I thoroughly enjoy watching ship reviews from Luke and Saber for the jaw-dropping beauty and to find some inspiration for my own ships. A recent top 5 from Luke kind of brought to the surface an issue within this Starmade universe. He made mention of the lack of creativity of ship interiors lately. I see his point and also have a feeling as to why this is.
Everyone loves to play on servers that have something different for a challenge and most of us want to play on the more populated servers as well. A large chunk of these servers use custom pirates in custom ships with the challenge being honestly one dimensional -- make em bigger threats. You, as a new player , go into one of these servers and very quickly discover defending yourself against npc pirates , real players aside, may require a ship with 2 million shields. This forces the new player to ramp up quickly and not worry about "non-essential" things like having actual rooms in his ship beyond a core room. It doesn't enhance his ability to survive. So he builds system ships not realistic ships.
That's the issue. There is no benefit from realistic interiors. It actually penalizes by adding size to the ship. The new players experiencing Starmade are rarely playing a vanilla version once they get out of single player and they experience a scenario similar to what I mentioned. They don't build rooms on their early ships and when they start working on larger ships they may not even know where to begin on interior design.
I don't have a solution to this, but it does feel like an issue that I hope can be resolved in a manner to give benefit to ships that are built as well on the interior as the exterior.
Everyone loves to play on servers that have something different for a challenge and most of us want to play on the more populated servers as well. A large chunk of these servers use custom pirates in custom ships with the challenge being honestly one dimensional -- make em bigger threats. You, as a new player , go into one of these servers and very quickly discover defending yourself against npc pirates , real players aside, may require a ship with 2 million shields. This forces the new player to ramp up quickly and not worry about "non-essential" things like having actual rooms in his ship beyond a core room. It doesn't enhance his ability to survive. So he builds system ships not realistic ships.
That's the issue. There is no benefit from realistic interiors. It actually penalizes by adding size to the ship. The new players experiencing Starmade are rarely playing a vanilla version once they get out of single player and they experience a scenario similar to what I mentioned. They don't build rooms on their early ships and when they start working on larger ships they may not even know where to begin on interior design.
I don't have a solution to this, but it does feel like an issue that I hope can be resolved in a manner to give benefit to ships that are built as well on the interior as the exterior.