Can the devs give us an official ruling on PS transfer

[GRHayes]

GRHayes Ok, first off you're only considering shield regen, and not capacity. Balancing strictly on regen means that battles between different sized ships will HEAVILY favor the larger ship, if not make it outright invincible. That's what would happen if regen and weapons had the same values. Lets face it, combat between ships of identical mass never happen (or it's really really rare), unless it's a tournament or contest. Besides, at the moment it's entirely feasible to have a better shield defense than offense for similar mass ships, if you use CAPACITORS!!! I'll pull out calculations in a few minutes to prove it (I'll make an other post).

Secondly, the reason combat regen is a thing is because it's entirely possible to pull out of combat, regen a bit and come back. It actually favors team based tactics where you rotate with team mates and let your shields recharge while they fight. I agree with Panpiper that it's annoying not knowing what state the shields are in, idk why that was removed.

Thirdly, armor tanking is no joke. Look at the armor and structure HP bars, not the hole you're putting in the enemy ship (even if you penetrate their armor doesn't mean you're doing much damage).
[DOUBLEPOST=1445265396,1445265346][/DOUBLEPOST]I don't remember the specifics of armor tanking, so it'd be great if Lancake could explain them (please). What I do know is that can provide beast mode defense in certain situations and if done properly.

You are wrong I did consider it regen capacity is equivalent to that of power gen capacity if you look at the role it plays. As you so easily pointed out that can be knocked out in short order.

While you said it favors team based play. Those who made the made the decision ignored to facts there is a single player side to this along with ships can't just magically run away without being chanced and since their are caps on the servers and speed it isn't like your chances are good of getting away and combat not continuing. The first thing I am going to do when a see a ship start to turn tail and run is go after it I know just from that it is in a weakened state. It also is more vulnerable because most people build their craft weapons facing forward by the greatest extent. So his back will be facing me and I am going to launch every damn thing up his rear I can and I won't stop.

Battles favoring the larger ship makes sense. That is how things work in the real world the more powerful you are the higher probability you win.

Armor is a joke because the only thing that matters is if structure is reduced to 50% if I can cut through armor as easily as I proved in the one post even with all the effects it does nothing to prevent it. At most it take 2 to 3 times long. So instead of 4 second I spend at max 12 seconds. No matter what the end result is the same.

Right now I don't have to dock just power and shield modules I could purely dock weapons modules that have their own power supply. I can fire them by using an internal link to trigger an transmitter receiver to each of them. If I was to take something like a 96ometer x 100metter x50 meter ship I could put on the order of 98*25 of those inside it. for a firing group of 2450 million or 2.45billion granted I would have to add room for the core and the logic but that is minimal. Then of course some engines and power for them.
I can refire that every 15 seconds.I could make it a double barrel system and fire one every 7 seconds reducing the number of units by 1/3 for 1633 of the units but my fire rate would be 2 times the original amount. If you are wondering that works out to 21.73 million DPS.

I went ahead and made this proof of concept ship below. So I know that at least can work.
Each module is an independently powered system there is nothing preventing us making each one of them 1M power regen. That means it could be cannons or anything each that can use 1Million power a second. Which works out to about 100,ooo DPS unless you are talking damage pulse and it is 200,000 because it only uses 5 power per 1 damage.

 

[MrFURB]

Armor tanking can definitely be worthwhile. Smaller vessels make good use of single or double layers of advanced armor and pierce passive (giving each armor block 4K effective health) while larger vessels can utilize a variety of different armoring strategies, some of them focused on alpha weapons or missiles, others on nullifying DPS and penetration. Armor is extremely useful in deciding how much enemy damage is applied to an area before important things start breaking. It is also much cheaper than shielding when utilized only in protecting important or likely targets.

Shields give you a temporary barrier of zero risk at the cost of a lot of resources and block space. In MMO terms think of it as a damage check... If the enemy can't deal your shield capacity in damage before the fight is over, the entire fight is null. Torpedoes and boarding aside, might as well not have happened.
Regen acts in a similar capacity but instead of a damage check it's a DPS check.
At low shield % and with ion effect active each shield regen blocks gives 1.25 effective shield HP/sec and each capacitor gives at most 275 shield HP, almost 30 seconds of fire from a single weapon block.

I think one of the given misconceptions in the defense vs offense mindset is that defense in Starmade scales independently with offense. A ship with ten thousand blocks of armor against ten thousand blocks of weapons... Yeah, the armor is going to get shredded in rapidly growing bits. Defense isn't about providing an unstoppable barrier, it's about being able to better and longer leverage your offense during combat. A balanced ship has enough defense that it stays together long enough to fully support it's offense.
If it ever becomes more effective to completely ignore defense in favor of brute offense, or to sacrifice as much offense as you possibly can for more defense, then we can assume that the scaling is out of whack.
As it is proven through testing done daily by people in both singleplayer and multiplayer this is not the case, as putting 5 layers of advanced armor and a million shield HP on a 100x100x100 cube makes it more combat effective than one with only weapons and a similar cube with only a few thousand weapon blocks in exchange for millions in shield and armor HP will be weathered down before inflicting real damage.


As for the shield regen in combat nerf being changed to an out of combat buff, I agree. It would help keep things understandable.

 

[Keptick]

You are wrong I did consider it regen capacity is equivalent to that of power gen capacity if you look at the role it plays. As you so easily pointed out that can be knocked out in short order.

While you said it favors team based play. Those who made the made the decision ignored to facts there is a single player side to this along with ships can't just magically run away without being chanced and since their are caps on the servers and speed it isn't like your chances are good of getting away and combat not continuing. The first thing I am going to do when a see a ship start to turn tail and run is go after it I know just from that it is in a weakened state. It also is more vulnerable because most people build their craft weapons facing forward by the greatest extent. So his back will be facing me and I am going to launch every damn thing up his rear I can and I won't stop.

Battles favoring the larger ship makes sense. That is how things work in the real world the more powerful you are the higher probability you win.

Armor is a joke because the only thing that matters is if structure is reduced to 50% if I can cut through armor as easily as I proved in the one post even with all the effects it does nothing to prevent it. At most it take 2 to 3 times long. So instead of 4 second I spend at max 12 seconds. No matter what the end result is the same.

Right now I don't have to dock just power and shield modules I could purely dock weapons modules that have their own power supply. I can fire them by using an internal link to trigger an transmitter receiver to each of them. If I was to take something like a 96ometer x 100metter x50 meter ship I could put on the order of 98*25 of those inside it. for a firing group of 2450 million or 2.45billion granted I would have to add room for the core and the logic but that is minimal. Then of course some engines and power for them.
I can refire that every 15 seconds.I could make it a double barrel system and fire one every 7 seconds reducing the number of units by 1/3 for 1633 of the units but my fire rate would be 2 times the original amount. If you are wondering that works out to 21.73 million DPS.

I went ahead and made this proof of concept ship below. So I know that at least can work.
Each module is an independently powered system there is nothing preventing us making each one of them 1M power regen. That means it could be cannons or anything each that can use 1Million power a second. Which works out to about 100,ooo DPS unless you are talking damage pulse and it is 200,000 because it only uses 5 power per 1 damage.

So, you're basically saying that ships should be able to COMPLETELY NEGATE incoming damage with shield regen? Do you know how fucking boring the game would get? Besides, right now if you have two ships of equal mass and power regen, the one with more shield capacitors will kill the one with more weapons before the opposite happens, as I said about 10 times by now.

We had what you're proposing once, shields got buffed to the point where regen was at about the same level per block as weapon damage. Do you know what happened? No one died. Ever.

Also, I'd love to see you aim docked logic weapons with the turn rate of a 900m long ship :p

 

[GRHayes]

So, you're basically saying that ships should be able to COMPLETELY NEGATE incoming damage with shield regen? Do you know how fucking boring the game would get?

We had that once, shields got buffed to the point where regen was at about the same level as weapons. Do you know what happened? No one died. No. One. Died.

No two people make their ships identical you pointed that out!
So one is always going to be stronger than the other. Someone may choose more defense vs offense and another person will go more offense vs defense.

The only way you could have no one dying as you say is if shield exceeded weapons. They were not balanced as I am saying should be done.

Right now all a battle comes down to who is bigger and who gets the first shot off. Its basically become a sniping game.
Seriously what is someone going to do against what I described above. Individual powered weapons modules make DPS unlimited.
Basically all you end up with is a cube of weapons shooting at another cube of weapons and who fires first wins.
That is what this current setup winds down to.
The way the current system is all shields and armor really do is protect you against the first shot if that and maybe give you a chance to line up and return fire hopefully before they do to much damage.

As I pointed out the current change in how they count ship damage was to increase the length of battles. It no longer relys just on the core being destroyed. Which is exactly the opposite of the shield systems being used to reduce the length of time of combat. In short when they made the change you just talked about they went to far.

BTW that ship above I can go up to 8 barrels per module to make a volley a second. It reduces the amount of modules need but increases dps. Because as you know when you can't fire all barrels it will fire 1 of them and then you can fire the next and so on. that would come to 555 modules times 8 barrels 4444 shots 1/8 of which would fire a second. that is 55M DPS sustained fire.

 

[Keptick]

No two people make their ships identical you pointed that out!
So one is always going to be stronger than the other. Someone may choose more defense vs offense and another person will go more offense vs defense.

The only way you could have no one dying as you say is if shield exceeded weapons. They were not balanced as I am saying should be done.

Right now all a battle comes down to who is bigger and who gets the first shot off. Its basically become a sniping game.
Seriously what is someone going to do against what I described above. Individual powered weapons modules make DPS unlimited.
Basically all you end up with is a cube of weapons shooting at another cube of weapons and who fires first wins.
That is what this current setup winds down to.
The way the current system is all shields and armor really do is protect you against the first shot if that and maybe give you a chance to line up and return fire hopefully before they do to much damage.

As I pointed out the current change in how they count ship damage was to increase the length of battles. It no longer relys just on the core being destroyed. Which is exactly the opposite of the shield systems being used to reduce the length of time of combat. In short when they made the change you just talked about they went to far.

BTW that ship above I can go up to 8 barrels per module to make a volley a second. It reduces the amount of modules need but increases dps. Because as you know when you can't fire all barrels it will fire 1 of them and then you can fire the next and so on. that would come to 555 modules times 8 barrels 4444 shots 1/8 of which would fire a second. that is 55M DPS sustained fire.

Please give me an in-game example of one shot kills between two ships of equal mass under the current release version of the game. Assume that both targets would be moving, meaning that aiming a giant logic aimed array of weapons at the enemy would be practically impossible. It's not practical, try it in actual combat, it won't work. The things you're saying don't actually work and/or act that way in-game.

Also, I have no idea what those "barrels" you're talking about are. Are you just talking about the weapon blocks? Because you'd need 5.5 million weapon blocks in order to achieve 55 million damage per second, and 550 million energy per second to sustain it.

 

[Panpiper]

Please give me an in-game example of one shot kills between two ships of equal mass under the current release version of the game.

The Buccaneer. The only thing that 'might' prevent victory being a one shot kill to whomever fired first would be if the 16 point defense turrets managed to shoot down a few of the heavy warheads, despite them being fired concurrent with 40 decoy missiles.

The Outlaw comes close to the same sort of thing, but with a much higher firing rate.

 

[Keptick]

The Buccaneer. The only thing that 'might' prevent victory being a one shot kill to whomever fired first would be if the 16 point defense turrets managed to shoot down a few of the heavy warheads, despite them being fired concurrent with 40 decoy missiles.

The Outlaw comes close to the same sort of thing, but with a much higher firing rate.

All I see there is a great use of long range tactics tbh, buffing shield regen wouldn't change that. However, you have to keep in mind that the further away you are the more enemy PD has time to kill the missiles, so they'd probably get shot down before getting there. There's also the fact that an armor tanked ship would be better against ships like these, since armor is really resistant when it comes to missiles. From what I understand the OP is using cannons, so you couldn't get this kind of alpha damage with a cannon ship of the same size.

Basically it all comes back the specialization and what the enemy is packing, which is how it should be. If you're caught off guard with the Outlaw you're just screwed due to the low defensive capabilities, so there's ups and downs to everything.

Nice ships btw ^_^

 

[GRHayes]

Please give me an in-game example of one shot kills between two ships of equal mass under the current release version of the game. Assume that both targets would be moving, meaning that aiming a giant logic aimed array of weapons at the enemy would be practically impossible. It's not practical, try it in actual combat, it won't work. The things you're saying don't actually work and/or act that way in-game.

Also, I have no idea what those "barrels" you're talking about are. Are you just talking about the weapon blocks? Because you'd need 5.5 million weapon blocks in order to achieve 55 million damage per second, and 550 million energy per second to sustain it.

I made a small version of what I am talking about so you wouldn't have to load something massive. I am sure you can figure out how these extends out to each power system is 1M and each weapon tube fires the full power load a shot. meaning you get 8 shots out of each weapons computer. just not at one time. Just means every second or so you need to push the button again depending on the weapon type you are firing. Those could be cannons or whatever else.

Just making a module 600 blocks long would give 755K power efficiency of power drops after that which is why it requires 360+ more blocks get to 1M.

The concept ship is attached you can play I can make these where they are packed against each other rather than a gap between them. The reason I can fire 8 tubes is because i designed left and right modules to fit inside each other. In the bigger system design I build it from bottom up to avoid issues.

Sure I need to do the aiming. Never had an issue with that personally. But that kind of fire power against a stationary targets is a slaughter.

I think when you realize the capability of what that can do you will figure out there is no balance in this game at all.

 

[Keptick]

against a stationary target

My point exactly. You can't use it against ships. So in actual PvP combat you'll get slaughtered. Therefore, it isn't an issue. If I was going up against a stationary target I might as well just board it and capture it intact.

 

[Lancake]

Right now the only info I can find on power shield transfer is that it is supposed to transfer 1200 for every 1500 spent.

However, we know shield transfer throws an shield module into a mode where it thinks it is being attacked.

And the power transfer beams sure as heck don't transfer at the 1200 rate once you put an decent number of them in to use.

If you are wondering why I am bitching about power transfer. I went through calculate out the max on 755K since the transfer beam is 2 seconds long doubled the blocks for each. Beam. I noticed I was still only getting about 40% of the 80% I should be getting so instead of getting 1200 a block I was getting 480. I also noticed it really wasn't taxing even 1/3 of the Power supply. So I added more blocks. Sure enough it started pulling more power but the transfer rate didn't go up instead I started getting 141 a block.

So in short wondering if this is intentional or a bug? What the actual formula is supposed to be would be nice.
I can file a bug report but not sure if it is a bug because lack of information.

I have not read much in this thread since it seems to go off topic quickly:
1) The issue where shield transfer goes into "under fire" mode is a bug, reported here http://phab.starma.de/T292
2) It's possible power transfer is bugged, can you give me the details so I can double check it?

What's your power storage, power regen, number of power supply modules (the amount of the main array and the support one)? what support did you use? did you use logic? did you hit something with the beam?

 

[GRHayes]

I have not read much in this thread since it seems to go off topic quickly:
1) The issue where shield transfer goes into "under fire" mode is a bug, reported here http://phab.starma.de/T292
2) It's possible power transfer is bugged, can you give me the details so I can double check it?

What's your power storage, power regen, number of power supply modules (the amount of the main array and the support one)? what support did you use? did you use logic? did you hit something with the beam?

Thanks Lancake

If you are wondering why I am bitching about power transfer. I went through calculate out the max on 755K since the transfer beam is 2 seconds long doubled the blocks for each. Beam. I noticed I was still only getting about 40% of the 80% I should be getting so instead of getting 1200 a block I was getting 480. I also noticed it really wasn't taxing even 1/3 of the Power supply. So I added more blocks. Sure enough it started pulling more power but the transfer rate didn't go up instead I started getting 141 a block.

It seems there is no way to get near the 80% transfer it just gets worse. I even tried other shaped power modules so it isn't just related to the length. It is independent of shape. That much I am certain.

 

[Lancake]

Thanks Lancake

If you are wondering why I am bitching about power transfer. I went through calculate out the max on 755K since the transfer beam is 2 seconds long doubled the blocks for each. Beam. I noticed I was still only getting about 40% of the 80% I should be getting so instead of getting 1200 a block I was getting 480. I also noticed it really wasn't taxing even 1/3 of the Power supply. So I added more blocks. Sure enough it started pulling more power but the transfer rate didn't go up instead I started getting 141 a block.

It seems there is no way to get near the 80% transfer it just gets worse. I even tried other shaped power modules so it isn't just related to the length. It is independent of shape. That much I am certain.

Did you have enough power capacity for 1 tick? Also give me the amount of main blocks and support blocks you originally had.

If you use the beam support, your burst will be much higher but so will be your draw. If you're only using the default 50K power storage you're not going to have enough.

EDIT: Power supplied is meant to be 240 per second per block, Power drawn is 300 per second per block. This is including reload time.

 

[GRHayes]

My point exactly. You can't use it against ships. So in actual PvP combat you'll get slaughtered. Therefore, it isn't an issue. If I was going up against a stationary target I might as well just board it and capture it intact.

I use dumb fire against ships all the time. So how does that make it not usable against ships? It just excels at obliterating stationary targets.
If I stagger the barrels back 1 for each row I can get a 100 wide by 100 wide area as a flying target shredder.

It doesn't even have to be just missiles cannons work from it beams work also.

The logic works I've tested it which was your first claim. So please explain how this doesn't work.

Or is this something that doesn't work for you in play. I can understand it if you personally don't like dumb fire or and so on. But I personally have no problem with the system its point and shoot.

Try the ship out it works no worse that dumbfire systems. Just you don't get the difference between left and right mouse button.
[DOUBLEPOST=1445277642,1445277573][/DOUBLEPOST]

Did you have enough power capacity for 1 tick? Also give me the amount of main blocks and support blocks you originally had.

If you use the beam support, your burst will be much higher but so will be your draw. If you're only using the default 50K power storage you're not going to have enough.

EDIT: Power supplied is meant to be 240 per second per block, Power drawn is 300 per second per block. This is including reload time.

More than enough pawer cap was 790K and the gen was 755K
In fact put the module up on this post asking others to verify
http://starmadedock.net/threads/power-transfer-issue-can-someone-verify.21478/

 

[Lancake]

I use dumb fire against ships all the time. So how does that make it not usable against ships? It just excels at obliterating stationary targets.
If I stagger the barrels back 1 for each row I can get a 100 wide by 100 wide area as a flying target shredder.

It doesn't even have to be just missiles cannons work from it beams work also.

The logic works I've tested it which was your first claim. So please explain how this doesn't work.

Or is this something that doesn't work for you in play. I can understand it if you personally don't like dumb fire or and so on. But I personally have no problem with the system its point and shoot.

Try the ship out it works no worse that dumbfire systems. Just you don't get the difference between left and right mouse button.
[DOUBLEPOST=1445277642,1445277573][/DOUBLEPOST]
More than enough pawer cap was 790K and the gen was 755K
In fact put the module up on this post asking others to verify
http://starmadedock.net/threads/power-transfer-issue-can-someone-verify.21478/

I've checked each beam separately (with and without logic) they provide 241 440 per second or roughly 1.2 mil per burst/5 seconds.
Both beams combined that's 482 880 per second. Power consumed is correct too.

This was tested in SP on a cloaked ship that had 460 000 power consumption per second, I could remain power stable by that reactor.

 

[GRHayes]

I've checked each beam separately (with and without logic) they provide 241 440 per second or roughly 1.2 mil per burst/5 seconds.
Both beams combined that's 482 880 per second. Power consumed is correct too.

This was tested in SP on a cloaked ship that had 460 000 power consumption per second, I could remain power stable by that reactor.

It was designed to be extremely efficient and give about 2K per mass or better. 600 blocks is about where the current power system drops off.
If you are wondering yes I really do calculate test the stuff out to that extent.

The power source is 755K if I remember. Which the beams work over 2 seconds of time. So dividing 755K by 1500 should have given me 50% of the modules I needed. per beam. meaning each beam should be 1006 blocks. to deliver 1.2M as you said. However, that isn't close to what I measured out of it over time. I used it to charge up massive power cap block it took 2+ minutes to charge. It should have took 83 seconds to charge 50Meg. 1.2 per beam but a beam is 2 seconds in length. 50/1.2 = 41.66 *2 = 83 sec instead you get times like 2:20 or longer. I tried adding more beams on it because I realized when it fired via logic it didn't pull power capacitance down much only about 25% to 30% instead of a greater transfer rate it actually got worse and took longer.

If you want to see if it really is giving out 1.2M test it by charging up a block of power capacitance.

Who knows maybe it has been fixed in the dev version.

BTW thanks for checking this.

 

[Lancake]

It was designed to be extremely efficient and give about 2K per mass or better. 600 blocks is about where the current power system drops off.
If you are wondering yes I really do calculate test the stuff out to that extent.

The power source is 755K if I remember. Which the beams work over 2 seconds of time. So dividing 755K by 1500 should have given me 50% of the modules I needed. per beam. meaning each beam should be 1006 blocks. to deliver 1.2M as you said. However, that isn't close to what I measured out of it over time. I used it to charge up massive power cap block it took 2+ minutes to charge. It should have took 83 seconds to charge 50Meg. 1.2 per beam but a beam is 2 seconds in length. 50/1.2 = 41.66 *2 = 83 sec instead you get times like 2:20 or longer. I tried adding more beams on it because I realized when it fired via logic it didn't pull power capacitance down much only about 25% to 30% instead of a greater transfer rate it actually got worse and took longer.

If you want to see if it really is giving out 1.2M test it by charging up a block of power capacitance.

Who knows maybe it has been fixed in the dev version.

BTW thanks for checking this.

Beam burst duration is 2.5 seconds, after that you have an additional 2.5 seconds of cooldown. It's 41.66 * 2.5 and not 41.55 (edit: I meant 41.66, typo) * 2

 

[GRHayes]

Again thanks.
[DOUBLEPOST=1445281378,1445281100][/DOUBLEPOST]

Beam burst duration is 2.5 seconds, after that you have an additional 2.5 seconds of cooldown. It's 41.66 * 2.5 and not 41.55 (edit: I meant 41.66, typo) * 2

Appreciate it that that explains I'll recalculate based on 2.5 and see if it improves it. just doesn't explain how it worked properly with you though. Considering it was calculated based on 2 seconds not 2.5

 

[Lancake]

Again thanks.
[DOUBLEPOST=1445281378,1445281100][/DOUBLEPOST]

Appreciate it that that explains I'll recalculate based on 2.5 and see if it improves it. just doesn't explain how it worked properly with you though. Considering it was calculated based on 2 seconds not 2.5

You said it took over 2 minutes to charge 50 mil (so 120+ seconds). If you can give the exact number (doesn't need to have decimals) you could see how many ticks are lost.
It *should* take 103.54 seconds to charge 50 million power

 

[GRHayes]

You said it took over 2 minutes to charge 50 mil (so 120+ seconds). If you can give the exact number (doesn't need to have decimals) you could see how many ticks are lost.
It *should* take 103.54 seconds to charge 50 million power

2:20 seconds was one time 2:11 was another 2:35 was another. None of those times the power capacitance dropped fully. But the more I added tubes/barrels to it the worse it got. I would have thought it would have gotten better. the timing circuit seems near perfect timed though for beam length.

 

[Lancake]

2:20 seconds was one time 2:11 was another 2:35 was another. None of those times the power capacitance dropped fully. But the more I added tubes/barrels to it the worse it got. I would have thought it would have gotten better. the timing circuit seems near perfect timed though for beam length.

I timed it again and now I got 2:20 by using your dual channel beams. From what I can see, often it does 4 ticks per beam and not 5. But the same goes for your power draw.
I've disabled power regen and gave the reactor 50 mil storage, it transferred 39.7 mil which is close to what it should be (it should be 40 mil).

Tried a power supply + cannon version too, exact same result.

What I noticed is that every 2.5 mil, it retracts 500K on the HUD...So I'm almost certain this is a client vs server conflict. I'll forward it and report it.