Balance weapon stats to only require a few system blocks

[JinM]

This suggestion is aimed to the weapon rebalancing that comes with or after the power update, in favour of using small gun systems and turrets.

Basically I would love to build impactfull small turrets on my ship, that are not out of realistic proportions, that can hurt an enemy ship.

It would be great if the overall turret size could be drastically smaller. It would be great, if 3 turrets of only 1/20th the size of my ship, would do a significant damge to an enemy ship thats just as big as my ship.

In the old weapon and combat mechanics, turrets needed be like half as long as my main ship. And even those big and totally out of any realistic proportions sized turrets, only did like 1/4th of the overall weapon damage that my ship dished out.

I hereby suggest to make weapon module's damage output around 10 times stronger (and cannons 20 times), and to heighten the power draw relational to their increased damage output.

The end story would be, that people who build fighters below 10m dimensions, would only be able to fit like up to 4 weapon blocks on their ship. Small figthers could use an additonal setting to lower their weapon damage output, for the benefit of drawing less power, so that they have enough energy for other systems left.


Let me leave some examples of turrets here, that I would love to be able to build:

The turret sizes shown below are big enough, to make sense of ships around 80 to 100 m length. If I can put 4 of the missile turrets and 2 of the railguns on my ship, it would be allready have no more surface space for additional turrets. Yeah ofcourse I can build a ship of 100 m length, that is just a sea of turrets. But I would love to have ship that has only like up to 6 turrets if it's between 80 and 120 m length, and that those turrets are not too big, but actually do make significant damage.

Small miniguns (cannon-cannon), that actually penetrate enemy fighters. My minigun has the total size of 5x5x5. And with this gun I would like to penetrate like 15 blocks deep into an enemy fighter.

Right now, if I have a turret in a box of like 5x5x5, I have around 15 aviable system blocks of cannon-cannon, I can't even penetrate 4 blocks with one shot I guess? And a turret that's fitting into a 5x5x5 box has only space for like 15, often less (8?) system blocks.

Spoiler: example

Railguns (cannon-beam), that actually hit their target, and make a big hole. They should have faster projectiles 30+ times sector speed pls), and they should penetrate even 100m blocks deep. Size: around 8x7x18. If I build a turret into this box, I end up with like less than 100 aviable system blocks.

Spoiler: example

Missile Throwers, that blast enemy fighters actually hard. I think a thrower, that fits into a box of 15x10x10, should be able to kill a fighter that dimensions are around 20 to 30 m with 3 hits. I can fit in a turret of this size 70 system blocks.

Spoiler: example

edit:
Exact weapon stats list explained by example setups:

scheme: module-module (total block count): weapon range (not in sectors but in km, to accomodate to ship size perception), speed (times server max), weapon damage, special effect, shoots/second

• minigun: cannon-cannon (count: 10): range: max 2km, speed: 12.5, damage: around 15 blocks deep, effect: extra damage to astronauts, 10 s/s
• railgun: cannon-beam (count: 50): range: 20km, speed: 50, damage: 100 blocks deep, effect: explosive, directly touching blocks get destroyed too (so the hole is not 1 m, but 3 m in diameter), 1 shoot each 3 seconds
• homing-missile or torpedo: missile-beam (count: 70): range: 20km, speed: 15, damage: 3 shoots take out a 20-30 m spanning fighter, effect: entities withing the double range of the destroyed-blocks radius get pushed away and astronauts receive damage, 1 shoot each 15 seconds (45 as it is right now, is way too long)
• "blast-cannons": missile-cannon (count 70): range: 20km, speed: 25, damage: 6 shoots take out an 20-30m spanning fighter, effect: none (just the vanilla explosion radius), 1 shoot each 1,5 seconds

My suggestion not aimed as end it all to weapons balance. My suggestion is aimed to give a precise example of how I would like to fight. I think the game engineers will come up with a balanced system anyway. But they can't take into account my vision of battles and what weapons plus turret setups I would like to fight with, if I never voice it.

 

[Dire Venom]

Intersting idae.
Turrets have certiantly felt quite large comparative to the size of ships in the past. I often even design ships around turrets imo.
In a way it makes Weapon systems both harder to hit, but much easier to disable.
A solid missile shot hitting a turret would take out a notable part of it's dps.

Certiantly weapons need to be re-worked at some point, and looking at weapon sizes might be a good start. It certiantly fits in with the design direction they have been taking.
It would also make turrets a bit less restricitve in shape (which would be nice). As useful as ball turrets are, I would like to build other designs too.

For example the output of all the guns on this vessel is absolutly pitaful. You would struggle to kill anything with it. Making the turrets bigger would ruin the asthetic as well.

So, in short this gets a solid +1 from me as:
-Turrets are no longer required to be 1/4 of your ship length and can be much more astheticaly pleasing.
-It fits in with the design direction the devs are taking.
-Weapon systems would be harder to hit, but easier to take out.
-Exsisting designs would be easy to update. There is no requirement to make turrets smaller, they simply need less weapon blocks.

(Not sure about shot speed or the rest, I'd leave that to someone else to figure out)
Also, small but powerful turrets can currently be built, but I would like to see more in-proportion turrets become viable without hurting exsisting designs.

 

[Calhoun]

 

[The Judge]

Buffing smaller weapons would just lead to horrendous balancing, there's no way it can feasibly work without making PvP broken.

 

[jstenholt]

I actually really like the idea of weapon damage being more based on power than on number of blocks. I'm not sure if the scaling could be done, but I'd be interested if Schema did this.

Not that I consider it likely, or even semi-likely.

 

[Zoolimar]

There are a couple of problems with making weapons very powerful per block.

Mass - you'll also need to buff mass of weapon blocks or anyone an their mother would be carrying spare batteries. You destroyed my main array? Shame I could afford to have 3 more.

Size - Not only weapons would be easy to have ridiculous redundancy but hitting them would be even harder due to small size of the groups. Where before you had say 2-3k blocks you'll now need to somehow be able to snipe only 20-30 blocks from 10km away. And considering that they do not need to be anywhere close to the ship body...

Freed volume / mass - Everything that is free from weapon blocks would be used for additional power or defences. If it could not be used for that ship would be made sparse and mostly empty.

 

[Non]

You know how pvprs are always mad at rprs for making dumb suggestions that would completely break balance, this is why.

This is another suggestion that aims to make rp focused ships more effective because people cant be bothered to learn the game mechanics and do it themselves.

 

[MeRobo]

I don't know if you did that already, but you may want to give Overdrive a try. Based on my understanding of what's said in Overdrive Effect Computer - StarMade Wiki a 10/10/10 (30 blocks total) Cannon/Beam/Overdrive should deal the damage of a 30/30 Cannon/Beam (60 total) at the cost of having the powercosts of a 60/60 (120 total) Cannon/Beam array. Based on this you need half or quarter the system space, depending on wether you ballance your turret on damage or power consumption.

 

[GDPR 302420]

Offence already scales much better than defence.

If anything we need to buffing defences, not weapons.

 

[Scypio]

According to what have been said to me (Lancaku), new shields should scale linearly, thus it's only a matter of base stats to balance shields and weapons.
Armor needs a complete change to feel useful and get rid of the side effect that the base stats of the blocks gives. So i don't count it into the balance.

 

[madman Captain]

I'm generally against buffing weapons even more, but on the other side if the weapons for exsample twice as powerful (and of course twice as heavy and need twice as much power) you need an half as large weapon arrays means you have more place for defence or other stuff.

Just what I think.

 

[SkaireKrough]

Buffing smaller weapons would just lead to horrendous balancing, there's no way it can feasibly work without making PvP broken.

You know how pvprs are always mad at rprs for making dumb suggestions that would completely break balance, this is why.

This is another suggestion that aims to make rp focused ships more effective because people cant be bothered to learn the game mechanics and do it themselves.

If you both are referring to the common pvp build style of a hull mostly box shaped stuffed with system blocks and no or extremely little interior room for pilots avatar or a spaghetti ship then I would say pvp is already broken. The only thing that discouraged the building of doom-cubes was server admins deleting such builds from their servers and the majority of vocal community players making negative comments about those builds.

Freed volume / mass - Everything that is free from weapon blocks would be used for additional power or defences. If it could not be used for that ship would be made sparse and mostly empty.

This is exactly what the new power and systems update is trying to accomplish. It is attempting to force pvp builders to adapt a more rp friendly build style. Unfortunatly after playing around with the dev builds for the last 6 weeks or so, I'm positive it will not work. Hardcore pvp builders will just adopt a build style that exploits the system to their best advantage. RP ships will still lack power and weapons to compete pvp -wise with the new dumbell pvp builds.


One thing that would help with turret size without disturbing the current game balance would be having the option of placing the secondary and effect blocks of the weapon in the turret base or even in the main ship itself, leaving only the primary weapon blocks in the "barrel". And yes I know that this suggestion has been brought up before.

 

[Lecic]

I feel like some players just have a magical debuff on them that makes their systems 10x less efficient than mine even in linear systems.

Right now, if I have a turret in a box of like 5x5x5, I have around 15 aviable system blocks of cannon-cannon, I can't even penetrate 4 blocks with one shot I guess? And a turret that's fitting into a 5x5x5 box has only space for like 15, often less (8?) system blocks.

Ok, so you want an 8 block weapon, which fires 10 times a second, to penetrate 4 blocks per shot? You want to be destroying 40 blocks a second with 8 blocks? Do you not potentially see a balance issue here?

Railguns (cannon-beam), that actually hit their target, and make a big hole. They should have faster projectiles (5 times sector speed pls), and they should penetrate even 100m blocks deep. Size: around 8x7x18. If I build a turret into this box, I end up with like less than 100 aviable system blocks.

First of all, Cannon-Beam already goes 25x the maximum server speed. It is plenty fast.

Second, a 100 block railgun should be doing 4000 damage per shot without even accounting for extra block damage from pierce or punch.

I'm not sure where you're getting "8x7x18" as your dimensions either. Just looking at your picture, the main body of your turret doesn't seem to be much wider than 5 blocks, or taller than 5. Why are you counting the dimensions of the small bulges on the side that are for, presumably, docking and the computer systems? That's pretty disingenuous.
Regardless, even a 3x3x16 (the rough internal dimensions of your turret when accounting for 1 thick hull all the way around) system space should give you 144 system blocks to work with, which would increase your damage per shot to almost 6000. What are you wasting over 40 system blocks on here to give you "less than 100 ... system blocks"?

Missile Throwers, that blast enemy fighters actually hard. I think a thrower, that fits into a box of 15x10x10, should be able to kill a fighter that dimensions are around 20 to 30 m with 3 hits. I can fit in a turret of this size 70 system blocks.

I don't know what missile system you're referring to here since you haven't listed it, but I'll assume Missile-Beam, since they're the most common.
A 70/0 Missile-Beam would give you a 10.5k damage missile every 15 seconds.
A 45/45 Missile-Beam would give you a 31.5k damage missile every 45 seconds.

And again with disingenuous system space sizes... Your turret's actual space is clearly a 5x5 front with 9 or 10 blocks length from the picture. So let's say a 3x3x8 system space, which is, yes, 72 blocks. That's how volume math works.

This whole post just smells like poor system design and massive over-expectations of the performance of tiny systems. It was clearly made without any regard for how this would effect actual PvP play and seems focused on making RPers have less lack luster performance so they feel better.

The obvious solution to your "problem" of turrets that are small in length not doing enough damage would be to allow placing weapon blocks in the base of turrets, so you could have a relatively large amount of weapon blocks being hidden away in a base that goes deep into the ship's hull.
This would actually succeed, instead of handing out buffs like candy that will just result in even more offense and speed tanking focused meta, with players going as fast as possible to try and avoid a blow that will instakill them while trying to deal one themselves.

Or just set up a custom server with higher weapon values and see how it goes.

 

[Scypio]

I feel like some players just have a magical debuff on them that makes their systems 10x less efficient than mine even in linear systems.

I just rated funny for this.

 

[JinM]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I am surprised that the thread is not allready derailed or bashed down. Thanks for everyone on using the disagree ratings instead of writting the first thing that came to their mind. 90% of the replies were usefull and on topic here, that's really neat. =)

There are a couple of problems with making weapons very powerful per block.

Mass - you'll also need to buff mass of weapon blocks or anyone an their mother would be carrying spare batteries. You destroyed my main array? Shame I could afford to have 3 more.
(...)
Freed volume / mass - Everything that is free from weapon blocks would be used for additional power or defences. If it could not be used for that ship would be made sparse and mostly empty.

Actually I like the idea of boosting the mass of weapon modules too.
But not too much, I think the idea of redundant weapon systems to replace shoot down ones is great. Fighters can not have 3 replacements for a main gun - but a battle ship could have a second railgun turret that can be used when the first one get's shoot down.

I have to add, that thruster output would need to be lowered too, the less system blocks we need. Thinking about the future of Starmade combat, I guess that there will come more adjustments to the stat systems of thrusters in relation to mass, and how much armor and system blocks weight. As we will need like 50% of the original count of system blocks with the power update.

You know how pvprs are always mad at rprs for making dumb suggestions that would completely break balance, this is why.

This is another suggestion that aims to make rp focused ships more effective because people cant be bothered to learn the game mechanics and do it themselves.

Please don't be mad at me.

 

[Non]

mostly box shaped stuffed with system blocks and no or extremely little interior room for pilots avatar or a spaghetti ship

No, not really

The only thing that discouraged the building of doom-cubes was server admins deleting such builds from their servers

Or maybe because they are terrible, system design is really complex.

having the option of placing the secondary and effect blocks of the weapon in the turret base

I would support allowing some way for weapons in the base to count, in real battleships most of what goes on is in the base and not the barrels.

Please don't be mad at me.

I'm not mad, just frustrated.

 

[JinM]

I don't know if you did that already, but you may want to give Overdrive a try. Based on my understanding of what's said in Overdrive Effect Computer - StarMade Wiki a 10/10/10 (30 blocks total) Cannon/Beam/Overdrive should deal the damage of a 30/30 Cannon/Beam (60 total) at the cost of having the powercosts of a 60/60 (120 total) Cannon/Beam array. Based on this you need half or quarter the system space, depending on wether you ballance your turret on damage or power consumption.

Hey just in short: Next to all my turrets use overdrive allready. Maybe my suggestion is redundant, because the power update will maybe and hopefully drastically lessen the count of weapon module blocks. In combination with overdrive this could then be sufficient. But just in case the devs didn't consider it, I wanted to point out my hope and thoughts for the weapon balance.

edit: oh it just appeared to me, that effects might be gone for weapons with the update. I am not sure about that. Anyone knows what will happen to the overdrive effect?

 

[Zoolimar]

Actually I like the idea of boosting the mass of weapon modules too.
But not too much, I think the idea of redundant weapon systems to replace shoot down ones is great. Fighters can not have 3 replacements for a main gun - but a battle ship could have a second railgun turret that can be used when the first one get's shoot down.

I doubt you really want that. Because that means that trying to damage weapons on your opponent's ship is useless and the only viable way to cripple it would be to hunt for the reactor. That means that there will be not that much difference in firepower between the ships at the start of the fight and at the end of it. So in group fights any ship that was not completely destroyed would provide more or less the same threat. Basically it strengthens the HP sponging of ships, where you need to obliterate them completely to make them stop their operation.

 

[JinM]

I feel like some players just have a magical debuff on them that makes their systems 10x less efficient than mine even in linear systems.



Ok, so you want an 8 block weapon, which fires 10 times a second, to penetrate 4 blocks per shot? You want to be destroying 40 blocks a second with 8 blocks? Do you not potentially see a balance issue here?



First of all, Cannon-Beam already goes 25x the maximum server speed. It is plenty fast.

Second, a 100 block railgun should be doing 4000 damage per shot without even accounting for extra block damage from pierce or punch.

I'm not sure where you're getting "8x7x18" as your dimensions either. Just looking at your picture, the main body of your turret doesn't seem to be much wider than 5 blocks, or taller than 5. Why are you counting the dimensions of the small bulges on the side that are for, presumably, docking and the computer systems? That's pretty disingenuous.
Regardless, even a 3x3x16 (the rough internal dimensions of your turret when accounting for 1 thick hull all the way around) system space should give you 144 system blocks to work with, which would increase your damage per shot to almost 6000. What are you wasting over 40 system blocks on here to give you "less than 100 ... system blocks"?



I don't know what missile system you're referring to here since you haven't listed it, but I'll assume Missile-Beam, since they're the most common.
A 70/0 Missile-Beam would give you a 10.5k damage missile every 15 seconds.
A 45/45 Missile-Beam would give you a 31.5k damage missile every 45 seconds.

And again with disingenuous system space sizes... Your turret's actual space is clearly a 5x5 front with 9 or 10 blocks length from the picture. So let's say a 3x3x8 system space, which is, yes, 72 blocks. That's how volume math works.

This whole post just smells like poor system design and massive over-expectations of the performance of tiny systems. It was clearly made without any regard for how this would effect actual PvP play and seems focused on making RPers have less lack luster performance so they feel better.

The obvious solution to your "problem" of turrets that are small in length not doing enough damage would be to allow placing weapon blocks in the base of turrets, so you could have a relatively large amount of weapon blocks being hidden away in a base that goes deep into the ship's hull.
This would actually succeed, instead of handing out buffs like candy that will just result in even more offense and speed tanking focused meta, with players going as fast as possible to try and avoid a blow that will instakill them while trying to deal one themselves.

Or just set up a custom server with higher weapon values and see how it goes.

Ok, so you want an 8 block weapon, which fires 10 times a second, to penetrate 4 blocks per shot? You want to be destroying 40 blocks a second with 8 blocks? Do you not potentially see a balance issue here?

Yes and no. I want that around 10 cannon-cannon modules can penetrate 15 blocks deep.
I get your point, that this seems op, when a turret of 10 blocks can destroy 600 blocks in one minute.

@all: My suggestion not aimed as end it all to weapons balance. My suggestion is aimed to give a precise example of how I would like to fight. I think the game engineers will come up with a balanced system anyway. But they can't take into account my vision of battles and what weapons plus turret setups I would like to fight with, if I never voice it.

The obvious solution to your "problem" of turrets that are small in length not doing enough damage would be to allow placing weapon blocks in the base of turrets, so you could have a relatively large amount of weapon blocks being hidden away in a base that goes deep into the ship's hull.

I would be happy with this solution. I like it, it gives me the exact same outcome.
Do you think they will implement it? Because I think they can't do it engine and performance wise.

Maybe don't put the weapon blocks as buff to a turret on a ship, but maybe put "turret damage enhancer" blocks on a ship that can get linked to the turret base...

 

[Lecic]

Do you think they will implement it? Because I think they can't do it engine and performance wise.

The main difficulty would be in having a cross-entity linking system that works reliably and is easy to use. For example, we have cross-entity logic, but due to problems in Schema's code, it likes to delink regularly.

Maybe don't put the weapon blocks as buff to a turret on a ship, but maybe put "turret damage enhancer" blocks on a ship that can get linked to the turret base...

This could be a really good workaround. The only problem I see is, how do you account for turrets with multiple weapons on them?