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- Oct 13, 2013
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Hey everyone! I'm just dropping in to give my two cents on what balance changes the game needs to thrive. I don't expect them to be implemented at this late stage, but maybe some ideas or points will inspire others in some way. You might remember me from the Manifesto that was deemed well-reasoned enough to be stickied on the General page. This post takes some ideas from there, but its been a few years now and my opinions have developed a touch. First, I'll start with the problems in the game as I see them, which mostly stem from frequent complaints I've had from family members and friends I've tried to sell on Starmade. Then I'll discuss, point by point, suggestions for solutions. 99% of my ideas are relatively simple math changes that would massively change the game without much work, not ideas for new features or UI elements.
Common Complaints
These are the list of reasons why my friends and family, all of them in gamers in STEM capable of handling even Dwarf Fortress and Crusader Kings, recoil at StarMade. Several of these complaints I've seen echoed online as well, but it's not like I've done extensive polling to find the top problems. They come rather from anecdotal evidence, so make of them what you will.
Many of these complaints, I believe, actually have much subtler roots than they appear on the surface. I'll try to figure them out in greater detail in this section.
"I Can't Figure Out How to Do Anything": Part of this stems from the fact that there are multiple wikis out there, each with interesting and new ways to present grossly outdated information. The official wiki has gone a long way to help with this problem, as have the block descriptions in-game. Continuing to keep in-game text and the official wiki up-to-date is the only way I see to solve this problem.
"It's Too Complex": This is an interesting one, because my siblings and buddies are perfectly content figuring out de jure claims and gavelkind succession laws in Crusader Kings, or managing scores of alcoholic, temperamental dwarves. So it takes a lot for them to complain about a game's complexity; they aren't 'casual' gamers by any means. I think the problem actually stems not from mere complexity, but from conflicting complexity--the game has many systems and subsystems that work on completely unrelated and seemingly-arbitrary mechanics (power has to be in many overlapping but not touching lines, shields can go anywhere but weapons have to all be contiguous, etc.) before you get into the complicated math involved (don't even get me started on trying to build a cloaking ship, or explaining why their docking rails sometimes go painfully slowly but not others, or what happens to shield generation in combat). I think the only solution to this problem is to get every single ship mechanic on one coherent system.
"Summon Bigger Ships:" This one gets thrown around constantly on the forums, and it's the main target of my Manifesto, and, while progress has been made, I think a lot of what I said still holds true. The problem is that there is a sense that if you'd just built your ship bigger, for which there is very little cost beyond your own time placing blocks, you would have won the battle. This sense is often true. This results in many people calling for nerfs of capital ships (inefficient thrust, power soft caps, nonlinear mathematics of various systems, etc.) that result in more and more complexity, in turn making it more difficult to explain the game to new players. "Oh, you can't go beyond 1 million power/sec," I'd say. "But I'm at 1,200,000?" They'd say in confusion. "Yeah... you can kinda go beyond it, but it's a bad idea. If you crunch the numbers, at some point its better to go into power storage." I know the point to do that at, because I'm the sort of person to memorize every single obscure rule in Dungeons and Dragons so I can use them to my advantage, but most people aren't like that. I'll go into my solutions for this problem below.
"Too Many Blocks:" For each colour of hull, there are pentas, heptas, wedges, tetras, blocks, slabs. Each weapon type has computers and weapons systems blocks. There are dozens of crafting components with no use outside of a factory. I don't even know how many logic blocks there are. All of this results in it being basically impossible to keep a well-organized inventory system, and while there have been a lot of improvements to that lately, its still a colossal pain when you need one blue wedge on your mostly orange spaceship and forgot to get it from the store. The huge diversity of blocks is actually one of StarMade's strengths--it means you can build some truly magnificent creations--but the way blocks are crafted and carried, I think, is a holdover from Minecraft. It works in that game because of the smaller scale, but StarMade has an order of magnitude more block types and the builds are vastly larger than in Minecraft. My solution, below, solves this problem without culling blocks.
"Non-system blocks are wasted:" Effort was made to solve this problem with the armour/hull update, but the result is now it's simply another complicated system to reason about. People already want to build ships with sweeping rooms and giant hangars and observation decks, they don't need encouragement to do so. However, they also want to win, and when one is at odds with the other, something's got to give. This has split players into "RP" players and "PVP" players; it's really challenging to design a ship that satisfies both to any degree. This division is unnecessary with some rules tweaks.
"It takes too long to cram shield blocks into every cavity": To be maximally effective, empty space in a ship should be packed with systems or armour. Most people think the solution to such a problem is better build tools (fill, etc). They're not exactly wrong, but what if, instead, we removed the need to cram these blocks in the first place? Let's see my solution to, as I see it, every single problem listed above, and most other complaints I've heard about the game, as well.
"No Sense of Scale": I think this is why we have dozens of competing ship classification systems out there. Everyone wants to know, basically, what's "big" and what's "small," and there's no clear in-game way to tell the difference right now.
The Solution
My solution is three-branched: an overhaul to Economics, Power, and Ship System. All three solutions heavily rely on each other, and some decisions made in one branch may seem bizarre until you read what happens to the others.
Economics
I propose we reform the economy into two separate economies. Only one will actually be talked about in-game, but the other will inform the game mechanics. The two economies are the Mass Economy and the Player Economy. Currently, the game has a salvage economy (the block you want can be got by salvaging it from a destroyed ship or station; value determined by your own military might and number of enemies), a credit economy (blocks can be bought at the store for various rates; value determined by cost and stock), and the crafting economy (blocks can be built yourself from base components; value determined by your salvage beams, proximity to asteroids, and time you're willing to devote to mining).
Mass Economy
The mass economy will replace the current salvage, crafting, and credit economy. Whenever a player salvages a block (either by hand or in a ship), they get 1 Mass instead of the actual block. Players can't carry more than, say, 1000 mass; any more requires storage blocks. Any block in the game can be placed at the cost of 1 mass. The survival inventory will basically be replaced by the creative one (that is, you can put whatever you want in your hotbar). Every time you place a block, it deducts 1 Mass from your supplies. Every block in the game is now worth the same amount. Harvester rate can be modified to increase or decrease the value of any kind of block. Current systems to prevent build-block mining exploits on stations will remain in effect, and likely have to be applied to planets instead. Mass will be charged instead of credits, so you won't come out ahead by repairing a station in order to build-block it; you'll have to salvage it.
Player Economy
In D&D, we have a saying called the "Action Economy," which is more important than hit points, damage, or gold. The idea is that every player can only take so many actions per turn, so making the most of those (through abilities that allow more attacks, more spells, faster movement, etc.) is more important than getting the best weapons or spells.
StarMade actually has a similar mechanic, though its rarely talked about: the Player Economy. A faction with two players but less up-front capital (factories, ships, etc.) has the advantage in the long-run over a faction with only one player. They can do more complicated tactics in space combat by preventing the larger ship from targeting both, they can split efforts to maximize productivity, etc. However, currently, this advantage is relatively minor. I propose making it an explicit game mechanic: two players should, all else being equal, have a huge advantage over one player. This encourages ships of differing sizes (fewer, larger ships being favoured by factions with fewer members, and more numerous, smaller ships being favoured by factions with more members).
Power Generation and Mass
The way the Player Economy comes into ship design is through power generation. Each power reactor block, including the ship core, in my system provides 5 power. Not 5 power/second, but 5 power. Each system block (thrusters, shields, guns, etc.) requires 1 power. For example, with 5 power, you could have 3 thrusters, 1 shield, and 1 gun powered all at once. Or, you could have 2 thrusters, 1 cloaking device, 2 guns, and 1 shield, totalling 6, meaning that if your cloaking device was on and you were using thrust, you couldn't shoot. Or if you were shooting and thrusting, you couldn't activate the cloak.
Thus, a ship's primary strength comes from its number of power blocks. A 2-power ship is exactly twice as powerful as a 1-power ship. The number of power blocks is displayed next to the ship name on the HUD, so you can tell at a glance how scary a ship is.
However, each power reactor requires substantial infrastructure, heat sinks, and whatnot sci-fi stuff. As a result, there are nonlinear mass requirements for each additional power block. So, while a 2-power ship is twice as powerful as a 1-power ship, it is more than twice as big, and therefore, expensive. For example:
1 power reactor: no mass requirement (i.e., just the ship core). (Class I Ship)
2 power reactors: Minimum 100 Mass (Class II Ship)
3 power reactors: Minimum 1,000 Mass (Class III Ship)
4 power reactors: Minimum 10,000 Mass (Class IV Ship)
5 power reactors: Minimum 100,000 Mass (Class V Ship)
... and so on. These exact numbers can be calibrated (for example, maybe doubling every step instead of going up an order of magnitude) to find a good balance.
These mass blocks can be anything the ship designer wants them to be. Armour plating, windows, a giant statue, power cables, whatever. For a quick and dirty ship, you can just place a 100x100x100 block of dirt and it will have the same mechanics effect as those number of blocks sculpted into a spaceship masterpiece, except that one of them will be fun to fly around in and the other is a hunk of dirt.
Implications of this Change
Turrets? Won't they break your system by allowing larger ships to be made up of several smaller ones?
Turrets will lose the ability to power themselves. Power reactors, shields, and thrusters on turrets will only function when the turret is undocked (for example, when assembling the ship in the first place). The turret weapon will drain power from the mother ship's reactor.
Damage? If 99% of every block on a ship is effectively worthless in battle, hits to those remaining 1% will be absolutely devastating!
There's a couple of ways to solve this problem. I think the simplest is to make the system blocks (the overwhelming minority of the ship) invincible as long as they are powered. Once the ship's shields are down, for every X damage the ship takes, a power reactor detonates (ideally with a special effects explosion like a missile went off). When the reactor detonates, every system block it was powering is destroyed by the ensuing power surge. Damage to mass blocks will largely be cosmetic at this point, so how they're destroyed or not once the shields are out is down to the aesthetics of the game designers. The ship core always detonates last, killing the pilot with it.
Carriers? By deploying several drones, you'll break your scaling system!
To be honest, I haven't totally figured this one out yet. If each of those drones was piloted by a player, the system would work perfectly. I think the only way to balance AI fighters is to have their AI be powered by a 'Server' block, which drains 1 power, on the flagship. By making formal the relationship between a drone and a mothership, you also open the potential for having on-board spawners/factories that replace destroyed drones and other fun stuff beyond the scope of this post.
Bigger Weapons? It sounds like you're talking about each weapon being a single block!
Multiple weapon blocks can be linked together, same as before. 2 cannons (either firing as one double-strength cannon or as a twin-linked single cannon) drains 2 power and shoots with the strength of 2 cannons. Connecting secondary and tertiary systems works as before, however, their math will be rebalanced around not increasing DPS or power consumption. That is, a 1/1/1 cannon/cannon/ion will have the same power consumption and base DPS as a cannon 1/0/0, just divided into more smaller shots, otherwise small ships won't be able to build fast-firing guns.
Common Complaints
These are the list of reasons why my friends and family, all of them in gamers in STEM capable of handling even Dwarf Fortress and Crusader Kings, recoil at StarMade. Several of these complaints I've seen echoed online as well, but it's not like I've done extensive polling to find the top problems. They come rather from anecdotal evidence, so make of them what you will.
- "I can't figure out how to do anything."
- "It's too complex."
- "You built a bigger ship months ago and can easily spawn it in; nothing I can do in my smaller ships can contribute" (AKA "there's no reason not to build bigger ships")
- "There's too many blocks to manage my inventory."
- "Every block on the ship that isn't shields, power, or guns is wasted; I feel like I can't add rooms or decorations without sacrificing competitiveness"
- "It takes too long to cram shield modules into every crevice and cavity in my ship."
- "There's no sense of scale; I built what I thought was a huge capital ship but yours could eat it for breakfast"
Many of these complaints, I believe, actually have much subtler roots than they appear on the surface. I'll try to figure them out in greater detail in this section.
"I Can't Figure Out How to Do Anything": Part of this stems from the fact that there are multiple wikis out there, each with interesting and new ways to present grossly outdated information. The official wiki has gone a long way to help with this problem, as have the block descriptions in-game. Continuing to keep in-game text and the official wiki up-to-date is the only way I see to solve this problem.
"It's Too Complex": This is an interesting one, because my siblings and buddies are perfectly content figuring out de jure claims and gavelkind succession laws in Crusader Kings, or managing scores of alcoholic, temperamental dwarves. So it takes a lot for them to complain about a game's complexity; they aren't 'casual' gamers by any means. I think the problem actually stems not from mere complexity, but from conflicting complexity--the game has many systems and subsystems that work on completely unrelated and seemingly-arbitrary mechanics (power has to be in many overlapping but not touching lines, shields can go anywhere but weapons have to all be contiguous, etc.) before you get into the complicated math involved (don't even get me started on trying to build a cloaking ship, or explaining why their docking rails sometimes go painfully slowly but not others, or what happens to shield generation in combat). I think the only solution to this problem is to get every single ship mechanic on one coherent system.
"Summon Bigger Ships:" This one gets thrown around constantly on the forums, and it's the main target of my Manifesto, and, while progress has been made, I think a lot of what I said still holds true. The problem is that there is a sense that if you'd just built your ship bigger, for which there is very little cost beyond your own time placing blocks, you would have won the battle. This sense is often true. This results in many people calling for nerfs of capital ships (inefficient thrust, power soft caps, nonlinear mathematics of various systems, etc.) that result in more and more complexity, in turn making it more difficult to explain the game to new players. "Oh, you can't go beyond 1 million power/sec," I'd say. "But I'm at 1,200,000?" They'd say in confusion. "Yeah... you can kinda go beyond it, but it's a bad idea. If you crunch the numbers, at some point its better to go into power storage." I know the point to do that at, because I'm the sort of person to memorize every single obscure rule in Dungeons and Dragons so I can use them to my advantage, but most people aren't like that. I'll go into my solutions for this problem below.
"Too Many Blocks:" For each colour of hull, there are pentas, heptas, wedges, tetras, blocks, slabs. Each weapon type has computers and weapons systems blocks. There are dozens of crafting components with no use outside of a factory. I don't even know how many logic blocks there are. All of this results in it being basically impossible to keep a well-organized inventory system, and while there have been a lot of improvements to that lately, its still a colossal pain when you need one blue wedge on your mostly orange spaceship and forgot to get it from the store. The huge diversity of blocks is actually one of StarMade's strengths--it means you can build some truly magnificent creations--but the way blocks are crafted and carried, I think, is a holdover from Minecraft. It works in that game because of the smaller scale, but StarMade has an order of magnitude more block types and the builds are vastly larger than in Minecraft. My solution, below, solves this problem without culling blocks.
"Non-system blocks are wasted:" Effort was made to solve this problem with the armour/hull update, but the result is now it's simply another complicated system to reason about. People already want to build ships with sweeping rooms and giant hangars and observation decks, they don't need encouragement to do so. However, they also want to win, and when one is at odds with the other, something's got to give. This has split players into "RP" players and "PVP" players; it's really challenging to design a ship that satisfies both to any degree. This division is unnecessary with some rules tweaks.
"It takes too long to cram shield blocks into every cavity": To be maximally effective, empty space in a ship should be packed with systems or armour. Most people think the solution to such a problem is better build tools (fill, etc). They're not exactly wrong, but what if, instead, we removed the need to cram these blocks in the first place? Let's see my solution to, as I see it, every single problem listed above, and most other complaints I've heard about the game, as well.
"No Sense of Scale": I think this is why we have dozens of competing ship classification systems out there. Everyone wants to know, basically, what's "big" and what's "small," and there's no clear in-game way to tell the difference right now.
The Solution
My solution is three-branched: an overhaul to Economics, Power, and Ship System. All three solutions heavily rely on each other, and some decisions made in one branch may seem bizarre until you read what happens to the others.
Economics
I propose we reform the economy into two separate economies. Only one will actually be talked about in-game, but the other will inform the game mechanics. The two economies are the Mass Economy and the Player Economy. Currently, the game has a salvage economy (the block you want can be got by salvaging it from a destroyed ship or station; value determined by your own military might and number of enemies), a credit economy (blocks can be bought at the store for various rates; value determined by cost and stock), and the crafting economy (blocks can be built yourself from base components; value determined by your salvage beams, proximity to asteroids, and time you're willing to devote to mining).
Mass Economy
The mass economy will replace the current salvage, crafting, and credit economy. Whenever a player salvages a block (either by hand or in a ship), they get 1 Mass instead of the actual block. Players can't carry more than, say, 1000 mass; any more requires storage blocks. Any block in the game can be placed at the cost of 1 mass. The survival inventory will basically be replaced by the creative one (that is, you can put whatever you want in your hotbar). Every time you place a block, it deducts 1 Mass from your supplies. Every block in the game is now worth the same amount. Harvester rate can be modified to increase or decrease the value of any kind of block. Current systems to prevent build-block mining exploits on stations will remain in effect, and likely have to be applied to planets instead. Mass will be charged instead of credits, so you won't come out ahead by repairing a station in order to build-block it; you'll have to salvage it.
Player Economy
In D&D, we have a saying called the "Action Economy," which is more important than hit points, damage, or gold. The idea is that every player can only take so many actions per turn, so making the most of those (through abilities that allow more attacks, more spells, faster movement, etc.) is more important than getting the best weapons or spells.
StarMade actually has a similar mechanic, though its rarely talked about: the Player Economy. A faction with two players but less up-front capital (factories, ships, etc.) has the advantage in the long-run over a faction with only one player. They can do more complicated tactics in space combat by preventing the larger ship from targeting both, they can split efforts to maximize productivity, etc. However, currently, this advantage is relatively minor. I propose making it an explicit game mechanic: two players should, all else being equal, have a huge advantage over one player. This encourages ships of differing sizes (fewer, larger ships being favoured by factions with fewer members, and more numerous, smaller ships being favoured by factions with more members).
Power Generation and Mass
The way the Player Economy comes into ship design is through power generation. Each power reactor block, including the ship core, in my system provides 5 power. Not 5 power/second, but 5 power. Each system block (thrusters, shields, guns, etc.) requires 1 power. For example, with 5 power, you could have 3 thrusters, 1 shield, and 1 gun powered all at once. Or, you could have 2 thrusters, 1 cloaking device, 2 guns, and 1 shield, totalling 6, meaning that if your cloaking device was on and you were using thrust, you couldn't shoot. Or if you were shooting and thrusting, you couldn't activate the cloak.
Thus, a ship's primary strength comes from its number of power blocks. A 2-power ship is exactly twice as powerful as a 1-power ship. The number of power blocks is displayed next to the ship name on the HUD, so you can tell at a glance how scary a ship is.
However, each power reactor requires substantial infrastructure, heat sinks, and whatnot sci-fi stuff. As a result, there are nonlinear mass requirements for each additional power block. So, while a 2-power ship is twice as powerful as a 1-power ship, it is more than twice as big, and therefore, expensive. For example:
1 power reactor: no mass requirement (i.e., just the ship core). (Class I Ship)
2 power reactors: Minimum 100 Mass (Class II Ship)
3 power reactors: Minimum 1,000 Mass (Class III Ship)
4 power reactors: Minimum 10,000 Mass (Class IV Ship)
5 power reactors: Minimum 100,000 Mass (Class V Ship)
... and so on. These exact numbers can be calibrated (for example, maybe doubling every step instead of going up an order of magnitude) to find a good balance.
These mass blocks can be anything the ship designer wants them to be. Armour plating, windows, a giant statue, power cables, whatever. For a quick and dirty ship, you can just place a 100x100x100 block of dirt and it will have the same mechanics effect as those number of blocks sculpted into a spaceship masterpiece, except that one of them will be fun to fly around in and the other is a hunk of dirt.
Implications of this Change
- Building ships is now as fast or as slow as each player wants them to be;
- It will be substantially cheaper for a larger number of players to be a devastating force on the battlefield if they stick to smaller ships;
- A small faction can still compete as long as they are fabulously wealthy;
- There is no penalty for adding "RP" rooms;
- Only 5-50 or so blocks will be actual system blocks, so adding or swapping them will be extremely quick. Modifying your ship to be faster or tankier will be the work of seconds, rather than of hours.
- It will settle all of the "gigantism vs. fighter" debates by leaving a clear role for both kinds of ships.
Turrets? Won't they break your system by allowing larger ships to be made up of several smaller ones?
Turrets will lose the ability to power themselves. Power reactors, shields, and thrusters on turrets will only function when the turret is undocked (for example, when assembling the ship in the first place). The turret weapon will drain power from the mother ship's reactor.
Damage? If 99% of every block on a ship is effectively worthless in battle, hits to those remaining 1% will be absolutely devastating!
There's a couple of ways to solve this problem. I think the simplest is to make the system blocks (the overwhelming minority of the ship) invincible as long as they are powered. Once the ship's shields are down, for every X damage the ship takes, a power reactor detonates (ideally with a special effects explosion like a missile went off). When the reactor detonates, every system block it was powering is destroyed by the ensuing power surge. Damage to mass blocks will largely be cosmetic at this point, so how they're destroyed or not once the shields are out is down to the aesthetics of the game designers. The ship core always detonates last, killing the pilot with it.
Carriers? By deploying several drones, you'll break your scaling system!
To be honest, I haven't totally figured this one out yet. If each of those drones was piloted by a player, the system would work perfectly. I think the only way to balance AI fighters is to have their AI be powered by a 'Server' block, which drains 1 power, on the flagship. By making formal the relationship between a drone and a mothership, you also open the potential for having on-board spawners/factories that replace destroyed drones and other fun stuff beyond the scope of this post.
Bigger Weapons? It sounds like you're talking about each weapon being a single block!
Multiple weapon blocks can be linked together, same as before. 2 cannons (either firing as one double-strength cannon or as a twin-linked single cannon) drains 2 power and shoots with the strength of 2 cannons. Connecting secondary and tertiary systems works as before, however, their math will be rebalanced around not increasing DPS or power consumption. That is, a 1/1/1 cannon/cannon/ion will have the same power consumption and base DPS as a cannon 1/0/0, just divided into more smaller shots, otherwise small ships won't be able to build fast-firing guns.
