This leaves me wondering if the ideal mass distribution is the main thing that hurts RP builds. Wouldn't it be better to say "about half of your mass needs to be armor to work well. You can make it look however you want though." (It's also important to remember the difference between a 'sane' or functional RP build and one that gives no thought to function. Only sane RP builds can reasonably be considered for balancing.)
It's kind of impressive how every single god damn time someone makes a point about "The game mechanics are busted and don't work" it always gets twisted into "how can we make the game accomodate RP better?"
To answer your question; 20/20/20/20/20 is NOT an "optimal" configuration, its just a generally effective standard for a good jack of all trades ship; not specialized for defense, offense or anything else. If your ship is 60/10/10/10/10 why would you not cut down armor by half then double shields, weapons and thust? This is the crux of RP failure; they never compromise their designs to accomodate the mechanics, instead expecting the mechanics to be twisted and bend to accomodate their specific ship. You CANNOT write mechanics that encourage you to ignore them, which is what RP ships do, attempting to do this is what created this entire mess.
Look at it this way; if you make a ship with 70% armor but all of it is hull, 20% thrust and 10% weapon with overdrive effect you'd end up with a ship that is without a doubt weaker for its mass than the 20/20/20/20/20 design, but that ship would consist of 95% hull, reactor, capacitor and thruster, all dirt cheap garbage blocks that cost next to nothing; it would cost a fraction of other ships but this design could still fight. Such a design has next to zero negative impact on RP building as you have all the armor mass you could ever want and empty space for interiors are just spaced armor with zero drawbacks, yet no RP builder builds their ships this way. It's not that mass distribution makes RP building impossible, it's 100% that RP builders aren't trying to make effective ships so they don't. No change in mechanics can solve this.
NOT having a "optimal" configuration is what my entire post is about; if you're building a ~10-20k mass ship for taking on 300k mass cruisers you wouldn't follow 20/20/20/20/20 eiter; what good is armor for a ship like that? You are much better off piling everything into weapons and speed. You have to sacrifice shielding too or you stand no chance of breaking their shields, but a ship like this ends up having trouble against similar sized builds because of how specialized they are; you need lots of ion damage to break the shielding so you cant fit a lot of anti armor/hull weapons letting a good generalist ship outlast you.
A lot of people continue to call for fleets and AI, and I can see why, but I'm still concerned that the large-scale strategy will end up consuming the game's soul. There's not a lot of point in designing your own ships if you don't interact with them and use them yourself. The current AI is really only suitable for small fighters. Maybe that's all AI should be.
Being able to design your own fleets for an RTS sounds pretty badass to me, but welcome to the fundamental flaw of starmade; nobody knows what it's supposed to be. I'd be perfectly happy to have any notion of crew and even walking around as a guy completely removed from the game. Obviously not everyone agrees about that but having multiple distinct games fused into one mega-game is really bad for everyone; performance will suffer from having to calculate pathfinding for characters, and i can easily see starmade doing the same bullshit that left X-rebirth unplayable for years, where walking around as a person and interacting with crew is seen as important and immersive by the devs, so you are forced to waste hundreds of hours in your spaceship game not flying spaceships but rather being dragged through interiors you dont care about to go through the exact same conversation thousands of times in order to do something that shouldve been done through a menu.
Repeat this video 100 times and that's what playing X-rebirth is like, NOT an exaggeration. You NEED to do this for every station in the game to see their trade offers, and there are hundreds of them, with about 4 different conversations all going exactly the same as this one. The game wasn't playable at all until modders made enough bypasses to skip the fucking NPC interaction because it dragged the game down so much.
A lot of the suggestions made here further highlight how divided we are on what we actually want starmade to be; things like crew interaction, oxygen simulation and interactive ship elements sound more like they belong in animal crossing.
Starmade has no clear vision for what it wants to be.
Instead of working towards a goal schine treats starmade as just a feature list, with no regard for how those features are supposed to work or what they're even there for. The result it everyone making suggestions are assuming schine are trying to make the game they want, so you have a hundred directions, many of them completely incompatible, stretching the game with too many bloated features.
I could still enjoy starmade even if it removed shipbuilding entirely, even if it did just turn into animal crossing in space, but its turning into some godforsaken abomination that doesn't focus on anything so it wont do anything well.
What I'm saying is, I'm not sure it's good for the game in the long run to have AI capable of operating completely independently with no players present. After a certain point, AI becomes so advanced that players are just about out of the picture. With a game that's centered around building things, it's not good for the endgame to eliminate interaction with most of the stuff you build. A balance has to be struck. Where that balance is remains up for debate, but needs to be somewhere. IMO fleets should act more like wingmen to player-manned ships so that they are player interactive at their core rather than independent at their core like they are now. The idea of fleets is good, but the current (half-)execution will end up being bad for the heart and soul of the game.
How are you going to protect your assets while offline if the AI can't do it? Not that you're wrong about anything in this post, but seems like you want starmade to be about being a character running around and not an empire builder or RTS, which would require starmade to have some kind of idea of what it wants to be.
