- Joined
- Jan 1, 2015
- Messages
- 923
- Reaction score
- 292
As pretty much everyone knows, titans are not allowed at spawn, lest everyone's framerates slow to a crawl. I am having similar issues with a destroyer fleet I built to hunt titans with. My framerate drops to as little as 15 FPS with my fleet in the same sector as my homebase. My framerate is normally well above 100 with just my station and battleminer. Heaven help the server or any player nearby if ever a titan and a fleet such as mine meet, let alone fight.
As time goes on optimizations will be made, server code will get tighter and people's computers will be able to handle more. However this alone does not address the issue sufficiently, as when the code and cards permit, we'll just have a few titans and a hundred small ships, creating the same issue.
We need a mechanism in the game which will limit the profusion of large fleets and titans, without prohibiting them. To this end I propose a mechanism which is ubiquitous in science fiction gaming, that of maintenance cost. Ships should require the expenditure of a limited resource, so people have to ration their use of said resource. They could opt to have a large ship, or several small ships, but not necessarily all ships, all the time.
Just what this resource should be, how much of it various ships might require, and how quickly it replenishes, is very much up for discussion. I will pen what thoughts I may.
I do not advise using credits for this, as future developments are certain to permit automated processes using fleets, such as mining, that will permit making the earning of such credits largely automatic. Rather than solve the issue, using credits would exacerbate it, as people would create such automated fleets to profitably generate what would be needed, resulting in even more fleet spam.
Fuel could work but would require a massive change to the game and a redesign of virtually every existing ship in the game. Given that there are other ways to handle it, I think fuel would pose too high a human cost for it to now be retroactively added to the game.
Faction points are very likely to be involved in this process, though exactly how I could only guess. Faction points generate slowly over time and there is relatively little do do with them right now. They are currently IMO ideal for being what gets spent on maintenance. A titan aught be more than any given player could generate on their own, but a group of players pooling their resources could each fly their own miner, and still have enough to field a titan. Alternatively a faction might opt to forgo such a spectacle and instead have a much larger number of smaller ships able to take the fight to such a titan.
Another way to abstract this would still use faction points but do so indirectly by paying crew out of faction points, and having ships either require crew (based on total system weight), or have the crew otherwise confer such a significant bonus to the ship's effectiveness that it would be foolhardy to deploy such a large investment without it. This latter is actually my preferred option, as it would still allow an individual to build a behemoth, it would not completely obsolete existing fleets and builds, but it would create a massive incentive to retrofit or otherwise restrain their use.
What say you?
As time goes on optimizations will be made, server code will get tighter and people's computers will be able to handle more. However this alone does not address the issue sufficiently, as when the code and cards permit, we'll just have a few titans and a hundred small ships, creating the same issue.
We need a mechanism in the game which will limit the profusion of large fleets and titans, without prohibiting them. To this end I propose a mechanism which is ubiquitous in science fiction gaming, that of maintenance cost. Ships should require the expenditure of a limited resource, so people have to ration their use of said resource. They could opt to have a large ship, or several small ships, but not necessarily all ships, all the time.
Just what this resource should be, how much of it various ships might require, and how quickly it replenishes, is very much up for discussion. I will pen what thoughts I may.
I do not advise using credits for this, as future developments are certain to permit automated processes using fleets, such as mining, that will permit making the earning of such credits largely automatic. Rather than solve the issue, using credits would exacerbate it, as people would create such automated fleets to profitably generate what would be needed, resulting in even more fleet spam.
Fuel could work but would require a massive change to the game and a redesign of virtually every existing ship in the game. Given that there are other ways to handle it, I think fuel would pose too high a human cost for it to now be retroactively added to the game.
Faction points are very likely to be involved in this process, though exactly how I could only guess. Faction points generate slowly over time and there is relatively little do do with them right now. They are currently IMO ideal for being what gets spent on maintenance. A titan aught be more than any given player could generate on their own, but a group of players pooling their resources could each fly their own miner, and still have enough to field a titan. Alternatively a faction might opt to forgo such a spectacle and instead have a much larger number of smaller ships able to take the fight to such a titan.
Another way to abstract this would still use faction points but do so indirectly by paying crew out of faction points, and having ships either require crew (based on total system weight), or have the crew otherwise confer such a significant bonus to the ship's effectiveness that it would be foolhardy to deploy such a large investment without it. This latter is actually my preferred option, as it would still allow an individual to build a behemoth, it would not completely obsolete existing fleets and builds, but it would create a massive incentive to retrofit or otherwise restrain their use.
What say you?
