A Manifesto on Fuel, Balancing, and Various Play Styles

[Snk]

My take that is part from my own feelings on the subject and part based on the millions of these threads.

Planets would have strong, cheap geothermal reactors. These could be susceptible to sabatoge, causing your base, and a sizable area around it, to explode. This would be good for ground combat/infiltration, as it adds a goal to attack and a reason to use planets. If smaller ships slipped past defenses easier, this would give piloting a fighter additional use.

Solar panels would be cheap, and decent. They would cost less mass, but take lots of space. This would make them ideal for civilian craft, and space stations. Small stations that are meant to be hidden might want to go with the zero-point reactors.(Assuming that block count(not mass) makes stations more/less detectable in the future.)

Fusion would require hydrogen, which would be plentiful(duh) and regenerating, and a fairly large amount could be stored(say, 10% of your ship stores an hour's worth, since you might run into a battle, configurable). It would not require any conversion system or such.

If you have a gigantic titan, it's going to take up some extra space, and make it a pain to run around refueling a bit. Makes it much better to just run a smaller ship(engine diminishing returns compete with storage space and salvager beam arrays, making them inefficient and a large target, rather than just making them a huge expensive pain that still dishes out too much pain, which would make everything just painful).

Zero-point energy would cost a little bit more(1.5-2x the hydrogen reactors), and generate a little less. They might have more diminishing returns. In return, they always work and never explode(if any do). Good for a non-combat ship, especially a distress shuttle.

There'd be a premium reactor, which barely sips an expensive, time-consuming to produce fuel. Perfect for a high-performance fighter-shuttle, that can outrun anything it can't outgun.(The idea being that in the future, small ships would be very good at evading detection and escaping from large ones.) Add overdrive(for weapons and speed), and you've got a pint-sized ship that packs, and costs, a punch.

Anything large would get expensive, and you wouldn't want to risk it. Ideally it'd be cheaper and better in most circumstances to just bring a larger fleet.

Perhaps reactors could be separated into two parts, one which is necessary for any reactor, and another which is the specific fuel-guzzling(or not) reactor. That way it's not quite AS painful to try to use backup power/toggle fuel types, allowing you to better use multiple reactor types for more varied gameplay. This depends on how much space reactors and fuel storage take, and might not be necessary.

There could be additional "low-tech" reactors, not really used outside of starting from scratch/low-tech NPC civs.

I like how well thought out that is, but all of these seem a little too complex, with really specific hypothetical situations. I'd suggest a simpler system.

 

[Jack Novius]

At first I was against fuel but thought "Could it actually work?" Then I remembered we have the effect system.

Of course the base power reactors would change but I'm not omniscient and can't think of a value for it. But if you want higher amounts of power, you specialize them.

Let's say the base power reactors are now balanced so that small ships can cross systems as if they're Vikings rowing the Atlantic but not jet across with a jump drive as it would cause power failure and restart the charge.

This is where the fuel effect system comes in. You've got your gas giants, radioactive material mining facilities, solar farms, fuel refineries (i.e, hydrogen or deuterium, helium, etc.).

Each having their own drawback
- Burning Raw Hydrogen

- A step up from baseline, easily maintainable fuel as it can be scooped from any source providing hydrogen or from water and ice.​

- Nuclear Power

- Gets the most out of fuel per unit, sustains vessels for a while on full tanks. Good for your extended combat and long range vessels​

- Refined fuel

- Provides high output, supports large and heavy ships easily. Refuelling limits their range unless supported by tankers and support craft.​

"But Jack, what about solar farms?" Good question and my answer is, "Why make energy when you can just collect it?"
- Electric Banks

- Ships running on this do not generate energy, instead they collect it. Their output is set by their demands but limited by their capacity.
- Refilled by Power Supply Beams.
- Great for drones.​

This leaves you with your base reactors in case you run out of fuel allowing you to disconnect the systems and travel back like a bunch of Vikings. It also keeps it simple enough for new players entering the game and doesn't pigeonhole those fresh to a server or fresh from the grave.

"Jack, the power capacitors!" Oh right those. Did I forget to mention you slave them to your power systems as well to determine their fuel type?

"Mah geothermal though." Of course, these will be Station Only.
- Geothermal Power

- Gains a higher power output near sources of heat being lava and the highest near a core of a planet.
- Lava asteroids would allow stations to build branches to them for power.​

By using the effect system, we don't have to have a separate block for both fuel and reactors, just a computer and reactor enhancement module per fuel type.

Edit: Indents added with the proper tool.

 

[Dire Badger]

I think they may have been angling for a new gas giant planet type.

 

[Grand King Ghidorah]

In my opinion, fuel should not be a constant drain. As the game is right now, things take energy to work. Thrusters. Weapons. Cloaking devices, etc.
So, why does everyone keep insisting that fuel consumption should be an equation based on the size of the ship? The most logical way, is to make it a function based on the fuel kept in the ship. If a ship is mothballed in an asteroid field somewhere, using no systems, it shouldn't be taking up fuel, except some negligable drain for lights or something, but with the scale of the weapons we're working with, that's laughably small. This way, small ships with twenty thruster blocks take hardly any fuel to get moving. But a Titan with twenty thrusters (which isn't going to move at all really... ) will also use the same amount of fuel to move. But obviously, a Titan with well over a thousand thrusters, is gonna guzzle fuel like a fleet of hummers.
And the same applies to weapons. More energy to weapons? More fuel to the reactor per second, and certain fuel sources should have a limit to how much they can supply per second. You can only burn so much petrol without needing more generators. Obviously though, you'll get more power per second from say Antimatter. As for the people that like a zero point energy source, perhaps the collectors from Creeper World would be good? They have a certain volume they can draw from, and that's it. Put two next to eachother, you get no extra power.

 

[Zephyrim]

I honestly like the idea of semi-finite resources, so things like Solar power; but that produces negligible power (unless, in the case of Solar power, you're closer to a star) and perhaps water or hydrogen for ship fuel. For it to work though, it would make sense to remove existing power generation as well, and perhaps just integrate the fluids into the new cargo system (fluid cargo ftw) and add new power generation blocks based on the different types. It would also make sense for multiple fluids to be incompatible so that they end up taking more space up on a ship if you have multiple. We'd also need a large variety of fuels (or other consumable resources) so that weapons can utilize something like antimatter and an additional unique resource for every weapon type (like iridium for cannons, nitrogen for damage pulses, etc), thrusters use hydrogen, repair beams use some sort of repair paste, etc.

However, Alpha is certainly not the time to implement something like this. A massive economy overhaul should be emplaced first, followed by a massive gameplay/survival overhaul. In the current state of the game, planets are very small and surviving on one is unexciting. Perhaps in the first version of Beta or Release, these changes could be implemented in such a way that it may take hours to get your first ship core, but the gameplay up to that point is just as or even more exciting than gameplay after that point. From a balance standpoint, it should definitely be exponentially harder to survive and progress in Space, and even when you compare building a small and a large ship the same should be true, but the graph of fun should be pretty flat, it shouldn't be such a bore gathering resources that it makes you feel like turning on creative or spawning in materials.

 

[Asvarduil]

Necrobump, at the request of Valiant70 in the Expendable Overdrive thread.

 

[Krade]

Nice, i like it, thanks for linking this tread.