Big ships, small ships

[xlxvr4xlx]

It could be worked in other ways but the point of it was to make something that can be effective for small fighters to use IF they are in a squadron. That why I said longer cool down so one ship small or large cant spam it.

As for fighters getting hit by it. This kind of buff should only be applied to the version of missile that would fire in a straight line from the point that it was fired. It would be near impossible for a large ship say 400 meters long to turn quick enough to even line up a fighter. The other factor would be a fighter would be able to dodge it or even hide on a certain side of the ship and stay behind it to avoid a large ship even firing that type of missile against a small fighter. The only viable use for a missile like this on a large ship would be for stations or bases which could also have this equipped for use against the ship.

This would provide a balance to where the smaller faster more agile ships can get in there and easily hit a large target with this nice weapon but a larger ship, and the larger it is, would increase the difficulty of hitting the smaller ship.

It could be anything, all I'm saying is the small ship should be able to solo a massive ship mentality should not even be considered. Giving incentives to smaller ships grouping together on one large target is what should be considered and at least in my opinion what would provide the best balance while maintaining creativity of ship designs. But like I said in my other post I'm just tossing in my two cents.

 

[SkullCollector]

Just throwing in a random idea.
What if we could add something akin to damage control and system wear-down?

After a certain damage threshold, systems have worn down enough to lose a bit of their efficiency. In addition to base capacity and regeneration of shields, we'd also get efficiency ratings based on the total damage they have taken since lay-down. Every group of shields functions as a seperate unit and is treated with their own threshold corresponding to its size. Wear-down is then spread randomly across these shield generator units, encouraging redundancy systems.
To counteract this wear, you'd use crew with handheld repair beams on larger ships during combat, or an astrotech post-battle. This might add necessity of interior to have access to the shield units without tearing apart hull components, and make RP feasible to a certain degree even without basing the design around it. If you do not repair, efficiency degrading stacks.
So if a squadron makes use of superior agility through swarming and exhaust tactics against a large ship, they can eventually degrade its systems enough to have their DPS > shield recharge, and take it out.

This could be applied to all systems. Those who despise having interior on their ships will find a clever solution to have all systems converge in a single room, while roleplayers can finally put all their engineering and control rooms to good use. Logistics might finally enter the stage.

 

[Johnathan Dahmnation]

It could be worked in other ways but the point of it was to make something that can be effective for small fighters to use IF they are in a squadron. That why I said longer cool down so one ship small or large cant spam it.

As for fighters getting hit by it. This kind of buff should only be applied to the version of missile that would fire in a straight line from the point that it was fired. It would be near impossible for a large ship say 400 meters long to turn quick enough to even line up a fighter. The other factor would be a fighter would be able to dodge it or even hide on a certain side of the ship and stay behind it to avoid a large ship even firing that type of missile against a small fighter. The only viable use for a missile like this on a large ship would be for stations or bases which could also have this equipped for use against the ship.

This would provide a balance to where the smaller faster more agile ships can get in there and easily hit a large target with this nice weapon but a larger ship, and the larger it is, would increase the difficulty of hitting the smaller ship.

It could be anything, all I'm saying is the small ship should be able to solo a massive ship mentality should not even be considered. Giving incentives to smaller ships grouping together on one large target is what should be considered and at least in my opinion what would provide the best balance while maintaining creativity of ship designs. But like I said in my other post I'm just tossing in my two cents.

There is no such thing as a weapon that a small ship can mount that a large ship can't spam. Cooldowns seem effective until you break them by adding more control systems or playing power games with multiple groups tied to the same computer, both of which are far less consequential for a large ship than a small ship. Essentially it could have the capacity to ruin the offense/defense balance of large ship and/or station combat.

Also small ships already have an advantage in being able to split the fire of a large ship's turrets and the agility to not be in the focal area of its main weapons. But if we're talking fighters vs capitals, yeah, those fighters should get vaporized in short order if the turrets are decent as that is the point of having them.

 

[NeonSturm]

I like that you can be better with maintenance on your systems, but:

• it would be a waste of memory (RAM) to activate this for each 1-block group
  
• If small ships dodge damage, they have to maintain thrusters and weapons instead of shields, but they need maintenance too (at least it would encourage a carrier with astro-tech)

I think you should improve your idea and once you thought through everything, create a thread about it.
Not as balance big vs small, but for RP.
(( Personally I think your systems maximum efficiency penalty should be 50% and it should be way faster to increase it the lower it is - well maintained ships will have an advantage! ))

 

[SkullCollector]

it would be a waste of memory (RAM) to activate this for each 1-block group

This is why I think it would encourage clever ship designs. Instead of stuffing shields wherever you have a hole, you might as well spend the time on planning your systems through; where they meet, where they split up in redundancy systems and where you have the maintenance / access point.

If small ships dodge damage, they have to maintain thrusters and weapons instead of shields, but they need maintenance too (at least it would encourage a carrier with astro-tech)

And that's exactly the fun in this. You'd need to evaluate your actions beforehand -- you have this much DPS, and you estimate your opponent to have around that much shield capacity, so do you think you can maintain your agility for long enough to actually wear him down? If you fail to plan ahead, you might have a strategic backfire and be ground down instead.

By the way; yes, this would put a lot of current ship designs at a disadvantage. But it's an alpha, so we shouldn't think about status quo and the habits that have already been set in place.
I'd like this to be discussed freely first, and it fits here quite nicely, I think.

 

[Johnathan Dahmnation]

This is why I think it would encourage clever ship designs. Instead of stuffing shields wherever you have a hole, you might as well spend the time on planning your systems through; where they meet, where they split up in redundancy systems and where you have the maintenance / access point.


And that's exactly the fun in this. You'd need to evaluate your actions beforehand -- you have this much DPS, and you estimate your opponent to have around that much shield capacity, so do you think you can maintain your agility for long enough to actually wear him down? If you fail to plan ahead, you might have a strategic backfire and be ground down instead.

By the way; yes, this would put a lot of current ship designs at a disadvantage. But it's an alpha, so we shouldn't think about status quo and the habits that have already been set in place.
I'd like this to be discussed freely first, and it fits here quite nicely, I think.

As someone who uses multiple small groups of shield capacity and recharge blocks in dealing and insulation of other systems this idea makes me want to murder puppies. It would be less obtrusive to disassemble my existing ships and rebuy them with blocks to bypass or just rework new ships as battle cubes with redundant paths to the bulk of systems to ensure that maintenence is simplified.

Edit: Reading that back, it came out a bit more combative than desired, but forcing game play penalties isn't really a good mechanic for getting people to enjoy the game. Further, ideas of this type seem focused on making large ships hell to fly by just hurting the experience.

 

[NeonSturm]

You could place astro-tech turrets and have astro ships docked inside close to the core in a room where everything merges / comes together.

It would be more a question of: can you do that during combat? How often do you have to do it?
Would you have a single thruster array for keeping top speed at 50% efficiency and switch combat thrusters off because you don't want to maintain them?

You could have less thrust usually, but still escape planet gravity if you need to. I think it is a good mechanic (especially as server option or with 50% minimum efficiency)

I believe in future we can build nano-bots doing repairs. But it will still be the question how much you want to have (mass). I guess that with nano-repair bots it would become like a second shield mechanic (but for regeneration of efficiency).

 

[Johnathan Dahmnation]

You could place astro-tech turrets and have astro ships docked inside close to the core in a room where everything merges / comes together.

It would be more a question of: can you do that during combat? How often do you have to do it?
Would you have a single thruster array for keeping top speed at 50% efficiency and switch combat thrusters off because you don't want to maintain them?

You could have less thrust usually, but still escape planet gravity if you need to. I think it is a good mechanic (especially as server option or with 50% minimum efficiency)

I believe in future we can build nano-bots doing repairs. But it will still be the question how much you want to have (mass). I guess that with nano-repair bots it would become like a second shield mechanic (but for regeneration of efficiency).

You could do that, though it even more penalizes designing interiors with logic kinda ruins the point. The min/max'ers doing that would have the advantage of continuous repair using no additional crew. They wouldn't have to make that choice for a bit of extra mass, mass they saved anyways by not having to over provision any systems to account for degradation.

Also, how would this not hurt the use of small one man ships that can't fit automated internal turrets or don't have adequate volume to have every system easily accessible? I can rework my BS or dreadnought to converge systems to a single protected access easily, not so much my fighters.

 

[Mork2]

The use of big ships or small ships comes down to how the technology available works, and its effectiveness. In the real world cost comes into it as well. In a couple of days on a multiplayer server I hit the 2bil limit and had over 200billion credits of stuff to sell so I would say money isn't really an issue in-game at the moment if you have some hours of relative peace and quiet.

Shielding systems give large ships a chance. Big enough shields can ignore damage from small ships. Armour do the same thing but in starmade, armour is relatively weak unless your fighting a small ship.

Weapon accuracy and speed. If weapons aren't accurate or don't have enough velocity small ships can survive in range of larger ships if they can change vector enough to dodge most shots or outrun them.

Weapon range is important. If a battleships weapons aren't as long range as weapons used against it then its just a not very mobile target.

While the big ship might be well shielded any turrets that might be trying to shoot small ships will be less protected and you can kill those with a similar sized ship to the turret. So while the large ship might be invulnerable to smaller ships its turrets aren't.

Arguments about battleships being obsolete to carriers and aircraft is because of a number of reason which don't always apply.

A modern purpose built battleship would be very dangerous and tough. One of the biggest Japanese battleships during WW2 took 30+ torpedo hits and 30 bombs to sink and almost all the torpedoes hit the same side. That was WW2 tech and its a boat it had to worry about sinking. Todays missiles and naval cannons tend to have a lot smaller warheads mainly. The Iowa class battleships America had weren't purpose built modern battleships they were just refitted with some air to surface missiles and CIWS. A purpose built battleship would have a very good missile system like todays destroyers so it wouldn't have a big a problem shooting down aircraft as its WW2 versions. Same with the guns. The negatives though is it would be hideously expensive and with limited uses. That makes it hard to justify the cost. Battleships are used a bit like tanks. I'm going to drive over to your base if you don't want me to flatten it you have to stop me and while your trying that I get to kill you. (assuming there isn't a range problem). It also means until someone fields a battleship you don't need one to stop it. Since people can afford battleships in starmade there is a arms race to build effective ones. Another reason why there aren't any battleships at the meoment is nuclear weapons, which we don't have in starmade, a one shot anything is dead weapon, that can be delivered by small craft. Navies build cruiser/frigates/destroyers because they are far cheaper and you can have enough of them to be everywhere you need them. Which is another reason why countries don't build them.

Battleships are very expensive and are only good at destroying things in range.
- Money isn't really a problem in starmade. Any weapon that can hit your ship you can shoot back with.
cruiser/frigates/destroyers/Carriers while not as expensive have a multitude of uses.
- You can build those uses into a large ship just not as effective as a specialist ship.
Battleship forcing a fight by attacking a base
- faction home base is invulnerable so that doesn't work
Small ships can just move clear to avoid fighting a battleship
- there is no need for you to do so since you don't have to defend an invulnerable base. Though as a battleship pilot I would like someone to scout and guide me.

If you make it possible to people to carry big enough weapons on small ships to take out battleships then the game will turn into a everyone cloak and kill anyone not cloaked game.

 

[Thomas Jetson]

How does all this apply to the current situation? How does one take out a capital ship? Is there a best way or many ways?

 

[Keptick]

How does all this apply to the current situation? How does one take out a capital ship? Is there a best way or many ways?

Get Weapon or turret equipped with a stop effect. Get behind the now immobile enemy ship with your superior agility. Hug it so that turrets can't hit you, unload everything = epic win.

 

[Winterhome]

How does all this apply to the current situation? How does one take out a capital ship? Is there a best way or many ways?

You take out a capital ship with either another capital ship or a lot more smaller ships.

 

[Thomas Jetson]

I prefer the second option. Two players in capital ships watching their ai turrets return fire is pointless.

 

[Thomas Jetson]

Get Weapon or turret equipped with a stop effect. Get behind the now immobile enemy ship with your superior agility. Hug it so that turrets can't hit you, unload everything = epic win.

Now add an escort of smaller ships to the capital under attack and you have something glorious!