A simple solution for Hull Mechanics

[McDili]

A Hull Block with 10,000HP and 90% Armor will also never be destroyed by missiles. I\'m not going to explain, yet again, how boosting stats makes missiles even more useless in comparison to AMC\'s. It\'s even in the Original Post now. So, if you\'re still dead-set on having stat boosts/adding more hull that increase stats, please re-read the Original Post, and you\'ll see where I pointed out the flaws.



You\'re right there is 16 different Ores and 5 tiers each. I\'d imagine Schema and the community surrounding StarMade are a pretty creative bunch. We can come up with new, more unique blocks.

And if that argument isn\'t good enough for you, it\'s Alpha. The amount of ores and tiers are extremely subject to change. I\'m not going to forfeit my suggestions on the grounds that Ores may or may not change.



To address your MMORPG comment, if StarMade was an MMO and/or a traditional RPG then that argument may hold some water, but it\'s not. We\'re not limited by levels, there are no time gates, there\'s no raid bosses. Better yet you should ask yourself, do you want StarMade\'s way of getting you to log in every day be a carrot on a stick style of play, or do you want StarMade\'s way of getting you to log on be, the simple concept that StarMade is a fun game?



And finally, again you have not presented any justifiable argument on how my proposal is bad for the game. So again, I will have to disagree with you. I don\'t think the argument \"MMORPG\'s do it, so it must be good\" is a good argument.

 

[CrusaderDeleters]

Perhaps what we don\'t need, are different-massed Hull Blocks. What we need, are different textured Hull Blocks with the same. Exact. Function.

And perhaps we don\'t really need a limit on the stats of the weapons, except for damage blocking percentage. But then you\'d take BaseWeight * ((percentage*health)/10)

This way, 100 health at 99% would be 9900/500, 19.8b (b is baseweight), or acting like 19.8 blocks, which makes a 3300 dam gun take 4 hits to break it, but can save you a lot of hull blocks later on. Change the health to 1000, then it has a block weight of 198, and takes 40 hits to break it. You\'ll save a hell of a lot of space, but you\'ll be riding in a WWII tank.

 

[lman94]

if you have it do a fixed amount of damage that is more that one, you need to account for shots that do less than one. what is more, if you have the AMCs seperated, you will do much more damage. this is already true, but this idea would amplify it.

that said, I think this is a great idea

 

[McDili]

This is why good feedback leads to better things!



This is an idea I could totally get behind, as long as the blocking precentage has no effect on missiles. Do you think that\'s fair?

 

[CrusaderDeleters]

Honestly, Yes. You\'ll need a shit ton of missiles to even scratch the hull, but I don\'t think Armor Percentage affects missiles anyways.

 

[McDili]

I believe both of the cannons on the Isanth-VI do 100 damage each. Now as I said before, numbers aren\'t as important as the general concept.

If I was the one making the decisions on the values related to this concept, the fixed damage would be 100, unless the AMC doesn\'t have capacity to output that.



Now against normal hull, your cannon will have to do ~134 damage(I think the Isanth does 138) to reach the minimum damage threshold and do 100 damage. But, just because it\'s setup that way for hull, doesn\'t mean you shouldn\'t have better AMC\'s, since they will still do full damage to shields.

For Hardened Hull, you will need to do 200 damage, so that you can do 100 damage. This is all because of the armor ratings.

Personally I don\'t see much issue with it. This is surely a flaw with my proposal, but it depends mostly on the values put in place. In my ideal world, you\'d almost never see the flaw.



But that\'s good feedback, so thanks for that!

 

[McDili]

If missiles ignore armor rating, it would only take 4-5 missiles at 200-250 damage to puncture a big hole in the hull if it had 1000hp. And only 1 missile at 100hp.



Did I miss something here?

 

[lman94]

but as of now, with the diminishing returns on grouping, 100 individual AMCs do more damage than 100 grouped AMCs. this is true even without your idea

the catch is range, an individual AMC doesn\'t shoot very far.

while I really like this idea, I fear it will lead to a generation of lag inducing shotgun ships.

so, this is the next problem to address.

btw, ideal worlds don\'t exist this side of Armageddon.

 

[McDili]

But I don\'t see how it isn\'t that way now. All the projectiles converge on what you aim at, you can assuredly destroy ships much faster with 100 separate blocks of AMC\'s now than if you grouped them. My idea doesn\'t change that particular function of the AMC.

Making a cube of checkered AMC\'s has always been the more efficient way to go about getting high DPS, people just don\'t typically do that because it isn\'t aesthetically pleasing.

 

[lazarus78]

You are basing your entire idea on the supposed false fact that the AMC and missiles currently in the game are the only and final versions to be affed. This is a silly notion given the plethora of unused or underutalized blocks and items currently in the game.

Your vision of the future is nerrow sighted at best.

 

[Cool3303]

Nice Ideas but we need to go further.

I think Missiles need to get rebalanced to do an higher DPS than AMCs.

For example the dumbfire rocket should do four times the DPS of an AMC simply based on the fact that only the half size of explosion hits (usually) and that it is rather hard to hit an ship with the dumbfire.

Also One Big Weapon should be better than many small and have (almost) no stat limits so that you can one hit the new armor blocks with an acceptable rate of fire no matter how far its stats are maxed out(the current max dmg of an AMC is between 25K and 30K Damage but the ROF gets insanely low far before that). This coulde be balanced with an better aiming system (so not everything fires on the EXACT same point)



Also thrusters efficency needs to get limited so you cant just trade in \"some\" space for an indestructible armor(You would know what I mean if you saw my capital borg cube lol)

@Mc Dilli:Aesthetic is seen differently by every person and therefore is no legit argument.

An Cube has the smallest surface and therefore the best AMC defense but is very aestethic.

 

[McDili]

I\'m merely making suggestions based on what we have available to us now. It is impossible to make suggestions for things that do not exist, that have unclear mechanics and stats. My idea is simply based on what is here now.



I never once expressed my vision of the future, nor did I ever imply that what we have currently is final. It\'s a suggestion that works in the current state of the game. If things change, I will come up with new proposals if there are new issues. It\'s part of providing valuable feedback to the developers.



You are against the implementation of my proposal. Yet you\'ve presented no argument or discussion that point out potential flaws. And despite that, you\'ve continued to suggest a solution that doesn\'t work.

Finally, you\'ve resorted to an Ad-Hominem attack, and decided to insult me personally rather than focus on the discussion.

That sort of tactic does not contribute to any discussion, so reject your Ad-Hominem attack, and with respect I ask that you take a step back, take a deep breath, and if you still want to discuss here, please keep it within the confines of the game and refrain from assosiating this thread with me personally.

Thank you.

 

[McDili]

I like all the feedback here.



You\'ve posted some pretty valid discussion on a lot of topics of interest. I agree that missiles should be more useful, I\'m not sure where I stand on thrusters, I don\'t have any immediate issues with them. If you\'d like, I\'d encourage you to start a suggestion about thrusters yourself if you haven\'t already. All of my current ideas surround depth and balance of combat.



And you\'re right that aesthetics are subjective. The point I was making before, is that people usually use hull for aesthetics, because you\'d be better off using shields instead of hull in the current state of the game.

 

[CrusaderDeleters]

Missiles require the shields be down and the ship to be moving slow enough that the missiles catch up. AMC\'s, as I said before, aren\'t as effective with mass-block obliteration as one might think. A still ship, or a ship chasing you is a great target to be missiles to dear hell.

 

[lman94]

i believe he was referring to the amc checkerboard, hence his reference to cubes

 

[Defentrix]

I\'m not sure if I have just missed some ones post and this has already been thought of but I think your missing a major problem. We all know that a lit of people love to build BIG guns, and that big guns shoot really fast, and do tones of damage. Some AMC\'s can nearly shoot even 20 shot per sec. It would easily do over 400 damage in one quarter of a second, (one hardened hull) so therefore 20 shots a second 4 LAYERS OF HARDENED HULL A SEC. There goes the layering idea if there no way to combat this, as in 2 secs 8 layers of hull... Problem?

 

[McDili]

Good feedback Defentrix, I can assure you that I considered this. I should also note, the numbers that I chose to use in my scenario aren\'t as important as the general concept is. However I do feel that the numbers I used were good numbers.

We\'ll use your scenario here, so one AMC cannon fires 20 shots a second. So in my proposal, that\'s essentially 5 layers of hardened hull per second, since it takes 4 shots to break

There\'s a few things to consider here. First, weigh in 5 hardened hull per second, compared to 20 hardened hull per second we have currently. So an AMC of this caliber that fires at 20 shots a second, has it\'s effectiveness vs Hardened Hull decreased by 75%.

Secondly, ships move. It would be hard, even within the confines of one second, to sustain fire on a 1block area against a moving target.



Even so, I\'m not even convinced that it\'s full proof. This is a particular scenario that would have to be tested in the game. All we know for sure is the aforementioned statement that such a cannon is 75% less effective vs Hardened Hull than before. But stats aren\'t everything, it looks nice on paper but in practice we may stumble upon some more interesting information.

 

[lman94]

this means that big guns are still viable, so shotgun ships are unnecessary. they are still more efficient, but not the only way to go

 

[John Sheridan]

I don\'t think there IS a problem with the current setup.

I think schema chose to make missles useless against shields, inline with Star Trek\'s Photon torpedoes generally doing not much against shields, but doing severe damage against unshielded hull. Same thing here.

Whats the problem?

Also I\'ve done a few big ships battles, to say AMC\'s are devestating, no... What they are good at is chipping the shit out of a big ship and causing alot of repair work. But they dont pound through super quickly. Missles do that a lot better. I find with AMC\'s I might have 20 seperate cannons, and they seem to hit the same block and negate the fact theres 20 of them... you would think they\'d massicare 20 blocks at a time but no, the aiming pinpoints them to one block, so its not as quickly devastating as you would think.

I think the system as is, is good, use AMC\'s to cut down the shields, fire missles at the hull. The end.

Only thing I\'d prefer is make missles faster they are dog slow and useless against all but stationary targets, hence why its rare you see them used in fights. I would leave everything else as is. I think allowing missles to be used as intended (hull destroyers) would be the best option. Hulls seem fine to me.

 

[McDili]

I get the impression that you think I created a proposal in which to solely make missiles more useful.

I could be wrong but, I agree with you. There ISN\'T problem with the role that missiles play in battle. But that\'s not what this thread is about.



The thread is about Hull being too weak against AMCs. I agree with the mechanic that exists between missiles vs shields.

I\'m simply suggesting the same mechanic between Hull and AMC\'s.



And yes, currently AMC\'s are devestating. If you have 20 AMC\'s all hitting the same block at the same time, that\'s a simple design flaw. The cause of that is likely because all of your AMC\'s output on the same axis, making the difference in travel time between each output very minimal. If you want to see the devestating penetration power of AMC\'s, make sure you have 2-3 outputs in front of the rest, ensuring that the main barrage has to travel a longer distance to the convergence point, that way when the first projectile lands, the rest just funnel into the hole and tear apart the insides.



And finally, I don\'t think Schema intended for Hull to be useless in comparison to Shields. Shields and Hull cost the same mass, and all it takes is 400 damage to take out hardened hull in one shot. So you get more out of the mass hit if you use shields in place of hull. Hull gets destroyed in 1 shot and gives you mass. Shields get destroyed in one shot, give you mass, and also more shields.



The system as is, is use AMC\'s against everything because missiles are too slow and won\'t penetrate to the core faster than AMC\'s, because AMC\'s projectiles much faster.



The system you mentioned earlier \"Use AMC\'s to cut down shields, fire missiles at the Hull\" is exactly what this proposal is trying to endorse.



EDIT: I tested your theory about AMC projectiles being \"Negated\" when they all converge on one block.

I had 40 separate cannons, and for each XY plane that had AMC outputs, only 4 outputs were shared.

So if your theory was correct, the game would only register my penetration as if 10 projectiles were fired.



However, this was not the case. I fired one shot. Just as you said, all the shots converged on one block, and from the outside, only one block of the surface I fired at was missing.

The penetration on the Z axis was 17 blocks.

But also, there were many other blocks within the whole that got destroyed. After counting the missing blocks from the structure, it came out to a total of 40 blocks missing. So out of my 40 cannons, every single projectile hit and destroyed what it hit.



So finally I have determined that the AMC projectiles are indeed not negated. I also did this while on a server with 120 ping, so it wasn\'t the lag-free single-player testing. That said, my argument remains justified on the matter.(It also means I was incorrect about you having a design flaw in your weapon placement. It either appeared to you that the AMC\'s were negated since most of the damage occured on the inside of the ship rather than on the surface your shots converged on, or you were experiencing abnormal latency.)