New Power DEV Thread

[kikaha]

Why is it that my perfectly fine turrets don' t even turn when i'm inside them ? Yes i have all the enhancers needed. I even replaced all my turret docking blocks.

 

[nightrune]

Why is it that my perfectly fine turrets don' t even turn when i'm inside them ? Yes i have all the enhancers needed. I even replaced all my turret docking blocks.

Enhancers we're broken in a previous dev build. They may still be broken.

 

[kikaha]

In 0.200116 they said not powered. Now in 0.200117 they are powered (so the game says) but still no movement. Thanks for the info nonetheless.

 

[Zyrr]

I thought the point was to remove the cryptic power puzzle and replace it with a more robust power system that is easier to understand, which doesn't mean dumber. And from what I've seen so far of the Dev build the system is much more complex and easier to understand at the same time. But that's just me.

nightrune It's in your best interests to read this and communicate to the rest of Schine.

No, this change is certainly dumbing it down - in fact, I feel like my intelligence is being insulted. The old power system was quite simple and allowed flexibility for efficient design in virtually any hull - the baseline "efficient" 2mil e/s generation, a set of long lines of reactors in a "checkerboard" pattern (IE no line was adjacent to another) was dead simple and effortless to make. If you understood what exactly was making your power generation more efficient per block (increasing the box dimensions of a reactor group with the fewest amount of blocks possible, EG straight lines in the X Y and Z directions or one very long one in one direction) you could get your 2mil e/s in a very, very small amount of mass. I think mathematically the minimum was well under 200 mass.

This was a problem. While it supported aesthetics-focused builders by allowing you to fit basically however much power you wanted into virtually any ship, it also made meta PVP builders' lives fairly simple and fairly easily. The most efficient setups for power were grids of power lines not connected whatsoever. Such a ship is nearly impossible to hit and while its box dimensions (what you're basing your power generation on now) are extreme, often quite similar to a ship well over 10x or 20x its size, its mass was not at all comparable - I have a 5k mass ship whose box dimensions are similar if not larger than a 150k mass ship. See the mismatch? Basing your efficiency on geometry such as this is a mistake in a three dimensional game where utilized internal volume (in layman's terms, weight/mass) is far more important than the dimensions of the ship thereof. I had hoped Schine had identified this problem and the new power system would address and fix this.

It did not. In fact, it's done exactly the opposite. Not only does this suffer from precisely the same problems the old system did, it exacerbates them - instead of having to worry only about the distance between two points three times per reactor group, I only have to worry about the distance between two points once. My work load for building power on ships has been decreased by 66%, which is quite sizeable. On top of that, it now punishes aesthetic builders - as mentioned, numerous examples exist now of people being unable to even utilize their old ships even with the changes to power costs. Edymnion mentions that expecting to refit should not be a problem - it isn't, what is a problem is having to trash ship hulls because they mathematically and geometrically cannot support their previous systems; this is called a downgrade, not an upgrade or even a sidegrade.

Contrary to popular belief here, myself and other "meta PVP" builders do care about the community - this update makes our lives vastly easier, but at the expense of everyone else, which is most certainly a problem and like any change that negatively affects the game, we are going to talk about it until your eyes get sore. FlyingDebris was able to make a testbed ship that did 14,000,000,000 (billion - count those zeroes) damage at ~300k mass within about 30 minutes of playing the dev build. No legitimately built ship in StarMade has 14,000,000,000 shields, ion or not - regardless of size. If this is working as intended for Schine, this ship has already sank and found a comfy spot on the sea floor.

I said this before when this was merely a proposal, but if Schine is going to ignore me and people like me, we'll just utilize your system to the best of our abilities, and then perhaps instead of us you'll listen to the people who complain about us. This isn't about nuance, this is about absolutely obliterating any semblance of balance you once had in ship design. If there was a divide between meta PVP ships and RP ships, it's turned into a god damn cosmic gulf between galaxies now. I cannot emphasize how much of a mistake this is for keeping 98% of your player base satisfied and happy.

 

[aceface]

snip

sad :/
didnt think of it much. now realised my ships will be a massive liabilty in that they will have so much useless space...

 

[FlyingDebris]

nightrune It's in your best interests to read this and communicate to the rest of Schine.

No, this change is certainly dumbing it down - in fact, I feel like my intelligence is being insulted. The old power system was quite simple and allowed flexibility for efficient design in virtually any hull - the baseline "efficient" 2mil e/s generation, a set of long lines of reactors in a "checkerboard" pattern (IE no line was adjacent to another) was dead simple and effortless to make. If you understood what exactly was making your power generation more efficient per block (increasing the box dimensions of a reactor group with the fewest amount of blocks possible, EG straight lines in the X Y and Z directions or one very long one in one direction) you could get your 2mil e/s in a very, very small amount of mass. I think mathematically the minimum was well under 200 mass.

This was a problem. While it supported aesthetics-focused builders by allowing you to fit basically however much power you wanted into virtually any ship, it also made meta PVP builders' lives fairly simple and fairly easily. The most efficient setups for power were grids of power lines not connected whatsoever. Such a ship is nearly impossible to hit and while its box dimensions (what you're basing your power generation on now) are extreme, often quite similar to a ship well over 10x or 20x its size, its mass was not at all comparable - I have a 5k mass ship whose box dimensions are similar if not larger than a 150k mass ship. See the mismatch? Basing your efficiency on geometry such as this is a mistake in a three dimensional game where utilized internal volume (in layman's terms, weight/mass) is far more important than the dimensions of the ship thereof. I had hoped Schine had identified this problem and the new power system would address and fix this.

It did not. In fact, it's done exactly the opposite. Not only does this suffer from precisely the same problems the old system did, it exacerbates them - instead of having to worry only about the distance between two points three times per reactor group, I only have to worry about the distance between two points once. My work load for building power on ships has been decreased by 66%, which is quite sizeable. On top of that, it now punishes aesthetic builders - as mentioned, numerous examples exist now of people being unable to even utilize their old ships even with the changes to power costs. Edymnion mentions that expecting to refit should not be a problem - it isn't, what is a problem is having to trash ship hulls because they mathematically and geometrically cannot support their previous systems; this is called a downgrade, not an upgrade or even a sidegrade.

Contrary to popular belief here, myself and other "meta PVP" builders do care about the community - this update makes our lives vastly easier, but at the expense of everyone else, which is most certainly a problem and like any change that negatively affects the game, we are going to talk about it until your eyes get sore. FlyingDebris was able to make a testbed ship that did 14,000,000,000 (billion - count those zeroes) damage at ~300k mass within about 30 minutes of playing the dev build. No legitimately built ship in StarMade has 14,000,000,000 shields, ion or not - regardless of size. If this is working as intended for Schine, this ship has already sank and found a comfy spot on the sea floor.

I said this before when this was merely a proposal, but if Schine is going to ignore me and people like me, we'll just utilize your system to the best of our abilities, and then perhaps instead of us you'll listen to the people who complain about us. This isn't about nuance, this is about absolutely obliterating any semblance of balance you once had in ship design. If there was a divide between meta PVP ships and RP ships, it's turned into a god damn cosmic gulf between galaxies now. I cannot emphasize how much of a mistake this is for keeping 98% of your player base satisfied and happy.

That 14 billion damage ship wasn't even optimized. I was literally just throwing system blocks together. That number could easily be doubled, maybe tripled with vastly more hull damage too due to the way missiles work.

 

[Napther]

The problem with the old system was that you were punished as an RP type builder on the smaller scale. If you wanted rooms inside the vessel this really hampered the use of extending the 3D power tree because you literally run out of space to fit it against tight areas, while being incredibly easy to scale outwards if Aesthetics were just your laughable concerns next to a Bottom Line of causing as much problems as possible to anyone you met on server.

The new system now punishes ANY player who does not extend their ship's hull to ludicrous lengths to achieve barely 100% Reactor stabilisation distance: Even if these parts are placed in the tail section and replacing 80% of frontal nose armour just to stabilise the react to get a FRACTION of what a ship once was in terms of raw power generation to convert to weapons and/or thrust. Aux I felt was pretty... Balanced? I guess? Mainly because I could FIT that into ships that are stout and bulky. Without the power now to run as many weapons, Thrusters, and Shield Rechargers now as we'd like everyone and their mother is now going to stuff their ships full of shield capacitors or basic hull.

Oh wait

Defence in this game is HILARIOUSLY OUTSTRIPPED by Offence.

ALSO not helped by the fact that the InDev power makes ALL weapon blocks fire with 20 damage/module in its group. While still allowing the old system to work, minus defence effects

This means that ships that are rapidly tailored for this middle-ground time will have TWICE the total DPS on them for the SAME power cost. This was tested on my old ships VS new. There is no beating the old system with the new while this is true for sheer damage potential.

 

[CyberTao]

I have no idea how the current game is played, not sure what the meta is or who runs the show. Dont play anymore.

Regardless, this power update sounds silly, I've heard rumours, whispers and talk about the changes and the new systems, and honestly I'm not thrilled. It sounds like the devs took the horrible idea that was the original brainstorm, and then changed it around without changing any of the core issues that were blasted back then.

I was honestly excited for the new mechanics, cause the blobs of blocks that was placing shields and weapons prior was what turned me off of systems. The problem is that Schine still tries to bind things to cubes and dimensions. There was a reason dimension based weapon systems were removed years ago, so why the hell would you try to put them back in.

 

[Zerefette]

sad :/
didnt think of it much. now realised my ships will be a massive liabilty in that they will have so much useless space...

Who cares really, you can get working on new stuff faster.

 

[aceface]

Who cares really, you can get working on new stuff faster.

I know but I worry my ships wont be as effective in pvp then. Unless I fill the space with shields and thrust...

 

[Jebediah1]

nightrune It's in your best interests to read this and communicate to the rest of Schine.

No, this change is certainly dumbing it down - in fact, I feel like my intelligence is being insulted. The old power system was quite simple and allowed flexibility for efficient design in virtually any hull - the baseline "efficient" 2mil e/s generation, a set of long lines of reactors in a "checkerboard" pattern (IE no line was adjacent to another) was dead simple and effortless to make. If you understood what exactly was making your power generation more efficient per block (increasing the box dimensions of a reactor group with the fewest amount of blocks possible, EG straight lines in the X Y and Z directions or one very long one in one direction) you could get your 2mil e/s in a very, very small amount of mass. I think mathematically the minimum was well under 200 mass.

This was a problem. While it supported aesthetics-focused builders by allowing you to fit basically however much power you wanted into virtually any ship, it also made meta PVP builders' lives fairly simple and fairly easily. The most efficient setups for power were grids of power lines not connected whatsoever. Such a ship is nearly impossible to hit and while its box dimensions (what you're basing your power generation on now) are extreme, often quite similar to a ship well over 10x or 20x its size, its mass was not at all comparable - I have a 5k mass ship whose box dimensions are similar if not larger than a 150k mass ship. See the mismatch? Basing your efficiency on geometry such as this is a mistake in a three dimensional game where utilized internal volume (in layman's terms, weight/mass) is far more important than the dimensions of the ship thereof. I had hoped Schine had identified this problem and the new power system would address and fix this.

It did not. In fact, it's done exactly the opposite. Not only does this suffer from precisely the same problems the old system did, it exacerbates them - instead of having to worry only about the distance between two points three times per reactor group, I only have to worry about the distance between two points once. My work load for building power on ships has been decreased by 66%, which is quite sizeable. On top of that, it now punishes aesthetic builders - as mentioned, numerous examples exist now of people being unable to even utilize their old ships even with the changes to power costs. Edymnion mentions that expecting to refit should not be a problem - it isn't, what is a problem is having to trash ship hulls because they mathematically and geometrically cannot support their previous systems; this is called a downgrade, not an upgrade or even a sidegrade.

Contrary to popular belief here, myself and other "meta PVP" builders do care about the community - this update makes our lives vastly easier, but at the expense of everyone else, which is most certainly a problem and like any change that negatively affects the game, we are going to talk about it until your eyes get sore. FlyingDebris was able to make a testbed ship that did 14,000,000,000 (billion - count those zeroes) damage at ~300k mass within about 30 minutes of playing the dev build. No legitimately built ship in StarMade has 14,000,000,000 shields, ion or not - regardless of size. If this is working as intended for Schine, this ship has already sank and found a comfy spot on the sea floor.

I said this before when this was merely a proposal, but if Schine is going to ignore me and people like me, we'll just utilize your system to the best of our abilities, and then perhaps instead of us you'll listen to the people who complain about us. This isn't about nuance, this is about absolutely obliterating any semblance of balance you once had in ship design. If there was a divide between meta PVP ships and RP ships, it's turned into a god damn cosmic gulf between galaxies now. I cannot emphasize how much of a mistake this is for keeping 98% of your player base satisfied and happy.

I logged into SMD just to like your comment you fuckin nailed it

 

[Zerefette]

I know but I worry my ships wont be as effective in pvp then. Unless I fill the space with shields and thrust...

Depends if it's counterproductive. I'd be happy if there was only 1 shield block and regen/capacity could be adjusted with a slider.
[doublepost=1507758830,1507758651][/doublepost]Well we need a reason to not fill ships with shield blocks.

 

[Top 4ce]

nightrune It's in your best interests to read this and communicate to the rest of Schine.

No, this change is certainly dumbing it down - in fact, I feel like my intelligence is being insulted. The old power system was quite simple and allowed flexibility for efficient design in virtually any hull - the baseline "efficient" 2mil e/s generation, a set of long lines of reactors in a "checkerboard" pattern (IE no line was adjacent to another) was dead simple and effortless to make. If you understood what exactly was making your power generation more efficient per block (increasing the box dimensions of a reactor group with the fewest amount of blocks possible, EG straight lines in the X Y and Z directions or one very long one in one direction) you could get your 2mil e/s in a very, very small amount of mass. I think mathematically the minimum was well under 200 mass.

This was a problem. While it supported aesthetics-focused builders by allowing you to fit basically however much power you wanted into virtually any ship, it also made meta PVP builders' lives fairly simple and fairly easily. The most efficient setups for power were grids of power lines not connected whatsoever. Such a ship is nearly impossible to hit and while its box dimensions (what you're basing your power generation on now) are extreme, often quite similar to a ship well over 10x or 20x its size, its mass was not at all comparable - I have a 5k mass ship whose box dimensions are similar if not larger than a 150k mass ship. See the mismatch? Basing your efficiency on geometry such as this is a mistake in a three dimensional game where utilized internal volume (in layman's terms, weight/mass) is far more important than the dimensions of the ship thereof. I had hoped Schine had identified this problem and the new power system would address and fix this.

It did not. In fact, it's done exactly the opposite. Not only does this suffer from precisely the same problems the old system did, it exacerbates them - instead of having to worry only about the distance between two points three times per reactor group, I only have to worry about the distance between two points once. My work load for building power on ships has been decreased by 66%, which is quite sizeable. On top of that, it now punishes aesthetic builders - as mentioned, numerous examples exist now of people being unable to even utilize their old ships even with the changes to power costs. Edymnion mentions that expecting to refit should not be a problem - it isn't, what is a problem is having to trash ship hulls because they mathematically and geometrically cannot support their previous systems; this is called a downgrade, not an upgrade or even a sidegrade.

Contrary to popular belief here, myself and other "meta PVP" builders do care about the community - this update makes our lives vastly easier, but at the expense of everyone else, which is most certainly a problem and like any change that negatively affects the game, we are going to talk about it until your eyes get sore. FlyingDebris was able to make a testbed ship that did 14,000,000,000 (billion - count those zeroes) damage at ~300k mass within about 30 minutes of playing the dev build. No legitimately built ship in StarMade has 14,000,000,000 shields, ion or not - regardless of size. If this is working as intended for Schine, this ship has already sank and found a comfy spot on the sea floor.

I said this before when this was merely a proposal, but if Schine is going to ignore me and people like me, we'll just utilize your system to the best of our abilities, and then perhaps instead of us you'll listen to the people who complain about us. This isn't about nuance, this is about absolutely obliterating any semblance of balance you once had in ship design. If there was a divide between meta PVP ships and RP ships, it's turned into a god damn cosmic gulf between galaxies now. I cannot emphasize how much of a mistake this is for keeping 98% of your player base satisfied and happy.

Outside of either overhauling everything or going back, what would you suggest?

 

[Lucidess]

Now it's back to cram packing as much as humanly possible into a ship until it's airtight.

So let's fix it already.

I have been making ships with the reactor/modules/thrust/shield ship with the stabalizers 100 blocks away floating in mid air, heavily armored in a long strip so it's really hard to hit. If schine could fix this atleast then it would give way to some air space in ships. You realize how broken this is right?

Fixes:

Lower the mass count for armor, and buff it to hell.
Do .03 for hull, .06 for standard, and .09 for advanced and you will see much better numbers for your ships thrust vs weight issue, which then solves a chain of other things.

Also if you dont want airtight naked op PvP ships, make modules explode and the shield only applies to hull/armor/doors. This alone would give an overwhelming amount of RP potential since people will have to literally spread out their stuff from not causing a massive meltdown explosion inside your ship, unless you dont care and then suffer the immediate consequences. Works great for PvP too as explosive effect is pretty much unused.

 

[Napther]

Outside of either overhauling everything or going back, what would you suggest?

the OPPOSITE to the current system. Use the convex hull distance calculations and make stabilisers have to be within a certain radius of the reactor to work. Bigger reactors have a larger working radius to go by, with the smallest reactors requiring the stabalizers to be practically adjacent, medium reactors having a leeway of a dozen blocks or so, etc. CERTAINLY NOT the current distance requirements.

I'd also give all system blocks 1-10 reactor HP (Armour and Deco have 0 or some other way to balance "sponge tanking") and make all reactor parts have high Reactor HP. This means that damage will eventually hurt a ship, but not disable it as fast as nailing the reactor.

An inverse of this system would allow some small distance between reactors and the stabalizers. Enough for an RP player to build around and plan for: If not, he can just replace a portion of the reactor with a stabaliser.

 

[Panpiper]

Eliminate stabilizer distance entirely, or use Napther's idea above. A distance mechanic is a needless restriction that forces bad design choices and hurts RP builders especially. Power would be dependant upon one set of contiguous blocks up to a soft cap of 2000 blocks.

Go back to a power cap of 2 million with a similar power curve as the old system, with the curve stretching between one module and two thousand. A good builder could easily hit the cap of power with 2000 modules in the old system. Simply give players the same benefit without making them jump through the hoops, as that seems to be the biggest bugaboo.

Make power modules explode the way auxiliary power explodes in the old power system.

Make stabilizers counter those explosions such that a 1/1 ratio no longer has explosions.

Put back docked power so we can create self powered turrets, etc..

Eliminate destroyed docking systems resulting in undocked systems. Destruction of a docking system should spawn in an intangible 'ghost' if necessary. Have such docked systems go inert instead.

Take a very hard look at balancing weapon damage to bring it back in line with the previous system. Anything that used to have any sort of charge time beyond one second needs to examined under a microscope for balance.

Put a temporary bonus massless, intangible block into the game that allows (maybe, for instance) the building of one or two additional chambers/points. That intangible block is a place holder for the crew and quarters update. People will now gain substantially from creating 'empty' RP space. Make the bonus dependant upon the ratio of those new massless blocks and the total block count of the ship.

Reduce armor and hull mass by half. Give basic hull a 50% damage reduction, standard armor an 80% damage reduction and advanced a 95% damage reduction. Make using hull and armor a no brainer.

Eliminate the ship size turn penalty, make it 100% dependant on mass(mass/#thrusters).

Add four new build tools: 'Fill Available Space' would reduce the block stacking work load a lot. 'Hide All But' would make it very easy to remove unwanted blocks. 'Hollow Ship' would remove all blocks except those exposed to exterior space. 'Hollow Ship Interior' would remove all blocks that are surrounded on all faces by other blocks, so as to leave intact any interior architecture.

 

[The Judge]

I'm surprised Schine isn't listening to the more veteran players who would most likely have more experience (in hours) with the community and Starmade's balance.

 

[StormWing0]

I'm sure half of us locked in a room for about 10min can come up with a way to make this new power system work properly but it doesn't help if we're being semi ignored.

 

[Top 4ce]

I'm surprised Schine isn't listening to the more veteran players who would most likely have more experience (in hours) with the community and Starmade's balance.

I'm sure half of us locked in a room for about 10min can come up with a way to make this new power system work properly but it doesn't help if we're being semi ignored.

Just because they aren't responding, doesn't mean that they aren't reading these discussions. I would suspect they are playing their ideas and internal discussions close to the chest, considering that the power system was needed for a larger universe system.

 

[Zyrr]

Pray tell, what is the point of playing ideas close to your chest when it has already been demonstrated innumerable times that Schine being tight lipped leads to cataclysmic balancing issues such as the one at hand?