Dev Blog : February 17th 2016

Lecic said:

I wasn't aware the points system had any sort of capability to detect things like "armor placement" or "docked reactors" or even things as simple as how certain effects, weapons, and building techniques (spaced armor, etc) work and how they function in combat, or that it will ever be able to detect that kind of thing without just flat out having some AI fight it out.

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Tbh, I'd rather have semi-accurate simulated combat than full out loaded in combat and burning servers everywhere.

keptick said:

Tbh, I'd rather have semi-accurate simulated combat than full out loaded in combat and burning servers everywhere.

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Especially when if actual warfare becomes feasible you're going to want to hit as many fronts as you can.

I wonder if there will be some way to see how an AI battle is going, some kind of way to see which side has the advantage, so you can order them to retreat or will they just fight till one is completely destroyed. A way to tell the fleet when to retreat automatically would be useful too. Meet a fleet more powerful then you, run. Have 60 percent of your health left, get the hell out of there.

SkylordLuke said:

the point is.... it was NOT an intended feature for it to work like that. what would be the purpose of support ships in the future,if you can cramp everything in one ship protected beneath layers of armor and mothership shields. all it does is ecouraging building jack of all trades motherships.

before you start defending. Yes.. we have many guys here who love their reactors,but I think we would all love if more ACTUAL strategic elements were introduced to battles. And removing reactors in favor of having support ships would do that. battles would be way more interesting,and fleet commanders would have more stuff to work with to outwit the enemy.

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Can I introduce you to our dear friend the Mitochondria?
And regarding the jack of all trades argument, when you take an equal mass jack of all trades ship and pit it aginst equal mass specialized ships, it will lose. (and a ship specialized in one aspect will loose to a ship specialized in its weakness, and vise versa).

However, in starmade there was NEVER a point to stop building a vessel at some point and then make a second one of it, until now!
You could only ever fly one ship, so you would try to make it as big as you could to defeat your enemies.
Now you have to factor in costs, and that really was only an issue before when your ship wasn't big enough and was destroyed.


I argue that docked components serve to make a ship even more specialized for a role and not for general purpose use.
I will also argue that the fleet update might serve as a way to somewhat cut out the "build big or go home" mentality.
red "I brought the biggest ship!"
blue "I brought two smaller but still really big ships!"
red "damn I lost my big ship"
blue "damn I lost one of my big ships, but I have this even bigger ship as salvage!"

We will just need to sit back and see where the balance of power switches to.
Ships that are small enough to not break the bank when lost, but not so small that it breaks the server whenever your fleet with you in command finds something to shoot at. (aka, maybe not battleships [too expensive] and maybe not frigates [need too many] but something in-between for ideal size range.)
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Laflamme said:

I wonder if there will be some way to see how an AI battle is going, some kind of way to see which side has the advantage, so you can order them to retreat or will they just fight till one is completely destroyed. A way to tell the fleet when to retreat automatically would be useful too. Meet a fleet more powerful then you, run. Have 60 percent of your health left, get the hell out of there.

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I agree, I also think they should take time to play out.
Like, with a ship engagement between 2 sides with 5 or more cruisers on each side, it might take up to a half an hour or more for the fight to finish, AND would allow time for people to join the fight, and for the participating parties to get reinforcements assembled or give commands and change up tactics.

We will really need to see if this game will lead more towards an RTS game or have more of the 4X flavor of the big strategy games.

Wow, it's more than I hoped! After seeing the support calls for the fleet testing I was so excited. I can't wait for this to be available.

Nice work guys.
You rock!

Kilim said:

True but I still think it's better that it exists rather than unloaded ships not functioning at all. You could also just not use docked modules on AI drones. I mean 2 million power on drones is still decent plus you can use many of them

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Docked modules are NOT the only problem with doing combat purely off points. Things like armor placement, system placement, interior layout (once we get crew), etc, are all very important, and doing combat off points damages the need for those kinds of skills.

Plazmatic and Megacrafter127 have offered up some good solutions to this issue, though, showing it'd be possible to do this sort of thing WITHOUT needing to fully load the sector and burn the hardware running the game.

Perhaps we should only Load the sectors in for combat IF the combined ratings of both sides are close to the same value. Maybe have a 33% range up and down that it will check to see if they are in the same range of rating. So If a Isanth goes up against your capital ship it will do a quick simulation and say the Isanth died. If you have two near size Capital ships (Or two Fighters) then it will load them in for an AI battle.

Jay_do said:

Perhaps we should only Load the sectors in for combat IF the combined ratings of both sides are close to the same value. Maybe have a 33% range up and down that it will check to see if they are in the same range of rating. So If a Isanth goes up against your capital ship it will do a quick simulation and say the Isanth died. If you have two near size Capital ships (Or two Fighters) then it will load them in for an AI battle.

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Yeah, but like any simulation it would have an element of RNG as to "simulate" tatics in a battle. So it is possible that mighty Titan might be defeated by a lone Isanth.

Reagarding server lag and what not, what is it that causes that for the players???
My orgional thoughts were just to get the server to download copies of all the ships involved and label the sector as a battle sector.
Then the copies fight an AI battle in an offline sector untill one ship overheats or the timer runs out (which can run at slower speeds) and then the results are re-uploaded to the actual server (under a set upload speed).
Therefore AI battles can take some time to complete but wont lag the server and will be quite accurate

Laflamme said:

Yeah, but like any simulation it would have an element of RNG as to "simulate" tatics in a battle. So it is possible that mighty Titan might be defeated by a lone Isanth.

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Ehhhh.... I think a little bit of randomness to the outcome of a battle could be a good thing, but that seems a little overboard.

Laflamme said:

Yeah, but like any simulation it would have an element of RNG as to "simulate" tatics in a battle. So it is possible that mighty Titan might be defeated by a lone Isanth.

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HA HA HA HA!
No.
I'm just gonna say that unless the capital ship is very speciallized, and very baddly done(Theyed need to have no shields, and no turrets) any fighter-sized ship(100-5,000 mass(getting most of thr player's ranges in that)) facing any Titain(especially if it gets the title"mighty") would get swatted out in minutes, let alone any(what, 75, 175 mass?) Isanth class ship. Very good icon of starmade, but needs to be updated a ton. Half of the models can't even fire. If the titain's got any decent weaponry it should both out shield, and shoot down the fighter in no time.

hmm I say unloaded fleet battles would have to take into account:

• The Stats of the ships and stations themselves
  • Structure
  • Armor
  • Power Regen/Max
  • Shield Regen/Max
  • AI Settings
  • Weapons and their stats and the direction they are facing
  • Thrust
• the ship scores
• Players flying through an unloaded area with a battle in it
• how long is the fight going to take?
• etc.

There's a lot more these could take into account as well but this is just a simple list.

Nevermind, just realized that this system is already programmed and suggestions are probably not required at this point.

Oh hey, my suggestion for hangars is getting made to be reality! :D I feel like I've contributed.

There needs to be more variables to unloaded battles than just the wheel, I think everyone who has built PVP ships, especially weird/gimmicky ones, can agree on this. How does the simulation take into account ship speed/maneuverability? Or armor thickness? If it ignores armor, then system doom cubes are in, if it needs to destroy all armor, then massive blocks of armor are in. How long do battles take? There's so many variables here.

Dellexe said:

Oh hey, my suggestion for hangars is getting made to be reality! :D I feel like I've contributed.

There needs to be more variables to unloaded battles than just the wheel, I think everyone who has built PVP ships, especially weird/gimmicky ones, can agree on this. How does the simulation take into account ship speed/maneuverability? Or armor thickness? If it ignores armor, then system doom cubes are in, if it needs to destroy all armor, then massive blocks of armor are in. How long do battles take? There's so many variables here.

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One partial solution is:

Nickizzy said:

If no ones on the server then the ships could do normal combat, but if people are on then do an alert to everyone on contributing factions, as well as an option to spectate the battle(look through the cameras and turrets of the leader of their own fleet). No participation, but you can watch the carnage with popcorn and butter to make up for the lags. If it's 2 megafactions but none of the members are on(but some other people are messing with turrets or something) then... You could make it normal combat, but only if the battle was small enough, or only spawn a certain amount of each side's ships(give a use for having your best ships up front on the command line?)-based on block count, no one wants their 5 of 200 drones facing the enemy's dreadnauts. As ships are destroyed more ships can spawn in to fight to keep the lag down. If to many fights are going on at once, you could make them be sim battles, or make them start once the other ones finished(I know, that might be bad for getting things done for everyone else, but still...).
[DOUBLEPOST=1455674876,1455674631][/DOUBLEPOST]3 minutes between posts... This may be a record for this thread!

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It would attempt to keep the lag down, probably doing an okay job, and would do the actual real battles.

Shameless self-quoting - it's not self advertising.

Nickizzy said:

It would attempt to keep the lag down, probably doing an okay job, and would do the actual real battles.

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This is a bad optimization because it promotes people not playing.

nightrune said:

This is a bad optimization because it promotes people not playing.

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Keep in mind that battles on this scale will always be done both in and out of player observation. The idea was to allow full scale battles when no one is on the server(because no one is blowing up planets or crashing around titains), but having a "from the depths" like fleet system* allows fleet battles while people are doing things in game.

You could spectate the battles looking through cameras or turrets, but you couldn't control them. This would allow people to watch things without needing 30 minutes in their jump ship to get there.



*(in from the depths, most of the time your creations are "out of play" where they are unrendered-it only keeps the blueprint and the position(as well as stats like speed and damage). When in combat, each fleet has a collection of ships, but you set the spawn priority of each ship, and the maximum blocks in the battle**. Your and your opponent's ships each spawn in their top ships(that you selected in the start of the battle) until the block limit is reached. As ships are destroied, new ships on each fleet are spawned until one fleet is completely destroied)

**The maximum blocks spawned would be poportionate to the amount of things going on in the server, ping rates, chunk updates, and frame rates, decided by the server.

Ships trying to keep a straight line formation around the center rotating flagship:
This is far from usable/finished but I thought it looked amazing :D

That's a pretty sizable number of ships. I like it.