Fighting Gigantism in Starmade

[Winterhome]

Remember, guys.

Giant battleships can be destroyed by a single torpedo or a single bunker buster bomb dropped by a vehicle under a thousandth of their size in reality, and in fact that\'s the only effective way of destroying them in the first place. In the future, that technology is going to continue scaling in the same manner. You make a big ship, someone else makes a cheap counter to it, so the only way to avoid death in either scenario is to think clearly about how to manage these issues.

If you design a ship that\'s got more blind spots than a cave salamander, then that\'s your problem. Make sure your turrets can hit everything.

 

[Ansambel]

i would make shields work as a spherical force fields meaning with somethink like shield core and shield enchancers (that increase the radius similar to the docking modules) this would allow the small ships to pass through shiled and damage side of a mothership, however i would also add a rework for technobeams(im not sure if anyone uses them atm) to auto repair even destroyed blocks according to what was build in build mode (and at some cost ofc) this woud prevent single small ship from killing a giant but would enable multiple small ships to kill a giant, also i think hud should be showing the numbers on shields etc.

my look on thrusters:

i think there should be no speed limit, i would like to see the super fast ships travveling at 0,1c with all systems off to power thrusters, and big ships that cant have such good thrust/mass ratio, slowly chanelling warp.

The next improvement would be radar system and jamming we should add radar block and space \"radio\" blocks Radar improve your radar strenght, \"radio\" block would enable you to exchange info with allies (something like in world of tanks), more blocks meaning more distance, then we should make the \'radar noise\' variable depending on the mass and kind of modules (weapons having a ot and hulls having a little) and radar would detect only ships that have higher noise that distance between ships divided by radar strenght (mby with some balance adjustments in the future like distance^2 or smth) , jamming would reduce noise

thx for reading i hope you liked my ideas

 

[Torrel]

Its not a bad idea but I think this would also need to be impiemented with some form of ship repair feature and some definite fine-tuning.

 

[Frosth]

Well there are the astro technician beams already implemented. They can repair blocks that have been damaged. Alongside hull, right now it\'s a useless feature. Add limited damages on blocks trough shield deficiency, and they would have a job.

For detroyed blocks, if ships cores could remember their blueprint on save or on load, then an astro technician beam coudl replace broken blocks too by taking it from an inventory.

Ideally, stores should stop selling ships above 100 mass and player run shipyards based of astro technician turrets with bobby AI would be the way to build and repair ships docked to the same structure.

Or even having a smaller repair ship docked on large ship to fly around and repair damage.

I think it woudl add to the game to not have the possibility of destroying and buying an identical blueprint for a large ship that has been damaged. Logistics like shipyards, having a supply of appropriate blocks and keeping a ship alive trough repairs would give some sort of character and attachement to a ship that has survived many battles.

 

[Torrel]

I deffo agree with that, I think ships should be hard to destroy and the larger it is the harder it is to kill. I know how intricate each block of my current project is and there\'s no way I could repair it properly if damaged, I would simply have to delete and rebuy it after every battle where damage was sustained. Perhaps use repairing as a penalty for taking damage and have the ship vulnerable while repairs happen. Maybe you need to deactivate shields for repairs to take place? I also think this would be a good way to change spawned ships from blueprints, it constructs slowly from the core, this also discourages larger ships due to longer construction time.

 

[VariousArtist]

in shipyards is already planned.. according to schema.

Still, gigantism needs to be nerfed for the good of the gameplay.

 

[heskey30]

Shields are not as strong on big ships now. I don\'t know if it is quite problem solved, but you no longer NEED to build big.

 

[Ludovsky]

I\'ve been reading this thread since a little bit, and similar subject and here are my thoughts(and ideas mentionned by others that I second).

First of all, the bigger the weapon, the slower it should reload. There\'s a reason something like the 800mm Bertha railroad gun wasn\'t used for antiaircraft, but stuff like the 20mm oerlikon weren(and often in quad mounts, to spread the amount of projectiles). The bigger the shell/power consumption, the longer it should take to reload/charge up for another shot, rather than players having literal 800mm caliber gatling guns on their ship. This could be compensated by damage truly scaling up on larger ship making them good ship/station busters, but bad at actually targetting small fighter crafts. Similarily this would encourage smaller weapons to actually take out the smaller fighters/bombers type.

Also, make missiles scale less in damage or efficiency perhaps, perhaps even decrease it a little(a friend was commenting on how quickly he could bust a whole station... with only 3 missiles). They should be efficient at punching holes... but not blowing up a full ships. The type of explosives that can punch through armor are either hideously powerful(like a nuclear bomb, and those aren\'t quite easily available) or use a -directed- explosion which generally yields to a much smaller blast damage than one would expect. The actual blowing up(like solid core armor piercing shells, explosive shells actually suck at penetrating armor in real life) of the vehicle come less from the ordnance used but more a critical component like the engine or ammunition storage exploding.

Perhaps a way to alleviate this might be to add an explosion effect to power generators or other such blocks when destroyed, but to radically decrease the explosion radius of explosive weapons(or try to direct it in a line rather than wide blast).

Ships could still look damage with plenty holes punched in armor, but without seeming utterly obliterated.... unless \"critical\" areas are hit. Which also would encourage \"smarter\" fighting than just shooting away.

 

[KuramaFox]

One way to deal with it is to add some actions to the shop. Specifically, a means of selling ships directly to the shop entirely, so you can just buy the saved blueprint again.

If it ever becomes possible for an object\'s file to \"remember\" what blocks it had before they were destroyed (basically, destroyed blocks get replaced with an empty block that has a data value, placing a new block there would overwrite it, kinda like the \"air\" block in minecraft), they could also add a repair option to the shop. Additionally, it could be possible to impliment a means of allowing a repair ship to restore those blocks, though that would be troublesome in execution (you would likely restore some exterior ones first).

 

[SeaPancake]

Regarding what you said about ships with a mass smaller than 5, I\'d like to make a few suggestions of my own.

Ships would be broken down into different classes, IE Fighter, Destroyer, Dreadnought, Capital- Maybe we could just steal the ship classes from EVE. What you\'d have is that the smaller classes have smaller radar signature radii, whereas the bigger ones like capital ships could be seen from sectors away. (Off topic but related to radar) I\'ve also heard a lot of things about warp drives. It should be if you use warp drives, it should take like 30 seconds to launch, and in that period your signature goes wild and you can be seen from very far away.

 

[Frosth]

What you suggest now may sound convenient, but it trivialize ship access. Shops abilities need to be reduced, or even removed.

Why woudl you need to have spare parts or repair beams if you can just go at a shop sell/rebuy or repair?

Changing ships should be at a cost in components and/or time. Not only for the \"soul of the game\" aspect, but also for an overall PvP balance and a form of organic anti-griefing system.

If you lost a fight, but managed to damage at least a bit your opponent and he has to conduct manual repairs or fly to his home station shipyardd for slow automated repairs, it won\'t be \"for nothing\", it reduces frustration aspect.

A griefer would eventually be weakened by each of its attacks and would eventually be taken down. If he could just rearm instantly, then he can carry on non stop.

And finaly, faction wars can have an attrition aspect. Rather than fleeing all battles you\'ll statistically lose, remaining and fighting well could mean breaking more blocks than you lose and netting positively for the war despite losing the battle.

Ideally, shops should only spawn ships of less than 100 mass only if the parts are available at that store. Then giving players the ability to design shipyards trough astrotechnobeam turrets and a \"blueprint cpu\" coordinating repairs/construction. Something like 1 block second.

This would add gameplay : technical challenge of designing effective shipyards, maintaining a factory for spare parts, exploring and prospecting for base materials and a wider array of outcomes for battles.

 

[Harbingerxy]

I hope this game won\'t go in the direction of catering to massive ships only. Building a capital ship should be an effort a single player shouldn\'t be able to accomplish. It would be lame and unrealistic if every single player had a death star. I actually prefer smaller ships like cruisers. It\'s just more fun and immersive.

 

[Dragleones]

Kaamio alrealdy mentioned the way to go in my opinion:


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.


In my opinion the antimatter should be completly redesigned and devided in 3 weapons instead. Range/speed/reload should scale logharithmic (so they have some kind of cap) while damage should scale linear (maybe even exponential). The caps shall prevent a weapon designed for a certain role to be effective in any other situation. Damage shouldn\'t have a cap so stacking weapons would always be the best way to go (would provide most dps to disable shields).

The different ship type would have to use different weapons to fulfill their roll in battles. Fighters for example have the task to prevent enemy bombers from reaching the big ships and protect their own bombers from enemy fighters. The capital ships would mostly fight against other capitals or corvettes and frigates being to small to be attacked successfully by bombers.
For these unique rolls are different weapons designated:

1. Pulselaser
It has high initial damage (low scaling) and a rapid reloading speed (cap around 100/150), but suffers under its low range (cap 100-200) [not completly sure what effect the speed has to the balancing so i\'ll leave it out]. Imho fighters had always the problem that their weapons weren\'t strong enough to actually do dmg in dogfights. Of course u could use them on bigger ships too but it would be almost impossible for big ships to maneuver in a position to do dmg in an effective way. Small turrets with Pulselasers would be good anti-fighter defense turrets, which are vulnerable to longer range weapons though. This weapon is not intended to do serious damage to bigger ships.

2. Antimatter canon

Medium initial damage (medium scaling), medium reloading (cap around 200) and medium range (cap 500-700) would make it a balanced weapon for medium sized ships to fight each other since they have a decent range and can disable shields at a decent speed.

3. Heavy Laser canon

Low initial damage (high scaling), low reloading (cap around 500) , high range (cap 1500-2000(or even more)), low speed and even a small splash radius would make this weapon good for big ships to fight other even bigger ships. It would be perfect at disabling huge amounts of shields and even be able to do some hull damage with its splash radius. Though they are terrible at hitting smaller faster and more maneuverable targets.

Note: The numbers are just first thoughts and are far away from being accurate numbers for the balancing of these weapons



With these changes shields could be even buffed again on bigger ships to prevent making pulselasers effective as antifighter-weapons and anticapital-weapons. By adding weapons for fighter-sized ships with shieldpiercing bombers would have a use.Though, shieldpiercing should be only implemented if there is finally a way to repair or reset the ship to the blueprint since replacing the blocks manually is way too time-consuming.

Torpedos

Similar to the Pulselaser these weapons would be tracking missiles but with a low range (cap around 300m), high initil damage, low speed and a decent explosive radius while they completly ignore shields. Corvettes and faster frigates should be able to get away from them while capital ships couldn\'t do much about it.



With these weapon changes all shiptypes should get their own tasks and should be able to get countered. Bombers could completly wreck a unprotected capital ship while a corvette with many pulselaser-turrets could destroy an enourmous number of bombers and fighters. This would add more depth to fights and would open up much more possibilitys.

 

[MuilConnaire]

What about having all entities in the game be detectable relative to its size? Ships with 10mass only appear in Nav within 50m or something whereas ship of 100mass can be detected within 500m etc. These numbers are arbitrary. This can apply to everything, asteroids, shops, stations, not just ships. I have a sneaking suspicion this has already been suggested.

 

[BasicPaul]

I like some of the suggestions, especially:

-No radar for small ships

-Modules on ships that could be destroyed and disable certain parts of the ship. (larger ships)

 

[The_Onion]

why not just increase the damage for the dummy missiles(dont remember their name)? make them slow enough so a pilot would only realistically be able to use them against huge ships(maybe reduce their range as well). This would help two-fold. First, it would give fighter pilots a viable option for fighting big ships, and it would force opponents to counter with fighters of their own to defend their big ships.

 

[Nootau]

Umm, why would a large ship be slow? They could have better accelleration than a

 

[Terramort]

Because of this thing called \"momentum\". Big ships should have their acceleration and turn rate seriously nerfed. Like, a lot a lot. If ships in real life could turn or accelerate a mere fraction of equivilent sized naval boats on earth, tug boats would never have been invented, and it wouldn\'t take literal miles to slow down an aircraft carrier.

\"But more thrusters!\" There is also a reason we don\'t just put bigger propellers on a big ship. Even the strongerst materials can only take so much force, and it think it\'s a little less than being able to stop a 400k ship in 4 seconds.

 

[Nootau]

Seeing as this is in space, if we use real life as an example, acceleration will be very similar in large and small vessels in near \'zero g\' environments. You are assuming gravity from celestial bodies will effect larver vessels the same way gravity effects larger vessels on earth. They don\'t. Are you asking to go against realism?

 

[Moph]

There is still mass in zero G environments. Mass is what gives things inertia and means more force is needed to accelerate it. More massive objects will always need a larger force to accelerate them compared to smaller objects.

Also, the guy you replied to first said slow missiles, not slow large ships. True, that could potentially imply that by that he was thinking that large ships should be slower too so those missiles could catch them, but he could have also meant that they were larger targets, and so easier to hit than smaller ships.

Terramort was accurate with his undersrtanding of physics in his analogy. It would make sense for larger ships to have a lower acceleration, yet still perhaps reach higher speeds! However, this isn\'t all that conducive to gameplay though as this would be a limitation on players with their freedom in constructing whatever they want. Terramort, there is also a reduction in turning acceleration in the game, and it already has a huge impact on combat, any further and it would be a pointless hinderance without any further advantage given to his/her opponents, thus damaging gameplay.


\"You are assuming gravity from celestial bodies will effect larver vessels the same way gravity effects larger vessels on earth. They don\'t.\"

It almost sounds as if you\'re talking from experience here!
In fact, the gravitational constant, which is the thing that defines the strength of gravity, along with the body\'s mass, will be the same in celestial bodies. So yes, gravity does act in \"the same way\" in space as it does on Earth; i.e. it acts in the same direction, it\'s constant and not pulsing, it\'s strength varies over distance with respect to the inverse square law, etc. The only thing that changes is it\'s strength which is based on the mass of the body.


Also, there\'s a lot of interchanging going on here between velocity and acceleration which would make Newton turn in his grave.