Balance induced problems and possible solutions

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    • Legacy Citizen
    *placeholder*



    Ps: i got hundreds of ideas if you like my approach leave me some comments and i will post more.
     
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    • Legacy Citizen
    Good Evening my name is Dr_Dac and i recently stumbled upon this little jewel of a game and instantly dumped a complete weekend into it. While playing i encountered a few problems, some balance induced, some more "buglike".

    First of all one of the biggest problems at the moment is the difference between an astetic ship and a fight cube. The working of energy generation and shield generation call for some really tight packed cubes full of blocks in specific patterns for maximum output. Heck who doesn't want more for his investments. The recent shield nerf and the matters resulting from it gave me some headache.

    1.Problem Shields why are people so fixated on shields, well simple answer to complex problem, because hull does not do its job. The shield goes down and the hull is gone in a matter of miliseconds. So what options do we have? First go back to pre nerf or rework it comepletely. The old version had its own problems but the new one created a few more. So what could we do to rebalance shields and make hull worthwhile again?

    Split the Shield Block in two, one does capacity one regeneration. The more regeneration blocks a ship or station hast the more damage(in a single hit) has to be dealt to it to trigger a regeneration delay. In effect protecting big capital ships and Starbases against abuse of the regeneration delay. This way an effective constructed ship could have enough shield capacity to engage other ships and on the other hand the enemy would have to do a certain amount of DPS to break through the regeneration or hit hard enough to trigger delay. An easy way to balance it would be to tie the cap to the mass of a ship. The heavyer and immobile the ship gets the more it has to rely on shields and plating to survive.

    Improve hull. The system to better hull already is implemented create a block and link it with hull segements(like a docking module is linked with docking enhacers. The maximum number of blocks connected to one of these "hull augmentors" would increase the armor of the blocks in the setup and combine their HP to a single shield. Thus creating armor plates. To make it even better you could add a regenerator block, that uses nanites to heal the ship, but like shields it costs energy and it has to be connected to the "hull augmentors". By linking all the augmentors with "nanite" blocks the individual augmentor would receive more %armor %HP and Bonus regneration. On the other hand if the attacker depletes this structural energy the individual blocks become vulnerable and take independant damage as before until the augementor starts up again.

    2.Problem Stations are pretty much fu**ed at the moment due to the new shield mechanics. So how can we buff space stations the "home" of a player to be more viable. Simple by creating a new type of generator and shield generator that are exclusive for space stations, the number of avaible generators should be linked to the mass of a station.

    3.Problem Docking and docking orientation. At the moment a docked turret/ship prevents the carrier ship to dock itself. Also a docked ship does not contribute its power and shield to the carrier. But is individually shielded. Also a docking module automatically aligns the docked turret or ship, making it hard to build something like broadside cannons for big ships.

    We should make a distinction between Ship and turret docking. A ship docked should provide its whole energy and shield into a shared pool with the carrier. In definition the docking module should be for inactive ships making it impossible to have active AI units on board. The Turret being protected by the carrier shields makes it a little overpowered, also an AI controlled fighter should count under turret docking, it is just a mobile version. So turret docking should have independant shield as before as price for their activity. The orientation problem calls for a new block, by adding it to the line of docking enhancers and linking it to the docking module it canges the default position a core takes upon docking.

    4. Problem Core drilling/tunneling, it sounds lame that a giant vessel obliterating planets gets killed by the destruction of a single block.

    Possible solution a dummy Core that changes the visible location of the core, once it gets destroyed the real core shows up again. This way a fight would not end in miliseconds, and the idea to diable weapons/energy/shielding/thrust becomes viable. Perhaps giant Megaships could be allowed to have more than one "dummy" but that is just an idea.



    To finish it up a suggestion out of the blue, make people able to bind docking stations to a Key on the Keyboard so that a carrier pilot does not have to tab through 100 turrets until he finds his transporter or fighter. Also Bobby AIs should remember being active once the player gets out again.



    That was all for now, i am not a native speaker so all errors you find blame it on the daytime.

    MfG: Dr_Dac
     
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    A lot of these suggestions a pretty good ideas.

    Just wanna address a few things.



    First, I\'m fairly certain that turrets do not share the shields of the mothership. You can build turrets with shield blocks, but the shielding of a turret is entirely separate from the shielding of the mothership.



    Second, I wholeheartedly agree that core drilling/tunneling is a terrible detriment to combat depth. Although I\'m not sure I agree with your solution. Combat would just involve drilling holes to destroy one block, and then doing it again for the second block.

    I definitely think that the radar signature of a ship should not point to its core, rather it should point to the center of dimensions. It isn\'t 100% realistic but radar is based off of dimensions so it makes some sort of sense. That would solve a lot of the drilling, since they have to find the core first.

    The problem then at that point is fixing the AI so that the AI doesn\'t immediately target the core, and instead just fires at the mass of the ship closest to it or something.

    I also think targetting should change, I think using F to target a ship should instead target whatever block you aimed at when you pressed F. This could be how the SD-BB missiles and targeted turrets would track their projectiles.

    And heat seekers should go to either power, or thrusters. Not the core.



    That\'s all the feedback I have on core drilling and how to make it more fun to fight other ships.



    Also, clever idea to improve hull with your \"Hull Plating\" solution. I like it, however there is one flaw I noticed. If connecting blocks to the augmentor increases Armor, then it\'s not beneficial to create individual plates of armor across the ship. It\'s more benefitial to just cover your ship in one giant plate of hull, because that would give you the most damage reduction.

    However alternatively, you could set up a cap, where after so many blocks have been connected to the augmentor, the armor caps at 75% for instance. Actually as I mention this, such a cap would definitely have to be in place, else people could build plates that scaled up to obscene levels like 99% or something.

    Also I would suggest that the HP gain work similar to power. Like when you connect hull to augmentors, you gain moderate amounts of HP to the plate, but you get diminishing returns as you add more and more, and eventually a fixed minimum amount of HP is added per hull block. I think it would be beneficial if this fixed minimum was hit a somewhat low amount of mass, like 100-200 mass worth of blocks or so. And the diminishing returns should be on an individual level of augmentors. So if you reach the point where you only get the fixed minimum amount of HP on Plate A, you can begin making a Plate B adjacently and the diminishing returns on Plate A have no effects on the stats for Plate B.

    In this way, making multiple plates is beneficial, because you\'ll have the 75% armor cap on multiple different parts of your ship with varying HP on both plates. It\'s more beneficial to have multiple plates rather than have your ship covered in one massive plate since you\'d reach the fixed minimum HP gain per hull block after a set amount, and you\'d lose efficiency.

    Ya know, this hull idea is starting to sound really really good.



    Lol, what do you think Doc?
     
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    maybe the number of blocks needed to reach the cap, and the cap itself, could be tied to ship mass. this would be to prevent large ships having 300 plates while fighters have 1.

    just an idea, since the size of the plates should really scale with the size of the ship

    and yes, I agree that making things depend on ship mass causes problems, I would prefer a different solution, but I don\'t like putting out a problem without first trying to fix it :)
     
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    • Legacy Citizen
    i was thinking about having a fixed cap on how many blocks can be linked to one augmentor, and that the

    augmentor has to have direct contact with the plate to prevent a cube of augmentors in the middle of the ship it would call for more advance building methods of ships. But your idea of scaling bonus based on the number of blocks or Mass is a really good idea.

    For the turret docking at the moment they have independant shields i just wanted to point out that building docked ship parts should provide a bonus to the mothership as reward for their inactivity. A turret on the other hand should be independant as a price for its activity.



    Also another way for diffrent ship classes are diffrent cores that from the start define how fast it turns and limiting the mass of the ship to a certain amount. (i mean a 500 block ship could be a fighter a 1000 block one a heavy fighter a 2000 block one a frigate and so on, so that people actually plan a ship instead of dumping a giant block of generator and a cube of shield) The exact amount of blocks for individual classes remains subject of discussion.

    Edit: Another way would be that the first 100 blocks connected to th augmentor would receive full strengh meaning the whole group gets maximum (75%or 80%) armor and a 100% Bonus to HP for the whole groups shared HP pool. Every block after the 100th block would lower the Bonus armor and HP for the whole group making good planned armor plates better than just stacking big chunks. The reason for it could be simple the augmentor has to destribute more of its avaible power to too many blocks resulting in less for each. On the other side Hardened blocks could get 90% armor and 300% HP but each augmentor would be limited to 10 or 20 blocks. Making the hardened blocks viable as armor for crucial systems as the game intended.



    Just a few more ideas as promised ;)
     
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    perhaps introduce something that prevents destruction of the core until a significant amount of the mass of the original ship is gone, and maybe a few of the power generators.
     
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    I see what you mean now about the turret docking, I misinterpreted it so that\'s my bad.



    I\'m gonna have to disagree about the different class of ship-cores, simply because of the fact that size is relative, so ship-class is subjective. So it might work fine for some people, for others it limits customization and design.
     
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    I\'ve talked about this idea before, and I\'m definitely fond of it. Having a ship\'s core become vulnerable/overheat after a ship loses something like 50% of it\'s integrity(Total Blocks)



    It would certainly make fights more interesting, but the downside is that it could also drag on very long. It\'s an idea that needs refining for sure.
     
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    No i meant your ship gets a classification based on its mass and the core upgrades on its own meaning you place 100 blocks more than a 500 block fighter can have it get auto labled as heavy fighter and gets less turnrate and acceleration based on the ship class, but the exact number are a matter of discussion. I would also promote the idea of massless blocks for decoration that have no armor and no HP and shots just pass through. They get destroyed if in a certain radius around the block no massbearing block
    exists. This prevents people from building vision blocks with passable blocks and still allows players to build interior.

    I also suggest implementing decoration blocks for interioir hull that provide little HP and Mass but enable large and
    complex interior with little sacrifice for mass.

    My goal is that a player does not have to think if he adds decoration or not because his ship gets too heavy. Because we all love beautiful ships.
     
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    I don\'t think the major problem is either the shields or the Hull itself.

    The major problem stems from everyone\'s main weapons which are really the ONLY effective weapon in the game.. AMC\'s

    AMCs have high power, rapid fire and they can chew through both shield and hull with little to no problem at all while.

    Missiles are slow to fire, weak, slow to reload and do absolutly nothing to shields.. (They are honestly a bit backwards in how they upgrade, they get faster and reload faster the bigger they are.. Shouldn\'t they start fast and get slower?)

    Dis-Intergraters while a bit interesting for man-made torpedos now with the new update, they do almost nothing still



    Likely the best solution is to nerf AMCs so they mostly do damage to shields and give missles a true use and give missles the ability to damage shields some.

    I know most or a lot would protest this, but there does need to be balance in the game.

    I don\'t want to see AMCs doing no damage to hulls but they shouldn\'t chew through it either, the same could be said for missiles they shouldn\'t do much damage to shields but they should devistate hulls.



    As for the stations.. Yes they do need their own Shield generators I can\'t disagree there.

    Seperate regen and power blocks for shields would make more problems for smaller ships more then anything.



    As for docked ships they should get no shielding from the parent ship, it makes no sense really.



    Turrets should share sheilding with their parent ship though since they are considered part of the ship, they should also share power too really.



    As for AI tunneling for your core that is because your core is preaty much the same as a player, the AI doesn\'t know about the rest of your ship physically it only knows where the core is.



    As for the docking problem.. We really need a \"Dock Clamp\" type block that allows us to pick where and how our ships dock to other ships, because if someone puts a docking modual on the bottom of their ship and I dock to it.. I am stuck upside down.

    [After a re-reading what you had posted about docking to a station with turrets it might just be a bug of sorts that was ment to stop you from docking turrets to turrets *shruges*]
     
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    But then you still have the problem that missiles are too slow to hit anything on top speed, shielding of big ships is broken and hull is useless. The AMC is a core of this problem yes, following the rules of antimatter it should not do damage to shields at all, Missiles on the other hand and their shockwave and explosion would be relatively easy to block.

    Also small ships should rely more on their speed, than on shield and hull. I mean you are fast you turn faster than a turret heck why not evade stuff?

    And tunneling i was not refering to AI tunneling they aim for the core, well it is their only means to kill an enemy. I wanted
    to point out that a giant 1 million block ship is destroyed with a tiny peck in its side reaching all the way to the core.

    And for your idea of docking. A turret that gets shield and power from the main ship and can also fire ? That is a bit broken, I agree that a part of the carriers shield regeneration could be buffed to a turret but it would be too overpowered.
    On the other hand everyone would dock their ships as turrets if the standatr docking would not provide shield while the turret docking does.

    yes the chaindocking is broken, but some people including me would be happy to build ships that consist of multiple parts
    that share their energy and shielding and can server diffrent purposes. As an example my main ship is a big capital, running around with 3 mio shield and i think 2 mio energy reg, heck it is not finished yet. I planned it as a carrier, so its
    main weaponry is turrets and some BB missiles. I plan to use it as a mobile home base because on my server no space station is safe at the moment thanks to the last shield upgrade. And i don\'t really like to lose my stuff to a small ship firing
    nonstop at a station and win it...... The point is a turret does something that pays off it shoots your enemy, a docked ship does nothing and contributes nothing. In my opinion a turret should have independant shielding as before perhaps a bonus based on the ship its docked to. And a docked ship should provide its generator and shield power to the main ship.
     
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    Hi,

    AMC should only really be for short/medium-range combat. SD-BB missiles should be used for long range combat but they\'re far too slow (and there\'s bugs that make them useless against shields unless you fire several missiles at once). SD-KB should be for medium range, should have no \"target lock time\" and should be even faster than SD-BB but with less damage (making them effective for large groups of weak enemies). The D1000 missiles should be very slow (about the same speed they are now) with short range and much much higher damage (used for anti-cap ship torpedos).

    Currently, it\'s far too easy to get extremely long range out of AMCs (e.g. my current ship\'s main gun has 6 km range, well beyond the radar\'s measly 2.5 km range); and this makes everything else pointless. Missiles are too slow which makes them doubly pointless, and the shield bugs make them triple pointless.

    The other thing the game needs is missile defense systems. This could be something like a \"flak chucker\" (to distract SD-BB and SD-KB and make them lose their target lock), or point defense (e.g. small turrets desgned to target/detonate missiles before they reach shields).
     
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    Well I think the biggest problem is turrets can turn at insane rates currently so they can keep up with even the fastest of ships (that and no ship seems to have much of a hit to their acceleration compaired to their mass..Yet)

    But in all honestly there should be a seperate \"Turret Core\" so they are considered different entities from a normal ship core, with no real thrust or turning speed but the implimenting of turret enhancers for turning speed at the cost of power drain, plus the drain the turrets would impose upon firing.

    Because right now as it stands turrets are just glorified ships.