A revelation on the redundancy of System Integrity

[Captain Fortius]

The integrity mechanic has been the subject of much discussion, with many posts pondering it's cons and pros, and sometimes trying to offer theoretical improvements or better ideas altogether.

After reading the Nth such post, I realized something;

Isn't the Integrity system unnecessary as a whole? (Well, okay, that's nothing new, but hear me out on the "why" of it.)

It's supposed to represent the fragility / sturdiness of a system.

Isn't it the job of armor blocks to make the ship, and it's systems sturdy?

For example, imagine the best reactor core ever. It's really robust and efficient.
Puncture the housing by ANY amount of weapons fire and you've got a full blown disaster, explosions that might rend the ship in half, and spreading fires that might consume the other half.

Think about a munitions storage vault. It's resistance to damage comes from thick, sturdy walls, and inner compartments, not the dimensions it was built in. Get one laser blast through the walls, and everything inside IS going to detonate.

The crew's working on armor updates anyway.
Shouldn't they just delete the integrity mechanic, and rely on the armor for protection?

Make it so that once the skin is penetrated, and any amount of system blocks inside are damaged, the whole system group shuts down, starts to burn maybe, or outright explodes;

It'd still discourage the dreaded space spagetthi ships!
There'd be less calculations for the game engine to do!
It'd make battles quicker!
It'd make it possible to disable a ship without breaking most of it's blocks!
There'd probably be an optimal way of arranging your systems, but at the very least the game wouldn't actively be forcing you to build cubes!

 

[apelsinsaft]

This is a tremendously logical solution. Unfortunately in isolation it feels like a trip back to core drilling simulator 2013. After all the best weapon to beat armor that protects a very vulnerable part is to find a way to quickly bypass it. Lets take another look at it and incorporate some more suggestions.

Nuke durability of all "system" blocks and buff armor to where it is a feasible form of defense like you said. Additionally, make mass matter more to the agility of ships and turrets. Remove the aiming angle of turreted weapons, and reduce the aiming angle of spinal weapons. Move from determining the efficiency of stabilizers with dimensions of your ship to determining the "storage" of your reactor with the total mass of the ship. Then let us draw more energy from the reactor than what we have in our "storage", at the cost of reactor durability. What do we get?

• Instagib core drills are slow to turn and move because they need the weight to power the huge gun without blowing up
• Spaghetti and other "dodge by being thin" ships are vulnerable in perfect proportion to how dodgy they are
• Fighters are as always vulnerable to small turrets, but a small to medium sized ship will require larger turrets which will turn more slowly and have trouble with small fighters.
• A much more logical system for power output which isn't nearly as limiting as stabilizers: Heavy ship? Heavy power. Light ship? Light power.

Then rename the game to Skywanderers and ship it.

 

[JinM]

I think the biggest reason why I like integrity is, because it actively prevents filling the empty spaces of a ship with random system blocks, and using for example shield capacitors as sort of second hull.

I think that really felt totally artifical but was neccessary without integrity, or your ship can't keep up in pvp.

Before integrity I just had to fill empty spaces in my ship with either thrusters or shield blocks. Now you put one type of system at one or two places. Feels more natural to me. I can't distribute my thruster engines on a real ship over 100 places neither.

 

[Kelpaz]

I've already permanently set integrity to 9999 with a custom config.
Integrity when active constantly recalculated during builds and battle and created unnecessary lag.
It also made it impossible to refit very small ships like fighters or frigates with interesting interiors.

I had to turn it off otherwise I would not be able to enjoy building anymore.

Integrity was forced upon us to counter spaghetti builds but instead it has ended up making normal builds impossible.
New weapon mechanics makes integrity redundant because thinly spread systems are easily destroyed now.

On my little server I've never seen anyone build/upload spaghetti, but if I did I could just delete the blueprint and any spawned entity which is by far the best solution.

Before integrity I just had to fill empty spaces in my ship with either thrusters or shield blocks. Now you put one type of system at one or two places. Feels more natural to me. I can't distribute my thruster engines on a real ship over 100 places neither.

There are already other limitations to stop filling everything, place too many shield caps and the recharge goes negative.
Integrity only stopped me from properly refitting some ship designs that weren't square enough, made it impossible to use thrusters as decorative elements.

The irony of this is my ships are mostly boxy and dense and I still have problems when integrity was on, because I also like to have interiors in the ship.

It's not about realism it's about being able to build without having artificial limitations working against creativity.

Wait a moment, speaking about realism I just remembered something called RCS those are tiny engines used for maneuvering in space and they are distributed all over real space craft.

 

[JinM]

The irony of this is my ships are mostly boxy and dense and I still have problems when integrity was on, because I also like to have interiors in the ship.

It's not about realism it's about being able to build without having artificial limitations working against creativity.

Wait a moment, speaking about realism I just remembered something called RCS those are tiny engines used for maneuvering in space and they are distributed all over real space craft.

If it feels more realistic, if your ship becomes a rubbiks cube where random system blocks are scattered all around then this is your opinion, and I respect that. I just didn't like it in the old meta at all.

There are already other limitations to stop filling everything, place too many shield caps and the recharge goes negative.

This are 2 arguments. The second one about shields doesn't have to do anything with the arrangement on where i put the blocks. Invalid for the point we argue about.

The first one is one half true, only a few system blocks have limitations. Weapon blocks could be placed in any arrangement you want to, thrusters, oh and shield blocks too. Only block that would have a limitation on how its placed is the stabilizer and the power.

So the first argument in this sentence is also not really applying.

 

[Raisinbat]

It's not about realism it's about being able to build without having artificial limitations working against creativity.

So much this.

Why do these threads always focus on forcing everyone into building like an RPer? You could just focus on reducing the penalties for adding interiors to ship instead.

Before integrity I just had to fill empty spaces in my ship with either thrusters or shield blocks. Now you put one type of system at one or two places. Feels more natural to me. I can't distribute my thruster engines on a real ship over 100 places neither.

Speaking of interiors:

This is interior from a high end PvP ship. There are no systems surrounding any of it, because this is added as padding to the outside of the ship. The point is to have ~20 blocks of empty space between the outer hull and your squishy systems underneath to greatly reduce missile damage, and it adds less mass than 1 block thick advanced armor.

The idea that you cannot have empty space on your ship without handicapping it is ridiculous, stop perpetuating it. The only cost to interior space is the armor surrounding it, if RPers would simply stop using advanced armor for making beds/wallpaper (wtf even???) you'd have much fewer issues.

Look at it this way:

Three variations of the same ship, but the 2. one has a single armor block moved away from its interior and now contains one extra unit of empty space. Repeating this step gives the 3. ship which now has !!!4!!! extra units of empty space! Point is all these ships are made of the exact same blocks and will have the exact same stats even if you keep repeating the step it remains the same, except for turn rate which shouldnt really be affected anyway... The empty space inside your ship is no more detrimental to your ship than the empty space surrounding it. It's a non-issue.

If you really wanted to make interiors less detrimental to ships REDUCE THE WEIGHT OF ARMOR.

If it feels more realistic, if your ship becomes a rubbiks cube where random system blocks are scattered all around then this is your opinion, and I respect that. I just didn't like it in the old meta at all.

Are you saying you'd like something more like tekkit, because i can definitely sympathize with that, but having a lot of heavy simulation on the ships with lots of individual machines doing stuff would slaughter the game's performance in combat, just like crew pathfinding is going to if that disaster ever gets added. It would neat having dedicated machines with actual functionality but i don't believe it's possible to have that and maintain decent fps during combat, and i'd much rather be able to play with the ships once they're built.

 

[Kelpaz]

The first one is one half true, only a few system blocks have limitations. Weapon blocks could be placed in any arrangement you want to, thrusters, oh and shield blocks too. Only block that would have a limitation on how its placed is the stabilizer and the power.

This weapon setup would be impossible with integrity:

A smaller scale example of integrity impossibilities is a craft called the "Zippy"

Putting thrusters in the back where they are meant to be turned it into explodium while waffling the beams was still just about possible.
After headaches and frustration I decided to turn off integrity.
Since then I've had more fun refitting my ships.

Integrity in a way favors gigantism, the larger the build the easier it is to get positive integrity, while smaller builds suffer.

Once I restart my personal server I will turn off integrity.
If I see spaghetti there's a well known command called "/DESTROY_ENTITY_DOCK" that will take care of it.

 

[JinM]

This weapon setup would be impossible with integrity:

Ok I get where you are comming from.

I can totally understand that you want your weapon outputs spread out.

But wouldn't it be ok for you, to just move the system blocks of that weapon a little bit closer to where its output is?

And do you think it feels natural ingame, if you shoot down this weapon output tower, but the weapon doesn't get damaged? I mean the main portion of your weapon system blocks are inside the ship. But your weapon shouldn't be functional anymore if I shoot down an area of 10% size of your ship around it's weapon output.

I think you just want your wepaons to be within a safe place inside your ship. But this advantage and additional build meta you have here, is now gone for everyone. Additionally you still can wrap your weapons output tower in some additional armour.

Isn't that a pro argument for integrity? Now you have to place armour to protect system parts that are vulnerable.

I mean your ship is typical old pvp meta: Spread out weapon blocks to be protected from a lucky blow. Now you have to decide if you let your ship be vulnerable to lucky blows, or if you actually place armour against lucky shots hitting your vital weapon array.

while waffling the beams was still just about possible.

I am not sure if waffling will even be neccessary with the weapons update.

After headaches and frustration I decided to turn off integrity.

I think that's a totally valid choice.

I am not saying integrity is perfect, and maybe they can adjust it better. I just wanted to say that it has some upsides as well.

And I am not really thinking about spagetti the points of mine are about other stuff, as allready stated. Mainly I don't like random and spread out distribution of system blocks over the ship. If I take out 10% of your overall ship volume where your weapons outputs are, then those weapons also should not work anymore. Same goes for every system.

 

[God mode]

I think we can all agree, even the devs, that integrity is way too harsh at the moment.

Its primary purpose was to discourage low-density ships, which it doesn't actually do effectively and which is now accomplished by the weapons update.

Its secondary purpose was to encourage system blocks to be grouped together instead of scattered throughout a ship, which I do think is a good idea in principle, but the implementation is terrible.

I think the biggest reason why I like integrity is, because it actively prevents filling the empty spaces of a ship with random system blocks, and using for example shield capacitors as sort of second hull.

I think that really felt totally artifical but was neccessary without integrity, or your ship can't keep up in pvp.

Before integrity I just had to fill empty spaces in my ship with either thrusters or shield blocks. Now you put one type of system at one or two places. Feels more natural to me. I can't distribute my thruster engines on a real ship over 100 places neither.

That might have been the intent of system integrity, but it doesn't actually accomplish that. You can fill your ship with single blocks of shield capacitors or secondary weapons with no negative consequences, and this is in fact encouraged by the initial integrity buffer. Primary weapons, shield rechargers, stabilizers, reactors, and chambers are all encouraged to be built in groups through alternate means. Thrusters are basically the only case where integrity is both necessary and actually works as intended, and even then it can be bypassed using docked thrusters.



How about this:

Integrity only starts decreasing at 5 exposed faces, and starting integrity is set to 1. All systems would calculate integrity like thrusters do, with a combined integrity value for that system.

So, something like:
6 exposed faces: -2 integrity
5 exposed faces: -1 integrity
4 exposed faces: +1 integrity
3 exposed faces: +1 integrity
2 exposed faces: +1 integrity
1 exposed faces: +1 integrity
0 exposed faces: +1 integrity

Integrity values of groups of blocks if placed in a line:
1 block: -1 integrity
2 blocks: -1 integrity
3 blocks: 0 integrity
4 blocks: 1 integrity

This wouldn't punish spaghetti because it doesn't need to. Integrity would actually be effective in preventing fully checkerboard systems, while not impacting valid system shapes and not allowing for integrity exploits. Every system could have enough of a buffer from other blocks to be able to support single blocks in reasonable amounts (roughly a third of a system could consist of single or double blocks).

 

[Captain Fortius]

This is a tremendously logical solution. Unfortunately in isolation it feels like a trip back to core drilling simulator 2013. After all the best weapon to beat armor that protects a very vulnerable part is to find a way to quickly bypass it. Lets take another look at it and incorporate some more suggestions.

Thanks.
I've been thinking about what you wrote.

I look at it this way:

With the current Integrity mechanics, if you don't build your ship's systems cube-y enough, they explode when the ship is shot, even though shields and armor are still intact.

With my proposal, systems built in every manner and style would shut down / start to degrade / explode after the ship's shields and armor failed.

It may not be the perfect method, but it is certainly an improvement. A cube ship with cube systems would not be harder -or easier to damage than a nice ship with any shape of systems.

And if we think about it, isn't real-life combat all about core drilling? A person can die from having a single hole put through him. Imagine if we needed to lose 50% of our body to cease living!
The same's true for machines.
Cut cables on a single point, they no longer transmit power or data.
Put one hole in a rocket engine, and all the fuel leaks out and combusts.
Pierce the armor of a main battle tank at the right spot - with a weapon focused on quickly bypassing armor, such as a depleted uranium penetrator, and the crew and inner workings get shredded by spalling and immolated by the burning metal dust.

Can you imagine an aircraft that still flies, even though it lost almost half of it's structure?

I know, that's the harshness of real life and games need to be a bit more forgiving for fun's sake, but half of the succesful games' combat models emulate this to some extent.
The other half uses an HP system with no physical damage.

It may be just my personal opinion, but I liked the pace of combat in core drilling times. This proposal would be nowhere near as drastic though, as you'd need to drill several system groups to kill or disable the ship.

Ultimately, if it's too controvertial, I'm fine with letting go of the system disabling part, and simply settle for the idea of exposed system blocks being universally vulnerable. Certainly there's no need for extra algorhytms calculating vulnerability adjustments real-time. As Kelpaz said, it's a waste of server performance.

 

[Kelpaz]

Ok I get where you are comming from.

I can totally understand that you want your weapon outputs spread out.

But wouldn't it be ok for you, to just move the system blocks of that weapon a little bit closer to where its output is?

And do you think it feels natural ingame, if you shoot down this weapon output tower, but the weapon doesn't get damaged? I mean the main portion of your weapon system blocks are inside the ship. But your weapon shouldn't be functional anymore if I shoot down an area of 20% size of your ship around it's weapon output.

I think you just want your wepaons to be within a safe place inside your ship. But this advantage and additional build meta you have here, is now gone for everyone. Additionally you still can wrap your weapons output tower in some additional armour.

Isn't that a pro argument for integrity? Now you have to place armour to protect system parts that are vulnerable.

I mean your ship is typical old pvp meta: Spread out weapon blocks to be protected from a lucky blow. Now you have to decide if you let your ship be vulnerable to lucky blows, or if you actually place armour against lucky shots hitting your vital weapon array.

The Clydesdale is pretty unique to other ships I made and my personal favorite:

Not sure how PVP worthy this ship is, since I never thought about PVP while building it, this is actually for PVE.

It's still possible to put weapons in any location and fire through your ship, I set it up like this because of appearance and fire pattern.
The armored hardpoint is there to prevent drills destroying everything.
The ship itself is multi layered with the reactor completely enclosed.

From my experience in combat it's not so much about lucky hits as is endurance, you need to outlive your opponents on the battlefield and my AI ships has no chill.

The thing is, I've seen plenty of players are turned away from integrity, I don't see upsides in loosing the player base and estranging older players to the point of not being able to recommend this game.

 

[Nosajimiki]

So much this.

Why do these threads always focus on forcing everyone into building like an RPer? You could just focus on reducing the penalties for adding interiors to ship instead.



Speaking of interiors:

This is interior from a high end PvP ship. There are no systems surrounding any of it, because this is added as padding to the outside of the ship. The point is to have ~20 blocks of empty space between the outer hull and your squishy systems underneath to greatly reduce missile damage, and it adds less mass than 1 block thick advanced armor.

The idea that you cannot have empty space on your ship without handicapping it is ridiculous, stop perpetuating it. The only cost to interior space is the armor surrounding it, if RPers would simply stop using advanced armor for making beds/wallpaper (wtf even???) you'd have much fewer issues.

Look at it this way:

Three variations of the same ship, but the 2. one has a single armor block moved away from its interior and now contains one extra unit of empty space. Repeating this step gives the 3. ship which now has !!!4!!! extra units of empty space! Point is all these ships are made of the exact same blocks and will have the exact same stats even if you keep repeating the step it remains the same, except for turn rate which shouldnt really be affected anyway... The empty space inside your ship is no more detrimental to your ship than the empty space surrounding it. It's a non-issue.

If you really wanted to make interiors less detrimental to ships REDUCE THE WEIGHT OF ARMOR.



Are you saying you'd like something more like tekkit, because i can definitely sympathize with that, but having a lot of heavy simulation on the ships with lots of individual machines doing stuff would slaughter the game's performance in combat, just like crew pathfinding is going to if that disaster ever gets added. It would neat having dedicated machines with actual functionality but i don't believe it's possible to have that and maintain decent fps during combat, and i'd much rather be able to play with the ships once they're built.

^ I'm so dumb-founded by this thread, that it is easier to say that this is the only reasonable perspective I see.

Is system death a good idea, sure, but but from "any" damage is so bad for game play, I can't fathom why anyone would want this. As for integrity being obsolete... it already mostly is without adding a single new mechanic. Acid follows the shape of a system and shield bubbles are harder to fit spaghetti ships into; so, if I just eat the shields with latch-on beams, and acid damage the systems, I can just watch the damage burn right up the string. Sure spaghetti ships might still be strong even without integrity, but not nearly as indestructible as they were before.

 

[Captain Fortius]

That's the thing. I don't want to add anything here.
I want to remove something unnecessary.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I think I'd go a little tamer and just say that systems should suffer soft failures like shutdowns or delays when damaged, and that damage should leech to them from adjacent hits even thru shields, scaling in leech distance by system size. You wouldn't want to cram shield blocks randomly in walls, especially near the outer hull, because your shields would get messed up the moment those walls would be hit.
That's essentially the Star Trek system of ship combat and system disabling, and ultimately I think it's the system that works best for making silly designs crammed with systems fragile (altho StarMade can do without the explosivity) in a way that feels intuitive, along with "target their ____" even while shields are up.

 

[MacThule]

It'd still discourage the dreaded space spagetthi ships!

I think it would actually encourage theoretical sketti ships (which no one dreads or care about and haven't even been seen on a server since 2017).

Making systems 1-shot would make the best defense not getting hit at all. Which is what spaghetti is all about - reducing systems profiles to the minimum possible so they can't be hit.

How might ultra fragile systems discourage spaghetti (which to re-iterate, even before integrity, really didn't need a lot of discouragement anyway and was never a problem)?

 

[Scypio]

Making systems 1-shot would make the best defense not getting hit at all. Which is what spaghetti is all about - reducing systems profiles to the minimum possible so they can't be hit.

Uh, no. How could you already forget what they were about ? Go there and read again. I want to see the spaghetti meta.

 

[MacThule]

Uh, no. How could you already forget what they were about ? Go there and read again. I want to see the spaghetti meta.

everything is spread out to shit and most of the ship is empty space, which makes you able to avoid 99% of all daamge sent your way because they miss

Which is exactly what I just said. Sketti was about avoiding systems being hit in the first place and so my theory is that making systems uber fragile would like only pressure players into damage avoidant building techniques.

What am I missing? What have I 'forgotten?'

 

[Agame3]

Turn rate which shouldnt really be affected anyway

When designing, you first decide what a ship is for, then starting from that you decide its main characteristics. Little details that make it pleasant come last, after you are sure it can do its job. So, you want a 'high end PvP ship". You choose the type and amount of modules of your weapons, the quantity of shielding you want on your ship and the T/M ratio. These in turn decide the amount of Me/s you will need in that ship. You choose how to gain that power. Now you can start building the ship.

And as long as your ship stick to its original specifications, the only other thing that matters is its maneuverability. Therefore, turning rate of a PvP ship is one of the most important characteristics of it. The real art is to have everything you want to have in that ship with the minimum x, y and z size. I can not say enough how important that is in a PvP ship. Way more important than decoration, easy access to turret bases, cargo bay for your loot, captain's cabin, etc. In your example you added 2 to the Y axis of your hypothetical ship for an increase of 4 in internal volume. It's against brain to do such a thing on a PvP ship.

Just do not claim it to be a "high end PvP ship", call it a pleasure ship capable of some PvP too, and then it all makes sense.

My 2 cents, anyway.

 

[Raisinbat]

turning rate of a PvP ship is one of the most important characteristics of it.

100% true, but there are extremely few ships that are perfect rectangles. On almost every ship you could expand the surface like my post says and it would have zero impact due to antennas/wings or other compartments already raising the dimensions. As long as dimensionality isn't raised, the empty space inside the bounding box, whether its inside the ship or around it, has exactly the same impact on the ship's performance, that was my point.

My post doesn't really make that clear tho so thanks for clearing it up!

 

[Agame3]

Thanks.
And if we think about it, isn't real-life combat all about core drilling? A person can die from having a single hole put through him. Imagine if we needed to lose 50% of our body to cease living!
The same's true for machines.
Cut cables on a single point, they no longer transmit power or data.
Put one hole in a rocket engine, and all the fuel leaks out and combusts.
Pierce the armor of a main battle tank at the right spot - with a weapon focused on quickly bypassing armor, such as a depleted uranium penetrator, and the crew and inner workings get shredded by spalling and immolated by the burning metal dust.

Can you imagine an aircraft that still flies, even though it lost almost half of it's structure?

I know, that's the harshness of real life and games need to be a bit more forgiving for fun's sake, but half of the succesful games' combat models emulate this to some extent.
The other half uses an HP system with no physical damage.

It may be just my personal opinion, but I liked the pace of combat in core drilling times.

THIS.

As an engineer I consider the kind of "heroic against the odds" acts like Polish cavalry charging German tanks with swords to be sentimental decisions. Those people simply did not want to survive the inevitable defeat, that were those charges all about. In designing combat systems, there is no sentimentality. If my weapon can not one-shot the enemy device but the enemy device can one-shot me, my weapon is inadequate and has to be replaced/redesigned. Of course I can't simply crush completely the enemy. The weapon design is all about taking out key elements from the enemy device to render it dysfunctional.

Anti-aircraft systems are not about crushing the enemy plane with almighty power, are just about the fact a war plane is so packed with systems that wherever you hit it it becomes too dangerous to fly and pilot (and crew for bombers) will eject. So then the main problem becomes hitting it. And for that some AA batteries use hundreds of weak explosive projectiles to fill the sky around the enemy plane until one of them detonates close enough, some use high tech missiles to make sure the one missile you launch hits 90% of the time.

Warship bombing, anti-aircraft batteries, submarine hunting destroyers, torpedoes, ground mines against armored or personnel, anti-tank missiles and cannon ammo, anti-infantry weapons, even Japanese swords, ALL weapons ever designed by men are only about core drilling. Sometimes the technology was not good enough to make the well thought weapons work as expected, but in time technology evolved.