Add a "Ready" state to reactor chambers

[Nosajimiki]

One of the biggest complaints with chambers so far is that there is no hot swapping them in combat. This is a major impetus on combat tactics and depth of gameplay.

To put things in perspective. Old power had passives, jammers, inhibitors, etc. that you could just turn on and off at will in battle, but you never ran them all at once. Each of these systems had drawbacks to leaving active that gave a lot of reasons to toggle them as a battle ebbed and flowed. This encouraged advanced battle tactics and made a person's piloting skills just as important as the tech they were flying. Jammers draw a lot of power which limited your firepower. Inhibitors locked down your own jump drives as well as the enemy. Shield/armor passives had to be toggled at just the right times to prevent them from working against you as shields broke or came back online. Scanners, had to be synchronized with your alpha strike to optimise damage with accuracy.

Now you go in with what you have on and that is it because swapping reactors is suicide. Now, combat (if it worked at all) is just two ships pointing and shooting.

Obviously, the new system is designed to push specialization; so, you dont want ppl playing around with everything at their fingertips but the amount of fudging server admins are having to do to default values to make ship even sort of flyable kills that because they are either setting recharge times supper low so ppl can hotswap whatever they need anyway without penalty, or they are making things cost so few Reactor Points that a lot of the specialization disappears.

I think a better idea would be to be able to have 3 states on chambers instead of two. (Active, Ready, and Offline). Active and Offline could work just like current chambers, but Ready would disable a chamber's effect and remove it's cost from your Reactor Points, but still hold a charge and cost power upkeep. Then you allow the player to bind chambers to their hotbar; so, they can left click to toggle the Ready state or right click to toggle the Offline state.

This way, you can set a ship up with a more diverse selection of chambers, but it would cost extra power upkeep to have everything at the ready, and you could not run more at once than you have RP. Instead of shutting down tactical options, this would open new ones up like choosing between setting jump chambers to ready or offline when going into battle based on whether you want to free up more power, or keep them warmed up for if you need to run away.

 

[Benevolent27]

One of the biggest complaints with chambers so far is that there is no hot swapping them in combat. This is a major impetus on combat tactics and depth of gameplay.

To put things in perspective. Old power had passives, jammers, inhibitors, etc. that you could just turn on and off at will in battle, but you never ran them all at once. Each of these systems had drawbacks to leaving active that gave a lot of reasons to toggle them as a battle ebbed and flowed. This encouraged advanced battle tactics and made a person's piloting skills just as important as the tech they were flying. Jammers draw a lot of power which limited your firepower. Inhibitors locked down your own jump drives as well as the enemy. Shield/armor passives had to be toggled at just the right times to prevent them from working against you as shields broke or came back online. Scanners, had to be synchronized with your alpha strike to optimise damage with accuracy.

Now you go in with what you have on and that is it because swapping reactors is suicide. Now, combat (if it worked at all) is just two ships pointing and shooting.

Obviously, the new system is designed to push specialization; so, you dont want ppl playing around with everything at their fingertips but the amount of fudging server admins are having to do to default values to make ship even sort of flyable kills that because they are either setting recharge times supper low so ppl can hotswap whatever they need anyway without penalty, or they are making things cost so few Reactor Points that a lot of the specialization disappears.

I think a better idea would be to be able to have 3 states on chambers instead of two. (Active, Ready, and Offline). Active and Offline could work just like current chambers, but Ready would disable a chamber's effect and remove it's cost from your Reactor Points, but still hold a charge and cost power upkeep. Then you allow the player to bind chambers to their hotbar; so, they can left click to toggle the Ready state or right click to toggle the Offline state.

This way, you can set a ship up with a more diverse selection of chambers, but it would cost extra power upkeep to have everything at the ready, and you could not run more at once than you have RP. Instead of shutting down tactical options, this would open new ones up like choosing between setting jump chambers to ready or offline when going into battle based on whether you want to free up more power, or keep them warmed up for if you need to run away.

I agree with the gist of what you are saying, but I think there there already is a "ready" state in-game. This is when the chamber is either full or the recharge is paused by left-clicking on it. What state does not exist is "off", where chambers deplete over time. But to address this, I think we need to look at the bigger picture of how Schine is attempting to balance specialization.

Right now here is how things are attempting to be balanced:
To prevent a ship from being overpowered, you can only have a certain number of chambers active to provide bonuses because you should not exceed 100% on your tech points. Otherwise, the chambers will become disabled. The effects in the chamber system are more pronounced than the effects of systems 1.0. Ships can now be more specialized in certain areas than before. However, right now the only way to remove the chamber from the tech point tree is to revert the chamber. But this is messy, because then you have this somewhat heavy, useless addition to your ship and trying to reset it will require you to turn off other chambers, to then clear up enough tech points to reinstate it. This is obviously not anything you want to be doing during combat, nor is it possible once your chamber starts taking damage anyhow. This system also limits the active decisions a player can make during combat with their ship, like you said, so that it now becomes more of a point and click adventure.

So, my idea here is pretty similar to what you were saying. It does not throw the concept of tech points out the window, but instead allows people to configure more chambers, adding in an extra off state. The power usage of the chambers would need to be balanced so that the ship would simply not function with all of the effects online and charging.

So right now, the left mouse button is used to temporarily stop a chamber from charging and the right mouse button is to use the ability. So a second "off" state would be needed for abilities. The first "off" state would simply stop charging and keep it where it was. This is the same as it is now, there is a "top-off" cost to hold it where it is in this "pause" state. This is also the same energy cost as if it were already fully charged. The second state, which needs to be added, would be an actual "off" state, where the system depletes over time till it is empty and then must be fully charged again before it can be used when it is brought back online. When in this state, it would have 0 upkeep. Of course then there would be the third state, which is "on", where it will recharge, use more power while recharging (compared to just being topped off), and then lower back down to upkeep energy cost when full.

A second thing would also need to be done. There would need to be abilities that are attached to these chambers, even for passives, and these would then be tied to the hotbar. (Example Jump-Drive multi-charge). When in the off state, the effect is not present. When in the "pause" state, the effect is not present. When in the ON state, the effect is only applied to the ship IF it is charged up.

This would essentially bring back having more options available on ships and being able to configure your power usage from the hotbar. The key here would be to ensure enough chamber abilities could be configured within the tech point system, but not to such a degree that all abilities can be maxed out at once. This is to retain the build specialization as intended in the chamber system's tech points, to allow deeper specialization options. So perhaps a ship might look like this:

At 100% of abilities (which are active-abilities, NOT passives), none can be fully leveled or it would go over the tech point limit.
At 75% of active abilities available, only 1 can be fully leveled.
At 50% of active abilities, 2 can be leveled to max.

Now, at all of these degrees of specialization, if the person were to try turning all active effects on, the person would not be able to power them all. Only half will actually stay on at any given time. HOWEVER, the player could sacrifice 25% of their abilities FOR the ability to have them all on by having a reactor efficiency chamber maxed out.

So, for example let's say a person has 4 abilities. At any given time, they can only keep 2 powered and still fire weapons. They could choose to nix one, add a reactor efficiency chamber and 100% level it so that they have only 3 abilities. However, they now have enough power to keep all 3 abilities on at the same time and still fire a "decent" weapons array. If they were to revert their power reactor efficiency chamber (just for testing purposes, since what would be the point of doing that?), then they'd go back to only be able to have 2 charging and still be able to fire weapons.

It's this kind of scaling that is missing from the game right now. It's far too restrictive on giving players options during combat.

Here is an example of how this might play out:
A player has radarjam, fast jump drives with distance and multi-charge, scan, power reactor boost, thruster evade burst, and the ability to overcharge their thrusters (increase their max speed). In order to use 2 or 3 of the abilities and still have some power regen left over, the player turns the others off (so they those all sit at 0% effect). So maybe the player just has radarjam, the good jump drive enabled, and overdriven thrusters. They travel to ambush an enemy. When they get close to the target sector, they turn off the jump drive boost and overdrive, and enable the thruster evade burst, scan, and power reactor boost. They charge them all up before jumping into combat. During combat, they are running a bit power hungry shooting their weapons, so they have to use the power reactor boost when needed, such as after performing a scan. Perhaps the enemy has a good scan specialization, which is defeating their less specialized radarjam, so they turn off jam so they can fire weapons more.

Now they are winning the battle! Yay! BUT WAIT, ONE OF THE ENEMY ALLIES CAME TO ASSIST! The person is now outmatched! They gotta get outta dodge! So they turn off scan, the power reactor boost, and turn on evade, the better jump drive, and radarjam. They keep charging up evade and using it as they are able to, to try to escape fire while they wait for the better jump drive to come online and to hopefully not be overpowered by an enemy inhibitor. The better jump drive ability FINALLY charges up and kicks in, so the jump drive starts charging faster. They player is evading left and right, getting hit by some flack here and there, but finally the jump drive is fully charged! The enemy went into interdictor mode to try and stop him or her from leaving the area, but was unsuccessful. One of the things the player did when making their ship was sacrifice a bit on their scanner, putting the extra tech points into the jump drive instead, so it was just powerful enough to overcome the enemy interdictor. The player then jumps away and thanks the heavens for their life.

Right now the same battle would probably be a lot less interesting, right?

 

[Nosajimiki]

I actually quite like this idea in concept; however, it may amplify the big problem that already exists which is that most chambers are not worth the cost. As it stands, there are a lot of really minor effects bound to chambers that add a ton of mass to a ship to incorporate, if they were also power hungry, then most chambers would simply not be as valuable as replacing their mass with more basic systems like bigger reactors and more guns/shields/etc.

For this to be viable to gameplay, I feel they would need to remove Reactor Points altogether, and reballence how much power reactors put out. If chambers are power hungry, then they will naturally take up a % of your reactor to use. The result would be that support/specialty ships could naturally "overclock" their reactors by not leaving a reserve of power for weapons, shields, and maneuvering (which is something that would help bring back viable scouting ships like people have been asking for without introducing OP ambush ships, b/c weighing down a warship with too many military passives would not leave any power left for shooting.
[doublepost=1519679560,1519677532][/doublepost]ALSO: RC scales should probably also be wrapped back into minimum chamber size relative to the reactor; so, instead of a chamber being 20% RP, it might need to be 20% of the size of your reactor or something like that. This would also make leveled based chambers more interesting since you could build a lvl 3 chamber that might need to be 3000 blocks, but if it takes a hit it could depreciate to a lvl 2 chamber instead of just failing out right.

This would also make balancing efficiency based chambers more logical since they reduce power, not consume it, so, something like a lvl-3 jumpdrive recharge power efficiency chamber may not consume power like your other jump drive chambers, but it might be 3 times as massive meaning that the tradeoff for that system becomes weight and cost instead of more power.

Another thing on a related note is that the current power generation chamber adds 50% mass to your reactor, but only 10% output... that makes no sense. I think there should be no general passive power booster, but instead add more specialized efficiency chambers that each have the potential to offset more than their investment when applied to a system that the ship has a lot of.

Another possible replacement for power boosting would be a power capacitor: something that draws power to charge and maintain, but when activated gives you a strong boost of power over time; so, you might need like 5 min to charge it, but when active, it will give you a 100% bonus to power output for 1 min which could be used for a number of strategies including running with extra active chambers.

 

[Benevolent27]

I actually quite like this idea in concept; however, it may amplify the big problem that already exists which is that most chambers are not worth the cost. As it stands, there are a lot of really minor effects bound to chambers that add a ton of mass to a ship to incorporate, if they were also power hungry, then most chambers would simply not be as valuable as replacing their mass with more basic systems like bigger reactors and more guns/shields/etc.

For this to be viable to gameplay, I feel they would need to remove Reactor Points altogether, and reballence how much power reactors put out. If chambers are power hungry, then they will naturally take up a % of your reactor to use. The result would be that support/specialty ships could naturally "overclock" their reactors by not leaving a reserve of power for weapons, shields, and maneuvering (which is something that would help bring back viable scouting ships like people have been asking for without introducing OP ambush ships, b/c weighing down a warship with too many military passives would not leave any power left for shooting.
[doublepost=1519679560,1519677532][/doublepost]ALSO: RC scales should probably also be wrapped back into minimum chamber size relative to the reactor; so, instead of a chamber being 20% RP, it might need to be 20% of the size of your reactor or something like that. This would also make leveled based chambers more interesting since you could build a lvl 3 chamber that might need to be 3000 blocks, but if it takes a hit it could depreciate to a lvl 2 chamber instead of just failing out right.

This would also make balancing efficiency based chambers more logical since they reduce power, not consume it, so, something like a lvl-3 jumpdrive recharge power efficiency chamber may not consume power like your other jump drive chambers, but it might be 3 times as massive meaning that the tradeoff for that system becomes weight and cost instead of more power.

Another thing on a related note is that the current power generation chamber adds 50% mass to your reactor, but only 10% output... that makes no sense. I think there should be no general passive power booster, but instead add more specialized efficiency chambers that each have the potential to offset more than their investment when applied to a system that the ship has a lot of.

Another possible replacement for power boosting would be a power capacitor: something that draws power to charge and maintain, but when activated gives you a strong boost of power over time; so, you might need like 5 min to charge it, but when active, it will give you a 100% bonus to power output for 1 min which could be used for a number of strategies including running with extra active chambers.

I'm not saying these active effects would necessarily be "power hungry" exactly, but rather would provide a benefit that scales with their power usage. Specs like chamber weight would need to be considered, of course. Tech points would be used more like a level limiter. For example, if you have 3 chambers that have 3 levels to each and you remove tech point restrictions, why would a person ever not have the highest level? Or the alternative then would be to only ever have 1 level for that chamber. To retain scaling and specialization, we need the tech points to provide limits.

The way I'd do it is I'd make it so the base level of each active-effect either takes 0 tech points or a small amount, depending on their usefulness. Then leveling them is where more tech points would be used up, as described above. This would allow for a deeper level of decisions to make and higher degrees of specialization possible, while ensuring people have "more to do". The focus would be on choosing specializations while building and then switching to different sets of active-skills depending on the situation the player is in, WITHOUT leaving their hotbar AND still being able to do so even after taking 1 block of damage.

But just to go even deeper, if custom chambers with passive effects can be used as an active effect, how gnarly would that be? There could be a lot of variety from this and custom actives. Here's a short list of ideas:
1. Replicate the ION effect, where shields take less damage, but block damage increases while on. This chamber would take 0 tech points and has no charge up time nor top-off energy usage while not in use, but does use up some power while on.
2. A chamber effect that increases reactor HP but weakens shields. Also takes 0 tech points.
3. A chamber that increases turn speed, but reduces weapon damage. (Probably useful on mining/cargo ships)
4. Increase AI accuracy at extra power cost.
5. Increase evade burst strength at the cost of regular thruster acceleration.

And then to add to this, some of these chambers can only be created with rare resources or with blocks unobtainable by normal methods. For example, let's say a server has some custom alien pirates that only spawn near the outside edges of the galaxy. They contain some of these custom chambers, so in order to put them on your ship, you need to go explore and find them. Or maybe a server has a wrapper that provides quests and other in-universe objectives, where players can obtain rare resources that are required for some of the chambers. Perhaps a person could take bronze bars, breaking them down to "bronze shards" and further process those down to "bronze dust." Some chambers that require rare resources might be:
1. Jump interdictor booster. Boosts jump interdictor level by 1.
2. Weapon overdrive - Passive effect which makes weapons take twice the power and obtain a +50% damage boost.
3. System Overload - Active effect that makes all systems charge faster, weapons do more damages, shields take less damage and start charging immediately. Effect has a short duration and a somewhat steep tech point cost to implement and the blocks are heavy.

But these are just ideas I've come up with off the top of my head. Anything I'd actually implement on the server would need to go through a thorough a process of idea brain storming, crowd-sourcing ideas, testing, and balancing. But being ABLE to do this to create new, unique content for StarMade would be excellent. It would also benefit the base-gameplay, because it would allow the devs more freedom in setting up active-effects for ships to use, rather than having to hard-code each one in.

 

[Nosajimiki]

I'm not saying these active effects would necessarily be "power hungry" exactly, but rather would provide a benefit that scales with their power usage. Specs like chamber weight would need to be considered, of course. Tech points would be used more like a level limiter. For example, if you have 3 chambers that have 3 levels to each and you remove tech point restrictions, why would a person ever not have the highest level? Or the alternative then would be to only ever have 1 level for that chamber. To retain scaling and specialization, we need the tech points to provide limits.

My previous post specifically addressed this by binding level to chamber size. So I may need 1000 blocks for a lvl1 chamber, 2000 for a lvl2, and 3000 for lvl 3. (or if you want non-linear scaling could be something like 500:1500:3000 or 2000:2500:3000)

In this case. you would invest the extra mass and resources into the larger chamber and it would just be a level 3 based on size. Because it costs and weighs more, you don't need RP to enforce a limit. In fact, you don't need them at all to prevent chamber spamming because at some point, chambers will become too much of your ship to stay practical. (Having a bunch of lvl 3 passives will actually make you weaker if 80% of your system mass is just chambers, and you don't have the power to run them all at once).

The result of this relationship is that highly specialized ships will be meta, but not necessary. It also makes eWar ships its own specialty where you make a ship weaker in exchange for versatility.

This also takes a LOT of the stress off of admins and devs to make the chambers balanced by considering every set of what can and can not be done, but instead lets the natural balance fall on the community to find based on what is worth the trade-off.

Also: applying level to chambers based on size means that affects will be less fragile. This way you can take a hit and run at partial efficiency instead of having to buffer with waisted mass or risk losing it all from a single scratch.

 

[Benevolent27]

My previous post specifically addressed this by binding level to chamber size. So I may need 1000 blocks for a lvl1 chamber, 2000 for a lvl2, and 3000 for lvl 3. (or if you want non-linear scaling could be something like 500:1500:3000 or 2000:2500:3000)

In this case. you would invest the extra mass and resources into the larger chamber and it would just be a level 3 based on size. Because it costs and weighs more, you don't need RP to enforce a limit. In fact, you don't need them at all to prevent chamber spamming because at some point, chambers will become too much of your ship to stay practical. (Having a bunch of lvl 3 passives will actually make you weaker if 80% of your system mass is just chambers, and you don't have the power to run them all at once).

The result of this relationship is that highly specialized ships will be meta, but not necessary. It also makes eWar ships its own specialty where you make a ship weaker in exchange for versatility.

This also takes a LOT of the stress off of admins and devs to make the chambers balanced by considering every set of what can and can not be done, but instead lets the natural balance fall on the community to find based on what is worth the trade-off.

Also: applying level to chambers based on size means that affects will be less fragile. This way you can take a hit and run at partial efficiency instead of having to buffer with waisted mass or risk losing it all from a single scratch.

You could do away with tech points entirely and separate out every level of a certain chamber type to be it's own chamber add-on that must be connected the a preceding level of chamber. Then you could make each of these chambers use power increase the power usage of the ability they modify. The difference here for a specialized ship would be that it would then need to be much larger in bulk, material cost, and weight. We could reduce the amount of blocks needed for each chamber to offset the cost. But there would be pros and cons to this as well. Because then the balancing factor would always have to come down to power usage. But what if a certain chamber doesn't increase power usage right now? Well, we'd need to make it increase power. Such as the FTL upgrades. Right now multi-jump and distance do not increase power usage, so we'd have to increase the amount of power the jump drive consumes with these upgrades on. But then what if power consumption is too high? Well, I guess we'd need to lower the amount of power the base jump drive uses, right? But then what if the base jump drive now barely uses any power at all? Back and forth we'd need to go to try and get the balance right. It wouldn't just be "up to the players."

But also consider chambers that do not increase power usage. For example, chambers that reduce power consumption then SHOULD always be used whenever applicable, right? So anyone with a jump drive should ALWAYS build the jump drive power efficiency chamber. The difference here with tech points is that even for chambers that do not use power (or which save the person power), the ship builder needs to choose which ones to install. This allows a higher degree of specialization. This is why I favor allowing more base level abilities, but then using tech points as a way of limiting how many chambers can be specialized to highest level. Is this the only way to do things? No. Do I think the tech-point-free way of doing things would also be viable? Sure. I'm just pointing out differences here in the pros and cons.

 

[Nosajimiki]

You could do away with tech points entirely and separate out every level of a certain chamber type to be it's own chamber add-on that must be connected the a preceding level of chamber. Then you could make each of these chambers use power increase the power usage of the ability they modify. The difference here for a specialized ship would be that it would then need to be much larger in bulk, material cost, and weight. We could reduce the amount of blocks needed for each chamber to offset the cost. But there would be pros and cons to this as well. Because then the balancing factor would always have to come down to power usage. But what if a certain chamber doesn't increase power usage right now? Well, we'd need to make it increase power. Such as the FTL upgrades. Right now multi-jump and distance do not increase power usage, so we'd have to increase the amount of power the jump drive consumes with these upgrades on. But then what if power consumption is too high? Well, I guess we'd need to lower the amount of power the base jump drive uses, right? But then what if the base jump drive now barely uses any power at all? Back and forth we'd need to go to try and get the balance right. It wouldn't just be "up to the players."

But also consider chambers that do not increase power usage. For example, chambers that reduce power consumption then SHOULD always be used whenever applicable, right? So anyone with a jump drive should ALWAYS build the jump drive power efficiency chamber. The difference here with tech points is that even for chambers that do not use power (or which save the person power), the ship builder needs to choose which ones to install. This allows a higher degree of specialization. This is why I favor allowing more base level abilities, but then using tech points as a way of limiting how many chambers can be specialized to highest level. Is this the only way to do things? No. Do I think the tech-point-free way of doing things would also be viable? Sure. I'm just pointing out differences here in the pros and cons.

Chambers that don't cost power are not a problem because they cost something else. Think of it like this: A chamber that makes jump drives more power efficient SEEM like they will alway be a good thing, but if you are adding a 50k chamber to a heavy warship to do it, that means you have to pull 50k out of something else: Less shields, less power, less weapons, less other chambers etc. OR you have to make your ship bigger to offset it meaning more surface area = more armor, more mass = less thrust, more volume = bigger shield bubbles: all things that consequently make your ships less efficient. Also, many chambers that improve your efficiency at 20% chamber mass will in many cases become a drawback at 60% chamber mass. Thirdly, chambers have rHP. A small reactor/chamber group is easier to protect against damage using smrt armor configurations than a one that fills most of your ship.

 

[Benevolent27]

Chambers that don't cost power are not a problem because they cost something else. Think of it like this: A chamber that makes jump drives more power efficient SEEM like they will alway be a good thing, but if you are adding a 50k chamber to a heavy warship to do it, that means you have to pull 50k out of something else: Less shields, less power, less weapons, less other chambers etc. OR you have to make your ship bigger to offset it meaning more surface area = more armor, more mass = less thrust, more volume = bigger shield bubbles: all things that consequently make your ships less efficient. Also, many chambers that improve your efficiency at 20% chamber mass will in many cases become a drawback at 60% chamber mass. Thirdly, chambers have rHP. A small reactor/chamber group is easier to protect against damage using smrt armor configurations than a one that fills most of your ship.

If other effects can use the mass in their calculation for power usage, then what you describe is basically systems 1.0. Was a tried-and-true system, for sure. Building a multi-use ship was possible, but then all your passives took more energy and for the size ship you were in, you'd seem weaker compared to other ships of the same size that were specialized in some other way, especially with more weapons. But if the power usage does not increase based on mass (or better would be total systems sizes), then I think we'd be basically only implementing part of a complete system.

I think it'd be interesting to see 3 different chamber configs to contrast and compare:
1. Based entirely around tech points providing limits, so a person could build one ship using the same blocks but have a wide variety of different capabilities based on how they distribute their tech points. The tech point costs would prevent anyone from having all active-abilities on any given ship, however. I'd like to see a lot more active-effects though, so there are enough options within each set to choose from and still have a full hotbar. But the total effects possible would never equal ALL active-effects available.
2. Based around being able to have more or all active-effects at base level. Balancing would be based on only allowing some active-effects to be fully leveled via tech point limits. This system would probably have less total overall active-effects available than #1.
3. Chambers use no tech points at all. All balance is provided by power usage, block investment, and ship weight. If a person wants all systems and all systems full leveled, they can build it and use it.

I think all three are viable. I was actually tempted to try #3 o LvD at one time, but right now I think that tech points can be a useful way to ensure a higher degree of variability in ship builds. But I definitely do plan on doing whatever I can to increase active-abilities when I am able to.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Chambers use no tech points at all. All balance is provided by power usage, block investment, and ship weight. If a person wants all systems and all systems full leveled, they can build it and use it.

I agree that implementing #3 through server configs alone right now does not work because of chamber leveling, but power is not as big of a deal as you may think.

Building a multi-use ship was possible, but then all your passives took more energy and for the size ship you were in, you'd seem weaker compared to other ships of the same size that were specialized in some other way, especially with more weapons. But if the power usage does not increase based on mass (or better would be total systems sizes), then I think we'd be basically only implementing part of a complete system.

I'm not sure if this is a communication issue, or difference of opinion at this point. I do not believe that all chambers should be powerless, many (especially the more useful ones) should draw power, but my point is that the ones that draw no power or improve power efficiency do not need reactor points to balance out.

Where power 1.0 was concerned, there were many effects people would often choose to or not to use based on mass that did not have a meaningful effect on power. Explosive, Pierce, Punch, Inhibitors, and Scanners (after they became mass dependant instead of length dependant) were all effects with very little power requirement that only some people would choose to use based on the function of their ship, but were not typically all put on everything.

Infact, making a ship with all passive effects, a full sized aweshit drive, a good sized scanner, & inhibitor would require 41.6% of your ship's mass aka: 208k for a 500k ship. Now that is only 12 systems back when a lot of things could be done without needing heavy chambers for basic quality of life stuff to start with. But even in that system, people who did that were at a huge disadvantage. I feel the system was not lacking specialization because there was no balance in the mechanics. It lacked specialization because there were only 12 options, of which, only about 1/2 were all that important. Also, as veteran builders it is easy to forget the mass impact of these things when used as intended because we are used to modularity and logic system allowing us to offset weight. By docking thrust, armor, and weapons, you could cut your ion and overdrive needs in half, docked armor made armor passive weight almost non-existent, chain drives made jump drives super light, etc. Now if you have a system with 40+ of such effects and no weight exploits, then the sum weight of everything could easily be >200% of your ship's total mass if you tried building a reasonably size reactor; so, ppl have to think not only about power draw for systems that do that, but about the mass implications of things that inherently don't draw power like power efficiency enhancers.

The problem was that there were certain effects that almost always made since to use such as ion because there was no meaningful trade off to just adding the extra shields or chain drives because they were light as a paper bag. Chaindrives are gone, and Ion like effects are now divided into more specialized shield enhancements.

I guess my point is that mass alone functions as a trade-off for systems that don't need a strong counterpoint to the option of not using them, and power (or other factors) can be used to further balance things that would otherwise be OP.

 

[Benevolent27]

I agree that implementing #3 through server configs alone right now does not work because of chamber leveling, but power is not as big of a deal as you may think.

Power was a big deal in Power 1.0. For example, it was very powerful having radarjamming on your ship. In fact, I think a necessity for any competent PvP ship. But using radarjamming would reduce the amount of weapons you could fire at once on the ship or limit your thrusting. This kind of balance was important. If Radarjamming didn't take any power at all, it would have been OP. If it took too much power, it would have been unusable. The devs did a job balancing it though I think. The same sort of balance would need to be struck for a chamber system that does not use tech points, taking into account that there actually is a block investment now (not just 1 radarjammer block).

I'm not sure if this is a communication issue, or difference of opinion at this point. I do not believe that all chambers should be powerless, many (especially the more useful ones) should draw power, but my point is that the ones that draw no power or improve power efficiency do not need reactor points to balance out.

For chambers that do not require power to operate or which improve power efficiency, then you'd need to ensure the block cost + weight addition make it so sometimes it is worth utilizing them and sometimes it is not worth utilizing them. I think right now it probably (<-- note the "probably" usage here) would always be worth building them into a ship because of the relative size of the chamber to the ship would be small in comparison to the bonus it provides. So perhaps increasing the requirement for size of chambers, increasing their weight, or increasing cost would be necessary to offset removing the tech point restriction. Or perhaps not. Maybe it would work just fine without any other modifications, but would you agree that a properly balanced system should be tested and modified as necessary?

Where power 1.0 was concerned, there were many effects people would often choose to or not to use based on mass that did not have a meaningful effect on power. Explosive, Pierce, Punch, Inhibitors, and Scanners (after they became mass dependant instead of length dependant) were all effects with very little power requirement that only some people would choose to use based on the function of their ship, but were not typically all put on everything.

Well, a few things about Power 1.0 defensive effects. Each effect was based on your total mass, which included other passive effects you've already added. If you added one passive, then you'd have to increase a previous passive so it would also be at full strength. All passives then also took more power and reduced total thrust and turn speed due to the additional mass. The power requirement addition was most noticeable with cloaking, but it also made a big difference for radarjamming on finely tuned warships or mining ships where you needed to maintain jamming while shooting/mining. Power 2.0 has no such limitation. Each passive is dependent on the size of the reactor, not the total weight of the ship. So both their block requirements AND power usage scaling are linear, not multiplicative. You can add more chambers to a ship and still cloak on larger ships with power 2.0, for example. What was previously impossible is now possible. Tech points do help to allow further specialization within each chamber branch without requiring power, thrust speed, turn speed, and block costs to be the limiting factors.

In power 1.0, it also bears noting that limiting factors were also whether the effect was worth it. For example, I never really found piercing effect passive to be worth it because it would cause your armor HP pool to deplete so quickly when your armor got hit. The benefit over the course of a battle was just not worth it, unless you were only planning on getting hit a few times and winning before your armor pool depleted. Punch-through, ion, and radaramming, on the other hand were almost always worth using on any warship, and subtract punch-through for something like a mining ship. Then for cloakers, it really wasn't a good idea to have any passives because you'd have to limit your thrust so much to continue cloaking. But in systems 2.0, for systems that don't increase power, tech points provide the limiting factors to allow them to scale to higher degrees of specialization without being overpowered.

Just to illustrate this, let's invent 3 chambers that allow a broad range of specialization and which do not use power as the limiting factor.
- Thrust 2.0 - This one can be upgraded to a level of 10 to multiply your max speed by 10.
- Turn Speed 2.0 - This one can be upgrade to a level of 10 to greatly increase your turn speed
- Acceleration 2.0 - This one can be upgraded to a level of 10 to multiply your acceleration by 10.

So in these fictitious chambers, we have DEEP upgrades possible in certain areas. An easy way to limit how many deep upgrades is to have it cost tech points to upgrade each. So maybe a person can apply 10 levels between the three. If we go a "tech point free route", then people will need to build 10 different chamber add-ons for each route, which would make a very heavy ship, so that might not be worth it to them or it might be counter productive, actually negating all the effects to a high degree. Or even if you only do one of these to "level 10" so you have 10 separate chamber groups for each level, it still might be too much mass. So then are we to also make chambers require less blocks per chamber? It's certainly possible to rebalance weight and requirements to have this kind of system. In fact, I think it'd be basically like power 1.0, but stairstepped. Instead of having odd strengths like 43.5% ion effect, you would have 5%, 10%, 15%...60%, with a similar amount of the chamber blocks used as would have been needed for ion effect modules on a power 1.0 passive system.

But all this aside, is it worth the time and effort to create all the necessary custom chamber block groupings and rebalancing to a power 1.0 type of structure in order to allow more base effects to be used on ships, or could the amount of tech points and corresponding bonuses be adjusted instead to allow more base-level active-effects to be usable on ships and then use tech points to limit how many can be fully upgraded? OR would a 0-tech point system be worth the time investment to re-create and balance?

Infact, making a ship with all passive effects, a full sized aweshit drive, a good sized scanner, & inhibitor would require 41.6% of your ship's mass aka: 208k for a 500k ship. Now that is only 12 systems back when a lot of things could be done without needing heavy chambers for basic quality of life stuff to start with. But even in that system, people who did that were at a huge disadvantage. I feel the system was not lacking specialization because there was no balance in the mechanics. It lacked specialization because there were only 12 options, of which, only about 1/2 were all that important. Also, as veteran builders it is easy to forget the mass impact of these things when used as intended because we are used to modularity and logic system allowing us to offset weight. By docking thrust, armor, and weapons, you could cut your ion and overdrive needs in half, docked armor made armor passive weight almost non-existent, chain drives made jump drives super light, etc. Now if you have a system with 40+ of such effects and no weight exploits, then the sum weight of everything could easily be >200% of your ship's total mass if you tried building a reasonably size reactor; so, ppl have to think not only about power draw for systems that do that, but about the mass implications of things that inherently don't draw power like power efficiency enhancers.

The problem was that there were certain effects that almost always made since to use such as ion because there was no meaningful trade off to just adding the extra shields or chain drives because they were light as a paper bag. Chaindrives are gone, and Ion like effects are now divided into more specialized shield enhancements.

I guess my point is that mass alone functions as a trade-off for systems that don't need a strong counterpoint to the option of not using them, and power (or other factors) can be used to further balance things that would otherwise be OP.

The removal of chain drives definitely impacts the ability to people to add other specializations. In fact, it is now it's own specialization, and you can't even upgrade all jump drive chambers on default settings. (LvD currently has modified these values so all jump drive upgrades add up to 100%, so someone COULD fully specialize as a jumper, but nothing else, and other ships can use 25% tech points to have a competent jumper). So ships that used to be able to radarjam and have ion effect, and still actually get around the universe quickly, cannot now. Now you have to choose between agonizingly long jumping periods and having defensive effects. Since you probably can't chase anyone with a slow jump drive or get to a battle in time before it's all over, jumping takes priority. I think I might actually remove all tech point restrictions on jump drive chambers on LvD actually.. or maybe all but multi-jump and distance. I want people to be able to actually get to each other so they can fight, and not feel like they've gimped their ship by using all their tech points on their jump drive.

But all this said, do you think that having more free or inexpensive base-level active-effects and then use tech points to limit how many of these can be maxed out is viable? This is part of my plan for LvD. The other part of the plan is to add more custom chambers that have different pros and cons to them to add more variety.