Gameplay Optimization Suggestion Sets

[Brisarge222]

Ship Function Revamp

I personally think ships need to have more function. I'll use bullet points so its not a mess.

• Hallways, corridors, and basic ship interiors must be necessary for a ship to function properly, this could come along if maybe two separate types of cores in the future. Or some algorythm to determine a ship is a fighter.
• Hallways and corridors could have an air pressure/life support mechanic which only allows the the corridors and rooms you make to be accessible without a personal life support system (space suit).
• Using a gravity module while in a moving ship is glitchy, this needs to be fixed. And with more advancements in AI mechanics this will go wonderfully with auto pilot travel. Set coords and then it flies there automatically. New block types would allow the player things to do around the ship, maybe a game of chess with the ship AI. Would make more use for windows as well so you can see your ship move past everything.
• A ship map and/or navigation menu, only accessible through the ship, and only if a ship navigation module is equipped.
• I'm not exactly sure what the Anti-Matter cannon is, whether its a projectile weapon or energy weapon, but either way, I want to see some bigger effects when it hits.
• If any laser weapons get put in I suggest hull blocks have a cooldown time when hit by them. They glow more red the longer they are hit, and eventually get destroyed. Powerful lasers can do this very quickly. Weak lasers would make this red glow effect mechanic more visible to see.
• I'd like to see more big ships, but making them is the hard part. Some more building tools like a type in x y z size changer in advanced build mode would be good.
• Make turrets necessary for enormous ships. Only allow a certain amount of AMC's and Missiles per computer so people can make fighters, but not super overpowered shredder ships. Enormous/large ships should not be allowed to have really any main weapons, maybe a few rockets, but thats it.
• This could all be determined by an integrated ship classifcation system that uses block count and dimensions to give each ship a certain classifcation, and nerfs certain things like I mentioned.
• PROGRAMMABLE SHIP AI/COMPUTER. From completely autonomous drones to opening and closing ship doors or something.

And remember, every suggestion is good in the suggestion forum, adding to an idea is more helpful than bashing one. Feel free to criticize though.

Power Revamp

Heres a Suggestion for a Power Revamp. Maybe 2 separate power systems for fighters and large ships.

Not sure what the generators will be,

 

[MrFURB]

The vast majority of your ideas would make the game into more of a space-sim, where part of the experience of space is actually being in and taking care of your spaceship. I like it.

Ship map and navigation menu? Yes please! Better yet, make it holographic!

More things to do during idle time? Yes please!

 

[Doomsider]

I like all your suggestions on the internals for the ships. Lifesupport should ne implemented in the future for sure Not sure about big ships not having maing guns but I think turrets should be used more (once they are working up to snuff).

 

[Alviss]

I agree with OP entirely. The thought of it alone is making me giddy...

 

[Brisarge222]

We want to make it more difficult for players to make ships that are powerful. Restriction induces creativity when a creative motive is already present.

Gigantic ships main guns, technically should be the turrets. And by gigantic ships I mean absolutely enormous, so the turrets won\'t be all that small, they will be powerful.

If we want to scale up ships we\'ll need to include new building tools in order to do so, as well as complete performance overhauls, and the environment around the ships needs to be scaled aswell.

I\'m not exactly sure where starmade is heading but it seems to be heading toward more of an MMO type game. Meaning really freaking big, I don\'t see this as a problem with player run servers though, if you look at all the players in one minecraft server, literally thousands, its not hard to imagine some big gaming group coming in and making huge servers like this. Facepunch didn\'t really do so well with that but they certainly tried.

Anyone who argues against new building tools, photoshop wouldn\'t be such a popular program if it didn\'t have all of the tools it does and wasn\'t the easiest one to use.

This game is going to start running into some serious performance issues with the more players and content we get.

Some other good topics that need to be looked at again:

http://www.starmade.org/content/fighting-gigantism-starmade

http://www.starmade.org/content/graphical-size-comparison

 

[Brisarge222]

Added Power Revamp Suggestion

 

[Timebom]

You could just play Garys Mod SpaceBuild if you want all that. I guess after playing Spacebuild for a few years I like how this game is simple and fun. Had to harvest water, make power, yada yada.. I like the fact I can throw togeather a 150mass or less ship in 10 minutes and go duke it out. I like the (space) navy model, large ships have all the perks of mass and the drawbacks. small ships have perks too and can force people to co operate in smaller ships to take out big ones... I would like to see hardened hulls react to AMC as shields do to missles, a little balance there.

 

[Brisarge222]

Garry\'s Mod Spacebuild is retarded, I played it way back when and I didn\'t like it because of how fucked ship building is. Far too complicated. This is with blocks, and the game needs some kind of construction balance, otherwise players can just build a giant mass of power, amc, thrusters, and shields and win any battle. We want to encourage good looking and working ships.

 

[Mercur1c]

1: Good Idea, all my ships generally have an interior. Although some tweaks would need to be made, so you can make a large ship, with a decent interior get a nice amount of thruse

2: This would be good, along with the implementation of airlocks, and more expensive \"Force field doors\" that hold air pressure, but objects can pass freely through.

3: This would be very cool, and it could be done, even withough the gravity module active. When the player hits a wall, or drags on the floor during acceleration, the ship\'s velocity is gradually, not instantly added to the player\'s, so they end up moving the same speed, but the player can speed up a bit to move forward, etc.

4-7: Yep

7. Also, what about an external program to design ships, and then load them into the game. Also, a way to convert blueprints to .obj or something

8: Big ships either require turrets, or multiple people to man them, with turrets being the more effecient of the two. Also, maybe instead of limiting gun blocks, limit the amount of separate groups able to be controlled, as firing a massive gun, can\'t take up more computing power than lots of little ones.

I don\'t see why big ships shouldn\'t have main weapons. Firstly not allowing this would limit one\'s creativity, and putting all the weapons into turrets would not really acheive anything, it still uses up the same amount of power, and turrets are more versatile, as they can turn separatley from the ship, while the ships guns only fire in a small arc.

9: See above, but something that auto-classifies ships by mass and number of weapons would be pretty cool. It should also nerf turning along an axis, if the dimension perpendicular to the axis of rotation is big. This way a ship with the shape of a shop (implying the ends are the top and bottom) would turn side to side quickly, but not pitch or roll very well.

10: This would be very cool, especially if it had a mode where you could program it in a simple text based language like python or BASIC, but exclusive to starmade, of course.

 

[ImperialDonut]

- Hallways and corridors - Yes please! I love interiors for ships, but there just isn\'t any point to building them right now, I think once the gravity modules are a bit more stable, actually work in-flight and an autopilot is added there will be a lot more incentive for building and roaming interiors. Also, Interior modules that need to be acessed manually for repairs,configuration or some other mechanic would help loads too, just to add that necessity of being able to traverse parts of your ship in a protected way...

- Life support - Has been suggested before I\'m sure, but yeah that\'d be great, maybe add a countdown to your suit\'s air reserves if you go outside pressurized zone\'s, this would probably require some modifications to the stations to allow folks to spawn inside and roam them in peace without fear of the vacuum (and perhaps a pressurized drydock or two for small projects).

- Gravity and ship modules - Like I said earlier, essential modules needing to be accessed would incentivise building interiors and an autopilot would be lovely so you can freely roam your ship in travel.

- Ship navigation module - My earlier suggestion for a projector block allowing for something like a 5x5x5 holographic map on your bridge?

- AMC - Weapon effects should not be a priority, but would be nice, flashes or something for AMC\'s?

- Energy weapons - I like the heat-dispersion idea, but maybe limit it to hardened hulls? Also, lazers are always a yes!

- Large ships - I don\'t think it needs a lot of changing, the UI could use a lot of work, but hey that\'s the same for the entire game and they\'re working on it, large ships should be hard to build, but the UI shouldn\'t get in the way of using existing tools efficiently.

- Weapons - This has obviously been discussed to death, but here\'s my take on how weapons would work nicely:

I would like to see maximum and minimum (preventing annoying disconnected singleblock turrets from damage taken) sizes on a per-weapon basis: AMC\'s could be 5-150 blocks, sd-KB\'s 3-30, d-1000\'s 10-100 and sd-BB\'s 3-50 blocks (not exact values, just examples).

The minimum size would also have the potential for any new super-weapons like a maybe railguns or particle cannons to have a bigger minimum size like 75-150 or so, limiting it to bigger ships or specially designed smaller classes and allowing it to be disabled if cut in half.

Also important for this to work: the bigger a weapon gets, the lower its fire-rate, not enough to offset the damage increase per block but enough to force ship-designers to balance between fire-rate and sheer damage. this would also very much encourage folks to use more smaller turrets with high fire-rates over large slow-firing shipmounted cannons for everything but fights between large classes.

This would make the whole weapon system vastly more interesting and make all weight-classes of ships much more viable, as well as balance its-self out very nicely by limiting weapons to certain uses a bit more. They can all still be used in a wide variety of situations, but within manageable (and balanceable) limits.

- Ship classification - The way I propose weapons, you wouldn\'t need an automatic weight-based classification sytem since all classes of ships can be viable if built right within set limits. Large ships will still be OP if built right, but I\'d say that\'s more than fair, if you put in the time you get the results.

- Pragrammable AI,PC - Very cool of course, with a LOT of possibilities, but it\'ll be a while before that becomes a viable thing during development for Schema... :|

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About the power thing, I think you might be overcomplicating (or overexplaining) it a little.

I\'d say have two kinds of blocks for regeneration: reactor cores and reactor extenders, the core is the main block of every reactor, it has 5 sides to connect to, the more sides you connect, the bigger you can make the entire reactor. Say every face connected to the whole is a 15k/s cap increase, so 5 connected sides would make for a 75k/s reactor max size, while the actual regen of the reactor is still dependant on sheer amount of connected blocks.

To counteract every reactor being built as a 75k/s cap reactor, make your power output vs your output cap affect efficiency, so a 25k/s reactor with 2 connected faces would have an efficiency of: 25/30 = 0.8333, while a 40k/s reactor with 5 connected faces would be: 40/75 = 0.5333. This efficiency then affects the eventual true output in some way, simplest way would be: initial_output * efficiency = true_output.

Now, for the last face, it would be the reactor-pilot interface that you can use to restart a reactor after a shutdown, such a shutdown could occur after damage to the reactor in the form of destroyed blocks or overtaxing your power-reserves which triggers a safeguard. This hooks in to that earlier topic of having to physically traverse your ship, by forcing you to restart reactors that have shutdown if you don\'t want to wait for the 60-90 second auto-restart.

It would make reactors a lot easier to understand but also a lot more interesting since: reactors have a max size (forcing you to build a bunch of reactors on bigger ships), they become an organic and more integrated part of your ship through the shutdown-restart mechanic, force players to choose between big blocks that can be easily shut down and smaller ones, producing less, but ensure less of a powerloss if critical systems get damaged.



Well, that\'s how I would like to see it all work, lemme know what you think, I think ill post this in my suggestion topic too since Im getting kind of excited about this. :P

 

[Brisarge222]

I doubt I\'m overcomplicating the power... if you\'ve taken algebra in high school you\'ll understand it.