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As of late, I've noticed quite a few people having difficulty getting started in the game. This isn't for lack of a tutorial; there's a perfectly good one in place by Schema. However, not only does it not touch upon major and advanced aspects of the game, but not enough people seem to know how to enable it.
Part 1: How to enable the tutorial.
When you start the game, there'll be a number of options in the settings area. Make sure that Tutorial is set to ON instead of OFF.
If you've already completed the tutorial, disregard this step.
Part One: Power supply and you.
Power block generation in starmade is a simple, yet difficult to understand system. The sum for generation of power is based mostly on bounding dimensions of a single reactor.
Pictured below are two reactors. Both consist of 14 power blocks each. Can you guess which one will produce more energy?
If you said the one on the right, you'd be correct. While both produce more than >1000E/S, the one on the right produces far more. This does not mean that you can't add blocks in the area between these points.
Simply put, the equation for power is:
Sum of maximum x, y, z dimensions + 1 (respectively) + the total sum of power blocks total in the cluster X 10 = recharge per second.
After a certain point, the efficiency of a single cluster falls off and you'll be required to build a new cluster.
Power load is another major part of power systems. Previously, power load was provided by the total numb.er of blocks in a cluster. Now, they have their own specific block, the power tank. On larger ships (1k mass and higher) power tanks become a neccessity. Having enough regenerative ability is good, but you must have a large enough load to actually support all of your systems. For example, the ship pictured below has very powerful energy regeneration abilities, but has a large weapon system with a required energy per shot of approximately 21k E/s.
The power regen alone is enough to compensate for hte power required of the cannon, however the cannon cannot draw enough energy from the battery to fire in the first place. For this, we look to power tanks to alleviate this problem. Power tanks work the same way thrusters and weapons systems do; the more of them you have in a cluster, the better they'll operate. Currently, power tanks add to load with the following equation:
Number of power tanks^1.3+20,000 = load
Therefore, the more powertanks you have in a cluster, the better your load will be. The larger your ship is, the higher your minimum load should be. A good rule of thumb is to have at least as much load as you do regen. I personally prefer twice as much, but everyone has their own preferences.
Part Two: Armor and Shields
In starmade, there are two ways to protect the delicious filling of systems that consists of your spaceship. Hull, and shields. I'm going to come right out and say that at the moment, hull seems pretty weak for what it does. It's more of a decorative block than it is actual protection from enemy damage. However, sometimes hull can be the deciding factor on wether or not your ship will lose a fight. Shields, on the other hand, are hands-down the best way to protect your ships from would-be attackers. I'll start with describing what's so great about shields.
Currently shields have two major characteristics; load and regeneration. I'm not too clear on what the equation for calculating shield load is. For every shield block aboard a ship, it adds 2 to the regenerative ability of the shield. For example, the humble Isanth IV (basic pirate mob) has only four shield blocks on board; therefore, it's regeneration rate is 8. Shields currently subtract as much power from your reserves as their regeneration rate. Therefore the Isanth's power intake for shield regeneration is 8 energy per 8 shield points regenerated. While smaller ships may use shields as a buffer for attacks, larger ships tend to utilize shields extensively. At the moment, shields are defined as their ability to regenerate even while taking damage. A ship that has a 10k Regeneration rate will be able to survive attacks indefinitely from ships that do 10k Damage per second, as their shield systems are sufficient to regenerate the shield points lost. Therefore, the better the regen rate on your shields, the better they are. However, if your shields are completely dropped to zero, there is a ten second waiting period before they begin to regenerate. Those ten seconds could mean the difference between life and death. That's where hull comes in.
Hull are a mixed bag. While they add detail and color to your ship, they also increase the mass and size of your ship. Another important function that hull serves is that it provides the last line of defense against incoming attacks. Once your shields are down, you'll be waiting for what seems like an eternity for your shields to come back online. In the meantime, you'll be relying solely on hull blocks to absorb damage that would otherwise destroy or cripple other ship systems. There are two kinds of hulls; normal and hardened. Normal hull has 100HP with a damage reduction rate of 25%. This means that all damage that makes contact with the hull will be reduced a full quarter. Hardened hull has 200HP and a damage reduction rate of 50%, effectively halving the damage done to the hull. This means that the minimum damage required to destroy hardened hull outright is 400. Otherwise, all you'll do is scratch the paint. Hardened hull does have some long-term downsides. In the future, they'll cost twice as much mass as normal hull. At the moment, they cost the same mass as a normal hull. However, their credit price and production price are far higher than that of normal hull. Normal hull sells and buys for a rate of 250 per block. Hardened sells and buys for six times that. It's an expensive investment, but is usually worth it.
In short, your primary defensive systems are your shields. Focus on these as much as possible. However, do not discount hull. If possible, armor the area around your core with hardened hull as often as possible. However, hull is still a necessary part of a ship.
Part Three: A Marauder's Easy Guide to Effective Weapons Systems.
As many of you have no doubt discovered by now, Starmade has a number of weapon systems available for use. To list them all:
Antimatter cannons are simply the best weapons in the game. As they are the only weapon in the game that can damage shields, your weapons should be based mainly on AMCs. Weapon ability scales with x^0.5 per block. Obviously, larger weapon arrays are going to be more effective - to a point. Eventually, the amount of damage done by a single cluster of blocks will reach a maximum point. The best way to maximize the ability of your weapons system is to adjust the power allocation with each weapon. This is done by accessing the weapons menu by pressing "t". For a more powerful weapon, you'll want to shift more points into damage. For a rapid-fire machine gun weapon, you'll want to put more points into reload. Reload has a hard cap at 50.0, but other systems have no maximum, allowing you to put whatever points that you want to.
Personal note; I prefer to have my weapon power allocation as such; damage 50% distance 15% reload 10% speed 25%. Feel free to play around with the values to find your own perfect balance.
To be completely honest, missiles are not a very good weapons choice right now. Not only do they not affect shields in the least, but they also are slow to fire and travel. In order for missiles to become a viable choice in combat, they need a significant shield buff. However, missiles do have their uses. Missiles are the best mass-block removal system. If you need to completely destroy a section of an enemy's ship, missiles are your tool. Just remember to wait until the shields are down.
Disintegrators are similar to missiles in that they require shields to be down to be effective against enemy ships. They differ mainly that they're an actual block, and not a missile system. This can lend to potentially endless possibilities. I've used them as anything from space mines to self destruct mechanisms. The most direct - combat oriented way of using htem however, is as a battering ram. Making a ship entirely of disintegrators and docking them ot the front of a ship is an easy and safe way of using them as a battering ram; once it detonates the first time, all you need to do is buy another battering ram and attach it. I'll post a picture of demonstrating this tomorrow (6/24/2013).
I'll add more as I finish typing it up on my own. Feel free to correct me on any innacuracies.
Part 1: How to enable the tutorial.
When you start the game, there'll be a number of options in the settings area. Make sure that Tutorial is set to ON instead of OFF.
If you've already completed the tutorial, disregard this step.
Part One: Power supply and you.
Power block generation in starmade is a simple, yet difficult to understand system. The sum for generation of power is based mostly on bounding dimensions of a single reactor.
Pictured below are two reactors. Both consist of 14 power blocks each. Can you guess which one will produce more energy?
If you said the one on the right, you'd be correct. While both produce more than >1000E/S, the one on the right produces far more. This does not mean that you can't add blocks in the area between these points.
Simply put, the equation for power is:
Sum of maximum x, y, z dimensions + 1 (respectively) + the total sum of power blocks total in the cluster X 10 = recharge per second.
After a certain point, the efficiency of a single cluster falls off and you'll be required to build a new cluster.
Power load is another major part of power systems. Previously, power load was provided by the total numb.er of blocks in a cluster. Now, they have their own specific block, the power tank. On larger ships (1k mass and higher) power tanks become a neccessity. Having enough regenerative ability is good, but you must have a large enough load to actually support all of your systems. For example, the ship pictured below has very powerful energy regeneration abilities, but has a large weapon system with a required energy per shot of approximately 21k E/s.
The power regen alone is enough to compensate for hte power required of the cannon, however the cannon cannot draw enough energy from the battery to fire in the first place. For this, we look to power tanks to alleviate this problem. Power tanks work the same way thrusters and weapons systems do; the more of them you have in a cluster, the better they'll operate. Currently, power tanks add to load with the following equation:
Number of power tanks^1.3+20,000 = load
Therefore, the more powertanks you have in a cluster, the better your load will be. The larger your ship is, the higher your minimum load should be. A good rule of thumb is to have at least as much load as you do regen. I personally prefer twice as much, but everyone has their own preferences.
Part Two: Armor and Shields
In starmade, there are two ways to protect the delicious filling of systems that consists of your spaceship. Hull, and shields. I'm going to come right out and say that at the moment, hull seems pretty weak for what it does. It's more of a decorative block than it is actual protection from enemy damage. However, sometimes hull can be the deciding factor on wether or not your ship will lose a fight. Shields, on the other hand, are hands-down the best way to protect your ships from would-be attackers. I'll start with describing what's so great about shields.
Currently shields have two major characteristics; load and regeneration. I'm not too clear on what the equation for calculating shield load is. For every shield block aboard a ship, it adds 2 to the regenerative ability of the shield. For example, the humble Isanth IV (basic pirate mob) has only four shield blocks on board; therefore, it's regeneration rate is 8. Shields currently subtract as much power from your reserves as their regeneration rate. Therefore the Isanth's power intake for shield regeneration is 8 energy per 8 shield points regenerated. While smaller ships may use shields as a buffer for attacks, larger ships tend to utilize shields extensively. At the moment, shields are defined as their ability to regenerate even while taking damage. A ship that has a 10k Regeneration rate will be able to survive attacks indefinitely from ships that do 10k Damage per second, as their shield systems are sufficient to regenerate the shield points lost. Therefore, the better the regen rate on your shields, the better they are. However, if your shields are completely dropped to zero, there is a ten second waiting period before they begin to regenerate. Those ten seconds could mean the difference between life and death. That's where hull comes in.
Hull are a mixed bag. While they add detail and color to your ship, they also increase the mass and size of your ship. Another important function that hull serves is that it provides the last line of defense against incoming attacks. Once your shields are down, you'll be waiting for what seems like an eternity for your shields to come back online. In the meantime, you'll be relying solely on hull blocks to absorb damage that would otherwise destroy or cripple other ship systems. There are two kinds of hulls; normal and hardened. Normal hull has 100HP with a damage reduction rate of 25%. This means that all damage that makes contact with the hull will be reduced a full quarter. Hardened hull has 200HP and a damage reduction rate of 50%, effectively halving the damage done to the hull. This means that the minimum damage required to destroy hardened hull outright is 400. Otherwise, all you'll do is scratch the paint. Hardened hull does have some long-term downsides. In the future, they'll cost twice as much mass as normal hull. At the moment, they cost the same mass as a normal hull. However, their credit price and production price are far higher than that of normal hull. Normal hull sells and buys for a rate of 250 per block. Hardened sells and buys for six times that. It's an expensive investment, but is usually worth it.
In short, your primary defensive systems are your shields. Focus on these as much as possible. However, do not discount hull. If possible, armor the area around your core with hardened hull as often as possible. However, hull is still a necessary part of a ship.
Part Three: A Marauder's Easy Guide to Effective Weapons Systems.
As many of you have no doubt discovered by now, Starmade has a number of weapon systems available for use. To list them all:
- Antimatter cannon - your bread and butter weapon system.
- D1000 Dumbfire rockets - Not very popular, but surprisingly useful
- SD KB Heatseeker rockets - Pretty much the only missile ever used on ships currently.
- SD BB Bunkerbuster missiles - Slow, but have lock-on capability (even slower) and incredible blast power.
- Disintegrators - Blocks that explode on contact.
Antimatter cannons are simply the best weapons in the game. As they are the only weapon in the game that can damage shields, your weapons should be based mainly on AMCs. Weapon ability scales with x^0.5 per block. Obviously, larger weapon arrays are going to be more effective - to a point. Eventually, the amount of damage done by a single cluster of blocks will reach a maximum point. The best way to maximize the ability of your weapons system is to adjust the power allocation with each weapon. This is done by accessing the weapons menu by pressing "t". For a more powerful weapon, you'll want to shift more points into damage. For a rapid-fire machine gun weapon, you'll want to put more points into reload. Reload has a hard cap at 50.0, but other systems have no maximum, allowing you to put whatever points that you want to.
Personal note; I prefer to have my weapon power allocation as such; damage 50% distance 15% reload 10% speed 25%. Feel free to play around with the values to find your own perfect balance.
To be completely honest, missiles are not a very good weapons choice right now. Not only do they not affect shields in the least, but they also are slow to fire and travel. In order for missiles to become a viable choice in combat, they need a significant shield buff. However, missiles do have their uses. Missiles are the best mass-block removal system. If you need to completely destroy a section of an enemy's ship, missiles are your tool. Just remember to wait until the shields are down.
Disintegrators are similar to missiles in that they require shields to be down to be effective against enemy ships. They differ mainly that they're an actual block, and not a missile system. This can lend to potentially endless possibilities. I've used them as anything from space mines to self destruct mechanisms. The most direct - combat oriented way of using htem however, is as a battering ram. Making a ship entirely of disintegrators and docking them ot the front of a ship is an easy and safe way of using them as a battering ram; once it detonates the first time, all you need to do is buy another battering ram and attach it. I'll post a picture of demonstrating this tomorrow (6/24/2013).
I'll add more as I finish typing it up on my own. Feel free to correct me on any innacuracies.
