Control chairs:a replacement for ship cores to help solve core drilling w/out abstract ship health.

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Put simply, I think the abstract ship health idea is silly. The current system's main flaw is that an attacker only need drill one line into your ship to kill it.
Instead of forcing them to somehow kill you by only stripping off your engines or some other block of your ship, I think it would be better to instead to be able change the position (and sometimes number) of the single point of failure:the pilot.

Ship cores would be replaced with a two-block tall control chair block that redirects any damage received to a pilot if one is in the chair. A pilot could exit one chair and get into another if the enemy starts drilling towards the chair they're in.
To prevent the issue of simply using arrow keys to change control chairs randomly constantly, as well as to make it easier to find the one thing you want to be in when in a ship with many docked turrets/ships, the changing of chairs could be done via teleportation that lets you go to any chosen control chair or docked ship/turret's control chair in a few seconds with some restrictions (no control over the ship while teleporting, and it would have a sizable cooldown).
Additionally, two people could be in control chairs on the ship at once. Only one would have control at any given time, but control could be passed to the other manually or in the event of the controller dying/leaving. In this way, having a crew of faction members in your ship would allow for better survivability and make very large ships potentially a bit less risky in a way that doesn't make them much more inherently powerful (no crew, no better survivability besides simply having lots of control chairs).

This would help stop core drilling because you could change where the enemy needs to drill multiple times during a battle. It wouldn't maximize armor effectiveness as much as the hit point system would, but I think it would be a far more logical way of dealing with the problem while also making multi-pilot ships an interesting and fun use of factions.

EDIT:I'd add a poll such as "Do you think this is a good idea? Yes, maybe, no, other (please post).", but there's no way to now that the thread has been created.

 

[scagjmboy45]

That was suggested in this thread recently.
Maybe the devs will see that this is a suggestion which is popular among the players, and thus implement it, because I think it's an awesome idea.

 

[Vyor]

I wonder... how will this stop core drilling? Now people will just aim for the player instead... players are weaker than cores...

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

That was suggested in this thread recently.
Maybe the devs will see that this is a suggestion which is popular among the players, and thus implement it, because I think it's an awesome idea.

This is a very different suggestion in the nature of the relation of the chairs to cores (that thread intends them as ways to separate the core from player control of the ship), as I have noted on that thread.

I wonder... how will this stop core drilling? Now people will just aim for the player instead... players are weaker than cores...

The idea is you switch to a different chair. In larger ships, it would be inadvisable to even attempt player-coring because they could have twenty different chairs and thus you might want to target systems.
The health difference is of little concern. Most ships will be able to instakill an exposed unshielded core anyways.

 

[Vyor]

This is a very different suggestion in the nature of the relation of the chairs to cores (that thread intends them as ways to separate the core from player control of the ship), as I have noted on that thread.


The idea is you switch to a different chair. In larger ships, it would be inadvisable to even attempt player-coring because they could have twenty different chairs and thus you might want to target systems.
The health difference is of little concern. Most ships will be able to instakill an exposed unshielded core anyways.

Then it is overpowered to the extreme...

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Then it is overpowered to the extreme...

Not necessarily. Once shields are down, you can pretty much annihilate blocks during the shield recovery period and possibly beyond if your DPS stays up. A smaller ship would probably just get a few chances to make a comeback from being drilled into (or to let the pilot escape). Very large ships would just try to force you to try and target systems to prevent the enemy recovering rather than just drilling at a chair, and if you do decide to just go for the player anyways, they would eventually be caught stuck in a chair during a teleportation cooldown. If the cooldown increased with each use during battle, it would also put a soft limit on the amount of times they could jump to different chairs.

 

[Vyor]

Not necessarily. Once shields are down, you can pretty much annihilate blocks during the shield recovery period and possibly beyond if your DPS stays up. A smaller ship would probably just get a few chances to make a comeback from being drilled into (or to let the pilot escape). Very large ships would just try to force you to try and target systems to prevent the enemy recovering rather than just drilling at a chair, and if you do decide to just go for the player anyways, they would eventually be caught stuck in a chair during a teleportation cooldown. If the cooldown increased with each use during battle, it would also put a soft limit on the amount of times they could jump to different chairs.

Then it doesn't fix anything... likely you wouldn't have time to move in the event of a shield breach(I saw 200 blocks get mowed through in about half a second)

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Then it doesn't fix anything... likely you wouldn't have time to move in the event of a shield breach(I saw 200 blocks get mowed through in about half a second)

You'd want to switch when shields are just about to go down, so that just as the enemy starts hitting hull, you're in a completely different spot (and possibly heading towards the escape pod). The key here is that on one end there's downright OP and on the other there's utterly useless. Unless there's some pretty severe discontinuities (or problems with ship size scaling that can't be addressed properly), perfect balance must lie somewhere between those two endpoints.
It most certainly isn't a complete solution to coring. The hitpoint system isn't either (shields would still be much, much more effective than hull and once shields drop it would just mean they have to fire that much longer to reduce hitpoints to 0 rather than pretty much instantly taking a ship out by hitting the core). Nothing alone is. To solve the drilling problem, we also need to address the inherent problem of scalability of shields vs. hull for protection. This would help, and I feel it's a more logical approach to ship/player death than the hitpoint system.

 

[Vyor]

You'd want to switch when shields are just about to go down, so that just as the enemy starts hitting hull, you're in a completely different spot (and possibly heading towards the escape pod). The key here is that on one end there's downright OP and on the other there's utterly useless. Unless there's some pretty severe discontinuities (or problems with ship size scaling that can't be addressed properly), perfect balance must lie somewhere between those two endpoints.
It most certainly isn't a complete solution to coring. The hitpoint system isn't either (shields would still be much, much more effective than hull and once shields drop it would just mean they have to fire that much longer to reduce hitpoints to 0 rather than pretty much instantly taking a ship out by hitting the core). Nothing alone is. To solve the hull problem, we also need to address the inherent problem of scalability of shields vs. hull for protection. This would help, and I feel it's a more logical approach to ship/player death than the hitpoint system.

Hence my balance suggestion:
http://starmadedock.net/threads/new-weapons-need-to-balance-armor-and-shields.647/

 

[Ithirahad]

What if:

• Systems got HP, and would explode and disappear if their HP went to 0. (The more blocks in a system, the more HP, but the larger the explosion for obvious reasons)
  
• Players' diamonds wouldn't be visible if there are ship blocks between you and them.

That way, people would be more inclined to take out engine modules and weapon systems, and people would have to design smarter... and there would be no "drilling"/"mining" of any kind really. It would also give more incentive to use two (or more) seats due to the possibility of a section of the ship being compromised, not to mention reasons to armor your interiors AND exteriors more. (Though this would require hull getting a fairly large buff for being in a cluster, which it needs anyway)

 

[RoyalWolfe]

let me just have my two sense say on the topic, I and the other person have only said what others will in a much more ruder way will do as well. others will still climb over to this thread and post the other one as citation for you posting the same topic regardless. trust me Ive seen it done, I think we need to set some rules that decide what counts as reportable in terms of double posting suggestions, in the suggestion forum, but I lack the following to do so I get reported and called a trolling jerks if i try. but that is just another topic all together. now that that is out of the way, I agree with you, its not the same. but others will not agree, I'm just warning you prepare for trolling.

OK here is what I think is good about this version of command chairs suggestion, which I agree is a better solution core drilling wise. let me summarize your approach here please.

what you are basically suggesting, is that crew health affects ship death, based upon ship condition health VS. Crew Health. Am I correct? your doing this by giving the attacker some more targets to shoot at namely the crew itself. your my kind of tactical minded individual. I don't want to destroy the ship, I want to take it for myself. to do that, I do need to get rid of the crew.

if that is the case, then what you are saying is why the hell doesn't my engineer crew member just go to my core place up an emergency hull patch and save the core from meltdown, in sci-fi movies like STAR TREK, they do that all the damn time. the engineer usually saves the ship by fixing the warp core from exploding, or they open an airlock and toss the damn thing out completely. right?

well if you allowed either possibility? it could work that way.

 

[Vyor]

let me just have my two sense say on the topic, I and the other person have only said what others will in a much more ruder way will do as well. others will still climb over to this thread and post the other one as citation for you posting the same topic regardless. trust me Ive seen it done, I think we need to set some rules that decide what counts as reportable in terms of double posting suggestions, in the suggestion forum, but I lack the following to do so I get reported and called a trolling jerks if i try. but that is just another topic all together. now that that is out of the way, I agree with you, its not the same. but others will not agree, I'm just warning you prepare for trolling.

OK here is what I think is good about this version of command chairs suggestion, which I agree is a better solution core drilling wise. let me summarize your approach here please.

what you are basically suggesting, is that crew health affects ship death, based upon ship condition health VS. Crew Health. Am I correct? your doing this by giving the attacker some more targets to shoot at namely the crew itself. your my kind of tactical minded individual. I don't want to destroy the ship, I want to take it for myself. to do that, I do need to get rid of the crew.

if that is the case, then what you are saying is why the hell doesn't my engineer crew member just go to my core place up an emergency hull patch and save the core from meltdown, in sci-fi movies like STAR TREK, they do that all the damn time. the engineer usually saves the ship by fixing the warp core from exploding, or they open an airlock and toss the damn thing out completely. right?

well if you allowed either possibility? it could work that way.

That isn't a tactical mindset, that is attempting to hit a needle in a haystack, with another needle.



You may not want to call star trek realistic... those warp core patches are about as unrealistic as they come... If a nuclear reactor starts to implode there is very little to do to stop it... You can't just eject it, it is connected by too many power lines for that. You have to flush the heat using either water(not recommended) or use a cooling solution.

What if:

• Systems got HP, and would explode and disappear if their HP went to 0. (The more blocks in a system, the more HP, but the larger the explosion for obvious reasons)
  
• Players' diamonds wouldn't be visible if there are ship blocks between you and them.

That way, people would be more inclined to take out engine modules and weapon systems, and people would have to design smarter... and there would be no "drilling"/"mining" of any kind really. It would also give more incentive to use two (or more) seats due to the possibility of a section of the ship being compromised, not to mention reasons to armor your interiors AND exteriors more. (Though this would require hull getting a fairly large buff for being in a cluster, which it needs anyway)

This has been posted before, however, it has some problems. It would be hard to implement, it would be laggy on larger ships. And you can't know what you are shooting at. This also opens up the possibility of being able to take out 1 system and having the entire ship go kablooie.

 

[Ithirahad]

This also opens up the possibility of being able to take out 1 system and having the entire ship go kablooie.

...That's why you might want to leave armor or space around your massive (say, power tank) systems, and put them in the center of the ship... That way, they can take out all the non-essential systems and little shield pockets they want, but it won't do much damage to larger, important parts unless they take out a lot of them. (Power generators would have to either be exempted from this or get a change in generation calculation for it to work with this system, though.)

 

[Vyor]

...That's why you might want to leave armor or space around your massive (say, power tank) systems, and put them in the center of the ship... That way, they can take out all the non-essential systems and little shield pockets they want, but it won't do much damage to larger, important parts unless they take out a lot of them. (Power generators would have to either be exempted from this or get a change in generation calculation for it to work with this system, though.)

Hits gun... giant explosion.

 

[Ithirahad]

Hits gun... giant explosion.

Good point; guns could always just disappear rather than blowing up.

 

[ImperialDonut]

Systems to counteract core drilling are in the works, its a known annoyance and it will be fixed at some point.

Multiple control seats are cool nonetheless, whether they be to combat drilling or not.

Also, please comment on existing topics in the future rather than starting a new one, there are plenty of them on this subject:

http://starmadedock.net/threads/next-generation-the-solution-to-core-drilling.175/

 

[Ithirahad]

(For the record, though it's different, I suggested control seats first. TWICE. http://oldsite.star-made.org/content/chairs-and-viewscreens , http://starmadedock.net/threads/chairs-n-viewscreens-and-stuff.75/ )

...So I guess it's a double-duplicate-suggestion? Not that I mind, really; IMO sufficiently different takes on the same idea or concept deserve their own topics.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

what you are basically suggesting, is that crew health affects ship death, based upon ship condition health VS. Crew Health. Am I correct? your doing this by giving the attacker some more targets to shoot at namely the crew itself. your my kind of tactical minded individual. I don't want to destroy the ship, I want to take it for myself. to do that, I do need to get rid of the crew.

I was really suggesting that only crew death means ship death. Ship death wouldn't really be a thing anymore, it would just be that the best way to neutralize a ship is to make sure noone's piloting it, and killing the crew is the obvious choice for that.
There would probably need to be a separate system for the ship's turret and AI functionality added, though, otherwise AI-controlled ships (presumably pirates would actually be controlled by NPCs in control chairs, but I wouldn't want to see unmanned drones go away) and anything with turrets on it would be a real problem.

 

[Vyor]

I was really suggesting that only crew death means ship death. Ship death wouldn't really be a thing anymore, it would just be that the best way to neutralize a ship is to make sure noone's piloting it, and killing the crew is the obvious choice for that.
There would probably need to be a separate system for the ship's turret and AI functionality added, though, otherwise AI-controlled ships (presumably pirates would actually be controlled by NPCs in control chairs, but I wouldn't want to see unmanned drones go away) and anything with turrets on it would be a real problem.

Faction blocks make this impossible.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Faction blocks make this impossible.

Another system that could be reworked slightly (probably via tying access-restriction to the computer/AI systems rather than what the player uses to control the ship).