Been Gone A While, How the Heck Do I Learn

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    Been gone for a while, as the updates were breaking all my stuff. Seems most of the technical overhauls are done, and universe update is sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowly on the way.

    Anyways, how the heck do you build a ship, lol? Where can I learn? The wiki is completely outdated, and tutorials are bare-bone at best. What is a chamber? What is efficiency? I have a billion questions and can't find any answers anywhere.

    Is there something that explains EVERYTHING clearly? Until then, the game is basically unplayable it seems...
     
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    Chambers are add-ons that you connect to your reactor with Conduit blocks, and give you abilities like Jump Drive (note: there is server config for allowing basic JD without chambers; check with your server to see if that's active when deciding a ship just needs basic JD) or stealth/scanning.

    Be careful when linking chambers to reactor and each other that the conduits don't touch chamber groups other than the tree you're building. This can and will mess up your chamber ability trees. Only the direct connection to the reactor can touch a bunch of separate groups simultaneously. If you're building two branches off of a base chamber (example: you may want distance + charge improvements on jump drive), each branch needs its own conduit off the base jump drive chamber; the system gets confused otherwise.

    The reactor chamber tree not only needs the groups built to physically represent the tree, but also needs Reactor Capacity (RC) points to activate them. This is a set amount of 100, regardless of whether you have 1 reactor block or a million. The RC costs are likewise also standard regardless of ship size; the same ability or upgrade thereto will cost the same stated RC regardless of the ship.
     
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    Ok, thanks, that is very helpful in understanding chambers. Does this mean that you can have, say, 100 chambers max, in any one ship?

    Also, how the heck do shields work? It used to be very simple -- caps increased capacity, and rechargers made it regen faster. Now, it seems far more complicated. I keep getting warnings that I don't understand as I build shields.

    Are shields now treated like reactors/stabilizers, where you should only have one chunk of connected capacitors, and rechargers should be in large chunks at a maximum distance possible?
     
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    Also, did the ugly purple power streams get removed? I don't see them anymore. I'm reactor streams are gone, I'm super happy. But does everything need to be connected by conduit now? (AKA reactors and stabilizers). I understand the chamber connection stuff in that regard now, at least.
     
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    The purple thing is gone, and with Quickfire update, so is the requirement to stick the stabilizers way far away. Conduits are only used for chambers.

    Each chamber power costs more than 1 point, so you can't have 100 active. You can build many more sets than you can activate, if you wish to have a ship switch abilities on the fly. However, you must wait some time before the new powers activate when you do so.
     
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    Shields are the same, but with 3 "improvements":

    1. The rechargers must be in one group, as they decide the geometry of the shield. The center of mass of this group is the center of the shield. The radius of the shield is given by the amount of rechargers (the shield is a sphere). The math behind finding the sphere's radius elludes my poor brain. Usually, it's really hard to build a balanced ship and not get a shield radius at least double than what you needed to cover the entire ship. Just try to make the shield center close to the ship's middle in all directions and you will be fine.

    2. All the capacitors inside the shield bubble will be used by that shield. If your shield covers the entire ship, then this means all shield capacitors in your ship. If you somehow manage to place capacitors outside any shield, those will be ignored by the game.

    3. Rechargers eat reactor energy and turn it into shield upkeep. One stabilized reactor block can feed 2 shield rechargers. But active shield capacitors eat up this upkeep just to exist. One recharger can keep alive up to 5 shield capacitors. Only what remains after the caps eat their upkeep is used to recharge the shields when needed.

    Example: If you have 6 times more capacitors than rechargers your shield will only deplete once, by its own will, and never recharge.

    If you have 4 times more capacitors than rechargers your shield will slooowly recharge over time.

    If you have the same number of capacitors and rechargers, the shield will recharge almost as fast as in the old days when you had the caps:recs 1:1.
     
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    I started playing again this week too: I barely remember anything about the game. I last played in 2013

    Would be down to hook up on a server and start something though
     
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    I'm actually figuring it out pretty quickly, thanks to help here and on reddit. The GUI is TERRIBLY intimidating at first glance, but it is actually quite simple and the GUI helps you quite out a lot now in some ways.

    Some thoughts from a returning player who just got back into this.

    1. Everything new is AWESOME. I mean it. Chambers customization, weapon rebalances, power rebalances, all of it... Really great stuff. It is really quite fantastic and I'm having a lot more fun building ships now than I did back in the day.

    2. There has gotta be a tutorial or a better wiki on this stuff. I mean, I figured it out in a few days, but I am also a returning player and an engineer in real life, so I don't know if the average joe could pick this game up for the first time and have any idea where to start.

    3. Chambers can be a little confusing. I understand the basics, but some of the stuff (level up my reactor? Why? Just for more power?...) Etc is just kind of vague and a little non intuitive. Chamber trees are epic, but some better explanations would be nice. Some boxes in the chamber tree are explained with long well written paragraphs, while others look like little more than a temporary note by the developers, and it can be tough to figure out what actually does what.

    In any case, I look forwards to the universe update. Hopefully the servers start populating again after it drops.
     
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    I started playing again this week too: I barely remember anything about the game. I last played in 2013

    Would be down to hook up on a server and start something though
    I might start playing online again as well. Brierie seems like the most populated server. You might see me on there under the same username. I'm still figuring out a lot of the stuff in single-player, but I'd like to see what servers are up to these days as well.