A Manifesto on the Relationship Between Fighters, Titans and AI

[Maxaxle]

RE: Assumption Three: Maybe this could be achieved by invoking some form or implication of the square-cube law.

 

[KingofCalamity]

I've just started and mainly build in creative on my home computer, so I've not really seen what it's like one public servers. That being said, I can see everything you've said here fitting amazingly well as both problems and solutions (if my own statement makes any sense) for not just this game but games in general.

On the other side of that, I've played a few games with wonky (yeah, couldn't think of anything else) economies. There is a handful that have had stable economies and most of those were player built and driven. Most often through market places, or auction houses.

On the AI, please oh please release a MASTER AI COMPUTER that gives a player on the main ship command functions over AIs from smaller docked ships and turrets even after they're undocked. (I'm going to visit the suggestion thread after this.)

 

[Bourne223]

I would say that i mostly agree with everything written. Personally I disagree with assumption four. I would rather ride shotgun in a buddie's ship, or a capital ship because i know that i may not be the best at flying, and i know that i should leave that responsibility to someone who is better. I can do more by providing them covering fire than being cannon fodder. In fact, I was talking on chat today and asked what mass on average people's personal ships were. Most were in the 10-50k range. I rarely build ships larger than 500 mass, simply because i don't like to fly slower, bulkier ships. I like to fly around, even if I'm not the best at it. Maybe thats just me though. Perhaps the community as a whole really like to build gargantuan death ships and recreate battles of God versus God ^_^

 

[ImShiny]

I have been thinking of this ever since I started playing Starmade and i think there is a viable solution, if people do want to fight like this. Create some sort of FvF (faction vs faction) server/ leaderboards ect. This eliminates the use of AI ships and lets maybe 15 - 20 ppl do the job. Specific rule sets agreed to by the community would have to be decided on and written up. But you could only allow 1 titan per faction and so many fighters, ect ect. (Titans have to me a certain mass including turrets).

I understand that your talking about on a large server with multiple factions, but realistically thats not gonna happen, ppl are gonna bring their biggest and baddest ship wherever they go. so having fights that include all ships, even even numbered fights would be near impossible, I came from a game called Guild Wars 2 (if u care about the mmo scene u prolly know it) we did this thing called GvG (Guild vs Guild) and basically we all went to an arena and fought fair numbers only way to tell who was superior in a fair set up.


However in open field ud have fights like 15 v 30+ and it wouldnt be as fair because more ppl = more damage ect ect.

So i feel like starting some type of FvF server or leaderboard or w/e is the best idea to accomplish the goal u want to achieve.

when i think of this type of battle this is what i think.

 

[MacThule]

Conclusion Three: A functional economy is necessary to fully balance larger spaceships
Because why show up with a cap ship and ten fighters when you can show up with eleven cap ships? In Homeworld, Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, and any other sci-fi series you can name, you can sure bet that barring any economic or logistic restraints whatsoever, they'd make every spaceship a Battlecruiser, Battlestar, or Star Destroyer, respectively. The tradeoff should be between one large ship and many small ships (or something in between), not between many small ships and many large ships or one small ship and one large ship.

First - I agree with all of your points, and your 2 previous conclusions. I also partially agree with this conclusion - the player economy needs work. A substantial cut-back in the number of NPC shops would go a long ways towards this, as would some way to make player-run shops more prominent and easier for players to find, even players who aren't very good at searching with the map/navcomp.

I disagree with the reasoning behind mixed composition fleets though.

A fleet of 1 battleship, 2 frigates, and 10 fighters might be similar in cost to construct, field & maintain to a fleet of 2 battleships. REGARDLESS of economic necessity, mixed composition fleets are desirable. Small, fast craft are hard to target with large integrated weapons and massive, slow turrets. They can get in closer to a large ship than another large ship could, which is important for bypassing anti-missile point defense systems and delivering boarding parties and demolitions teams onto the hull of an enemy vessel. They may actually outlast larger ships against an enemy that is specialized to fight larger vessels. Smaller ships may handle long-range travel better. There can be many, many reasons to favor a smaller ship over a larger one. Unless small ships are punished purely for their small size.

In my opinion, Starmade strongly discourages mixed-composition fleets by scaling power-generator yield to favor larger arrays. All other systems are identical in small and large ships. Weapon & shield efficiency costs the same in terms of power & mass for a 100 mass vessel as it does for a 10,000 mass vessel, but the larger vessel is actually deliberately being rewarded for its size with more power generation PER BLOCK than its smaller counterpart.

Eliminate size scaling in the generator bonus and you'll level the playing field for smaller, faster ships.

I'm not talking about the shape bonus, just the size bonus. A 3-D array of 10 units should be able to yield the same e/sec/generator block as an identically shaped array of 1,000 units, instead of 1/4th the amount per block. Current power dynamics literally penalize you for having a ship with a power generator array smaller than 666 blocks. Which means the smallest power-optimized ship is going to be around 500 mass. Anything smaller is denied similar weapon & shield capacity regardless of design quality.

 

[Invadr]

Historically, or perhaps even for that matter universally in our reality, given approximately equal mass between a single large combatant and a large force of small combatants, the singe combatant would succumb to the many. Realistically speaking, there is a diminishing return on size. For reference, historically speaking, in WWII no single ship could hope to stand up to a equal mass of smaller attacking planes, proven in out all the theaters of war. You can go back to the dinosaurs and have the same outcome in that hypothesis. Mass itself, in the end, becomes your enemy. As an entity gets larger, and yes more powerful, it becomes slower, less nimble. More and more mass is required to provide structure and power to a larger entity. In combat hits will eventually wear down a single combatant, and as they are less and less able to respond, the remaining smaller combatants are gaining in strength by comparison as they are still fighting at 100%. There are a lot of variables of course, but I think, given the discussion between smaller drones and titans, it was a worthy thought.

Of course, this is irrelevant in a game. But it is interesting and worth consideration when you are deciding how you want your game to feel. How much reality do you want?

 

[NeonSturm]

1. Bigger is stronger for:
   1. Fights
   2. Mining
   3. Moving stuff around
2. Bigger allows more detail, but takes more time to build.

That's Star-Made!

_____

Spoiler: About ''1.1. Fights'' I like the approach of Star-Conflict (open to see how they balance) :

• Interceptors (Scouts, Special-Ops, Recon)
  • about 7'000 (hull + shield)
  • low survivability, but fast and evasive
• Fighters (Command, Gunships, Tacklers - vs small)
  • 10'500 (hull + shield)
• Frigates (Guards, Engineers, Long Range) have 18'000 (hull + shield)
  • high survivability, but slow and easy targets
• (each 170% hull+shield compared to that above)

Normal ships recover fully in about 30-60 seconds (some special stuff in 120 seconds).
Each ship has 2 weapons.

• Continuous guns (normal fighting)
  • 10 seconds flight path as range.
• Burst Missiles (second damage type (kinetic, EM, thermal)
  • 12 sec reload (3-10 missiles)
    
  • 120 for cartridge.
  • Up to 10'000 damage per missile.

Hull (without resist buffs) : stronger resist than shield

• kinetic : weak (compares to piercing or punch-through in Star-Made)
  
• EM : strong
  
• thermal : moderate

Shield (without resist buffs) : regenerates by 90 per second

• kinetic : strong
• EM : weak (compares to Ion-Effect in Star-Made)
  
• thermal : moderate

Sadly this does not work with custom ships.

• But for servers with rules for ship classes it might be something to think about.
• Then we just need a way for admins to enforce rules for ships per role.

_____
About "1.2. Mining" :

If resources are pretty fast to harvest, jet rare to find a good spot, small ships will have an advantage with mass/efficiency.

• Perhaps people start to like these because of their higher manoeuvrability and accelleration.

_____
About "1.3. Moving stuff around" :

IRL, each moving, man-made object, has size limits.

• You can't just build a 2 times as long rocket/plane
  • because materials have to compensate for a much higher leverage*mass.
  • length = 1 dimension; leverage*mass = 2 dimensions (square)!

In Star-Made it would be the size of Warp-Gates or the limit of acceptable rotation-speed or acceleration (or lag).

• Perhaps server limits (xyz, mass).

____
About "2. Bigger allows more detail, but takes more time to build" :

That's one thing that makes me sad :

• you can't have details 1/4 the size of your avatar.
• with a lag-free 5km big station.
• in the same block-based game.

Star-Conflict, X-Series and Eve-Online -for example- have HUGE stations where you can fly within - even Space-Engineers did something on that matter.

• With big stations and a size-norm, peoples would be encouraged to have small ships and pretty stations instead of big ships and tiny unrecognisable stations.

 

[Mered4]

To sustain a healthy balance between large ships (battleships, Titans) and their smaller counterparts (frigates->cruisers, drone carriers) without dismissing a particular weight outright, we need to give size its own advantages and disadvantages. At the moment, size is a huge detriment - you lose per-block efficiency very rapidly and become an easier target. Thus, small, maneuverable drones will quickly wipe ships 3-4 times their mass weight.

The only thing stopping drone v drone warfare is the high maintenance cost - both to the server and player - caused by large per-player entity counts.

We have to take this into account before fleet control is implemented, else we'll be participating in weird, long range fights between two swarms of tiny ships. Don't get me wrong - this is cool. However, there is and should be so much more variety in the way ships can be constructed for combat.

Part of this solution is to make support class vessels more viable. I'm talking about flak frigates, supply cruisers, and Electronic warfare Cruisers. All three of these classes are extremely vulnerable to attack in small fleets or solo, and lose their effectiveness very quickly. After all, you'd rather have 2 DPS vessels than one DPS and one mediocre support vessel.

But beyond that, the community needs to start coming to a more precise consensus on what combat should look like in the future. Are we to fight the same way those in Fractured Space do (large ships, drones are secondary), or is it more like SW Battlefront II (cap ships are mostly passive, while fighter craft rule the day)? Or EVE, where massive fleets slam into each other, commanded by 2-3 players? I hear so many different visions for the game because no one is really sure where it is headed.

 

[NeonSturm]

Or EVE, where massive fleets slam into each other, commanded by 2-3 players?

Depends on player base and server stability. I'd like that.

Do you know Star-Conflict's maps? - huge asteroids (2-3km) and bases (plates, spires, ...) 10km across which can be invulnerable bunkers for sniper fights or just obstacles to recover from damage behind before re-engaging the team-fight (players + 2-3 bots mixed).


Perhaps in a fight, 1000 drones should be represented by just 6 attacking from different sides with dmg/shield/hp multiplier on?

 

[Mered4]

Depends on player base and server stability. I'd like that.

Do you know Star-Conflict's maps? - huge asteroids (2-3km) and bases (plates, spires, ...) 10km across which can be invulnerable bunkers for sniper fights or just obstacles to recover from damage behind before re-engaging the team-fight (players + 2-3 bots mixed).


Perhaps in a fight, 1000 drones should be represented by just 6 attacking from different sides with dmg/shield/hp multiplier on?

Star-conflict's combat is something unique and I highly doubt it would work well in Starmade. The ships are so precisely balanced that the customization in Starmade would completely ruin the idea of balance.

In addition, the size and weight of ships in SC doesn't linearly scale with power and HP.

The idea is sound, but in a sandbox universe, it will be difficult to add in anything that large without causing serious lag.

 

[NeonSturm]

Not with that much detail with block-hp...

If you only fly around in your super-titan, you encounter only smaller things and the game loses some part of it's epic awesomeness.

Limits to the size of moving objects may be the key to archive the awesomeness of your environment.​

A 16x16x16 cube of the very same blocks takes 12 KiB in memory, currently. (AFAIK)

Even if it just consists of the very same blocks.
Perhaps this will change when schema learns something new.​

 

[jorgekorke]

The only reason for Titans being invincible today is the current turret mechanics. 100k, 200k mass turrets that turns just as fast as a 5k mass turret makes the game so easy that you can just sit and watch your enemies burn while drinking some coffee.

The default turning rate does not help as well. A 100k mass ship currently turns at the same speed as a 1mil mass titan.

 

[Brobiwan_Kenobi]

A thing I thought of while reading about AI "drones/fighters" and the use in combat; that is combat damage. If you have 20 drones and 15 of them suffer moderate to heavy damage, the time it takes to manually repair them could end up being very long.

My (admittedly basic) idea is to have a set of blocks that are required to be linked in a manner similar to logic blocks that can access a stored blueprint (possibly inside a linked a plex storage unit) to replace missing blocks. The time requirement would be similar to construction of the ship minus the time of the already constructed portions. This system would require all the resources used in original construction (shield capacitor/recharger, thrusters, the various weapon systems, hull/armor, etc) to be stored along with the blueprint for repair to be possible.

What do you all think of this?

 

[1adog1]

You've pretty much summed up everything that this game needs for realistic battles!

(Kind of building off of Brobiwan_Kenobi's post above me.)
Along with all this though, the issue of producing all those small A.I. fighters is going to become a future issue. What if instead of our current blueprint system, we had a kind of "ship factory" system that would build ships faster than you could place blocks, but not instantaneously. It would be impractical for larger ships because it would be placing blocks one by one, but for those smaller fighters, you could create a few factories and churn them out once every couple minutes.

 

[Brobiwan_Kenobi]

Reply to 1adog1:

I think I understand what you are talking about, and they can effectively be split into 2 types of structure. The first being a space dock on a space station that can build, and launch multiple craft that either went to a docking point or had a rally point somewhere near the station. For balance this still should have a limit of how many ships can be constructed from it.

The second being the ship factory would be a combination of space dock and fighter docking bay; it's biggest limitation being it can only build and support a single craft.

 

[tyroney]

(edit: posting in suggestions)

About the first post - Your assumptions started out alright, but your first conclusion suddenly jumped to "swarms" of ai, and then you were talking about respawning on ships. (I think the person who brought up remote-controls offered a simpler way to do such things)

About the discussion in general - I encourage people to think less in terms of "limitations" and more in terms of "interesting decisions".

Personally, swarms of anything doesn't sound very exciting to me. Maybe fun in a "look at all I can control" sort of way, but otherwise it's just throwing numbers at a target (or as targets) and being less directly involved.

With just a little detail, here are two things I think might add to the diversity and engagement of ships and players-

Limited (in-ship) action bar slots. One ship, or more specifically one person on a ship at a single point, should not be able to do everything. If you want more than x weapons systems, and a warp system, and a salvage system, etc etc then you'd need more than one person (or one person dividing their time amongst a number of consoles) to get them all done. I'll pull a number out of the air I haven't thought about - give every console/whatever 3 slots. If you want to fly/steer, you just lost a slot. (or two, if you also want jump drive control) Want to fire? lose another slot. You get the idea.
(going further, if a given console had its systems and their power source as slaves, and slaves shared damage to a degree, making redundant or separate power grids and creating backup/emergency systems would be a thing, and that seems like it would be neat in my opinion)

Second thing - there could be an order-of-magnitude difference between (some of) the systems of small and large ships. Say a large ship's systems requires a power core the size of a small ship. (and similarly with their weapon systems and shields) Now institute a few more rules - large weapon systems only do fractional damage to small ship shields. (full damage to armor/ship when the shields are down) Small ship weapons ignore large shields. (the large ships have more armor/hp to chew through, so nothing special there)
(taking that further, you could have 3 classes of size. Make it so the largest basically can't attack the smallest directly, and suddenly you have tiny fighters flying through the death star...)

If both of those changes were in place, you'd naturally need a large ship to do appreciable damage to a station, so you have a big ship with a huge jump drive to travel into a system and a monster cannon to try and take it over, but you also need to bring a small pile of fighters to get past defenses.
(To round things off, turrets allow you to install small weapons on a large ship, and stations can further attach large-system weapons as turrets. Maybe power requirements or console bar slots could be used to keep turret use reasonable and balanced.)

 

[Mered4]

(edit: posting in suggestions)

About the first post - Your assumptions started out alright, but your first conclusion suddenly jumped to "swarms" of ai, and then you were talking about respawning on ships. (I think the person who brought up remote-controls offered a simpler way to do such things)

About the discussion in general - I encourage people to think less in terms of "limitations" and more in terms of "interesting decisions".

Personally, swarms of anything doesn't sound very exciting to me. Maybe fun in a "look at all I can control" sort of way, but otherwise it's just throwing numbers at a target (or as targets) and being less directly involved.

With just a little detail, here are two things I think might add to the diversity and engagement of ships and players-

Limited (in-ship) action bar slots. One ship, or more specifically one person on a ship at a single point, should not be able to do everything. If you want more than x weapons systems, and a warp system, and a salvage system, etc etc then you'd need more than one person (or one person dividing their time amongst a number of consoles) to get them all done. I'll pull a number out of the air I haven't thought about - give every console/whatever 3 slots. If you want to fly/steer, you just lost a slot. (or two, if you also want jump drive control) Want to fire? lose another slot. You get the idea.
(going further, if a given console had its systems and their power source as slaves, and slaves shared damage to a degree, making redundant or separate power grids and creating backup/emergency systems would be a thing, and that seems like it would be neat in my opinion)

Second thing - there could be an order-of-magnitude difference between (some of) the systems of small and large ships. Say a large ship's systems requires a power core the size of a small ship. (and similarly with their weapon systems and shields) Now institute a few more rules - large weapon systems only do fractional damage to small ship shields. (full damage to armor/ship when the shields are down) Small ship weapons ignore large shields. (the large ships have more armor/hp to chew through, so nothing special there)
(taking that further, you could have 3 classes of size. Make it so the largest basically can't attack the smallest directly, and suddenly you have tiny fighters flying through the death star...)

If both of those changes were in place, you'd naturally need a large ship to do appreciable damage to a station, so you have a big ship with a huge jump drive to travel into a system and a monster cannon to try and take it over, but you also need to bring a small pile of fighters to get past defenses.
(To round things off, turrets allow you to install small weapons on a large ship, and stations can further attach large-system weapons as turrets. Maybe power requirements or console bar slots could be used to keep turret use reasonable and balanced.)

The key to a lot of this is to drastically increase the power consumption and effectiveness of all weapon blocks so we can have smaller weapons with a bigger punch. That would help reduce the size of turrets and increase the flexibility in fighter design.

I think this has been said before, but if we suddenly had this awesome fleet control system and automated repair/restock for ships (limited or not), combat would swiftly devolve into Drone Carrier Wars just like some sort of Ender's Game clone. Now, that's cool (Watch the movie. It's cool), but so are a lot of other scenarios. Additionally, maintenance is still a huge problem, and I'd rather not spend my time in MP repairing/restocking my ships.

We need to find a solution for small/large ship dynamics that doesn't involve eliminating either class from regular combat. I hope the Council (when it is elected) will hold a BrainTrust of sorts on the subject. It's the root cause of many non-technical gameplay issues and I'd like to see what our best and brightest are thinking.

 

[NeonSturm]

That would help reduce the size of turrets and increase the flexibility in fighter design.

Requiring 5 hull blocks per vital (dmg, shield, energy) block would help too.

• As these don't have to be in some special shape.
• And make things (especially together with RP-stuff) more balanced with default settings.

I'll pull a number out of the air I haven't thought about - give every console/whatever 3 slots. If you want to fly/steer, you just lost a slot. (or two, if you also want jump drive control) Want to fire? lose another slot. You get the idea.

I would like that.
Give big ship guns diminishing returns which they have to compensate with many weapon arrays = many controls.

But how would you solve the logic-problem?
It would hurt scripting/"block"ing to limit actions per pilot.

Second thing - there could be an order-of-magnitude difference between (some of) the systems of small and large ships.
[...]
(taking that further, you could have 3 classes of size. Make it so the largest basically can't attack the smallest directly, and suddenly you have tiny fighters flying through the death star...)

I agree, but it has to be a smooth transition.
1st class : Everything less than 1/8 blocks of the entity compared to.
3rd class : Everything more than 8/1 blocks of the entity compared to.
2nd class : Everything between.

 

[1adog1]

Sorry I've been posting kinda on and off here, busy times lately lol

Requiring 5 hull blocks per vital (dmg, shield, energy) block would help too.

• As these don't have to be in some special shape.
• And make things (especially together with RP-stuff) more balanced with default settings.

I agree, but it has to be a smooth transition.
1st class : Everything less than 1/8 blocks of the entity compared to.
3rd class : Everything more than 8/1 blocks of the entity compared to.
2nd class : Everything between.

These two things are direct restrictions, which in a sandbox game should be avoided at all costs. If you're going to put in restrictions people are going to want a logical reason for them being there. Simply saying "This ship will not function unless you have these block ratios." is a turn off.

The hull requirement is interesting, but 5 to 1 is too much, as most people just use hull for external and internal aesthetics. Maybe a 1-1 or 2-1 ratio would be more well received, and, as I said above, with a logical reason behind it.

The class system is completely impossible without a massive redesign of how shields work, and it's not really necessary anyway. Have you ever tried to hit a fighter with a titan's main guns? It's not easy by any stretch. Turrets serve the purpose of protecting larger ships, and they do it in a relatively realistic way.

Here's a constant that you can't avoid: You need either a massive ship, or a ton of smaller ships to destroy another massive ship. This whole "let's just fly through their shields and kill them with a small fighter" thing isn't realistic or fun for the person that spent days building that ship. Making it easier for us create and manage that ton of smaller ships is what we're talking about here.

 

[Mered4]

Sorry I've been posting kinda on and off here, busy times lately lol



These two things are direct restrictions, which in a sandbox game should be avoided at all costs. If you're going to put in restrictions people are going to want a logical reason for them being there. Simply saying "This ship will not function unless you have these block ratios." is a turn off.

The hull requirement is interesting, but 5 to 1 is too much, as most people just use hull for external and internal aesthetics. Maybe a 1-1 or 2-1 ratio would be more well received, and, as I said above, with a logical reason behind it.

The class system is completely impossible without a massive redesign of how shields work, and it's not really necessary anyway. Have you ever tried to hit a fighter with a titan's main guns? It's not easy by any stretch. Turrets serve the purpose of protecting larger ships, and they do it in a relatively realistic way.

Here's a constant that you can't avoid: You need either a massive ship, or a ton of smaller ships to destroy another massive ship. This whole "let's just fly through their shields and kill them with a small fighter" thing isn't realistic or fun for the person that spent days building that ship. Making it easier for us create and manage that ton of smaller ships is what we're talking about here.

Exactly. Those smaller ships will completely obliterate the larger ship in the current balance, but you will spend hours redocking them and replacing them. Most combat is about 1v1s - once fleet control comes online, it will be completely different.