A Manifesto on the Relationship Between Fighters, Titans and AI

[NagasGuardian]

Assumption Three: Players want ships to serve their need for security.
If an enemy can respawn destroyers or even fighter infinitely to harass their holdings and make a nuisance of themselves indefinitely then whats the point of destroying the enemy? Making ships harder to obtain is one way of accomplishing this but whats to stop someone from strapping 100 warheads to the front of a ram and using hyperspace to close the distance on a high-value target. That doesn't serve security. Factions invulnerability gives people a fallback point of security. But if any ship is destroyed in Star Made even if an economy is introduced. The focus will shift from massive planet busting titans to moderate "ship of the line" type destroyers. But the problem isn't solved at all. changing the availability of ships will not solve the problem of player security. But a new system that changes the way the game works might.

As strange as this sounds a large area of the game space needs to be protected by a special in-game AI faction. Seriously Battles can take place in this protected space but after a timer expires determined by the distance away from a security outpost in the system several large and powerful Police ships should appear to break up the offending parties. kill pirates, and hunt lawbreakers. (keep tabs on who fired first, give the enemy the ability to pay for damages they caused deducted from their accounts and transferred to the accounts of the players they accosted. Exceptions should be when two factions have lawfully declared war upon one another OR battles is taking place outside the effective protection range of one of these factions bases. This is only the beginning. What if I told you this system is not just for the AI but that the player could establish a police force of their own. In their own sectors, this way the sectors are secured by AI until there is a declared declaration of warships just appear fight and disappear unless there a war. Special modules would have to be installed in a station or on a planet to calculate the response ships reaction time. The money would have to be placed in this system when a ship spawns is money cost is deducted when it returns from a mission the money is refunded to the police stockpile and the ship removed. This means destroying these holding stations during a war are critical for capturing new territory or dislodging enemy territory. Hope this little Idea helps.

 

[Zephyrim]

Now that we have the weapons update I think we're fairly close to sealing the deal on this thread, and I have a few ideas.

Separate Build Mode from survival completely, add building drones and focus on blueprints

It's easy, really. All your time in survival mode is currently spent in build mode. It makes sense, because that's how you can build bigger and better ships.
My suggestion is to simply separate build mode from survival - it would be an option in the main menu, and also the pause menu if it was ever revamped. When you click on "Build Mode" in either of these menus it would take you to a singular, empty sector with no station, no asteroids, and no planets. Creative mode would be fully enabled. Building would be instant like it always has been. From here you can save, customize, and upload blueprints. You can see stats on various systems like armor and weapons, including detailed breakdowns.

The real kicker would be survival. The time it takes to craft everything and the recipes for everything would be readjusted. It would play out kind of like Factorio; resources would be plentiful enough, and making single items at a time would be easy, but making the most advanced items and blocks would require several crafting steps and many items. Acquiring vast quantities of the best blocks would be much harder this way, but not impossible. Most importantly it would give lower tier hulls an actual use. It would also allow for certain weapons to be stronger per block than other weapons, but more expensive and harder to make. I also feel like it would give uncombined weapons (like missile plain instead of missile cannon etc) a use because they're half as expensive for the same effect, give or take.

Lastly a pilot building would be instant, but pilots wouldn't be able to move around like you can in build mode, so you couldn't simply build massive ships with only survival mode like you used to be able to. Instead you'd upload a blueprint, and place/anchor it in the world, and then use flying construction bots kinda like in Factorio to build the ship. You would be able to make as big of a "roboport" with as many robots as you want, and also of different tiers.
But wait, I hear you ask, how is that different from the old system other than adding tedium and more progression?
Simple, say you have a massive shipyard with thousands of roboports building a titan per day. Now I blow it up. I've won the war decisively, because although you have the blueprint you can no longer quickly build another titan. This fixes the problem of your opponent being able to produce infinite AI fighters as well, in a sense.

Let's also say resources are spread out, as they already are in Starmade. You can easily make low tier weapons, armor, and machines all from one planet or system. But to effectively produce everything of the next tier you might need to spread out to one or two additional systems. To make the highest tier of items you might be spread all throughout an entire arm of the galaxy! So let's say you're making T3 weapons somewhere - someone can come and blow up your production. Think about it, you could actually win a war economically. Player factions could differ widely in economic strength and doctorate, some would make a few large ships, others hundreds of fighters/drones. It adds so much depth to the game just to balance war around an economy.

Plex Undeathinators on ships
I don't recall if this was added yet, I think it was but can't recall. But combined with "roboports" you could have enough supplies in a ship to automatically assemble fighters on the spot, so you could not only respawn pilots but also fighters for them to pilot. Because of the changes above, it'd be hard to keep producing fighters at the same rate while a ship is being destroyed. It'd be even harder to build powerful fighters because you'd have to add more machines or at least produce the necessary blocks before hand.

Additionally one could simply add a cooldown to plex undeathinators that increases as the ship is destroyed, so with 20% of a ship destroyed the respawn would be 20 or 40% longer or whatever value the team thinks is best. This would also mean that you need one plex undeathinator for every crew member, but could also have more if you really want to bypass the cooldown.

Also, make Undeathinators way more expensive, to the point where you really wouldn't put them on smaller fleet ships, because economy and balance.

I had more ideas that pertained to this thread, but for now I think I'm going to write them all down and create a slightly better formatted thread of my own, with all my ideas clearly explained, and also with some visual aid to really cement things. But I think we're closer than ever to the version of Starmade we have all always been dreaming of.

 

[petlahk]

Holy nuts. This thread is 4 years old and still kicking. The time really flies.

 

[Briaireous]

Dude.... You said my exact thoughts about the game.

Not sure if I misread it or anything but, I do believe there is a balance between larger ships and smaller ones.

Like titans are definitely favoraites of the game in terms of everything (except cost) and people are complaining about the balance of the game shifting towards larger ships. But that's the thing, when was the last time you seen a single fighter fighting force going against a dreadnaught and winning unless there is a very exploitable weakness to the dreadnaught. There is a reason they are called dreadnaught. I believe that until they add undeathanators on ships, the game will be the territory of battleship like titans. Afterwards, depending on how it is implemented, aircraft carrier type titans might dominate instead. A complete re-enactment of how world war 2 to coldward fleet flagship change.