Gigantism - Why build better when you can build bigger

[Chances_Ghost]

i propose a single change that makes small ships useful while letting people have their server lagging monstrosities.

make beams/cannons less accurate as they grow in size, and make missiles take longer to lock onto targets slower/faster based on size.

leave swarms alone (or add a preferance to target larger ships aka larger sources of heat)


thats it, now small ships can fight along side big ships in multi-ship battles without getting obliterated instanly.

large ships have an easyer time targetting large ships rather than the small fry but arnt sitting ducks to fighters either.

 

[therimmer96]

Accuracy changing based on ship size? No thanks.

I could support a mechanic that randomly changes the angle within a certain area which a shot gets fired at based on array size, hard capping out at ~10 degree's, but not ship size.

Rather than lock on time scaling with the ship firing, it should scale based on the size of the ship being locked on too, with small ships taking longer.

Now I think of it, why are neither of these ingame yet?

 

[Chances_Ghost]

yes rimmer, thats exactly what i meant.

thanks for clarifying it.

 

[aceface]

i think it is a very good idea to make it so that its harder for smaller ships to be hit by mega missiles, cannons, beams etc but mainly missiles. ugh, the starmade weapons system is so balanced that the only way to over power someone is really just to build bigger, with no diminishing returns

along with bigger ships having a harder time to hit smaller ones, i think weapon power consumption should be exponential the bigger your weapons systems are, and shield cap/regen logarithmic to make smaller ships more economically worth while, when still the bigger ones are stronger to a lesser extent than they are now.

 

[AtraUnam]

Aren't small ships meant to avoid the fire of larger ships by out turning them?

 

[Aynslei]

This thread needs some more love. It is the start of a good conversation and not mindless arguing.

I feel large weapon blocks should face higher power costs as well and I agree with smaller ships taking a longer time to lock.

(Maybe scanners could actually function and not be anti-jammer jammers)

 

[PizzaPress]

Don't fear the titan.
Fear the drone carrier.

On another note, I do think small ships should have a good chance to run away.

 

[Effane]

I think the biggest issue is the lack of diminishing returns on large weapons and ships. Weapons power consumption and damage output scale in linear fashion making bigger make more sense. As you get bigger you spend less space on armor which means more space on shields and weapons. BUT since shielding has some diminishing effect on it (Recharge post 300K is very expensive) you end up with weapons being the goto for large ship scaling.

So now you have massive ships with some hefty but diminishing shields and very big weapons. Then the battle becomes about A) Who shoots first with the uber cannon, B) Who has the best shield droppers coupled with drilling weapons, C)Who has the most meat between them and the incoming fire.

So then frontloaded damage weapons combined with ion effect become the go to, with ion effect cannons to spam while waiting on your big core weapons to reload. In short (Big Beam Missiles + Ion, Followed by lots of Cannon fire). Notice the lack of 50% of the games weapons and most of the support modules? Then you get lop-sided block ships (pretty ships are fragile, they don't tend to have that extra meat).

I checked out the survey 1 results and I was surprised that missiles were not the OP weapon on the list but cannon's were. I guess a lot of it is ship scale that people usually fight with. Past 2-3Million blocks missiles become the killer of choice. The math for missile damage is so incredibly slanted, only thing is the fact they are slower and can be shot is the tradeoff.

 

[lilFishy]

I think the biggest issue is the lack of diminishing returns on large weapons and ships. Weapons power consumption and damage output scale in linear fashion making bigger make more sense. As you get bigger you spend less space on armor which means more space on shields and weapons. BUT since shielding has some diminishing effect on it (Recharge post 300K is very expensive) you end up with weapons being the goto for large ship scaling.

So now you have massive ships with some hefty but diminishing shields and very big weapons. Then the battle becomes about A) Who shoots first with the uber cannon, B) Who has the best shield droppers coupled with drilling weapons, C)Who has the most meat between them and the incoming fire.

So then frontloaded damage weapons combined with ion effect become the go to, with ion effect cannons to spam while waiting on your big core weapons to reload. In short (Big Beam Missiles + Ion, Followed by lots of Cannon fire). Notice the lack of 50% of the games weapons and most of the support modules? Then you get lop-sided block ships (pretty ships are fragile, they don't tend to have that extra meat).

I checked out the survey 1 results and I was surprised that missiles were not the OP weapon on the list but cannon's were. I guess a lot of it is ship scale that people usually fight with. Past 2-3Million blocks missiles become the killer of choice. The math for missile damage is so incredibly slanted, only thing is the fact they are slower and can be shot is the tradeoff.

Pardon me but, lol wut m8? 300k diminishing return?

What happened to maintenance systems like fuel, heat, water.... All of those are exponential in scaling with size?

 

[Effane]

Okay, so last post before I do that crazy sleep thing.

In Starmade only RP Servers worry about the fuel, heat and water. but if we look at it from Real Life to get a bigger explosion we don't double the fuel to the explosion, it has to increase according to the inverse square law. In short typically a factor of 4 or 8 for a bigger explosion by 2x.

In starmade to do 2x damage, you just need 2x modules. That never tapers off in any way.

Since all weapons are baselined to 5DPS that means a 1000 DPS cannon just needs to have 200 modules, and to make that cannon do 10x damage you just need 10x module blocks (From 200 blocks to 2000 blocks). You can carry that on till you have energy issues which is currently the only system that slows weapons down.

Now consider that in real life. You said M8 so I am not sure how much modern weapon knowledge you have, but a handgun in 9mm has typically a little bit over 300 ft.lbs of force at its peak (muzzle) and . While the 45 Cal is heavier and has much more gun powder behind it plus the added recoil with about 380 ft.lbs. of force. You might notice in this small scale how extra mass, force and recoil go into only a moderate gain (Now performance wise the two have different factors that come into play). This is why the 9mm is still very popular with military and police, you gain speed, fire rate and reduce mass at the cost of only a moderate amount of force.

That's not exactly how SM should function because inverse square laws and potential energy laws wouldn't be fun in here, but there needs to be a drop off that is higher than shield regen drop off, that way weapons will still trump shields eventually, BUT as ships increase in size the weapons become more costly and less effective. All systems should have diminishing returns IMO.

Why would this work? Because the ship will form a peak performance in the curve. This will encourage more diversity in weapons or at least more batteries of weapons. It also still trumps shields, and gives smaller ships the performance edge, a smaller ship in specific ranges will just function better with respect to energy consumption and DPS per a block. Which makes drones and fighters more deadly. Essentially the end result would be a ship of 5 M blocks would be much less effective than 2 ships of 2.5M blocks. Current system this isn't as much the case unless you can create tons of tiny ships to absorb fire. A current battle assuming that all three of these theory craft ships fire at the same time would end with the big ship over whelming one of the two smaller ships rapidly. Then the firepower of the remaining forces would be half versus a very large ship with its nearly fully intact firepower.

I can get a lot more specific with numbers, but I then tend to make peoples eyes glaze over.

 

[lilFishy]

You speak of this shield cap/drop of, please point it to me?
Leave the damage of weapons untouched but add exponential power usage that kicks of hard after 1mill dps or something like that.

 

[AtraUnam]

I don't want to be the one to say it but there's a reason we have linear scaling weapons as opposed to diminishing returns Waffle guns.

 

[Ithirahad]

I don't want to be the one to say it but there's a reason we have linear scaling weapons as opposed to diminishing returns Waffle guns.

...And waffle guns are why we have the multi-group penalty.

 

[AtraUnam]

...And waffle guns are why we have the multi-group penalty.

Thats a good point, there would probably be an optimum balance between group size and number of outputs. However I could easily bypass this problem using docked auto-guns.

 

[aceface]

Aren't small ships meant to avoid the fire of larger ships by out turning them?

a bit hard when they spam swarmers and the way current thrust is the same in all directions, nullifying the fighters increased turning speed, so the bigger ship needs to only reverse.

 

[Ithirahad]

Aren't small ships meant to avoid the fire of larger ships by out turning them?

A bit hard when, due to linear regen scaling and turrets, it can become nigh-impossible to actually do any meaninngful damage to the larger ship.
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Thats a good point, there would probably be an optimum balance between group size and number of outputs. However I could easily bypass this problem using docked auto-guns.

So? You can already do this. If it was such an advantage power-wise people would already be using tons of them... Or is it that nobody actually thought to make these yet?

 

[iceman6491]

...the way current thrust is ...

For now... Mr Comr4de may know more, but from something he mentioned the other day, the Dev build may be worth checking out :p

 

[AtraUnam]

a bit hard when they spam swarmers and the way current thrust is the same in all directions, nullifying the fighters increased turning speed, so the bigger ship needs to only reverse.

Now that I can agree with, if ships could only go at full speed moving forward then we would probably see a lot more tactics to make small ships more viable.

A bit hard when, due to linear regen scaling and turrets, it can become nigh-impossible to actually do any meaninngful damage to the larger ship.
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So? You can already do this. If it was such an advantage power-wise people would already be using tons of them... Or is it that nobody actually thought to make these yet?

Didn't they make turret turning speed mass based? please correct me if I'm wrong.

Currently people don't use auto-guns because of the accuracy drop and because large ships can easily take the power hit from multiple outputs. If we added non-linear scaling to energy consumption for weapons then more people might start using auto-guns.

Edit: Even with all the changes suggested in this thread I could simply build a large ship with rear facing auto-guns and a rear facing camera; then re-map my controls to swap forwards and backwards.

 

[aceface]

For now... Mr Comr4de may know more, but from something he mentioned the other day, the Dev build may be worth checking out :p

oooh ill check

 

[Effane]

Radar Jamming is the counter for little ships to use. But radar jamming has some issues, some bad some good.

Stepping up the energy cost on the groups should be the cure for the waffle gun effect. I also understand there was a ton of other issues with waffle guns such as issues with pierce/punch through that made it worse. I didn't get to experience that period of SM, but I can see the issues.

Currently this is the formula showing in the XML config files.

powerConsumption * (1+countGroups*thisValue)

If that is true then 5PPS (Power Per Sec = Average for 3 weapons by default) for weapons would follow this kind of growth currently.

5*(1+(1)*0.1) = 5.5
5*(1+(1)*0.1) = 6.0
5*(1+(1)*0.1) = 6.5
5*(1+(1)*0.1) = 7.0
5*(1+(1)*0.1) = 7.5

Somewhat a linear growth which is annoying but not painful. 10 groups would only be 200% energy cost. Granted 20 groups would be 400% energy cost. We won't ever see the cannon do that (But beams and pulse don't have group limiters on them, so have fun with beam checkerboards, and beam pulsing 5 times a second makes them nastier than cannons).

Just some thoughts, I am still experimenting with my balancing, but the current idea of "Don't touch it!" worries me. Nothing should be sacred when designing something for fun/entertainment. Hopefully we end up with different flavors of servers and people can travel about to find their play styles in the end.