Are you serious? Huge, "useless," surface area like that is great for boosting your armor HP (which is very useful for defense, despite your apparent opinion that shields are the only way to go) and for drawing missiles, turrets, and drones away from your real system masses.
sup all
I would like to tell I find armor insanely useless. What armor gives you as "defensive bonus" is ridiculous against decent sized weapons.
It makes you spend much more block count on defensive effects too (since defensive cost - power and group size - accounts for mass instead of block count: every armor block above hull you place is VERY COSTY compared to any system) and you end with a ship that's overall FUCKING inefficient (or minimalist), so I don't even want any on my system entity anymore. This way my defensive effects block counts are 1/3 of thoses of ships of same size that have armor on systems entity so I am always superior in every aspect (attracting missiles argument is a joke, weapons try to target systems and that's all LOL did you notice anything different? also there's a thousand way to attract missiles without armor at all).
Also it let you give defensives to armor (very cheap in block count), and use it as an ablative armor that soak SHIELD damage and NEGLECTS ion damage once it's <50% (and armor pool don't fucking matter LOL) it's so OP you guys don't even know. Also you get a free docked reactor slot (docked reactor and armor can be the same entity). Also power reactors ARENT innefficient when you're not using power transfer system. Just use the power ON the said entity (with turrets docked on it, mis/beam via bobby or such) and you're good.
So yeah Raisinbat's point is totally valid: wanna remove multiple entity ships because buildin them is a pain in the ass and you guys can't? Sure. But then what are you doing with such dumb mechanics to build DECENT interesting ships?
For me the starmade ability to combine block entities and also (but not only) moving them for doing doors, moving parts, etc. is the ABSOLUTE BEST THING. Their best "feature" ATM (Made me totally "in" the game since old stupid docking mechanics updated) and that goes with EVERYTHING WE CAN DO WITH IT. SO GODDAM WHY does it have to be restricted to hull decorations and small elevators? I'm all for reworking the mechanics but ATM docked ships are the last and best tier of tech so if you guys don't have anything interesting to offer you're just cutting the absolute most interesting part of the game. The "Chronos" ships I do (full docked features) are the biggest pain in the ass I had in videogames building (and they're goddam small compared to some titans everybody seems to do) but they're also the most effective ever seen for their size and their strength pay for all the effort.
The lag IS definitely a thing when using docked entities. Just like it is a thing when using VERY BIG ships, BIG turrets, carriers, planets or collisions. That's a thing we ALL know and we build/play with that in mind. Right? What could be improved would be cancel collision when stuff are overlapping badly. That happends when docker gets destroyed or if you fuck something while building it. Solution is: system should avoid collision nonsense by stopping colliding the two things together and separate the things smoothly from each other (no calculation anymore between thoses two (groups?) of entities until they're at safe distance). Then the docked reactor/armor stuff is totally fitting combat purposes (but also things like turrets, docked elevators, arms, hangars parts and stuff)
Lag argument is nonsense since it also concern other things than docked reactors, and can be fixet.
Learning curve argument is nonsense since they're no learning curve except reading what block does what and not doing the same aesthetic garbage everybody does.
HerrColonel out! =)
(tards rate my post funny I'm HerrColonel the clown I have no clues what Im sayin, loosers dont need to pay attention)
