A few quick observations on the new auxiliary generators...

[lupoCani]

Has it been established how, exactly, auxiliaries degrade when hit?

They explode, I've understood that much. Is it a chain reaction? If not, what is it that keeps the explosion mostly contained to the auxiliaries, like the devs have said it is?

 

[Dvaren]

Has it been established how, exactly, auxiliaries degrade when hit?

They explode, I've understood that much. Is it a chain reaction? If not, what is it that keeps the explosion mostly contained to the auxiliaries, like the devs have said it is?

Yes, it is a chain reaction that slowly takes out chunks of the reactor over a couple minute time span. The explosions either have a low damage rate or a small radius, as they don't cause massive damage to blocks around them, but they DO cause damage. The amount of damage increases as the size of that particular single group increases.
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How do these things work in turret bases and turret guns?

Seeing as there is no way to turn them on with logic, and they don't retain their last state of on or off, they will be rather inconvenient in docked entities unless you enjoy turning them all on manually every time you log in.

 

[StormWing0]

What'd be nice is if laying down auxiliaries like power reactors would make their regen way higher while laying them down like capacitors would make their capacity higher instead.

 

[Dvaren]

Having to lay down reactors in anything other than the same way capacitors can be placed is just uneeded complexity for the sake of complexity.

The entire game relies on "unneeded" complexity in order to attract players with a very specific mindset. Do you not believe Schema to be perfectly capable of reducing all systems to the lowest common denominator to appease the CoD crowd? Within the complexity lies the challenge, else you have little more than a hybrid of Starfox and a watered down Minecraft.

It serves no purpose.

It serves a perfectly reasonable purpose which is laid out in detail in a very recent post by Lancake himself. You can find it in the "News" section, I believe, under the listing for the most recent update.

Having to lay them down in XYZ lines to get the biggest bonus out of them is one of the largest complaints I hear from new players.

New players will spew a virtual plethora of complaints when facing their first few days within a game such as this. You rarely find these complaints being uttered by experienced players, at least not in any serious sense, besides the occasional exasperated grumple.

But hey, I guess almost all the servers having a population below 10 players is fine so long as its needlessly complex right?

An Alpha game with no marketing whatsoever is not likely to produce a massive player base, especially when the game itself caters to those who don't whittle their afternoons away watching Honey Boo Boo reruns. Judging a game by the number of glorified beta testers it boasts would be rather silly.

 

[CrunkPrime]

People like you will be the death of this game.

The same kind of people who defended Docked Reactors, "because they made the game more complex!". And thankfully those are pretty much gone now unless somebody wants them on their custom server. It was ridiculous to tell people that they needed Docked Reactors if they want to have decent regen above the soft cap without using a million reactor cubes. And its just as ridiculous to make some of the games most basic systems be needlessly over complicated.

Its fine to make "end game" systems to put on your ship "complex", so after a player has been playing for a week they understand how the game functions and can figure out ridiculous block placements for min maxing efficiency. But when the very first thing somebody new to the game needs to do is build a little ship to fart around in and you tell them "oh sorry, you can put down your capacitors in a big cube or whatever shape you want, but not your reactors because reasons.", thats bad game design.

New players will spew a virtual plethora of complaints when facing their first few days within a game such as this. You rarely find these complaints being uttered by experienced players, at least not in any serious sense, besides the occasional exasperated grumple.

So you are telling me its okay to alienate new players, so long as the experienced players are happy?

 

[Sen OTS Tier]

You severely underestimate the intelligence of players.

 

[lupoCani]

Um... As much as I'd like to chime in on this debate, I really like that we have an auxiliary reactor R&D thread here. It's nice to have information gathered in one place, and helps everyone get up to speed quickly. So, uh, could we perhaps not have this discussion here? It does tend to run quite long, and it would leave the purpose of the thread rather watered down.

Yes, it is a chain reaction that slowly takes out chunks of the reactor over a couple minute time span. The explosions either have a low damage rate or a small radius, as they don't cause massive damage to blocks around them, but they DO cause damage. The amount of damage increases as the size of that particular single group increases.

This is confusing. From what the devs have said, it seems like a hit reactor will be severely weakened, but still operational. Furthermore, internal armoring will decrease how weakened, exactly, it becomes.

If it is indeed a chain reaction, and the destruction of any one block is enough to initiate it, then any damage would eventually wipe out the whole reactor, right? Furthermore, even with internal armoring, the end result of a chain reaction would always be zero blocks left. This seems contradictory to the idea that the decay will leave some percentage of the reactor functioning, and that internal armor can increase this percentage.

 

[Captain Tankman]

the point of internal armor is that you don't have the aux. power system in one giant block, but in serveral armored chunks, so one explosion doesn't affect the others

 

[lupoCani]

But then you loose the very significant grouping bonus, do you not? Furthermore, if the internally armored auxiliaries were entirely split off, then the destruction of one would leave the combined output at eighty or ninety percent, not thirty or forty like the devs said.

 

[Captain Tankman]

I haven't done any testing by myself yet, so the post I made was pure suggestion based on "how the stuff probably works" :D

 

[Madman198237]

Perhaps instead its only a % of the blocks that are destroyed? Otherwise they'd have to somehow act as a ghost-block of some kind. Or perhaps they'd take damage, explode, but remain in a damaged state, or something like that...

 

[NeonSturm]

these where never meant to be a substitute for a main reactor, they where for when you already had a maxed main reactor but needed even more power

Except maybe on torpedoes with push-passives where the standard-reactor would be more expensive than the fuel-version and fuel itself only plays a minor role in it's 5 minutes life-time.

The entire game relies on "unneeded" complexity in order to attract players with a very specific mindset. Do you not believe Schema to be perfectly capable of reducing all systems to the lowest common denominator to appease the CoD crowd? Within the complexity lies the challenge, else you have little more than a hybrid of Starfox and a watered down Minecraft.

That's a reason to make medium/big ships complex, not making small starter ships complex.
We could have a config-option for that too!

An Alpha game with no marketing whatsoever is not likely to produce a massive player base, especially when the game itself caters to those who don't whittle their afternoons away watching Honey Boo Boo reruns.

StarMade is on Steam.

ts fine to make "end game" systems to put on your ship "complex", so after a player has been playing for a week they understand how the game functions and can figure out ridiculous block placements for min maxing efficiency. But when the very first thing somebody new to the game needs to do is build a little ship to fart around in and you tell them "oh sorry, you can put down your capacitors in a big cube or whatever shape you want, but not your reactors because reasons.", thats bad game design.

Agree.
Min-maxing will play more a role if you are limited - by resources for efficiency, by hangar-size (or gate size/mass), by crew-requirements.

You can build a carrier however you want, but when you need the smallest ship that fits into that hangar or the cheapest ship for mass-production or the fastest ship to beat ship/pirate X from player/server Y, then you have to min-max.
Usually there is one class of ships utilizing the most efficient power-setup most effectively for a certain role, but apart that there is no goal to aim for.

New You severely underestimate the intelligence of players.

And you overestimate my patience for a build-tool I can't modify myself.

New But then you loose the very significant grouping bonus, do you not? Furthermore, if the internally armored auxiliaries were entirely split off, then the destruction of one would leave the combined output at eighty or ninety percent, not thirty or forty like the devs said.

To make it easier, let's discuss this on a concrete example setup:

You have 2 arrays, both 1/2 of the softcap.
You now connect them with a single line.
In total ("both chunks" and "the line") it is exactly the "optimal size".

The line has a "sufficient length" and is surrounded with advanced armour blocks.
Each block in "the line" has only 2 neighbours.

Is it very different from what you imagined?

​

Let me give you an overview over the whole topic (my own perspective)

With docked reactors, you have 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x … which is a difference of 1>2= 100%, 2>3= 50%, 3>4=33%.

The gaps between "existing" and "1-more" become smaller the more docked reactors or reactor groups you already have.
​

BUT with the new system, it's the same!
It fixes the issues with "docked reactors" but again gives no aim to a specific size apart from the standard-ship based on the 2-mille softcap.


In the real life, you often prefer to have "backup systems", but more than "4 turbines on a single plane (example)" make no sense.

Let's assume, ideal is 1 for unmanned and 2-4 for manned craft.
​

If we want similar in StarMade:(similar to the example)

we need something like random power failures at a chance of 5% / 8 seconds (once every 4 min) to discourage the use of no backup systems during combat in ships you care for. In turn, we need to make this more efficient.

we also need meta-stable groups of just 2 or 2&3. Dividing groups might decrease power-output but also reduce the lowered output by 33% per additional reactor and stable groups of 4.

To conclude:

Imagine nominal output / block = 1/( 0.9+ 0.1*goups) * nominal power //diminishing returns
But minimum/failsafe output / block = 0, 0.6, 0.8, 1, 1, … * nominal output //negative asymptote

We can now modify output based on group size too to encourage "bigger" over "more".​

The original problem of docked reactors was how we create "many separately targe-table entities for small ships" without limiting "titan vs titan combat". Soon it became a balance discussion between "equal mass" in "small ships" vs in "titans".

But actually it doesn't matter if it is docked or not when it is covered in the same shell.

Instead of focusing the per-ship problem, we should focus the "under the same shell or behind the same cover" problem.​

 

[lupoCani]

To make it easier, let's discuss this on a concrete example setup:

You have 2 arrays, both 1/2 of the softcap.
You now connect them with a single line.
In total ("both chunks" and "the line") it is exactly the "optimal size".

The line has a "sufficient length" and is surrounded with advanced armour blocks.
Each block in "the line" has only 2 neighbours.

Is it very different from what you imagined?​

No, this is a reasonable setup. What I'm wondering is, why is it a reasonable setup? If auxiliary decay was a chain reaction, then that one line between the two halves should propagate the destruction just fine, shortly reducing both halves to zero. Since the setup is indeed reasonable, that sort of chain reaction is obviously not what's actually happening. So, what is?

 

[Groovrider]

From the explody tests i'm doing at the moment it seems the damage stays local it its spread. The damage seems to burn armor but not penetrate it meaning that it may cross a small air gap but a bigger one may protect it. Forcefields seem to work too. The small couples would connect the groups by minimizing the chances of a strike but it still represents a risk to a lucky shot. I suspect there will be many different styles of encasement, from armored blocks to manifold designs.

EDIT:

It seems if the aux groups are connected the damage is shared through the array. When I removed the couples the damage was confined to a single cell.

 

[Tomruler]

A major part of the chain-reaction system is the amount of blocks destroyed per explosion. Each block that gets destroyed has explosive damage that gets applied in the next explosion in the system. If you space out your blocks enough that each each explosion does minimal damage to it's surroundings, i.e not solid blocks, the explosion will eventually stop propagating, and a notification will pop up on the side saying it has stabilized. So you can have large groupings, and as long as you space out the affected blocks enough so that each explosion doesn't take out a very large chunk, you'll still have decent efficiency after the explosions.

 

[Phrendol]

These are a couple of images taken from tests i'm running with auxiliary reactors.

Friends don't let friends build giant block auxiliary reactors in their 200 man hour Titans. All it takes is a tiny nick to take do immense damage. The problem with defending this type of a reactor is that its to easy to hit with a piercing weapon that can penetrate through 30 blocks of solid advanced armor (I have 4 turrets on my destroyer capable of this). Placing that much armor around this thing doesn't really seem like a good idea anyways. Once shields are down, a reactor this size will be easy to find and hit, especially if you are aiming the weapon manually rather than leaving it to the AI. The core overheated because the entire ship was made of auxiliary reactors, but this illustrates that one stray shot from a piercing weapon hitting this reactor could turn your titan into the Hindenburg.

This meltdown stopped on its own eventually, and the grid setup maintained power efficiency for the most part, just minus the destroyed blocks. I think spaces between the lines are far larger than necessary, but i set it up this way for illustration only. This obviously grants much less of a bonus to power efficiency, but its much harder to hit and far less damage is done during a chain reaction.

 

[Jojomo]

People like you will be the death of this game.

The same kind of people who defended Docked Reactors, "because they made the game more complex!".
<snip>

Are those two groups of people one and the same in reality, or only in your imagination?

Take myself: like I said a few posts back, I'm a fan of the reactor layout bonus as it is (and would like to see it on other blocks), but I'm not a defender of docked reactors (I think the new blocks are better - their volatlity adds a new aspect to the game that didn't exist before).

 

[AtraUnam]

Please don't tell me were back to the 'Remove all compelxity from the game because people are too dumb to understand basic principles' circlejerk again.

 

[Az14el]

1; Technically large Aux reactors that pose no danger to your ship are the sort of thing that won't last through patches (if you're building that 200 hour titan to the flavor of the month in an alpha release I have really bad news for you, but see Docked Reactors to get the gist of it without me explaining)

2; If you were to later have to actually protect them as you likely will be, suddenly you have to place many times more adv armor than the aux reactors your placing depending on how "clever" you were about it.

Just some thoughts before everyone goes crazy with sticks

 

[Olxinos]

Has it been established how, exactly, auxiliaries degrade when hit?

They explode, I've understood that much. Is it a chain reaction? If not, what is it that keeps the explosion mostly contained to the auxiliaries, like the devs have said it is?

Lancake said yesterday in chat that there was an amount of explosions determined when the first block is destroyed depending on the size of the auxiliary bank, if I understood well. So I've read the code and quickly tested it, it indeed suggests that there currently are exactly
max(1, floor(group_size/200)) explosions when a block of a group is destroyed.
I haven't determined whether there's a predictable pattern in the explosion locations though.

[Edit:
I might as well recall the known formulas:

for a single group of auxiliaries (sum those values for each auxiliaries to have the total)
capacity = 500*(groupSize^1.05)
regen = 2000000*(2/(1+1,000232^(-(groupSize*0,00613)^2,25))-1)+(25*groupSize)

The regen formula has an optimum which is 9891 blocks for 192.9356 energy regeneration per block (on), you can however build your auxiliaries banks with a slightly lower block count (ideally finishing with x99 where x is odd) to reduce the number of explosions without reducing too much the regeneration per block. For instance:
- 9399 (192.2442/block, 46 explosions)
- 9599 (192.6958/block, 47 explosions)
- 9799 (192.9122/block, 48 explosions)

here's a graph to sum it up:

I zoomed on the most relevant part]