Balancing Issues?

[Virz]

So i started to build a medium sized ship. The final version is about 100m x 40m x 110m big and uses 15k blocks, 30k when it was filled with all these engine and power stuff. However, it turns as slow as the ships my friends have which are twice or triple the size and 200k+ blocks. The problem is, i cannot fill in as many shield or weapon or power blocks because its far smaller. Theyve got 2million+ shields and insane power generation and i barely scratch 250k shields and cant even fly whithout stopping from time to time to regenerate. I accelerate faster, but that doesnt help me when i cant hold that speed or even fire a few shots.
I have even deleted all blocks which where not needed and filled some of my rooms with power blocks, still not enough. I have a strange feeling we are not supposed to use hull blocks or even have some ship interior...
Not to mention i tried to build a cloaking ship, which in his final result looked like a long stick because the only way i could stack enough energy was to build an ugly long line. Obviously this ship has no hull or anything else, so its like a car, with wheels, a steering wheel, an engine and nothing more...would totally buy that if i could...
So the only effective ships are either insanely large capital ships or those that i would not call ship because they dont have a single block of hull installed?

 

[Florrible]

From what you said, I don\'t think that the problem is the balancing. I can easily build a ship of this size with constant acceleration if not firing and have decent shields. Cloaking is very energy costly and therefore you will have difficulties using hull with it. Ask your friends to build a ship with the same dimensions as yours. I am confident that it will be ore efficient then yours. Also, interiors are always a problem. You have to decide between appearance and functionality. Finding a good balance can be difficult,

 

[der_scheme]

You should probably take a read about game mechanics and power generation in particular.

http://www.starmadewiki.com/wiki/SD_HCT_xm3.4_Power_Block

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

You make long lines of generators or 3 dimensional crosses, not cubes.That\'s the key of extracting power from them.



Once you generate over 1.2 million energy a second, you might as well make massive cubes since you don\'t get any bonus for doing reactors anymore. But below that it really pays off to design ships as efficiently as possible.

 

[Virz]

Yes, found that out after i had finished my ship. Should have done some testing or looked into the wiki before...
Now i am to lazy to delete all of the blocks again, as deleting takes far longer than building. Guess ill have to stick to it until we get some more \"advanced\" editing functions.

 

[NeonSturm]

Thrusters can get 5 thrust per unit on my not nearly finished planet-sized ship.

But they only have about 2-3 thrust after the first until you go to x+y+z dimensions of 50 or more.

 

[Virz]

Ty, good to know.
Any suggestions for Antimatter Layout? So far i am using cube formed formations. I know that the shotgun-layout is probably the best, but i dont like it. Especially not for my capital ship i am building.

 

[NeonSturm]

But you can try to guess which layout might come in future.

Also see: master-slave system.

It is propably the best to just reserve some space, and a tunnel along each ship axis - just to be sure.