Energy, shield and firepower values... What do they mean?

[ted234521]

Blueprints currently give values for a ship, like their firepower and maneuverability and whatnot. Being new to starmade, I have no frame of reference for these values. What are decent values to aim for in various weight classes? Like, "for a 25k ship, you generally want X amount of firepower" and so forth.

I've always read some things about soft caps, what are those? I heard anything above 1 million energy gets reducing returns or something?

This game is so complex and I love it but as it stands I'm a bit lost.

 

[Dire Venom]

I wouldn't base anything off blueprint values, it's more of a gimmick at this stage that doesn't tell you much.
Energy production has a 'softcap' at 2 mill e/s per entity, and the energy per block depends on the layout of your reactors up to that cap.
Energy production blocks placed after the soft cap only provide a set amount of energy which is lower than what you can get with efficient reactor designs bellow 2 mill e/s.
Even 3+ years after I started playing starmade I'm still learning new things every time I log on so don't worry, we're all still learning

In general with ship design, first determine the ships purpose (minner, transport, fighter, cruiser etc) and then build off that. There's not much point in giving your mining vessels insane amounts of shields or defense platforms large jump drives XD

If it's combat orientated, try and determine what situations you'd expect it to be inand build weaponry to suit.
For example. unless your planning some sort of crazy ramming strategy pulse as a primary weapon is very in-effective.
Just play around with the 20+ odd weapon combinations and then fiddle around with the 10 or so effects you can apply to them.

In general, cannon+cannon+ (punch through, explosive) is a all round effective combination,as is missile+beam.
Overdrive is not advised as an effect (twice the damage for 4 times the power consuption) except if you've got limited space.
Ion effects are great for breaking shields.

All in all I would suggest downloading ships from 'community content' and playing around with them to get an idea on how other build their ships and what sort of shields/weapons they use for different sized craft.

Best of luck and feel free to ask questions!

 

[Batavium]

What Dire Venom said basicly. Also:

Welcome to StarMade! And your new meaning in life. Seriously it can take over pretty fast.

I have no frame of reference for these values

These are numbers of the combined values of all the systems and blocks that make up the ship. They are also a bit useless at the moment. The values swing up and down a lot even if you make little changes to a ship. So i would just ignore them and look up some not to old but well reviewed ships in the Community Content on this site. To learn how things fit together.

some things about soft caps, what are those?

This game is Lego in Space. And in theory you can pile on an unlimited number of blocks to get high readings. The energy/fuel in this game is the most important thing of any ship as it is needed to run everything else. It is also one of the hardest things to get right in a ship. In order to limit the available energy they introduced a limit a soft cap to some systems like energy. The limit on energy regeneration is about 2 million. After that you can still add blocks but it no longer adds the same amount per block dropping significantly in effectiveness.

I'm a bit lost.

Well guess what I'm playing this game for like two years now and I'm still lost myself. Don't worry this game is very complex and you learn by playing it. Step by step. Just beware that it's a Space Game with Missiles, Beam Cannons and what not. So everything around you is hostile unless proven it's not. Some people fail to get that part when they go multiplayer. Thinking they are protected from others just by saying they are builders or peaceful or just name a reason. You will be shot at. You will loose your stuff. Use a Home Base and dock your ships to it. Even build while being docked if you go multiplayer. Though there are servers that tailor to things like builders or roll playing if that is your thing. Those server tend to be less aggressive with rules stating what you can or can not do.

If you do go multiplayer then when you enter a server don’t scream HELLO EVERYBODY. Just quickly build something simple at spawn and fly off into the void. “Not into a star” And when your a good distance from spawn maybe then start talking to who ever is online. Learning some basics of this game in single player really helps with avoiding some of the multiplayer hardships. And don't get me wrong the fun really is in multiplayer.

 

[AtraUnam]

These numbers can all be described as 'never enough'

 

[Panpiper]

New player advice...

 

[jayman38]

I've always read some things about soft caps, what are those? I heard anything above 1 million energy gets reducing returns or something?

I recommend that you bookmark the Official Starmade Wiki. It's not always accurate, but it does a decent job of giving you the basics.
The Wiki has a subsection dedicated to power generation and also one dedicated to weapon systems.
The power soft-cap increase is roughly a year old, having been doubled from 1 million to 2 million approximately 12 months ago, in update 0.19519.

Soft Cap: This is an upper limit of a value after which, you can still add, at a very basic rate.
Example from the Power Generation Wiki entry on efficiency analysis:
100 reactor blocks placed in a row will give a per-block efficiency of approximately 300.
200 reactor blocks placed in a row will give a per-block efficiency of approximately 400.
1500 reactor blocks placed in a row will give a per-block efficiency of approximately 1300, and will very nearly reach the softcap of 2 million e/s.

After you have enough reactors to reach the 2 million e/s softcap, each additional reactor block adds 25 e/s to the overall power generation, instead of, say, 1300 e/s. So when you add additional blocks above the softcap, the average power efficiency over all blocks starts dropping again.
So you can reach 3 million e/s, but it will take 40,000 additional reactor blocks on top of the original series of blocks that were needed to reach the 2 million e/s softcap. (Typically, it takes less than 10,000 reactor blocks to reach the 2 million softcap, depending on the length of individual reactor lines.)

It is common practice to have extra power reactors, even if it doesn't add very much on top of the softcap, in case the original efficient reactor lines are cut with battle damage. That way, if reactor lines are cut, creating shorter, less efficient lines, which inevitably drop the power generation, the extra reactors have a chance to keep the overall power generation closer to the 2 million e/s softcap.

 

[terra mining corp.]

There are a lot of very good videos on you tube from Bench, Saber, Criss, Skylord Luke, Raiben, Jace machine, Lenscap just to name a few of the many, also if you go on a multi-player server you should try and join a friendly faction so you have protection at first,strength in numbers.