Gigantism

[jorgekorke]

And, again, that's not an issue for the developers. If your server can't handle big ships, limit them.

Good luck convincing EE/SS admins on that.

 

[Colt556]

This is the kind of flawed thinking that prevents any progress in game balance.

The number of active players in a faction cannot be expected to scale with the size of ships they'd have to kill , if they were to use small ships.
Small ships have no shield regeneration and so even a large group will always die before they have any chance to break through a titan's shield.
That mechanic alone makes small ships not viable.

There's no good reason that a titan with no mass dedicated to fighter defense should be invulnerable to them. If they are , what's the point of the game ? Stockpile blocks until you can build a bigger ship ? Is that all there is to it ?

This is supposed to be a multiplayer game. That means giving a chance to the opposition. You can refine your designs to minimize that chance , but don't ask for the game to keep giving you free wins , as it does now. Otherwise , it'll turn singleplayer very fast.

You seem to think every little fighter needs to be manned. If your opponent has a big titan you don't load your faction members into snub fighters, you load them into carriers that carry drone fighters. As has been repeatedly tested and proven, drone swarms can and will destroy ships while having collectively less mass than the target ship. AKA, the amount of resources in your drone swarm is less than the titan, yet it will beat the titan.

We don't need some stupid "balance" that makes a huge hulking titan vulnerable to corvettes and fighters, we need better AI control so a single player can operate entire squadrons of fighters. Starmade doesn't have the playerbase to have manned fighters in combat, unless you just want the novelty of it.

 

[Mered4]

Good luck convincing EE/SS admins on that.

Move to another server. MushroomFleet, for example. :D We've had quite a few converts from EE in the past few months. XD

 

[Pacific_Jim]

This is the kind of flawed thinking that prevents any progress in game balance.

The number of active players in a faction cannot be expected to scale with the size of ships they'd have to kill , if they were to use small ships.
Small ships have no shield regeneration and so even a large group will always die before they have any chance to break through a titan's shield.
That mechanic alone makes small ships not viable.

There's no good reason that a titan with no mass dedicated to fighter defense should be invulnerable to them. If they are , what's the point of the game ? Stockpile blocks until you can build a bigger ship ? Is that all there is to it ?

This is supposed to be a multiplayer game. That means giving a chance to the opposition. You can refine your designs to minimize that chance , but don't ask for the game to keep giving you free wins , as it does now. Otherwise , it'll turn singleplayer very fast.

I agree bigger ships shouldn't be invulnerable. Which is why it's a good thing they aren't.

Otherwise, yes, you absolutely should be expected to field more people to take out stronger targets. You don't even need to get dozens of players launching thousands of drones. About a quarter of the mass of the ship you're fighting split into a few ships is usually enough (if the attackers know what they're doing). Shield recharge is very difficult to get to the point where it can deal with high ion alpha damage. "fighters" (assuming you mean like, sub 30 meters or so, everyone has different standards for what makes a fighter) aren't really particularly useful for this as of yet, but honestly, they kind of shouldn't be. Fighters should be more for taking out mid sized vessels, turrets, drones etc (they as of yet aren't really good at the last 2 admittedly).

And if your faction isn't big enough member wise to deal with the larger ships you have two options. First option: Don't. There's plenty of space real estate, avoid fighting things much bigger than you until you have the resources necessary to keep up. Second option, make alliances, cut deals, get help from other factions etc.

 

[jorgekorke]

Move to another server. MushroomFleet, for example. :D We've had quite a few converts from EE in the past few months. XD

Could enumerate a list of reasons of why not to go to MF. But I'll just leave this :

Spoiler: There must be a reason for this

 

[Winterhome]

Move to another server. MushroomFleet, for example. :D We've had quite a few converts from EE in the past few months. XD

Or SS. Or GenXNova. Or FUYB.

 

[Knack]

This is the kind of flawed thinking that prevents any progress in game balance.

...
There's no good reason that a titan with no mass dedicated to fighter defense should be invulnerable to them. If they are , what's the point of the game ? Stockpile blocks until you can build a bigger ship ? Is that all there is to it ?

Have you ever tried to hit a fighter with a titan while not using lock-on missiles?
Why should this fighters be invulnerable to titans? Oh wait...

Sure if the titan has more in-combat-recharge as you have dps, you can't destroy it. But otherwise, the smaller more agile fighter could hide in the back of the titan and kill it slowly, while the titan has no chance.

The optimal ships a neighter fighters nor titans, the optimal ships are those who exactly fit the 1kk e/s power regeneration and use about 90% of that power for continous fire. (90k dps).

Keep in mind that 100.000 powercaps give 177kk power which can provide 17.7kk damage while 100.000 shieldcaps give only about 8.6kk shields.
If you are more agile you will win the fight with a much smaller ship aggainst a much bigger ship. You can't expect to kill a 100k mass ship with a 1k mass ship, but 20k are able to kill 100k.

To make it clear, we are not talking about RP-ships or something similar.

If you build ships with more than 100k mass for fighting you must be stupid or very rich in resources because one 200k mass ship will not win a war, 10 20k ships will.

The only real balancing issue i see between titans and fighters are swarm missiles.

 

[QuantumAnomaly]

Seriously, quit banner-waving for mushroomfleet. Take it to a PM or the servers forum. It's off topic and tacky, like your server solves the problem. I play on Shattered Skies, where the only shops in a system are trade stations (which makes them vulnerable to attack), no vote rewards, and the only ship limits are 1km in any direction.

Slowly but surely the bigger ship always rules the day. It doesnt have to be a titan, just a bigger ship. However, that progression goes back and forth with players constantly having to outclass their opponents ship in size instead of having other options.

If your ONLY answer is "drone carriers" then the game will simply become "Dronemade". If the AI update only benefits this, then we will have the SAME EXACT PROBLEM but only with drone carriers instead of titans. The issue is not titans, it's gigantism, or, better put the slow creep toward bigger and bigger ships with no repercussions or disadvantages for doing so.

If drone carriers replace titans, the problem will be "carrier spam" and it wont be an issue with them existing, just like it isnt an issue for titans to exist. It will be the same things we talk about now - lack of maintenance and lag. Especially if drones/fighters return to the mothership, and there's zero drain on resources. To repeat, titans and carriers should absolutely exist and be free to be built, but should have some kind of balance in play to keep everyone from being nigh forced to make bigger and bigger ones.

 

[Mered4]

Seriously, quit banner-waving for mushroomfleet. Take it to a PM or the servers forum. It's off topic and tacky, like your server solves the problem. I play on Shattered Skies, where the only shops in a system are trade stations (which makes them vulnerable to attack), no vote rewards, and the only ship limits are 1km in any direction.

Slowly but surely the bigger ship always rules the day. It doesnt have to be a titan, just a bigger ship. However, that progression goes back and forth with players constantly having to outclass their opponents ship in size instead of having other options.

If your ONLY answer is "drone carriers" then the game will simply become "Dronemade". If the AI update only benefits this, then we will have the SAME EXACT PROBLEM but only with drone carriers instead of titans. The issue is not titans, it's gigantism, or, better put the slow creep toward bigger and bigger ships with no repercussions or disadvantages for doing so.

If drone carriers replace titans, the problem will be "carrier spam" and it wont be an issue with them existing, just like it isnt an issue for titans to exist. It will be the same things we talk about now - lack of maintenance and lag. Especially if drones/fighters return to the mothership, and there's zero drain on resources. To repeat, titans and carriers should absolutely exist and be free to be built, but should have some kind of balance in play to keep everyone from being nigh forced to make bigger and bigger ones.

I have a solution to this problem, but I need to draft it first. I probably won't even bring it up until after the next Council election.
The basics of it are fairly simple: Either commit to the EVE way of doing things (everyone gets a big ship but the smaller ones have a role) or commit to a SWBII style: a couple of big ships with PD and a bunch of people in Fighter-Bombers trying to waste the other team's frigates and capitals.

There is a third option (Sins): Capital ships are the backbone of the fleet, while frigates and fighters are spammed in abundance.

Regardless of how Schine chooses to do things, they'll need some solid feedback on which system to use.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

As has been said before, Drones aren't the only answer.

And the repercussion for larger ships is both the time and resources to make them, which on a server with default settings is pretty huge. You either need a serious workforce to gather materials, or time investment to get one "legit". As far as return on effort investment goes giant ships are pretty poor.

And they have a serious manoeuvrability issue compared to smaller ships, they rely on turrets (which outside of missile turrets, which have ways to be avoided, are pretty unreliable at the moment) to hit anything other than other capital ships, so once you have a few ships capable of beating your recharge that can get behind you you're finished.

 

[Winterhome]

As has been said before, Drones aren't the only answer.

And the repercussion for larger ships is both the time and resources to make them, which on a server with default settings is pretty huge. You either need a serious workforce to gather materials, or time investment to get one "legit". As far as return on effort investment goes giant ships are pretty poor.

And they have a serious manoeuvrability issue compared to smaller ships, they rely on turrets (which outside of missile turrets, which have ways to be avoided, are pretty unreliable at the moment) to hit anything other than other capital ships, so once you have a few ships capable of beating your recharge that can get behind you you're finished.

Capital ships are still able to utilize server maximum speed to outmaneuver and kill smaller ships. Fly away from the smaller ship at speed limit, then turn to face them and blast away.

Shooting a fighter with a capital ship cannon is no harder than shooting a fighter with another fighter when they're in your sights. If anything, capital ship main guns have an *easier* time of hitting fighters, due to generally having more outputs.

 

[Valiant70]

Now, I know I'll be shot down for this (because Buddy Squad, that's why), but Gigantism isn't a problem. In fact, successfully detailing and building a detailed and efficient large vessel is a difficult challenge that takes more time and effort than any other singular act in Starmade. It should be celebrated when someone comes out with another amazingly built ship of massive proportions - it's what sets Starmade apart from Space Engineers and other wannabe voxel-in-space survival games. We have these massive spaceships. Space Engineers has these tiny fighters and frigates that wouldn't break a thousand mass in Starmade.

Truly massive ships require millions of blocks to build. Space Engineers doesn't have a system in place to build that many blocks in a decent amount of time - neither does Interstellar Rift. In this, Starmade stands alone. We'll attract tons of players to the game through that fact alone. It'll be amazing!

Now, what are the arguments commonly thrown out against Gigantism?

They're fairly simplistic, actually. I'll list the more common ones so we don't have to deal with those in this thread. I want to get to the heart of the problem. That problem is as follows: the people who don't like big, oversized vessels are all people who (in general) don't build big combat ships in the first place. They build compact vessels. In other words, they don't like the idea because it isn't theirs. They are promoting their agenda instead of supporting what's best for the game. Now, that's a bit of a leap for most of you - but I've been dealing with these guys for almost two years now. Trust me on this one.

Anyway, here's the common arguments:

1) Building a bigger ship to beat out your opponent with a *normal* ship is lazy and you should just build a *better* ship of the same size to kill him.

Look, I hear this one a LOT. And there's a simple counter argument - if both ship's builders are NOT incompetent, their ships will always be around the same level of performance. Yes, you can always make it more efficient, but efficiency only really matters when fighting larger or smaller ships. Ships of similar size? It's usually up to skill and how well you know the enemy's weaknesses. Sorry. This is not the place to *git gud.* And unless something blatantly points to it, assume the builder ISN'T incompetent.

2) Everyone just flies around in these massive space vessels they built in SinglePlayer on my MP Server! ITS SO BORING. Why can't people use smaller ships?

First off, SuperJumper technology can't work past a certain mass (around 50000 last time I checked), so those will always be small. Second, WHY THE HELL is that boring? Those massive vessels took FOREVER to build. I know people who have spent months on their Titans. MONTHS. Their work should be celebrated and enjoyed, not ridiculed because *it causes too much lag.* There are exceptions, of course - some people try to break Starmade on purpose. But the majority are almost works of art in their own right. Doubt me? Go check out some of Skylord's replica UNSC ships. Awesome, right?

3) Big ships always win in PvP. It's not fair.

Remember what I said earlier about efficiency? This is what I was talking about. Drones win every time. They are more efficient than larger vessels and thus can utterly demolish ships three and four times their combined mass. The only reason we don't see constant *Drone warfare* is because we don't have the proper tools to repair and rearm drone carriers in a timely manner. There is also no way to recall drones to their previous docks. Thus, one player per ship, and people bring more mass for better survivability. Until we get a gameplay feature update in this area, there is no reason to change anything.

4) Turrets Wreck EVERYTHING. A big shielded ship with lots of turrets can lay waste to entire fleets on its own.

Again, Drones win every time. That said, turrets have their own issues and they have nothing to do with the size of the ship. I'm actually planning a ship based around the idea that the turret system is broken, but that's a different problem.


Now that we are all on the same page, what do you guys think? I know the Buddy Squad will be coming out with their usual *we don't like it so you shouldn't either* BS, but I want to hear from the players, not the admins. The players make this game what it is.

In reply to the OP, and not to anything else in particular in this very long thread:

No, gigantism is NOT a problem at all.

• Big ships are fine. They're a lot of work and usually very artistic.
• Big turrets are fine. Well, at least in theory. Right now their turn rate is limited by AI scripts rather than actual mechanics which is odd. Turrets are frequently unshielded, or their shields are in their base meaning only half may protect the barrel. Thus the mothership and barrel base need only reach 50% for the barrel to be blown away and the turret dudded.
• A lot of turrets are fine. Ships with enough firepower and some cluster missiles will blow them away quickly, allowing smaller ships to wreak havoc.
• "Laggy" ships mean either the server is permitting things too large for them to handle, or the client has his/her render distance too high. Both are cases of user error, not a fault of large ships themselves. Do what your hardware can handle.
• Yes, a big ship should win against a small one. It does make sense.

The problem is thus:

1. As you mentioned, there is no reasonable way to recall, repair, and rearm drones. Also, BOBBY AI is an "Artificial Idiocy" module.
2. Mounted weapon cones of fire are freaking massive. Seriously, FOV 100 degrees and your weapon can hit all of that??? If a small ship is ANYWHERE in front of a Titan and the Titan's pilot or gunner is reasonably skilled, the small ship will get fried. Maybe not one-shot dead, but really messed up really fast. Evasive action is futile. This is overpowered as it negates all negative impacts of large ships' maneuverability when the enemy is in front, and there is almost not chance of escaping the front. The small ship should lose, yes, but not THAT quickly.
3. Once the massive ship is built, there is very little incentive to use other ships. Fast, flimsy transport and stealth recon are the only exceptions I can think of.
4. A single person wields untold might at the helm of a Titan. In the real world and most sci-fi, the crew required increases with ship size.

How to fix it:

1. The shipyard update and a proper AI rework.
2. Limit cones of fire to a few degrees, something that small ships can actually strafe out of instead of having to literally fly BEHIND the ship to avoid fire. (They may never get there in the first place.) This makes loss of maneuverability more meaningful and necessitates yet more extensive turret armaments. This may even motivate some manned turrets due to the critical amounts of firepower that would be transferred to the movable guns. At the very least, I think having such a massive cone of fire should require a gunner crewman in the weapon computer. ONE person wielding that kind of domination power is just a little much. (Not to mention that I find trying to shoot and fly simultaneously to be awkward and annoying, but that's just me...)
3. I know all the Titan people hate the idea, but partial fuel dependency for large ships would go a long way toward diversifying manned ship sizes. Like the OP said, think about what's good for the whole game, not just your own agenda. Remember: No one (in their right mind) wants to turn this into Space Engineers. In a good system, fuel supply quantity would have more to do with holding territory than with labor. If some punk wants your fuel source, you have something to shoot at with that super-cool, super-powerful Titan. Plus, the Titan's ability to capture enemy fuel sources would likely more than make up for its thirst.
4. The fix for 2 will fix this.

In the end, gigantism is no problem at all. The game just currently has a few little quirks that negatively impact tactics and strategy. I would build and enjoy Titans and their support ships with the changes I have listed here, and I would enjoy the more diverse strategy of working with and against mega ships.

 

[therimmer96]

Good luck convincing EE/SS admins on that.

We shouldn't need too. We're running on a 6 core hyperthreaded server with 192gb of ram! Its not like EE is running on an average desktop computer in gravy's basement. One of the biggest selling points of starmade is scalability. Well, it should be running pretty fucking well if it scaled like advertised.


And yes, it IS the devs job to fix this, when the game behaves this poorly on some pretty damn overkill hardware.

 

[Lecic]

People go for big ships because they are the best, they always will be the best, and they always SHOULD be the best. If you have the time and resources to make a big ship there's really no reason not to, and there shouldn't be a reason not to. The most the devs should ever do is, as I said, add things to maintenance such as fuel so it takes dedicated logistics to keep them running. But if you have a faction capable of keeping their fleet of titans supplied, they have no reason not to spam em. That's just how life works.

Big ships should NOT be the best for every single situation! That isn't fun for anyone who doesn't have the biggest ships on the server, because it means that the one who does CAN and WILL kick their ass into nothingness. Does that sound like an enjoyable game that people stick around in long?

Big ships should be powerful, simply by virtue of their massive amounts of systems. That doesn't mean they should be the be all, end all for everything except mining and scouting.

My solution to big ships being the be all, end all, is this- maintenance costs, and a need for crew with maintenance as well. Basic costs could go one of two ways- fuel, or repairs. Fuel has already been massively discussed, but I just want to point out that unequally spread out sources of fuel (ice planets, gas giants, etc) would give people a reason to hold and conquer extra territory.

The other way maintenance costs could work is that systems on a ship get slowly damaged when they're in use, requiring you to repair them at a shipyard, which costs capsules. Larger ships have a higher capsule cost to maintain, so people are less likely to use them for every single thing.

As for crew, I think for a large ship to function at maximum efficiency, it should need crew (either player or AI controlled) running some things. Crew would need things like a bed, food (farmable plants and meat from creatures, perhaps?), sleep (multiple sets of crew working on shifts for the best efficiency), and recreational areas. Crew can man systems (fixed weapons, shields, power, passive effects, thrust, etc) as well as remotely control turrets for better accuracy and tracking than BobbyAI. Crew would have maintenance costs due to the need for food, medical supplies if they get injured, and of course, a paycheck.

drone swarms can and will destroy ships while having collectively less mass than the target ship.

Sure, as long as you're locked into a sector. Otherwise, you've just got a bunch of drones floating around in the sector you left them in after your enemy flies away from the drones/jumps out. Sure, you'll be able to recollect them eventually, but once you recollect them and find the enemy and drop the drones again, what do they do? They just flee again. Because no one in their right mind fights drones, because drones will wreck them.

 

[Visitor]

Colt556, please, before replying - spend some time checking the thread and reading my and many others' stance because it seems you present opinions which not only were already discussed, repeatedly, but also do not - sans the extreme degree you take them to - oppose what many of us are saying in this thread. With the exception of your 'always' since personally, I think that in certain roles like scouting, exploration, dogfighting or courier runs big ships should do worse nor should they easily - without risking noticeable damage repairing of which would cost something - shrug off attacks of anything beside other sizeable constructs.

Hell, since I understand you may not have much free time, I'll summarize above points even though it may be taken as rude that you actually took part in the discussion while basing your standpoint on the wobbly premise having little to do with what was underlined as a problem:

A small ship shouldn't beat a big one, people often complain about that but deal with it.

People go for big ships because they are the best, they always will be the best, and they always SHOULD be the best.

Most of us here don't claim that small ship should beat big one just like that. Nor we want to deny superiority (at least in straight 'slugfest' combat, which is nearly - beside mining/scavenging - the only gameplay aspect involving piloting so far) of big ships. Many of us do actually enjoy the idea of great, big vessel as testaments to guts, power and engineering aptitude.

If you'd be so kind as to pay attention, the issue raised here has to do with the fact that efficiency of the gradually bigger ships/systems rises disproportionately to demands of ingenuity, costs and risks involved, while also providing efficiency in every field, allowing little to no space for alternatives, actual smart design (the difference of shoving ion computer or some such somewhere into free space doesn't make the design of the whole ship suddenly ingenious) and, funnily enough, creativity (I find it funny because too often 'creativity' is a word people trying to maintain dependance on gigantism hide behind) as in competitive play, to have better results, no matter the endeavor, one is forced to get bigger ship which is simply disappointing.

The most the devs should ever do is, as I said, add things to maintenance such as fuel so it takes dedicated logistics to keep them running.

Fuel, as mentioned in one or two posts above, is one of the features that could potentially help manage the issue. Probably insufficient on its own to do so, but a thing worth considering as a part of bigger effort.

 

[Keptick]

Good luck convincing EE/SS admins on that.

Then perhaps EE and SS aren't for you? I players don't mind some lag and like big ships I say let them.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

Field of fire I can agree with, some of the firing arcs are ridiculous, though I don't think firing arc should be too limited. The issue of backpedaling should be fixed by the thrust update, though I suppose there's always the option of setting your capital entirely into maximum reverse thrust.

And again for fuel, it doesn't really fix anything. Especially once the AI is improved, all you're doing is swapping from who can build the biggest ship to who can field the largest fleet. Either that, or who stockpiled the most expendables. I'd much rather the games weapon balance and combat mechanics encourage varied groups and multiple ship types with differing roles.

 

[hakkarin]

It's why I support ideas such as fuel and the like.

No, I do not want fuel into the game. It would only add horrible micro and it would also make it harder for the AI to work properly without cheating.

 

[Valiant70]

backpedaling

That's a separate issue. If a ship is backpedaling but has a limited cone of fire, you can still dodge its forward batteries, which is the way it should be. You should NOT have to be almost behind a ship to avoid its fire.

And again for fuel, it doesn't really fix anything. Especially once the AI is improved, all you're doing is swapping from who can build the biggest ship to who can field the largest fleet. Either that, or who stockpiled the most expendables. I'd much rather the games weapon balance and combat mechanics encourage varied groups and multiple ship types with differing roles.

Swapping from the biggest ship to the largest fleet would be a step forward, as this appears to imply different-sized ships which is something much of the community would like to see. Stockpiling the most fuel would be a factor, but because of that conflict could easily arise over strategically critical fuel sources. If fuel sources are not all equal and not equally distributed across the galaxy, this will intensify. Either way this would be a new and different factor in war, which is something to be desired.

The catch is that most players would probably hate chewing asteroids to keep the engines burning, so a less labor-intensive method of fuel acquisition is necessary, like placing a collection ship or station in a nebula that can dispense a limited amount of fuel per time.
[DOUBLEPOST=1434498761,1434498669][/DOUBLEPOST]

No, I do not want fuel into the game. It would only add horrible micro and it would also make it harder for the AI to work properly without cheating.

Play on a server with fuel disabled. A large portion of the community likes the idea of fuel and it does offer benefits besides survival challenge.
[DOUBLEPOST=1434499081][/DOUBLEPOST]I'd like to add that most people oversimplify the idea of fuel into something a ship must have to operate, and that's not necessarily the case. When it is implemented (it is highly unlikely that it won't be implemented as an option), it will likely function as a buff. If the buff is large enough, many ships (particularly big ones) will find it more or less necessary to use fuel in battle to compete with other ships effectively.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

I don't see it encouraging varied ships at all. If two options are equal in all ways but one requiring an expendable resource, the non-expendable option becomes superior and no one uses the other. If the the option that requires a resource is clearly superior then the optimal strategy is to stockpile on that resource, leaving the other option kind of worthless. Neither of those are really in the best interests of the game as a whole. If you want larger ships consuming a resource you have to overpower them, otherwise you're making them worthless. This is even more of a factor when you consider that someone had to build the thing (which can take months sometimes), people have to gather the resources (literal millions of ores and crystals in a lot of cases), the fact that if its lost those resources are essentially lost forever. All I can really see it leading to is people just not bothering, which is already a problem Starmade suffers from pvp wise.

Especially because realistically, fuel would never properly be scarce. Starmade contains an infinite universe, you can always get something by just going somewhere else. And any other method of limiting this, such as putting the best stockpiles nearer spawn will make getting set up on an established server unfeasible.