the current shield capacity if there is to be a point to the tank ship and most combat.

By the way with current shields and 4million block ships I would consider these capacity values for ship types.

Tank: About 1/4 or more of ship is capacitors and re charger. ATM that is 50 million shields.

Balance: About 1/8 ship is capacitors and re charger. ATM that is about 25 million shields.(uper end)

Glass cannon: About 1/20 or less in capacitors and re chargers. ATM that is about 10 million or less.(normal much less)

Tank should be able to kill Glass cannon.

Glass cannon should be able to kill Balance.

Balance should be able to kill tank(thou it may take a bit).

This is vary basic as there are many types of Tanks, Glass cannons and Balance ships but this should be the main trend.


This is not the case as a 4 million block glass cannon can do near 150 million damage to shields and still be a fast jump ship.

This makes Tank and balance ships near useless.

So we must all hail the glass gun in less there is a fix.

 

[Criss]

Just wanted to point out that on like 90% of the Sci-fi franchises involves shields as a vital source - got no shields ? You are about to die. So, calling "damaging the shields is a dull part of the combat and it should not take long" is very... odd.

Pretty sure battlestar galactica could take on nuclear warheads from cylon basestars full force with just it's hull. It never had any shielding. That series was rooted in a more realistic science fiction universe. They relied on point defense and fighters to fend off enemies.

 

[Sgtwisky]

Snip.... The problem is there is no server to test these ideas on. You could modify single player and try that for a couple weeks, but that doesn't really give much weight to any argument, since it is just what you would do. I say a couple weeks in order to see if it is just a short term bandaid, or a legit solution, since for the first while people would be using their old ships, which would benefit from the change. What s needed is to see what kinds of ships would be built afterwards, a continuous push for more weapons, less shields, and it working, would prove kep's idea a failure for example (with the reverse supporting it)....Snip

Somewhat off topic rant:

I think one issue with that is not many people would be willing to host a "test" server where they take suggested config changes,(From the community) test them for a month or more and then compile the results. Its a bunch of work. THEN they have to actually get players on there to test. Players that would have to remain vested in the server, because if they only played for a day or two it would render testing pointless. SO the arguing continues.

After reading your comment I realized many proposed config changes work this way. People argue without any way to "prove" their theory in action (not theory or math, cuz when has math been right). and so ultimately these threads go nowhere.... This bothers me a bit. as the JOB of us as alpha testers/players IS to find a way to prove or disprove proposed community changes before there has to be an official "config update" (IMO). We are here to test! To try to break the game, to find ways that things could work better, and in doing so provide that feedback to the dev team.

Well I am willing to remove part of that barrier. I (after reading your post) am willing to run something of a "Test" server to discover what config tweeks can help/harm/do nothing. The only question is..... who other then myself is willing to devote time to playing/testing these new configs that the community comes up with? If you guys ARE interested in jumping into a rabbits hole to find out, hit me up and I will get a server setup. (and make an official server post... cuz I know this if offtopic but its this topic that made me see the possible need)


OT: I agree with the OP at the moment. I think that working PD turrets could also solve part of the glass cannon issue.

 

[Criss]

Alrighty. I am posting this here to showcase some visual evidence for what I stated earlier. There are tweaks that I would make to the changes showcased in the video. DO NOT expect this to be a perfect solution. There are still issues but I have already addressed a few. I will be making a separate post when the other two parts of this combat testing are on my channel. I will go into much further detail about my proposed changes there.

 

[Sgtwisky]

So Vanhelsing, are you proposing a (pretty massive) limit on weapon size in addition to the HP system? OR was this just a demonstration of how you think it will look like when implemented? Or a combination?

 

[Panpiper]

If you guys ARE interested in jumping into a rabbits hole to find out, hit me up and I will get a server setup.

I will certainly help with testing config changes on a test server. I cannot promise to do this full time or anything, but at least some sort of daily effort I could likely manage.

The question of course is 'what' changes would we test? Pulling from my own post above, I would suggest doubling shields, increasing advanced armor to 250 and it's armor value to 60-65%, and halving the capacity of power capacitors.

 

[Criss]

So Vanhelsing, are you proposing a (pretty massive) limit on weapon size in addition to the HP system? OR was this just a demonstration of how you think it will look like when implemented? Or a combination?

I wouldn't want to force a player to build weapons at a specific size. That takes away from what this game is. I would rather give the pros and cons for the amount of weapons they place. With a change such as the one I proposed, there would be massive amounts of unused space on ships (if the player goes for an efficient weapon setup sort of like what the video shows). They would likely use other systems or interior decks (more armor) to fill it up. If they use more systems, then those systems will be overpowered. They would have to get a bit of a nerf. Power would be wasted. People could accelerate to top speed in too short a time. Just a few examples.

The pros of staying under the "soft weapon cap" that I proposed would be:
- More room for other systems, which all contribute to ship health.
- Specialized ships. Reducing weapon count means players can use that space for specialized systems.
- Combat longevity would increase after shields go down. Even as it stands currently, too much of a ship can be taken out by players weapons (missiles). The health system will only slow that down so much.

Pros of going over the "soft weapon cap":
- Glass cannons. Or specialized weapon ships.
These ships would focus on weapons more. The more weapons that players place, the weaker the ship. This way nuke-capable ships are not only incredibly powerful, but also really weak and not considered the go-to for combat. Taking this in alone to fight another ship should be considered suicide. Suddenly we have needs to fly in fleets. It should also be noted that with this, weapons would have to contribute the bare minimum towards ship health.

Now don't see this as two different sides of a coin. Think of these two examples as the far extremes of a new balancing act. On one end you have a thoroughly balanced ship that has sufficient weaponry, on the other end you have incredibly powerful ships that have weak defensive capability.

This could be taken further too based on what systems or blocks you have on ships. Let's say you put on more storage blocks? That weapon cap should take a hit then. Far too often do I see freighters with capital sized guns. Now we have created the need for escorts to help our cargo ships travel.