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    jorgekorke

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    You've got me interested right there. Maybe I'll leave EE for that.
    Now, to the most cruel question ever that might decide the future : Will the mining rates be default or tweaked ?
     

    Ithirahad

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    You've got me interested right there. Maybe I'll leave EE for that.
    Now, to the most cruel question ever that might decide the future : Will the mining rates be default or tweaked ?
    Yeah... if I didn't intend to reboot my faction on Shattered Skies I'd just join this server... As it happens I'll have to just go ahead and play on both. If something like this server could be set up except with player factions rather than established ones I'd happily jump on there.
     

    jorgekorke

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    Yeah... if I didn't intend to reboot my faction on Shattered Skies I'd just join this server... As it happens I'll have to just go ahead and play on both. If something like this server could be set up except with player factions rather than established ones I'd happily jump on there.
    Shattered Skies does not have size limits, so it's just a matter of time for it turning into a EE MK II. So I'll be rather waiting on this one.
     

    Ithirahad

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    Shattered Skies does not have size limits, so it's just a matter of time for it turning into a EE MK II. So I'll be rather waiting on this one.
    SS DOES, however, have rules against doomcubes, if memory serves. And evidently, that server seems to tend towards more interesting ships than giant flying fridges anyway.
     

    jorgekorke

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    SS DOES, however, have rules against doomcubes, if memory serves. And evidently, that server seems to tend towards more interesting ships than giant flying fridges anyway.
    Only when it's over 1 km long/wide/i forgot the word in english
     
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    Okay you asked for it. I apologize to everyone else for this since its about to get interesting like a math class. I will try to Spoiler tag it and lets see if that works.

    So in the current build I have only the weapons changed on the base level. We haven't tested it much besides watching a couple dozen AIs kill each other and our two PVP experts smashing things with them. They seem quite effective now and much more balanced. The missiles aren't wrecking the world and the beams and cannons actually seem 'heavier' feeling. Sadly we haven't had a chance to blow up as much as we have been building. 4 stations of the size in the pictures over 2.5 weeks.

    My personal notes I wrote for myself starting this bit of work.

    "The point of this balance was to increase the effectiveness of the 3 other weapons without invalidating the missiles. This avoids ruining a Blueprint by nerfing the missiles. While one could argue buffs to everything else are nerfs, in this case the numbers show the power of the missile. Missiles are dead even to the other weapons when range and AOE is not accounted for, then another 60% range is given to the weapon set plus the AOE effective against unshielded targets. Combined with its lethal seeking accuracy this can cause an imbalance. Solving for the DPS and PPS is easy. Once those are solved for then the data needs to be normalized. Since the next variable factor is the range that is compared against the total as a raw multiplier. The power needs to be reduced to a ratio since not all devices use the same power amount per shot. The constant was 50 for this since it was the missile baseline. Then the balancing was performed. Some tweaks to the weapons and groups need to be made."

    First thing I did was break up the weapon into metric categories as follows (I ran this through excel).
    View attachment 11861

    I then categorized them by proportionality and supplementary. That then becomes Indirectly and Directly.
    So Directly Proportional are Multipliers, Inversely Proportional are Divisors, Directly Supplementary are Additions and Inversely Supplementary are Subtractions. I then slapped all that into a formula which was then fed all the data for the weapons.

    Formula(AOE): =(POWER(Radius, 2)/20*DPS*Range)*(50/PPS)
    DPS is Damage Per Second = Damage * Pulses / Reload
    PPS is Power Per Second = Power / Reload

    Formula (Direct) =(DPS*Range)*(50/PPS)

    This is where the formula needs weighting. The DPS is essentially as valuable as the range, which is kind of true, but not to the current extent. But even with the weighting you can see the issue. AOE damage is huge against unshielded targets. (Yes the formula for Volume of a circle is (V=4/3 π r^3) but I traded it to a nerf area of a circle because Using half or 1/8 sphere was off the scale, I think half sphere was something like a weight of 8k, AKA unmanageable to balance).

    I will tweak later as we go along with testing but the end result is it gives me a Balancing formula that can be used to gauge the 'on paper' lethal nature of a weapon. The first numbers coming back were scary, much having to do with the issue of missiles and the lack of range on the Damage Pulse. Damage pulse was in this formula essentially useless, which is somewhat true from experience. On the other hand missiles are the prime PVP weapon, with cannons providing that backup between salvos. And beams are essentially MEH. So the formula holds true for what we are seeing.

    Next I started balancing the weapons. Keep in mind their are playstyles and overall block destruction that required some things to be tweaked away from my baseline of 8 points I was aiming for. Beams are very good at killing a half dozen blocks with the pulse effect. While the cannons were great against shields but the block damage was terrible even with piercing and punch through (Can we say nerf gone too far?). So play style kicked in and the the cannons got a slight bump up (to compensate for the lack of single block damage). I tried my best to not nerf the missiles and think I did a solid job. They feel explosive and yet aren't the king of the server.

    Once I feel those are solid and leveled I will work on the Slave weapons. I already have another formula for that and have the basic numbers up. Just it takes a lot of testing for me to be satisfied with balance.

    Here are my notes of what the pro/con/tradeoffs were.

    Advantages:
    • Alternate weapons are opened up.
    • pulses are now semi capable of combat, but slower.
    • Cannons and Pulses are now not as effective against missiles.
    • Less projectiles will be launched in a fight with slower cannons, but increasing hit rate. (Lag skipping of bullets)
    • Beams have much greater range and a heavier feel
    Disadvantages:
    • Missiles will need projectile speed increase to offset loss of superiority, loss of pulse counter and AA cannons helps though.
    • Cannons and Pulses are now not as effective against missiles.
    • Beams will be VERY power hungry for their new strength
    Neutral points:
    • Power usage will be much spikier in combat, alpha** strike less likely.
    • Beams need group penalty added (DEVs please?), will reduce lag as well through with less beams
    • Combat will have harder hits, but slower firing rates.
    • Combat ranges have been increased significantly with these changes
    • Might encourage diversity of weapon builds
    **Alpha strike does not mean First Strike, it means everything is fired at once. Which IMO should mean 'Power Failure' flashing on your screen afterwards.


    XML code for those that like it, and for those that will wander off with this and not say thank you. ;)

    <Cannon>
    <Damage>16</Damage>
    <Distance>1</Distance>
    <Speed>10</Speed>
    <ReloadMs>2000</ReloadMs>
    <PowerConsumption>50</PowerConsumption><AdditionalPowerConsumptionPerUnitMult>0.1</AdditionalPowerConsumptionPerUnitMult>

    <DumbMissile>
    <Damage>75</Damage>
    <Distance>1.8</Distance>
    <Radius>8</Radius>
    <Speed>1.50</Speed>
    <ReloadMs>15000</ReloadMs>
    <PowerConsumption>1200</PowerConsumption>
    <AdditionalPowerConsumptionPerUnitMult>0.1</AdditionalPowerConsumptionPerUnitMult>

    <DamageBeam>
    <DamagePerHit>10</DamagePerHit>
    <PowerConsumptionPerSec>875</PowerConsumptionPerSec>
    <Distance>1.4</Distance>
    <TickRate>0.2</TickRate>
    <CoolDown>10.0</CoolDown>
    <BurstTime>2</BurstTime>
    <InitialTicks>0</InitialTicks>

    <DamagePulse>
    <Damage>25</Damage>
    <ReloadMs>30000</ReloadMs>
    <Radius>100</Radius>
    <PowerConsumption>2500</PowerConsumption>

    More will come in the future for rebalancing. its a slow process which is likely why the Devs haven't done it much yet. They do rapid tweaks to keep us going but nothing major can be done on their part without the time investment.
    Very promissing so far, cant agree with everything you did, and it seems you didint know about the Beam Hitregistration bugs beyond 2-3km, but other than that its good work and promissing.

    A few tips/concerns thou:

    Beams are Hitscan ofc, after a certain range around 2-3km they have issues with their hitregistration, its very sporadic, but does exist. So you might want to test for it, and maybe limit beam range to prevent frustration caused by this bug that can literally render beams useless after a certain range.

    Cannon rate of fire and projectile speed, nearly nobody uses cannons except cannon+cannon due to the rate of fire and slow projectiles, so the RoF nerf is pretty ugly. I would advice to rather raise the rate of fire of normal-, beam- and pulse-cannons, and keep the RoF of Cannon-Cannon pretty close to the original, and slightly increase the projectile speed.

    Missile Speed, while homing missiles dont need that much speed, and should be slower than on most servers, unguided missiles need a serious speed buff to be usefull, you even nerfed their speed, with <Speed>1.50</Speed> a ship with 51%+ overdrive would be faster. So i advice to increase their speed to at least 3 or 4 times the server speed, otherwise those will be dead weapons again.
     
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    Beams are Hitscan ofc
    I will have to test for this. I sadly don't know of all the wonderful bugs in the game only being a member for 5 months. Also there is always hope they stealth fixed it sometime. TBH, the beams in the current build are quite deadly. It needs more testing before I move on to the slaves then the effects.

    Cannon rate of fire and projectile speed, nearly nobody uses cannons except cannon+cannon due to the rate of fire and slow projectiles, so the RoF nerf is pretty ugly. I would advice to rather raise the rate of fire of normal-, beam- and pulse-cannons, and keep the RoF of Cannon-Cannon pretty close to the original, and slightly increase the projectile speed.
    I might be able to pull that off but cannons currently have a side effect of rounds skipping. This I have tested on a few servers. At 10 RPS the bullets just start disappearing. So actually you lose bullets. Mostly happened in large ship fights. I tested it on hulls to see how many were disappearing and it seemed like 2-3 out of 10, which wasn't good. I wanted to avoid that on this server. Just because it looks like its firing fast if its losing rounds that is not good. ONce again, more testing needed. Sadly cant build, test, code, and have a life all at once.

    Missile Speed, while homing missiles dont need that much speed, and should be slower than on most servers, unguided missiles need a serious speed buff to be usefull, you even nerfed their speed, with <Speed>1.50</Speed> a ship with 51%+ overdrive would be faster. So i advice to increase their speed to at least 3 or 4 times the server speed, otherwise those will be dead weapons again.
    You can't separate the base weapons. So dumb fire missiles have to be slower if they are unslaved. I can boost the speed on the Slave side, but to effectively slow down the heatseekers you are stuck nerfing the base then buffing them individually on the slaves. Since I haven't got to the slaves that makes this a "wait and see" argument. I still think dumbfires are best against space barns, because then you can't miss.

    I think I will sum up it this way. I need a base of play testers in the end. Sadly that means the most likely population of testers will be during the server opening up. But as you can tell now, I am very open to discussion and actually want it. Starmade needs good servers and server admins that aren't totally running amuck.

    You've got me interested right there. Maybe I'll leave EE for that.
    Now, to the most cruel question ever that might decide the future : Will the mining rates be default or tweaked ?
    Mining rates will be tweaked to encourage more expendable usage of blocks. Being that its a PVP server I really want players to beat on each other. A) That takes blocks, lots of them. B) If blocks are too rare then players will hide instead of fighting.

    But I have a concern for the PVE players, because they will come. I want them to be able to trade. Servers that flood free blocks and free cash (**Cough** Voting rewards **cough**) tend to ruin the PVE economy. On the other hand the Free to Play model can be useful if the rewards aren't a single step plus it helps new players get established.
     
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    I might be able to pull that off but cannons currently have a side effect of rounds skipping. This I have tested on a few servers. At 10 RPS the bullets just start disappearing. So actually you lose bullets. Mostly happened in large ship fights. I tested it on hulls to see how many were disappearing and it seemed like 2-3 out of 10, which wasn't good.
    Okay havnt had that so far, last tests i did on rapid fire cannons was on shielded targets (without regen ofc), and they did pull their full DPS as calculated, so all projectiles must have hit. This was in SP though.

    You can't separate the base weapons. So dumb fire missiles have to be slower if they are unslaved. I can boost the speed on the Slave side, but to effectively slow down the heatseekers you are stuck nerfing the base then buffing them individually on the slaves. Since I haven't got to the slaves that makes this a "wait and see" argument. I still think dumbfires are best against space barns, because then you can't miss.
    Wait, you are making the base missiles slower because you want to slow down the already slow swarmers too?

    Oh dear, everybody who uses swarmers in any kind of serious way already uses lower support numbers because they are otherwise just to slow, even with 0% support the 1.98x serverspeed is painful, 100% Overdrive can literally still outrun them. And 100% Support is so painful, that pure swarmer ships can cripple servers with the amount of swarmers flying around like snails chasing their to fast targets, on default settings they have a life time of 43 seconds (3600m range / 74,25ms speed), with a reload time of 15 seconds, that means that every swarmer group can have up 60 missiles flying around nearly all the time, and thats just per group. On servers with big sectors this is an even bigger issue as the life time increases due to the range being calculated based on sector size.

    So i really advice that you think about that again, both for the sake of players and the server.

    I think I will sum up it this way. I need a base of play testers in the end. Sadly that means the most likely population of testers will be during the server opening up. But as you can tell now, I am very open to discussion and actually want it. Starmade needs good servers and server admins that aren't totally running amuck.
    I cant promisse that i have time to help testing, but should i have time available, ill gladly help.

    But if you got any questions on weapons beheavior, ill gladly answer them.
    I have some pvp experience under my belt (well as much as you can have with everybody hiding in their homebases and trashtalking + the fun matches with buddies), i spend days min-/max-ing everything on my ships, and since im writing a large proposal for starmade, ive tested all weapons, effect modules and ship relevant game mechanics in various settings over the past 2 months (Still not done on some effect modules like stop, couldnt figure out the math behind it yet), so i guess i can help a bit with some experience and knowledge.
     
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    No, I am not nerfing the speed on missiles to cripple swarmers. I slowed them down to provide a balance against the reduction of antimissile systems (Pulse and C+C). I knew that AM turrets are a boon for killing missiles for big ships so I had to do something. IN the end the final factor for a lot of this way feel. We shot a ton of giant armor blocks seeing how it 'felt' to shoot them. Plus the AI test. I actually have two VERY experienced and scary deadly PVPers in my group, but building is actually the most important thing on the server right now. I play with numbers and mods in my down time or when I get burned out straightening rows of blocks on an imported model.

    You have helped though. I now have a couple more test items to use to validate weapons and changes. Always some little details to be had in every situation.

    Also if you want a fast Heatseeker, try Missile + 0% missile. Ultra fast and fairly hard hitting combo, only a single projectile but they do plenty of damage.

    I need to stop posting at 3 AM, I think I am typing gibberish, LOL.
     
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    No, I am not nerfing the speed on missiles to cripple swarmers. I slowed them down to provide a balance against the reduction of antimissile systems (Pulse and C+C). I knew that AM turrets are a boon for killing missiles for big ships so I had to do something.
    Well its kinda a bad solution if the missiles then cant even catch a 50% overdrive ship anymore, and honestly, AMS is useles against swarmers anyways due to the sheer numbers used most of the time, in 1vs1's i even use tiny 2 block swarmer groups just to piss of AMS turrets. Id rather advice to play around with the rate of fire and projectile speeds, and maybe wait with this until the Turret AI for tail turrets is fixed.

    You have helped though. I now have a couple more test items to use to validate weapons and changes. Always some little details to be had in every situation.
    Glad that i could help.

    Also if you want a fast Heatseeker, try Missile + 0% missile. Ultra fast and fairly hard hitting combo, only a single projectile but they do plenty of damage.
    Well i said "even with 0% support the 1.98x serverspeed (swarmer) is painful", but yes i use them, one of my ships has 128 0% support swarmer groups.

    I need to stop posting at 3 AM, I think I am typing gibberish, LOL.
    Nah, just seems like you misses some of the things i wrote, but being tired can have that effect XD
     

    jorgekorke

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    I guess I'm late for that one (been away from the forums for a while, RL stuff), but -

    I might be able to pull that off but cannons currently have a side effect of rounds skipping. This I have tested on a few servers. At 10 RPS the bullets just start disappearing. So actually you lose bullets. Mostly happened in large ship fights. I tested it on hulls to see how many were disappearing and it seemed like 2-3 out of 10, which wasn't good. I wanted to avoid that on this server. Just because it looks like its firing fast if its losing rounds that is not good. ONce again, more testing needed. Sadly cant build, test, code, and have a life all at once.
    Nope, even if the projectiles does not get rendered by the game, they still do damage. Same for multiple-missile launching.
     
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    More work on the server. Wrote some more formulas and working on finishing up stations. We currently have 4 stations in the finalized box of the check list. 2 More to go and one of those is about half done already.

    I figured I would take some time and post up an image of the almost done Cyber empire station. This is the one with a Tron influence in the design. Its really neat inside and might be my favorite station even though one of the last two is shaping up to be amazing as well. The mood on this station is like walking into a dark war machine factory, what that looks like you will have to see for yourself. Its 3Million Blocks and has 12 fully capable rail docked turrets, it has moving machinery inside and a unique lighting scheme plus some nice bulkhead doors courtesy of the rail system improvements.

    CyberStation.jpg

    Our next station that I will post a picture of is one of two that we are working on. One is somewhat ultra high tech and the other is very much more down to earth.

    FullMetalFox
    Did some more work on weapons BTW. You are right. 2k exactly the beams stop registering hits. They just cannot hit at that range. I had to reduce the beams range to compensate for that issue. I would consider this a bug IMO, and hopefully Schine agrees with me.

    Also tested a bit more with missile speeds. Was taking 8 seconds to cover 2k, so I increased the speed of the missiles to compensate. Apparently its something worth noting on servers with larger sectors/top speed, the sector range doesn't really scale missile speed properly. So moving to 350-400 m/sec seems to be a better target range for speed (2k in ~5 - 5.7 secs instead of 8). This ties in well for my work on Slaves since this makes the Missile + Cannon travel 2k in ~1.67 seconds. This will allow Heatseekers at the current design to achieve 400m/sec and the server OD 100% speed is 500 m/sec.

    Base weapon calculations. **Not set in stone, always testing and the systems are highly connected.
    upload_2015-5-29_22-25-45.png

    Slave Weapons calculations. **Not set in stone, always testing and the systems are highly connected.
    upload_2015-5-29_22-34-38.png

    ****Keep in mind on these charts. You can't replace actual feel of the weapons with just purely numbers, they just get us closer than a guess in the dark. Also the Slaves are measured independently of the Base systems in the charts. The assumption is if the base systems are balances amongst themselves then if you balance the slave systems amongst themselves it should all become balanced in the end. Also I set out with the idea of giving each mode of weapon a flavor that will bring something unique to the battle field. For those who are a fan of the pulse + cannon in the vanilla build, they are still there almost the same.
     
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    FullMetalFox
    Did some more work on weapons BTW. You are right. 2k exactly the beams stop registering hits. They just cannot hit at that range. I had to reduce the beams range to compensate for that issue. I would consider this a bug IMO, and hopefully Schine agrees with me.

    Also tested a bit more with missile speeds. Was taking 8 seconds to cover 2k, so I increased the speed of the missiles to compensate. Apparently its something worth noting on servers with larger sectors/top speed, the sector range doesn't really scale missile speed properly. So moving to 350-400 m/sec seems to be a better target range for speed (2k in ~5 - 5.7 secs instead of 8). This ties in well for my work on Slaves since this makes the Missile + Cannon travel 2k in ~1.67 seconds. This will allow Heatseekers at the current design to achieve 400m/sec and the server OD 100% speed is 500 m/sec.

    Base weapon calculations. **Not set in stone, always testing and the systems are highly connected.
    View attachment 12332

    Slave Weapons calculations. **Not set in stone, always testing and the systems are highly connected.
    View attachment 12333

    ****Keep in mind on these charts. You can't replace actual feel of the weapons with just purely numbers, they just get us closer than a guess in the dark. Also the Slaves are measured independently of the Base systems in the charts. The assumption is if the base systems are balances amongst themselves then if you balance the slave systems amongst themselves it should all become balanced in the end. Also I set out with the idea of giving each mode of weapon a flavor that will bring something unique to the battle field. For those who are a fan of the pulse + cannon in the vanilla build, they are still there almost the same.
    SMD Y U NO GIVE ME NOTIFICATION?
    I was looking at the thread to see if there are news, then i see this.

    I would consider this a bug IMO, and hopefully Schine agrees with me.
    It propably is, as it is quiet random sometimes, either its a bug in the algorythm, or some bug in translating the sector size and range multiplication into the actual hitscan range of the client. Most of the time it is 2km, default sector range, once on a server we were chilling near a guys station with rainbow beam turrets, those beams would have had 5km range on that server, was a lightshow... suddenly out of no where, those beams did damage on 4km, and just like that, it stoped again, and there was nothing else on nav shooting us.

    Also tested a bit more with missile speeds. Was taking 8 seconds to cover 2k, so I increased the speed of the missiles to compensate. Apparently its something worth noting on servers with larger sectors/top speed, the sector range doesn't really scale missile speed properly. So moving to 350-400 m/sec seems to be a better target range for speed (2k in ~5 - 5.7 secs instead of 8). This ties in well for my work on Slaves since this makes the Missile + Cannon travel 2k in ~1.67 seconds. This will allow Heatseekers at the current design to achieve 400m/sec and the server OD 100% speed is 500 m/sec.
    Good to hear. Well it doesnt scale with the sector size at all, its only scales based on the speed limit config like every weapon does.

    My main issue with missile speed, and even cannon projectiles, is the overall agility and speed of ships vs weapons. For example, normal default block behaviour config Dumbfire, Cannon Missile, or even 0% Support Heat/LockOn Missile, cant chase a ship with 100% overdrive, as it itself can only reach the speed of a ship with 98% overdrive. 100% Heatseekers are even slower, with 1.98/2 being 99% of the Speed Limit, and Pulse i believe was 66%.

    Just think about how much distance a ship can travel in the time it would take a projectile to reach it. Then consider the insane omnidirectional acceleration of most ships and distances of fights on large sectors unles you rescape the weapon ranges. (Just alone for the sake of avoiding this stupid sector border fight crap, i personally would put sectors at very large scales, and reduce weapon ranges around a standard engagement distance of 5-10km)

    You may want to ask your PVPer on advices about the practical impact of projectile speeds, unles they are just the regular "LockOn/Heatseeker Missile Everything" guys, then they may be useless in that regard :confused:

    You can't replace actual feel of the weapons with just purely numbers.
    Thats propably the smartest thing ive yet heard a Starmade Admin say, simply because i think thats what most people forgett when they try to change, sorry, "butcher" in most cases (im looking at you EE) the configs.

    Alright, hope is raising, so ill give it some more enthusiasm.
    Since ive already mentioned this above, you really have to consider more in those calculations, as while i to used some calculations while doing balancings for various mods, most of the stuff, cant be translated into hard numbers, and you really need to consider so more stuff, as a lot falls away in balancing here since we have flowing stats and none predefined hp and such, we still have a lot of common things, like the mentioned projectile speed, or the hated alpha damage. But all that also translates into factors that dont have a value you can edit, you can only edit multiple ones to influence it, for example:

    Hit Ratio, sometimes also called Applied Ballistics.
    Now whats that? Well, its how easy it is to hit something with a weapon, and its based on various factors. In Starmade this luckly is rather simple since we dont have Accuracy and stuff to worry about, but we still have Rate of Fire, Range, Projectile/Hitscan/Guided, Projectile Speed, Target Speed, Target Acceleration. Those translate into a Hit Ratio and you can calculate some basic value for it based on some rules, like for example:
    Rate of Fire = The higher, the easier it is to hit your enemy, not only due to sheer volume of fire, but also due to more visual tracing of your line of fire.
    Range = The longer the range is, the more important is the Damage Delivery Type and Projectile Speeds, for example an Unguided weapon with long range but slow projectiles, cant hit mobile stuff very well, if its guided projectiles, that becomes les of an issue and translates into a Damage Delay.
    Projectile Speed + Target Speed = ^ + The more mobile your target is, the more distance it can travel until your Projectile travels the distance between you and your target, depending on the distance and size of the target, this can be huge, and can essentially make a weapon useles on its proposed engagement distance, and guided weapons being slower than the target ofc not being able to reach it.
    Target Acceleration = How quickly can a target alter its movement to evade your projectiles. (Normaly this is cross considered with Target Size, but thats not a static in Starmade)

    Without this Ratio, all your calculations are essentially based on the false assumption of hitting every shoot even on max range.

    Now, those charts, ill go over them after ive had some sleep, but i can tell that i already spotted a few things that nearly give me an aneurysm, and no i dont mean the cheesy names :p
     
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    SMD Y U NO GIVE ME NOTIFICATION?
    I was looking at the thread to see if there are news, then i see this.
    You likely recieved a notification, but the alerts popup cannot display more than 20-24 alerts, meaning if you have more, you need to look onto the alerts page instead.
     
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    FullMetalFox
    This is the current formula broken down from Excel speak to Something more pseudocode looking. It works be applying a few different weights and some assumptions. Every column in that sheet has some effect on the secondary weapon relationships. Strangely the secondary weapons are more complex then the base weapons so the formula got a bit crazy.

    Code:
    "=(6.5*(10*Damage+ 4*Range + 2*BlastRadius^3,4*ProjectileSpeed,4*SpecialRating)/(6*(PowerCost + ReloadTime) ) ) + ( 2* Damage / ReloadTime *((10*Burst Length) / (10* PulseSpeed + 0.0001)))
    The jist of it is the formula needed to model what the handful of players I interviewed were stating about weapons. The numbers from the model needed to correlate with the anecdotes of the players. Once I got that down the real craziness kicked in and I started to produce flavors of weapons that had a better 'range' of effect bringing more meaning to the %s between 0 and 100% slave. The numbers are really only supposed to get me close. There is an art form and a science to balancing things and this is just the science part. Playing the game of dividing the difference as I tweak the system will make a difference in the end.

    SOME great news. We have finally moved to a more comfortable server home. The server is East Coast Based (Sorry Aussies and other island people) and it has some hefty horsepower with a solid pipeline. We chose this location for the benefit of the largest population. It will be close to the gulf pipe to South America, Western Europe and still solid for the US. We chose this provider after interviewing some of the other server admins and doing some research. This has left us with two servers in our possession till the end of the month. I will by the end of the weekend have everything pulled off the old server and clean it of content. I am currently re-rolling the universe till I get one I think will be the best environment for what we are trying to accomplish for the new server.

    The old server. I am thinking it will become a playground for blowing up things with the new tweaks I have been working on. This will be nice for testing balance of the weapon changes. I will poke my web admin with a sharp stick to get him to finish the forums enough that we can at least start having discussions there about that testing.


    ***Also still looking for more Builders*** please message me for details.
     
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    Effane
    I saidly havnt had time to finish writting my advice list due to a new contract i got friday evening, but ill post/send it to you as soon as im done.
    On your equation, i think you give blast radius to much importance, and projectile speed not enough tbh.

    Well fuck it, dont know when ill have time to finish it, so ill post this rough draft, maybe it already will be of some use or spark some ideas.
    Turn Speed
    You might know this, but currently larger ship battles are just a pure strafing battle, as the turnspeed is just to darn slow. I highly suggest to increase this, a good benchmark would be a 200m long ship needing around 8 seconds to make a full 360° turn.

    Thrust
    Also, its quiet easy to get nearly insane accelerations, which sadly are omnidirectional, i personally would add a slight negative boxdim multiplicator to thrusters so simulate some pseudo inertia on bigger ships.

    DPS
    While youve increased the DPS of various weapons, i would suggest nerfing all weapons, simply because otherwise you will reach the realm of even more insane high numbers. So say since you have a Cannon with 10 DPS, try to reduce it to 5, since you halved that weapon, look if you could do the same with the others, if not, try another number. In essence, try to keep the global DPS per Block as low as possible.

    Shields
    I hope you aware that shields are rather useless in real PVP, if someone tells you something else, then he never fought a real PVP Meta Ship, simple as that. So they do need a major buff, especially the ShieldCapacityPow needs to be turned into a bonus instead of a malus, as on average big ships quiet frankly throw around much higher damage outputs per mass unit.

    Alpha
    Bad alpha, bad, go in some corner and think about what youve done!
    Joke aside, alpha damage is currently the bane of any good PVP fight, so i highly suggest reducing the alpha capabilities of most weapons. That "Plasma Scram" and "Fusion Torpedo" nearly gave me an aneurysm, not because of the cheese names, but because of their potential alpha capabilities. Note if a PVP ship with default Meta cant oneshootkill itself and opponent around 50% larger, its a bad PVP ship currently, and that all due to alpha strikes. So break that meta.

    Energy Regen vs Capacity
    Okay, this is kinda a scaled down thing out of my big WIP suggestion thingy:
    If you want to go really crazy, and i mean crazy in terms of batshit "shit this could actually work" kind of crazy, think about changing the whole Energy Meta Game. Right now, Power Cap is nothing more than just a buffer you need for high alpha weapons, it serves no other purpose, because if you can build good ships, they WILL supply more than enough Energy/S to supply all system running in Combat. So lets go crazy and try something new.

    - Decrease Energy Regen, around 5% or les
    - Reduce Energy Cost of weapon systems to around 10%
    - Reduce Energy Cost of everything else to around 5%
    - Increase Energy Capacity, around 20x (or even higher)
    - If you do this, you need to go down on alpha damage, otherwise people WILL abuse this for insane oneshootwonder ships

    What this would do is make ships in combat run on Capacitors, while they will still have enough energy to run Thrusters, Tools, some Effects and normal Shield Idle, but while in combat they would slowly deplete their Capacity with using their Weapons and Modules, forcing people to think about how they use their system. This would even enable you to change the Effect Module meta game, think about Overdrive being like some limited Afterburner, use it and youre faster, but youll run your Cap dry if you dont watch out, or use a lower Overdrive that allows you to stay mostly Cap stable, same with other effects like Ion. People would need to think about how they utilize their energy, not just run everything all the time.
     
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    Effane
    I saidly havnt had time to finish writting my advice list due to a new contract i got friday evening, but ill post/send it to you as soon as im done.
    On your equation, i think you give blast radius to much importance, and projectile speed not enough tbh.

    Well fuck it, dont know when ill have time to finish it, so ill post this rough draft, maybe it already will be of some use or spark some ideas.
    Turn Speed
    You might know this, but currently larger ship battles are just a pure strafing battle, as the turnspeed is just to darn slow. I highly suggest to increase this, a good benchmark would be a 200m long ship needing around 8 seconds to make a full 360° turn.

    Thrust
    Also, its quiet easy to get nearly insane accelerations, which sadly are omnidirectional, i personally would add a slight negative boxdim multiplicator to thrusters so simulate some pseudo inertia on bigger ships.

    DPS
    While youve increased the DPS of various weapons, i would suggest nerfing all weapons, simply because otherwise you will reach the realm of even more insane high numbers. So say since you have a Cannon with 10 DPS, try to reduce it to 5, since you halved that weapon, look if you could do the same with the others, if not, try another number. In essence, try to keep the global DPS per Block as low as possible.

    Shields
    I hope you aware that shields are rather useless in real PVP, if someone tells you something else, then he never fought a real PVP Meta Ship, simple as that. So they do need a major buff, especially the ShieldCapacityPow needs to be turned into a bonus instead of a malus, as on average big ships quiet frankly throw around much higher damage outputs per mass unit.

    Alpha
    Bad alpha, bad, go in some corner and think about what youve done!
    Joke aside, alpha damage is currently the bane of any good PVP fight, so i highly suggest reducing the alpha capabilities of most weapons. That "Plasma Scram" and "Fusion Torpedo" nearly gave me an aneurysm, not because of the cheese names, but because of their potential alpha capabilities. Note if a PVP ship with default Meta cant oneshootkill itself and opponent around 50% larger, its a bad PVP ship currently, and that all due to alpha strikes. So break that meta.

    Energy Regen vs Capacity
    Okay, this is kinda a scaled down thing out of my big WIP suggestion thingy:
    If you want to go really crazy, and i mean crazy in terms of batshit "shit this could actually work" kind of crazy, think about changing the whole Energy Meta Game. Right now, Power Cap is nothing more than just a buffer you need for high alpha weapons, it serves no other purpose, because if you can build good ships, they WILL supply more than enough Energy/S to supply all system running in Combat. So lets go crazy and try something new.

    - Decrease Energy Regen, around 5% or les
    - Reduce Energy Cost of weapon systems to around 10%
    - Reduce Energy Cost of everything else to around 5%
    - Increase Energy Capacity, around 20x (or even higher)
    - If you do this, you need to go down on alpha damage, otherwise people WILL abuse this for insane oneshootwonder ships

    What this would do is make ships in combat run on Capacitors, while they will still have enough energy to run Thrusters, Tools, some Effects and normal Shield Idle, but while in combat they would slowly deplete their Capacity with using their Weapons and Modules, forcing people to think about how they use their system. This would even enable you to change the Effect Module meta game, think about Overdrive being like some limited Afterburner, use it and youre faster, but youll run your Cap dry if you dont watch out, or use a lower Overdrive that allows you to stay mostly Cap stable, same with other effects like Ion. People would need to think about how they utilize their energy, not just run everything all the time.
    One of the biggest issues is the sheer amount of stuff in the game. So balancing isn't as simple as does this long list. I actually have to take time on each part. I actually have a plan with this in mind and always had this plan in mind from the beginning since I knew the results would cascade. Don't assume what I have shown you is even close to being done. It is just slow moving since I am bouncing between 5 things right now.
    1. Balance Base weapons (Normalize the base weapons to something meaningful)
    2. Balance slaves (Create a broader variation with slaves)
    3. Balance Armor types (Reduce number of meaningless variations)
    4. Balance Shielding (Meet new weapons numbers)
    5. Balance Thrusters and Overdrive
    6. Balance power regen/capacity
    7. Balance items like Cloak, Jammer, Jump drives,
    8. Balance Offensive Effects
    9. Balance Defensive Effects
    10. Revisit any outlying, outstanding or obvious issues
    Is Alpha damage bad? That is an interesting question. In many ways you want an alpha strike option in a game. It provides a way to overwhelm a target that might be built around longer duration fighting. I think more so instead of blaming Alpha damage as a bane to PVP lets look at ways of making it not the only choice, but slowing it down. BTW, keep in mind Alpha Strike is an all out attack, while First Strike is initial spike damage at the beginning of an engagement. We see more First Strike in Starmade than Alpha strike which is what is making fights very short and chalky tasting.

    I think your worries about Alpha damage and then thinking that regen needs to be decreased while increasing capacitance only helps Alpha damage. If you want to reduce Alpha you don't take it away from the weapons, you give it a nasty side effect. The only side effect we currently have is power loss. If you increase capacitance you encourage front loaded weapons because the fastest win is the most effective outcome. Now if you decrease capacitance and increase regen you push the role to longer duration fighting and encourage power management within the battle.

    Trust me, I have thought about more in this topic. Just I am not trying to totally hijack the servers work. This isn't the Effane Show, we are a team in the end. But I would be lying if I said that I wasn't using this a bit to topic bump about the server between real postings about information. I think I just might make a topic in the MOD section about this for future conversations. FullMetalFox New MOD topic for this. http://starmadedock.net/threads/voidflare-gaming-vfg-mod-to-starmade.8001/

    BTW, the Test server where I am playing with my balance options is as follows
    Code:
    TEST.VoidFlareGaming.com:4242
    Server is wide open for access, generally unmonitored and the spawn station is set to infinite mode for block purchases (You can buy with no cost to yourself and without limit). Warning I will rebuild configs on it with little notice and reboot it, but I will try to be courteous if I see someone on it. I am making little 'brick' ships for the AI to use that will exist as targets to test shoot at. There is no content on that test server so it isn't a good place to tour our stations, they aren't there.
     
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    Good Day Players!

    Yes this is a "necro", BUT, its for a good reason! WE ARE COMING BACK!
    Myself and Effane have come back to the game and are continuing the work on this server idea. Now, some of our ideas may or may not be possible to impliment at this moment but we are working on it.

    My current thoughts are to actually release the server in its current state to the public and make changes as we go so we can get first person input right when things happen.

    We still have the BPs for the stations we showed way back, not sure how long it will take to get them updated and put on the server.

    Thank you all and I will post here when things happen.
     
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    Just an update, the server is now public. -- 198.12.70.162:57921

    NOTE: The vast majority of the features have not been implimented on the server yet. We are working on them, like I said in my post the other day, I just want folks to come on and play and as we add stuff we can get immediate feedback.

    Thank yall for the intrest in the server and I hope to see ya online.
     

    StormWing0

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    This should be interesting to keep an eye on, always needed to locate a server to run PvP testing on since ARES MOD went down. :)