A Solution To Flying Spaghetti Monsters

[Zoolimar]

Having local bleedthrough to systems would devastate spaghetti

How? They are strong because you can't hit anything on them in the first place. Bleedthrough won't change that much.

Favoring blobs will just make people build doom cubes instead of anything interesting.

No more than current system, maybe even less. Because while blobs themselves would have cuboid / elongated shape their position relative to each other could be any that you want.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

How? They are strong because you can't hit anything on them in the first place. Bleedthrough won't change that much.


No more than current system, maybe even less. Because while blobs themselves would have cuboid / elongated shape their position relative to each other could be any that you want.

Missiles exploding when near, and powerful continuous beams (for sweeping) would make it pretty easy to hit them. If such a beam hitting for half a second directly on a system took out that system, then disabling a spaghetti monster would be trivial. It's mostly a matter of making systems very weak to direct hits and then having the appropriate anti-spaghetti weaponry on some ships to discourage the spaghetti strategy.
Blobs are much like the old power system, which favored doom cubes as well as flying spaghetti monsters. It's just better to put all your blobs into one big blob rather than separated because you have a lower surface area relative to volume (and thus need less armor). Now, that's fine and all except that it leads to stuffing ships with systems rather than leaving some space. Nothing about a blob system favors spacing out stuff unless you go to extremes with blobs on the end of spaghetti, which is bad.

 

[Zoolimar]

Missiles exploding when near, and powerful continuous beams (for sweeping) would make it pretty easy to hit them. If such a beam hitting for half a second directly on a system took out that system, then disabling a spaghetti monster would be trivial.

There are a couple of problems with that. Missiles will need to check continuously for near targets and could still fly through spagetti with not one of their checks hitting anything. And continuous beams have a range problem - by the time you get to sweeping distance you may very well get half your systems dead, because without armour spaghetti will have better acceleration and possibly top speed.

Now, that's fine and all except that it leads to stuffing ships with systems rather than leaving some space.

Except my original proposal included a little spacing and vulnerability for blobs. So that you need to choose between stuffing them all in one place and losing them all if outer hull will be breached or making a more spread out design with multiple internal bulkheads dividing non-critical systems from critical.

 

[Lecic]

Take your system blobification arguments to the proper thread. You can debate that suggestion where it belongs.

Genius! Thank you for creating a visual example, it helps a lot. May I add it and refernce it in the orgional post:?

Of course.

Couldn't i then make a 1-thick conduit that leads from my reactor to the system, and at the system just surround it with conduits or make a blob that only just covers it?

Well, it still knows how "thick" a conduit is on each layer of a plane. And thin conduits bleed off a lot more waste power than thicker ones. So you could do this, but you'd be wasting a ton of power into the void.

Not sure how you inferred that from my post but ok.

Your post seemed to be implying that the distance between the reactor and the stabilizer couldn't be filled with systems.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

To properly address the suggestion: not only do conduits absolutely kill RP builds, they also strongly favor doom cubes and do not solve the problem of stuffing ships full of systems, they only worsen it. I don't think they're worth it just to stop spaghetti monsters. As much as I like having actual block connections instead of this ethereal magic nonsense, it'd just be a huge pain having to run gigantic conduits in between hulls and would make every ship a systems building nightmare. The meta ships would just be like that old Mushroom Fleet ship that was just a grid of cannons with shields and power behind it, plus a tail (which would be filled with stabilizers, obviously).

 

[Lecic]

To properly address the suggestion: not only do conduits absolutely kill RP builds, they also strongly favor doom cubes and do not solve the problem of stuffing ships full of systems, they only worsen it.

First and foremost, "stuffing ships full of systems" is not a problem. At all. I have yet to see someone give a single good reason why this is a bad thing. Interiors is not a reason, because a ship with interiors that has the same mass (NOT DIMENSIONS) as a ship that doesn't have interiors will be almost 100% comparable, to the point where it would entirely be down to pilot skill and luck with AI rather than actual statistic differences. If you want a reason to have "RP builds" (why do system even matter if you're just RPing, though?) then they should add NPC crew that require an interior.

Secondly, how in the fuck does my suggestion favor doom cubes? Doom cubes are weak because of how compact they are and how poorly they deal with damage due to their shape and large, flat sides. Doom cubes have been weak ever since HP and armor was reworked. How does my suggestion favor them?

I like having actual block connections instead of this ethereal magic nonsense, it'd just be a huge pain having to run gigantic conduits in between hulls and would make every ship a systems building nightmare

"I like having actual block connections, but I don't like or want actual block connections."

K.

I don't think it's really a "nightmare" to make a line of conduits between your systems. That's pretty easy to do.

The meta ships would just be like that old Mushroom Fleet ship that was just a grid of cannons with shields and power behind it, plus a tail (which would be filled with stabilizers, obviously).

Sorry, what?

Mushroom fleet Migraine Trigger style ships are easily one of the worst kinds of vessel. Their weapons are a doom cube (incredibly weak shape as explained earlier) located at the FRONT of vessel, where they will quickly take huge amounts of damage and annihilate the damage and power efficiency of said weapons. They don't have the turning speed advantage of cubes either. And why do you think my suggestion wants to further extend stabilizer range? I want it cut down massively.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Stuffing ships full of systems is a problem because it means a given size of ship will have more blocks, more damage, etc. that lead to lag and designing any ship becomes mostly about stuffing in the required blocks rather than planning out how the systems will work and how the ship will look. A lot of the problem with StarMade ship building has been that you just reserve big areas to stuff full of things, and that's why the new power system was tried. Unfortunately, the new power system didn't meet its goals, but they are good goals.

Conduits favors doom cubes because wide conduits would need to be as short as possible to fit the maximum amount of weapons.
The goal of meta ships is to maximize outgoing damage and minimize incoming damage. The spaghetti meta is all about focusing on the latter half because it doesn't affect the former half. Conduits would mess with the latter half and make it restrictive, preventing Spaghetti, but instead people would focus the former half and recreate doom cubes.
And yes, I do like them in concept, but a game with meter cubes makes connections take up too much space, especially if you insist on multi-block-wide ones.

Ultimately, required interiors will have to happen with a crew of some kind, but until then, systems should at least favor actually having armor instead of protruding systems. If conduits don't make doom cubes, they'll likely make instead some kind of lesser spaghetti (ravioli, perhaps?) that'll just be systems and the required conduits, and you may say that "well, you can shoot out their conduits!", but that'd just be like how the existing conduits for chambers can be shot out and still remember existing in order to not resemble and promote a system like breakaway.

In short, conduits to connect systems is a rather blunt way to try to beat away from spaghetti ships, it might work a little bit, but it won't solve the host of other problems tied into things and it'll create some new ones.

 

[apelsinsaft]

First and foremost, "stuffing ships full of systems" is not a problem. At all. I have yet to see someone give a single good reason why this is a bad thing.

Im going to list down the reasons why filling ships to the brim with systems is bad design.

• Its too many blocks. On the scale of some of the bigger ships, its way way too many blocks. And on the smaller scales, you're often forced to leave some systems exposed or it would take too much space/mass. On that note, its a god damn eyesore.
• It makes it hard to find specific blobs of systems to make revisions.
• It turns new people off to find out that they need to fill most of the ship for it to be viable, when they often struggle to even understand how the systems work in the first place.
• It heavily favors people who build systems first, as opposed to interiors first or hull first (both in terms of time spent building ship and actual viability of ship), something that not always leads to less aesthetic designs...
• Actual ships aren't "stuffed to the brim with systems". Even in the most utilitarian designs, there's maintenance corridors, crew quarters, various useful areas and various not so useful areas. This applies to both today's naval vessels and a lot of ships i can think of from sci fi. You have your reactor and your propulsion as the main "big systems", but the rest is mostly interior.

I give you the last point for free, because i can't be arsed to argue about the importance of aesthetics and immersion and "calling something your own" and what not. Not everyone wants to invent their own rules to appeal to some RP sensibility, i get that much. But eventually, the crew update is gonna come, and if we're still working with the same "fill em up" rules then, i fear crew quarters are going to be a real let down in terms of immersion. See Terraria commie blocks to see what i mean.

 

[kulbolen]

My car with a little 1.8 litre engine is more efficient than your 5 litre V8, but yours will outperform mine every time...

youre out of context. he was talking specifically about those setups and theorycrafting vs actual performance being deceptive. On paper a stock corvette will beat a stock jetta just as it would on the track.

Still, lets look at why people build ships with systems first: It's because they don't want to have to rework their systems repeatedly within a set hull.

i build systems first, and this is not why...

Here is a video

oh hey thats my video, and i built that ship.

Favoring blobs will just make people build doom cubes instead of anything interesting.

people who dont care about aesthetic will always build uninteresting crap (im one of them, i know) but doomcubes are FAR preferable as the goto uninteresting meta ship, because theyre not overpowered or mechanicly abusive compared to other options...

Stuffing ships full of systems is a problem because it means a given size of ship will have more blocks, more damage, etc. that lead to lag and designing any ship becomes mostly about stuffing in the required blocks rather than planning out how the systems will work and how the ship will look.

incentivize empty space with bonuses or crew benefits, or simply get over this idea that a ship with a larger interior will be "weaker" for its dimensions (duh?)... mass is a more relevant objective statistic than dimensions in game, and functional interiors take almost no mass. not to mention, the way the games aoe mechanics work, spaced armor is incredibly useful, and a nearly 0 mass functional interior will go in the spaced armor void anyway if planned well.

all this boils down to is the mentality of the player. do you build for form or function? a ship where form follows function can still look good, but will outperform a ship where function follows form.

It heavily favors people who build systems first, as opposed to interiors first or hull first (both in terms of time spent building ship and actual viability of ship), something that not always leads to less aesthetic designs...

no system will ever favor people who build for aesthetics over function. any system that tries will just water itself down to nothing.

as far as noodle ships go, theres a lot of easy ways to fix that problem. make reactors have very small individual output but fairly large bonus when all in one group, remove the bonuses as they add more groups. the group itself can be shaped however you want, from a solid chunk in the ship to strung out around the ship, but a strung out bit will lose its bonuses super fast when shot since its only 1 thick and gets severed, quickly making the ship garbage. dont need stabilizers or forced distances or anything, just a compromise between density and reliability under fire. if you wanted to further penalize noodles you could keep stabilizers in game but have them encase the reactor group to get the bonus instead, and if not encased bonus dips, ta da forced several blocks of thickness, and less mass efficiency on noodles, no stupid forced dims.

as far as power goes, the new system sucks. forcing longer dims to try to make people have open space is dumb. just make a non dim based reactor mechanic that doesnt force any of that crap, and let people place them how they want. remove the bonuses for dims, remove the penalties for dims, ignore dims altogether and stop pushing them on people. if you want to have open space, incentivize bonuses for it like crew, and stop trying to "make" things easier on people. (a qouted reason for forcing open space was to make refitting easier for people later on... ... ...)
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Actual ships aren't "stuffed to the brim with systems". Even in the most utilitarian designs, there's maintenance corridors, crew quarters, various useful areas and various not so useful areas. This applies to both today's naval vessels and a lot of ships i can think of from sci fi. You have your reactor and your propulsion as the main "big systems", but the rest is mostly interior.

except a vast majority of this "interior space" is devoted to the ships systems, and not luxury shit. fire control, radars, weapons and ammo control, lockers, storage, etc. in a simplified system like starmades, most of this would just get chalked up to "system blocks" unless the game gets a LOT more complex and starts asking for things like ammo and fuel and maintenance and shit tons of crew to work all the stuff.

Its too many blocks. On the scale of some of the bigger ships, its way way too many blocks. And on the smaller scales, you're often forced to leave some systems exposed or it would take too much space/mass. On that note, its a god damn eyesore.

this one i completely agree with, and i cant really think of a good way to fix it other than to just scale the entire game down. but i also think its not necessarily the most important thing to compromise on compared to the other topics brought up.

 

[Magrim]

Interiors is not a reason, because a ship with interiors that has the same mass (NOT DIMENSIONS) as a ship that doesn't have interiors will be almost 100% comparable,

This is absolute veritas people. Interiors have virtually no impact on performance block for block, mass for mass. Comparing ships based on dimensions is flawed. The divide between meta ships and rp ships comes down to how they are constructed.

Also trying to force interiors through the power system shows ignorance of the underlying issues. It could be done, I suppose, but not without heavy restrictions that will never make sense.

 

[Madman198237]

I bring up, AGAIN, the fact that having interior space right now is a PROBLEM. It causes LAG. I believe the thing we need is called 'occlusion culling' (Though I may be wrong) because more faces of blocks get rendered without it. OC is just the de-rendering of non-exposed faces.

I, actually, agree with Lecic----why do we not want ships filled with systems to reduce those empty spaces (And thus reduce lag)? What benefit is there to forcing people to leave open space?

If it's because you want people to build interiors, take another look at the game you're playing and ask yourself, 'Does forcing a design choice on somebody make sense in a spaceship-building sandbox?'


As for the TOPIC OF THIS THREAD, killing spaghetti ships, the best way would probably be to allow some sort of damage-bleeds-through-shields mechanic, where shields are 10x stronger but let 1% of damage per projectile 'through' them to hit the blocks beneath (As though a much smaller projectile actually hit the spot that was hit) and to make systems more vulnerable...though I'm not sure on the viability of that last bit. You could also just make shields work different, in that if the block that's hit is a systems block the shields only stop 50% of the damage, or something like that. Armor would, of course, not receive any damage.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I bring up, AGAIN, the fact that having interior space right now is a PROBLEM. It causes LAG. I believe the thing we need is called 'occlusion culling' (Though I may be wrong) because more faces of blocks get rendered without it. OC is just the de-rendering of non-exposed faces.

I, actually, agree with Lecic----why do we not want ships filled with systems to reduce those empty spaces (And thus reduce lag)? What benefit is there to forcing people to leave open space?

If it's because you want people to build interiors, take another look at the game you're playing and ask yourself, 'Does forcing a design choice on somebody make sense in a spaceship-building sandbox?'


As for the TOPIC OF THIS THREAD, killing spaghetti ships, the best way would probably be to allow some sort of damage-bleeds-through-shields mechanic, where shields are 10x stronger but let 1% of damage per projectile 'through' them to hit the blocks beneath (As though a much smaller projectile actually hit the spot that was hit) and to make systems more vulnerable...though I'm not sure on the viability of that last bit. You could also just make shields work different, in that if the block that's hit is a systems block the shields only stop 50% of the damage, or something like that. Armor would, of course, not receive any damage.

That's client lag, not server lag. Both are a problem, but I think that server lag is a bigger one right now and reducing the amount of blocks is thus more important than having ships be mostly solid chunks with no gaps.
I don't think we need to force actual interiors (at least not without crew). The point against cramming is mainly that players will build given ship shells and players should not have to shove mindless crap into every corner of those shells to make them work. There should be a maximum and somewhat low amount of systems you'll want to fit into a given shell, and the ideal meta build should just be an inner shell around systems and then an outer shell (or multiple layers of shells). Unfortunately, the HP system punished having shells or armor of any kind.
Relatedly, I think stabilizers would be less hated if armor blocks had the same effect, since there'd be less mindless crap to shove in to most existing designs.

I think bleedthrough punishing exposed systems needs to be absolutely massive when it directly hits a system block to stop spaghetti. If it just takes out the one block or such, then spaghetti is still viable (since it operates on only being hit every so often to begin with). Hitting someone's reactor core blocks directly should pretty much cripple them, same for engines and such.
Of course, damage bleedthrough alone could work if we had breakaway, but I'm not holding my breath on that little abandoned(?) feature.

 

[Lecic]

Stuffing ships full of systems is a problem because it means a given size of ship will have more blocks, more damage, etc.

A ship with fewer blocks isn't as strong with one with more blocks? Wow!

This is literally only a problem if you are incapable of understanding that mass is what matters for balance, not dimensions.

that lead to lag and designing any ship becomes mostly about stuffing in the required blocks rather than planning out how the systems will work and how the ship will look.

Uh, no. Just no. Interiors cause substantially MORE lag than "stuffed systems," because the game has to render all exposed faces, even if the player can't actually see them because they're inside of a ship. Anyone who's ever built a large titan call tell you this, as their FPS increases as they fill more and more of the ship with a solid medium instead of the outside of the interior hallways and the inside of the hull being what's loaded.
Furthermore, your statement that "block stuffing" means "systems aren't planned" and "how the ship looks" aren't taken into effect are clear signs you are a rookie engineer, if you ever are one at all. Any experienced systems engineer will tell you that quality systems are planned extensively before they're inserted into a vessel. The only block that is used as "filler" when all the other systems have been installed are usually shields, or basic hull, depending on the ship. Everything else is planned extensively.
As for those that build systems first, they usually still have a rough scaffold for how the ship will look when it's done, which they edit as they need to while placing systems. I know this is how FlyingDebris builds his ships, which I think look quite good, contrary to your uninformed opinion.

Conduits favors doom cubes because wide conduits would need to be as short as possible to fit the maximum amount of weapons.

Sure, I can see this. That's a good point, it does give cubes a bit of an advantage, as they can have shorter overall conduit length. However, cubes still suffer heavily from extremely poor damage mitigation and are inherently more difficult, expensive, and less effective to armor properly.

And yes, I do like them in concept, but a game with meter cubes makes connections take up too much space, especially if you insist on multi-block-wide ones.

A small ship needs none or very few conduits to power all of its systems. A medium ship only needs thin conduits to successfully power all of its systems. A large ship needs thicker conduits, but it also has much more internal space and can fit those conduits. A giant ship needs thicker still conduits, but it also has even more internal space, so it is still not a problem.

It's called scaling. It fixes this problem and is already in the suggestion.

Ultimately, required interiors will have to happen with a crew of some kind, but until then, systems should at least favor actually having armor instead of protruding systems.

Uh, how about you do that by making armor useful, not through some bizarre fashion that wouldn't even work properly? How does the current shitty power 2.0 implementation "require interiors" and "prevent protruding systems" in any way? If anything it encourages loose systems through spaghetti meta.

Its too many blocks. On the scale of some of the bigger ships, its way way too many blocks. And on the smaller scales, you're often forced to leave some systems exposed or it would take too much space/mass. On that note, its a god damn eyesore.

This is just blatantly wrong. Advanced build mode and fill tool make the "too many blocks!" argument completely worthless. And smaller ships? On "small ships" that are actually still big enough to be useful, around the 1k mass range usually, you should never need to leave systems exposed. Even on fighter scale drones, slabs exist, and basic hull weighs next to nothing.

It makes it hard to find specific blobs of systems to make revisions.

Not the game's fault if people do not design their ships with revisions in mind. I haven't had a problem redesigning a ship since 2015, because I compartmentalize my systems properly.

99% of the "problems" in this game come from people not using the tools they are given. Build your ships properly. Stop whining.

It turns new people off to find out that they need to fill most of the ship for it to be viable, when they often struggle to even understand how the systems work in the first place.

New players are not building ships that require large amounts of blocks to fill them. Null point.

Actual ships aren't "stuffed to the brim with systems". Even in the most utilitarian designs, there's maintenance corridors, crew quarters, various useful areas and various not so useful areas. This applies to both today's naval vessels and a lot of ships i can think of from sci fi. You have your reactor and your propulsion as the main "big systems", but the rest is mostly interior.

Well, I've already made it pretty clear I think interiors should be integrated through crew, not half assedly through a garbage reactor mechanic, so I'm not sure why you put this point here. I don't have a problem with interior. I do have a problem with forcing useless interior because morons can't understand that dimensions are not the proper way to balance the game.

It heavily favors people who build systems first, as opposed to interiors first or hull first (both in terms of time spent building ship and actual viability of ship), something that not always leads to less aesthetic designs...

Uh, what? This sounds like a personal problem. Nothing in the balance favors people who build systems first. Have you considered that the deficit in performance between people who design around systems and the people who design around aesthetics is not an actual balance problem but that the people who design around aesthetics are paying much less attention to ensuring they have quality systems?

I don't think we need to force actual interiors (at least not without crew). The point against cramming is mainly that players will build given ship shells and players should not have to shove mindless crap into every corner of those shells to make them work. There should be a maximum and somewhat low amount of systems you'll want to fit into a given shell, and the ideal meta build should just be an inner shell around systems and then an outer shell (or multiple layers of shells).

"I don't think we need to force interiors, we just need to force people to have giant amounts of empty interior space in their shells."

Wow, you've really convinced me.

If you force a "low amount of systems into a given size shell," we will just build without the shells. Why would we inflate our dimensions and make ourselves a bigger target when we could strip that off and go small?

Let me make this clear, because RPers need to understand this.

YOU DO NOT BALANCE OFF OF DIMENSIONS. YOU BALANCE OFF OF MASS.

Thank you.

Unfortunately, the HP system punished having shells or armor of any kind.

This is just blatantly false. The HP system turned armor from "worthless" to "functional if underpowered."

 

[Magrim]

just make a non dim based reactor mechanic that doesnt force any of that crap, and let people place them how they want.

Just want you to know, I completly agree with this point. The underlying issue with power has always been determining output based on dimensions. The problem with changing it is that there's not a lot of other things we can calculate output from. Mass or block count come to mind but how do you figure that out early in the build? Dimensions are much easier to ascertain and usually don't change much after it's been established.

I made a suggestion specifically to eliminate that underlying issue but because it was based on block count it didn't get much traction. Even so, I still believe the proper way to fix power is to move away from dim boxes, instead of treating the symptoms of the cause through more and more restrictions.

 

[Jojomo]

youre out of context. he was talking specifically about those setups and theorycrafting vs actual performance being deceptive. On paper a stock corvette will beat a stock jetta just as it would on the track.

The point is that efficiency isn't performance.

And if you were to take a perfectly efficient ship, say for example it has an xyz perfect cube power system of 100 length on each axis, and then copy a mirror image of the power system onto itself so that the power system is now a wireframe cube (scale it down slightly if you want to have the same undamaged power output as the original if you like, for the sake of the argument).
Efficiency will have gone down (more blocks for same output), but you could argue that the power system is now more robust and resilient to damage for a virtually insignificant increase in ship weight/volume, and that the ship is therefore "better".
(I don't guarantee that it is in this case, I just mean that this is an example of the concept of sacrificing efficiency for performance, which is possible in SM just like it is in RL).

The same theory holds in power 2.0: for example if you take a ship with perfect (power, in this case) efficiency, covered in a single layer of AA (not dumbbell shaped) then compare it to a ship that is otherwise identical except that you move the stabilisers closer to the reactor and add more stabilisers to ensure the same power output, and then cover this one with a single layer off AA. The second, inefficient, ship will have smaller dimensions (length) that the efficient ship, and depending on geometry can also have less mass than the efficient ship thanks to the fact that the amount of AA required to cover it all is less and more than offsets the added stabiliser mass. So you can argue that the inefficient ship is "better" than the efficient ship.

Or if you like another way to think about this concept is: if you make a ship of any significant size it's almost certain to not be absolutely perfectly efficient, so I could take a copy and find one tiny thing to make more efficient, but also at the same time rearrange things to make the ship significantly worse in a fight (say put the reactor outside the armour on the nose of the ship). The result would be a (slightly) more efficient ship that is "worse" than your original.

Efficiency isn't performance.

 

[apelsinsaft]

Not the game's fault if people do not design their ships with revisions in mind. I haven't had a problem redesigning a ship since 2015, because I compartmentalize my systems properly.

Do you think any of my points refer to the people who have stuck around the game for 4 years? Of course you build your ship with revisions in mind. The game has been forcing you to for years, because finding blobs of systems is hard otherwise.

This is just blatantly wrong. Advanced build mode and fill tool make the "too many blocks!" argument completely worthless

If advanced build mode also featured click-and-drag area block placement like Space Engineers, i'd agree with you. A lot of the basic features in adv build are kind of clunky.

YOU DO NOT BALANCE OFF OF DIMENSIONS. YOU BALANCE OFF OF MASS.

A ships silhouette (talking about dimensions could mean a number of things, lets clearly define dimensions as XYZ size and silhouette as average cross section) determines how easy the ship is to hit with weapons fire. It's just as valid of a baseline for power output as mass is, where mass determines how agile your ship is/how expensive it is. If you went for a true "potential combat viability" balance, you'd want to base the power output off both. The issue however with balancing of mass is, the mass changes for every block placed and requires revision if the player doesn't have X years of experience with building ships. Balancing of silhouette doesn't. Other than the potential issue of abusing hollow hulls to make superagile ships (this could be amended somewhat by basing agility off a combination of dimensions/silhouette and mass), do you have anything particular against balancing with silhouette?

 

[FlyingDebris]

Dimensions/silhouette/length is an absolutely horrible way to determine a ship's anything. Go by block count or mass, those are the only things that won't limit designs or force a certain type of ship.

 

[apelsinsaft]

Dimensions/silhouette/length is an absolutely horrible way to determine a ship's anything. Go by block count or mass, those are the only things that won't limit designs or force a certain type of ship.

do you have anything particular against balancing with silhouette?

Provide arguments please. Why is it better to go by block count or mass?

Keep in mind i was arguing specifically in favor of balancing by silhouette. Not dimensions.

 

[Asvarduil]

That is offensive.

No, calling said players "Munchkins" might questionably be offensive, but I think Edymnion has the right of it in the end. Instead of promoting this behavior - something that has gone on for a long time, to the detriment of the game - having a power system that disincentivizes these 'hardcore' builds would go a long way towards making the game more fun in general.

 

[Lecic]

where mass determines ..... how expensive it is

Yes, exactly. You are seeing my point. Thank you. How much a ship costs and its ratio of effectiveness:cost is literally the best way to balance the game. You cannot find a better way to balance that works on a personal, tactical, and strategic level than how much everything costs a player or faction to make.

The issue however with balancing of mass is, the mass changes for every block placed and requires revision if the player doesn't have X years of experience with building ships. Balancing of silhouette doesn't.

Yes, it does. I can argue that silhouette can change with every block and that your system would require revision of ships if the player doesn't have X years of experience.
Every "systems first" ship will generally have the builder pre-planning an end mass, which makes mass based balancing work better for them, and "hull first" ships can have their end mass found out extremely fast and easy by using the fill tool to flood a ship with an example system and just writing that down somewhere to keep in mind. Both kinds of players can easily work within the confines of mass based balancing.
Meanwhile, in silhouette balancing, actual balance (RESOURCE COST) is thrown to the wind in favor of feels good shit that only helps RP players, and even then, it tends to fuck them over, because RP builders make tons of changes to the dimensions of their ships as they work. Systems first builders? You're fucked. Hull first builders? Only somewhat fucked, as long as you make no dimensional changes once you finish that hull. Oh, you wanted to shorten or lengthen you ship a little? Guess you're fucked too, buddy!

Balancing off dimensions is trash. It is a "feel good" solution to people who just can't comprehend why their epic RP ship, 500 meters long, which is 90% open space so it only weighs 25k mass, got smashed by that 250 meter long ship that is mostly solid and weighs 40k. It's simply impossible, they had bigger dimensions! How could they lose!? It is how we got spaghetti in the first place, because balance needs to be off the most important thing, what REALLY matters in a game, especially one that goes into strategic elements like clashing interstellar factions- RESOURCE COST.