Fighting Gigantism in Starmade

[Marduk]

Firstly I want to thank Schema for making an awesome game. If it wasn\'t for how good the game is and how much potential we all know it has, we wouldn\'t be here offering ideas/criticisms for improvement.

My thoughts regarding gameplay and balance are written with the following core thoughts in mind:

1) The bigger the ships, the longer the battles should be, not the other way around. Large ships represent a large investment of time and resources. Their staying power in combat should reflect this.

2) Diminishing returns. As it stands now, returns escalate to absurdity and this renders anything less than titan size more or less worthless. It should be easier to double the potency of a small cluster than it is to double the potency of a large one. If the return on investment for creating ever-increasing cluster sizes drops off to some non-zero but still insignificant value, then practicality, efficiency, and economy become paramount.

3) Ship size and role diversity is a must. Fighters, bombers, corvettes, frigates, destroyers, cruisers, dreadnaughts, and carriers all have a place. This encourages team/faction play and means that even the little guys can play an important role in combat instead of everyone racing up to titan sized ships.

This leads to the third and most important idea:

4) Fun! Being inclusive of all players is a must to maintain a healthy and happy player base, whether they just started playing or have been here since the begining. An in-game need for ships of all sizes and types means a new player can join, hop in a fighter and contribute to a large scale battle by harassing and by using debilitating (but not necessarily destructive) weapons on larger craft, could join a faction and go mine asteroids to help a faction\'s production capacity, or operate a turret on a capital ship.

The trick is melding all of these into one cohesive game. I feel that incorporating logistical elements into the game will go a long way to making micro-ships useful, titan-ships a raririty, and everything in-between more useful.
In response to the OP:

• 
  Ships under 5 mass are too small to show a radar signature (permanent radar jam, without a Jammer)

> scaled radar signatures with size. The bigger it is, the farther away you can detect it.

• 
  Mass of weapon inversely reduces % of gains from addition weapon blocks on that grouping (each addition weapon block provides slightly less power to the weapon group)

> I totally agree that diminishing returns should be the name of the game here. Bigger == less efficient, not the other way around. Bigger may be better, but the returns should taper off to reflect a lesser return on investment. This applies to power regen, weapons, and everything else that has a growth rate.

• 
  Power and Reload speed should be on a set percentage scale with each other (more power=less reload, and vice versa)

>I agree with RPGprayer that weapon power and fire rate should be inversely proportional.

• 
  The larger the total ship mass is the slower the base firing rate of cannons becomes

>I think the firing rate should be based on the size of the cannon, not of the mass of the ship. Big ships need fast-firing anti-fighter/point-defense cannons in addition to slow firing spinal mounted cannons. I don\'t like the way the firing rate sky rockets currently because large ships end up with super high powered machine guns rather than large hard hitting cannons.

• 
  D1000 missiles should be converted to EMP (power draining) dumbfire missiles, these will drain a certain amount of power from the target ships energy pool (even through their sheilds) -This is a good counter against building slow large combat ships

>I would suggest their range be decreased dramatically and NOT scale up with size. This would encourage the creation and use of small ships (fighters/bombers) that can fly in close. The hard cap would prevent titans from using them because they would never get so close to anyone to be able to fire them. Without a hard cap, there\'s nothing to prevent a titan from loading up on them for use against another titan, since titans aren\'t likely to dodge anything, even from another titan.

>The EMP idea would work because it would encourage diversity of ship types. It\'s not a trump card that anyone could use, and it doesn\'t enable tiny ships to destroy huge ships, but it works to hamper the juggernauts so that a lesser fleet could feasibly defeat or at least neutralize a huge ship.

• 
  If this isnt viable, when shields are hit they will stop recharging for 1 second, this would allow for groups of smaller ships to conceivably defeat a large frigate or a capital ship

>Already a lesser power load worth of weapons can defeat a greater power load worth of shields. Smaller, though not tiny, ships already have a chance against larger ships. I like the need to simply overwhelm a ships shield recharge rate with weapon fire without the addition of another shield recharge cooldown.

• 
  When a ships Power Load is reduced to zero, the ships power will go offline for 10 seconds before resuming its recharge rate (similar to the shields 10 second offline funtion)

>I don\'t like this idea. It would be too easily to accidentally cripple yourself by firing the main guns when power is low. Additionally in a small ship fleet versus a titan scenario, the titan could be rendered completely harmless by sustained EMP weapon fire without ever even having the chance to regen power because of a constantly resetting regen cooldown.

• 
  The larger the ship mass becomes, the lower the percentage of the servers max speed a ship can travel

>With diminshing returns on large thruster segments, it will be difficult (or impossible) to provide enough thrust for a massive ship to ever reach max speed in a reasonable amount of time. Large masses would then attain top speed rarely, if ever.

• 
  Weapon sounds get bigger as a weapon group aquires more blocks (big gun=big boom)

> I like this idea and woul even say let the bigger guns have bigger/more dramatic visual effects. AMC bolt size being proportional to the weapon\'s size or power. A bigger shot could affect a larger diameter area than a single block (as is currently) and if implemented with the slower firing rates of larger guns, would serve to form natural (and visual/functional) distinctions between guns of different sizes.

• 
  A complete conversion of the current power block grouping and its box dimension system to

>This idea sounds interesting. Without seeing it action and being able to fiddle with the blocks or the numbers, I\'m not sure how it would be a vast improvement over the current power system. I\'d like to see some hard numbers comparing it to the current system to see if it would be of benefit, or simply be different. I do like the idea of a clever design being able to outpower a crude design with the same materials.

 

[Ferdi265]

Great Idea!

 

[Colt556]

I don\'t know much about the game, but I don\'t think you really need to \"balance\" large ships vs small ships. I mean it\'s universally accepted in all scifi that larger ships will be more powerful, but more sluggish. An X-wing can not, and should not, be able to take down an Imperial Star Destroyer. It also takes a long time and a lot of work to build these giant ships, far more than it is to build a small ship. Punishing players for putting in the time and effort just aint fair.
If balancing is required I\'d do so in other ways. For example, adding in certain weapons that can be powerful without requiring a boatload of blocks. For example, a bomb-bay type block which can reach peak capacity with only a few blocks, so massive ships wont really benefit from spaming a million of them. It could be like thrusters so total blocks on the ship contribute, doesn\'t matter where they are if they are connected. So a massive worldship\'s bomb bay will be the same as a small bombers.
I would take it in that direction, giving different weapons suited for different sizes of ships. Massive beam-laser turrets that require a ton of power and generally a lot of room, but can cause catastrophic damage. Good for slow moving, large capital ships but fairly worthless against small fighters. Add to this a proper physics system for movement, so cap ships truly are sluggish, and you\'d have balance without arbitrary limitations like reduced power just because it\'s big.

 

[Calbiri]

big ships= big lag
im not trying to prevent big ships, just curb the natural requirement the game has pushing you into making bigger/better
smaller should have viability, otherwise, make bigger harder to get (eve is a perfect example of this sort of concept)

 

[Colt556]

I don\'t disagree that big ships should have limitations, I\'d just like to see limitations that make sense. I don\'t like the arbitrary power limitations and whatnot. A big, powerful reactor will give out a lot of power, for example.

Instead I\'d rather see limitations that rely on a more stable, complete game. Instead of trying to balance ships around this Alpha version that\'s pretty bare bones, we should instead balance them around what will one day be available. For example, resources can be made much more difficult to come by. Reduce/remove the randomly generated stations, make players mine asteroids and planets, then craft those into useable materials. Make them actually work for their ships. You can also give them actual build times, so they don\'t just spawn out of thin air. I saw that block building module idea. Instead of buying a ship and having it spawn out of thin air, you can instead buy a blueprint and stick it in the building module, then feed it the necessary materials and it will build on it\'s own.
Even with the various work-arounds to get resources, if you had to actually had to obtain every block, rather than just the credits, it would make obtaining large ships far more difficult.
I think that\'s the route that should be taken. If a big ship is built, it should be exceptionally powerful. If designed well it should wipe the floor with smaller ships. But I shouldn\'t have to line my walls with power generators or have my guns arbitrarily shoot slower just because my ship is big. Once I actually have the ship, it should be pretty simple to use, and design. The limiting factor should be on getting that ship in the first place.

 

[Calbiri]

Ya know, I don\'t like having \"this is alpha, balance comes later\" thrown in my face, I\'m aware of that, these posts I make are suggestions and brainstorming sessions, and we can discuss balance issue at any point thank you.
Awesome idea on the build block, and if you check my other post you\'ll see I suggested something quite similar a bit ago, so no arguments there from me.
The BIG problem with big ships isn\'t their might, its the load they put on the game, schema mentioned a desire to curb the tendency to build big, so I made some non drastic suggestions (as opposed to imposing a mass limit for example, please no)
Dislike me for making these suggestions if you want, but bare in mind that I\'m hoping to spawn ideas that will prevent much harsher gimping of large ships that might otherwise be implemented.
Also, some things, like cannon dps growth scale, is just OP

 

[Calbiri]

I never proported to reduce energy block power output, if anything it needs a boost to reduce the size needed...
(Maybe you mistook weapon power vs weapon reload to mean ship power vs reload? I\'ll add a note about that possible confusion)

 

[Colt556]

I don\'t dislike you, and I also don\'t think \"balance comes later\" is entirely valid. But I also don\'t think you should balance around Alpha, either. You can plan for the future by looking at what will come, but it\'s a fact that this game is nowhere near finished and it\'s simply part of game design that you can\'t properly balance a game when 70% of your content isn\'t even in yet. So really, balance DOES come later, but only in implementation. As I said, we can still plan and discuss things.
I don\'t disagree that preventing massive super ships is important, otherwise that\'s all people would fly. But we need to do it in as natural a manner as possible. As I said, making them just downright difficult to get. Another thing is I think I understand your reload idea now, so I\'ll just state my idea and see if it is indeed the same thing.
Basically, make it so the moe blocks you have stacked together, the more powerful the individual shot is but the longer it takes to reload. So those giant guns on the big ships will be firing massive turbolaser blasts (that should have a radius effect like missiles) and generally be exceptionally destructive. But the recharge rate on them takes a while, so you wont be firing very fast. So justl ike your standard sci fi, if a snub fighter gets hit by a turbolaser, he\'s instantly vaporized in his entirety. But actually hitting him with a turbolaser is no easy task.
Is that essentially what you were saying, or am I still misunderstanding things?

 

[MrFURB]

Yeah, that sounds like Calbiri\'s idea.
We want people to not worry about going into a fight just because their ship isn\'t as big as the enemy\'s. Even small craft should be able to do something to disrupt enemy capitals and make their life harder, because shooting at them with your frigate cannons/missiles is a waste of time.

Statistical supremacy should always be on he larger craft\'s side, but all games have a way around it that creates a type of skill based mini-game, such as maneuvering into blind spots or hitting turrets or other precision targets that may be weak points. In order to be used, smaller craft can\'t just be cheaper because it\'s better to win a battle without losing any of your 2 huge capitals instead of winning and still losing a bunch of frigates or destroyers. They need to fight differently, be equipped differently, and serve a different purpose from huge ships. They need to be a boon to their fleet instead of useless bait for a free kill.
I\'m against doing a lot of tweaking to limit the numerical power of larger ships. That\'s the only reason they exist. I think the best way to \'balance\' ship size is by mechanics, and I hope the community will agree with me. Give us slow moving precision charges to make bombers capable of taking out important sections of a larger ship, give us tethers/tacklers to help limit the firepower of huge monstrosities, give us weapons that aren\'t made to drill through a ship\'s shield and straight to it\'s core as much as dwindle it\'s power through attrition!

 

[Colt556]

Before I see any improvements on this end, I\'d much rather see that building module idea implemented. If my super ship is going to be getting damaged by snub fighters, I want a way for it to automatically repair, since I can\'t go looking for that one missing block out of tens of thousands. Give us a way to either track down damaged/missing components, or a way to auto-repair, then I\'d like to see attention put on combat balance.

 

[Calbiri]

I\'ve actually proposed a simple solution to the repair issue, as have others, check my making ships cooler post. These ideas are put forward so that schema has the option to veiw possible game features in a holistic manner before possibly coding things in a way that might have to be changed to implement. Thanks for your help/input you helped me realize and clarify a staggeringly bad misunderstanding about ship power instead of weapon firepower

 

[Ferdi265]

That is a soo f*cking huge post right now xD

 

[Mercur1c]

Perhaps a different way to deal with this is to make larger ships not completly controllable from the core, and require other people to man certain stations for maximum effectiveness.



I would rather something like that, rather than increasing power demands, as it is already somewhat difficult to make a large ship with a decent interior, not just fill it with generators.

 

[bobucles]

Let\'s go over a few potential gigantism solutions and see if they\'ll work.

The 1 block : 1 addon that is a natural fit for voxel construction genre
Does it work: Unfortunatlely, no.
Analysis: Bigger ships deal more damage and have greater defense systems. This lets them beat smaller ships more quickly while taking less damage in return. It is this mechanic that creates the drive towards gigantism in the first place. It must be countered by other options for big ships to have diminished returns.

Bigger ships lose speed and agility
Does it work: Yep!
Analysis: Speed is king in the dogfighting world, whether it\'s in atmo or space. Agile ships can dodge more projectiles and land more hits at critical locations. Big ships must then rely on turrets or anti-fighter systems, which remain clunky and less effective than small vessels with efficient guns. Large vulnerable ships will also demand fighter escorts, creating an inherent need for small vessels.

Big ships are more expensive
Does it work: HAHAHAHA no.
Analysis: All ships are built with the same parts. You can not make big ships more expensive without making ALL ships more expensive. All it will do increase the grind and the need to strip mine the universe. It does not help in any reasonable way, except to encourage huge mining vessels to get the components.

Big ships demand additional crew
Does it work: ...technically.
Analysis: If you can\'t run everything on your ship, then you need friends and guild mates to keep everything going. The game rules may be simple to make, but the engine backbone to allow lots of players on the server will be insanely difficult to do.

Ships consume fuel, which must be replenished.
Does it work: HELL NO.
Analysis: Fuel is a flat tax. If you think flat taxes have EVER hurt the wealthy more than normal people, you should kill yourself. Alternatively, fuel expenses will encourage strip mining the universe, screwing over newbie sectors even harder than they might normally be screwed. Bigger ships will solve the problem easily with bigger mining vessels and more strip mining (as well as killing EVERYONE in their way for more fuel money). Hello, Unicron.

The current energy system
Does it work: Not really.
Analysis: Anything that gives exponential returns is going to favor gigantism. It just does. Things that demand exponential energy, on the other hand, will create severe diminishing returns on ship scale.

The current weapon scaling system
Does it work: Not in a million years.
Analysis: Additional blocks increase damage AND fire rate AND speed AND range, creating an exponential growth in weapon effectiveness. This gets even more obscene with explosive weapons, which have an extra layer of exponential returns thanks to AoE. It\'s just not going to happen, big guns are going to do even BIGGER damage. Use Damage-per-second as a metric instead, which decreases with factors that make a weapon more desirable (range, speed, fire rate).

The current shield system
Does it work: Nnnnnope.
Analysis: Pure damage negation means that ships below a certain threshold can\'t deal damage. Large vessels will naturally have higher shields, making them immune to more potential threats. This is okay for space stations, as high protection is needed to help prevent griefing. It is no good for combat ships, as the biggest one will have the most advantage.

The current armor system
Does it work: All too well.
Analysis: If you are unfamiliar with the square-cubed law... basically as ships grow they need MORE armor to cover more ship, giving REDUCED returns on that armor. If anything, this system needs love so that armor on a large ship doesn\'t end up completely useless. Perhaps a connection to a combined \"structure\" health bar?

Ships must repair at station docks
Does it work: Yep!
Analysis: Small ships can use the NPC docks that are naturally strewn about the universe (note to schema, more NPC station docks). Owners of large ships must create their own docks, limiting the ship\'s effective range to their zone around these stations. Bigger ships mean bigger stations, which means an increasing difficulty to maintain a large sector of space with large ships. It really works.

Ships can repair from other ship docks
Does it work: ...maybe.
Analysis: Take two large ships with large docks. They could, in theory, dock to each other and take turns giving repairs. The simplest solution is to 1) Shut down the docked ship, rendering it completely vulnerable and 2) deny the shield coverage that stations bestow on docked ships. This creates a scenario where ships have to envelop their docked vessels to protect them from damage(carrier style), rather than gluing everything to the outside (missile rack style). However, you could still use a large repair tug to fix up a critically wounded capital ship in deep space.

Systems can be disabled by high damage
Does it work: Yep!
Analysis: It\'s easy to vaporize a small system, so no difference here. It is much easier to chip at a large system, causing a malfunction that renders the entire system useless. Huge death cannons will be difficult to maintain as they must be armored by hulls and protected from enemy fire.

Systems can critically malfunction and explode
Does it work: Oh yeah.
Analysis: Do you enjoy watching your entire vessel chain react in one cataclysmic explosion? I know I do. Small vessels won\'t notice much difference, as any damage isn\'t much different from total destruction. Large vessels will need to be designed with bulkheads and internal blast shields, dramatically reducing the number of components they can reasonably pack into their hull.

 

[MrFURB]

Wow, it\'s been awhile since I\'ve paid any attention to this thread...



Balancing ship sizes is important, but I believe that a lot of us are forgetting something. Large ships are more expensive, they have more blocks, they NEED to be powerful. Smaller ships can be put together by anyone, anywhere, with just about whatever blocks happen to be at hand. Small ships need to be statistically inferior to a degree that limits their use of the traditional idea of \'firepower\'.

Do not overtax huge vessels. They\'re fun, they\'re cool, and the unimaginable differences in scale present in this game is a huge appeal to some people. There are people who can\'t imagine being at the helm of a kilometer-long monster, much less building one.

The solution lies not in stats, that is the sole strength of capital ships. In my strange mind, the thing we must add to balance small vs. large is skill.

Pit a fighter or frigate pilot against a dreadnaught and give the pilot a tiny inkling of a chance to inflict serious damage, and they\'ll go through hoops to do so. They\'ll chastise themselves for failing, or feel like a total bada** for suceeding, even if it\'s just to wound a greater monster. I do not want mass to solidly dictate who can fight who. I want mass to dictate the level of challenge present.

Tools should be added that take a pilot\'s reflexes and skills in maneuvering, stealth, and tactics in order to utilize. What I want is for a skilled fighter pilot to be able to make a mark on a battle that is disproportionate of the ship\'s size. If a fighter manages to evade attack, stealth, and close the distance to a capital ship through a screen of protective ships and firepower, a heavy torpedo could be undocked to slam into the capital ship, ignoring shields and taking out enough of a chunk to cut some box dimensions in half or take out an unsuspecting turret quickly. Stuff like that. Fighters need to be the \'rogues\' of the fleet in RPG terms, either using their ellusive and maneuverable frames to deliver precision strikes against the enemy where they least expect it or to act as a screen against other fighters in protecting their larger and more expensive brethren.

Where stealth and precision attacks are the forte of the fighter, capital ships should specialize in the more direct, brutish aspects of combat. Broadsides, shelling, flak batteries line the hull and target any fighter in their effective range. Enormous shielding arrays give a near-immunity to missile barrages and act as a buffer HP pool that must be burned down first before standard weaponry is effective, and after that is a thick hull that should grant a near-immunity to non-explosive weapons. The worth of a capital ship should be based upon it\'s massive size and bostered by a strong crew and supportive allies. In RPG terms, heavy ships are the armor-clad hulks weilding huge weapons; Slow, but deadly when they hit.



That\'s my view on it. Battles and duels won\'t always be pointing and shooting at eachother while letting stats decide the winner; there should be tricks and tactics pilots discover, create, or learn.

 

[Nero90]

Nice post, MrFURB. I totally agree with every point. In my opinion, it is normal that the maingun of a titan will destroy a fighter in a second. So the fighter have to avoid the maingun and use special tactics, if he will survive. In reality, you would never attack a ship wich is 10-100 times bigger then yourself by your own.

You should not undervalue the materials, credits and time wich are needed to build a titan. This oneself is a big point of balancing. And as bigger the ship is as more time you will need to repair it after a battle. A fighter could be repaired in minutes or buy a new one at low costs. But a Titan would take an hour for repairs after a heavy battle and buying a new one would be no option at cost of 150Mio Credits or more (156Mio Credits for my titan, for example, plus 14 turrets). You could take this as a part of your strategy and attack the enemy titan during repairs. And don\'t undervalue the skills you need to pilot a several hundret mether long titan compared to a fighter.

 

[RGavin11]

I might have overlooked it, but I haven\'t seen a post about powerdraining beams. Thought I\'d contribute.

While they can drain power, it requires a power module to be exposed (something most ships avoid). I\'d suggest removing that need for exposure and just have the beams drain from any part of the ship. This would give smaller ships the tool to drain some of the giant\'s power.

If anyone could check the current capabilities of powerdraining, it would be highly appreciated.

 

[MrFURB]

I\'m trying give folks a realistic reason to put themselves in a small iron coffin instead of spamming capitals until you don\'t have anymore resources and sending the rest of your pilots home. I would love to command a small gunship, dueling with others while staying away from a capital\'s field of fire, but unless we include tools that give proficiency a value similar to that of having better stats, there\'s absolutely no reason to ever fly a ship smaller than you\'re opponents.

The pirate Raith shows a measure of excellence in picking his engagements and maneuvering to get an advantage. He\'s got a tactical, \'in the now\' mind fitting of a craft that can maneuver and act \'in the now\'. He\'d make an excellent fighter/frigate/destroyer pilot.

Someone who is better at keeping track of multiple things (Subsystems of a capital ship that need maintenance/attention), has a brighter strategic mind (Knows what sectors one can dock to safely or which fleet needs his firepower most), and usually has more responsibility will be better suited in control of a capital vessel.

 

[SkyTitan]

I know I\'m a little late here, but it hasn\'t been too long since the last post, so...



What everyone seems to be ignoring is why people build huge ships. In reality there\'s nothing else to do with that money aside from do something like build a station (which is pretty much the same problem, just stationary, and making more credits from asteroids to build more bigger ships). There\'s just nothing else to do with the money you get than to build a big ship. You only fly one ship at a time, what do you expect them to do with their money? If you could get a competant ai to fly ships for you, there would be a lot more small ships, but as it is it\'s just too easy to kill ai ships, and the naturally spawning ones will give you millions of credits for killing them, despite how little it costs to build a replica of a pirate ship.



Bring in a better (and more expensive) ai to the game and fix pirate drops and the problem will solve itself. The speed cap means that from a certain distance against a projectile of a certain speed, it\'s impossible to dodge, and missiles are really powerful; you can one hit a pirate ship with a ship smaller than a pirate ship. Imagine not being able to dodge something like that.



What happens in other games is that huge ships are amazing against fighters for their cost, but are least cost effective against ships just a little smaller than them. Basically, assume that there are 5 sizes, fighter, frigate, cruiser, capital ship, supercapital ship. Fighters are used to kill frigates, frigates kill cruisers, cruisers kill fighters and capital ships, and capitals ships kill everything but cruisers, with supercapital ships killing all but capital ships.

Keep in mind this is all in terms of cost effectiveness; you need multiple ships to accomplish the task. Without a better ai module it just won\'t happen, but once it\'s in balance will sort itself out. The last thing I\'d want to see happen to this game is to have big ships ruined because of some uninformed discussion while the game is still in alpha. Trust me though, those missiles hurt quite badly. If you can\'t avoid a hit you\'re naturally at a disadvantage in terms of cost effectiveness.

 

[Marshymallow_]

This is a bit of newbie necromancy of an old thread, but my thoughts are on the same subject of dealing with the problem of the only good ship being a huge ship so hopefully it\'s okay. There\'s going to be a lot of dumb small ideas and then one big one that you need to read. If you don\'t care about small things, please please please just skip the section with small stuff and go straight to the big idea. It needs to be heard.

SKIP EVERYTHING FROM HERE IF YOU DON\'T CARE

At the moment, small fighters have no ability to put the hurt down on larger craft, and I really think that\'s a shame. As well as this, things like frigates aren\'t useful either because it\'s just a less fast fighter for when you kinda want one and a less shooty capital ship for when you want that.

For the sake of breaking things down, let\'s simplify ship sizes into a few classes:

Fighter Class - anything under 50 mass or so is a fighter-type ship. The role of a fighter/bomber should be to keep other fighters away from the larger ships, and to damage vital systems to make the work of the larger craft easier.

Frigate Class - switching to length, anything that isn\'t a fighter and goes up to about 50-150 length is probably a frigate of some sort. The role of a frigate is to allow larger amounts of damage to be done to large ships, while still retaining some degree of maneuverability.

Cruiser Class - past this point up to, say, 300 or 400, you start getting Cruisers. Cruisers are not maneuverable. They are giant guns with other smaller guns on the sides and more shields than anyone knows what to do with.

Supercruiser/Carrier Class - things more massive than this are simply not capable of reasonable combat. At this point, you have to start thinking about support roles - repairing frigates, holding backup fighters, stuff like that.

So, at the moment only Frigates and Cruisers really exist depending on how unwieldy you want your ship to be. So how do we make more interesting combat?

1. Fighters need a way to harm big ships. My thought on this is something risky, where you can only use it once and then you have to go back and rearm or go die. In essence, my thought is allowing people to use the explosive blocks currently ingame as guided missiles. The blocks have to be allowed to damage through shields or otherwise do enough damage to break through shields, though I prefer damaging through shields as this avoids the situation where you get one bomb through and now every other ship guns the cruiser down.
To balance this explosive, the method of delivery is generally going to be an ai pod with a mode set to ramming the selected target. This means turrets can shoot down the missile, making it very hard to use at long ranges. Thus, only fighters can really use this effectively. As well as this, once you\'ve spent your load it obviously doesn\'t automatically reload, so you have to return to shop or base to build a new one, program the AI and dock it to your fighter, making it a very high-risk weapon.

2. Frigates need the ability to use those same missiles, but hide them via powered doors. To explain, you would have a door computer that controls special airlocks, unable to be opened by hand. This allows for a variety of interesting plays - keeping weapons hidden until you\'re close enough to fire, or a carrier closing up its fighter bays so they cannot be strafed as easily.

3. Cruisers need to be slower to accelerate. Really, all large ships do. At the moment, I can easily keep up with the maneuvering of a fighter by strafing and moving up and down. My turn and roll rates are crap, but somehow I still manage to move like a king as long as it\'s not involving rotating my craft. Also, Cruisers suck at being able to see which is bad. I would love for there to be the ability for there to be head movement ala ARMA when it comes to cockpits, allowing for such a slow-turning craft to choose what to target without opening its nav menu or turning the entire craft.

4. Carriers need nothing special. What does need to happen is boarding crews and other crew-based combat. This means three added items - a laser gun, a det charge and a hull drill.
Let\'s explain the most baffling of those first. What in the name of heck is a hull drill? Well, it\'s what a small ship sticks on the front of it to allow it to forcibly dock with a larger ship. In short, this is what gives a boarding crew a chance to, well, board.
Det charges are small explosives that, again, don\'t bother with shields, but are obviously much less powerful than full on missiles. These are used to break into the hull of a ship and eliminate anyone inside.
Lastly, a laser is... a laser. Crew would be able to shoot eachother, as well as shoot the core of a ship to kill anyone that\'s inside.
All together, this allows for small teams of men to take advantage of unprepared enemies, though the odds of success are obviously low.

So, now we\'ve got lots of cool things for people to do, but the core problem of combat still exists.

START READING AGAIN

Combat range is too damn short. Currently, everyone can see the same distance and be seen the same distance - somewhere between 1600 and 2000 meters. Now, this might be fine if this was a game purely about the small scale, but it\'s not. So, here\'s what I propose:

Firstly, your average craft should start off only being able to sense a distance of about one sector, including on navigation (which means it is less distance than it is now). This is where a new item comes into play - sensors.
Sensors would come in two types to keep things from getting too hectic on a player\'s screen - passive sensors and active sensors. Both work exactly the same in terms of distance, the only difference being passive sensors find non-combat things (shops, rocks and planets) whereas active sensors find combat-related things (ships and stations). This is purely to make it so a commander doesn\'t have to look at 800,000 rocks along with the enemy fleet.

Now, onto what sensors actually can do - they drastically increase the range of targeting and reasonably increase the range of your weapons themselves. What does this mean for your average ship?
-A fighter doesn\'t get any bonuses to range, for the most part. Some people might add a small panel of sensors to allow for slightly more firing range, but that\'s about it. The fighter can see the fight it\'s in, and that\'s about it.
-Frigates start being able to see 2-3 sectors away and fire up to a sector away. The Frigate sees the fight it\'s in and the new fighter wave for the enemy 30 seconds early, allowing his side to prepare.
-Cruisers can see around 6 sectors away and fire 2-3 sectors away. This means Cruisers end up fighting extremely far away from one-another with their mainguns, though due to the speed of rounds they will rarely hit smaller targets at these ranges. The Cruiser sees the fight, the new fighter wave and that the left front of the enemy\'s defense is crumbling.
-Supercruisers can see a dozen or so sectors away and fire from half that. This means huge amounts of firepower, albeit with terrible accuracy due to things moving in space.
-Carriers see longer than Supercruisers, as there\'s plenty of weight and space left by not needing huge main guns. Both the Supercruiser and the Carrier see the fight, the reinforcements, the left flank crumbling and when the enemy\'s cruiser finishes repairing at their spacestation and begins returning to battle.

The biggest thing keeping this from being overpowered is that it should either take a lot of blocks to get the proper range or it should be artificially forced to need to be external - either way, the idea is that players have the majority of their sensors on the outside of their craft, giving smaller ships the essential job of trying to destroy those sensors while protecting their team\'s own.
And, obviously, turrets would not gain any sensor bonuses without having antennae of their own, meaning fighters can get in close without being shot from 8 billion miles away.

In short, the reason multiple scales of combat doesn\'t work right now is because everyone is scaled to the same range. There\'s no way for a fighter to prove himself when the only difference between how he plays and how the Cruiser guy plays is that he\'s faster at turning and a lot worse at fighting.
Holy cow I didn\'t mean for this to be so big I\'m so sorry whoever reads this but hopefully some of this is good thinking and not just rehashing of previously-stated ideas.