Flexible Power System Overhaul Proposal (updated)

[Haalon]

can now design SM in a way to simply allow to over-feed systems which then produce more heat …
… or require systems meant to be over-fed to have overdrive slaves/chambers and make them less efficient when not over-driven.

What you just said, as for me, is just a game of words.
Since, in my mind, its enirely your choice how much energy you want to supply to a system, this system havent actual borders of overcharged and normal state. It just can be more powered or less powered. Or powered enough to shut it down.

 

[NeonSturm]

What you just said, as for me, is just a game of words.
Since, in my mind, its enirely your choice how much energy you want to supply to a system, this system havent actual borders of overcharged and normal state. It just can be more powered or less powered. Or powered enough to shut it down.

If you require overdrive blocks in that system, you cannot change it during combat or mission, only in your shipyard.

Think about it like this:

• But if you go out with 100$, a thief can steal 100$ from you.
  
• But if you go out with 10'000$, the thief steals 10'000$ from you.
• Thus unless you want to buy something worth 10'000$ or are rich enough that 9900$ more or less do not matter, you don't go out with that much money in your pocket.
• However you cannot buy a Ferrari on the black market with just 100$ in your pocket.

It's not about "you can, you cannot" but about the meta, lore and game-depth.​

 

[Haalon]

If you require overdrive blocks in that system, you cannot change it during combat or mission, only in your shipyard.

One of the most important ideas of my overhaul - is to let you change efficiency of any system during the flight.
You do not need overdrive modules for that, you just send more energy to that system. And you can change that amount of energy you send to a system at any time, ideally this can be done through weapon panel or something like that.

 

[NeonSturm]

If an AI builds your ship according to your specifications, who is the builder? The AI or you?

That is where our opinions part.
- I think good shipbuilders should be rewarded, but I guess your proposal sets the entry-barrier of required skill before noticeable reward higher. The result could be another demand for more complexity elsewhere - which would be taxing on Shine's time.​

 

[Lecic]

. If we go from 'block count' to 'quality' paradigm, gap in efficiency between ships designed purely for that effectiveness, and ships that designed fisrtly for appearence and then for efficiency - gap between them will decrease. But this gap will always be - because without it terms like 'efficiency' and 'better design' willbe meaningless.

I have severe doubts that moving from a mostly formless system to a specific shape system will reduce the gap between ships designed for appearance and ships designed for efficiency. In fact, it would probably make it worse.

Forsed design choices - I think this problem is misunderstood. It's perfectly ok if game has some designs that are better than others. Because it's how any game works - there will always be more optimal paths, more optimal choices, more optimal tactics. What is not ok - when there is ONE design choice that is better than everything else, and that's close to starmade current situation. We cannot eliminate optimal layout in any way, but we can give more than one optimal choices, each with its own pros and cons.

I'm interested in what you think the current "one design choice better than everything else" for ships in the current game is. From my personal experience as a combat systems engineer for 4 different factions over the past 4 years, it is anything but.

 

[Haalon]

If an AI builds your ship according to your specifications, who is the builder? The AI or you?

What? What are you talking about?
It's enirely player's task to build a ship. And the skill of a builder ofc affects the quality of a ship. As for this flexebility, I think there is some misunderstanding, so let me quote myself:

Flexibility. Old system, official and your proposal - in all of them there is no flexibility. After you built your ship, its characteristics is constant - its shielding, firepower, overall maneuverability and dynamics are always the same. What I want to do - is to make this characteristics ranging. You will be able to prioritize some characteristics, while sacrificing the others. Ofc you wouldn't be able to turn a small fighter into tanking dreadnought and make a dreadnought faster than a small fighter. But, for example in a battle, you will be able to sacrifice thrust power, in order to make your shields and weapons stronger.

 

[Haalon]

I have severe doubts that moving from a mostly formless system to a specific shape system will reduce the gap between ships designed for appearance and ships designed for efficiency. In fact, it would probably make it worse.

It's not a specific shape system. All systems with computer controllers will still be systems with computer controllers. Only thing that will change for them - is the way how their block count affects their stats.
Power system, however, works differently. It still can have any shape, you can even make a torus reactor if you want. What actually matters - is the way you place reactor blocks inside that shape.

As for appearance vs. efficiency. For example, we have a tasteless system brick and a good-looking ship with similar mass. If builders of both ships are skilled, than even in current game, gap between those wont be large. This gap appears because the good-looking one wastes some of it's mass and volume on decoration purposes. This waste ~linearly affects weapon and shield systems, and more seriously affects power system. But if this waste affected them in logarithmic fashion, or, in some cases, didn't affect them at all - than that gap will be reduced.

I'm interested in what you think the current "one design choice better than everything else" for ships in the current game is. From my personal experience as a combat systems engineer for 4 different factions over the past 4 years, it is anything but.

As for this one, I didn't mean that current starmade is purely one-sided. Vice versa, it has a great diversity in weapon systems and effects. They have some issues, but still.
However, IMO, it has some major bias towards shields, power regeneration, lock-on missle turrets and placing system in any unwanted space you have.

And about your expereince as a combat system engineer, it would be interesting for me to hear it.

 

[Lecic]

However, IMO, it has some major bias towards shields, power regeneration, lock-on missle turrets

Shields: Shields are powerful, but so is armor, which is highly underrated. Could armor use some buffs? Sure, but I've built multiple highly successful armor tanking and shield tanking designs.
Power Regen: Not even going to argue this one, the current power and weapon configs definitely favor regen over capacity on everything but extreme alpha strike vessels.
LOML Turrets: LOML makes a good turret weapon due to its small block count needed for decent damage per shot, but, more importantly, due to the fact that AI can still lock on to a jammed ship. Fixing that would get rid of its biggest advantage. LOML is hardly the only good choice for turrets, though. Any long range, high damage per shot weapon makes for good turrets.

placing system in any unwanted space you have.

I don't really see why this is a bad thing. Would you rather there be pointless hollow spaces inside hulls? If you change systems so that scattering bits of systems in tiny open spaces doesn't work, well, there's always armor to throw there instead.

 

[Haalon]

I don't really see why this is a bad thing. Would you rather there be pointless hollow spaces inside hulls? If you change systems so that scattering bits of systems in tiny open spaces doesn't work, well, there's always armor to throw there instead.

It's not a bad thing, yep. It's just a consequence of 'block count' paradigm. I personally would prefer ship packed to its limits with system to a ship with lots of filler blocks.

So in my mind, systems in tiny space does work. But do it much less effective than now, so in some cases, it's really better to have armor there.

 

[Haalon]

I have severe doubts that moving from a mostly formless system to a specific shape system will reduce the gap between ships designed for appearance and ships designed for efficiency. In fact, it would probably make it worse.

I'm interested in what you think the current "one design choice better than everything else" for ships in the current game is. From my personal experience as a combat systems engineer for 4 different factions over the past 4 years, it is anything but.

In fact, we talked only about problems I stated at very beginning of my proposal. What do you think about proposal itself?

You look like a guy, who is skilled at finding flaws and biases in game mechanics. So, your opinion would be valuable.

 

[Lecic]

In fact, we talked only about problems I stated at very beginning of my proposal. What do you think about proposal itself?

You look like a guy, who is skilled at finding flaws and biases in game mechanics. So, your opinion would be valuable.

I'm not opposed to changing the reactor mechanics to something like what you've described. My main issue with Schine's proposition is the heat boxes, and you've got a better heat solution suggested here than that. I see a lot of potential for interesting reactor designs like what we currently have with aux armoring schemes or how supercompact power reactors used to work, and I like that.

I'm not sure how I feel about your proposed shield changes.

Your proposed weapon ideas are interesting, but I feel there may be some balancing problems with allowing small, fast moving turrets to still output a large amount of damage, at least for a little while.

Wires are probably a bad idea. I would avoid them if possible.

 

[kulbolen]

not an argument against the proposal for change, but against some of the ideas you wrote about, and a few of the comments since.

your block count paradigm is wrong. block count is one (albeit important) variable of several in most system setups. weapons rely a lot on group size, spread, impact spacing, ratios; a well laid out weapon system will far outperform a poorly laid out one with higher block count. system blocks have placement priorities based on what should be most protected or what becomes worthless fastest as the ship is damaged, and what costs the least shp to lose. also, scanners do rely specifically on count to combat multiple cloak/jam groups ad get shorter cooldowns.

your diversity problem is fairly accurate. most mechanics are pretty 1 sided... seeing as starmade is a block by block building game, instead of just looking at each system specifically and claiming lack of diversity and 1 sided mechanics, you can look at how they interact with each other as you place multiple system types since each block represents one specific thing. but i agree itd be nice to get more variety in block interaction.

your unflexibility problem is half right. you say theres no flexibility but there is some, you just have to build it into your ship. maybe not the same context, but i can alter how a gun works on the fly if ive built the ability into my ship to do so (hotswap main guns ion effect for my punch passive for example), i can alter how my thrust works, or whether i suck more energy for speed and defense. more would probably still be good.

your forced design choices is mostly wrong. with exception to obvious basic requirements, you arent forced into any decisions. specifically weapon choices; the only weapon that really needs to be looked at is pulse main because its not viable. the others (whether intentionally or not) have some semblance of balance and good warships generally have a pretty solid mix of several available options. noteworthy community ships run the gamut in ratios to mass of thrust, power regen/capacity, weapon count and makeup, armoring, shield capacity and regen, effects...

i did come to realize awhile ago that much of this games "complexity" is unintentional by design (with developers and testers only learning of it as it becomes mainstream) and hidden behind a pretty large experience wall that most people never climb, leading them to believe and argue that it doesnt exist. maybe it shouldnt...

but it does. evidenced by the fact that high tier players or factions spend huge amounts of time engineering stronger warships, and the huge differences in those ships when compared side by side, as well as their huge differences in combat abilities at a given mass.

 

[SpirionKyrani]

I definitely agree that this proposal makes a lot more sense, and opens up more gameplay and design choices, than the original one from Schine. I'm a huge fan of being able to make an effective ship without spending weeks, or months, painstakingly laying out system blocks; I would say that the best way to do this is to make it so you don't need to fill a ship to the brim with systems to be reasonably effective. Multi-block shapes, like your reactor overhaul proposal, would offer more customization and reward than the mazes of power lines we currently have.

However; (Some of these points are expressed in the OP, so take them as clarification or refinement as opposed to argument)
Weapon power being dynamically allocated in the systems panel... is not quite in line with the game mechanics we currently have. I like the idea of being able to have a small turret pack a helluva punch if you can give it the power, it would open up some niche slots that would be really fun to play with. (And it's way cooler to have two titans broadsiding one another than to have them locked in a snail's paced dogfight) However, I think the maximum capacity of the weapon should be limited by the amount of power you can store on your ship, as opposed to some arbitrary power level. You could still use the control panel to tell the weapon to use less power, but a block-based physical cap just sounds better IMO. This could simply use the current system, where you have a capacitor pool on your ship that energy is drawn from. I feel like it is a good system as it stands. All systems on your ship would draw power from this capacitor pool: thrusters, shields, weapons, jump drive, as it currently stands. Reactors could still have inherent capacity based on their size, but it would be less effective storage than a dedicated bank.

Now, if you make a single-block weapon able to draw the power of your entire million-unit capacitor into a single shot, there should be a weapon heat mechanic. A weapon too small in heat capacity to handle a certain power level will, as expected, spontaneously and violently explode (or perhaps just not fire, but what's the fun in that? :P) One could make weapons dump heat into your ship's heat sink pool, and your cooling capabilities would then determine your fire rate. This again would enable small turrets, on a ship with good power regen, heat management, and heat sink pool, to be very effective in combat.

Block count on your weapon can't be forgotten, however. Weapon groups could have various benefits; weapon blocks are inherently better at cooling themselves off, and can store more heat per unit than a heat sink, but only for the heat accumulated by weapons fire. A large turret or fixed weapon would not need extensive secondary internals to be effective.

Your changes to shields are very interesting. Unlinking, to an extent, the strength of your shield to the block count of your systems could open more gameplay mechanics. Anyone else thinking, "Maximum power to shields!" However, I'm not sure how you could really do that with the current block system, except maybe logic blocks (activator ratios).
Shields generating heat feels like a logical move, and it puts further emphasis on building good cooling systems.

 

[Haalon]

Thank you for your answers, and sorry for my late reply.

your block count paradigm is wrong. block count is one (albeit important) variable of several in most system setups. weapons rely a lot on group size, spread, impact spacing, ratios; a well laid out weapon system will far outperform a poorly laid out one with higher block count. system blocks have placement priorities based on what should be most protected or what becomes worthless fastest as the ship is damaged, and what costs the least shp to lose. also, scanners do rely specifically on count to combat multiple cloak/jam groups ad get shorter cooldowns.

Don't get me wrong, I don't deny that there is much more meaning in system design than just block placing. Especially if it is a weapon system. But block count is essential value for every system now. Even well build weapon system, with clever grouping, is still greatly based on block count. And again, I don't want to make block count completely unimportant, just less important than now.

your forced design choices is mostly wrong. with exception to obvious basic requirements, you arent forced into any decisions. specifically weapon choices; the only weapon that really needs to be looked at is pulse main because its not viable. the others (whether intentionally or not) have some semblance of balance and good warships generally have a pretty solid mix of several available options. noteworthy community ships run the gamut in ratios to mass of thrust, power regen/capacity, weapon count and makeup, armoring, shield capacity and regen, effects...

I won't argue with this one. I already discussed it with Lecic.

I'm not sure how I feel about your proposed shield changes.

Your changes to shields are very interesting. Unlinking, to an extent, the strength of your shield to the block count of your systems could open more gameplay mechanics. Anyone else thinking, "Maximum power to shields!" However, I'm not sure how you could really do that with the current block system, except maybe logic blocks (activator ratios).
Shields generating heat feels like a logical move, and it puts further emphasis on building good cooling systems.

I don't thought much about shields, actually. The only things about them that are important to me - it is that their efficiency will be based on power, and they will generate heat.

However, I think the maximum capacity of the weapon should be limited by the amount of power you can store on your ship, as opposed to some arbitrary power level. You could still use the control panel to tell the weapon to use less power, but a block-based physical cap just sounds better IMO.

There are at lest two ways of how a weapon system can consume energy:

First one is the current one - weapon consumes all energy it needs when you shoot. And if there is not enough power capacity on your ship - it won't even shoot.

Second one - is the official proposed one. The weapon consumes power during its recharge. Thus making capacity less important for a alpha-strike systems.

I prefer the first one - because, yes, arbitrary power to even a small alpha-strike weapon system can be too devastating.
However, second one can be limited too, but with more precise heat mechanics.
As for capacity itself, in my proposal it is a part of reactor. Kinda unrealistic, but it makes reactor designing more important.

 

[Ghent96]

'Block count' paradigm - effectiveness of all current systems depends entirely on their block count, with the exeption of power system and ...scanners. Remember how you place shields, secondary and tertiary weapon modules, jump modules, thrusters, etc. You just place them in any unwanted space you have, because the more blocks - the better system works. As Schema nicely described: The current system makes power and systems purely a game of ratios, which doesn’t offer much complexity and increases the total number of blocks. If we go from 'block count' to 'quality' paradigm, gap in efficiency between ships designed purely for that effectiveness, and ships that designed fisrtly for appearence and then for efficiency - gap between them will decrease. But this gap will always be - because without it terms like 'efficiency' and 'better design' willbe meaningless.

Wrong. First off, power is not broken at all. It is merely a bit imbalanced.
Second... this is a voxel game. WTF do you expect? This is how voxel games work: you put down 1 block; it's good; you put down 2 blocks; it's better. A developer of a voxel game easily prevents runaway enlargement of buildings/entities by balancing stats and introducing soft-caps so that it becomes pointless in the gameplay for players to create entities beyond a certain size except for mere aesthetics. The "block count paradigm" is not a problem to be solved, but a central facet to all voxel games.
If the devs all of a sudden don't want to make a voxel game anymore, then go make a separate game. Then they can go make reactors and heat and copy Elite:Dangerous all they want.
Power and systems are not merely a game of ratios. If a player wants to get that complex, then they can, but they don't HAVE to. Some players want that complexity (so yes, there is in fact complexity currently offered. If you have to grab a calculator or a spreadsheet, then it's complex, and yes a lot of players do that now with StarMade), and some players don't. That's fine. Let us as players decide what level of complexity we want. Maybe we WANT to just plunk down a few systems in our unused spaces between hull and interior. SO. The. F. What? let us alone to do that.
It doesn't increase the number of blocks if you balance things properly, which... the devs haven't bothered to do. Private servers have, and have come up with better balance than the vanilla game.

Complexity Diversity problem - while current weapon system has various things to offer, other systems are purely one-sided in thier mechanics, and the only choice you make during placing thouse - how much of them you need/you can have on your ship and how make it most efficient, in case of power systems. And by placing them you only change values but not the overall behaviour. Diversity always brings some complexity with it, but reverse is not true. I am not looking for realism or extreme complexity, contrariwise, I want to make more ship system designs viable, such as capacity-based ships, without making this systems too hard to build, and with keeping systems simple on small ships.

Wrong. All systems are sufficiently diverse currently, and OF COURSE you change behaviors of your ship by making more or less of each system block. You must be smoking yhole. There is no logic at all in what you're typing.
Shields - you can choose to emphasize all capacity, or all regen, or anywhere in between. Some servers have even experimented with all cap and no regen, and require use of shield recharging stations or ships. So much variety in gameplay choice here, and you can't really introduce more than what we have. Shields should be simple... ARE simple, in every game out there. They're always 1) capacity, 2) recharge rate. That's all you need and should have. Good gameplay offers choices yet simplicity.
Power - you can again choose to emphasize capacity in your ship, or all regen, or anywhere in between. Some servers have again experimented with "battery" concepts, all capacitors, no regen, and required charging /refueling stations. Great fun, very interesting. Power is not hard, AT ALL, to build. Across 3 years and hundreds of ships, I have NEVER had power issues that I couldn't solve, large and small ships, even with cloakers.
Thrust - you can choose to build a lumbering behemoth or a fast dart, or anywhere in between. You can tweak your thrust by adding blocks, or by adjusting a slider, or ....gasp.... even by the SHAPE AND DIMENSIONS of your ship. Wow?!?! Such diversity!? Look at all those vertical ships, long z-axis needles, wide manta rays, and everything in between.
If you're not seeing diversity in ship design, then you're not looking.

Unflexibility problem - currently there is no flexibility in spaceship's characteristics. It's deffence, firepower and maneuverability is constant and depends only on how it was built. Only thing you can do about it now - is to use various docking parts. While it can be said, that unflexibility is hardly a main a problem for a sandbox voxel game, it's a major unused opportunity for starmade. Flexibility of ship systems can bump PvP, as well as any other ways of spaceship usage, to absolutely new level.

Again, you must be smoking yholes. Ships in starmade are VERY flexible. We have hundreds, even thousands of different ships that players have built for a huge variety of different specialized roles, and tons of jack-of-all-trades ships also. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY you can logically claim that Starmade does not have flexibility in ship design. Plus, it's not even a matter of using docked entities or not... unless one rightly claims that we suffer a loss in ship building choices now after the devs nerfed docked entities ;P The only way ships in Starmade can get MORE flexible than current, is by completely changing the game engine to use rubber voxels.

Forsed design choices - I think this problem is misunderstood. It's perfectly ok if game has some designs that are better than others. Because it's how any game works - there will always be more optimal paths, more optimal choices, more optimal tactics. What is not ok - when there is ONE design choice that is better than everything else, and that's close to starmade current situation. We cannot eliminate optimal layout in any way, but we can give more than one optimal choices, each with its own pros and cons.

Wrong, again. Stop smoking yhole! Pull your head out of your rear.
There is most certainly not 1 and only 1 design choice that works better than all others, unless you are referring to a n00bcube. If you are worried about noobcubes, then simply go on any of the top 10-12 servers right now and see how many noobcubes you see floating around.
How many? Go on... we can wait for your observations...
or you can accept my observation, which is... NONE.
When everyone laughs at you for building a noobcube, and/or you simply get it deleted by admins, this is a very powerful impetus to never build noob cubes. PLUS the fact is most 'good' builders and pvp'ers can do just fine with an aesthetically nice ship as with a noobcube. A noobcube has never won any PVP competition.
Plus, on some servers they have made custom armor blocks which essentially serve as an 'armor class' to empower small ships against large ships and large turrets (as if the movement speed nerfs to big turrets vial rail mass enhancer system wasn't enough already).

TL;DR = power is not broken, and can be easily rebalanced as is. Yholes are bad for your brain.

 

[Haalon]

TL;DR = power is not broken, and can be easily rebalanced as is.

First off, I have never said that the current power system is broken. It has some issues with softcap, docked entities and regen bias, but still, it works. So, I don't want to repair it. I want to improve it.
And maybe, the issues that I stated at the beginning, should be considered not as the terrible problems I want to end at all costs, but as things I want to change on my way.

Now, I am actually tired of explaining same things to people, who misunderstood issues I stated there. Maybe my english is not very good, idk.
For example this one:

Again, you must be smoking yholes. Ships in starmade are VERY flexible. We have hundreds, even thousands of different ships that players have built for a huge variety of different specialized roles, and tons of jack-of-all-trades ships also. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY you can logically claim that Starmade does not have flexibility in ship design. Plus, it's not even a matter of using docked entities or not... unless one rightly claims that we suffer a loss in ship building choices now after the devs nerfed docked entities ;P The only way ships in Starmade can get MORE flexible than current, is by completely changing the game engine to use rubber voxels.

That's absolutely not the flexibility I was talking about.
Starmade offers large variety of roles and interesting ship designs, that's for sure, but all that specialized ones and jack-of-all-trades ships - their characteristics, after you built them, are mostly constant. Yep, we can play with their thrust, swap weapon slaves and so on, but that's not much and/or convenient. I just thought: "What if we will give players more system customisation, like we have with current thrust? How can we do it? How can we balance it? what can it give us?"

As for other issues, I already discussed them in previous posts, and I really don't want to do it again. And I can't blame you for not reading all the previous posts. But if you had done that before writing yours, you at least would have known that I agree that the last one issue in the proposal is surely incorrect.

 

[Ghent96]

...
Starmade offers large variety of roles and interesting ship designs, that's for sure, but all that specialized ones and jack-of-all-trades ships - their characteristics, after you built them, are mostly constant. Yep, we can play with their thrust, swap weapon slaves and so on, but that's not much and/or convenient. I just thought: "What if we will give players more system customisation, like we have with current thrust? How can we do it? How can we balance it? what can it give us?"

Did you play ~3 years ago? We used to have a weapon computer slider menu that allowed on-the-fly changes to firing rate, damage, range very similar to the Thrust menu we have now.

 

[Haalon]

Did you play ~3 years ago? We used to have a weapon computer slider menu that allowed on-the-fly changes to firing rate, damage, range very similar to the Thrust menu we have now.

Nope, I am playing Starmade only for ~2 years. So, I haven't played with that system, and I don't know much how it actually worked.
But for me, it seems like it can be used as example, that any bright idea, if pushed out of its limits, will turn into nonsense.

Real-time customisation is nice if it has boundaries. If customisation will not have them: if we will make every stat customisable and/or remove caps of that stats - then it will be not only a balancing nightmare. It will greatly reduce importance and interest of ship design, it will greatly decrease diversity of ship's designs, it will turn battles into a game of sliders.

I ll repeat - I don't know much how old system actually worked. I don't think that it was that boundless as I described above, but real-time change to weapon range and firing rate means that weapon system design wasn't as interesting and diverse as we have now.

It looks like flexibility and diversity are two sides of the same coin - if we will aim for a pure system flexibility, than we will lose diversity of our systems, because the only difference between them will be the slider's position.

So, ofc I don't want to aim for flexibility only. The only additional mechanics I want to add is power distribution. Besides some customisation, it helps to reduce importance of sheer block count, without affecting diversity of your current weapon system.

 

[Haalon]

Oh, I haven't said one important thing about docked entities.
In our current game, we have both penalties from power group count and the overall power softcap for every entity. This two things greatly encourage the usage of docked entities, since they can avoid both penalties and softcap. This leads to emergence of modular ships, and they can create lots of lag, especially if some of their inner part will undock.

But in case of reactor mechanics I described - without any penalties from group count and power softcap - it will otherwise encourage usage of single-entity ships (excluding its turrets ofc). And this will also make big ships more combat effective against lot of smaller ones with the same overall mass, but until some limit. This limit comes from the size of cooling system of a big ship.
And encouraging of both single-entity ships and lesser fleets can potentially reduce amounts of lag