Missilespam, Point Defense's OP & UPness, and Turret Lag

[NeonSturm]

I agree with you mostly, but the issue of PD turrets being a huge amount of lag causing entities is still a problem.

The PDs are, not the missiles?
I thought that there was a second bounding box around the ship, detecting missiles and assing PDs randomly to the ones that still need more PDs to get shot down. sum( ((xyz)-(xyz))^2 ) > range^2. inside the outer box.

 

[RabidBat]

Honestly I do not think there is a problem with weapon balance myself right now. I'd rather Schine lock in mechanics once and for all and focus on adding gameplay elements. It's this kind of shit that is why this game gets nothing but rebalances every other week.

AMS is fine if you build it right, I can decimate swarmers and still have some get through. So it's like anything, it can be OP or not depending on how you build it. Same for missiles, beams everything.

You beef up AMS, then people will bitch it is too OP, then Schine will beef up missiles or nerf turrets for those complaining, then they will be too OP. And around and around we @#$%ing go as we have been for years now.

Seriously same people always making the same stupid suggestions on these forums and shutting down actual new ideas and logical ones put forward by others and this is why we end up with a game in a state like StarMade is. Wish more people playing the game would get on the forums and give an opinion instead of the same handful all the time. With some seeming to virtually live on the forum, posting every 5minutes I wonder how they're finding the time to actually play.

Forums are seriously the worse place for developers to take ideas from, it happens in every game when such a small percentage of the players actually get on them and voice themselves. You just end up with 2% of players determining the way the game becomes for the other 98% and the game just does not end up evolving, and just ends up a stagnating mess.

So yeah,my thoughts are. People stop suggesting unnecessary rebalances and let Schine start making a game, not a mining and building simulator. Offer up suggestions that will get us a game,not make us have to rebuild our ships every few days because purple.

God damn we need things like working Pirates, but instead we get new power caps and weapons nerfs/boosts because someone will always be bitching about this is too OP and that is too OP and sadly it seems Schine listens. I mean otherwise why else are they always fixing that which is not broken while other stuff goes by the way side?

Round and round the balancing goes.When StarMade become a game nobody knows.

Comes a time when a dev needs to put logic over appeasing the community and make decisions themselves.

 

[Master_Artificer]

I'd rather have reasonably realistic AMS like rapid-fire turrets than click a button and poof they're gone. Sure swarmers are hard to counter with AMS, but lets remember that they also do less damage per actual missile, so you don't have to neutralize all of them to get off okay.

Also, missile HP would just screw smaller ships when it comes to fighting larger ships. Pretty sure its been argued many times before and usually a majority don't want it.

Its that everyone makes 1 block missile missile outputs and then fires off the nukes and the AI point defense doesnt know what to do

 

[Lecic]

The PDs are, not the missiles?
I thought that there was a second bounding box around the ship, detecting missiles and assing PDs randomly to the ones that still need more PDs to get shot down. sum( ((xyz)-(xyz))^2 ) > range^2. inside the outer box

Pretty sure that's not how it works. Pretty sure PD turrets label missiles as targets and fire, nothing about "two bounding boxes" or whatever, just the engagement range of the AI.

The turrets cause a lot of lag from the issues caused by lots of bounding boxes being inside the main ship's bounding box. This is even more noticeable when you try and dock a ship with lots of PD and the game freaks the hell out.

AMS is fine if you build it right, I can decimate swarmers and still have some get through. So it's like anything, it can be OP or not depending on how you build it. Same for missiles, beams everything.

Oh wise point defense master, please explain your amazing PD design that can decimate the literal thousands of swarms that serversider cruisers deploy.

My faction runs 40+ PD turrets on some of our larger ships. All they do is make the ship WEAKER to swarms because it bypasses the main ship's ion.

You beef up AMS, then people will bitch it is too OP, then Schine will beef up missiles or nerf turrets for those complaining, then they will be too OP. And around and around we @#$%ing go as we have been for years now.

It's not a "beef up" to AMS, its a "making this actually functional" to AMS. Not only that, it makes AMS an actual system that requires blocks, rather than just letting any 10 block PD turret shoot down your nuke that took 100k blocks to fire. Which is... overall, more of a nerf?

Additionally, I must ask- did you actually read the thread before posting here? I made it pretty clear this idea removes PD turrets, but you mention them, so...

Seriously same people always making the same stupid suggestions on these forums and shutting down actual new ideas and logical ones put forward by others and this is why we end up with a game in a state like StarMade is. Wish more people playing the game would get on the forums and give an opinion instead of the same handful all the time. With some seeming to virtuallyloveon the forum,posting every 5minutes I wonder how they're finding the time to actually play.

I make suggestions when I play the game and notice something wrong, or when a factionmate notices something wrong.

For example, I made this post for two reasons- one, I (and my other factionmates) were just leaving our ships floating in void space after battles and missions instead of returning to the HB and docking because we'd almost crashed the server multiple times before due to massive PD count. And two, because a factionmate lost a battle against a swarmerboat he should have curbstomped, because of PD being an active detriment rather than a buff.

Your implication that I (and other suggesters) don't play the game is extremely rude and unjustified.

Forums are seriously the worse place for developers to take ideas from, it happens in every game when such a small percentage of the players actually get on them and voice themselves. You just end up with 2% of players determining the way the game becomes for the other 98% and the game just does not end up evolving, and just ends up a stagnating mess.

If the "98%" care about the direction of the game, maybe they should, I don't know, do something about it? Where else are developers supposed to get ideas from, anyways? Survey completely random users on servers? You'd end up with the same results.

So yeah,my thoughts are. People stop suggesting unnecessary rebalances and let Schine start making a game, not a mining and building simulator. Offer up suggestions that will get us a game,not make us have to rebuild our ships every few days because purple.

God damn we need things like working Pirates, but instead we get new power caps and weapons nerfs/boosts because someone will always be bitching about this is too OP and that is too OP and sadly it seems Schine listens. I mean otherwise why else are they always fixing that which is not broken while other stuff goes by the way side?

This may come as a shock to you, but the people who code the features and the people who do the general balancing that doesn't require adding new features are DIFFERENT PEOPLE. Lancake tweaking a value in the configs has ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT on schema's coding efforts.

Also, what in the hell are you talking about with a seesaw of two things getting tweaked back and forth? That's not what happens. It's usually a new feature that's imbalanced, or interacts with a past feature in an unexpected way that's imbalanced, that people ask for balance fixes on, not a cycle of "buff X, nerf X, buff X, nerf X.

Comes a time when a dev needs to put logic over appeasing the community and make decisions themselves.

"It's different when I'm the community member trying to get Schine to appease me and make decisions for Schine because *I* think *my* ideas on the game direction are the best! Everyone else is just a jerk who doesn't care about the 98% who don't bother to make a single post on the direction of the game, unlike me, because I've definitely interviewed all of the non-forum players on their opinion on the games direction."

How about you leave my thread, or make a post that actually relates to the topic and not just complain about topics you don't understand or agree with? Thanks.

 

[Master_Artificer]

^I am going to stay out of this one .-.

The PDs are, not the missiles?
I thought that there was a second bounding box around the ship, detecting missiles and assing PDs randomly to the ones that still need more PDs to get shot down. sum( ((xyz)-(xyz))^2 ) > range^2. inside the outer box.

Have a ship, like a stick, with 20+ point defense, and 6-8 main turrets, and 2-4 docked reactors. Doesnt matter the mass.
Enter the bounding box of anything. Kills the server almost.
we had about 5 PD per ship face, and we feel like we need to remove it down to 2 or less per face for the lag it gives us.


EDIT:
And to clarify, shots that hit the docked entities to a ship take the ships shields, but do not apply the ion effect. Swarmers, which spread out evenly, will hit mostly docked stuff and ignore ship ion effect, so if you follow up with some anti- hull cannon's... ouch.

 

[Tunk]

Honestly with current targeting algorithms AMS systems reach saturation point very quickly and become useless.
You can literally have a ship with 80 omni-directional point defence turrets and they would be barely more effective than 5.
And it gets worse with lag to boot.

If there are a lot of missiles or the missiles are traveling in anything but a straight line then you'll be lucky to hit any at all, and when you have two ships dancing around each other those missiles sure love to move anything but straight.
Simply look at any video involving missile or swarmer spam, they literally keep accumulating and piling up until they eventually get on target and do nasty damage.

 

[Lancake]

Currently there's nothing I can do about it config wise, as lecic stated. This requires coding effort to solve.

There is 1 issue with the current system from my point of view:
- all missiles are considered equal

Decoy missiles or high damage ones, all considered the same when PD turrets are deciding who to shoot. It's relatively easy to fire 1000-3000 decoy missiles, which floods any PD system. This crazy amount of missiles also ruins client and server performance.

The in-game solution against this many decoy missiles, is more PD turrets which makes performance even worse and it wouldn't exactly help a lot either. At some point you just have too many turrets for the game to handle efficiently.

The solution would consist of 2 parts:

1. give missiles health points, scaling logarithmic with their damage. Decoy missiles have little damage so they would be 1 shot killed by pretty much any PD turret. Bigger missiles could only be killed by many small PD turrets, or 1-2 big ones.
2. prioritize missiles according to missile damage. Ideally you could set a damage number yourself and it would prioritize that the most (so the slow high damage nukes don't get shot down first).

This would solve many issues, and reduce performance impacts. Using 3000 decoy missiles would be useless since any higher damage one would be prioritized. Using less decoy missiles but with higher damage would work a lot better, this increases client/server performance too.

It would also reduce the PD turret spam I see from time to time. Every turret you add makes performance go down fast and only PD turret count matters right now. When missiles have HP, PD turrets would need more than the usual 10-20 DPS to function properly. Spamming 100 small PD turrets, or 10 medium PD turrets would be roughly the same in terms of effectiveness so why bother using so many small ones if you're going to a combat zone. Less turrets -> better performance.


If you disagree with my findings, please say so and clarify.

 

[kiraen]

My only problem with this: why would my enemy tell me the hp of his missiles? I would build in some kind of deception on my missile, so why wouldn't he?

I suppose that's an RP issue and could be covered by lore (quantum laser scanning algorithms?). But still...


$0.02

 

[NeonSturm]

My only problem with this: why would my enemy tell me the hp of his missiles? I would build in some kind of deception on my missile, so why wouldn't he?

Why would you put a ton metal into a 10x10x10cm cube?

 

[Imagination01]

I completely disagree with everything the OP has stated, missiles are fine, PD is fine, other than perhaps some bug fixes, PD does not need to be buffed and Missiles to not need to be nerfed.

Swarm Missiles already have several disadvantages around their use that effectively makes them useless as is, lets not make them more useless, the only thing I want to see happen to swarm missiles is they should not be able to target radar-jammed entities.

PD should never get to the point where spamming PD turrets on your ship makes your ship missile proof, the OP is effectively asking for PD turrets to make ships missile proof, they should be able to reduce damage from missiles, they should NOT be able to completely prevent it.

Considering the ease of spamming tiny PD turrets on your ship allows you to prevent more than 75% of missile damage, PDs need to be nerfed if anything, if the Developers want PD to be balanced, they need to only be able to prevent a maximum of 30%, to achieve this, prevent PD from leading their shots and put a configurable hardcap on PD turrets.

 

[godmars]

give missiles health points, scaling logarithmic with their damage. Decoy missiles have little damage so they would be 1 shot killed by pretty much any PD turret. Bigger missiles could only be killed by many small PD turrets, or 1-2 big ones.

If this does happen, plz consider going with Spunkies suggestion and giving higher damage missiles lower acceleration or something

Swarm Missiles already have several disadvantages around their use that effectively makes them useless as is, lets not make them more useless

its pretty silly I can shoot down a nuke with a laser pistol tbh. who needs PD when you can command a bunch of daves to sit on the wings of your ship. The same efficiency at 1/2 the price!

 

[Lecic]

Swarm Missiles already have several disadvantages around their use that effectively makes them useless as is, lets not make them more useless, the only thing I want to see happen to swarm missiles is they should not be able to target radar-jammed entities.

If swarm missiles are useless, why does almost everyone use them? It's because they're not. Swarmers continue to be extremely effective on servers with large sectors and high speeds, which is nearly every server. They're automatically homing, they have a decent reload speed, they can't be stopped by PD, they kill astronauts, and they're are more likely to bypass ion than any other weapon.

PD should never get to the point where spamming PD turrets on your ship makes your ship missile proof, the OP is effectively asking for PD turrets to make ships missile proof, they should be able to reduce damage from missiles, they should NOT be able to completely prevent it.

Once again, I am forced to ask someone- Did you actually read the post? My suggestion involves the replacement of point defense turrets with things hard-built into the ship, so...

Considering the ease of spamming tiny PD turrets on your ship allows you to prevent more than 75% of missile damage, PDs need to be nerfed if anything, if the Developers want PD to be balanced, they need to only be able to prevent a maximum of 30%, to achieve this, prevent PD from leading their shots and put a configurable hardcap on PD turrets.

PD turrets do not prevent "75%" of incoming missile damage, unless the enemy is using very few missiles and firing at the PD turrets in a straight line. PD is already absolute garbage at leading shots against arcing missiles, which a large number of missiles are, as well.

I suggest you go and try to fight a swarmer boat and see how many of the missiles you can really shoot down before you start making posts like this.

 

[canadianbacon]

I absolutely agree with lancake. If any suggestion is going to be implemented regarding PD and missile balance it needs to be that one.

 

[Shaker]

If you start adding more code into how PDs work, its just going to slow it down even further.
Adding hp to missiles is a bad idea, players will just make bigger/longer PDs.

It all comes down with what is more effective, maybe make pulse destroy missiles in its bubble? Or players make better PDs and put them in better places, ive only ever had to use 6 on my 400m ships

 

[refirendum]

the problem has always been too many entities. and that's promoted by the fact that every missile only has 1 hp. so to protect the one high damage missile, players have been using thousands of small distractor missiles. if missiles have HP scaled by damage, they have their own protection without the need for distractor missiles. this causes the neccessity for massive numbers of distractor missiles to be gone, however based on how AI works, it doesn't fix distractor missiles from rendering PD completely ineffective. To fix that issue, PD turret priorities need to be in place so that people who use massive numbers of distractor missiles will find that the numbers no longer render PD ineffective and instead it is missile damage, and thus missile HP, that makes missiles effective at breaking through PD. consolidating all of their preexisting swarm distractors into high damage-highHP missiles improves performance and has the same technical capacity to take shots as before, just with much much less lag, and a much better user experience.

edit: there needs to be more anti-missile than just cannon. anti-missile missiles or anti-missile pulses and beams should all be viable (though in the current state of the game, they are incapable of doing anti-missile duty)

 

[Ithirahad]

Honestly I do not think there is a problem with weapon balance myself right now. I'd rather Schine lock in mechanics once and for all and focus on adding gameplay elements. It's this kind of shit that is why this game gets nothing but rebalances every other week.

AMS is fine if you build it right, I can decimate swarmers and still have some get through. So it's like anything, it can be OP or not depending on how you build it. Same for missiles, beams everything.

You beef up AMS, then people will bitch it is too OP, then Schine will beef up missiles or nerf turrets for those complaining, then they will be too OP. And around and around we @#$%ing go as we have been for years now.

Seriously same people always making the same stupid suggestions on these forums and shutting down actual new ideas and logical ones put forward by others and this is why we end up with a game in a state like StarMade is. Wish more people playing the game would get on the forums and give an opinion instead of the same handful all the time. With some seeming to virtuallyloveon the forum,posting every 5minutes I wonder how they're finding the time to actually play.

Forums are seriously the worse place for developers to take ideas from, it happens in every game when such a small percentage of the players actually get on them and voice themselves. You just end up with 2% of players determining the way the game becomes for the other 98% and the game just does not end up evolving, and just ends up a stagnating mess.

So yeah,my thoughts are. People stop suggesting unnecessary rebalances and let Schine start making a game, not a mining and building simulator. Offer up suggestions that will get us a game,not make us have to rebuild our ships every few days because purple.

God damn we need things like working Pirates, but instead we get new power caps and weapons nerfs/boosts because someone will always be bitching about this is too OP and that is too OP and sadly it seems Schine listens. I mean otherwise why else are they always fixing that which is not broken while other stuff goes by the way side?

Round and round the balancing goes.When StarMade become a game nobody knows.

Comes a time when a dev needs to put logic over appeasing the community and make decisions themselves.

Not sure how many times people will have to say this, but THESE ARE DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS. Lancake could be testing some new balance for, say, missiles, at the same minute as Schema's writing code for blocks to load 3D models for chairs and Zanaten (Saber) is adding animations to the player model for chair-sitting or creating new creatures.

Of course, Lecic's suggestion would require work from Schema, but by nature, suggestion threads aren't going to be instantly followed if Schine is busy with other things at the time anyway.

 

[Shaker]

I think rabidbat was just trying to say that we should be coming up with topics that will add content to the game instead of wanting to nerf stuff

 

[Master_Artificer]

Okay having a swarmer boat with a bunch of strong 90% ion effect swarmers coupled with some classic block removing guns is amazingly powerful.
My swarmers target the docked entities and the host ship equally, so if the host ship has 1 docked entity, its a 50/50 split. If it has a turret, its a 33/33/33 split between the ship, turret base, and turret barrel. AANNDD because people don't put ion defensive effect in their turrets, the turrets when hit seem to be pulling the shields from the host entity (my opponents ship) WITHOUT applying the host ships defensive ion buff! That means I am doing 2.5 times the damage than they expect me to be doing, because I am straight up bypassing that 60% ion buff (60% ion buff means you need to be doing 2.5 times more damage to remove the same amount of shields without the buff).

so aginst ships with 10 turrets and some docked doors or reactors, I have a negligible amount hitting the main ship and the rest hitting docked stuff and bypassing the hosts ion effect. Once it is down to 25% and I pop the turrets, I hit them when a beam-pulse-ion to aplha the rest away and then work them over with my dedicated pure anti-hull guns. :3
This feels so broke I love it. :3

If you start adding more code into how PDs work, its just going to slow it down even further.
Adding hp to missiles is a bad idea, players will just make bigger/longer PDs.

It all comes down with what is more effective, maybe make pulse destroy missiles in its bubble? Or players make better PDs and put them in better places, ive only ever had to use 6 on my 400m ships

Wait how do you know adding more code will make things slow down? What if the code added fixes the slow down and, in-fact, speeds things up? Its the type of code, not just code, that could boat and slow down things. But right now the code isnt slowing things down, its the ingame actions which lag things.


Isn't bigger PD what might end up being better for the game? Instead of spamming turrets with 1 block outputs, we might need to think and apply more design to our pd turrets.
Already I do larger than average pd turrets with waffleboard and checkered outputs, with cannon missile outputs, and even some cannon beam outputs for the tipple range shots. Unfortunately, after many in-game tests (3 of each, 12 tests total), of both simulated combat with twits and turns at 200 m/s and with standing still, (each with 3 turrets on the sides of a cube, and 1 front 1 back, 14 turrets total) my larger turret with its complex design did not seem to preform any better than the cheap 1 block machine-gun output design, and both failed to stop literally anything once the missile count extended beyond 40-50 being launched each volley, and the effectiveness actually degraded.

Also please define "better PD" and "better places" because maybe my perceived notions are wrong.

And for PD count, I certainly use less than what Thryn slaps on their ships, but using only 6 is basically one for each direction cardinal direction!

I use 3-5 on each cardinal face (up down left right front back), and even a minimum of 3 on each face is 18 docked entity chains for dealing JUST with missiles, 36 additional entities overall, not including anything else.

 

[koksvik]

Swarm missiles are not that good at all, here is why:

SMS as i like to call them are weak against mobile small units, that can out maneuver/run the missiles, plus the costs franticness of them is not ideal for small thrash/drone units

SMS Destroys any medium ship totally regretless of shield or armor i agree, But SMS are absolutely not OP against Big ships, the bigger the ship's gets past XXX,k blocks the more they become not cost effective and once you hit the glorious block count to being a dreadnaut, the SMS feels like mosquito bites

If you would compare SMS to a RTS game unit, they're decent early game, they're the king mid game, and completely useless endgame

 

[Master_Artificer]

Swarm missiles are not that good at all, here is why:

SMS as i like to call them are weak against mobile small units, that can out maneuver/run the missiles, plus the costs franticness of them is not ideal for small thrash/drone units

SMS Destroys any medium ship totally regretless of shield or armor i agree, But SMS are absolutely not OP against Big ships, the bigger the ship's gets past XXX,k blocks the more they become not cost effective and once you hit the glorious block count to being a dreadnaut, the SMS feels like mosquito bites

If you would compare SMS to a RTS game unit, they're decent early game, they're the king mid game, and completely useless endgame

In theory swarmers are weak. In practice swarmers are very strong. Maybe stronger than missile beam's placed on turrets under AI control (instant lock and ignores jamming).