Balancing

[Spartan-228]

There has been a lot of talk about how the game needs to be better balanced, but I would submit to you that the game is already pretty balanced. The problem is people are just not using the options given to them.

One of the big ones is the game economy. Most servers have it set to default, where all you need is credits to buy your ship. This system as we know is easily exploited. How ever if you turn on buying ships with blocks you solve a lot of your problems. Capital ships become very expensive and harder to get and it is a much bigger loss when it is destroyed.

Another thing you can do is play with the block confg file. A few of my friends and myself are looking into limiting the number of shield blocks that are available. So far we the method we have come up with is working but we still need to test it more.

As for fighters l believe one fighter should not be enough to kill a battleship it should require three or four at least.

As for engines I agree something should be done about capital ships getting up to speed as fast as fighters that is a bit crazy. But some times a super fast cap has to sacrifice some weapons, shields, and sometimes armor to creep there speed.

 

[K10wN]

How ever if you turn on buying ships with blocks you solve a lot of your problems. Capital ships become very expensive and harder to get and it is a much bigger loss when it is destroyed.

When a ship is made up of more types of blocks than inventory and the hotbar can hold, how do you buy it? Agreed that this would solve many of the economy issues, but it comes with limited ship building abilities and limits you to how many types of blocks you can use in your ship.

 

[Spartan-228]

You have a point there I have never had an issue with it but I can see how some people would. An increase to the inventory slots would fix that issue. Or possibly being able to use the items in your ships inventory will your in it to buy ships.

 

[NeonSturm]

What are your favourite block/weapon configs?

I would prefer decoratives and basic hull (mostly) to be very cheap and not made out of shards but out of wood, rock...
Lights and Binary Logic should compare to hull and displays should compare to 10 binary logic blocks.
Vital parts (energy, thrust, weapon, shields) should be as expensive as 200 decorative / 100 hull/logic elements to buff hulls.
Computers should cost as much as 25+ weapon modules to make less peoples going for 1 computer per array.

Ores should refine into few high-quality refinery products and many common-quality refinery products.
High quality is required for computers, thus they are expensive _but not_ consuming all your resources.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

As for the blueprint problem: a ship yard has been confirmed to come into the game (at some point).

 

[Johnathan Dahmnation]

@NeonSturm

I don't think cost based balance has ever prevented behaviors that other game aspects would deem beneficial (single array weapon comps/etc). I'd be really surprised if it actually worked here.

@Spartan-228

With people producing blocks from factories how do you enforce any limits on block availability over the course of game play? Also what would you consider a fighter and battleship to help understand better what you suggest by having 3 or 4 of the former being able to defeat the latter. Using my personal definitions that sounds ludicrous and anyone on that server who built a BS with balance like that doesn't deserve to have nice things said about their intelligence.

 

[Spartan-228]

First enforcing a limit is easy when you make a block unproduceable.

Second I consider about 100 m ships to be a corvette, 150 m to be a destroyer, 200 m a frigate, 250 m a cruiser, 300 m a battleship, 400 m a carrier, and 600 m a dreadnought.

Also in order four fighters to defeat a battleship, they would have to be piloted by capable player's, and be specialized fighters. Like three fighters to take out shields and one to nuke the hull.

 

[NeonSturm]

I don't think cost based balance has ever prevented behaviors that other game aspects would deem beneficial (single array weapon comps/etc). I'd be really surprised if it actually worked here.

It would if it costs time to gather resources. Credits for buying ships is a bad requirement currently.

It would allow elite and scavenger ships as most ships would rather space their vital parts out and hide them instead of filling their interior with them.

I also made a suggestion which would also help balancing by hull being required for few vital parts to work (to counter hull-baring death-cubes of Borg-doom) and increase value of RP ships.

Now offered you 2 ideas to choose from + 1 Advantage for RP and ship design guides.

 

[BDLS]

When a ship is made up of more types of blocks than inventory and the hotbar can hold, how do you buy it?

Yeah, would be swell if the game pulled items from nearby plexchests (shop range) and inventory when purchasing a ship with blocks.

---

Curious, does anyone here use damage pulse as a primary weapon on any ships? I think it might need to be reworked in that aspect.

 

[NeonSturm]

Damage pulsars are bugged - they don't even do damage to planets (at lest for me).

I wait until a fix before rating them. (like I wait currently for most things including: better planets loading time, remote/computer/multi-bit logic, balance (economy, weapons), ... )

 

[MrFURB]

Curious, does anyone here use damage pulse as a primary weapon on any ships? I think it might need to be reworked in that aspect.

No, not really. With a pulse/beam/explosive system and any number of blocks in the array the maximum range I got is 15. Meters, that is. Large arrays have the potential to insta-gib shields with a good hit because they deals their damage value (5/block) to every block in it's radius, so a 10,000 damage (2,000 block) pulse hitting 200 of an opponent's blocks will deal 2,000,000 damage to them. For a ten second reload that's not bad at all damage wise... But you still have to deal with getting cozy with the enemy, which is normally a bad move. Think of a pulse like a reusable disintegrator. They do their one extremely specific job well under very specific circumstances.

I want to say that they deserve a range boost from fisticuffs range to short area deterrent range... Maybe 100-150 base radius. Problem there is that suddenly they become completely unmatched in damage potential and people will be doing nothing but sneaking up on capital ships and nearly 1-shotting them with a pulse/pulse or pulse/beam due to the weapon applying it's damage on thousands of blocks. I think that perhaps a change in how it applies damage to shielding may be in order if we're to increase it's range.

 

[Johnathan Dahmnation]

@Spartan-228

Making the block unproducable then setting a cap makes hoarding super effective. A questionable strategy. Before I can comment on balance I'd have to ask if you are specifying lengths or mass in your ship sizes.

@NeonSturm

Length of production time and resource intensiveness become less of issues in the long run due to the fact that it gives more time to produce things and more time to increase ones capacity to produce things. Between those 2 factors people WILL eventually end up with large resource caches unless you somehow ensure they are spent.

Also, and this is personal opinion mind you, but why would I want to space vital components in my ship if resources are scares? I wouldn't because:

1: If someone killed me I don't want them getting the juiciest parts intact because they went strait for my core, I want the good stuff scrapped as much as possible because chances are, if you have successfully created value in the blocks, my enemy will salvage all they can and be stronger for it. I'd rather they burn with me then be used against me later.

2: Wasted volume. Dimensions = agility, and agility is a great combat advantage. It's in my interest to create as compact a vessel as possible with as much performance as I can squeeze in it if I want to survive a fight, and I do because again, blocks now have value. If I go into a fight with a ship designed to minimize losses against someone built to win, all other things being equal our ships will both live up to their respective tasks.

Basically, making blocks more tedious to get doesn't make any of the min/maxing strategies we currently have and many loathe any less valid. What it does do is strengthen the desire to use them as recovering from a loss isn't as easy as stripping the plexglass off of an abandoned station and selling it to the nearest shop to buy a replacement if removing ship purchase for credits is added to this.

Requiring hull on some level I can get behind, though I'd have think a bit more on how it scales.

 

[der_scheme]

I want to say that they deserve a range boost from fisticuffs range to short area deterrent range... Maybe 100-150 base radius. Problem there is that suddenly they become completely unmatched in damage potential and people will be doing nothing but sneaking up on capital ships and nearly 1-shotting them with a pulse/pulse or pulse/beam due to the weapon applying it's damage on thousands of blocks. I think that perhaps a change in how it applies damage to shielding may be in order if we're to increase it's range.

Doesn't this rather affect small ships negatively? A large pulse radius would make them lose their only advantage (being hard to hit).

Anyway, I just had an interesting thought. Afaik, area triggers can be activated by ships. What I don't know is, if they will react only to the core or to any block—my idea requires the second to be true.
What if we built a torpedo solely for the purpose of taking enemy shields down using pulses? The torpedo launcher is trivial. For the torpedo itself we would use a Pulse+Beam+Ion system wired to an area trigger. It should be obvious: Just before the torpedo impacts on the enemy ship the area trigger will fire, unleashing the pulse at the right moment.

The question is: Would that work? :>

 

[NeonSturm]

Doesn't this rather affect small ships negatively? A large pulse radius would make them lose their only advantage (being hard to hit).

Anyway, I just had an interesting thought. Afaik, area triggers can be activated by ships. What I don't know is, if they will react only to the core or to any block—my idea requires the second to be true.
What if we built a torpedo solely for the purpose of taking enemy shields down using pulses? The torpedo launcher is trivial. For the torpedo itself we would use a Pulse+Beam+Ion system wired to an area trigger. It should be obvious: Just before the torpedo impacts on the enemy ship the area trigger will fire, unleashing the pulse at the right moment.

The question is: Would that work? :>

Yes. Nice Idea. But AFAIK damage pulses only deal damage to shields once (may have changed through versions).

1: If someone killed me I don't want them getting the juiciest parts intact because they went strait for my core, I want the good stuff scrapped as much as possible because chances are, if you have successfully created value in the blocks, my enemy will salvage all they can and be stronger for it. I'd rather they burn with me then be used against me later.

2: Wasted volume. Dimensions = agility, and agility is a great combat advantage. It's in my interest to create as compact a vessel as possible with as much performance as I can squeeze in it if I want to survive a fight, and I do because again, blocks now have value. If I go into a fight with a ship designed to minimize losses against someone built to win, all other things being equal our ships will both live up to their respective tasks.

1. Why do you not have a 3x-redundant self-destruction mechanism? If a block gets taken out of a logic-"chain mail" around your core trigger self destruction of vital parts. I dis-integrator per 3^3 cube of vital blocks.

2. You got a point. But once the mass exceeds 100'000 blocks, why don't you sacrifice 100 for interior?
Maybe (if it makes us happy) we can also require things like hull with at least 1 open side (aka double-walls) or not-completely filled chunks as this would not punish interior as much as currently

 

[Johnathan Dahmnation]

1. Why do you not have a 3x-redundant self-destruction mechanism? If a block gets taken out of a logic-"chain mail" around your core trigger self destruction of vital parts. I dis-integrator per 3^3 cube of vital blocks.

2. You got a point. But once the mass exceeds 100'000 blocks, why don't you sacrifice 100 for interior?
Maybe (if it makes us happy) we can also require things like hull with at least 1 open side (aka double-walls) or not-completely filled chunks as this would not punish interior as much as currently

1:I could, but we're still left with the issue that there is no advantage to spread things around. Now instead of clustering the computers, which become rather costly components under your proposition, around a core, I concentrate them around a disintegrator. I can spread them around the hull with separate disintegrators without much space loss, but I can't think of a single reason to consider it a good or beneficial idea to do so over grouping.

2:Because it's still wasteful when you've promoted min/maxing by making blocks more time costly, and as such the loss of blocks more costly still. Consider: A) Blocks are trivial to get and I can buy it back easily, I can make a pretty and functional thing in no time, and if it's lost , oh well, I have credits and the shop is right here. B) Assuming I concentrate all my production capacity on functional blocks I can build/replace the ship in x time if I stick to essentials. If I make it pretty with interior I'm probably looking at 10-30%(conceivably even much more) more hull and decoration + the thrust to support it to maintain my thrust:mass (+ any power I want to add to compensate for the thrust + any passive effect blocks to ensure they stay at max effect after adding that mass + more thrust to counter all that and so on...) and now I have to get the raws for all that and wait for it to be processes into the blocks I need.

Long story short making blocks more "costly" 1 way or another I'm looking at a choice between considerably larger ship with no more more effect, or a battlecube that does the same thing at a significantly lower time/material investment.

 

[NeonSturm]

1.
There will be an advantage in spacing vital parts out once the new hp system protects our core. It would make greater use of hulls as enemies have to take out more hulls to reach vital parts / can't use existing holes as if they were all in the same spot.

2.
I support restrictions which don't hurt RP ships at all while they hurt battle-cubes. Thus NOT-discouraging peoples to build a little bit RP.
My goal: a 3x as heavy (volume) partially-RP ship is equal to a 6x as heavy full-RP ship which is equal (combat strength, except agility) to a min-max ship.

Rather than forcing PvP players to build RP I want RP player ship be partially viable as PvP to make shared blueprints more useful.

I think even PvP players enjoy RP ships from time to time (even if it is just the trading guild or a cargo-transporter from a pirate squad) and it would make the game more appealing/interesting.


But that this discussion is not only about Min-Maxing vs RP.
It is about

• long-range vs short-range weapons, small vs large, too!
• Dis-integrators vs other weapons
• Economy
• ... other balance stuff

So please just assume that blocks are NOT trivial to get!
Treat this discussion like if : cost = resources to build, shops = not exploitable for credits!

 

[Johnathan Dahmnation]

1.
There will be an advantage in spacing vital parts out once the new hp system protects our core. It would make greater use of hulls as enemies have to take out more hulls to reach vital parts / can't use existing holes as if they were all in the same spot.

2.
I support restrictions which don't hurt RP ships at all while they hurt battle-cubes. Thus NOT-discouraging peoples to build a little bit RP.
My goal: a 3x as heavy (volume) partially-RP ship is equal to a 6x as heavy full-RP ship which is equal (combat strength, except agility) to a min-max ship.

Rather than forcing PvP players to build RP I want RP player ship be partially viable as PvP to make shared blueprints more useful.

I think even PvP players enjoy RP ships from time to time (even if it is just the trading guild or a cargo-transporter from a pirate squad) and it would make the game more appealing/interesting.


But that this discussion is not only about Min-Maxing vs RP.
It is about

• long-range vs short-range weapons, small vs large, too!
• Dis-integrators vs other weapons
• Economy
• ... other balance stuff

So please just assume that blocks are NOT trivial to get!
Treat this discussion like if : cost = resources to build, shops = not exploitable for credits!

Ok, honestly I can only ask you reread my prior post because I based my reasoning on exactly the assumption you are now asking me to make. I specifically presented the proposed scenario of ship production being block manufacture dependent and demonstrated how and why it favors min/maxing (more effective ship in less time and fewer resources).

Unless you have a way to ensure block count for decorative/hull blocks is maintained between min/max builds and RP builds balance will favor min/max builds as will production due to the difference in resource and manufacture time requirements. Even if you do enforce it the min/maxer can still turn the extra hull into layered armor which provides superior benefit, but at least it makes the 2 closer.

I also still think there is a range where agility needs to not be overlooked since ideally we don't want all the ships under x dimensions being doomcubes, but I think the issue there lies in how agility is determined rather than rp vs m/m, but until that sees revision smaller RP ships will be notably weaker than their RP'less cousins in the same agility braket.

I have nothing against RP, WHICH IS EXACTLY WHY I'M HARPING ON IT! I don't want ideas that harm it unintentionally because the logical conclusions to another area, such as economy/manufacture specifically, weren't completely explored.

Regarding the HP system, I can't comment on it till I have some idea of how it's supposed to work. If you have concrete info I'd be happy to look, but my current uncertainty makes it too unclear to even speculate on. Until then I can only speculate, but even then a protected core area of sorts seems like a good idea unless areas of interest, computers etc, are actually advertised to hostiles.

Regarding other areas of balance, feel free to engage. I already spoke on ship size and am awaiting response from @Spartan-228 . If I find something I feel I may be qualified to comment on rest assured I will interject.

 

[NeonSturm]

Enforce Hull is the most important key element as battle-cubes have so few mass in hull that passive effects behave too differently and that makes balancing them impossible.
If you need more thrusters, you can have less weapons, thus RP and BC (battle-cube) are again closer together.

If Decorative < 1%, it is negligible. Thus RP ships are almost purely made out of hull. (you can mostly replace light-lines with dotted light-lines). It would give opportunity for creative design of RP/PvP hybrids if they have even a small chance of being combat-ready.



If you need the "vital-ore" (using it as alias for one of the existing) for vital parts but not for decorative, no matter how many planets you eat with your planet-eater, you will always have excess of decorative blocks.
If you can make some decorative parts out of anything (including rock or wood) + paint, mass would be the only limit to it.

If partially-RP is significantly more expensive depends on how many decorative parts you use and whether the admin decides that decorations should be either hard to get (valuable and an archivement) or cheap (encourage the use)

 

[Johnathan Dahmnation]

Enforce Hull is the most important key element as battle-cubes have so few mass in hull that passive effects behave too differently and that makes balancing them impossible.
If you need more thrusters, you can have less weapons, thus RP and BC (battle-cube) are again closer together.

If Decorative < 1%, it is negligible. Thus RP ships are almost purely made out of hull. (you can mostly replace light-lines with dotted light-lines). It would give opportunity for creative design of RP/PvP hybrids if they have even a small chance of being combat-ready.



If you need the "vital-ore" (using it as alias for one of the existing) for vital parts but not for decorative, no matter how many planets you eat with your planet-eater, you will always have excess of decorative blocks.
If you can make some decorative parts out of anything (including rock or wood) + paint, mass would be the only limit to it.

If partially-RP is significantly more expensive depends on how many decorative parts you use and whether the admin decides that decorations should be either hard to get (valuable and an archivement) or cheap (encourage the use)

Unfortunately there is no "vital ore" currently. Infact the newest set of decorative blocks, the various circuits, function as intermediaries to actual functioning blocks so it sounds like you are requesting a complete re-rework of the crafting system.

Also that gets around any resource bottlenecks, but not manufacture capacity bottlenecks.

But assuming we get around both I would suggest we go beyond simply making those blocks 0 hp/mass and make them literally ignored by weapons. Last thing we need is for a new avenue of abuse by having buffers of massless, near costless blocks that can be piled on endlessly.

Also I'm not seeing what you mean by passive effects being impossible to balance. Leaving RPvM/M alone for a second, those effect all ships the same, the only difference being the block count needed to max out the effect based on mass and the resulting power consumption. The behavior doesn't change regardless of the allocation of mass to other types of blocks.

The more thrusters/less weapons argument however, unless I'm not understanding, seems pretty indicative of what isn't desired. Essentially the point being that giving up significant performance for design has people hating doomcubes now and a resource intensive economy seems like it would only exasperate that.

Edit: On an unrelated note to the above, does anyone find pulse as a secondary particularly useful? I played with it a bit but for all my applications the novelty seemed to wear thin really fast simply due to the sudden energy demands such weapons create. Alongside the really long ROF I wondered if anyone had novel uses making it more relevant?

 

[NeonSturm]

Assuming each hull provides 1 structural integrity point _ & _ Both thrusters and weapon block need 5 of them each (=enforce hull)

For 10 Hull blocks you can have (( 2 thrusters _ or _ 1 weapon, 1 thruster _ or _ 2 weapons ))
Passive effects would than also require 5 hull blocks each, thus can be (5+1)* as efficient without buffing doom-cubes, but they would buff RP ships with currently excessive amounts of hull.

thrusters + weapons + shields count + power == 1/5 of hulls == <1/6 of all == 10..16%
Would mostly nerf doom-cubes, not RP-orientated ships with already <10% mass in vitals.​

While decorative being <few% of blocks are negligible - thus have almost no impact on mass, but don't give you free hp either (as that would require them being spamed).
They are often only <few% on hybrid RP/PvP ships and only spamed on RP ships.


I'm feeling a bit misunderstood and repeating myself now & regret starting such a long 2-people post chain.
I said "vital-ore (using it as alias for one of the existing)".