"Heat Boxes" and Crew - Why it Works

[Raisinbat]

Also, Idk why you think I'm trying to speak on your behalf, do I need to put in a disclaimer or something? This is a forum, and I only speak for myself. That's what all of us here do. I would like to see this type of mechanic put into place, and Idgaf what anybody else wants. Doesn't mean I expect to get my way though, I'm not unreasonable lol.

I was referring to

They don't want it to change because then all their "work" has been wasted. Or maybe it isn't due to wasted work, but just having to deal with the BS of what doesn't seem like an objectively better system.

"THEY" being my behalf, and everyone else that disagrees with you.

I guess it does just come down to the detail I like in a doll house then. Most "rp" ships I've seen still have most of their interior space cram packed full of systems with absolutely no regard whatsoever to necessary crew compliment, maintenance areas, logistics support...you know a bunch of stuff that doesn't really do anything lol. I'd like there to be a reason for that. The crew update will go a long way. Hell, probably most of the way. But I like the idea that I have to basically design the systems I'm putting in.

Is starmade supposed to be freelancer, eve or x3 like game about ship battles and factions (what it started out as) or no man sky, mass effect, ftl about crew interactions and story, that's the issue i think Schine seem to have an idea of what direction they want the game to go in but are pointlessly obtuse about it.

Trying to cram 2 games into one rarely turns out good. All the RP and aesthetic focus that goes on on the forums remind me a lot of the shift from X3 to X-rebirth. X3 was an amazing game, in spite of all its flaws, and X-rebirth is one of the worst sequels i've ever seen. It added interiors and crew to a game that didn't need them. Where in X3 flying around and interacting with stations and your ships was all handled through menus, the addition of an interior you had to navigate created a massive time sink for doing the simplest, most routine things. Everything ended up revolving about you running around looking and clicking on things.

You cant make that optional either, if it was optional noone would use the interior system, and it would just be a waste of time adding it, but making it mandatory ruins the game for people who just want to play without roleplaying.

 

[Lecic]

You are completely misinterpreting everything I am saying and every term I am using. I build war machines. I am constantly frustrated by how hard it is to decorate them to the degree I'd like without compromising their performance.

But you can build ships with interiors that are also effective in PvP... Unless your ship has a huge amount of its mass dedicated to decoratives, it can do perfectly fine in PvP.

 

[Brokengauge]

I was referring to



"THEY" being my behalf, and everyone else that disagrees with you.



Is starmade supposed to be freelancer, eve or x3 like game about ship battles and factions (what it started out as) or no man sky, mass effect, ftl about crew interactions and story, that's the issue i think Schine seem to have an idea of what direction they want the game to go in but are pointlessly obtuse about it.

Trying to cram 2 games into one rarely turns out good. All the RP and aesthetic focus that goes on on the forums remind me a lot of the shift from X3 to X-rebirth. X3 was an amazing game, in spite of all its flaws, and X-rebirth is one of the worst sequels i've ever seen. It added interiors and crew to a game that didn't need them. Where in X3 flying around and interacting with stations and your ships was all handled through menus, the addition of an interior you had to navigate created a massive time sink for doing the simplest, most routine things. Everything ended up revolving about you running around looking and clicking on things.

You cant make that optional either, if it was optional noone would use the interior system, and it would just be a waste of time adding it, but making it mandatory ruins the game for people who just want to play without roleplaying.

Ah, I see that now. How presumptuous of me. Sorry lol. I'll try and cut that crap out.

 

[Valiant70]

last time i walked around in a military cruiser, the only decorations on it were the paintings and posters the crew put there for morale. the halls were about 1 starmade block wide. the space shuttle is even more cramped, and it has no weaponry at all.

warmachines arent built for decor, theyre built to take advantage of the mechanics of their environment. you build dollhouses that imitate popular media representations of warmachines. i see nothing wrong with this; i admire lots of these dollhouses... but they are what they are.

Yeah, half the time my hallways are about that size, with the walls made of wedges to make it feel a little bigger. It's a little hard to squeeze two player characters past each other though. Plus the halls are still a hole through my shield bank, and half the time it's really hard to find a place to thread them through the mess of power grids I use to squeeze 2m e/sec into a ship under 100m long. I don't care if you call it a dollhouse. It has the firepower to melt your face... but it's kind of immersion breaking for a thing that big to have no living space at all, and no way to get into the systems from inside the ship (because they're a solid mass of amorphous blobs jammed together in as small a space as possible). I'm not asking for the freaking Enterprise interior (which is pimped af). I just want the thing to feel like a real-life ship.

What I usually end up doing is jamming in a small sickbay, a toilet, enough bunks for a few people, and a table with a mockup "food replicator" next to it just to make the thing feel like it could actually be lived in... for a while. It's still frustrating thinking about how many shield capacitators that space could have held, though.

With some extra forced space in there, I could have networks of jeffries tubes, catwalks, etc. That'd be fun.

 

[kulbolen]

It's still frustrating thinking about how many shield capacitators that space could have held, though.

i wouldnt worry too much about it, the empty space isnt adding mass, just a small bit of volume, and if you placed it well, thats not even a bad thing. so youre not "losing" shield caps, because they still cost you something you didnt spend by leaving it empty.

 

[Valiant70]

i wouldnt worry too much about it, the empty space isnt adding mass, just a small bit of volume, and if you placed it well, thats not even a bad thing. so youre not "losing" shield caps, because they still cost you something you didnt spend by leaving it empty.

Kind of... although there's room for thrusters in there too, and most of my ships are designed with plenty of power for their size so powering the thrusters isn't a big deal either. It could be worse, and it was before the HP update, but it's still more annoying than it needs to be. I'd rather have function working with me rather than fighting me. If systems actually looked like something and didn't need to be a solid mass to work well, I could decorate and display them, giving more depth to the artwork involved.
[doublepost=1492471549,1492471459][/doublepost]Also, in the current system, more empty space inside means I need more armor to cover the outside. If I want more armor HP, I can stuff some hull inside. I don't want to stretch advanced armor over more area.
[doublepost=1492471956][/doublepost]I will say, I am one of the few who can combine RP and PVP and do both well in a single ship. The downside is, it's so tedious and frustrating to actually do it that I rarely finish a ship. Most of them get thrown out because I can't force them to conform to my vision of what I want them to be (without being obscenely messy inside and impossible to work on or modify).

 

[kulbolen]

I'd rather have function working with me rather than fighting me.

welcome to the world of warship building haha.

If systems actually looked like something and didn't need to be a solid mass to work well, I could decorate and display them, giving more depth to the artwork involved.

this is totally agree with. i often decorate with partially exposed systems because i like how it looks and i like the fragile speedy aesthetic, but if the art were more "systemy"as opposed to "representationy" itd look way better i think.

Also, in the current system, more empty space inside means I need more armor to cover the outside. If I want more armor HP, I can stuff some hull inside. I don't want to stretch advanced armor over more area.

i would argue that you can stretch the advanced skin over a much smaller area by only skinning the core systems in adv, while using basic hull for the exterior layering, where the extra few blocks for more volume wont matter so much since its a lot lighter and you want to pad your ahp some anyway.

 

[Crashmaster]

With some extra forced space in there, I could have networks of jeffries tubes, catwalks, etc. That'd be fun.

That would not be fun for me. I would suffer some level of my design freedom taken away and wasted space forced upon me just so that you don't have to wrestle with the choice of sacrificing a few shield caps to make a walkway.

 

[Valiant70]

That would not be fun for me. I would suffer some level of my design freedom taken away and wasted space forced upon me just so that you don't have to wrestle with the choice of sacrificing a few shield caps to make a walkway.

What kind of design is impeded by empty spaces? Can you show pictures of what it would prevent from working perhaps?

 

[Crashmaster]

What kind of design is impeded by empty spaces? Can you show pictures of what it would prevent from working perhaps?

Solid.

 

[Valiant70]

Solid.

...???
[doublepost=1492478059,1492477926][/doublepost]If you mean a hull stuffed completely full of blocks, I think there was talk about putting in a lightweight "filler" block comparable to expanding foam, so you could still do that.

 

[Crashmaster]

I'll be more blunt;

You are not willing to accept the sacrifices required for the choices you want to make in a sandbox game. Instead you want a blanket rule to force everyone to make the same choice to eliminate the sacrifice - which is totally overstated anyways.
[doublepost=1492478243,1492478176][/doublepost]

a lightweight "filler" block

"garbage block"

ftfy, I don't play with garbage.

 

[Valiant70]

I'll be more blunt;

You are not willing to accept the sacrifices required for the choices you want to make in a sandbox game. Instead you want a blanket rule to force everyone to make the same choice to eliminate the sacrifice - which is totally overstated anyways.

Here we go again... Accusations and hostility for no particularly good reason and without any real argument about the issue. If you'd like to debate like a civil person, feel free. I really wouldn't mind.

I'm not asking to change everyone's build style to fit my taste. I'm asking for a better game that more people will enjoy. The current game has a small, dedicated, but dwindling following, but isn't attracting a lot of new players anymore because the core mechanics are flawed. There are several problems with the "block stuffing" meta that this idea attempts to remove. Among them are:

• Hard to tell how ships work (read: "harder to learn how to build")
• Tedious or nearly impossible to make even small modifications to the systems of a finished ship, leading to more frequent total refits.
• The game does not resemble any familiar sic-fi franchises, reducing the game's overall appeal to new players compared to games with more familiar look and feel like Interstellar Rift.

These are characteristics that make the game less desirable. If you do like having a hull full of blocks, there remains the option to fill it with expanding foam, which you can then easily remove-filter out of the way to make modifications, then replace.

"garbage block"

ftfy, I don't play with garbage.

This isn't an argument for anything. It's just a smart alec comment. Expanding foam isn't garbage. It serves a purpose. It fills space, hides stuff, and provides some structural integrity that wouldn't be there otherwise.

Like it or not, the block-stuffing meta isn't a good thing for the game, and it never has been.
[doublepost=1492479724,1492479557][/doublepost]

That would not be fun for me. I would suffer some level of my design freedom taken away and wasted space forced upon me just so that you don't have to wrestle with the choice of sacrificing a few shield caps to make a walkway.

I'm quite honestly baffled that you are so bothered by an open space inside your ship.

 

[Raisinbat]

I'm going to stop discussing this with you at this point because you have moved from discussion to sarcasm. If you'd like to discuss this further, please state a valid, rational argument instead of throwing out sarcastic comments.

Sarcasm is still a discussion, if you want people to be polite to you at least put in some effort in trying to understand them.

You are completely misinterpreting everything I am saying and every term I am using. I build war machines.

My term, and you're the one misusing it. I'm not misinterpreting a single thing, you're shoving your opinion down everyone elses throats. I read what you've posted, i know what it means, and i don't agree with you. This is what your posts mean to other people

I am constantly frustrated by how hard it is to decorate them to the degree I'd like without compromising their performance.

So your problem is with aesthetics not mechanics.

To correct your mistranslation: "After spending hundreds of hours experimenting and optimizing the functional parts of a ship to rip your face off, I would like to add enough decoration to make it look and feel 'real' without impeding its mechanical function, making the war machine potentially suitable for immersed role-play."

That's great, WHY do you need heatboxes for this?

You don't of course, because you don't make warmachines. If you did you'd be smacking your head against a wall for all the cringy nonsense you're posting.

The problem with aesthetics ships is in the method through which they're built.

For aesthetics ships the aesthetics take priority over the mechanics; You decide what the ship is supposed to look like, starting with a shell and interior. Systems are added in later with no forethought and no ship doctrine in mind, usually a buffet of different systems, 5-10 different weaponsystems where you can only use one at a time, and about 20% of the ships mass in power capacitors,,,

And can't forget the pointless miniature turrets. A decent fighter has 2-10k shield regen, wtf do you expect a 500dps turret to do against that? Of course you can't fit larger turrets because you already designed the shell and the shell was designed to look pretty rather than accomodating turrets.

Said it before but apparently it keeps going in one ear and out the other; MOST PVP SHIPS HAVE INTERIORS THIS IMPOSSIBLE THING IS DONE REGULARLY BY BETTER BUILDERS THEN YOU.

And finally:

The empty space doesn't. fucking. matter. You want aesthetics to have less of an impact, go after the things that are ACTUALLY hurting your ships; passive effects based of mass, stupidly heavy armor and lack of armor like decorative blocks. Your complaint literally has nothing to do with the power system.

Besides unless your ship is perfectly egg shaped you're wasting a lot more empty space OUTSIDE you ship, but nobody complains about that do they? Here have a drawing:

Left and right have the same surface area, but left has more volume!

Why do you complain about the cost of internal empty space when its much lower than the cost of external empty space? If your ship isn't a perfect egg you're paying a lot more surface area per cubic meter for the empty space outside... It's such a petty, pointless thing to complain about and the larger ships get the less it matters because volume rises exponentially with surface area.

What kind of design is impeded by empty spaces? Can you show pictures of what it would prevent from working perhaps?

First you have to stop seeing everything from your own perspective. Like i said you don't make warmachines; anyone who does would never think to ask that question. The question is: "What kind of design is POINTLESS with empty spaces?" For starters, gatling guns. Gatling guns are great because you can focus a lot more fire in a smaler surface area. Reducing the system size for systems means the gunsticks the gatling guns are made of can be put closer together; eliminating the need for a gatling gun, thus making it POINTLESS. It still works, but so what? It doesn't serve a purpose, it doesn't enhance your ship in fact it detracts from it since you need blocks to make it spin.

Other designs include larger turrets, the non-aesthetic types that need to be socketed deep into your ships. I have a capital turret with a sodding elevator to get to the gun that merges with the interior, what is the point of that when guns become 1/10th their size?

Then there are regular rail guns, like swiveling broadside guns or conveyer guns, inline turrets which are a lot more challenging thanks to reactor lines; Try making a smaller ship with multiple inline turrets with reactor lines going through them, it's really hard to pull off but in a way that's really satisfying. Inline turrets still have a purpose, but if inline turrets become ultra cheap and can just be draped over the ship on top of systems, what's the point in non-inline turrets? Hell the inline turrets come with built in docked armor...
[doublepost=1492480963,1492480370][/doublepost]Wow what a trash post.

I'm quite honestly baffled that you are so bothered by an open space inside your ship.

You're the one bothered by it, which is why you made this thread.

Here we go again... Accusations and hostility for no particularly good reason and without any real argument about the issue. If you'd like to debate like a civil person, feel free. I really wouldn't mind.

Did someone say that to you before? You sound like a parrot that doesn't know what the words mean.

YOU are bothered by the cost of empty spaces. YOU want to force empty spaces everywhere. The hostility is free of charge, if you don't like it try not to dismiss everyone that disagrees with you.

I'm not asking to change everyone's build style to fit my taste.

Yes you are.

I'm asking for a better game that more people will enjoy

Then why are so many people telling you they'll quit the game if you add these idiotic heat boxes? Maybe you don't speak for everyone.

• Hard to tell how ships work (read: "harder to learn how to build")

• Tedious or nearly impossible to make even small modifications to the systems of a finished ship, leading to more frequent total refits.

• The game does not resemble any familiar sic-fi franchises, reducing the game's overall appeal to new players compared to games with more familiar look and feel like Interstellar Rift.

• PUT SHIELD CAPACITOR ON SHIP -> SHIP GAINS SHIELD CAPACITY... really? How does the heat system make this !!!SARCASM!!! extremely complext !!!SARCASM!!! system easier to learn?
  
• ok
• These forums have made me appreciate jar jar binks. I finally see him for what he truly is; the just punishment for everyone who likes star wars. This is stupid and once again has nothing to do with heat boxes.

You want people to be nice to you try reading AND UNDERSTANDING their posts instead of non-stop shoveling your own opinion down their throats.

 

[Shaker]

Warmachines vs dollhouses... again

No matter what you come up with mechanics wise, someone who builds for the purpose of destroying ships, will always win over those whos focus is on building empty rooms with no current function besides looks.

At least your dollhouse takes longer to destroy due to the amount of armor blocks it has in its interior, so savour the moment as your dollhouse burns for an extended amount of time.

 

[Az14el]

"Real PvPers can win in beautiful ships" is something you hear in some way or another a whole damn lot, and you can kinda get behind it until you see those same people lose and instead of accepting it, make excuses based on purely subjective opinions like "i would have won if your ship used as many detail blocks & had as much space dedicated to rooms as me". They can go ahead and think that but it's trash logic that helps noone and hamstrings themselves, and honestly demeaning for everyone involved, nobody wants to see that scroll past in chat or on the forums.

 

[kulbolen]

nobody wants to see that

shut up az you only beat me because i have a toilet in my ship

 

[Valiant70]

"Real PvPers can win in beautiful ships" is something you hear in some way or another a whole damn lot, and you can kinda get behind it until you see those same people lose and instead of accepting it, make excuses based on purely subjective opinions like "i would have won if your ship used as many detail blocks & had as much space dedicated to rooms as me". They can go ahead and think that but it's trash logic that helps noone and hamstrings themselves, and honestly demeaning for everyone involved, nobody wants to see that scroll past in chat or on the forums.

Amidst a burning, troll-infested wasteland, a few of us remain, trying to find a way to lessen the gap against all odds.

...Unfortunately most of the threads end up like this so we can't make much progress.

 

[Shaker]

Amidst a burning, troll-infested wasteland, a few of us remain, trying to find a way to lessen the gap against all odds.

...Unfortunately most of the threads end up like this so we can't make much progress.

the few who come up with ideas and cant back it up?

 

[Dire Venom]

Much like the people arguing heat boxes were good for interior/crew in the original threads, this does not actually address WHY it needs to be heatboxes. What do heatboxes do that requiring an increasingly larger number of crew for bigger and bigger systems does not do on it own? Simply put, heatboxes are an unnecessary and restrictive system.
The only possible purpose they might serve is to encourage people to future proof their designs before crew are actually added. That's it. That's the only positive, among an ocean of negatives, and in the meantime, the overall balance and quality of the game will suffer tremendously because of them.

Completely agreed! I want to be in control where all my pretty insides go, not have it enforced by a limiting box that players will obviously do their dammest to exploit and break. It makes building ships less fun and only severs to detract from the gameplay.
I also find it funny how this concept of 'heat' is being proposed, as it only serves to confuse players and pretend to be something else, while still being the exact same as the current system.
Couldn't they have a less limiting factor such as being explosive like axuillary power:?