Okay, so you have your glorious 100 ton spaceship bristling with weapons and armor. The thing is, you have just two choices of armor - meter-thick tissue paper or meter-thick cardboard. Both have considerable mass and provide relatively minimal protection. While they look shiny and are available in a variety of colors, they are entirely inadequate in terms of defense and will be blasted through by anyone armed with more than a peashooter.
So, where does that leave us? We have thick, unwieldy blocks of armor that provide minimal protection. What might we do about this, you ask.
Hulls, Plates, and Armor
The first portion of the solution would be to add in more types of armor and hull pieces with varying characteristics. If you can only afford a basic frame for your ship (providing minimal protection but extremely light and cheap), then you have that option. If you have slightly more money, you might coat that frame in a layer of light armor. With yet more, you would build that armor out of the current hull blocks. Moving up the scale, you would have tiers of hull blocks going in several directions: low mass, high protection, and a balance of both mass and protection. If you're making a dedicated fighter, you might want some kind of fancy, lightweight carbon-fiber frame. This would give decent protection, have very low mass, but probably be prohibitively expensive for new players. Now, if you have a capital ship and want actually effective armor you might want to go in the other direction - an ultradense, ultratough composite of depleted uranium, handwavium, and insanium. Very, very heavy and very, very, good at taking damage.
But what if I can't afford a capital ship made of the toughest blocks in the game, you may ask.
Simple! Have half-blocks. And maybe quarter-blocks. Maybe even sixteenth-blocks. Constructing your ship out of a light, cheap frame with a thin plating of armor would save considerably on credits and mass at the cost of reduced protection. And really, it doesn't make much sense for a twenty meter long mining ship to be covered in meter-thick armored hull blocks.
Anyway, this would allow you to build cheaper, lighter ships while still looking cool with the fancy new hull plating and giving your otherwise naked components some degree of protection without compromising speed or maneuverability.
Cheap, light frames would also allow skeletons of ships to be built for evaluation and testing during the design phase for minimal cost.
Balance to the Above
But antimatter cannons only destroy one block at a time! If you stacked dozens of thin plates together it would be OP!
So change the cannons. Add penetration. If they destroy one block they pass on part of any residual damage to the next block, perhaps creating an expanding cone of damage or creating a crater as they do so. This would make large-scale capital ship weapons far more effective against armor, which brings us to the next point.
Balancing Weapons and Defenses
Right. So you have a pair of gigantic, 2400-damage antimatter cannons as main guns. You shoot an unshielded ship with these things and what happens? A single block with 100 HP is sacrificed to stop your shot. Of course, you have a couple dozen shots coming right behind the first one because of the current system of an increasing rate of fire on progressively larger guns.
Now even in the current system, this is unbalanced and illogical. Generally speaking, larger guns fire higher-caliber, more powerful projectiles that take longer to reload or recharge. This would mean that a large, 800 block gun should fire more slowly and do more damage than a 2-block long noob gun.
So, we have half of it right. Yes, they do more damage. But they also fire faster. Now, common sense tells us that in the vast majority of cases this is incorrect. Realistically speaking, very powerful weapons have higher projectile mass and/or energy cost, higher recoil, release more heat during firing, and are generally incapable of sustained bombardment for any real length of time.
Now if we have the mechanic mentioned above allowing for splash damage and overpenetration, there is a way to easily balance antimatter cannons of all sizes and shapes.
Your 2400-damage gun would fire quite slowly but obliterate large sections of whatever it hit or penetrate deep into the hull of the target depending on the specific settings and layout of the weapon. A 2-block fighter weapon and/or noob gun would have a very high rate of fire but do a tiny amount of damage per shot. In a real engagement, this would mean that a capital ship fight would comprise of slow-firing salvoes with each shot capable of blowing apart vast chunks of armor or simply piercing right through the opposing ship. On a smaller scale, smaller weapons would be blasting away at a high rate of fire, sandpapering the opponent's armor into oblivion with sustained shooting.
"But this is OP! It would make armor even more useless!"
That's why I talked about modifying the armor mechanics earlier. You'd have different tiers of armor, both worse but mostly better than what we have now. You would also have the ability to craft all of these with the necessary materials and also create or buy plates of different thicknesses thinner than your average block. What this would do would be to allow those who can't afford heavy armor in terms of weight or cost would have an option besides leaving their core components exposed. There would also be extremely expensive and effective armor plating for all needs, allowing capital ships to have far tougher and heavier armor than a smaller ship, with high-end fighters having lightweight but still tough armor that allows them to keep their maneuverability and speed advantages. Larger ships would be able to support heavier armor due to the increased volume available for engines due to their size.
"But this is so OP! You can make 5 million credits in 10 minutes and buy 89124898wtfbbq of the best armor in the game! You could just spawn in your capital ships if you had the money and there would be an infinite amount of the best blocks in the game!"
Well, that brings us to our next topic.
Ship Construction
Right now, ship construction is as follows:
Buy parts for ship
Build ship
Fly ship
Save ship as blueprint
Go somewhere else/lose ship
Buy same ship from catalog, literally made out of credits
...Well this is obviously unbalanced because it lets you farm otherwise unavaliable materials. This would be doubly true with the introduction of rarer, better, more expensive parts. However, there is a pretty easy solution.
Require you to have the parts necessary for the construction of the ship on hand. The necessary components would be listed in the catalog.
And there you go, no more duplicating materials out of pure money. As bonus points, it'd stop those dickheads from spawning 9001 battlestar galactica derpships in 2,2,2 to lag the server and make them have to go buy or produce the materials first.
Random Other Stuff Like More Components and Manufacturing
So we have engines. We have antimatter cannons. We have missiles. We have shield generators. All of these are garden-variety components that can be bought at your friendly neighborhood shop for a fixed price. You can even make them in a factory if you want to.
Okay, toss that out the window. One type of each block is boring, unimaginative, and stifles creativity, functionality, and gameplay mechanics. If we had more, what would they be like?
Well, let's think about it. If we had, say, different varieties of engines, we would be able to further specialize our designs. You might choose TurboAntimatterInsaniUnobtanium, high powered, energy-hungry drives for a fighter or efficient but low-powered thrusters for mining ships. A larger ship may even have multiple kinds of engines: general-purpose, tough, efficient engines for normal use but powerful, energy-devouring auxiliary boosters for combat use.
Moving on to shields, we can have the same thing. The garden-variety, fast-recharge shields we already have access to, or stronger but much slower-recharging examples for another specialization. Of course, there should be more than two types to account for different play styles and specializations.
With weapons, we already see a little of this with the ability to tweak range, damage, fire rate, etc. But we can have more. Pulse guns. Beam cannons. Lasers. Miniguns. Etc.
Each would have their own balance of minimum effective size, rate of fire, range, damage, projectile speed, and accuracy. Yes, accuracy. We need that. Some have said that certain classes of weapons should have a hard limit, but I disagree. If people want to build a capital-class minigun then so be it. The short range and low individual damage would cause it to have difficulty with heavily-armored targets, but far more effective against lighter, faster ships due to its ridiculous rate of fire.
Going on to missiles, it would probably be wise to overhaul that system completely. Creating different configurations of missile launchers and separate reloading mechanisms and magazines would allow for different rates of fire and a system of modular launchers firing different types of missiles. Of course, these parts and missiles would all have variations and improved versions like the other parts mentioned.
Now, energy generation. At the moment we have the funky structure-sensitive.... things that, let's face it, are okay. Let's look at some other possibilities.
And so on and so forth. These different types would not be all by themselves, though. Like armor, different tiers could be bought or crafted with the best only available by manufacturing.
Now, what are the advantages of this system?
First of all, it would mean that a 200,000 mass death star would (a) be far harder to build and (b) not be invulnerable to higher-end but smaller ships. It would also allow for more creativity, more specialized designs, and prevent certain people from lagging servers with random ship spam. Further, it would make people have to think more when they build larger ships and also greatly increase the cost of making an effective capital ship. To make the best ships and components possible, one would have to have a dedicated manufacturing facility to build the necessary parts, as well as the resources necessary to feed it.
All in all, you get a more fleshed-out and interesting environment with more freedom of creativity and far more interesting ship design and combat.
This is not to say that noobs would be hopelessly lost and ineffective in combat. Creating a ship out of simple, standard-issue parts in the beginning would still be viable. One might even choose to stick with such cheap parts due to their low cost and, with friends, decide to zerg-rush enemies with much better equipment. Also, this system would not only be available to veteran players. A noob could still choose between the new varieties of parts, just not have access to the very best in the beginning. For that, one would have to work for.
Anyway, comments? Constructive criticism? Both are, of course, welcome.
So, where does that leave us? We have thick, unwieldy blocks of armor that provide minimal protection. What might we do about this, you ask.
Hulls, Plates, and Armor
The first portion of the solution would be to add in more types of armor and hull pieces with varying characteristics. If you can only afford a basic frame for your ship (providing minimal protection but extremely light and cheap), then you have that option. If you have slightly more money, you might coat that frame in a layer of light armor. With yet more, you would build that armor out of the current hull blocks. Moving up the scale, you would have tiers of hull blocks going in several directions: low mass, high protection, and a balance of both mass and protection. If you're making a dedicated fighter, you might want some kind of fancy, lightweight carbon-fiber frame. This would give decent protection, have very low mass, but probably be prohibitively expensive for new players. Now, if you have a capital ship and want actually effective armor you might want to go in the other direction - an ultradense, ultratough composite of depleted uranium, handwavium, and insanium. Very, very heavy and very, very, good at taking damage.
But what if I can't afford a capital ship made of the toughest blocks in the game, you may ask.
Simple! Have half-blocks. And maybe quarter-blocks. Maybe even sixteenth-blocks. Constructing your ship out of a light, cheap frame with a thin plating of armor would save considerably on credits and mass at the cost of reduced protection. And really, it doesn't make much sense for a twenty meter long mining ship to be covered in meter-thick armored hull blocks.
Anyway, this would allow you to build cheaper, lighter ships while still looking cool with the fancy new hull plating and giving your otherwise naked components some degree of protection without compromising speed or maneuverability.
Cheap, light frames would also allow skeletons of ships to be built for evaluation and testing during the design phase for minimal cost.
Balance to the Above
But antimatter cannons only destroy one block at a time! If you stacked dozens of thin plates together it would be OP!
So change the cannons. Add penetration. If they destroy one block they pass on part of any residual damage to the next block, perhaps creating an expanding cone of damage or creating a crater as they do so. This would make large-scale capital ship weapons far more effective against armor, which brings us to the next point.
Balancing Weapons and Defenses
Right. So you have a pair of gigantic, 2400-damage antimatter cannons as main guns. You shoot an unshielded ship with these things and what happens? A single block with 100 HP is sacrificed to stop your shot. Of course, you have a couple dozen shots coming right behind the first one because of the current system of an increasing rate of fire on progressively larger guns.
Now even in the current system, this is unbalanced and illogical. Generally speaking, larger guns fire higher-caliber, more powerful projectiles that take longer to reload or recharge. This would mean that a large, 800 block gun should fire more slowly and do more damage than a 2-block long noob gun.
So, we have half of it right. Yes, they do more damage. But they also fire faster. Now, common sense tells us that in the vast majority of cases this is incorrect. Realistically speaking, very powerful weapons have higher projectile mass and/or energy cost, higher recoil, release more heat during firing, and are generally incapable of sustained bombardment for any real length of time.
Now if we have the mechanic mentioned above allowing for splash damage and overpenetration, there is a way to easily balance antimatter cannons of all sizes and shapes.
Your 2400-damage gun would fire quite slowly but obliterate large sections of whatever it hit or penetrate deep into the hull of the target depending on the specific settings and layout of the weapon. A 2-block fighter weapon and/or noob gun would have a very high rate of fire but do a tiny amount of damage per shot. In a real engagement, this would mean that a capital ship fight would comprise of slow-firing salvoes with each shot capable of blowing apart vast chunks of armor or simply piercing right through the opposing ship. On a smaller scale, smaller weapons would be blasting away at a high rate of fire, sandpapering the opponent's armor into oblivion with sustained shooting.
"But this is OP! It would make armor even more useless!"
That's why I talked about modifying the armor mechanics earlier. You'd have different tiers of armor, both worse but mostly better than what we have now. You would also have the ability to craft all of these with the necessary materials and also create or buy plates of different thicknesses thinner than your average block. What this would do would be to allow those who can't afford heavy armor in terms of weight or cost would have an option besides leaving their core components exposed. There would also be extremely expensive and effective armor plating for all needs, allowing capital ships to have far tougher and heavier armor than a smaller ship, with high-end fighters having lightweight but still tough armor that allows them to keep their maneuverability and speed advantages. Larger ships would be able to support heavier armor due to the increased volume available for engines due to their size.
"But this is so OP! You can make 5 million credits in 10 minutes and buy 89124898wtfbbq of the best armor in the game! You could just spawn in your capital ships if you had the money and there would be an infinite amount of the best blocks in the game!"
Well, that brings us to our next topic.
Ship Construction
Right now, ship construction is as follows:
Buy parts for ship
Build ship
Fly ship
Save ship as blueprint
Go somewhere else/lose ship
Buy same ship from catalog, literally made out of credits
...Well this is obviously unbalanced because it lets you farm otherwise unavaliable materials. This would be doubly true with the introduction of rarer, better, more expensive parts. However, there is a pretty easy solution.
Require you to have the parts necessary for the construction of the ship on hand. The necessary components would be listed in the catalog.
And there you go, no more duplicating materials out of pure money. As bonus points, it'd stop those dickheads from spawning 9001 battlestar galactica derpships in 2,2,2 to lag the server and make them have to go buy or produce the materials first.
Random Other Stuff Like More Components and Manufacturing
So we have engines. We have antimatter cannons. We have missiles. We have shield generators. All of these are garden-variety components that can be bought at your friendly neighborhood shop for a fixed price. You can even make them in a factory if you want to.
Okay, toss that out the window. One type of each block is boring, unimaginative, and stifles creativity, functionality, and gameplay mechanics. If we had more, what would they be like?
Well, let's think about it. If we had, say, different varieties of engines, we would be able to further specialize our designs. You might choose TurboAntimatterInsaniUnobtanium, high powered, energy-hungry drives for a fighter or efficient but low-powered thrusters for mining ships. A larger ship may even have multiple kinds of engines: general-purpose, tough, efficient engines for normal use but powerful, energy-devouring auxiliary boosters for combat use.
Moving on to shields, we can have the same thing. The garden-variety, fast-recharge shields we already have access to, or stronger but much slower-recharging examples for another specialization. Of course, there should be more than two types to account for different play styles and specializations.
With weapons, we already see a little of this with the ability to tweak range, damage, fire rate, etc. But we can have more. Pulse guns. Beam cannons. Lasers. Miniguns. Etc.
Each would have their own balance of minimum effective size, rate of fire, range, damage, projectile speed, and accuracy. Yes, accuracy. We need that. Some have said that certain classes of weapons should have a hard limit, but I disagree. If people want to build a capital-class minigun then so be it. The short range and low individual damage would cause it to have difficulty with heavily-armored targets, but far more effective against lighter, faster ships due to its ridiculous rate of fire.
Going on to missiles, it would probably be wise to overhaul that system completely. Creating different configurations of missile launchers and separate reloading mechanisms and magazines would allow for different rates of fire and a system of modular launchers firing different types of missiles. Of course, these parts and missiles would all have variations and improved versions like the other parts mentioned.
Now, energy generation. At the moment we have the funky structure-sensitive.... things that, let's face it, are okay. Let's look at some other possibilities.
- High-Powered Energy Reactor - Very high energy density, therefore useful for smaller craft. Benefits from as many neighboring connections to additional HP reactors as possible, but can actually become unstable in large, connected numbers. This instability can be conquered by either having multiple small reactors or fewer, larger builds with specialized cooling systems.
- Low-Energy Block Reactor - Less powerful than our current reactor but benefits from being in cubes instead of weird-ass tetris things. Becomes more efficient in larger connected numbers and thus encourages the use of single, large power cores.
And so on and so forth. These different types would not be all by themselves, though. Like armor, different tiers could be bought or crafted with the best only available by manufacturing.
Now, what are the advantages of this system?
First of all, it would mean that a 200,000 mass death star would (a) be far harder to build and (b) not be invulnerable to higher-end but smaller ships. It would also allow for more creativity, more specialized designs, and prevent certain people from lagging servers with random ship spam. Further, it would make people have to think more when they build larger ships and also greatly increase the cost of making an effective capital ship. To make the best ships and components possible, one would have to have a dedicated manufacturing facility to build the necessary parts, as well as the resources necessary to feed it.
All in all, you get a more fleshed-out and interesting environment with more freedom of creativity and far more interesting ship design and combat.
This is not to say that noobs would be hopelessly lost and ineffective in combat. Creating a ship out of simple, standard-issue parts in the beginning would still be viable. One might even choose to stick with such cheap parts due to their low cost and, with friends, decide to zerg-rush enemies with much better equipment. Also, this system would not only be available to veteran players. A noob could still choose between the new varieties of parts, just not have access to the very best in the beginning. For that, one would have to work for.
Anyway, comments? Constructive criticism? Both are, of course, welcome.
