Fighting Gigantism in Starmade

[xandervm]

that why would you take all the trouble of building a huge spaceship with lots of shields to protect yourself or gather enough money to finaly buy the Titan ship if a ship made out of 85000 blocks can be destroyed by a fighter made of roughly 500 or less blocks?

why the hell would you even go to all that trouble just so it can be blasted out of space by a ship that is 100 times smaller than your ship? it would just defeath the purpose of the ship! you could just fly a fighter and defeath a battle ship, and sure, you will get blasted out of space a few times, but eventually you will beat the ship because repairing your fighter is super cheap in comparison of repairing the titan.

that would suck! anybody that takes the time and the effort building a 80000+ block ship WANT it to be invinsible to the ships that are way smaller.They want that just for all the trouble of making the bloody thing ( or, in some cases, getting the cash to buy it) and they accept it if they are defeathed by a ship that is as big, or bigger than their ship.Because they then get destroyed by a person who has also spent a huge amount of time building his ship.

The one thing that IS broken is the economie. Right now, it is way to easy to get a lot of money. You just have to find the nearest space station, kill the first pirate you see and take his loot ( which may be harder if youve just started and sometimes even impossible) or just go sell the catus or ice kristals that you found.

the roll of the fighter would be more usefull to be support: let the big ship shoot through the shield and then the fighters can chip away at the ship trying to find its core or damage important modules.

Please just don\'t nerf big ships just because they are big! the game is in a way already balanced because the guy with the big ship that is shooting at you is not the only one that can get a big ship. everybody has equal opportunity\'s to get a lot of fire-power.

I (and a lot of other people) went through the trouble to build a big ship to BE superior to smaller ship. and because big ships are superior at the moment you will get the feeling that it was worth it and that youve achieved something.

When thats gone, and big ships become these slow lumbering pieces of metal which can shoot only ones in a long amount of time and have shields that do not work because tiny fighters are able to shoot right trough it then why bother building one?

I get it that you want to heroicly fly too a battleship, dodge his laser(s), get near him and blast through the shield like its nothing and then proceed to shoot the Titan and evades its laser. But it just isnt fair for the guy flying the titan.

I think you guys get my point now. sorry if some things i wanted to say not came out right ( like this) but english is not my first langues.

 

[Kaamio]

To be honest, I don\'t think a small ship should have a chance one on one, even a group of smaller ships should have little chance of actually destroying a really big ship. But what they should have is ability to do something about it, lone fighter gets destroyed by turrets almost certainly but a group of them might be able to land enough hits to make the bigger ship reconsider if staying around is actually a good idea. It should be no problem keeping you facing towards a ship 10 times your size while staying out of it\'s frontal arc, if you have good engines.

Sure, the shield piercing torpedoes I mentioned earlier do pretty minimal damage to a 3000+ mass ship, and even less against a really big one, but if there\'s 5 200 mass bombers circling around your ship you\'re going to end up dead if you stick around and they get to disable your turrets... and because of that, when you decide to fall back and start accelerating your huge ship you should reach higher top speeds to get away.



Small ships should be able to easily manouver around a bigger ship and drive it away if equipped with anti capital weaponry, but they shouldn\'t be able to kill them completely if the big one doesn\'t play stupid. That\'s my point of view, and reason for carriers as well as varying size ships. It does require some new weapon types though, something that scales poorly beyond and under it\'s sweet spot.



For example, shield piercing torpedoes might have really poor speed and range regardless of weapon size and their piercing damage radius might be 0,5 at 50+ block weapon and 1 at 150+, capping there. You could fit a pair of them in a heavy bomber easily or lesser ones in a fighter, but stacking them in a big ship would be pretty bad idea because you need to be close to hit anything. Let\'s face it, a big ship doesn\'t get seriously hurt by someone making 3x3 holes on it\'s surface, especially if it has some spaced armour on it. But it does hurt on the long run. And if you lose your shields.... well, they could have more regular damage radius when not impeded by shields.

 

[Fuguzawaz]

I think that it is interesting how boarding is not taken into account in this thread. Boarding the enemy ship is/should be a valid option. If we had NPC crew, since players and ships arent affected by shields, having a small boarding vessel would in theory discourage large sheild-boating mothership. For some reason no one tries it in the game at the moment. I would really like to test a scenario with this...

 

[Danzarlo]

You cant open plex doors if the ship has a faction module on it aswell as the ship has sheilds so you cant get on it anyway i agree boarding should be viable and it is just take down the sheilds and hit the core simple as

 

[kekb]

I think that the answer to this question really lies in how you want wars to be faught in this game, are they wars of attrition or supply, balanced combat with fun fighting, territory or objective based wars (rich minerals for example), is the philisiphy that the person with the most money wins, or the faction with the most manpower, start to answer that question and it might point you down the right path

...also i have faith that this wont be anywhere near as big of a problem when the economy becomes more stable.

A few thoughts though.

Rebalance power and shields. Right now the emphisis is on regeneration, i think it really should be an emphisis on buffer, basically it just opens more options for combat and lets you design mechanics arround.


Its not speed thats needed, its agility, I dont feel that my if i compare my 25 000 weight ship to my 100 weight ship it dont feel that much worse(maybe i dont have enough engines?). It needs increased agility on the low end and reduced on the high end. This means that capital ships can be caught with their pants down a bit more and means they are riskier to use because you need to do it a bit more strategically.

Add Scatter to weapons based on their size. The FPS thing where your bullet can go anwhere in your reticle. This wont have much effect with a big ship shooting at ship of equal size, but it would make hitting smaller target much harder, it effectivly adds weapon classes. Even if it forces a big ship to have a battery of smaller weapons on a smaller computer, those wont be used with the main cannon, they take up space in its hull so there is less space for other stuff.

Different types of ship cores. It kind of goes against the whole sandbox idea, but having a few different core types with some exclusive modules is essentially a reason to build multiple capitals, have diverse fleets, more modules that only require 1 block like the cloaking or the radar dampener may be a step in the right direction

 

[TDude]

How can the larger mass ships get a slower speed in space, were space has a 0 resistance in travel? I bet this has already been stated, but Mass shouldn\'t effect speed, but instead the level of which you reach the speed.

and Instead of how you have were more power = slower reload, why not have it simple as in Longer the weapon system the longer the range, while the larger (more blocks connected) causes boost in damage, but if there connected you will get a Average between the 2+ a power consumption boost.

I love the EMP Idea, and making them the straight fire rockets makes you have to aim, but instead of taking Energy or Freezing Shield Recharge, make it were Each rocket (depending on power of recharge of enemy ship) take a % off till it Freezes the Power Recharge, not stopping the shield but instead, can lead to a ship being frozen in space, making Hijacking Enemy Vessels possible but like I said each rocket depending on the Recharge rate does a % so large ships (Capital Class) will need a large ships (Battle Class) array of rockets to do much damage to there Recharge rate.



Like I said I bet most of this has either already been said, or posted in another Topic, but it I think it would be better in a way.

 

[MikeV37]

Nothing, power/AMC/Missles/Shield should grow Exponentially. That\'s a recipe for giant ship dick waving.

If anything, weapon/shield/engine power should scale logarithmicaly, with diminishing returns on combined (giant) pieces

Maybe something like x/lnx (obviously not adjusted, just an idea) as aformula of DPS/Shield regen.

For small ships, this would mean they could be actually viable if they have proportionally larger cannons.

For large ships, this would mean broadsides and turrets would become more useful, as more large but not absurd cannons take the place of the one ship length giant killer AMC.

Also it would mean swarms of missles instead of several nukes, which I think would look cooler (and therefore is better, don\'t question it :P)

Speaking of missles, they need more forward momentum and some variance. When I launch a missle upward, I wanna see it arc towards the target, not ghost through my ship and crawl to the enemy. If I launch several, I don\'t want them to all converge on one spot. In fact, this would make them more useful ship killers, as instead of one crater near the core, there\'d be several. It\'d make them more liable to hit a larger target than a small one if they spread out some.

AMC\'s should also not just affect one square. Perhaps they should only affect the squares next to them if they do some absurd amount of damage, but it should make large holes in the enemy ship instead of turning them to swiss cheese.

 

[Charlie_]

I threw boarding in here too a while back, but then I remembered you can\'t remove blocks from a piloted ship, not manually anyways.

And therefore, while the pilot remains in core, you can\'t effectively create any damage as a boarding crew... Because why would the pilot leave his core? He\'d gain nothing and only lose.

However, a really tiny ship, that could work with largers.. once the shields go down, rush in a hole and start wrecking it from the inside. Though I\'m not certain if the shields affect the inside as the game currently stands.. I\'m afraid they do.

 

[Stakhanov]

As said before , if linked weapon blocks decrease the effective performance , then all you\'ll see is weapon arrays and countless turrets. If arrays and turrets are also limited , then you won\'t see any large ships outside screenshots.

Large groups of modules need to remain effective in frontal engagements , especially for the purposes of shield breaching. Linked AMCs having a lower rate of fire and speed , but higher damage are better against larger ships , but worse against smaller ones evading you. Such specialization leaves large ships counterable , but their counters not dominant themselves.

Missile scaling already favors arrays (given that missiles are completely useless at range) but this is a problem. Lots of heatseeking are bound to cause lag. Arrays should be more convenient against small ships , but worse at destroying large ones.

 

[MikeV37]

They make ships and ship battles look cooler.



Large groups of weapons would still be effective, at dealing a large amount of concentrated damage.

Perhaps shields or armor could absorb some amount of damage? Not much (again, logarithmic scale), but enough where a supermassive shield would take less damage from an array of weapons than one giant shield cracker gun. That makes large weapons have a role (killing ships with great big shields) while smaller guns have a role as well (taking apart ships without great big shields)

I entirely agree with the RoF decreasing as weapon size increases. the RoF increasing is the thing which gives AMC their exponential increase in power.

 

[Alabattai]

• The larger the total ship mass is the slower the base firing rate of cannons becomes
• The larger the ship mass becomes, the lower the percentage of the servers max speed a ship can travel

These two are IMO uncecessary fake unrealistic physics that just go around the real issue: big ships are far too cheap.

 

[MikeV37]

Without making ALL ships more expensive

And making ships more expensive in general does not solve the problem.

Say me and my buddies took a few hours to mine and build good, medium sized ship. We\'re having fun, when a giant monstrocity warps in from a nearby sector. He clearly either spent days in game mining/working or had his faction pool resources to get him the galaxy sized thing. (Same amount of blocks as us, for this example, just one ship v 6 or 7)

Are we going to attempt to fight it, or interact in any way with him? Hell No! Soon as we see the tip of his ship, we scatter and get out of dodge. We have no chance of scratching his paint, and we\'d be sacrificing the hours we each spent on our ship for no gain.

In conclusion, we have no fun (we had to run away) he had no fun (he didn\'t get to fight) his faction had no fun (they gave all their resources in order for their ship to be effective, and now are twiddling their thumbs back at base). This is less than ideal.

 

[Stakhanov]

It just makes the game more of a grind.

Artificial mechanics are necessary to compensate for other artificial mechanics (fixed top speed) arising from hardware limitations. And there is no realism in starmade , it\'s a game about instant-built spaceships and flat earths !

 

[Alabattai]

I don\'t mean incresing prices, I mean removing the possibility to become a mutimilionaire within 10 minutes.

 

[MikeV37]

Just through a different means. The problem is not that Everybody can build 6000 block ships. The problem is that ten 600 block ships cannont take on one 6000 block ship.

Making it so that not everybody can build 6000 block ships only excascarbates the problem.

 

[Frosth]

Well that\'s not true. Small ships with mroe players rape large ships with only one player.

It did before and even more after the latest patch. Two well played 2000 blocks ship can take a 20 000 block ship appart very easily. Especially if they perma jam.

The problem is the binary aspect of shields, between being either useless or being invulnerable. Even the latest patch didn\'t change the fact that small ships can\'t even damage large ships until they manage to pierce the new shield load. The latest patch was an improvement, but not a solution imo.

I posted a wall of text a while back, but I stand by my opinion. large ships need to win, but their victories need to cost them everytime. And for that, shields need to not be 100% effective at stopping damage.

If 5% of damage could pass trough, then hull and hardened hull would make a whole lot more sense. So would astrotechnobeam. Small well piloted ships could target expensive blocks or focus one area and \"dig\" trough large ships. Even if they get one shotted, they would at cause pain to the large ship\'s pilot and he would at least question going in every and all engagements.

 

[Nootau]

If you have boarding, what stops someone from having long halls with shotgun turrets at the end with bobby AI primed to shoot every red it sees? You can\'t board and survive.

 

[ante185]

If the hallways are big engouht to fit a turret that would be hard to defeat with a hand held weapon i think that hallway might be big enougth to fit a \'boarding\' ship (Basicly a core with a shield, few AMC cannons and a computer for them)

 

[MrFURB]

Frosth shows some good understanding of gameplay mechanics, and I think that\'d be a decent long-term solution, but I can think of a few things that would need rebalancing to fit within your system, namely huge missile boats with enough burst potential that 5% of it\'s damage leaking through your shields will take out large chunk of your ship while ignoring shields completely.

 

[Frosth]

To be honest, I had a full wall of text that went nearly completely un answered that I believe would fix that problem.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Starmade/comments/1hish6/suggestion_quality_of_life_tweaks_and_balancing/

Generally speaking, missiles should be \"shield breakers\", but should have a very hard time loking or even targeting/following smaller ships. With a rebalancing of damages on hit according to the \"damage potential\" notion rather than the flat \"all blocks get damaged\" we have now, armor plating would compensate.

Ideally, it would mean that dumb fire rockets on small bomber type ships would be a real pain to large ships, forcing them to require fighter escorts and creating a whole ecosystem of ship sizes and roles.

Also, the \"damage potential\" and shield letting trough some of it can have an advantage in the \"cool factor\".

If you build a death star like gun, its shots would be able to go \"trough\" another ship and continue behind it. Sure, that thing would fire once a minute, but boy would it be awesome(literaly).