Infinite weapons/shields, Armor Thickness, Faction log

[Doomsider]

I wanted to make a couple suggestions, but first we have to face the fact that Starmade rocks. I get excited everday thinking about where Schema is going to take us next. Here are some ideas that we have been kicking around and talking about in chat.

Infinite types of weapons/shields/hull:

This is a simple idea that goes along with the whole crafting approach. Certain minerals/objects around the universe have certain properties and these can be added to weapons systems you make. For weapons you could have different damage types and effects like area damage or chain attacks. You could mix and match types of effects and damages to make truly unique weapons that no one in the universe has. I think of epic one of a kind weapons built with skill adding yet another unique, challenging, and rewarding system to the Starmade experience. If we have it for weapons why not have it for shields and hull types as well. It would add a unique strategic element to the game with people trying to outwit weapon systems with specialized shield and hull types.

Armor Thickness

I would like to suggest that we make armor resist a certain amount of damage based on how thick it is. This would simulate how massive structures tend to be hard to damage. Basically if a hull was a certain thickness a weapon system would have to do a certain threshold of damage to even touch it. As thinckness increases so would the the total damage of the weapon system in order to penetrate it. I envision a small fighters energy weapons being unable to damage the hull of a large battleship. I also think that armor should absorb a certain amount of damage as well and this should increase based on how thick the armor is. You would need a weapon of sufficiemt damage to even chip away at the armor. This would also increase the lenght of combat for large ships.

Faction Log:

One thing I have always found disturbing is the lack of knowledge about what happened to your stuff when your off the server. Ships will dissapear, people will join your faction, another faction will blow up one of your starbases and you don't know any of it. What I would like to suggest is a faction log that everyone can read that lets people know what happened while they were away.

 

[Galacticruler]

i agree with 100% of this.

 

[Ixalite]

totally on board as well

 

[Kowalski]

That would be another good addition, the faction log should also contain info like:

\"X ship(s) flew trough sector (homebase sector), pilot: (pilot name|faction)\"

and that for every starbase your faction owns, but only the sector the starbase is in would be scanned

 

[MrFURB]

I love that crafting suggestion for weapons/shields/armor. I can see that giving people another minigame with expirementation and crafting. It could also flesh out faction identities well, and if NPCs can be spawned with random alterations to their subsystems it could make PvE a lot more interesting as well.

At first I didn\'t like your armor thickness idea. It doesn\'t affect larger weapons which hit harder, only smaller ones, which shouldn\'t what you\'re targetting if you\'re trying to lengthen capital fights. Then you got into the armor absorption bit and my fears were averted. It won\'t affect bombers that badly as missiles have a much higher damage-per-shot than AMCs, and thus can still damage/take out chunks of hull (As they should) where it\'s primary armament would be useless.



Makes sense now.

 

[Visitor]

Instead of just being another \'yay, +1, great idea!\', I\'ll comment and point out a few thoughts regarding the idea including possible issues with it as well.

Infinite types of weapons/shields/hull:
Such idea could be good, but only to a certain degree. First, to create even seemingly infinite number of types of systems, you\'d need great many special ingredients. With such, and their potential not being just restricted to small boost in abilities, it would most surely imbalance things and in a way that adjusting it back would take months of playing as people would be coming up with new sets outperforming by far all others. It wouldn\'t be making unique weapons, it would be then \'every cannon is a new pokemon\' thing, as every weapon would be unique and uniformity, even across one ship design would be quite possibly obliterated.

I can already hear shouts of different players calling bullshit when other players, through lucky mix of some ingredients, taken out their ships easily, despite seemingly inferior armaments, design, time put into logical planning of said design etc.

That when we\'ll ignore the process of implementation itself. In reality, if it would be even a few dozens of different efects for different modules, you already would possibly have months of work. You see, it\'s not just about weapons/armor/whatever having special effects. You have a lot, lot more to add:

Make new ores and other ingredients, balance their rarity, remake world generation so those minerals are being spawned and unlike the current ones aren\'t just there plain in the sight, create the system of processing those resources, GUI for it, system for mixing them with different modules and then all their effects - balanced effects - that the moduel will benefit from. While somehow ignoring rise of possible issues I wrote about up there. Oh, and you need different types of damage, a whole very big feature that just balancing of would take some time. Just so you can add different damage effects and resistances to counter them.

It\'s really a lot of work, for what may actually be not fun at all for many, due to balance being required (or the whole system making little difference) and aforementioned lack of uniformity on the servers where factions want to produce homogeneous fleets - for them, I assure you, it won\'t be \'unique and rewarding experience\'. It will be \'why devteam messed up this promising game\' thing.

Why would I say it\'d be good to a degree, then, you may ask. Because making it smaller, useful but not whole game-spanning feature could benefit gameplay a bit. Having some very rare resource, which in turn has chance to show up only on some particular type of planet in token amounts or be found - again, very rarely and in token amounts - as a loot from stations and enemies and which can be used to create versions of modules with some noticeable, but not unbalancing additional bonus would be nice. And by token bonuses I don\'t mean some special effects, but somewhat (as in, not too much) affecting existing stats: lowering power consumption, giving more HP, decreasing weight etc

I want almost whole potential of player creation to depend on the design and scale, not magical crystals which may turn any rusty bucket into decent spaceship.

Armor Thickness:
That may be useful. Though you didn\'t say how it would work. Do you mean making yet another block? Or some special effect from several blocks in a layer? I wouldn\'t mind it if it would work like current combined modules, just for hulls and with the exception that only hull blocks between space and straight line to the core affect each other. Otherwise whole hull, even on the other side of the ship, away from the place that was hit would be granting bonuses and that\'d be silly.

I am not sure about making hulls so powerful though that there\'s no way for smaller ship to penetrate thicker ones. I\'d say it depends on type of weapon. Already shield generators themselves make bigger ships almost impenetrable by fighters, to the point people are asking for some devices to disable shields or weapons on which shields wouldn\'t work. Realistically, too, even very big structures can be taken down by automatic drones having enough freedom and time to concentrate fire upon some area for longer period of time.

So yeah, this idea may be good, but I\'d not take it too far. Especially as it seems that the core of the problems lies in the balancing of hulls and hull effects themselves. I consider this thread to be one where decent discussion regarding balance took place.

Faction Log:
This one is just fine. Some news tab in faction window which would store info of the bigger events would be useful. Things like disassembling of a ship/station (core was taken out by hand), destruction/station of the ship (core exploded), member joining and member leaving the faction. Maybe also, if they\'re publicly available, informations about other faction changing attitude toward yours (declaring war etc).

 

[Doomsider]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply Visitor. I don\'t think that creating a configurable weapon system would be the time sink you think it is although balancing would be an issue. I could implement a system like this with a couple days of coding so I don\'t think a month or more of work is realistic. I like how you expanded the idea to include a GUI for mixing and creating weapons, armor, and shields.

As far as a lot of work to create the actual systems. I think, for example, that the basic weapon systems components would be readily available so it wouldn\'t take a lot of time collecting unless you truly wanted to make a very large or exotic system.

I am not sure how a magic crystal that added an effect or damage type could make the weapon suddenly very powerful. We are still dealing with things like scale and size so adding fire damage to a weapon or a effect like spread would not suddenly make it a immensely powerful weapon. It would still depend on how big and efficient the weapon system is already.

As far as the Armor thickness goes I was refering to the spot your are hitting not the entire hull at once (Although large structures do add strength to the whole through things like tension). I personally don\'t like the idea of relying on shields only for defense. This would add a strategic elememt to armoring a ship to protect vulenerable areas for instance.

I don\'t not share your skepticism about a small ship not being able to penetrate a very large ships armor. This is no different than a jeep with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on it unloading on a modern tank. They can fire all day but the tanks armor is thick and strong enough to resist the damage completely.

 

[Stakhanov]

Instead of just being another \'yay, +1, great idea!\', I\'ll comment and point out a few thoughts regarding the idea including possible issues with it as well.


Thanks for your time , I didn\'t feel like addressing them in detail. Nay -1 bad ideas ! :p

 

[Zarth]

I don\'t not share your skepticism about a small ship not being able to penetrate a very large ships armor. This is no different than a jeep with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on it unloading on a modern tank. They can fire all day but the tanks armor is thick and strong enough to resist the damage completely.


Not true. Given enuogh time, ammo, and sustained fire. That Jeep would eventually dig through that tanks arrmor. Every bullet chips a peice off, and eventually, that relentless fire will punch a hole through the tank. It may take a while, but it\'ll happen.



Also, on a game balance perspective. Small ships NEED to be able to do something about larger ships, because as it stands right now. Absolutly everything favros titan type ships.



If they\'re big enuogh, then they are basicly immortal.

Their bigger guns can fire faster, do more damage, reload faster, and travel farther.

They have more energy

More surface area to pack a shit load of turrets on.



Ect

ect

ect

Giving big ships a bonus to haveing thick armor is like a punch in the face for smaller ships if they aren\'t able to do anything. it is just antoher reason to go big, or go home. Small ships need some love.

 

[Doomsider]

I agree there needs to be balance, but to have a 20 block big fighter doing damage to a 100k block titan is asinine. All ships have a purpose and trying to give a small fighter the ability to destroy a titan is by far more unbalanced IMHO.