AMC Damage Rework (Fix shield and hull problem)

[Jolly Roger]

Basically, I think the hull kill rate is pretty good for AMC and don\'t find it as overpowered, but shields are weak. We should totally fight on a server with the ship I built, I tried it with someone on my computer, and it was kind of slow, so I don\'t think my computer can support this.



It takes 8 seconds to deplete the shields on this ship wiht 48 AMCs at 400, but the rest of the 5 minutes I spend trying to hit the core.

I just think the balance is off. Don\'t you think that is a little bit ridiculous?



let\'s say we nerf the amcs to half the power. It takes 16 seconds to deplete the shields (you can hit it anywhere), and i spend an exponentially higher 20 minutes to kill it since it is difficult to hit the same spot. Isn\'t that even more off?



Do you see what i\'m saying now?

 

[Terramort]

It takes 50,000 shields to get 1,094,943.70 capacity, and it takes under 14 seconds for 5,000 AMCs in arrays of 250 (20 arrays) to take those out. Once those shields are down, those 5,000 AMCs will destroy 199 Hardened Hull blocks PER SECOND.


This is far too overpowered. There is no reason that a ships only REAL defense falls in under 14 seconds to a 3rd of the ships defensive power. What kind of capital ships do you think we are using? The majority of the time, if a player is attacked, they literally do not have time to get into their ship before it is destroyed. That... how is that even fun to you?




For people who say antimatter canons are too strong, I made my ship a mob and fought it with the same ship. I just did it, took me 5 minutes to kill it. My ship has 48 AMC canons doing 400 damage each. Think about how long this would take if AMCs were nerfed. Mind you your ships will still be messed up and you will still have to fix it. It would just take forever to kill one ship.



Seriously just up the shields!!! If your ship almost looks like this nobody is going to want to repair it anyway! just load a new one!! Who cares if it gets destroyed after shileds are down!


What you are essentially saying is, \"Ships get torn up after shields fall so bad, the ship is essentially lost after the shields are destroyed.\" Well... it seems to me the solution isn\'t to just buff shields so weapons get stronger, but change something so this doesn\'t happen. Have Reinforced Hull spread 90% of incoming damage to all connected Reinforced Hulls and 1 layer of regular hull, so you can actually build layers of armor that doesn\'t lose individual blocks, but actually acts like a real bulkhead, absorbing a fair amount of damage before failing. With slowed AMC fire rate (i.e. Inverse the curve of adding more AMCs vs. fire rate), you can actually have a capital ship battle that doesn\'t just end in 30 seconds.


Because of diminishing returns, 400 separate antimatter canons is much more powerful than 400 networked ones in dps. How stupid would it look to have a ship with 400 separate antimatter canons? Is that what you want people to build instead? Something that fires and looks stupid so that hulls and shields are more effective when canons that look cool when fired?


That\'s already how it works. Go look at the DPS stats in some of the other threads. The most powerful warships are actually comprised of thousands upon thousands of checkerboarded AMC cannons that can drop 10mil shields in 5sec or less (assuming you survive the lag). So, instead of just doing the same old \"more shields! No, less shields!\" argument, just add some damage absorption to the shields. Walla. Players no longer want to spam little turrets, as their damage will be nulled by big ships, then add slowed tracking speed for larger turrets, and big turrets will no longer be able to just... mow down everything in sight.

 

[Jolly Roger]

400 damage anti matter canons should burn through hulls. Shields should take more damage so it doesn\'t blow up before you get in it when it is attacked. Actually go try and fight in a big ship with a lot of blocks before telling me AMC is overpowered.

It takes an additional 3 seconds to burn through the hull after shields are gone on the ship when it is a static target that\'s a total of 11 seconds to make the core go when the ship is sitting still.

If you take down AMCs to half the damage, now it is less than 22 seconds because. before we were dealing with hardened hull taking 1 hit, and now only the hardened hull portion takes more than one hit. Any of the other stuff between that and the core, still takes 1 hit.



So in conclusion, to unsuccessfuly fix the situation where you get attacked suddenly, you want to spend 20 minutes killing a ship with someone actually in it and fighting back, with 16 seconds spent on shields, and this makes perfect sense, instead of actually making the shields do something..

 

[Terramort]

Yes. When using ships that are nearly half a kilometer in length, I would enjoy actually having a space battle, instead of \"ha ha ha I shot you first!\" Seriously, where is the fun in that? I would also like to see the acceleration TREMENDOUSLY reduced as ships reach larger sizes. That\'s another large part of the problem, is there is exactly 0 reason to use a smaller ship, as with enough thrusters, you are magically able to accelerate/stop on a dime. Turning also needs to slowed down very, very much, so cap ships are not the \"lol gotcha\" things they are, but instead actual mobile bases, and the real fun is from going in your personal craft as your capship backs you up with it\'s big guns. There\'s no reason capships should kill each in less than 20 seconds (which I have seen and have had happened) - right now, the WHOLE game is pointing more, better aligned AMCs faster than your opponent, with 0 regard to how a ship is actually built.

 

[Jolly Roger]

Hey Terramont, I think ship design does matter with the AMCs right now. I just fought the much bigger ship with this smaller one that is about 1/8 its size.After 5 minutes it\'s still alive. The other ship is my dreadnought with the 48 antimatter canons with 400 damage each. This is why I don\'t think Antimatter canons need to be nerfed. It takes a lot to kill even a medium sized ship with 48 400 damage AMCs right now. What is it going to be like with half the damage?

You have seen cap ships kill each other in 20 seconds? They must have not been built too well, othewise they\'d look like this before one got killed. EIther that or they were not moving as it would take much longer if that was the case.



The shileds on this ship lasted about 8 hits. The fight has been 5 minutes? I\'m not shitting you guys. Why do shields get depleted so quickly, and then it takes forever to kill a ship? How do you not see that shields should be increased?

 

[Jolly Roger]

AMCs too powerful? Really guys? 48 of them at 400 damage Can\'t even kill this ship in 5 minutes? It\'s not like the 376961 shields did anything to prevent it those were gone in a few seconds.



Instead of talking about how the AMC is overpowered and talking about how it looks on paper, could you please actually build a ship and try fighting with it first and see what the bottleneck is.

This destroyer has 4 antimatter canons on board 2 do 900+ damage and 2 do 400+ damage. Guess what, the other ship is alive and kicking after 5 minutes of being shot at. If AMCs were so overpowered, why is it still alive? Oh, and yes the shields on it got depleted quickly as well. Seconds.

 

[Terramort]

I\'m not talking a 20 seconds until core overheating, I mean 20 seconds until the ship is beyond repair. Look at that ship. There\'s no way anyone would want to repair that thing. Just faster to buy a new one from the catalouge. Even just a few seconds exposed to mass AMC fire means that your ship is pretty much destined for the scrapyard. I\'m not suggesting a total loss of DPS, but instead a changing of how damage is dealt. When using giant cannons over 20 meters long, it should high damage rounds that have a small AoE, not just shoot more rounds faster.

Capships should also have a mere fraction of their current acceleration/braking/turning capabilities as well. Go play any game based in space with space combat, and find the one where capships move the same rate as the fighters, fall to each other\'s shields in 20 seconds, and look a cored apple everytime a fight is over. Or the movie. Or the book series. Or even a real-life naval battle, from which most space-themed battles/fights or based from.

 

[Jolly Roger]

I think the turning is already pretty slow as it is. But doesn\'t it also makes sense that bigger engines cause more acceleration?



I do agree that this repair issue is what is most annoying. There is no way I would want to repair that even after the first 5 seconds of the shield being down.

 

[DracoNB]

Are you using Turrets to attack or manual arrays? I can\'t see how the damage could be that spread over the ship with how fast both the attacks are, and the speed of them. With only 4 250 AMCs I was able to drill through 6 layers of HH and 31 layers of innards to get to the ship core. With those same 4 speced to do 0% damage and 49% in distance (didn\'t want to modify speed / recharge), it was left with 43 something damage which is the lowest I could get it, it took 13 seconds to get to the core.



AMCs should not be the core killers is what I\'m trying to get at, Missiles should fill that purpose and AMCs should be for taking out shields.



I don\'t want to rebuild a ship that size just to test this, but if you provide me with a link I\'d be more than happy to.



Also from your screenshot it looks like your max power is only 200,000 (20,000?)? That might not be enough to allow all of your weapons to actually be firing 100% of the time, since they take 1.3 million per second (yes I realize your recharge is enough, but if it hasn\'t recharged by the time the next weapon needs power it won\'t fire).

 

[Jolly Roger]

No the turrets are kind of just for fun right now, they really barely do anything. All 4 together can kill an Isanth-VI, but it takes some time. The power is 20000 this smaller ship has no power storage. New it is 969,690 power regen. It is just enough power for it to fire all the time and use its engines. The \"not enough power for weapons\" does flash, but I don\'t see any difference in performance. Maybe there is a slight difference?



I\'m not sure how to get a ship blueprint uploaded do you know how?

 

[DracoNB]

Use a filesharing site (mega, mediafire), or dropbox / drive / skydrive / cloud / whatever

 

[Jolly Roger]

I figured it out and just uploaded to the website. Here are the links:



Dreadnought (bigger): http://star-made.org/sites/default/files/apiupload/Dreadnought_102387.sment

ARES (smaller): http://star-made.org/sites/default/files/apiupload/ARES_102387.sment



You can also sort by newest posted and they will be the first 2 that show up.



What i did was to buy one ship for myself and get in it,

Then hit \'enter\' and type \'Spawn_mobs_line Dreadnought -1 1\'

to spawn the enemy dreadnought.

 

[DracoNB]

Ok I did some testing with the dreadnaught (as the other had 4 cannons, 2 were much higher than 400 damage each), took about 18-20 seconds to get to the core (hard to tell which core I popped first) when it was stationary and I was a ways out moving around and firing directly at the front (longest route to core).



I also did some testing against my dummy ship (31 blocks of water with 6 layers of hull in front) to get a \"gel mold\" of the damage done to internal systems.

A single shot (one click) went 28 blocks deep through a single hull block spot in front, so 6 layers of hull and another 28 deep, plus some random blocks here and there on the inside destroyed (cannons converge on the front hull and keep going at that angle once the first shots pierce through.



Firing for about one second (under most likely) it went 68 blocks deep into the test ship (made it go to 100 layers of water) with about 4-6 block wide hole for most of it, and 10 wide at the front hull which tapered down to 6 until about 30 blocks in and then 4 until about 65 blocks where it went down to 2 wide/tall



Water has the same HP / armor (100 / 0) as all other internal parts, so its a great test since its semi transparent and shows as \"cloudy\" for removed and damaged blocks



I did try fighting the AI, but because they do their stupid bug out and flip all around like a fish out of water, it was impossible to get a good test from it, and thats probably why your ships look like they do, when they twitch like that (which players can\'t) the shots go all over the place. Also the servers have issues keeping up with all of the shots (almost 500 per second per ship, plus the turrets) so the damage is less than it should be once optimized and all of the guns actually fire correctly

 

[Jolly Roger]

Yeah, maybe it will be easier to kill AI when they stop twitching.

On the Destroyer I was in, that was damage done to my ship by the AI, and of course no twitching.

 

[mrsinister]

the only thing that needs fixing is the speed / reload. The damage is ok, may need tweaking but, the problem is the huge ginormous cannons fire like an uzi(and thats with everything but the damage set to 0 %) and small fighter ships that have like 3 blocks of AMC fire insanely slow. the smaller the block the faster it needs to fire, and the more blocks the slower.

 

[DracoNB]

The damage is ok, may need tweaking but, the problem is the huge ginormous cannons fire like an uzi(and thats with everything but the damage set to 0 %)


That isn\'t possible, unless you aren\'t reassigning those points into damage and just letting them auto assign back to their values (and 1/4 going into damage as well)

 

[Visitor]

Both shields and AMC are currently a bit too strong in comparison with hull. At the same time, it\'s plain too easy to make huge shield and AMC cannon batteries, which thing power demand is not scaling well with effectiveness - one shield generator block is enough to withstand prolonged assault of one, two blocks of AMC for longer period of time which is bad, though the power of AMC raises too quickly and like OP said, in case of bigger ships AMC can destroy everything.

No matter the situation, hull is horrible paper mache - reinforced or not. Only in case of small ships it\'s actually a decent defence (mass 10 and less), but still protecting the ship only where it\'s mounted, unlike shields which have the advantage of protecting the whole ship, no matter where it is hit.

 

[Dragleones]

I think the design of the AMCs is the problem. It has really low starting stats and scales high making fighters and turrets way to strong while big ships with big arrays are getting ridiculous effective. Just raising the starting stats and lowering the scaling would result in big ships building hundreds of seperated AMCs which would result in massive lags etc.
Nerfing AMCs in general (1/10 of its dmg) would balance big arrays but destroy fighters and turrets even more.

To make the guns of fighters and turrets stronger while nerfing the arrays of big ships there should be different weapons. (Already wrote this in the fighting gigantism thread


1. Pulselaser
It has high initial damage (low scaling) and a rapid reloading speed (cap around 100/150), but suffers under its low range (cap 100-200) [not completly sure what effect the speed has to the balancing so i\'ll leave it out]. Imho fighters had always the problem that their weapons weren\'t strong enough to actually do dmg in dogfights. Of course u could use them on bigger ships too but it would be almost impossible for big ships to maneuver in a position to do dmg in an effective way. Small turrets with Pulselasers would be good anti-fighter defense turrets, which are vulnerable to longer range weapons though. This weapon is not intended to do serious damage to bigger ships.



2. Antimatter canon

Medium initial damage (medium scaling), medium reloading (cap around 200) and medium range (cap 500-700) would make it a balanced weapon for medium sized ships to fight each other since they have a decent range and can disable shields at a decent speed.

3. Heavy Laser canon

Low initial damage (high scaling), low reloading (cap around 500) , high range (cap 1500-2000(or even more)), low speed and even a small splash radius would make this weapon good for big ships to fight other even bigger ships. It would be perfect at disabling huge amounts of shields and even be able to do some hull damage with its splash radius. Though they are terrible at hitting smaller faster and more maneuverable targets.

Note: The numbers are just first thoughts and are far away from being accurate numbers for the balancing of these weapons

With these changes shields could be even buffed again on bigger ships to prevent making pulselasers effective as antifighter-weapons and anticapital-weapons. By adding weapons for fighter-sized ships with shieldpiercing bombers would have a use.Though, shieldpiercing should be only implemented if there is finally a way to repair or reset the ship to the blueprint since replacing the blocks manually is way too time-consuming.

Torpedos

Similar to the Pulselaser these weapons would be tracking missiles but with a low range (cap around 300m), high initil damage, low speed and a decent explosive radius while they completly ignore shields. With this weapons bombers would actually be a thread to capital ships.

 

[Archer6621]

let\'s say we nerf the amcs to half the power. It takes 16 seconds to deplete the shields (you can hit it anywhere), and i spend an exponentially higher 20 minutes to kill it since it is difficult to hit the same spot. Isn\'t that even more off?


Makes 0 sense, because AMCs all point to the same target/block, making them destroy 1 block at a time anyway, unless different projectile speeds are involved.

You would still spend 5 minutes to reach the core, and even less if you hit the correct spots, because the core is directly located at the nav-point marker... So you are just trying to prove an invalid point, with complicated terms like \"exponential\" and all.

Even with half the power (you don\'t say what power, it could be reload speed or damage), your cannons would do 200hp each, 48x200=9.6k damage per shot, that\'s more than enough to destroy a single block of any kind (perhaps with the exception of the faction block) in one shot. Ultimately, it would be a matter of drilling to the core, while evading turret fire.

 

[LazerusKI]

the balance between rockets and AMCs is broken in my opinion.

my ship has 120 AMC in 100 length, dealing 253 damage per shot, so around 30000 per hit for 12000 cannons.My ship also has 80000 Shield blocks (50% finished, 160k are planned), its around 1,5 Million Shield, it would take a while for my ship to eat through my shield.
Yesterday i build a d1000 rocket with 60000 blocks...only around 750 damage per rocket and 50 radius, but 60k blocks for this, if i can reach a better effect with 120x100 AMCs build in a circle pattern? No thanks.