Opinions On Starmades Combat

[StarWars1981]

Yeah, being able to take fire control of all the turrets would be great. Could double into the NPC systems - NPCs don't control remote turrets, and if they do, it's still a follow-the-pointer setup where all guns go one direction, where the bridge guy says. This means that, if, instead of having individual turret control stations, you set them from the bridge, you can control them possibly better than the AI, but you cannot have them targeting multiple vessels at once automatically even when relegated back to NPC control, as there's only one fire-control station.

SM combat is tough. Even small vessels are horrifically laggy (talking less than 200m long and thin, too; about 6 of them in a sector far, far away from the galaxy's main inhabitants. Now, I don't have a supercomputer by any means, nor good internet service, but still, on a server, that shouldn't be that laggy. Now, this was some months ago and recent updates probably affected that, but it still stands; SM is laggy on bad comps, so combat is tough unless you already seriously overwhelm the opponent before beginning. But it's fun to wreck things, even if you can't see it all til afterwards. I also appreciate that there is no reason to fight, and I can't wait for that to change, but it's fun to do so. And the combat system is solid, even if it needs tweaks and maybe more options to stay interesting over years of playing and testing and battles; it's better than some. For instance, WoWP: if you don't have a Zero, you don't play the game. It's completely based on aircraft parameters, not pilot skill in ANY way. Or it was when I left because it was laggy, bad, and uninhabited. And the Zero was the fastest-turning aircraft, so it was the only one that anybody ever played once they could get it. Speed didn't matter enough, nor did durability, nor firepower; they could take almost as much as you and dish out enough on that dang HP system to annihilate anything, because you couldn't get them off your tail. It was infuriating. In SM, though, you're never at such a disadvantage if you're anywhere NEAR the same size. Within 100Ks of mass, you can deal some damage. Some. Or, at least, you can run faster than they can chase you down. I appreciate that balance; you probably won't win, but you COULD. It's not a guarantee that if the other guy has half a brain, his aircraft is going to outdo yours no matter what; it's a guarantee that if you're not a poor noob looking for control buttons still, you might even live!

 

[sayerulz]

Yes and no.

It's more about ship's conception. In star wars for example most of the weapons are turret mounted weapons while in starmade it is infinitely better to put them on the hull, otherwise your ship will have less firepower than the opponent with hull mounted weapons.
In this meta, because i like to call it a meta (i'm probably playing too much LoL recently), you'll need to have your ship face to face to be the most efficient.
If weapons were to be turret mounted on horizontal ships you would be fighting like the clip in star wars. Because if you don't use the thing that our naval ships use for turrets and that i can't remember properly the name then to use your firepower the most efficient way then it's the only one way (and it's pretty cool, i'll agree with that).
For figthers/small vessels i'll agree that the current AI doesn't use the fact that you can move and do a lot of basic maneuvers with much more maneuverable vessels.

To go back to the original question of the thread, the thing that i dislike the most with the current combat system is the dps. It's the same (well, supposed to be at least) for every weapons. Then why should we take low range weapons when we can have long range weapons with the same dps ? They're much more safier.

This exactly. It's all about having a gigantic-ass cannon/cannon that takes up 25% of your whole ship. Which means that capital ship combat is really just scaled up fighter combat.

 

[Nickizzy]

Looking at the weapon statistics and usability I gotta say all the different weapons and defenses that aren't bugged or unimplemented are pretty well balanced. The weapon combos that are working as intended have a good balance of numbers and both shielding and armor feel okay, each with their advantages and disadvantages.
One thing that I feel that Starmade lacks in it's combat are things to do that aren't shooting at people. You have defensive effects and such like radar jamming and scanning but those are not things that take a great amount of player interaction, do not make enough of a difference to lead to specialized designs for them, nor do they offer any counterplay for the opposing player. I would enjoy seeing some of these non-weapon combat abilities revisited and added onto to make them more interactive and important for those that wish to fully utilize them.

I've got a lot of minor gripes... But the only other major one is how difficult it is to manage AI, and that I'm sure is already on Schema's mind.


That is... Ripping thoughts straight out of my head. Perhaps when fleets are more commonly utilized we can see this addressed properly.

I feel like the big vs. small thing is going to be brought up again in a bit. In the meantime, here's some numbers to work with.
Shield regen/block when in combat is up to 1.3/second. With full ion passive that is an effective regen of 3.4/second.
A weapon block deals a base 10 DPS. When equipped with full ion effect that is 20 DPS against shielding.
To become effectively immune to a ship's weaponry you would need approximately 6 times as many shield rechargers as the other ship has weapon blocks.
Assuming either both or neither use ion, a regen-specialized shield tank might be able to become immune to weapons fire from a ship or combination of ships whose mass is up to ~20% of it's own. It'd be extremely weak to anything closer to it's own mass.

But that just means that it just needs to have 6 times the shield blocks as they have weapon blocks(because one weapon block will use a lot more power than one recharger, and people don't always have the same amount of weapons as they have shields)to be Immune to that ship. The other ship can shoot all day, they can't break the regen.

In reality, what you're talking about is a regen tank, a ship that has low shield pool, but a lot of regen. But an ship that has some amount of regen should have at least ten times that in pool(I once heard someone say that if your ship can't fully regen out of combat in 10 seconds, it isn't built right). Even a regen rank would be useless if it didn't have at least two or three times their regen as a pool, otherwise you could alpha them to shields down and tear them apart.

Let's say you have a ship with 1k shield blocks, or 5200 regen per second(1300 per second in combat). If it's a regen tank then it has about 15.6k shields, which is absolutely tiny. You could alpha that with a 110 block missile/beam system. If it's a regular shielded ship, it has about 52k shields. That's okay, you should be fine against any regular pirates. If it's a shield tank it has like 100k+ shields, which would laugh at any alpha weapon in that league(it'd take 29 seconds to regen, but that's if it starts at one and goes with out taking damage.

So the numbers are:
ST(shield tank) 104k pool, 1.3k regen
RT(regen tank) 15.6k pool, 1.3k regen
RS(regular ship) 52k pool, 1.3 regen

For any of them, a ship with a weapon system with more than 130 primary blocks could break their regen, but it would take varying lengths to drain each of them. If their weapon has 150 primaries,then the ST would take 520 seconds to drain, the RS 260 seconds, and the RT only 48 seconds.

Of course, the ST will be a lot bigger than the RT, but if you go by weapon and regen blocks, they are equal. That what you want from that.
[doublepost=1474857107,1474856795][/doublepost]

This exactly. It's all about having a gigantic-ass cannon/cannon that takes up 25% of your whole ship. Which means that capital ship combat is really just scaled up fighter combat.

+a bunch of turrets. And scaled up buzz droids. The fleets and motherships update was cool, wasn't it.

 

[Scypio]

This exactly. It's all about having a gigantic-ass cannon/cannon that takes up 25% of your whole ship. Which means that capital ship combat is really just scaled up fighter combat.

That's mainly caused by the current mechanics of starmade with the more blocks you add, the most efficient your weapons are. Turrets need to be really light compared to their mothership to be useful, good fire arc and easy to move around so it's not a surprise to see hull mounted weapons being so much more powerful than turrets. I've only see once someone with a good idea for turrets but i cannot remember who, but still his idea was pretty good. Sadly it only works in certain cases.

+a bunch of turrets. And scaled up buzz droids. The fleets and motherships update was cool, wasn't it.

Still waiting for useful and not just annoying buzz droids. :p
Well, the update is really cool but we need more tools and AI to use this entirely.

 

[Ithirahad]

SM combat is tough. Even small vessels are horrifically laggy (talking less than 200m long and thin, too; about 6 of them in a sector far, far away from the galaxy's main inhabitants. Now, I don't have a supercomputer by any means, nor good internet service, but still, on a server, that shouldn't be that laggy. Now, this was some months ago and recent updates probably affected that, but it still stands; SM is laggy on bad comps, so combat is tough unless you already seriously overwhelm the opponent before beginning.

This specific issue was dealt with in a recent hotfix.

 

[Livaria]

While performance issues are important. I'm looking for more issues on just the the principles of combat that are in place now. If there are performance issues, it's reasonable to assume that things are already being done about them.

 

[Comradecolonel]

I like a lot of the dynamics in combat as they are. I think some more choices would be nice though. Maybe some more defensive options as others have stated. Blink drives, diverting power to shields, and lightweight armor are all things I can get behind. I'd like some tactical decisions that are as interesting and indepth as the design decisions I make.

 

[StarWars1981]

I like a lot of the dynamics in combat as they are. I think some more choices would be nice though. Maybe some more defensive options as others have stated. Blink drives, diverting power to shields, and lightweight armor are all things I can get behind. I'd like some tactical decisions that are as interesting and indepth as the design decisions I make.

Lightweight armor is either Standard or Hull right now.
See several-months-old suggestion on partially-charged jumpdrives carrying you through the sector. The idea was that partially-charged jumpdrives turn their charge percentage into distance (as a percentage of a sector in the server) in-sector. That's the blinkdrive, and it doesn't need new blocks, just added functionality to one. And the way it works is probably a double-right click while not charged, and it goes the direction you're facing, or towards waypoint. The double-right click is so you can't accidentally waste all the charge in one missed click.
Diverting power to shields - well, Idk how that'd balance, but it might be cool to see another months-old suggestion on options for energy use, allowing you to control where energy went - weapons, turrets, shields, and thrust were all options as I recall. It allowed basically boosting the energy consumption of a certain system to give added capability, i.e. thrust, at the cost of reduced capacity from other systems, i.e. shield charge. Only systems that actually actively use energy can have additional energy diverted.

DEFINITELY on the dang fleet AI upgrades. Every option we can get out of them is going to be good. Different formations, more orders, better-described and better-circumscribed orders that are more reliable (*cough* MINING DRONES *cough*) ... even options for how they maneuver, i.e. strafing versus broadside (literally, flying along side-on, no fancy maneuvers bringing turrets in line), close-in versus sniping. A large checkbox screen with "manuevering trees" starting with basic types and going on into more-detailed options for specific activities would be great. Say, "fighter", "carrier", "artillery", "battleship" (or heavy warship) - they maneuver according to their purpose, either arranged in a battle formation around a flagship or in squadron formations running towards hostiles, or orbiting far outside the battle (like current AI, actually) delivering fire from just within a sector radius of the hostiles, and maybe a bit more with extremely long-ranged weapons. But the point is that they orbit within visual range of a player, or something closer than Missile-Beam range ... cause that's annoying to go hunt them down, and also, it's not very cinematic. And they're USELESS at that range - can't hit a thing no matter what they've got. Then the trees give more options - do they fly in very close and attack large vessels, or target smallest first? Do they fire on Turrets, or the main vessel? Do they deliver fire on the heaviest first from long range, or the lightest, or something in the middle range? Do they target (PREFER to target, I should say - no Absolute limiters on anything) the highest or lowest shielded target in the battle? Do they play fast and light and move everywhere fast, or do they tank damage and prefer to keep their main weapons in-line at all times? (Turrets act much as they are, but could get some more targeting options?) Do they flee at low shield/armor health values, or stay in it to the bitter end? Do they focus on badly damaged enemy vessels, or attempt to disable more? Do they target astronauts or ships or turrets first? The list can go on, but I had a long day yesterday. I've got nothing. -- Oh wait, on this "AI Tree", branches could include all options under "Manuevering", "Targeting", and "Behavior" - the last being fleeing/not fleeing, jumpdrive use/no use, anything really that doesn't fall under what they kill and how they get to it, actually.

I've now hijacked the thread a little.

Minus the orbiting-ridiculously-far-away AI who I can never chase down, I'm alright with the current combat system. Because I know the devs are upgrading it as they go. While upgrading everything else in the Alpha game that can compete with many finished games for enjoyment and time spent.

 

[terra mining corp.]

hopefully for fleet combat effectiveness they will give ai more brain cells to go with the 1 they have,not sure why in a mixed fleet battle my 50 mass drones think they are destroyers and stay still trading shots with big ships instead of similar sized vessels!

 

[Comradecolonel]

I mean I'm fine with no new combat features. Don't wanna imbalance the game and make it no fun at all. It doesn't hurt to reiterate some of my favorite suggestions from the past year. There are many more of course but that's another thread altogether.

 

[arci]

I did a thread about the mechanical part a while ago. In my opinion the best combat system is the lock on target combat style. However in order to make it work for starmade there need to be some changes like fixing the 3rd person camera (angle, memory, controls and stuff). And second weapons (not turrets) should work in every direction. Here is an example how it could work:

 

[DrTarDIS]

Yes and no.
...y
If weapons were to be turret mounted on horizontal ships you would be fighting like the clip in star wars. Because if you don't use the thing that our naval ships use for turrets and that i can't remember properly the name then to use your firepower the most efficient way then it's the only one way (and it's pretty cool, i'll agree with that).
For figthers/small vessels i'll agree that the current AI doesn't use the fact that you can move and do a lot of basic maneuvers with much more maneuverable vessels.

To go back to the original question of the thread, the thing that i dislike the most with the current combat system is the dps. It's the same (well, supposed to be at least) for every weapons. Then why should we take low range weapons when we can have long range weapons with the same dps ? They're much more safier.

1st: 100% disagree on hull vs turreted weapons. Any combat ship worth it's salt has a bunch of "fire my target" turrets each at half or full E/sec softcap. This allows you to cut through any form of tank the opponent has with an optimum block count. Math of thrust:energy curve generally means that the main ship will have 80-90% of it's energy diverted to it's own shields and maneuvering at that point. Spinal weaponry is usually relegated to a large energy capacity "battery" at this point. Combined with the crappy turn-rate of large ships this means spinal is best made into high-alpha long-cycle systems, while the majority of DPS comes from independent systems. The new power aux adds some versatility to this, but doesn't really change the paradigm.

But that just means that it just needs to have 6 times the shield blocks as they have weapon blocks(because one weapon block will use a lot more power than one recharger, and people don't always have the same amount of weapons as they have shields)to be Immune to that ship. The other ship can shoot all day, they can't break the regen.

In reality, what you're talking about is a regen tank, a ship that has low shield pool, but a lot of regen. But an ship that has some amount of regen should have at least ten times that in pool(I once heard someone say that if your ship can't fully regen out of combat in 10 seconds, it isn't built right). Even a regen rank would be useless if it didn't have at least two or three times their regen as a pool, otherwise you could alpha them to shields down and tear them apart.

Let's say you have a ship with 1k shield blocks, or 5200 regen per second(1300 per second in combat). If it's a regen tank then it has about 15.6k shields, which is absolutely tiny. You could alpha that with a 110 block missile/beam system. If it's a regular shielded ship, it has about 52k shields. That's okay, you should be fine against any regular pirates. If it's a shield tank it has like 100k+ shields, which would laugh at any alpha weapon in that league(it'd take 29 seconds to regen, but that's if it starts at one and goes with out taking damage.
... The fleets and motherships update was cool, wasn't it.

AFAIK The regen per block of shields is directly proportional to the cap. There's a certain ratio after which regen suffers diminishing returns per block unless you increase the capacity to match. It's a weird "balance" that I'm not sure is intended, but can matter when you're trying to get to a million s/sec.


On original post: I think starmade combat is quite fun if your computer and the server can keep from chugging out bad frames. The biggest issue I find is that servers will set large sector sizes, and fail/forget to change the weapons ranges to smaller values.
The weapon config lists weapon ranges as a ratio of sector size. When you have a 10KM sector, even cannon/cannon has a max range that's beyond your view distance.

Either we need a "zoom" function in the HUD, or the server admins need to change weapon ranges down by a factor of 10 for every factor of 10 sector size increase.

 

[MrFURB]

AFAIK The regen per block of shields is directly proportional to the cap. There's a certain ratio after which regen suffers diminishing returns per block unless you increase the capacity to match. It's a weird "balance" that I'm not sure is intended, but can matter when you're trying to get to a million s/sec.

Shield regen is linear per block, but unless your shields are getting dropped instantly more capacity means more time to regen means more shields gen'd per block. In a roundabout way you are correct.

 

[DrTarDIS]

Shield regen is linear per block, but unless your shields are getting dropped instantly more capacity means more time to regen means more shields gen'd per block. In a roundabout way you are correct.

0.o I'm going to have to go check my test-brick again then. but I'll look at blockconfig first...
(ed:coded tagz)

Spoiler

<!-- totalUnitShieldRecharge = (unitSize*ShieldExtraRechargeMultPerUnit) -->
...
<!-- shieldCapacity = ((totalUnitShieldCapacity*1.0)^0.9)*55 -->
<ShieldRechargePreMul>1.0</ShieldRechargePreMul>
<ShieldRechargeTotalMul>5.5</ShieldRechargeTotalMul>

...

<ShieldRecoveryTimeAfterOutage>10</ShieldRecoveryTimeAfterOutage> <!-- time, the shield will not recharge after reaching 0 -->
<ShieldDirectRecoveryTime>60</ShieldDirectRecoveryTime> <!-- this time is set to the value gives after each hit sustained. In direct recovery, <ShieldRecoveryMultPerPercent> is applied. Otherwise it's running on full recharge -->

...

<ShieldRecoveryMultPerPercent>0.5</ShieldRecoveryMultPerPercent> <!-- MAX % at high health - in direct recovery, the shield recharge will be multiplied by (1-((shield/max)*thisValue));-->
<ShieldRecoveryMult>0.25</ShieldRecoveryMult> <!-- MAX % at low health - in direct recovery, the shield recharge will be multiplied: recharge = recharge*thisValue;-->

Something about this says something to me...I'm gonna have to do one of those topographical map spreadsheets for this later [cap%]X[regenvalue]y vs [magnitude]z?

just means that the less total % you lose over a given period, the higher your actual regen rate. with 1.0 second cycle times, and the 10-sec "duress" recharge you have reduced "real" regen if the (damage/10second) : (shields/capacity) is high magnitude.

 

[MrFURB]

To put that in layman's terms, while in combat with low shields your shield regen is at 25% it's normal rate.
As your shields regenerate their rate of regeneration slows down until it reaches half of the previous value (about 12.5%) when they are nearly full.
(Yeah, the behavior config is weird, if accurate.)
[doublepost=1475385776,1475385721][/doublepost]I'd actually love to have that graph showing when it is more effective to add more regen or more capacity. That'd help a lot of folks.

 

[Scypio]

1st: 100% disagree on hull vs turreted weapons. Any combat ship worth it's salt has a bunch of "fire my target" turrets each at half or full E/sec softcap. This allows you to cut through any form of tank the opponent has with an optimum block count. Math of thrust:energy curve generally means that the main ship will have 80-90% of it's energy diverted to it's own shields and maneuvering at that point. Spinal weaponry is usually relegated to a large energy capacity "battery" at this point. Combined with the crappy turn-rate of large ships this means spinal is best made into high-alpha long-cycle systems, while the majority of DPS comes from independent systems. The new power aux adds some versatility to this, but doesn't really change the paradigm.

Y'know combat is totally different if you don't take the same reference. On really large scale it's totally what you're saying, high alpha weapons and turrets dps. On the other hand all that is smaller than about 150-200k mass can't rely on it's turrets because they're simply too small, not so sure about the mass indication but someone will correct me if i'm wrong. Well, that makes me smile because it's already really big ships there in my opinion.

 

[Azazel_]

I would really enjoy the ability to shift to firing my docked turrets while in my ship, like I can shift between my camera views. That way if I'm in my Titan or a battleship that turns too slowly I can still have fun when enemy ships aren't in my frontal arc.

 

[Malacodor]

I would really enjoy the ability to shift to firing my docked turrets while in my ship, like I can shift between my camera views. That way if I'm in my Titan or a battleship that turns too slowly I can still have fun when enemy ships aren't in my frontal arc.

You can do that with up/down arrow keys. You just have to reactivate the AI after leaving the turret.

 

[lupoCani]

Yes and no.

It's more about ship's conception. In star wars for example most of the weapons are turret mounted weapons while in starmade it is infinitely better to put them on the hull, otherwise your ship will have less firepower than the opponent with hull mounted weapons.
In this meta, because i like to call it a meta (i'm probably playing too much LoL recently), you'll need to have your ship face to face to be the most efficient.
If weapons were to be turret mounted on horizontal ships you would be fighting like the clip in star wars. Because if you don't use the thing that our naval ships use for turrets and that i can't remember properly the name then to use your firepower the most efficient way then it's the only one way (and it's pretty cool, i'll agree with that).
For figthers/small vessels i'll agree that the current AI doesn't use the fact that you can move and do a lot of basic maneuvers with much more maneuverable vessels.

To go back to the original question of the thread, the thing that i dislike the most with the current combat system is the dps. It's the same (well, supposed to be at least) for every weapons. Then why should we take low range weapons when we can have long range weapons with the same dps ? They're much more safier.

This exactly. It's all about having a gigantic-ass cannon/cannon that takes up 25% of your whole ship. Which means that capital ship combat is really just scaled up fighter combat.

I'd like to voice my concurring with this point in particular. The forward-facing weapons are an artifact of StarMade's lack of ship modularity in general, and hardly constructive to gameplay. So long as the majority of firepower is restricted to that one direction, it's beneficial to

1. Keep large ships pointed at each other, and
2. Move around a lot.

Until large ships can sit still and slug it out with turrets, there will be something important missing in this game. Better turret control, and the ability to funnel firepower from the main ship into the turret at the expense of the latter's rotational speed, are both needed features.

 

[Nickizzy]

I'd like to voice my concurring with this point in particular. The forward-facing weapons are an artifact of StarMade's lack of ship modularity in general, and hardly constructive to gameplay. So long as the majority of firepower is restricted to that one direction, it's beneficial to

1. Keep large ships pointed at each other, and
2. Move around a lot.

Until large ships can sit still and slug it out with turrets, there will be something important missing in this game. Better turret control, and the ability to funnel firepower from the main ship into the turret at the expense of the latter's rotational speed, are both needed features.

So.... Make diminishing returns on large weapons after a point, and allow weapon mods on the main ship to be used by turrets?
#1. I agree this could work, I haven't done any big ships so I don't have an official opinion, but it could work something like: if [modules]<1000 then [damage]/x^1.06
#2. IMHO(remeber kids- just say IMHO and no one can dispute you) it would be balanced if it only extended one docking chain(so the base) and a certain ratio would need to be on-turret. And maybe you would need an extra computer for it or some new "wireless weapons link" expensive item that you would need for each weapon.

Just the base should be more than enough for a turret to get it's strength, you're base can be massive.