After playing StarMade for a good 2 weeks, and lurking the forums most of that time, the weak points of StarMade's combat system have become fairly clear. I think I may have some ideas to help alleviate these problems, while at the same time making ship construction even more creative and fun. All 3 of the biggest problems (capital ship vs. frigate shields, AMC lag/big ship lag, uselessness of armor/massive missile damage, and gigantism) can solved by some slight tweaking to current mechanics, as well as the addition of one new mechanic.
First, Armor. It is currently near-useless against any kind of attack, and it's only advantage over building a ship out of moonrocks is it has a 10th of the mass. Have Reinforced Hull spread 90% of it's incoming damage to all other connected Reinforced Hulls, as well as an regular Hull directly touching Reinforced Hull. Once a Reinforced Hull block reaches 20%, it quits sharing damage. This will encourage players to have realistic bulkheads to weather damage in key locations, much like today's naval ships. Have missile deal their damage only to blocks in the blast radius that are also touching open air. The will be much more realistically, as their blast force will be greatly reduced against a full health, flat bulkhead, but will still do a very large amount of damage to blocks on a piece of armor that is nearly dead. This will also help prevent "drill for the core!" strategies, as it may become more viable to pick off the much-weaker turrets, and will also prevent smaller ships from being instantly destroyed.
Second, AMC Cannons. They shouldn't get bigger, deal more damage, shoot faster, and go farther just for having more stuffed into a single cannon. I propose adding one more option to the output for AMCs, as well as changing how their reload speed works. If you have 2 or more AMCs flush with each other at the output, grant the laser a greatly reduced fire rate, a reduced projectile speed, roughly 1.9x attack, as well as minimal splash damage and a roughly 2.1x higher power draw (the advantage being increased damage vs. bulkheads, via splash+spread damage) . Also greatly reduce the +reload speed from adding more AMCs in general, having each subsequent AMC grant less +reload than the block before it – even to the point of decreasing the fire-rate (so the largest cannons will have a very slow fire rate, but deal a massive ball of high damage that has extreme range+projectile speed). Also, add a tracking speed to turrets, based off the mass of the overall turret. This will work minimize DPS the larger the AMC cannons become, as well as making less and less effective against smaller ships as the turret grows in size.
Third, Shields. Add a “damage soak” mechanic based on the number of shield blocks in a ship. If each shield block adds a small of amount of damage prevention against each shot (I’d suggest a hard number vs. a %, as this will be a huge deterrent to metagaming players who spam single-shot checker boarded MAX-DPS cannons that generate massive lag), shields would become useful again. I’m not sure what number for prevention would be good right now, but defiantly something that favors small amounts of shield blocks over mass shield blocks. Maybe 10 for the first 1, 1 for the next 10, .1 for the next 100, .01 for the next 1000, and so on. This way, a small ship with 111 shield blocks will have 30 damage from every shot reduced, while a Titan with a whopping 1.1mil shield blocks will only resist 70 dmg/shot. Again, the idea being to stack the odds in the favor of the small fighter, as now turrets will have both a harder time hitting the fighter with high damage rounds, and the fighter will much greater resistance to smaller, faster turrets.
The final mechanic I suggest adding is reduced maximum speed+acceleration for capital ships, then adding some sort of warp-drive. This will greatly help to deter players from just cruising around in their 2 second 0-to-100kmh Titan, decreasing server stress. Add a rare resource that is both expensive and can’t normally be found in shops normally that works as fuel (or modify one of the current ones), to prevent players from abusing capital ship warp-advantage too much, and have it exponentially increase based on ship mass, and linearly decreased based on the volume+mass of warp-drive cubes.
Hopefully, these 4 changes will help to a.) Reduce capital ship wieldeness to only be usefully in large battles, as fighters will have every mobility advantage. b.) Increase creativity+fun in ship design by incorporating realistic armor. c.) Greatly reduce server lag by slowing down AMCs, reducing usefulness of spammed AMCs vs. single, large AMCs, and reduce the amount of people cruising in capital ships. d.) Reduce the current state of the OP missile, without destroying everything the missile is about (although, I do suggest they follow the same pattern as the AMCs, so to destroy huge chunks, you’ll need a 5x5 cannon that fires fairly slow, but does incredible damage to bulkheads)
First, Armor. It is currently near-useless against any kind of attack, and it's only advantage over building a ship out of moonrocks is it has a 10th of the mass. Have Reinforced Hull spread 90% of it's incoming damage to all other connected Reinforced Hulls, as well as an regular Hull directly touching Reinforced Hull. Once a Reinforced Hull block reaches 20%, it quits sharing damage. This will encourage players to have realistic bulkheads to weather damage in key locations, much like today's naval ships. Have missile deal their damage only to blocks in the blast radius that are also touching open air. The will be much more realistically, as their blast force will be greatly reduced against a full health, flat bulkhead, but will still do a very large amount of damage to blocks on a piece of armor that is nearly dead. This will also help prevent "drill for the core!" strategies, as it may become more viable to pick off the much-weaker turrets, and will also prevent smaller ships from being instantly destroyed.
Second, AMC Cannons. They shouldn't get bigger, deal more damage, shoot faster, and go farther just for having more stuffed into a single cannon. I propose adding one more option to the output for AMCs, as well as changing how their reload speed works. If you have 2 or more AMCs flush with each other at the output, grant the laser a greatly reduced fire rate, a reduced projectile speed, roughly 1.9x attack, as well as minimal splash damage and a roughly 2.1x higher power draw (the advantage being increased damage vs. bulkheads, via splash+spread damage) . Also greatly reduce the +reload speed from adding more AMCs in general, having each subsequent AMC grant less +reload than the block before it – even to the point of decreasing the fire-rate (so the largest cannons will have a very slow fire rate, but deal a massive ball of high damage that has extreme range+projectile speed). Also, add a tracking speed to turrets, based off the mass of the overall turret. This will work minimize DPS the larger the AMC cannons become, as well as making less and less effective against smaller ships as the turret grows in size.
Third, Shields. Add a “damage soak” mechanic based on the number of shield blocks in a ship. If each shield block adds a small of amount of damage prevention against each shot (I’d suggest a hard number vs. a %, as this will be a huge deterrent to metagaming players who spam single-shot checker boarded MAX-DPS cannons that generate massive lag), shields would become useful again. I’m not sure what number for prevention would be good right now, but defiantly something that favors small amounts of shield blocks over mass shield blocks. Maybe 10 for the first 1, 1 for the next 10, .1 for the next 100, .01 for the next 1000, and so on. This way, a small ship with 111 shield blocks will have 30 damage from every shot reduced, while a Titan with a whopping 1.1mil shield blocks will only resist 70 dmg/shot. Again, the idea being to stack the odds in the favor of the small fighter, as now turrets will have both a harder time hitting the fighter with high damage rounds, and the fighter will much greater resistance to smaller, faster turrets.
The final mechanic I suggest adding is reduced maximum speed+acceleration for capital ships, then adding some sort of warp-drive. This will greatly help to deter players from just cruising around in their 2 second 0-to-100kmh Titan, decreasing server stress. Add a rare resource that is both expensive and can’t normally be found in shops normally that works as fuel (or modify one of the current ones), to prevent players from abusing capital ship warp-advantage too much, and have it exponentially increase based on ship mass, and linearly decreased based on the volume+mass of warp-drive cubes.
Hopefully, these 4 changes will help to a.) Reduce capital ship wieldeness to only be usefully in large battles, as fighters will have every mobility advantage. b.) Increase creativity+fun in ship design by incorporating realistic armor. c.) Greatly reduce server lag by slowing down AMCs, reducing usefulness of spammed AMCs vs. single, large AMCs, and reduce the amount of people cruising in capital ships. d.) Reduce the current state of the OP missile, without destroying everything the missile is about (although, I do suggest they follow the same pattern as the AMCs, so to destroy huge chunks, you’ll need a 5x5 cannon that fires fairly slow, but does incredible damage to bulkheads)
