Fighting Gigantism in Starmade

[Krayt]

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

This sounds like a pretty good idea. But I would rather prefer that the ship\'s mass should determine the range in which the ship marker is shown.

 

[Charlie_]

The purpose of carries is to drive around crafts that otherwise wouldn\'t travel the distance. So until fuel makes an appearance, which I personaly am not eager for, a slower carrier would have not more purpose at all. It\'d be both faster, and safer to travel in the smaller ships, because the larger vessel is slow and agile like a whale half on a beach.

Other than agreeing with you;

I personally thought that one of the main appeal of bigger ships was safety.. from smaller ships..
To quote a famous movie, if big ships are really a dangerous and undefeatable threat for you...

You\'re gonna need a bigger boat.

 

[Mercur1c]

If the top speed was made relative to a selected object, rather than a 50 kp/h hard limit, the limit is 50 kp/h relative to a selected object, and braking would match velocities, big ships would not need to have their speed limited, because the little ships would be moving as if the big ships were not.

 

[Phicksur]

1. Ion Cannons are generally considered good anti-shield weapons in sci-fi, so adding them for the purposes of destroying shields specifically (virtually no hull damage) isn\'t a bad idea. It would be a new block, though. Should be capital-ships only, methinks.
2. The idea of different scaling for different weapons types is also a good idea, methinks, but done differently. Rate of fire is reduced by increasing the sizeof the gun, while damage is increased by the size of the gun. This way mega-weapons can be built and used, but they are slow to fire and generally only useful against other large ships (although an unlucky or unskilled pilot can still be blown away with one shot).
3. I haven\'t played with missiles at all, but if a small, nimble fighter is able to outrun one, they would be good against larger capital ships and useless against fighters as a way of balancing. Fighter/Bombers with missiles can attack from distance against large capital ships, but be useless against other fighters.
4. Shields should be more effective the farther away the origin of the fire is. If the source of damage is CLOSE to the ship with the shields, they should reduce less damage (so, explosives and close-in fighters). If the source is far away (two capital ships broadsiding each other), they have to be BIG guns just to deal damage. This allows the megaships with huge guns, while also giving fighters a chance, even against a monstrous ship.
5. Change how large ships must be built, so that their \'power supply\' must have ventilation shafts depending on the size of the power planet. Small ships won\'t require vents, Frigates and similar smaller ships are also safe, but anything with large shield ratings and hull values should require ventilation (and STRAIGHT shafts), as weak points for skilled pilots to go for. Death Stars should require long, wide shafts that other, smaller ships can actually fly into to deal damage inside.

 

[Gorthoss]

On top of the weapon specialization (like ion, plasma, and laser) there could be shield specialties, where you would get a specific type of shield (only one type per ship) that could be weak against one gun type or missile payload and very strong to another, possibly the same with armor or hull plating.

The type could possibly be chosen when buying the ships core, so one picked your Massive ship will be stuck that way till it\'s destroyed.

Or implemented in the game system so you couldn\'t place multiple shield and armor types on each ship.

 

[SkyTitan]

Different sizes of ships don\'t need different speeds, that part is fine as it is. Bigger guns have a slower rate of fire would not solve the problem at all. They would simply make a lot of smaller guns on their big ship.



As for missiles vs antimatter cannons, missiles are useless against any decently shielded target; missiles have a very low dps. Antimatter cannons are great against shields, but suffer from needing to blow up a capital ship one block at a time.

A capital ship is dead as soon as you bring it\'s shields down to zero. A small fighter can just start ripping holes in it after that point. With the whole square root thing of shields now, You can use very large arrays of missiles to bunch through the shields before they can regenerate. Bomber craft exist at this point, but I\'m not sure how many people know how to use them. The trick is lots of unconnected missile modules.

 

[Scorpione]

Another way to reduce \"gigantism\" would be to rework the shield mechanics.

Currently the more shield blocks you have = the more shield the ship has.

I\'m suggesting to give the shield block an area of effect, lets say 20 blocks, so a shield block would extend it\'s shield value to any block that\'s no more than 20 blocks away.

In this way a specific hull block would have a certain number of shield blocks that are providing him with shielding. When that hull block is attacked, only the shield blocks protecting him would lose shield value.



In this way little and nimble fighters will just have to put their shield blocks in the middle of the ship and they\'ll be fully protected, while capital ships would have to put several shield arrays to protect various areas of the ship. This would obviously force capital ships to increase mass and loose maneuverability.

This would also open up a lot of interesting tactical options, such as attacking where the shields are weaker or maybe creating some kind of shielded armor extending away from the ship that will give extra protection to an important part of the ship.

 

[D-Car]

It\'s an interesting idea, but you\'d force servers to do tons more number crunching when ships get hit because they\'d need to start keeping track of how many shield points are remaining in every little shield generator block as opposed to keeping a single value for the ship as a whole. Might be a way to go later on when servers can run smooth as glass with 1,000 players all spawning capital ships repeatedly, but not right now.

 

[Atavism]

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

I would think that anything, of any size should be detectable at close enough range. Make it so that the smaller something is, the closer you need to get to detect it. But making anything below some magic boundary completely radar invisible seems like a bad idea.

• 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)
• *Weapon* power vs weapon reload speed should be on a set percentage scale with each other (more *weapon* power=less reload, and vice versa)

Yes, and yes.

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

Assuming a guns overall DPS remains the same, then yes. I agree that larger ships should tend towards a slower rate of fire with more damage per shot

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

I don\'t really see any reason why a large ship shouldn\'t be able to travel just as fast as a smaller one. Note that I\'m just talking about travel speeds, not combat maneuvering. The really superheavy ships should be barely capable of combat maneuvering at all, and that could be easily addressed without gimping travel speeds by only limiting their strafing and reverse speeds.

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

Yes. Absolutely yes. I\'ve seen some wonderfully creative designs that people have come up with, but because they were based on a long, narrow hull, they were effectively gimped when compared to a giant cube with the same mass. Your suggestion would allow a much greater flexibility in useful hull shapes, while still encouraging skillfull reactor design

 

[Kaamio]

Except one. Ships should have maximum acceleration stat, based on either mass or mass modified by hull mass/total mass ratio to represent structural integrity, limit being put in place to prevent ships tearing themselves apart. It could be even listed in the build mode data as max acceleration, along with how much thrust you need to achieve it to avoid wasting on useless thrusters.

Edit: ship mass could even increase max speed to give them a measure of use as carriers and ability to flee from small ships. As long as acceleration is reduced, speed is not game breaking, as they won\'t be staying in combat at full speed. /edit



Gun updates have already been mentioned, big guns slow to fire and travel but with high dps and range, small guns with low range, high rate of fire, fast projectiles and early dps cap but higher dps/block on their sweet zone. I\'d like to see torpedoes too, some shield piercing damage (few blocks, tops) and short range and low speed. Some anti fighter missles with good speed but less damage, etc.



The main issue now (my noobish opinion) is that problems with size start way too early with turn speed hitting low end really early, and everything scales up really well. Fighters can\'t hurt each other because their tiny guns shoot slow rate of fire and slow projectiles, so it\'s hard to hit even if dps would be high enough. Compared to bigger ships, that is...

 

[SkyTitan]

Hard coding the limits to ships is not the way to go. People will find ways around it, and if small ships become the best ships, everyone will simply have swarms flying around, increasing the lag factor dramatically.

The whole \"square root effect\" on shields already makes large ships rather fragile to other large ships. Also, large guns firing slowly does not make much sense in real life, or in game. A power distribution can already be done. Also, machine guns in real life are generally quite large. Vulcan miniguns and the like are also quite large, and would be incredibly unwieldy for a person to use. They\'re mounted on aircraft and aircraft carriers for a reason.

It should also be noted that every combination of firerate, impact damage, speed, and range is generally improved with size. True machine guns fire more big rounds faster and farther than sniper riffles. World war one was fought with machine guns far beyond the maximum range of even modern sniper riffles. It was also fought with artillery, but it had somewhat similar range of effectiveness. That being said, these are just trade offs, and are already done by switching the power settings for weapons. A better solution would be to make the power settings have a more dramatic effect on combat. Currently, there\'s no reason to put any power into range or speed if you have a fighter, because of the minimum range and speed values. The extra power can just be put into damage or fire rate but it doesn\'t help the guns as much as you would think.

I\'d just suggest that it should be made so that switching damage from 25% to 50% actually doubles the damage. If this were the case, fighters would have four times the dps of capital ships, as a capital ship cannot afford to lower it\'s range and speed beyond a point, since if fighters get close enough, they can easily dodge the slow turning ship\'s weapons. Turrets are a different story, but they don\'t benefit from the capital ship\'s shields and are mostly just a weak point to kill.

 

[Trinova]

The whole \"square root effect\" on shields already makes large ships rather fragile to other large ships.


Since regeneration is the prime value for shields your statement is wrong in this place. If you have enough fire power to overcome the regeneration you break shields in a couple of seconds. Thus encourages even bigger shields since a shield of 100k blocks has a reggen of 200k where you need 200k dps just to conter the regen. But since the capacity doesnt grow linear the moment you have 210k dps you crak the shields in about 1.36 seconds of sustained fire which is no problem in capital vs capital combat.

Thus you are invincible or you just dont have any defense at all... there is nothing in between. A 210k dps AMC array setup will melt through your \"armor\" (realy there is nothing that deserves the word atm) in a fraction of a second. Your biggest protection is the lag between a block getting killed and it getting removed allowing the lower block to be destroyed.

Since you only need to kill the core rockets are complete useless in ship to ship combat (nice for tearing down stations and planets). Sniping the core (with AMC) is much more effective while the weapon isntt useless against shields. Hull is useless since every serious AMC does at least 400 damage and onehits every block but faction modules (which you can\'t stack as armor since only one is allowed).

Even a super massive cuboid will get killed within seconds by a decent AMC setup. I expect capital vs capital combat to need time...

Let shield capacity increase linear as some kind of armor. But for christs sake turn of shield regen while under fire. It\'s this \"invulnurable or useless\" effect that bothers me most about shields.

 

[SkyTitan]

That\'s the whole point of different ship classes. What I was getting at is that a ship of similar size will be able to punch through the regen and the lower shield bank per firepower means that the ship will just melt.

Missiles are actually amazing, they just suck against shields. Once you shoot down the shields, missiles own ships much faster than cannons. Cannons can only punch through a hull so fast, a missile just blows through everything.

 

[Kaamio]

What I meant with big and small guns was that they would be separate gun systems. There\'s a limit how far you can upscale machine guns before they stop resembling that (bigger your gun, slower it fires unless you add more barrels), as recoil and ammunition size causes issues with speed. Big cannons are good for dealing damage far and against tough targets, but your regular pair of 20mm autocannons (working much like big machine gun) mounted on a good spot is pretty nifty against smaller targets from humans to lightly armored vehicles which would be a pain to deal with a huge cannon.



For example, Antimatter cannon likely would be a long range gun with low rate of fire as antimatter has to be capsulated to avoid it dispersing on the first particle it comes across as it explodes. Thus limiting acceleration in the barrel and meaning bigger guns would probably just fire bigger payloads to avoid massive issues with capsulation system. Massive damage at long ranges, suitable for bigger targets near and far, but less effective against smaller enemies as hitting them would be an issue.



Smaller gun could be pretty much anything, like a random generic Plasma projector that doesn\'t have efficient delivery method, but takes less power than antimatter and is very effective at short ranges (150-300m maybe?) and could be set to fire at high rate to work as point defense gun for big ships. Upscaling might have reduced effect as the barrel materials can\'t handle the increased heat too well or something, main point being that game mechanics should not revolve on only bigger is always better, because it\'s not fun and it\'s not realistic either.



Anyway, a lot of this could be remedied by restricting acceleration and reducing the turn rate reduction from smaller vessels to mean that huge ships are pretty ponderous, currently they turn about as fast as a heavy fighter and accelerate better because fitting big engines isn\'t that much of an issue. Or at least that\'s my experience, a ~3000 mass ship is more agile than ~200 mass one. Except of course the big ship has good shields and about 30-50 times more firepower.

 

[KDR_11k]

My suggestion would simply be the square/cube law. Make some of the systems require a certain surface area to work, e.g. thrusters can\'t output more than X Newton per surface so a huge cube won\'t have more output than a thin plane (maybe some small gains from thickness so you get max thrust for an area at 3 deep or so), same for weapons and such (can\'t squeeze more than X DPS through one block of AMC). As mass grows with the cube but surface area only with the square you will naturally get lower returns at larger sizes unless you make a massive saucer. Then just make thruster output depend on the surface area in the thrust direction and that saucer can only go forward, no other direction.



Fast and small vs slow and powerful depends on the relative powers of weapons and defenses, IRL these days most weapons are powerful enough to wreck their preferred targets with one shot so it is much more valuable to have a small, fast and only moderately armed vessel than a massive battleship. Of course in the days of the first ironclads defenses were far better than weapons, the first battle with them was a stalemate because neither one could seriously damage the other. When defenses are stronger than weapons it makes sense to build large, heavy vessels that can mount bigger guns that have a chance of penetrating the enemy defenses. If airplanes couldn\'t mount weapons that could destroy tanks or ships then they wouldn\'t be used for more than scouting but as it is now a single airplane can carry enough payload to disable if not sink any ship.



Of course as long as it\'s possible to have shield regeneration outstrip all but the largest guns you won\'t see smaller strike craft being built. If you simply remove shields entirely you will see fighters a lot.

 

[reddragonfall]

I believe that large ships should be able to go faster than fighters but they would have to build up their speed over 10s of sectors so the fighters could still keep up and attack. Somewhat like in a Sci-Fi movie where the giant ships have to power up the eingines while fighters and bombers are still doing tons of damage. This would also make it so carreirs would be great for long range transport and an attack would start by capital ships stopping just out of range of the other team then slowly advancing as fighters swarm out of bays and speed twards the enemy with the opining salvo of missiles inches ahead.

 

[The Great Chilli Pepper]

I these are scales you are using for these classes of ship then what class would mine be, currently in construction it is roughly 30k blocks large and plays the role of a carrier/warship. It is my PROJECT_EDEN_MKIII (I make my own ships. I refuse to rely on the online catalog, I have an imagination), it is kinda supposed to be a gigantic, moving, space station type deal and house many people and inspired by the station in the game \"StarDust I: The Fall of Man\".

 

[Alpha_Squad]

Having more AMC blocks attached will increase your dps is actually a myth, in reality it is the other way around. According to my small scale calculations (from 1 to 50)using only single blocks will actually increase the dps of your ship, for example I have a ship with 105 single cannons which correlates to ~4000dps . However, the tradeoff is firing a shorter distance with slower bullets. This perfectly complements small ships as they can easily out maneauver giant ones to get in close and peg them for a lot of damage. In the same vein larger ships will need to fire longer distances quicker, so the balance between damage, accuracy and distance becomes a main design point. It is also worth while to note that small ship vs small ship will also incur a similar situation.

 

[TangentialThreat]

I play on a PVP server with upgraded pirates to shoot at. I have opinions.



Being slightly smaller than your opponent is a big bonus even if you don\'t use missiles, or aren\'t allowed to use missiles because the server admin asked you to stop (he had his reasons). Take your slightly smaller ship and maneuver behind your opponent to deny them the ability to return fire and then wear down their shields.



There are also massive penalties for being too slow to dodge a missile. A small ship can escape if it loses shields, fly away to recharge, and try again. A big ship that loses shields is going to be immediately hit with a missile and destroyed, or bombarded with AMC so it never gets a chance to recharge.



Then there\'s the shield bug. Basically, shields don\'t always work especially when getting hit by a couple of things at once from close range. Glitching a missile through shields will instantly win a battle against practically anything, so that\'s another reason to have a ship that\'s too fast to be easily approached and hit with a missile.



Tl;dr small ships good PVP more balanced than expected missiles equal win.

 

[MichaelSeph]

I don\'t think it will get so dramatic, if sizes won\'t matter anymore, then half the aspects of this game dissapears.



There\'s no serious way or place you can see or think that some fighter guns can take down capital ships with their guns that are bigger than the fighter itself.



It would be a balance tweak, not making big ships totally useless vs fighters. But still the repairing idea looks great, since hte big ship has crew aboard and robot systems that repair, right ?