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If you don't like reading, turn away. There's a lot of text here.
I like StarMade; I really do! That said, I've found that at present the game is just not very fun. Some of that can be solved by creating other systems to force interaction, but a good bit of the things stopping the game from being fun are caused by the shipbuilding metagame itself.
In this thread, I'm going to outline the problems I'm observing, and provide some potential solutions. The solutions to problems I've observed are not mutually exclusive - in fact, my proposed solutions are specifically intended to be sampled "a la carte" such that things can be done to make the game, you know, fun.
I - Problem: Power Generation
Power generation and storage is one of those things that is ridiculous in this game, not because of how it was designed, but because of how it's utterly broken. Due to the way Power Generators work there is a "softcap" of 1,000,000 e/sec built into how much power you can recharge per second. The problem, is that this softcap - intended to place a practical limit on what you can do - is easily circumvented by simply docking a "ship" that produces power to the ship that you want to overpower.
As a result, you get everything else that I'm going to be complaining about, and making suggestions on how to fix in this thread: Planet-killer nukes, "needlessly"-supersized ships. Power is the piece that needs to be nailed down to even start to fix the shipbuilding metagame.
Proposed Solution I: Making the softcap a little harder
Ships that are docked to other ships should not contribute their power or power capacity to the ship they are docked to; they should be drawing from the ship they are docked to, as Turrets currently do.
Proposed Solution II: Power Density
Another thing that will help the builders of small ships produce credible threats to a larger-classed vessel, is to make the amount of power available matter. If you've got a 1m e/sec power plant on a Super-Dreadnought, it might make a bit more sense if the Dreadnought were actually using a bit more for things like propulsion, maintaining shields, maintaining charge on the warp drive, and powering all those Point Defense turrets that you need. Similarly, a dropship or fighter with a 1000 e/sec power plant isn't so encumbered, but then too it's also not supporting all those extra systems.
Proposed Solution III: Cut The Power!
One of the reasons it's a bad idea in the current metagame to build a small ship, is because they produce a reasonable amount of power for a small vessel. That said, the current EMP effect weapons are pointless against the super-dreadnoughts the game asks you to build, because their size means they can host more powerful generation systems. This is highly lopsided, and the first case I'm mentioning of many, where weapons are simply more useful against small ships than larger ones, period.
The EMP needs a serious scaling buff - a large ship needs to fear a "cable-cutter" build, and actively deploy its own interceptors and point-defense systems to prevent such a vessel from getting close. Sure small ships can be destroyed - but large ships need something to fear too! I suggest exponentially increasing the effect of EMP-affected projectiles, and not capping the energy drain at the 'normal' damage of the shot. Needless to say, such a shot would deal no actual damage to blocks, and for balance reasons shields would mitigate it. I want the game to enjoy competition, not become more of a bloodbath.
Speaking of shields...
II - Problem: Shield Regeneration
One positive change I've noticed in the most recent patch is that shield regeneration has taken a "slight" nerf. This is a great change to help combat the prevalence of large, over-shielded ships, and I thoroughly applaud it. The problem is, in combination with, and stemming from, the power problem above, the metagame discourages anything smaller than a dreadnought because these ships have the capacity for a shield that, even with nerfed regeneration rates, takes forever to bring down - and that's before you can start killing blocks on said supership.
Proposed Solution I: Here we go with tertiary effects again...
Just as the EMP effect isn't as useful as it could be period, the Ion effect needs a similar form of love. A shield-cutter ship is actually a viable build in small-ship combat (as far as that exists) in this game, and such a concept needs to extend to the big-ship game as well. Similarly to EMP, instead of maxing out effect to the damage of the weapon, instead it would help if the Ion effect exponentially scaled, at the cost of actual damage done - an Ion projectile that hits anything so durable as Glass would merely fizzle out.
Proposed Solution II: Placement Rules on Shield Generators
Getting briefly away from combat, one of the more interesting problems to come up in the game is how crews are useless and decorating your ship is punished by the game mechanics. Now, I'm no decoration-hippie or RPer, but they've got a point on this. After all, what's the point of conquering a whole enemy fleet without a nice place to view the aftermath of your fresh conquest, before your salvagers go to work?
Back on the combat topic, if the Ion suggestion above makes you squeamish...well, this one won't help much. I recommend that Shield blocks have placement rules similar to that of Power systems, and with all the same restrictions, resulting in a softcap of about 1m shields at max. That's all there is to that. That alone will probably help a great deal, actually, especially given the power drain that shield rechargers impose.
Proposed Solution III: The "Obvious" Rule Patch I
You thought I'd go about my merry way and forget about docking a ship whose sole purpose is to shoot a Shield Recharger beam at your ship, right? Sorry, you don't get so lucky. Since a docked ship shares shields with its parent ship now, the net result from such a setup should be null, and the placement rules in the suggestion above should limit what a small "shield generator ship" could do for the parent anyhow.
The spirit of this, though, isn't to be a jerk to people who like this - it's also to give support/repair ships utility. One of the cool things about this game is that these "support" systems exist. Having to have fighters and other ships cover a "healer" ship that keeps them in the fight is a great way to increase a force's time to defeat and cater to the "healer" play style in general. Something to think about.
III - Problem: Your Weapons (Nearly) All Suck.
This one I've said before, but it bears repeating: Missiles are the King of Weapons in this game, not because they're awesome (you can shoot down missiles, they have a long reload) but because nothing else is even half as useful. My suggestions will outline specific systems' problems, and how you can solve them.
I: Cannons suck because they're useless.
Cannons deal 5 damager per module in a group on a 1sec cooldown, without any other modifiers. While they don't eat (much) power, they also can't do anything about the absurd shield pools in the current metagame. The best combination - Overdriven Pulse Cannon - is power intensive to rival nukes, but not nearly as powerful, and only affects a single block anyways. (I'm ignoring machine gun cannons, because this metagame emphasizes per-shot damage over literally everything else. Fire rate loses you fights - it doesn't even act as suppressing fire.)
Suggestion: Just Buff 'Em.
Seriously, they're useless as they are. Increase the damage scaling as the number of modules in the group increases to make these a more viable alternative to missiles.
This is a case of "Why don't you just use nukes instead?" - Nukes (Overdriven Pulse Missiles) have a prohibitively long cooldown, much better per-shot damage, and have the added bonus of applying that damage in a huge spherical radius.
Suggestion: Charge Beam
If you're dead-set on never buffing the Cannon, fine. Why not then allow the player to charge the shot? Due to the current metagame's use of slowly-reloading missiles, it's not like we players have a problem with sacrificing speed for power. In fact, choosing between a charge and a straight shot might provide some interesting opportunities for counter-play. Just a thought.
Suggestion: Suppression Effect
This one can manifest in a variety of ways, but as this game is a shooter, it would make sense that being too close to bullets is a very bad thing. While Schine is specifically avoiding graphics-intensive things (despite the game being inoperable on old rigs, but that's another topic altogether), I think one exception to make is that if a bullet passes too close to a camera that there should be an Interface screw of some sort, requiring that the player not be chillin' in the void with bullets in their face. That's just common sense.
II: Beams suck because they're useless and too short-ranged.
Beams deal less damage on their own than Cannons, and have a 500m range (as opposed to the ?2000m - the Wiki doesn't say) range of the Cannon - but it eats more power! Sounds like a good deal to me.
The reason they're in the game at all is as a support system. This is the first time you're going to see that statement, but not the last.
Special recognition goes to the Beam + Missile System combination (Shotgun Beam). The Official Wiki even calls this a "Troll Weapon" that is useless. I have to ask: What the f***, Schine!?
Suggestion: Buff these harder
If you're going to have a close quarters ship weapon, make it at least useful for close quarters. Start by making the weapon the most economical in the game (like a sword - swords don't run out of ammo, unless they break.) The high energy cost already justifies this; other than scaling up one number, you don't have to do a lot to make people take a second look at short-range beam weapons.
Suggestion: Make beams be able to destroy missiles
This is probably the big one. These instantly fire and don't require leading a target. Due to the short range, these are the ideal point defense weapon. The downside of this suggestion, is it would effectively make missiles useless, unless there were some turn speed limits on turrets.
III: Damage Pulse needs to just be a secondary system, it's that awful.
Damage Pulse creates an expanding bubble of damaging force. I've noted before that if Damage Beam is melee range, then Damage Pulse is ships punching each other in the face.
The problem is, for all the same reasons as Damage Beam, but taken up to eleven, this system shouldn't even be in the game as a primary weapon. Damage Pulses have higher energy requirements than beams, have an even shorter range, making them useless in general, and the Wiki has no data about their damage, because no one uses them, ever. That's a red flag.
Even worse, one of it's combinations, Damage Pulse + Missile, is completely broken.
Suggestion: Make Damage Pulse able to destroy missiles
This is even more broken than the idea of making Damage Beam the go-to point-defense weapon, but at least it'd have a justification to be in the game.
Suggestion: Rework Damage Pulse into a purely defensive system
Here's the suggestion I've waited all post to make, that I've sat on forever.
As it is, Damage Pulse already is most useful in a defensive role to prevent boarders (as rare as that is; it's better to just "Core Drill" a ship you want to take.) Why not, instead of using it as a weapon, make it an active defensive system that - when triggered - deflects anything nearby?
This has an unusual benefit - it allows for "tanking" ships to be built, without the shields-spam that we see in the current metagame. The energy use of the Defensive Pulse would be huge, enough to warrant a tank ship requiring half-decent maneuverability and point-defense systems to protect itself. Still, this opens up a type of shipbuilding that suits that overly-defensive personality - one I've been known to enjoy in the past, even!
IV: Missiles aren't great, they just suck less than everything else.
You thought I'd let missiles get away scot-free because they're the go-to weapon in the game, and by default "OK"!? That means you haven't read the first two sections of this post.
Seriously, missiles are the kings of weapons in the current metagame, but due to how we see ships utilizing them, we can tell instantly there's problems with Missiles too.
First, is that they're by and far the most accurate weapon (with Damage Pulse or Beam as the Secondary), with by and far the least penalties for using. A 15s+ cooldown and 90% of your energy depleted means little if your power system regenerates you to full within a second (other than a very small and hard-to-exploit window to slightly damage a ship's shields.) The energy cost of missiles is in my opinion the most well-balanced energy cost in the game, given their utility; the Power Generation model is what breaks this the worst.
Next - the "ability to shoot down missiles" doesn't mean much when everyone uses missiles. This much-touted weakness isn't a weakness when all the other weapons that could theoretically be a deterrent to missile-spam, aren't. This weakness is at once the most useful, and least-well-used aspect of the weapon.
Suggestion: Implement at least one of my other suggestions
If I've been railing against missiles a lot, there's a reason - they're a semi-balanced weapon, in a work with no other balance to speak of. Just about anything else I've said in this post will help to bring missiles under control and encourage exploration of other weapon systems.
Suggestion: Remote Detonation
So, this would require another thing be added to the game, but this is another one I've been waiting on. Those of you who read The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund, remember the "Keyes Loop" where he accelerates, fires a Shiva nuclear warhead backwards, does a bunch of maneuvers, with the end result being that the Shiva rear-ends the Covenant ship, allowing his ship a chance to use the MAC guns to gut the thing? That was pretty hardcore.
Remote Detonation would require that missiles move more slowly, which I believe is a server configuration setting (if it's not...why!?) While the game is a ship-based shooter, you have a chance to slow down the combat and make it more like high-speed chess with warheads and lasers by allowing for the ability to lure enemies into a well planned trap. This will make for memorable moments that many will try - and fail - to reproduce.
Conclusion
Normally, I'd try to sum it up in a lighter way, but let's not mince words - this game is just broken. The shipbuilding metagame is a complete cluster-screw. Among the other systematic reasons no one does PvP, or ever ever leaves ships undocked, is because some jerk is going to come along in a superdreadnought and nuke whatever isn't docked down.
I've provided helpful suggestions on ways to bring this into balance. Even one will be of value in making this game more interesting, because between super-ships being The Only Way To Go™, and weapons that aren't missiles being useless...well, there's not really much of an actual game left when you get beyond the shipbuilding. And, that's sad, because there's a lot to love about this game.
It just needs a little push to be more fun. I've given you some ways. Have I missed a spot?
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