New Power DEV Thread

[kikaha]

After crashing while attempting to save my station on local from multiplayer server i relog every time stuck in the build block of the station. I move the charactere and i believe thats what make the station disapear....

 

[Dire Venom]

What I can't figure out is why my turrets aren't working.

The AI won't seem to activate and they won't move manually either. They aren't blocked. I triple checked.

Ideas? Comments? Suggestions?

I've had similar issues in the past. Creating working turrets sometimes just requires re-doing them until they work.
You'll want to make sure they have enough mass enhancers (althougth they arent required for manual movement so that isnt the issue).
Sometimes the direction the base and turret are facing can cause it to 'lock up' or move in reverse.
Somtimes a block can get placed far out from the turret and then get caught on the ship.
I would advise creating anew turret with just a skeleton and slowly piecing it together while constantly testing it.
Not sure if AI works properly in the dev build either. It seems to have a number of bugs,

 

[kikaha]

Ai don't work. It can't be activated manually or with admin commands.

Build helper (circle at least) is "broken" the outline of the circle appear like hovering above or under the structure you're building onto.

 

[StormWing0]

Ya the AI is totally broken. It functions off the old systems just fine because it seems to take them into account but with the new system it might be wanting to check for power capacity and since it can't fine it the AI doesn't know how much power it has to make use of.

 

[timethatswasted]

Wow.... just wow....

As many do, I fail to see why this new bonus system could not have been added to the existing power system. This system would be great if you had just started developing the game, but to add it in 6 years into the games development is just ... “insert colorful language here”

I am all for a bonus system that makes ships unique.

But you could have saved yourself a summers worth of coding. Not to mention all the work that has to be done to ... well .... REDO EVERYTHING.

The reactors/stabilizers should have been added in as a “central computer” or something that the chambers connect to.

The old power system should have remained, but had caps and diminishing returns added to it. Requiring you to use chambers to make your power system better.

Everything would have still worked. You would have just had to add more stuff to it to make it better.

I’ve played/followed this game for 6 years. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my fun with it, thousands of hours over that time. I am not mad, just sad to see this game flounder around. I’ve seen it have 3 major direction changes that I can think of.

It’s just unfortunate. Like many games these days, just locked in a perpetual cycle of bad decisions and a total lack of ability to just get something done.

 

[MChain]

Hmm... Downloaded dev and am unable to find the chamber GUI. Tried the whole keyboard on both reactor and chamber blocks, no reaction. Conduit connections do not cause anything to appear, c-v connections do not work on reactors or chambers... Can anybody explain how the thing is supposed to work?

 

[Cluwne]

It's in the radial menu. Watch the stream highlights.

 

[nightrune]

Hmm... Downloaded dev and am unable to find the chamber GUI. Tried the whole keyboard on both reactor and chamber blocks, no reaction. Conduit connections do not cause anything to appear, c-v connections do not work on reactors or chambers... Can anybody explain how the thing is supposed to work?

Tab -> radial menu -> ship-> reactor

 

[MChain]

Thank you.

Forgot about radial menu...

 

[Drakkart]

Listen to this gentlemann by req he is refering to the stabilizers

please move away from dimensional req's already ;_;

You say you want ships to have more design freedom, yet are stubbornly holding onto essentially the same design constrictions that affected power reactors.

Agreed. I feel that ship designs shouldn't be forced into shapes, and that a player should beable to make a hull, then outfit the ship without needing to rip holes all across it just so the reactor works :/
Overall I don't see much of a need for stabilizors. I would much rather they simply provided a small bonus + reduce the chance of reactor blocks exploding when hit (like how auxiliary blocks worked). The devs have said that they will be considering and testing the idea as well :3

There will be just one new ship shape a long stick...

 

[bricox01]

My personal feelings after playing around with the new system:

• The chamber to reactor ratio is too harsh. Drop it to about 1/10 to 1/5 the current # of chamber blocks req'd
• The new beam graphics are much better
• The activated chamber blocks need meaningful and obvious symbols instead of a simple green dot
• Turrets are broken and focus-fire is quirky. I have faith that these bugs will be ironed out soon.
• I can get lots of power into my 300 meter heavy corvette without making a stick ship
• The new system doesn't give me advantages over the old system in terms of space or block savings. See my first point.
• It isn't any simpler in terms of building ships.
• I like chambers and ship specialization.
• Where's the option for an auto-charging ftl drive?
• Stabilizers feel too much like an artificial limitation. Maybe ditch those and simply have logarithmic mass increase for larger reactors.
• Primary reactor should handle chambers. Additional reactors should generate power, but not allow attached/active chambers.

My two cents. Feel free to call me crazy.

 

[Az14el]

• I can get lots of power into my 300 meter heavy corvette without making a stick ship

Lots of power relative to what?
Point is you can do better with one, there's no reason 300 meters couldnt be a "light corvette" with the exact same throughput in this case. Not because of "good engineering", but because its simply long. h'okay

 

[kulbolen]

measuring your ships size by its z axis dimension is very... limiting.

 

[Mork2]

Some interesting ideas which appears like you can do with the current chamber system.

Station with 2 FTL chambers for increased warp gate distance and the ability to send to set of coordinates.

• This would allow you to form a fleet up at your base and just drive through the gate with charged jump drives into target sector in range.
• You would have a small station blueprint with a warp gate loading ready to spawn and carry it through the gate to the target coordinates then spawn in the small station and set it to back near the starting station.
• There is enough room that with another 2 FTL chambers you could build in a jump inhibitor into your station.

A second station reactor setup with 3 Recon chambers for perma scan, scan strength 3 or 4 (whatever is required to pickup perma cloakers) and then scan range.

• The station can then scan and engage hostile cloakers.
• You can switch back to another reactor like the warp gate one when needed.

You could setup a small armed station with the above recon setup and set it down in the area your AI mining fleets operate. So it can auto-attack hostile cloakers. Won't standup to combat ships but maybe against stealthers so should be expendable.

Mining reactor setup 1 resource chamber and maybe 2 mobility chambers.

• You can set it to mining bonus 3 whatever that ends up being for mining
• +100% max speed for travel and 2 levels of turning so you have a very agile and fast mining ship for travel purposes.

Or you could try perma cloaking mining ships. In theory the fleet AI can activate cloaking so while there not mining their cloaked.

With your mining fleets you could setup some escort ships one with the recon setup, a couple with cloaker setups and one with a warp inhibitor setup. That way any attackers attacking the mining fleet would have to deal with a ship that can see cloaked ships, will be inhibited and there are a couple extra ships cloaked.

With the new chamber setup you can't specialise in a lot of things at the same time. You need multiple ships so fleets will be more important if you don't have friends flying with you.

 

[DevajC]

- Reactor block count should be smaller than that of stabilizers. Probably much smaller.
-Chambers should be smaller in relation to reactor. Not half the block count per chamber.

- Weapons with long recharge times must have higher cost of recharge/maintenance than weapons that have high rate of fire. The higher the reload times the higher the cost.

I highly disagree with your first point. I think reactor count should be drastically higher than stabilizer count. Otherwise its multiple large space investments scattered throughout your ship instead of a single large one that can be placed wherever. 1 large system is also easier to relocate later on when there is less space,since the distance factor is less important (you wont have to tear into nearby ship systems as badly with smaller stabilizers.) I very much agree with your chamber point though.

. Plus it makes sense in a sci-fi way like in irl that isnt how it works but thats subjective.
[doublepost=1507435936,1507435753][/doublepost]

- Reactor block count should be smaller than that of stabilizers. Probably much smaller.
-Chambers should be smaller in relation to reactor. Not half the block count per chamber.

- Weapons with long recharge times must have higher cost of recharge/maintenance than weapons that have high rate of fire. The higher the reload times the higher the cost.

i mostley agree. Though i dont like the idea of needing that much bigger stabilizers. I agree on the chambers though, they tend to ear up a lot of space especially for those effects with complicated trees (its ok for chambers you can upgrade). And i strongly agree that high alpha weapons need some sort of serious balance. Also, shields in general seem to be pretty useless atm. They cost quite some energy to maintain and drop instantly to the new weapons (especially the high alpha weapons).

I think having high damage alpha weapons be easy to make was a intended feature. I think its kind of a good idea.
[doublepost=1507436520][/doublepost]

I was so happy when I saw JW608s video about the release of the new power upgrade in DEV mode.
So I updated the new files and went right into it.
First Mistake I made, was I used my current universe, I had been working hard on for 2 Projects, a 50x50x50 small station, and a mega Manufacturing Plant that can create every possible block every tick.
So of course , I had to be able to produce the new blocks myself. So I added several basic, and standard factories to do just that, I made about 200 of each. enough to start playing with it.
I started my first ship with the new blocks, major mistakes all the time, no videos to teach how to use yet. The problem I had was using a Radar Jammer, It just wont work with the new power blocks.
THEN MY STATION VANISHED, I logged out and back in a few times and still no station, THEN ALL MY SHIPS VANISHED. Now I'm getting upset and worried, I tried repairing starmade and still nothing.

IF YOU WANT TO TRY OUT THE NEW POWER BLOCKS, MAKE A NEW UNIVERSE FIRST.

So now I,m still upset over this, there were no warnings of this will ever happen. I think you should have waited another 6 months before releasing it to Dev Build, with more tutorials, paperwork on how to use, and what TO WATCH OUT FOR.

I ENDED UP HAVING TO DELETE EVERYTHING AND LOADING STARMADE FRESH. nOW IM SEEING NPC SHIPS DISSAPEARING RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME, IM USING RELEASE BUILD THIS TIME.

fix this please. I'm going to have to wait a little longer before I try that again. I learned another lesson to, save a copy of everything every 30 minutes while building any ship or station.

Im sorry ive lost progress before too because of broken release updates. And if they released a tutorial for this it would be their actual first ever tutorial!
[doublepost=1507436796][/doublepost]

The most serious problem I see with the new power system is that it's purely based on GENERATION of power, aside from the scant little power storage innate to the core, the system has no visible power STORAGE. Unless you hybridize your power systems (add power caps alongside the new reactors), you don't get more storage than the 50k innate to any ship core (which is part of the old power system, so it's not affected at all by the new power system).

With the old system, you could calculate how much power the ships needs to be fully functional and then tailor the power system to match those calculations.

With the new system, you can still do the calculations, but as you have no storage capacity beyond the core, you can only match generation and not have any stored power to fall upon if your generation is affected.

This is intentional and a good feature IMO. They need to scale up the stats of functional systems and and scale down the range of numbers that stats can fall within to 50'000, and it all should fit together.
[doublepost=1507437787][/doublepost]

They really need to add a FCS (Firing control system) chamber, or just built into every shipcore. This would mean we can simply lock on to targets just like an AI would, but with our main weapons. Then improve it even further by allowing multiple targets to be locked on in your view, depending on how many groups of weapons you have.

Say you made a big expensive ship and then you fight 100 small "efficient" but cheap ships.
This would stop quantity over quality when alpha weapons are staring down a swarm of mosquitoes and can only hit 1 at a time, as I can easily see this happening with the new power update. Spreading out a swarm would take time, but your ship could be fast enough to catch 2 or more at a time.

Then we won't have to perform math on a PHD level (and MLG FPS accuracy) to hit something, and our weapons would actually be worth using no matter what they are.

Otherwise i'll just have a ship with no main weapon and turrets to hit stuff. How does this relate to power? Well missed shots = wasted power = less efficient ship = etc.

Absolutely!! This would make the combat so much more fun about would be a very much needed "new feature". Right now its just a game of point and click, like a spot the difference game.

 

[bricox01]

Lots of power relative to what?
Point is you can do better with one, there's no reason 300 meters couldnt be a "light corvette" with the exact same throughput in this case. Not because of "good engineering", but because its simply long. h'okay

Relative to a similar size ship of the same role under the old power system.

Sorry, my "heavy corvette" hasn't been named yet. I term it a heavy corvette as a working title based on it being bigger and heavier than my old corvette.

The height is around 80m and the beam is around 100m. It maintains a 2.1 TWR without its turrets or shields installed yet. Thanks to the chamber system, it's actually more manueverable than its smaller predecessor.

However, until the game bugs are resolved, empirical testing isn't really possible.

 

[DevajC]

Lots of power relative to what?
Point is you can do better with one, there's no reason 300 meters couldnt be a "light corvette" with the exact same throughput in this case. Not because of "good engineering", but because its simply long. h'okay

There was never a universal standard in the old system either, so we just have to wait and see. We might even get one in the new system though since it looks like they are removing power capacity so there wont be ridiculously huge numbers to guesstimate between

 

[Zoolimar]

I highly disagree with your first point. I think reactor count should be drastically higher than stabilizer count. Otherwise its multiple large space investments scattered throughout your ship instead of a single large one that can be placed wherever.

In that case it probably would be better to just remove stabilizers completely. Because if your stabilizers take damage during a fight reactor will lose some effectiveness, but if your reactor takes damage during the fight your power will shut down completely. With reactor being smaller than stabilizers you could reasonably have multiple redundant reactors only one of which works, but with reactor being much bigger than stabilizers making a redundant reactor is not only problematic by block count but also because it will be hard to place it in such a way that it won't take damage before you need it thus making the reason for a redundant reactor obsolete.

If you want big reactors it actually would be better to remove stabilizers completely and allow multiple reactors active on the single dock chain but also making them a little more vulnerable and more powerful the bigger they are. So big reactors would be more effective than smaller reactors but also easier to destroy and players will need to choose between one big and effective reactor or multiple smaller but less effective.

To Note: Under "more powerful/more effective" I don't mean a more or less exponential growth where big reactors are vastly more efficient but instead a growth to a certain limit of effectiveness per block with it slowing down at bigger sizes. So let's say a 1 bock reactor will have 50% of effectiveness and 20x20x20 cube will have 90% effectiveness. But 40x40x40 cube won't have 130% effectiveness it would be 97% effective instead. And no reactor ever will be able to pass 100% only ever trying to get closer to it.

 

[Az14el]

There were other ships to compare to?
There still are if we're talking old system?

So obviously it would be fair to compare new ships to new ships? Who's potential is once again reliant on their use of dimensions due to, yet again, dimensional based power generation. So yuh, capability for any ships mass is going to be pretty damn dependant on dimensions;mass and more extremely so towards the smaller scale of ships.

An example on old systems is that ~1.5 kms length of power reactors is 2m e/s, and only ~150 mass, making extreme dimensions even more important the smaller you try to be (ratio of power;weight, also consider that turrets are all "small ships" essentially). This kind of design is explicitly rewarded at all scales on current systems even when considering turn rate, one extreme dimension still allows and even complements 1 extreme turning dimension, aka vertical or 'wide winged' ships, it makes demands of the builder aesthetics wise to create a strong ship that can compete with other piloted/well designed ships. This is something Schine have stated they want to change, as one of the primary reasons for systems 2.0's design, but havn't yet addressed the underlying issue.

 

[Zoolimar]

This kind of design is explicitly rewarded at all scales on current systems even when considering turn rate (one extreme dimension still allows and even compliments 1 extreme turning dimension, aka vertical or 'wide winged' ships), it makes demands of the builder aesthetics wise to create a strong ship that can compete with other piloted/well designed ships. This is something Schine have stated they want to change, as one of the primary reasons for systems 2.0's design, but havn't yet addressed the underlying issue.

I don't think it is possible to remove demands for certain shapes from ships in a game that relies on creation of them in 3D world from voxels. Unless of course you want to transform ships into blobs of systems+HP with no ability to destroy individual blocks.

It is just a difference in approaches that people take to creation of ships. One man will try to make a ship that looks like something from a known universe, or with a nice looking shell with no compromise for how systems should be placed due to Starmade rules. The other will first build systems accounting fully to how they work and only after that go for beautification of the build. And as long as any advantage could be squeezed from building the ship in a certain shape the second builder will use it.