Balancing Starmade's Awesome Spaceships

[Mered4]

I've been designing some pretty interesting vessels lately to model in either Blender or Starmade. Some are mostly aesthetic builds, while others are more combat focused.

Most of the questions I find myself asking for combat vessel designs involve team size. Am I fighting with a bunch of friends against a 15 player fleet? Is this a fight between myself and some loner next to a planet? What if I'm on most servers, where factions can't really field more than five people at a time due to time zone differences and people actually having a life?

The answers to these questions usually lead me to the "hey, Starmade really needs balanced...." conclusion. The issue I've found with a lot of solutions to THAT problem is player count. Lots of folks don't want long ship battles (I still am befuddled by these people - that problem is literally 18 months old), while others are really tired of the one-shot kill mentality that pervades most fights between 5k and 50k mass. Still others really want big fleets, but their ideas fall flat when swinging around to the ship-ship combat. It would invalidate some ship builds UNLESS they had a fleet behind them. This isn't a bad thing in itself - I'm just not sure Starmade is built for that level of specialization.

That said, I'd like to put it to a poll. Let's see what the forum goers think of this. Where should we primarily focus the balance? Small fleet battles, 1v1 fighter duels, or massive engagements on an EVE-like scale? I'd love to hear your comments. This is one area where some opinions are quite murky, at least from what I've seen.

Please note I'm not necessarily counting drones into the ship count. The numbers should be taken as a loose count of the number of *capital ships* being flown into a fight. Or, if you like, those piloted by actual players.

 

[starhaiden]

one word battle-mode

 

[Aecetym]

You can't start balancing things when so many aren't even finished yet.

 

[hzzzln]

You can't start balancing things when so many aren't even finished yet.

But we can think about how we will balance them when they are.

I've been designing some pretty interesting vessels lately to model in either Blender or Starmade. Some are mostly aesthetic builds, while others are more combat focused.

Most of the questions I find myself asking for combat vessel designs involve team size. Am I fighting with a bunch of friends against a 15 player fleet? Is this a fight between myself and some loner next to a planet? What if I'm on most servers, where factions can't really field more than five people at a time due to time zone differences and people actually having a life?

The answers to these questions usually lead me to the "hey, Starmade really needs balanced...." conclusion. The issue I've found with a lot of solutions to THAT problem is player count. Lots of folks don't want long ship battles (I still am befuddled by these people - that problem is literally 18 months old), while others are really tired of the one-shot kill mentality that pervades most fights between 5k and 50k mass. Still others really want big fleets, but their ideas fall flat when swinging around to the ship-ship combat. It would invalidate some ship builds UNLESS they had a fleet behind them. This isn't a bad thing in itself - I'm just not sure Starmade is built for that level of specialization.

That said, I'd like to put it to a poll. Let's see what the forum goers think of this. Where should we primarily focus the balance? Small fleet battles, 1v1 fighter duels, or massive engagements on an EVE-like scale? I'd love to hear your comments. This is one area where some opinions are quite murky, at least from what I've seen.

Please note I'm not necessarily counting drones into the ship count. The numbers should be taken as a loose count of the number of *capital ships* being flown into a fight. Or, if you like, those piloted by actual players.

The way it is now, I feel like going in to the fight as a team already has an advantage over fighting alone (given equal mass, of course). This is good, in my eyes. Teamplay and working together are fun in interesting, and should be rewarded. I think combat is most interesting if all parties have roughly the same mass and the one with best ships design and strategy execution should be the one to win. Currently, it is kind of a game of luck, the winner is the one who hits his first sniper missile barrage. When the HP system is introduced and point-defence gets a buff, I think we already have a very interesting combat system going.