Game Balance Suggestions

[Gmodism]

Make magnification zoom avalible for cameras, like in mechwarrior 4, because it is impossible to hit with cannons on a long range.

 

[NaStral]

A PIP (Predicted Impact Point) using the target's speed and heading to plot a firing solution on the heads up display would be ideal for cannon weapons.

 

[Valck]

Not exactly a balance issue, but a quality of life improvement that is possible with a few simple config changes:

Arrange controllers and their modules into multislots

Each weapon computer and its barrel can go together in one inventory slot; dito every effect computer and its module, scanner/antenna, transporter/jump drive/inhibitor controller and the corresponding module.
Also while not strictly controllers/modules, group together blocks with similar functions like a "shield" slot with shield capacitor/recharger, a "power" slot with power capacitor/reactor, a "shipyard" slot with all the shipyard stuff, you get the idea.

Unclutters the inventory and helps keep related stuff together.

 

[taisong]

Make faction territory smaller, something like 4x4x4 sectors. I am looking to the faction update on this one. I would really want to see the faction taking over smaller parts of the solar system, eventually claiming it whole.

Also, plz make the camera into an invincible block with no HP and hitboxes, much like the pickup rail. Having to spam cameras on a ship is NOT fun.

 

[Brokengauge]

Also, plz make the camera into an invincible block with no HP and hitboxes, much like the pickup rail. Having to spam cameras on a ship is NOT fun.

I think cameras need to stay as destructible as they are. Their placement is a tactical decision, and if they don't seem to be surviving a fight, or are at bad angles, then perhaps a redesign or modification is in order? Also, pick up points are intangible objects.

It would be cool to be able to pan the cameras side to side and up/down!

 

[taisong]

AI ships fight according to its engage range, which is dictated by the weapon with the longest range. This is annoying for me, because ships with missiles tend to leave the rendering/scanning/loading range and disappear. Please let us decide the range, or at least our fleet's.

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

AI ships fight according to its engage range, which is dictated by the weapon with the longest range. This is annoying for me, because ships with missiles tend to leave the rendering/scanning/loading range and disappear. Please let us decide the range, or at least our fleet's.

YES

 

[Gonzalo]

Shield & Power supply beams have same range of misisle+beam to make support ships viable as they are now just deadweight since the blocks used to make them could have just been used to make the main combat ships (the tankier ships) even better rather than using support ships now that will be super close to the combat and get knocked out straight away. This way they have a way to stay somewhat out of the fight and still play a big role combat.

Would also be very interesting to see as I have never seen a single support ship used in PVP ever.

 

[DragonSoul9000]

just an idea I had. Make docked entities have a class that then gets passed to the naming of the docked entity. Currently we have to wade through multiple docked entities in search of a mining drone or a fighter just to find the one we want. Oh and the time it takes to find it goes up drastically if the parent entity has oh say 10 turrets 8 mining drones and 100 misc. items making up doors and elevators.

Currently we get this:
ADE Frigate 1004
ADE Frigate 1004_rl1
ADE Frigate 1004_rl2

that's kinda hard to follow when you have 20+ docked entities to go through just to find out the one you want is the last one on the list.

A solution system for this is already being used by our current blueprints system. we need to be able to classify a docked entity when it is created as to what it is then when we go to form fleets we can select only the docked entities that are related to what the fleet was designed for, rather it be a mining fleet, fighter fleet, etc...

Example:
ADE Frigate 1004
ADE Frigate 1004_FighterAsset_1
ADE Frigate 1004_MinerAsset_1
ADE Frigate 1004_DroneAsset_1
ADE Frigate 1004_ElevatorAsset_1
ADE Frigate 1004_EscapePodAsset_1

a system to sort them in the add member to fleet menu could make for easy navigation and sorting of the entity type. This would give the player more gameplay time rather than spending an hour trying to figure out what entity is which on ships with a lot of docked entities.

Thanks for listening to me ramble and I hope I'm not the only one to think it's a good idea.
[doublepost=1483233473,1483233324][/doublepost]P.S. I know you can name it at the time it's created but when you either respawn it or spawn it in from a blueprint the naming convention when you to it that way is what I'm trying to address here.

 

[Nerva]

I'm really upset right now but I'll try to keep this post calm.

The story is that I loaded my inventory of everything I had on my server, onto my ship to move to a new home. 400+ mass units of cargo. Might not sound like a lot but it was all I had and I was proud of it.

Anyway, I flew near a star on my way to my new home, and lost everything I was carrying. The majority of the ship survived, adding insult to injury. I wasn't very near the star, it was just very hot and had a very large kill radius.

Now, I know I could have avoided this with backup jump drives, more careful course plotting, etc. Whatever.

What I'm saying is, please make the kill sectors of a star visible in the map view so that we can see this coming! Don't let super hot stars ambush the unwary anymore.

 

[Batavium]

I wasn't very near the star, it was just very hot and had a very large kill radius.

The problem is two fold. One is a lot things in this game require some form of knowledge and most of that is gained through experience as you play. In StarMade that experience usually comes at high costs. Stars in StarMade are rated pretty much as the real stars you see at night. The color from hot to cold is Blue, White, Yellow and Red. Blue "hot young" stars are really scary and have a huge burn radius.

That said the default setting between the warning that you are to close to the Star and the start of taking damage "getting sun bombed" is only 5 seconds. Add to that that we all make navigation mistakes. On servers that have a long jump distance it can be hard to see if your path of travel goes near a star. Made more difficult by the new Fog of War.

To change these settings on a server you need to edit the GameConfig.xml file. Here you can also give players a different start package or even a filled blueprint.

<SunHeatDamage>
<DamagePerBlock>1.0</DamagePerBlock>
<MaxDelayBetweenHits>0.2</MaxDelayBetweenHits>
<SunDamageRadius>8.0</SunDamageRadius>
<SunDamageDelayInSecs>5.0</SunDamageDelayInSecs>
<SunDamageMin>100</SunDamageMin>
<SunDamageMax>1000000</SunDamageMax>
</SunHeatDamage>

The default of 5 seconds before you take damage is ridiculous. I would set it at like 2 minutes 120 seconds. Space probes don't flash melt either when they fly near the sun.

 

[boomchacle]

Make magnification zoom avalible for cameras, like in mechwarrior 4, because it is impossible to hit with cannons on a long range.

I think that it would be better to have a Scope as a separate block. It would ONLY be at a high zoom and be able to change zooms.
[doublepost=1484452897,1484452713][/doublepost]

Warheads aren't really all that reliable. Instead of dodging my suggestion by telling me about what already exists in the game. Try to think of the consequences of my suggestion and how it would affect gameplay. I for one am not convinced that fighters/bombers can contribute any amount of lasting damage against a much larger entity. I don't care if you agree or disagree I care about feedback.

First off. I was telling you something that exists in the game that can defeat shields. Secondly, and this is very late Sorry but Ion weapons can help kill shields much faster than just using normal guns and missiles. I think that a gun with full Ion can do like 3X damage to shields but 0 damage to armour and blocks.

 

[Winterhome]

I think that a gun with full Ion can do like 3X damage to shields

2x shield damage.

 

[Quadro]

is this thread even a thing?

 

[DrTarDIS]

Spoiler: Change weapon range from a {ratio of sector size} to an absolute or {explicit value} in meters/blocks.

Many servers use larger sectors because it's easily changed in the basic config file. Weapons ranges grow as a percentage of that, and your average plebian admin doesn't want to (or possibly know how) to alter the weapons range values in the block config (that's a lot of values to change every time you change sector size).

Spoiler: Give Player-Factions the same AI and benefits as NPC factions.

Expansion of territory to remain player-controlled. "Faction Inventory" governed by the cumulative storage of the homebase. Certain values like "number of fleets to respond to attack" to be under founder-control in the faction menu. Turn-based-mining, "faction fleets" etc calculated as normal, based on ships under AI control. Blueprint build list, build number, etc controllable from faction menu.

Spoiler: better starting game

New players should start in one of the 3 default factions, able to "requisition" a standard ship of that faction's type from the faction's inventory. Basic faction missions based on the "needs" the last faction-turn has calculated. Completing said missions should increase your faction rank(but never give you control) allowing you to requisition more/better ships and supplies.
This will allow new players(IE NEWBS, skipped the tutorial, let's just fraking PLAY!) to experience the "more fun" aspects like exploration and combat without penalty. Once a player "outgrows" the basic faction they will have the personal resources and SKILLS to strike out on their own.

remove range from warp-gates. as-in, remove the limit.

 

[sparta114]

We are talking about updating the power system to make ships less death cuby but I feel that making smaller reactors with keeping the shield system the same or similar could still lead to completely OP mega ships that shrug at every shot because their regen is 5 mil+ (because we have those right now too). It really isn't a problem for smaller ships but it can be very frustrating for the "big" game.

A friend told me about this one;
if ship's shields were dependent on outside surface area (of some kind) and the shield regen was somehow inverse of mass or area. The blocks for regen and capacity would simply be useful until they approached their max and then add null for each added block. This way, small ships would have small shields and fast regen while the bigo's get lots of shields and very little regen.

It's just become noticeable how overpowered shields systems can become with big ships; makes the game feel a little unbalanced. Hopefully something along these lines could be implemented to make the fleet battles feel all-inclusive for every size ship.

 

[kulbolen]

shields arent overpowered, but armor is underpowered. weapons already scale like 20x what shield regen does.

if your ship cant break the regen of something its own size, your ship is poorly designed for combat...

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

If your ship cant break the regen of something its own size, your ship is clearly not built for peer-to-peer combat.

Maybe for mulching cruisers

Fixed that for you. Not everyone uses a battleship-sized ship as a battleship. Sometimes, it's meant to fuck-over a cruiser group.

 

[wizardoftrash]

Penalize ships for running out of power! If a ship's drops to 0 power and attempts to draw additional power, it should suffer a power re-gen penalty or a "complete power failure" cooldown of 0 power output duration proportional to reactor size/number of power blocks. Even if it were brief, this would provide disincentive to pushing your ship to the limit, and would provide a niche for EMP effect modules. A ship could disable a combatant without destroying by using EMP to trigger the Power Failure debuff, and using STOP to immobilize them.

 

[Ithirahad]

Penalize ships for running out of power! If a ship's drops to 0 power and attempts to draw additional power, it should suffer a power re-gen penalty or a "complete power failure" cooldown of 0 power output duration proportional to reactor size/number of power blocks. Even if it were brief, this would provide disincentive to pushing your ship to the limit, and would provide a niche for EMP effect modules. A ship could disable a combatant without destroying by using EMP to trigger the Power Failure debuff, and using STOP to immobilize them.

At least in the original power proposal, there won't be an "amount of power" that a ship has any more... Ships will just have a maximum safe powerplant output and if you exceed that your power generators start burning up. EMP under the new scheme, while it hasn't been talked about here, might just lower the max output so that you might fry your systems just by having your shield generators running.