There was a time that Starmade had extraordinary promise. It had the potential to be the perfect meld between a highly nuanced building game of extraordinary tactical depth, a first person space RPG, and a grand space strategy game. That potential was still a long way off given that it is a VERY small team building the game. In the mean time however, the building part of the game was quite finely honed and functional and much fun could be had gaining even more expertise in ship building. There were still bugs and optimizations to work out, but the future looked very bright indeed.
Then instead of building upon that base and starting to flesh out the rest of the game so the ships we build had something to do other than get materials for more ships, instead the developers decided to scrap the entire building system and start it over from essentially scratch. The extremely complex block building mechanics were still there, it would still take you days of work to pile all the blocks together to get a ship working, but virtually all the tactical depth of decision making in building was removed. The actual game mechanics of the build system has been dumbed down so much, that it is barely more sophisticated than most other space strategy games. The difference is that those other space strategy games do NOT require you to master an incredibly obtuse construction system that requires you to spend days piling blocks.
This recent change has caused ALL of the literally thousands of ships and stations posted to community content to be utterly obsolete. Everything is now scrap. Everything will have to be rebuilt. The product of literally hundreds of thousands of man hours has been wasted. All so that the build system can be dumbed down to the point that even the most casual of gamer can easily understand the ship mechanics.
(Choose the size of ship you want. Decide if you are willing to hugely sacrifice performance and stick with a long narrow ship, or worse a 'normal' looking ship, or go for a seriously weird oblique ship for maximum power. Decide on which weapon configuration you will use and how much of them. Decide how much shield, regenerators and thrusters you will use. Decide how you will allocate your ten chamber points. Then spend 100 hours piling blocks. That's it, that's ship building now.)
I'll spare you the details of such as; how in so doing they have not just reduced the tactical depth of building choices, but also forced some truly bizarre ship design choices upon players. There IS an optimum ship shape that is so utterly bizarre that NO science fiction artist has ever thought to draw or paint, because no one would ever build a ship that way. But in Starmade, that is now the optimum ship.
They have thrown their baby out with the bath water. Rather than take the one thing they had working, the thing that was the most extraordinary in all of gaming when it came to build systems, and finish the rest of the game. Instead they scrapped it and are basically starting over with a VASTLY inferior system. At this point it looks like the actual game part, the grand strategy part, will likely never be done. They will have to spend years tweaking, bug fixing and balancing their new, inferior build system first.
I used to love the richness of the old build system and looked forward to expanding it into the strategy game proper. Now I hate the new build system and I expect we will never see the strategy game. I could not possibly more strongly NOT recommend this game at this point.
I agree with your first paragraph and love the first sentence of your second paragraph, but the rest is bonkers.
What is so "tactifully challenging and difficult about this game? How many forum posts do you see where (not new) players are asking about how to get the best power setup? Did anyone EVER talk about power? What extremely complex building mechanics are you talkin about? What deep tactical decisions did you have to make on each ship? Please I need examples because all im hearing is
"roleplay"
Your description of ship building-how is that any different than before? Old system: Choose design (shape), weapons/systems, outfit remaing space with shields(or add them first)
New system: Same as before but with a new final step: Add chambers which customize your ship (warp drive,cloak,Push + all of the 100's of combinations they can come up with in the future now that we have a base for it.
The most important thing to know is that for most people, the old system sucked. It was boring and took up too much space. They took a vote, and the majority was in favour. Most of us dont think it was full of "richness" and it definetly was not the pinnacle of space games for most of us either.
The Power Stat was a means to an end, not the whole point of the game. No one wants MAXIMUM power in each ship they build-because why would they? Why have more power than you need when you can have functional systems there instead? It was a mini game, nothing more.
You not liking it being easily accessible for new players is frankly one of the problems with this game, too much elitism. It is not difficult, but more importantly not fun,for most players to spend hours trying to get 2mill power in every ship possible. Go start a poll and see how many people play this game solely to "acheive max power". It was a minigame.
Your optimum shape thing is debatable too. What was the optional shape before and was that the only shape players made? Im not talking about competitive PVP players only either, there are others here who play just as much but dont care about "acheiving max power" For us this update is a leap in the right direction- just not far enough. And losing man hours building ships that are now useless....not the first or last time it will happen. Pointless and ridiculous to complain about because its a game not a career. Should they just keep working on a system the majority consider flawed, just so we can fly ships from 1 years ago?
How many 1year old ships do you fly everytime you play? Not alot right? cus its a building game! Build more.
This update will make things better in time. We only have a dev build to work off right now too, so everything is subject to change. Also remember that you thought you had enough information to make a judgment before the dev, when you didnt even have ANY numbers to work off. Hold your horses until the release is here.
