New Power DEV Thread

[Ithirahad]

How could you not have stabilizers for this power system? It would simply be OP if they didn't exist.

False binary. Not having the current stabilizer system does not automatically mean an overpowered system with no moderating mechanic whatsoever. In an absolute worst-case scenario, they could simply (and rather trivially) rebalance power reactors so that a reactor blob to run a ship would end up roughly the size of a reactor+capacitor+aux system in old power, and it wouldn't be OP. Of course, I don't want that, and hopefully nobody else does either, as there are plenty of better options for power mechanics, but yeah...

 

[nightrune]

nightrune is there any plans to make multiple groups of stabilizers serve the same reactor?

All stabilizers are for all reactors. You won't be able to tag them together.

 

[kulbolen]

How could you not have stabilizers for this power system? It would simply be OP if they didn't exist.

im not advocating for removal of stabilizers, but this is pretty easy to answer tbh. numbers can be tuned, curves can be tuned, you can get basicalyl the same result without them as you have with them, minus the dim reqs. speaking of, why are they needed nightrune?

 

[Dire Venom]

nightrune is there any plans to make multiple groups of stabilizers serve the same reactor?

Wait..... so all your stabilizers need to be part of the same group to work for a reactor .........
Why is this a thing? Doesn't seem very engaging, just frustrating building wise.

Edit: Thank goodness that was clarified, don't scare us like that :P

 

[Snowtiger256]

I noticed some glitches in calculating power in the new system, sometimes the system stops calculating altogether, giving you false data (as in it defaults to 300 e/s at a 100% efficiency, no matter how many reactors and stabilizers you have). This can be remedied with adding more power stuff (triggers a recalculation of stats), but it's annoying, nevertheless.

I had one test build that refused to actually work due to the glitches, and I had to despawn the build and rebuild it to get it working.

Also, it seems that all stabilizers on a ship are counted as being in a single group at the moment, I have a test build with multiple stabilizer groups, and still in the Structure menu, it all counts as one group. I suspect this is going to change though, seeing as there are some placeholder and testing entries in the Structure menu at the moment. Also, the entry on "Main reactor" doesn't list the recharge rating, while listing the block count of the reactor group.

 

[alterintel]

Alternatively, get rid of stabilizer distance entirely. Make reactor blocks explode from damage (which you should do regardless). Make stabilizers counter this. The downside to that is that people will again be tempted to fill their ships with blocks (which in my opinion has never been an issue that needed fixing). Putting the crew and quarters system into the game however would neatly fix the 'problem' of solid ships.

nightrune
SO MUCH YES!

 

[Panpiper]

It would seem to me that if stabilizer distance was no longer a thing, if power was simply a matter of power blocks and corresponding stabilizers to keep the power blocks from cooking off in battle, that there would be little reason to maintain the prohibition versus docked power. Self powered turrets could again be a thing.

This would make ship building MUCH easier for the more casual builders, as they would then be able to simply download a self powered turret from community content and add it to their ship. Without self powered turrets, A player has to be MUCH more judicious.

The big problem with docked power was not so much free floating turrets, but rather docked internal reactors free floating from battle damage, clipping inside the ship, and the lag that caused. (This could have been solved by making destroyed docked systems inert instead of free floating, which should still be done.) The prime motivation for docked power however was to exceed power caps. It was the power caps ultimately that were the true culprit.

It would seem to me that the current system being developed has done away with power caps, attempting to limit power solely by forcing giganticism. This again is not IMO a good way of handling things. The game has problems with giganticism, you should not create mechanics that reward it.

Do away with power limits entirely. Make power a linear function of how many power blocks you have on a ship. Give each separate entity a 'quickly' (like with a mere 100 blocks) achieved bonus of power equal to perhaps a thousand blocks and then level it off at what the current power per block is. This will be sufficient to make effective small ships and drones, but it will not be so large as to encourage battleships with eighty internal docked reactors (those kinds of ships are quite complicated to build, and most won't bother just to save 8000 mass).

Yes, you will get ships that have lots of power relative to what they would have otherwise had with your linear giganticism model. So what? Balance for that. Reduce weapon power, increase shield effectiveness, lower armor mass, etc.. There are all sorts of ways you can balance for ships being able to build in the amount of power they want. You will take away un-intuitive build restrictions that inevitably result in absurd distortions as people try to build around the restriction. Let people simply build as they see fit.

To encourage open space for RP building, hurry up the crew and quarters system. If that will take too long, create a placeholder massless, empty space block that gives say (as a possible example) two extra chamber points 'if' 50% of the blocks of the ship are those massless empty space blocks. Bingo, lots of RP space, even in ships that are not built for RP.

 

[GDPR 302420]

im not advocating for removal of stabilizers, but this is pretty easy to answer tbh. numbers can be tuned, curves can be tuned, you can get basicalyl the same result without them as you have with them, minus the dim reqs. speaking of, why are they needed nightrune?

fukin this

 

[Scypio]

im not advocating for removal of stabilizers, but this is pretty easy to answer tbh. numbers can be tuned, curves can be tuned, you can get basicalyl the same result without them as you have with them, minus the dim reqs. speaking of, why are they needed nightrune?

Tagging nightrune so we can get an answer. Maybe.

 

[Nosajimiki]

The power system does not meet the goals of the new power system

See Here: Issues with the 2.0 Power System (Regarding the Goals of the New System)

 

[kikaha]

Removing systems then trying to look up the ship reactor menu crashes the game

 

[Capt Black001]

Well, I gat into a few fights with the Pirates, (That's Pirates 3 Me Zero. For those keeping score.) I noticed that with no armor, no shields, just systems, you get hit once, youre kicked out of an overheating ship, So I Reboot, wait the 40 seconds and go in, reboot again, and again and again. It wont let me back into the ship. So I did a reboot one more time, exited the game, and went back in, finnallt I got back into my ship and admin warped out of there. It happened twice before and lost my ship everytime. Its a good thing I saved those ships.

Is this another BUG, not being able to re-enter your ship after a reboot.

 

[nightrune]

Tagging nightrune so we can get an answer. Maybe.

Its does mostly what players have pointed out. It limits the amount of power you can have in a specific ship. So far its working as designed. Depending on how we scale the blocks and ratios you'll have more or less space from blocks on the config. Except for a few anomaly's we can effectively control how much power given a specific ship size. From our viewpoint, we need to balance not only combat but ship roles as well. Chambers seem very effective at that, but in the initial chambers rely on the stabilizer mechanic working. We understand some players believe this to not be the case, and that having empty space shouldn't actually be empty space (i.e. crew areas).

As far as a ship that uses a far distance to maximize power, We understand that its an odd(immersion) issue to allow within the system, and will monitor the ships that get built. On paper that seems to be a rather strong build. We'll need to see how it players out with the mix of chambers.

My question is, and has been, how much more effective should a well designed ship be compared to a poorly designed ship. What does it mean to be poorly designed and what does it mean to be well designed. I see many discussions in many threads over this area. I would love to see a wealth of equally viable ships, but alas a game is built on a series of functions/math so there may always be an optimal solution. The key for Schine as game designers is to build a system in such a way that, when we change something it doesn't fundamentally break user creations (I know the irony in that based on this breaking change, we did not chose to do this lightly), and that it is balance-able.

So please continue to dissect, discussion, and document your findings within the system. I love seeing the brainstorming people do as they come up with what they can do with a certain ship and systems.

 

[Az14el]

So my 1.5km ship should be how strong relative to my 1.3km ship? Trick question

 

[kikaha]

Still way too many blocks involved to create a power system.

keep the distance between reactor and stabilizer but please reduce the amount of blocks needed. Do increase the price as you reduce the quantity.

 

[0ldSkull]

Just a piece of advice... All of this feedback requesting to increase this or decrease that will probably be a lot more helpful to the devs if it comes with some kind of context. Describe the scale, dimensions, role, or just something about the affected ship. Maybe even tell about what you're trying to do with the ship or how you're going about it. What are you dissatisfied with under the new system relative to the old system (if that is the source of dissatisfaction)?

Also, just as an observation, the most, um, critical contributors most likely have ships which have been highly optimized under the legacy power system. Expect to have to perform an appreciable amount of tuning under the new system to reach the same satisfaction. If every ship just dropped in the new power system and changed nothing else, and remained just as powerful (or greater), and had just as much advantage relative to other ships, then I doubt (just my guess) that Shine would consider it to have met their intentions.

 

[Az14el]

We do expect an appreciable amount of work to learn the new system, which is part of the problem, we've all done the bigger boxdim to stack more power game to death, a mechanic independant of dimensions (which do very little to represent actual ship size in terms of investment or block count/mass) for a change would be far more ideal imo

 

[Nosajimiki]

Also, just as an observation, the most, um, critical contributors most likely have ships which have been highly optimized under the legacy power system.

You are right, but not for the reasons you think you are. People who have dedicated thousands of hours to optimizing the old system did so because it is something we enjoy. Having to learn a new system is just a new batch of things to optimise = fun. The criticism comes from already knowing what we would do to beat the new system and knowing that if we did that, it would result in some autistic garbage. This system does not enforce inner space, it enforces long skinny phallic ships or ships with stupid floating power systems that will still be filled with systems, because that is optimal, and optimal is what PvPers are going to aim for exactly 100% of the time. If you want innerspace as an objective, you have to make it an advantage and not a desired byproduct of an arbitrary penalty.

Edit: Also, just because you enforce an inner space does not mean you will get an RP interior.

 

[diremage]

Its does mostly what players have pointed out. It limits the amount of power you can have in a specific ship. So far its working as designed. Depending on how we scale the blocks and ratios you'll have more or less space from blocks on the config. Except for a few anomaly's we can effectively control how much power given a specific ship size. From our viewpoint, we need to balance not only combat but ship roles as well. Chambers seem very effective at that, but in the initial chambers rely on the stabilizer mechanic working. We understand some players believe this to not be the case, and that having empty space shouldn't actually be empty space (i.e. crew areas).

My question regarding stabilizers in particular is, why are you using two block types when one would do? Clearly this has been a much-discussed point in the office.

...
My question is, and has been, how much more effective should a well designed ship be compared to a poorly designed ship.

One elite, experienced PVP'er in a max-optimized ship should have no trouble taking out one knowledgeable regular in a mostly-optimized ship, but two regulars should beat the elite player at least half the time. If the elite player sees four regulars in smaller ships, the elite player should avoid engagement. An elite player should be able to take out at least four (possibly up to any number) of novices who have only a vague idea of what they're doing, even if they greatly out-mass him. Note I probably qualify myself more along the lines of a regular than an elite PVP'er, I know all of the basic principles of ship design but I've only got limited experience in applying them.

What does it mean to be poorly designed and what does it mean to be well designed. I see many discussions in many threads over this area. I would love to see a wealth of equally viable ships, but alas a game is built on a series of functions/math so there may always be an optimal solution. The key for Schine as game designers is to build a system in such a way that, when we change something it doesn't fundamentally break user creations (I know the irony in that based on this breaking change, we did not chose to do this lightly), and that it is balance-able...

If you want to see a wealth of equally-viable ships, the stabilizer mechanic is probably not the way to do that. Here are some tweaks to think about for it:

* What if stabilizer groups could use not just the distance to reactor but the minimum of the distance between each group and the reactor? So six equally-spaced stabilizer groups could be placed in a cube around the reactor with a shorter range than one larger reactor group, leading to a prevalence of fins and wings.

* What if stabilizers had to be exposed to vacuum on exactly two faces to work most efficiently? (For the sake of RP ships, let's suppose that hull and armor blocks count as vacuum).

* What if every power block actually had to touch at least one stabilizer, rather than enforcing a distance mechanic; but both power and stabilizer had to be exactly one group?

* Remove stabilizers. Power blocks function most efficiently in groups of exactly 17 where each block is touching exactly two other blocks.

* Remove stabilizers. Power blocks function most efficiently when exactly three faces of each block are touching another power block.

* Remove stabilizers. Power blocks function best in groups of exactly 1000 with 50-meter power "conduits" between generators. (I like this one, it suggests that your ship has to take a certain volume of space just like the stabilizers do but it doesn't say how you have to fill that space).

* Remove stabilizers. Power blocks must touch water blocks in order to function efficiently. Power blocks gain bonus output for each block they touch. A pebble-bed reactor could be six times more efficient than a cube.

 

[Panpiper]

Also, just as an observation, the most, um, critical contributors most likely have ships which have been highly optimized under the legacy power system. Expect to have to perform an appreciable amount of tuning under the new system to reach the same satisfaction.

This is absolutely false. The problem is that the old system 'permitted' an enormous amount of brain time and building nuance to squeeze greater performance out of a ship. It had more depth and nuance than ANY other build system in the history of computer gaming. Schine for some inexplicable reason thinks this is a bad thing that needs to be fixed. So they came up with this new power system that makes every bit as little sense as the old, that will result in MUCH more limited ship designs, and here is the kicker, has utterly NO depth or nuance whatsoever!*

The new system with require absolutely no 'tuning'. Power plants are now trivially easy and possess no nuance or depth whatsoever. Schine has succeeded admirably in their goal, albeit with a system that is going to result in extremely stupid looking ships for anyone who builds for optimum effect.

*I am referring here specifically to the power system, not so much the chamber system or the changes to how weapons load, etc.. I do think the chamber system for instance is a pretty major step backwards from the old system that required a mass percentage investment, but it is not utterly devoid of nuance, unlike the new power system, which is.

For more constructive feedback refer to my previous post.