Adding ship-types

[Hamsta]

I have an idea how to slightly balance ships of different sizes.
The idea is to seperate shiptypes to different sizes measured by their mass (numbers are pretty random and would need to be adjusted):
small ship: 0-500
medium ship: 0-1000
big ship: mass: 0-5000
huge ship: 0-infinity

Now comes the part, where this will help the game balance.
Every shiptype should use its own blockBehaviorConfig.xml. This way you can set different effectivity curves curves for each block. You could for example change the thrustersetting to BOX_DIM_MULT for small ships so that they can easily be the fast and agile ships they are supposed to be while big ships need to use the LINEAR setting. I do realise, that while this immensly increases the possibilitys to balance ships it also creates a whole lot of work to actually finding a fair and balanced setting.

The reason every shipsize starts at 0 is, that the shiptype is not autoadjusted. You should be able to select your shiptype in your shipcore and once you reach the max. mass for this shiptype you get a warning and will not be able to add more blocks (except you change your shiptype). Otherwise it could get quite confusing (especially for new players) if the shipstats suddenly change for no apparent reason.

So what are your thoughts? Any suggestions or criticism?

 

[Unnamed25]

Now, i really like this idea!
No more slug-speed fighters and warp-speed titans because they have lots of engines
Did you get the idea from space engineers game thing?

 

[Hamsta]

Did you get the idea from space engineers game thing?

Nope. I just know space engineers from talk.
I got the idea while i was sulking over the new /old thruster system and that it will be hard again to build fast AND strong smaller ships. So i thought it would be nice if smaller ships could use the BOX_DIM_MULT system while bigger ships still use the LINEAR one. (just as said in the example)

 

[ltmauve]

Well, if you want your small ships with high thrust, you could add a dimension bonus to thrust, but with a cap like the power systems (per ship). If the bonus if something like 500, that means that larger ships get less of an effect from it.

 

[1adog1]

I definitely agree. As you said the numbers would have to be adjusted (Finally an excuse to get an official class system), but it could definitely work.

 

[Lecic]

The thruster speeds in the new update were bugged. Fighters will be faster, and cap ships will need big blocks of engines to move at decent rates. I'm saying this because I feel this thread has something to do with that issue.

I don't like the idea of dividing ships into different classes based on mass, because everyone has a different idea of what each class is and is not.

 

[PizzaPress]

Scaling, not classes.

 

[Hamsta]

The thruster speeds in the new update were bugged. Fighters will be faster, and cap ships will need big blocks of engines to move at decent rates. I'm saying this because I feel this thread has something to do with that issue.

I don't like the idea of dividing ships into different classes based on mass, because everyone has a different idea of what each class is and is not.

First off; I know that the thrusterconfigs were messed up but i got this idea prior to 0.158.

And i still think that mass is the only logical thing to base a shipsize on. It is quit necessery since smaller ships (as long as you don't want them to look ugly) have a far worse hull/usefull-blocks ratio then any bigger ships. Yes you can do that via caps and curves...but to be perfectly honest, I just love using the BOX_DIM_MULT method in smaller ships, since it is more of a challange to build a good small ship. To be more precise there are clever ways to build a small ship and even though two ships are the same size they can have completly different stats. The bigger the ships, the less it matters how you build them...hence you can just go back to linear scaling.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Note to author of thread: change the 0 by the last 4 types, because right now you're basically saying that every ship falls in all five types.

 

[Hamsta]

Note to author of thread: change the 0 by the last 4 types, because right now you're basically saying that every ship falls in all five types.

Note to FunnyBunny14: read the hole post. There is a reason why every type starts at 0. ^^

 

[MrFURB]

I like what you're trying to do here and the ideas behind the classification system, but I'm thinking that there's a couple of problems created by the system's interaction with the game not being along the same lines as the player's interaction with the game. It's like having three people in a conversation and two of them can't hear each other.

First and foremost is the ever present temptation to min-max any system to get the maximum effectiveness possible. If you're wanting a ship that's decently balanced between speed and firepower, you'd naturally go for something between a fighter and a battleship; a decent medium ship. Someone who's wanting to get the most firepower without sacrificing lots of speed, though, would simply build right up to the upper limit of the 'medium ship' class without going into the 'large ship' class. Having any mixture of different linear, exponential, or diminishing returns will naturally push ships towards either the upper or lower limit of a specific weight class, depending on the desired traits of the vessel.

My second concern would be presentation. You've actually managed to bypass the most harrowing of the issues by making the player consciously choose the 'class' of ship instead of it automatically applying changes based on mass (which would be a major problem because new people would be wondering why the stats of his/her ship is randomly changing in such a drastic fashion) but you've still got the problem of how to let people know why they're allowed to have a 10 mass large ship and it's strengths and weaknesses compared to a 10 mass small or medium ship.

Do you have any specific ideas on how to make this beneficial and intuitive?

My own idea for the first issue would be to change the distinctions between the classes into 'roles' instead of 'masses' and then remove the now extraneous mass limitations. The 'roles' would work off of the base config and provide a set of bonuses and detriments that would tilt the config to favor the role chosen.
For example, instead of basing 'large ship' off of size or mass, you could instead have a 'heavy' role which heightens the soft cap of energy regeneration but drastically lowers thrust. In a nutshell, small craft would have extremely limited use of a role meant for larger craft because it positively modifies things that small craft can't make good use of (mostly) but is perfect for capital ships due to them making great use of it's positives and not really caring about it's negatives.
I think a role-based system might be a little easier for the community as a whole to digest. There's a lot of variance in size between different players, factions, and servers, and having one's fighters be too large for a 'small' class or one's battleships be available in 'medium ships' might be a little bit off-putting for some.

All in all, it's a creative idea and worth some discussion at least!

 

[Hamsta]

Considering your first concern; i am aware of this problem as well and I do understand, that some people won't like beeing "forced" to add or remove blocks from their ships to get their prefered system. It would be really annoying that your beatiful ship has worse stats, just because it is 10 blocks over the mass limit. I on the other hand really see this as a positive aspect. As mentioned before, I really like competing in building effective ships (while still looking good) and with this system i would finally have someway of comparing the effectiveness with other ships. Right now it pretty much works the way, that bigger ships equal better stats.

Regarding your secound concern, the easyest way would be to just tell them in a small text what the shiptype does. Interface wise it would pretty much look like this:
When you start building your ship with your shipcore the standart message pops up, asking you to name your vessel. additionally there will be a dropdown menu in which you can choose which class your ship will be in. If you select a class there will be a small text below describing the specifics of this class plus a note, that this can be changed later on. For Example:
"Small ship
- High shieldcapacity efficiency
- Low shieldregen rate
- Uses boxdimensions to calculate thrust and powergeneration

The Ship class can still be changed later on via the Structure menu."

Considering how many people i have met, who didn't even know that there are better ways to build a generator than packing them in a 10x10 block, this is more information about shipbuilding, then the players have right now.


I to thought about using this system to have some RPG like shipclasses for different roles but since my main concern was balancing smaller vs. bigger ships i decided to use mass as a defining value. As you already said yourself, if you have a "heavy" shipclass with a lower thrust efficency but hightened energy soft cap, big ships will gain a massive advantage since they have enough space to put in a few extra thrusters...especially now since they need less energy generators. I doubt that it would be easy to find a class giving an equal advantage to smaller ships that can not be exploited by bigger ones. And even if, then we are back to a shipsize system.

You could compromise by removing the max. mass per class and instead use different soft caps for the different classes. This way you could give smaller ships an advantage that can't be used by big ships without having hardlined mass-barriers between the different classes.

 

[Lecic]

Considering how many people i have met, who didn't even know that there are better ways to build a generator than packing them in a 10x10 block, this is more information about shipbuilding, then the players have right now.

Wouldn't this be better solved with more advanced, optional tutorials that the players view and learn from?