General Questions and Help With Dev Build

[Kainos_Kerensky]

I'm by no means a great player, I like to do shells and then fill them out with designs or recreate SciFi stuff. That said, I'm currently doing a refit of a ship I had and gutting it for the new systems and need some help or to correct me on assumptions I have:

1) I think I have the power system down. You can have one or more reactors and then place the stabalizers far enough away with enough of them for 100% stability. If you can't get far enough away, you will need more to get to 100% Seems simple.

2) Conduits don't really make sense to me yet, I attached some defense blocks to the conduit and suddenly had shield regen but my UI didn't show shields. Can anyone better explain conduits and these other capacitors? Movement bonus, defense bonus, ect...

3) Shields. If I'm understanding, I can place multiple shield sections around a bigger ship and I need the bubble to overlap to ensure full coverage. However, what is the correct way to create large pools of shielding for each segment and does the recharge block allow you to connect to all shield or does each section of shielding need its own recharge system?

4) Weapons. I'm understanding that weapons have internal power capacity in that they use the recharge from the reactor to "charge" then you can shoot them. Have the official power needs or any other changes come out to explain how these will scale? For reference, the ship I'm working on is a UNSC destroyer (Halo Universe) so I'm concerned with having power to fire multiple volleys of rockets and a singular large cannon or beam that, in the prior build, took something like a million power to fire.

Any help or expanding on these new/inprogress mechanics is a great help. Most likely I'm going to finish gutting and work on interior design while the Devs finish the build but I may get froggy and try to fit stuff out which is why I'm asking.

 

[Jojomo]

Power and shields may be somewhere near "correct" (possibly?) for systems 2.0, but nothing else is, and the GUI's been pretty buggy lately so don't rely on that too much either.

Each group of shield blocks is an individual shield. If the bubbles overlap the weakest one is inactive (in the area of overlap), but if the shield blocks themselves are in the bubble of another shield then that entire shield is inactive.
So because bubbles have a fairly large minimum radius, multiple shields is more for large ships, not small ones (currently, AFAIK)

 

[Kainos_Kerensky]

Thank you, makes sense. I'm going to have to experiment to see how recharge works. Seems that now you will need to just make sure your block count is the same for each shield segment so your shields are the same unless you purposely wanted weaker shields in one area than another.

 

[Lancake]

There's no tutorial videos yet, as they'll be built out in a pre-release state after getting player feedback, and they'll definitely help a lot. However, anything we can make more intuitive is definitely a good thing so perhaps we can figure something out here.


2) Conduits need to physically connect a chamber block group with a reactor block group before you can use it. The chamber block group depends on the reactor block group size but that should be visible in the reactor menu(s).
If you have any ideas yourself how to better explain this in-game through visuals or text, make sure to share ^^

Currently I'm thinking of adding a decent block description to each of them, and possibly using the red hover text you see in shipyards/factories that have one or more problems. It could hover over each group you make if a chamber is not connected, or invalid, or not big enough, etc or if a conduit is not connected to anything or other issues that may occur.

3) For shields, each shield recharger group projects its own shield and also gives it a recharge / sec. The capacity of this group is low though so you want to add shield capacitors within range, and you simply need to put them within the sphere of the shield rechargers for them to count towards them.

Again, I think a decent block description could go long ways here and simply changing the names of each block to better suit their purpose would already clear up some confusion. There's already visuals for the shields but that may not be too clear, the ship information panel definitely doesn't help in that regard as it's using old information still. Any ideas yourself that may clear things up for you (after you've figured it out completely)?

 

[Kainos_Kerensky]

3) For shields, each shield recharger group projects its own shield and also gives it a recharge / sec. The capacity of this group is low though so you want to add shield capacitors within range, and you simply need to put them within the sphere of the shield rechargers for them to count towards them.

Again, I think a decent block description could go long ways here and simply changing the names of each block to better suit their purpose would already clear up some confusion. There's already visuals for the shields but that may not be too clear, the ship information panel definitely doesn't help in that regard as it's using old information still. Any ideas yourself that may clear things up for you (after you've figured it out completely)?

With the shields, I think the confusion comes from how most scifi works and how we are used to shields working in the game. By reading your description, if I put a massive block of rechargers in the middle of a larger ship I then only need to add capacitors anywhere in the sphere and they will increase the shield total within the bubble. If two bubbles overlap, putting shield capacitor inside the overlaps should impact both shield bubbles. Whats intersting to me is that its the opposite of how you would assume it to work. The shield capacitor would make more sense as the shield system and then you connect rechargers to it.

I'll play with it soon and hopefully myself or others will come up with some good descriptions that provide clear and concise wickets for this.

 

[Kainos_Kerensky]

As an update, 450m length ship, I was able to adequately create a single shield system by placing a large cluster of rechargers in the center and then placing the capacitors in other areas of the ship.

It looks like you can create a line of shield rechargers and as you expand the line in a linear direction, the orb of the shield will turn oblong and stretch linearly. I did these in large 10x10 blocks but as I went linear with them the "shield sphear" turned into an oval.

I believe it is a UI issue but the blocks are saying I have 2million shield HP but when I spawn the ship it says over 8million in the readout as well as if I spawn it and target it from outside.

Further, shooting my own ship with the updated shield and power system I cannot lock on with missiles or do damage with beams. Hitting it with a beam does nothing and the missiles will fly off to the right of my ship and burst all over. When I spawn an old ship design, my beam and missiles perform as expected. However, dumb firing missiles into the ship will do damage.