A Solution To Flying Spaghetti Monsters

[Lecic]

So where I am wrong when I say that you don't even consider that Starmade pvp needs serverside rules?

It shouldn't NEED rules in the first place. The game should be balanced so that these types of ships aren't the optimal choice to begin with.

 

[JinM]

It shouldn't NEED rules in the first place. The game should be balanced so that these types of ships aren't the optimal choice to begin with.

Yeah that would be great... I would enjoy that too if it would happen one day.

Right now I just try to work with what's there and with what I expect will be developed into the game. It's not like I don't want that too.

I just can't think of a way where booth, creative block building, and competetive pvp, can come together. I mean I don't think the suggestions and ideas that have been made are more than brainstorming ideas, instead of realistic and feasible new game mechanics.

And I can't blame the devs for not fullfilling this dream, when I don't have a good solution myself.

 

[OfficialCoding]

[doublepost=1512365434,1512365250][/doublepost]You are attempting to make ship creation ridiculously complicated. I bet 68.4 percent of these people including myself don't even know what a darned conduit is. And stabilizers should have no max distance. And if a person likes making "flying spaghetti monsters", what is that to you?

 

[Dire Venom]

[doublepost=1512365434,1512365250][/doublepost]You are attempting to make ship creation ridiculously complicated. I bet 68.4 percent of these people including myself don't even know what a darned conduit is. And stabilizers should have no max distance. And if a person likes making "flying spaghetti monsters", what is that to you?

I think it's more about the power system inherirently favouring some ship designs over others.
Spaghetti is just unbalanced in PvP due to how the game mechanics work, no one cares what else players do in it.

Conduits have been stated and explained as being a notable part of the new power system in pretty much the last 6 months of dev posts. If someone doesnt have a clue about them, they either don't use the forum or don't care for being invloved in the development process.

 

[OfficialCoding]

I think it's more about the power system inherirently favouring some ship designs over others.
Spaghetti is just unbalanced in PvP due to how the game mechanics work, no one cares what else players do in it.

Conduits have been stated and explained as being a notable part of the new power system in pretty much the last 6 months of dev posts. If someone doesnt have a clue about them, they either don't use the forum or don't care for being invloved in the development process.

I know what it IS what I meant is not knowing how to use them. Maybe everyone should make long slim ships or the devs should leave the ability to purchase of power blocks in the game.
[doublepost=1512394266,1512393875][/doublepost]

[doublepost=1512365434,1512365250][/doublepost]You are attempting to make ship creation ridiculously complicated. I bet 68.4 percent of these people including myself don't even know what a darned conduit is. And stabilizers should have no max distance. And if a person likes making "flying spaghetti monsters", what is that to you?

The other issue i have is that this idea destroys the ability to make large ships with lots of weapons. You'd have to make small ships and that would take a lot of fun out of the game.

 

[Lecic]

The other issue i have is that this idea destroys the ability to make large ships with lots of weapons. You'd have to make small ships and that would take a lot of fun out of the game.

Okay.... you still haven't explained why you think this though. I certainly don't see it and I wrote the suggestion.

 

[OfficialCoding]

Okay.... you still haven't explained why you think this though. I certainly don't see it and I wrote the suggestion.

People should be able to build however they like. You are favouring smaller ships. I like larger ships with superweapons. Why can't the two coexist?

 

[Lecic]

People should be able to build however they like. You are favouring smaller ships. I like larger ships with superweapons. Why can't the two coexist?

Okay....

1.) I build mostly medium (25k to 100k) mass ships. I don't like building small or large ships, I think they're both boring and annoying to build for different reasons.
2) You still haven't said how my suggestion favors small ships or removes large ships.

 

[OfficialCoding]

Okay....

1.) I build mostly medium (25k to 100k) mass ships. I don't like building small or large ships, I think they're both boring and annoying to build for different reasons.
2) You still haven't said how my suggestion favors small ships or removes large ships.

Because if stabilizers have a max distance, and weapons need aconduit connection, and conduits have more resistance the larger they are, big ships would become extremely inefficient.

 

[Lecic]

Because if stabilizers have a max distance, and weapons need aconduit connection, and conduits have more resistance the larger they are, big ships would become extremely inefficient.

But maximum distance scales with reactor size, and conduits only have more resistance if they are too thin for the amount of power they are carrying. A properly designed big ship should have the same efficiency as one a tenth its size.

 

[OfficialCoding]

But maximum distance scales with reactor size, and conduits only have more resistance if they are too thin for the amount of power they are carrying. A properly designed big ship should have the same efficiency as one a tenth its size.

Huh. Idk

 

[Benevolent27]

For those not aware, the current meta, in both power 1.0 and power 2.0, is kilometer wide ships made of "spaghetti strands" of power reactors or conduits with the rest of the systems spread widely in small segments, the majority of the ship's volume being composed of vacuum.

Here's my proposal to fix this up.

Step One: Give a maximum range as well as a minimum range to stabilizers so there is a range they must actually be placed in to work. This makes it so the reactor and stabilizer must be a combined unit, making it harder to spread the ship out into spaghetti strands. Compare this to something like the internals and inert protective shell of a real world nuclear reactor.

Step Two: Conduits should follow the resistance rules of real wires. Longer and thinner conduits should have increased resistance, reducing the amount of power that gets to their system. For an average normal ship, which might be roughly 30x30x300 and weigh a few tens of thousands of mass, this isn't a problem as they can just make their conduits a little thicker for their systems on the absolute far end of the ship. For a 30k mass spaghetti ship that might cover a kilometer and a half, however, this is hellish abuse on power efficiency or on their thin profile when they need to make their conduits into 10 meter thick columns to cross such a vast distance.

Step Three: All systems (weapons, shields, thrusters, turret docks and enhancers, etc) should require a conduit connection. This is the final nail in the spaghetti monster's coffin, as it can no longer rely using gulfs of empty space between each individual thruster and shield. Each system group would need its own thick conduit leading to it or it will have to rely on "wireless power" which will have heavy debuffs or efficiency loss, and if they have to lead conduits to all their spread out groups in the first place there's no longer a reason to build spaghetti, because it's become so solid with conduit lines that it would be more efficient and "meta" to just build a normal ship.

So, what do you think? Good way to get rid of this fellow?

I agree and disagree here. Some of the premises I agree with, such as having to connect systems with wires. And some things I am very against, such as stabilizers having artificial requirements on distance.

I'd like to see "realistic" reasons for things. Such as a power reactor being naturally better in certain shapes, such as requiring reinforced walls which are expensive to build and also heavy. Trying to reinforce a giant string reactor would totally tank the efficiency of the ship by making it extremely heavy and expensive to build. Also extra sorts of effects could reinforce this concept, such as reactor systems that aren't reinforced by these special blocks but which are instead just big long strings might turn extremely unstable when used and start exploding everywhere. Or maybe another kind of reactor starts to blow up when they get hit.

Imagine someone doing a left-to-right sweep with a weapon and damaging a bunch of power reactor lines causing them to all blow up. Spreading the blocks around like that would have the opposite effect as it does now, because even though total blocks hit would be less, it would make it easier to hit multiple groupings in one pass. Or maybe the whole reactor shuts down when it's damaged. Same effect. Or maybe it becomes unstable if it doesn't have enough structural integrity on the ship itself.

But I think a big part of what is missing here is to allow more than 1 power reactor. And not just more than 1 power reactor, but also allowing different kinds of power reactors with different strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately though, regardless of however power reactors work, I think the best way to fix spaghetti ships is to implement things like break-off or structural integrity of some kind if breakaway isn't feasible. A spaghetti ship would naturally have very low structural integrity, and even less once a lot of the strings started getting snipped. The balance to be achieved then would be to ensure that the debuff from insanely bad structure integrity would outweigh the block damage savings that occurs from all the spacing.

 

[Valiant70]

All we need, ultimately, is to make a moderate density (between 30% and 70% of internal space) optimal. Making it optimal will draw the PVP meta to that ideal density.

Now how the heck do we do that? Power 2.0 mistakenly favored low density, which players inevitably took to the extreme.

I think this will have to be done by balancing two mechanics against one another rather than relying on the power reactors alone. In fact, the two balancing factors used to position optimal density could be entirely separate from power generation itself.

Any ideas? Oh, wait... Let's go read the OP again and get back on topic.

 

[Valiant70]

Step one, can you not build the reactor in a line/plane and same for the stabilizer and have those 2 groups parallel to each other? That will stay within the sweet spot area, not sure what this would do.

That sounds... weird. We don't think of reactors as being a plane or stick, but some kind of geometric figure like a sphere, cylinder, or torus.

Step two, this seems needlessly complex as each system would require different thickness of conduits. Don't think the game can easily figure out the thickness either although you could estimate/average it out but still, not exactly a predictable result.

Would it not be better to just require a touching line but every conduit in use drains a little power? And severed conduits (by damage) would put penalties of the previously connected system.

The result would be that you could still connect far away systems but have to sacrifice quite a bit of power to get it there, something larger ships would be more OK with considering you have more power to work with. You would want your conduits to be as short as possible to reduce the power loss. You would also want some conduits to be thicker perhaps to reduce the chance of having a total severed conduit by a lucky shot. You could even do a conduit interlaced with armor.

That's something we would have used before when we considered linking chambers/reactors/stabilizers and even systems.

I like that. It eviscerates anything that requires kilometer-long conduits. However, that doesn't do anything about systems that don't need conduits, like shields or thrusters. It might still be enough to stop spaghetti though. If you have to have the whole reactor group close together, and that's what needs to be hit to kill the thing, it might be more efficient to group everything else around as a buffer.

Step tree, I believe this would be too much for most to handle. Some stuff may need to be linked with others, but you can always use group block count vs group dimensions buff system to encourage people to build it denser and not spread out all over the place.

That would most likely get rid of predictability though...perhaps if the most optimal shape has some buffer area where its pretty much linear scaling, and when you go into the "long lines in huge dimension" or "long lines intertwined within a relatively small dimension box", then it would quickly lose efficiency and become "unpredictable" but that's OK, as it would be a situation you normally wouldn't want to be in.

I don't think minimizing conduit length is too much for anyone to handle.

EDIT: There's some "exploit" here too. You can technically use your group stretched out to reduce the amount of conduits needed, at least for systems and not for the stabilizers as they have an efficiency loss over distance and you can simply consider the whole group as the "least efficient block of the group" in that case.

For example, a long shield line could lead towards the reactor and pretty much touch. Then you only need a single conduit to connect them when your shield line is still huge and all over the place.

How about a density or box dimension bonus/penalty for individual chambers?