A Solution To Flying Spaghetti Monsters

[Hugoba]

- building some non spaghetti structure
- using multiple weaker shields (relative to the old system)
- leaving some of the ship unshielded

- or build one big thin deadly needle with powerful reactor, distant stabilizer and protect front of needle with "umbrella" which is located in shielded area. People will love when they will be trying to penetrate throught umbrella and meanwille your super gun needle will erradicade their stations/ships/planets

 

[Dire Venom]

make the system blocks exposed to space becomes cosmetic only

That ventures into the relm of implimenting oxtgen/compresurization. A bit resource intensive to calculate I would think, still keep the ideas coming!

- or build one big thin deadly needle with powerful reactor, distant stabilizer and protect front of needle with "umbrella" which is located in shielded area. People will love when they will be trying to penetrate throught umbrella and meanwille your super gun needle will erradicade their stations/ships/planets

Congradulations! You've just crashed the server, your internet provider and melted a hole in the floor!
It's certiantly possible but you'd need to be a pretty big idiot to do it XD

 

[Lecic]

make the system blocks exposed to space becomes cosmetic only

I surround my spaghetti in a one block coating of decorative slab blocks.

 

[Crashmaster]

I place one spaghetti face down and end my turn.

 

[MacMartel]

I surround my spaghetti in a one block coating of decorative slab blocks.

yes but that would make it 4 times less efficient
[doublepost=1509620669,1509619874][/doublepost]

That ventures into the relm of implimenting oxtgen/compresurization. A bit resource intensive to calculate I would think, still keep the ideas coming!

I misspoke I was talking about apparent systeme block

 

[Lecic]

yes but that would make it 4 times less efficient

No it wouldn't. Quarter slabs would only increase the width of my lines by 50%. The weight is basically nothing, certainly nothing that can't be countered by adding a couple more thrusters. And decoratives are extremely cheap to produce so it's not much of a cost issue.

 

[GnomeKing]

for sake of the archive, i shall link this contribution from FlyingDebris here as a concrete demonstration of a spaghetti ship and docked entity exploits:

"Fair And Balanced"

it is an extreme example that no player would enjoy for long and that would get deleted from a server quickly because of its hideous lag potential - good work . New power system does not make such possibilities go away either > but how much do we actually have to worry about whole spaghetti servings like this on servers ? probably not much, as they will get deleted, if ever built in first place. More problematic are less extreme examples, ie free-floating turrets and power 2.0 dumb-bells> or maybe the lag caused by overheating docked entities > etc > again no new solutions to this on the horizon with power or systems 2.0 ...

I have considered this possible spaghetti demon in power 2.0 , and i think it would function just about the same > 2 well armored nodes, with the reactors and stabilizers, separated by [insert insane distance] m, then a forest of spaghetti systems and overlapping spaghetti turrets ...

I shall call it 'The Hair-Ball-with-Tug-Nuts' -

{{{{ image very much deleted ]]]]

edit:
[in fact new shields can probably be exploited well in The Tug-Nut > 2 huge shield bubbles over the 'balls', and small ones scattered everywhere like shampoo foam (or lice ...?) - now The Tug Nuts 'ball-shields' can not be depleted by easy shots on the periphery . and if a ball does take a heavy slap (ooof!), a quick twitch n' twist (you bet!) and 100's meters of cushioning 'spaghetti-system hair and shield-lice' are swung into place, very likely preventing additional slaps to the 'ball-shields' until they have recovered (ahhhh!)...

 

[GDPR 302420]

it is an extreme example that no player would enjoy for long and that would get deleted from a server quickly because of its hideous lag potential - good work

Have you been on any of the more popular PvP servers recently? Ever heard of people like Zyrr and kulbolen who almost exclusivly use Spaghetti ships and have yet to get anything deleted.

New power system does not make such possibilities go away either > but how much do we actually have to worry about whole spaghetti servings like this on servers ? probably not much, as they will get deleted, if ever built in first place.

 

[GnomeKing]

ok fair enough - anything goes in full pvp, especially if both sides are using something similar > presumably those players are not going to want to loose thier pasta anyway> but if this ship was routinely causing lag, or just random trouble for servers that do/did have admin warnings for lag and 'trouble' i don't think it would be much fun, and would be abandoned, or deleted...

i presume you don't want to see my Tug Nuts either ?

 

[GDPR 302420]

but if this ship was routinely causing lag, or just random trouble for servers that do/did have admin warnings for lag and 'trouble' i don't think it would be much fun, and would be abandoned, or deleted...

Big metashit titans cause just as much, if not more lag

 

[GnomeKing]

yes they do indeed - and are equally as unpopular with many players

[but thank you for the contribution - i must show my Mentor my Tug Nuts sometime..]

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Regarding shield bubbles, I don't think it will be enough. Spaghetti monsters are the meta because:

1. Weapons greatly outpace defenses
2. Sweeping weapons don't work properly
3. There are no area-denial weapons
4. The few hits that land don't matter much

As long as these factors overall are sufficiently at play, glass cannon spaghetti will always be better because it allows you to put the same mass (and thus capabilities) into a package that is very hard to destroy, but doesn't have too much difficulty destroying the enemy; if you want to stop spaghetti, you need to do at least one, but likely most or all, of the following:

1. Make weapons scale closer to defenses (this might happen because of shield bubbles, but I'm skeptical it's enough)
2. Fix continuous beams so they can actually hit something while sweeping with them
3. Create something like missiles that explode near a target rather than having to hit it
4. Make hits matter a ton (possibly via severe damage to nearby systems)

Put simply, spaghetti doesn't care about defenses except the ones on the enemy, so if bubble shields aren't crazy strong, spaghetti will just continue to tear through them and either not use them itself or exploit them on critical areas that will still be hard to hit.

As a sidenote, shield bubbles are another way to balance on ship dimensions ultimately, they just use a low-dimension-favoring reward system that's less artificial.
And that's a good thing, we need to balance on both mass and dimensions because what really matters, what really makes people dislike spaghetti, is that we intuitively prefer dense ships. If we just balance on mass, or if we favor larger dimensions per mass (as the power systems both do), then without anything else to steer us away, the optimal density is very low (like a cloud of spaghetti).

 

[GnomeKing]

relevant issue raised there;
Additionally; explicitly penalizing having all your systems exposed to space would also work against this sort of build.

[finally (blue-sky), by using geometry based rules/ratios rather than just total dimensions, more compact forms and shapes are rewarded over endless rods. ]

 

[kulbolen]

Have you been on any of the more popular PvP servers recently? Ever heard of people like Zyrr and kulbolen who almost exclusivly use Spaghetti ships and have yet to get anything deleted.

hey hey hey i specifically avoid this ship most of the time, i built exactly one just to show how it worked. hehwehwe

it is an extreme example that no player would enjoy for long and that would get deleted from a server quickly because of its hideous lag potential

this was made up from thin air, because it was objectively wrong before you wrote it lol

yes they do indeed - and are equally as unpopular with many players

yes but theyre still all over the place, and the most common thing every new player ever wants to work towards in game.

theres no magic argument that makes this work, it can and already has been shown. youre right about one thing though, the few of us who have built them generally avoid them outside of testing and shit.

 

[GnomeKing]

Well, ok then Kulbolen - I would not enjoy flying something like that around for long - so i guess i revise my comments to "I myself" rather than the admittedly overstated "no player". Laggy builds with 'exploity docks' ect are/were explicitly banned in some places, or if not could be reported when problematic. > This remains an option for any admin, or community of players on a server (for example any uploads of the Fair And Balanced bluprint if it was a server problem, or construction of similar)

Highly exploitative builds like this which are explicitly militarized really have only one function - and since they are meta-ships without rivals that are not themselves very similar, they would of course generally be 'dry docked'. (if just for the sake of saving the universe from lag). Unless fighting a competitive rival, such a ship is only likely to be 'on the loose' on a sever if it is causing trouble...

Eventually 'trouble-makers', whether spaghetti, titans or whatever, piss-off server communities, and some get kicked by admins...(others just kill player numbers)
(i don't really care per se if people want to make these things - as long as they don't cause ridiculous game-load or completely disrupt server game-play...two criteria which are highly unlikely with a ship like this :/ )

Starmade sets minimal hard limits, allowing a player to build in highly exaggerated, extreme, cpu-crushing ways > in single-player it is just personal choice as to how much ugliness, lag and calculation load you will put up with before your enjoyment is reduced. Speaking for myself, I feel a responsibility not to be a dick and (knowingly) inflict this on other players on a server either.


In a way this a kind of moral choice - ie, In the end, I wont really enjoy the game myself if I am restricting the enjoyment of it for others.
(or it put it in modern talk - 'don't be a dick')

This is a basic rule of most community based online games, and whatever 'exploits' or 'disruptives' are found in game like Starmade (and there will probably always be some), this basic rule (either for ones personal games, or with other people) should be the final bar and balance to be applied, not matter the details or updates to the specific game mechanics.(which is a good,flexible thing and works very well when there are active admins and an interested community)



So super-titans are what most people want ? - maybe, but i am not so sure that really reflects the fundamentals of what many people want to get out of the game. They also seem to be the most common 'started-but-abandoned-for-something-more-achievable' type of ship. Anyway, if this is true, and if super-titans (or spaghetti, or whatever) are problematic (for servers) then it really must in the end be the responsibility of the server community and the admins to deal with it - unless we want to see all kinds of hard limits and arbitrary caps set into the basic game mechanics.

If some online players want SvS (spaghetti vs spaghetti) or WvW (whatever-new vs whatever-new) that is also fine, and probaly damn good fun - it can/should be moderated (as all online play ultimately must/should)

But ask this: Would the majority of people enjoy a using a spaghetti ship in their own 'single-player Starmade' game? (assuming some theoretical future single player content)

 

[Dire Venom]

I guess one simple way of approaching the problem (low density spaced out ships) is simply to penalise low density ships.

Simply just take their dimensions and work out what % of that is blocks, and thus the rest is empty space.
If bellow a certian threshold, apply significant penalties to the ship or whatnot.
This way only Spaghetti ships would be targeted, since no resonable ship would have anywhere near such a low block density.

Its a very simple calculation, and all that would need to be done is calculate the density of a variety of ships (including spaghetti) and come up with a resonable cut-off threshold where the density is simply too low to be considered a balanced ship.

Do you guys think this idea holds any merit:?

 

[Zyrr]

Random penalties for ships that have details like docking arms, wings, what have you. No.

 

[Dire Venom]

Random penalties for ships that have details like docking arms, wings, what have you. No.

How so:? That is not at all what I have suggested.

 

[Zyrr]

"Simply just take their dimensions and work out what % of that is blocks, and thus the rest is empty space."

A ship with large thin wings, long docking arms, etc receive the same penalty as they extend dimensions without adequately increasing block count.

 

[Dire Venom]

"Simply just take their dimensions and work out what % of that is blocks, and thus the rest is empty space."

A ship with large thin wings, long docking arms, etc receive the same penalty as they extend dimensions without adequately increasing block count.

I agree, no one would want that.

However I fail to see how that would be the case. Even with 300m long deployable wings, there is no way such a ship would have a lower or equal density to a Spaghetti. That is precisely why such a system would be tested on a variety of ships to ensure it can only convieably target Spags.