fleet action and its lack of it

[kiwionthemoon]

space = huge spaceship fleets destroying each other, and doing awesome stuff YES

starmade = huge spaceship fleets destroying each other, and doing awesome stuff NO



Alright, so this thread is about large faction warfare, pretty much what we all dreamed of when we joined a faction. In the sci fi movies, you always hear "the planet is blockaded by the 21rst fleet, there is no escape" or something awesome like that, related to a large number of ships. Now in starmade, if there was an actual blockade this would happen "HAHA LOLWUT? LETS WAIT TILL THEIR ALL OFFLINE AND KILL THEIR SHIPS" That, is bullshit, and has to be stopped.

At first i imagened starmade like a chess board, or a tactical map, where the leader could move his armies around according to opposite army threats (and his soldiers would have a good time fighting the enemy), maybe attempt a last ditch dash to destroy the enemy capital ship, going around all the enemy fleets, or performing a clever feint and flanking attack. But then i realised this would never happen, starmade wars are not about who has the best tactics, the best ships and the best pilots, its about who can stay up the longest waiting for nobody to be online and killing an entire fleet with a ship.

Heres another example, you know those warhammer campaign maps? if each sector represented a hexagon on those you could have some truly tactical warplay.

What is currently happening on starmade is a kinda offline wars, were members simply cannot stay online 24/7 (and even if they could, the battles are very unsatisfying and in no way would justify that lack of sleep or that lack of real life) and then their ships are destroyed when they are offline. And when they get back on its "ha, we beat you, all your ships are dead" now many of you will say that there are "clean wars" were both sides agree on a set battletime. However this isnt really tactical its just a slugging match.

What can we do about it? tbh not much, there will always be a horrible troll out there who will do this. But we can agree on a moral system to not attack offline players ships (and if there is one member of a faction online, that doesnt count for the entire faction, be representative) untill a new system is implemented because it NEEDS to be.

 

[Iskandar]

While it wouldn\'t stop people from going after the ships of offline players, there\'s a couple of simple AI options that could be added in to help alleviate it.

\"Defend on Hostile Action\" - the AI takes control of the ship, flags the attacker as an aggressor, regardless of whether they are in a faction or not, and light them up with the ship\'s onboard weapons and docked turrets. This would require the ship-based AI to override the turret AI and command them. After combat, it reverts to the previous setting.

\"Flee on Hostile Action\" - when attacked, the AI takes the ship to a player designated location (the faction\'s homebase or some other well-defended area). This would work best with something like the stasis chambers that someone else suggested in another thread, which would allow the player to log in and still be aboard the ship in the new location. Otherwise, it should add an entry to the faction\'s news indicating who attacked, in what ship, and at what location, and that it retreated to the specified coordinates.

I\'m sure there\'s more that would be good AI options as well (it\'s an Artificial Intelligence after all... imho it should have a wee bit more intelligence and be able to at least defend itself properly when the player is offline). It\'s not a cure-all (and it doesn\'t guarantee that players will stick around to fight other players either), but it would help make offline ships a little less \"offline\"

 

[FlyingDebris]

I agree wholeheartedly with everything you\'ve said. The only real reason Vaygr was able to brag and demoralize many of us was the fact that our offline ships, while at base and inside of a protected sector, could simply not defend themselves, no matter how much we tried. As to the AI improvement options, that is a viable way to stop attackers, but the AI would need to become smarter, which I believe schema will end up doing at some point.

 

[Sergeant Base]

I think he didn\'t name any of the factions because he didn\'t want this thread to end up in a flame-war again, what definetly will happen with such posts. Could you please take the factions name out of your post so they don\'t feel attacked. Everyone knows examples for such wars but we should keep this thread clean of flaming versus others.

 

[ridik_ulass]

wars in thier current state is currently timed greifing raids. espicially with christmas CR, DFN they vaygr and my own faction are very comparativly inactive to what they were at the hight of the vaygr - DFN war. also college and high school tests and the older folks buying shopping and preparing for christmas, activity is down. and lastly there is a bug going around I\'m struck down with it and so was OBI I\'m sure there are less prominent members of the community who are I\'ll and less people are taking notice.



but less about activity,



other than grefing raids the only option is arranged pitched battles, which people will rally up as many numbers as they can, and for the most part the larger faction will win, that is until they don\'t by that I mean the member count arms race, gets to a point where the server is just to laggy for the engagment to occur.



then there is the who builds bigger arms race, we have ships like the wrath of blake and the Tsar which are so big they need to have turrets and shields filled after they are bought, the unarmed hull alone costs around 2bn, these are the kind of ships that a single player alone could wipe out most factions with and are the only way for a small \"elite\" (I use that term loosly) faction can over come the numbers arms race.



so what we have are the 2 easiest ways to win at war are both causing lag to the server, if we liken lag and server death to an end of the world senario we have a cold war era style arms race on our hands, and the only outsome is mutually assured destruction. shit if the fight isn\'t going too well for 1 side, all they have to do is crash the ships into each other and crash the server, and then just say they were about to win and it becomes a stalmate.



currently picthed battels need to be a bit of a gentalmans agreement, there needs to be a pilot cap (around 5 I think) a ship size cap( not even sure where to begin there) if you are going to arrange set piece battles you may as well all play by the same rules.



the only other option is build massive defence platforms that range out to several sectors and defend all your space, I built a defence platform when I heard that the DFN and CR were going to attack my home planet back on nass, wheather that was true or not didn\'t matter I had to get the finger out and do it myself.

12 turrets each with 1.6mil dps (19.2mil total) 4mil shields each (48mil total) and enough power to remain cap stable later on a planet with 22mil shields and an extra power later, after spending over 6bn credits I had my defences up, but the whole area was a lag trap and I could no longer work comfortably on my planet. my defences had become my prison, it is not an option I\'d reccomend to anyone.



so there is the 3 options to fleet battles, numbers, huge ships or planetry defences that can defeat numbers and large ships. all of which = unplayable un fun laggy death.

 

[Sergeant Base]

Maybe some kind of \"offline\"-garage near shops where noone could build turrets to attack incoming ships. These garages could be used by everyone (not limited to factions) to safely log-off so your current ship also gets un-spawned and saved so noone can attack it.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

Why not make a faction home base and dock your ship to it?
That works fine...

 

[kiwionthemoon]

Would you really like to dock your captial ship to your homeworld? Im not sure thats even possible with the docking cap atm. And anyway, i should be able to leave my battleship undocked knowing it is safe.

 

[Sergeant Base]

This might work for small factions, but as soon as multiple big ships are docked you will lag the hell out of the server you\'re on. Also that doesn\'t make you\'re ship immune versus attacks from INSIDE the faction (betrayers, spies aso.).

 

[Iskandar]

The faction system as it is now is just an open invitation for griefing All it takes is to invite one person who isn\'t who they claim to be, or piss off one member who decides to lash out, and every single base, station, and ship in the faction could be destroyed overnight.

There needs to be limits (either in the faction ranking system or specified per player in the faction roles popup) on who can access/change/remove the Faction blocks and who can use a build block on a factioned structure. But that\'s really a topic for a different discussion

 

[Tarkaris]

Perhaps an updated faction block could set a ship it occupies to an \"offline\" mode where the entire vehicle is incapable of moving, attacking, etc. but is set to be invulerable like the shops? It wouldn\'t fix bad player behavior but I might work as an insurance that could be made available to just about anything you could build.

 

[Sergeant Base]

1. That would end-up everyone using those docks to dock invulnerable armor-plates for their ships.

2. Betrayers inside a faction could still undock those even from stations so it\'s still not protected...same as with home-base docks.

Ships actually need to get unspawned somehow to completely stop griefers, betrayers or rammers. Also ts would increase the performance and reduce lags if there\'re just ships from actual online-players

 

[kiwionthemoon]

wow, i never even thought of the invenurable plates. But anyway, if you had ships disapearing when the player logged off then you would get combat logging and spawn issues.

 

[Syzygy]

Ships actually need to get unspawned somehow to completely stop griefers, betrayers or rammers. Also ts would increase the performance and reduce lags if there\'re just ships from actual online-players


And what if someone parks there big ship where yours was just before when it spawns in?

 

[wolfboyft]

Trolls are non-human SCUM. That kind of warfare really should stop, but thats impossible. Also, when you kill an enemy ship, THE PLAYERS RESPAWN! D: BUT YOU CAN\'T STOP RESPAWNING... D: AAAAGH!