Alternative Power Suggestion 2.0

[Haalon]

Months ago, I made my own proposal after the first official one - at that time I was really worried about lots of restrictive rules the official one had. And now we've got a new one. It's surely better, I liked many of its ideas, but I see some flaws in it - one of them is that the new proposal looks like its power system lacks hard-to-master part . And for me, power system must offer you depth, opportunity to make different power designs, it's the heart of a ship after all. So I decided to merge the ideas from new Schine's proposal, my old one, and my new ideas.

Power consumption​

It's rather strange to start with power consumption instead of power generation and all that stuff, but there is a good reason for that.


There are two different concepts – diversity and flexibility.

Something is diverse, if it can offer you large amount of important, independent choices.

Something is flexible, if it can be modified – if it exists not only in some fixed states.

Our current weapon systems are all about diversity – they offer you large amount of choices, some of them less meaningful, yeah, but these are balance problems.

Old StarMade weapon systems were all about flexibility – you were able to change damage, fire rate, distance, speed of the weapon at any time, so there were very little important choices – it's not very important choice if you can change it a second later to a completely different.

And what I want to do – is to let these two concepts meet each other. I want to make a system that based on the compromise between those two.

The power consumption is the key. Currently, there is linear dependency of weapon's damage on the power it consumes. But the power consumption and so the damage of the weapon is fixed by its block count, so it can't be changed. Similar situation with most of other systems. My idea is to let players adjust amount of power the system will try to consume, and keep linear dependency of that consumed power to the system output. Excessive heat generation will be logical limiter of such overcharge of a system. We should be able to set these power requests for all systems through a weapon panel or some other menu.


But what about block count? Block count takes the support role – it increases system output, but slowly, in a logarithmic fashion, and decreases heat generation up to some minimum.

This mechanics shifts importance from sheer block count of your system, to the amount of power you can supply to the system – i.e. to your power system quality. This also brings a lot of tactical opportunities to the game - such as energy distribution (all energy to warp-drive/cannons/shields thing), and, for example, small capacity-based suicide drones, which deal one extremely powerful shot from a small weapon, and then explode because of excessive amount of heat.


So. For example we have weapon group of 100 blocks with one second recharge. All values below are for demonstration.

• If we supply from 1 to 10 000 energy - weapon will generate very small amounts of heat, manageable for inherent cooling, so small ships can shoot for a long amount of time or non-stop.
  
  
• If we supply from 10 000 to 100 000 energy - damage output is great, but heat generation becomes noticeable. So big ships with well-built power and cooling systems could use this overcharged weapons for large amounts of time or even non-stop. And small ships can use such overcharge for single-strike weapons.
  
  
• If we supply from 100 000 to 1 000 000 energy - the weapon will shoot once with very high damage, generate extreme amounts of heat, and shut down for some time or until reboot. Shutdown time goes from 0 sec at 100 000 power, to the infinity (until reboot) at 1 000 000 power.
  
  
• If we supply to it 1 000 000+ energy, it wont even shoot, but will generate INSANE amounts of heat. This will limit capacity-based suicide ships.
  
  
  
  Spoiler: System Behaviour Infographics

  

  Ox axis on the left ones is used power. On the right side - Ox axis is the block count

Power Generation
​

I want power system to truly be heart of any ship. I want them to have depth, to be hard-to-master, to be compact, and finally, I don't want them to encourage any form of ship over another.

So, my proposed reactors are made from different type of blocks, and layout of this blocks defines reactors characteristics - energy production, heat generation, power capacity, efficiency per block(or even per fuel point, I personally like idea of consumable fuel) and safety - and while you want to max them all out(except heat generation ofc) you cannot do that. You can find a balance between, or trend to some characteristics, while sacrificing others, or make an extremely one-sided or two-sided reactors - for example capacity/efficiency-based-reactor for those suicide drones I mentioned above.

Reactor itself is a group, consisting of various block types - such as active, capacity and cooling elements. Main idea is simple - every block receives bonuses with adjacent blocks of the same type, and somehow interacts with other block types, thus changing reactor final stats. I.e reactor generates more power and more heat with each adjacent active elements, cooling elements work better with each adjacent cooling element, same logic with capacity elements, if cooling and active elements are adjacent - active elements generate less heat and so on.

Energy, that can be potentially produced by reactor, must exponentially grow with block count of reactor, but ofc real produced power must greatly depend on reactor layout. This will make small amount of big reactors more optimal, than lots of small ones. This also fixes current problem with docked entities that can easily avoid softcap.

But what about giant ships? Exponential growth of power means that ships with massive reactors would be able to generate enormous amount of energy. Yeah, that's true, but with great power comes the great heat. The potential heat generation of reactors will escalate even faster than power generation - in order to handle with that heat, that ship must have VERY large cooling system, which will turn it into giant volume-inefficient powder keg. And if that ship will split its giant reactor into several small ones, yes, it will not need enormously large cooling system, but it will lose all its extreme power efficiency. So, it's like two-step soft-cap - after some point, increasing the size of reactors even further will be unprofitable, not because of power diminishing returns, but because of excessive heat.


Reactors can be placed anywhere and have any shape. But its 'adjacent block' mechanics encourages cuboid shapes. One thing I liked in the new Schine proposal is the reactor HP system – and it nicely fits with my compact and localized reactors, so I want my reactors to use the same HP system.

Spoiler: Here are some reactor layout examples with description.

All of them are 6x6x6 and without capacity elements.

First one:
Power generation - high.
Heat generation - noticeable.
Safety - average.
Efficiency(per block and per volume) - high.

Second one:
Power generation - below average.
Heat generation - none.
Safety - very high.
Efficiency(per block and per volume) - low.

Third one:
Power generation - average.
Heat generation - none.
Safety - average.
Efficiency(per block and per volume) - average.

Last one:
Power generation - enough to supply average space station with energy.
Heat generation - enough to burn down average space station immediately.
Safety - none.
Efficiency(per block and per volume) - insanely high.

Heat
​

Heat is something you don't want to have on your ship, you receive it from:

• Reactors
• Other systems
• Overcharged systems
• Stars
• Maybe some weapon effects

So, how to get rid of heat? I believe that cooling system, unlike power system, must be simple. Mostly because large ships will have big cooling systems, and massive amounts of something that requires complex design is both very time-consuming and bad for game performance. There will be only one block type – heat sink, it both stores and dissipates heat, but it is volatile. This blocks can form a group like current Power Capacitors and Auxiliaries – the bigger the group is, the more efficient in heat storage/dissipation it gets, but the stronger it will explode under certain conditions.

And now about what excess heat can cause: if there is no heat in your ship – than your heat sinks aren't volatile, the more heat you store – the more volatile they get, if 100% heat capacity is exceeded – than you will be forced out of core, and ship will be inaccessible until all heat is dissipated, and if you managed to exceed, for example, 200% - than your ship will just explode.

So, heat works as logical limiter for my power distribution idea and it also prevents the large ships from literally being OP.

So, while power system gives you opportunities to use other ship's systems, cooling system solves the consequences of that usage.

What about?​

• Self-Powered Turrets: there is a discussion currently: can turrets be self-powered, or we must forbid them to power themselves. I personally do not tend to any of this opinions. If we let them be self-powered, than exponential power growth of my reactors will make sure that self-powered turrets are less power-effective, if we forbid them to use their power – ok, I don't mind, it's not the point of my proposal.
  
  
• Logic: another interesting idea I took from Schine's proposal is switchable reactors. It can be used in interesting ways. We can design very efficient reactor with great power output, but with even greater heat output – and we can toggle it by logic for very short amount of time to get a lot of power in crucial moment, or we can use it to easily self destruct our ship – just turn it on and enormous heat generation will do the rest.
  
  
• Power Distribution to the Turrets: we should be able not only to adjust power distributed to ship's inner systems, but to adjust power our turrets will use. The turret will split the power you gave to it to all its systems, using requested power of this systems to calculate percent of given power that they will receive.
  
  
• Chambers: and another interesting idea from Schine's proposal. And again, it can be easily combined with my reactors – just let them generate those tech-points, according to the reactor size or power generation or something else. That's not the only way to make ships specialized – another way is to make this specialization blocks a part of my reactors, make them interact alike reactor elements do. In this approach there will be no actual chambers – reactor themselves give you passive effects, based on their design.
  
  
• Performance: clever dudes may say, that my reactors are performance-eaters. And they would be right: destruction of a single reactor block will cause, in worst scenario, recalculation of six adjacent blocks, and only after that recalculation of the reactor group itself. But the thing is, my reactors are meant to be compact – they will take much less volume than the current spaghetti lines and new proposed reactor-stabilizer system, so in most meaningful cases, the amount of recalculations wouldn't be much greater than with our current or new proposed system. But what about meaningless cases? Yes, it's surely possible to make giant reactor that wouldn't explode in a second – it would be very inefficient in terms of power and volume, but it can be easily made. If this will be major problem – than the easiest way to solve it – is to avoid recalculation of adjacent blocks, and directly recalculate the whole group, using some averaged values for destroyed blocks.
  
  
• Capacity: in my proposal, capacity elements are the part of reactor, weapons do not have inner storage, and drain all needed power when they fire. Because if they had - than suicide drones would be dirt cheap and alpha-strike guns will be much more easy to handle, which in combination with the idea of power distribution will be too OP. And I also like the idea of capacity-based ships.
  
  Feel free to ask or comment, any meaningful replies will be appreciated.

 

[Lancake]

Thank you for writing this all out. I can see that you're avoiding arbitrary limits and let it be a player choice where they want their ship to end up in that smooth transition from efficient to inefficient. Something we definitely can work on with our own proposal.

Before I address my other concerns, aren't you making power consumption and power generation both non linear here? Consuming power will generate heat in an exponential way, to get rid of heat you'll need to put blocks down that scale in a non linear way too. Getting rid of heat == allows you to use more power consuming weapons => synonym for generating more power.
To me that sounds like it would be extremely hard to estimate the amount of blocks you'll need, how many your ship might be able to consume/generate. Granted, this limit here is dynamic but it could take you a long time before you level out the power consuming and the power generating.
Perhaps I'm just not understanding it correctly, I've talked about so many ideas in the past that it's sometimes hard to keep them separated.

Back to the rest of your proposal, the power reactor building is something we also discussed in Schine. We called it the "Mixed block reactors" and we dismissed it for a few 2 major reasons:

• Complexity
• Scalability

Complexity

If each block gives you different stats depending on adjacency, you'll end up with something that is incredibly hard to understand and build yet simple to "master".
For starters, adjacency bonuses in a 3D group are incredibly hard to decipher. If we're talking about a cube, then you have no idea which block is touching which block within that cube. You can only see the outside and in order to see what's going inside, you'll need to start cutting away layers and make sure you remember what you did. If you didn't build it in the first place and what to edit an existing reactor, you basically have to start from scratch.

Adjacency bonuses are also incredibly easy to simplify in a pattern you can copy paste. And that pattern is also easy to maximize. Assuming these adjacency bonuses are linear (+1 if you touch X, -1 if you touch Y,...) then you can simple re-use that pattern over and over again.
Then you also have to consider that 500 blocks of A, interlayed with 500 blocks of B in checkerboard pattern with each other offering 500+ of something, 500+ of something else and 500- of something else. Can be replaced by a simpler system that is just 500 blocks of A and 500 blocks of B in 2 separate groups that do not care about adjacency bonuses of other types that each offer the same bonuses. Yes your customization is more limited by that, but we could just introduce more block types that each have their own positive/negatives they add. Since we would need to define that anyway for adjacency bonuses for each type with each type.

Spoiler: Example

Even if you keep adjacency bonuses, you'll end up with a system that can easily be optimized. If you want maximum power and less explosive, go with pattern X and paste it enough times till you reach your power generation.​

Scalability

For a large ship, you would expect something that's at least 5 000 blocks big for a reactor. Copy pasting patterns would make life easy for you, but if you download a ship and you want to figure out what's going on there, you'll have to be a smart guy to distinguish all the different patterns he used. Although in reality I see groups of 2 block types appear in checkerboard pattern, not hard to spot but let's just assume it's going to be way more fancy than that. Your examples where small, had only 2 block types in it and also one of them was transparent. Transparency will only help you so much, try to think of a cube that is 10 x 10 x 10 with a mixture of transparent blocks and solid ones, perhaps 6 different types in there. You could only see 1/2 layers deep at most, and then you need to start cutting to know which patterns are repeated and how. Doesn't sound fun to me, neither does working on any reactor I made in the past since I would have forgotten what I did with it specifically.​

Reactor <-> Heatsink

So what stops you from going to a crazy amount of blocks? Heatsinks are better when you have more of them in group, so you can quickly reach the best heat dissipation with a small amount of blocks. Allowing you to put down more reactors and power consuming/heat creating systems. Keep doing this till the ship is filled with a certain ratio and you have what we have right now, a ship that is fully filled with systems.

If your heat generation from reactor groups scales faster than the heat dissipation from heatsinks, you'll just have these 2 block types appear at different ratios.

Example: Filled ship with:
- 10% reactor blocks
- 40% heat sinks
- 50% shields, thrusters, weapons,...

Heatsinks are more volatile when they get bigger, the only thing that makes you consider from going crazy. But with more power, you can get better shields to protect you from any damage. With more power you can get way more damage and thrust to annihilate your opponent before he can even down your shields and hurt your oversized heatsink.​

Docked Entities

As for docked entities, you basically do the opposite here and forcing people to use single entities for optimal scaling. With the current power softcap, you profit more from smaller groups than large, so you encourage people building a ton of entities that have small groups.
With your example, you profit more from larger groups than small, so you encourage people building 1 entity that has it all. You could argue that turrets offer a large firing arc, but fixed weapons or modular built ships would suffer greatly from this if you want to put reactors on them. You're way better off of not doing it and just building a giant reactor on an entity and let the rest inherit power.​

 

[Haalon]

Before I address my other concerns, aren't you making power consumption and power generation both non linear here?

Yes, power generation is non-linear, but I don't understand what do you mean by non-linear power consumption.

Adjacency bonuses are also incredibly easy to simplify in a pattern you can copy paste. And that pattern is also easy to maximize. Assuming these adjacency bonuses are linear (+1 if you touch X, -1 if you touch Y,...) then you can simple re-use that pattern over and over again.

Well, This idea was created in the beginning of the year, as a reaction to the first proposal, so I don't remember exact formulas I used. But I ll try to describe my idea using something similar. For example, active element with N adjacent ones contributes (N+1)^2 some intermediate points to the whole group. Than the sum of all this points exponentially turned into power generation, maybe with the usage of the reactors total block count.
With heat it's a bit more tricky - cooling elements do not actually cool, they decrease amount of heat an adjacent active element generates. They can decrease this amount to zero only for actives with small adjacency. So it's already a game between the power generation and the heat generation. Add there capacity, and I believe it will be a hard task to find some optimum. And about this optimum, it's not even single - someone may seek power optimum with zero heat generation, someone will accept additional heat generation and seek higher power generation/capacity optimum, and someone may use lots of alpha-strike weapons, so they consider capacity-based reactors to make a powerful few strikes in the beginning of the battle. All of them can achieve their goals, using different layouts in the same amount of volume.

Scalability
For a large ship, you would expect something that's at least 5 000 blocks big for a reactor. Copy pasting patterns would make life easy for you, but if you download a ship and you want to figure out what's going on there, you'll have to be a smart guy to distinguish all the different patterns he used. Although in reality I see groups of 2 block types appear in checkerboard pattern, not hard to spot but let's just assume it's going to be way more fancy than that. Your examples where small, had only 2 block types in it and also one of them was transparent. Transparency will only help you so much, try to think of a cube that is 10 x 10 x 10 with a mixture of transparent blocks and solid ones, perhaps 6 different types in there. You could only see 1/2 layers deep at most, and then you need to start cutting to know which patterns are repeated and how. Doesn't sound fun to me, neither does working on any reactor I made in the past since I would have forgotten what I did with it specifically.

When I said I want my reactors to be compact, I mean really compact. Exponential power and heat growth means that reactors bigger than, for example, 15x15x15 are plain overkill - if built power-efficiently they ll generate unmanageable amounts of heat, if we will sacrifice some of their power efficiency, and bring heat generation to a managable level - than why do we need reactor of that size, we can just have a smaller, power-efficient one with similar power generation and managable heat.

Reactor <-> Heatsink
So what stops you from going to a crazy amount of blocks? Heatsinks are better when you have more of them in group, so you can quickly reach the best heat dissipation with a small amount of blocks. Allowing you to put down more reactors and power consuming/heat creating systems. Keep doing this till the ship is filled with a certain ratio and you have what we have right now, a ship that is fully filled with systems.

If your heat generation from reactor groups scales faster than the heat dissipation from heatsinks, you'll just have these 2 block types appear at different ratios.

Example: Filled ship with:
- 10% reactor blocks
- 40% heat sinks
- 50% shields, thrusters, weapons,...

Heatsinks are more volatile when they get bigger, the only thing that makes you consider from going crazy. But with more power, you can get better shields to protect you from any damage. With more power you can get way more damage and thrust to annihilate your opponent before he can even down your shields and hurt your oversized heatsink.

The amount of volume they consume stops you. Look at this like that: you can make a ship with big, very power efficient and hot reactor, and than waste almost half of your ship with cooling system (I consider them to scale with size very slowly). Or you can make reactor with noticeably less power generation, but with really small heat generation - and than you can fill with systems that half of your ship, that was wasted in the first variant. So, for example lets take shields - first one can supply more power to them, than the second. But the second one has much better block count - its shields can use less power, but they use it more efficiently - so in the end, their shields have close performance.
And aside from heatsinks, actually, it never was my goal to prevent players from filling everything with systems. I just wanted to make block count less important.

You're way better off of not doing it and just building a giant reactor on an entity and let the rest inherit power.

That's exactly what I was thinking about. Except that reactor isn't giant.

 

[Dire Venom]

Some very cool concepts here which I like :3 This is more how I originally envisioned heat as well
Thanks also to Lancake for giving an informative response as well.

 

[Haalon]

pattern

Found some time and made a list of obvious tiling patterns, including their approximate stats. There will be no exact values - only comparisons between this patterns, and there again will be no capacity elements - only active and cooling.

Row:Column
1:1
Checkerboard pattern - the worst power generation, the smallest heat generation. If we continue this tiling in 3rd dimension, i.e make a checkerboard cube - than it's inner elements wouldn't generate heat at all.

1:2
1*2 checkerboard pattern - has much better power generation, bigger heat generation. ~ All blocks have adjacency of 1. If we again will tile it in 3rd dimension - heat generation of inner elements will be noticeably reduced, but it won't be zero. It has some problems with fitting in odd sized rectangles.

1:3
Line pattern - almost all blocks have adjacency of 2. So, it's more-power efficient than previous ones, and generates not much more heat. Again, in 3d, heat generation per inner block drops. Actually, for all this patterns heat generation will drop if we will continue these patterns in 3rd dimension, so I wouldn't mention it any more. This one doesn't fit into even-sized reactors.

1:4
"Circle" pattern - again ~ all blocks have adjacency of 2, and there are more of them than in the previous one - so this one has better output. Inner blocks give the same amount of heat as in the previous one. Its only problems - this pattern requires reactor to be square-like to reach maximum efficiency, while other patterns don't depend on that. And this one has a lot of blocks on the edge, they don't receive proper cooling, thus increasing heat output (isn't this-pattern-only problem in 3d, though)

2:1
2*2 checkerboard pattern - has better power generation than line patterns in even-sized reactors, but worse in odd-sized ones. Has less power generation than circle pattern in all cases, but has smaller heat generation.

2:2
3*3 checkerboard pattern - things are getting hot here. Blocks with adjacency of 3 and 4 appear. Power and heat output rises greatly.

2:3
Same line pattern, but thicker - has almost the same power generation as previous one, and smaller, but still high heat generation. Almost all blocks have adjacency of 3.

2:4
Same circle pattern, but thicker - has some blocks with adjacency 2 and 4 in the corners, the rest has adjacency of 3. In some cases can be better at power output than the previous one, it depends on size, but it always has higher heat generation. Has the same problem as 1:4.

So, only pattern being close to an optimum is 1:4 - it's one the best simple patterns with medium power output so far. But others, with the exception of the first one, aren't much worse, and may have their uses in some modified variants. This is also only 2-dimensions and 2 elements, real picture is more deep.

And btw, you said nothing about the idea of power distribution. What do you guys think about bringing some on-flight adjustments (back) to the game?