Overhaul of Ship-Core

[McDili]

I thought of this myself, but I didn\'t find the need to talk about it because Schema could probably figure out a better system.



But, you could simply define that when a call for damage calculation is passed, the current amount of power generators is 100%. That variable would be static unless a different condition is met.



That condition would be the very same condition that is met for the shutdown sequence to disengage, to be more specific, the condition in which for a period of time you take no damage. If such a time period has elapsed, the shutdown sequence is disengaged, and the variable that determines 100% of power regen capacity is returned to a dynamic value based on current power generators.



For other readers who don\'t understand how coding works, if the shutdown sequence is engaged, but at some point before it completes, you survive a span of 20 seconds without taking any damage to your ship, the amount of power gens in your ship will be the \"New\" 100% until you start adding on more power gens.

 

[FlyingDebris]

Maybe when the ship explodes, there could be debris left, perhaps, everything within twenty or so blocks of a gun or missile gets destroyed. This debris would be easier to salvage from the wreck of the other ship than it is now. That would also allow a defeated player to retrieve the wreckage of his ship.

 

[McDili]

Yes a merging of our ideas could work in a very similar fashion, but it has a caveat similar to the one you thought mine had before.



The only reason I was hesitant to push for your idea exclusively is because the HP of the core doesn\'t rely on any other part of the ship. If I were to bring up a scenario similar to what you came up with before, if you destroy the blocks on a small fighter because the core takes too much damage to focus on, wouldn\'t the core be able to just fly away if it hasn\'t taken enough damage to trigger the shutdown sequence?



Surely a planetcracking missile might take it out in one shot, but then if that was the case, such would happen to any large ship once the shields were down too, which kind of undermines the \"Shutdown Sequence\" function entirely.

 

[McDili]

Sure!



Yeah I agree that once the core explodes, the wreckage should still stay if there is any.

 

[Kaelum]

I believe the ship core should not be able to move by itself, as that is the flaw of both our ideas, as the guy in the overheating core could run away quite fast. Also, merging our ideas would remove some of the flaws. The core would have HP based on the mass, which would be an easy addition by linking the variables that belong to the same ship, with the health being x times more than the mass variable. Also there would be a minimum, which would make fighters less of a target but not as OP as a solid number.

AND YET AGAIN, I ALREADY SAID THINGS ABOUT HOW AFTER THE CORE EXPLODES THERE COULD BE A WRECK!!!

 

[McDili]

Woah there, nobody is saying you didn\'t come up with the whole wreck thing. I think that collectively everyone here wants that man, both of our ideas can easily incorporate it.



I\'m concerned that you have missed some of the debate in this thread, but that\'s okay because I\'ve made edits to the OP highlighting one of the issues you previously brought up about cores flying without power.



That said, I would like to clarify this here and correct you when you said that a flaw in my idea is that an overheating core could run away quite fast. This is actually not the case. As I have highlighted in bold in my OP, and deep into the debate here, is that once the shutdown sequence has been engaged, if your capacity to regenerate power is depleted entirely, your ship core explodes.



For example, if your titan class cruiser fired a planet-sized missile at a small fighter, it would destroy all the blocks except the core, and engage the shutdown sequence. However, since it destroyed all the blocks, including the power generators, then the capacity to regenerate power is already at 0%, in which case the ship core would also explode instantaneously instead of 100 seconds later.



Ships of the same class would have more balanced fights with each other if they allocate their systems in a similar way. The only way a player could survive a losing fight is if they built some sort of escape pod and got out of their ship core and miraculously finds their way to the escape pod without getting hit, or by running away before their engines took damage and before they lost too much power.



Now with all that said, if the HP of a ship core is in relation to the mass of the ship, yes our ideas merged could work. But I can\'t help but feel weird about that, I\'ll try my best to explain why I feel like it\'s kind of goofy.



Let\'s say I\'ve made a ship, and I put the core in the back and the back of my ship is very lightly armored. But the very front of my ship is this collosal build of hardened hull. Because of the front of my ship being super heavily armored with loads of hull, it contributes to the HP of my ship core, so even though the back of the ship is lightly armored it will still takes loads of damage to destroy it because the front of my ship has so much mass.



I\'m not sure if I explained that well, but I feel like the actual mass of the ship itself should contribute to its own defense based on how well you hardened certain parts of the ship. That way if I have my core in a lightly armored area, in my suggestion exclusively, if I had a super hardened frontal hull, I would still be in a load of danger if somebody got behind my ship.



In an effort to better explain this, the HP idea is a cumulative number, while the Shutdown Sequence is based on percentage. The percentage based idea keeps everybody on a more level playing field, the HP idea can really snowball into something overpowered.

 

[Wade]

you had a special block i dunno what to call it but you could make a special haul around the core that you could attach some thrusters to and some power along with plex storage containers which,you dock the core insert inside the ship via a special docking block that would allow you to have an eject on your hot bar and when press it would lunch the core with its special haul destroying an blocks in its way as it left the ship... a true escape pod type of thing lol i knw it would be hard to impliment but one can dream lol

and to help prevent server lag after 5-10 min the rest of the haul of the ship you ejected from would vanish

 

[McDili]

Made some edits to the OP, changed it so that instead of the original suggestion in which you lose 1% of your total capacity to regenerate power/sec and die when that capacity is depleted, to losing 2% of your total capacity to regenerate power/sec, and once the capacity to regenerate power is gone, the reserve power you have available to you starts to drain at 2%/sec.



The other conditions still apply, if your shutdown sequence is engaged, but you survive a span of ~20 seconds without taking any damage to your ship as a whole, the sequence is halted.



This change in how things works makes power tanks actually viable, and was also done with this thread in mind: http://star-made.org/content/buffing-power-tanks-and-limited-gens



I wholeheartedly agree with elijahpederson\'s suggestions to power generators and power tanks, and I think it would work hand-in-hand with the suggestion I\'ve made here.

 

[Kaelum]

I have been building capital ships for a while after barely killing one with my fighter, mostly because the idiot used unguided missiles and had only 2 gun formations. Hardened hull has no more mass than regular hull. Also, adding insane amounts of armor would make it easier to kill you, as hardened hull DOES slow you down. BTW I know this because I tried armoring my fighter and hardened hull made it extremely hard to manuever, and the only way to kill fighters was to get in a dogfight and back up suddenly, giving me good perspective to fire my missiles.

 

[Kaelum]

Again, the power percentage would not work as intended as it would mindfuck the game, and it would be unforgiving for people in coreships who get attacked. Also, in the mixed idea that I have made, the damage determines the speed of degrading and instead of power degrading maybe something realistic like malfunctions. Also, if you put an entire capital ship worth of gun into the ship, one power module will give it time to get away quickly. A core should not be the only target, but should not be immortal as you wait for it to die. Instead, it should be the final goal, which you can only really get by killing other stuff first.

 

[Dogdard]

As it stands, the ship retains in effect ALL of its capacity to fight for at most 50-100 seconds. How about if say once the shutdown sequence is initiated all of the ships systems become say half as powerful? As in, weapons do half damage thrusters provide half thrust etc etc. (the number can be tweaked as 50% does seem a little steep)

Although I know that with your system this still will happen as the attacking craft will continue to fire and probably have hit other key systems prior to the core.... but what if by some lucky shot our above ship\'s \"core\" got hit first? Shouldn\'t it instantly lose a severe amount of combat effectiveness? I mean how can a ship still \"steer\" or obtain weapons lock if the main hub is inoperable or severely damaged?

 

[Kaelum]

That is sort of my idea, but not everything at once. If the core is overheating major malfunctions could occur, from a weapon system being disabled for a second or two to a reactor malfunction resulting in an explosion in your power system, all depending on how damaged the core is, or how far it is on the overheating. Things could fail, and reactors and weapons could explode, or even a total system failure if you take a massive amount of damage at once, which would essentially EMP you.

 

[Kaelum]

Wow, we reached two pages.

 

[Dogdard]

I\'ve been a little lost trying to keep up understanding exactly what you and the op are getting to..

So as it stands (let me break it to my level) a ships core \"overheats\" however this does not immediately kill the pilot. Instead they are left with the option to flee or fight. The longer the timer goes the more systems are affected and thus the less effective the ship becomes. At the end of the timer the ship explodes and if the pilot is in it, they die.

So then the debate is simply over what factors into the time it takes for the ship to explode?

 

[Kaelum]

No, it is over whether the core should be able to be destroyed regardless of time overheating. So the core will not be an invincible god core that takes its time, and if you disable the ship you can finish them. Not excluding his idea but setting a maximum amount of punishment it can take, albeit a high one.

 

[McDili]

If you scroll up you will see that I replied earlier to your concerns about the code.



It\'s actually fairly simple, you have a function that determines your current power gens as 100% when the ship first takes damage, and that variable stays static until you meet the condition of not taking damage for 20-odd seconds and halt the shutdown sequence. Once that condition is met, the value that determines percentage of cores returns to a dynamic value based on how many power gens you have.



With code that achieves this, the game is not mindfucked, and the \"Shutdown Sequence\" works just fine. Although, I\'m willing to bet Schema could come up with an even better code than what I came up with.



You and I are at an impasse in which we can\'t overcome. We are both too fond of our own ideas. I personally believe that my idea contributes to gameplay and combat more than an having HP based on mass on the ship core. I believe with Mass-based HP on the ship core, you can still make cheesy builds.



But really, there isn\'t any way to see which is better, or if they are both better merged as one, without proper testing.



So unless we obtain a way to test our ideas in-game, we will just have to agree to disagree for the time being. But the debate was good, and it covered a lot of the bases that both our ideas are involved in. Any further debate about the two ideas would just continue the thread on repeated information. Instead we should just continue the discussion.



If you really want to see your idea come to life, I would suggest making a thread with your alternative suggestion to achieve the same goals. I will post my feedback on it there as you have posted yours here, just to make sure that both threads show the potential pros and cons of both ideas. Hopefully that way, both of our ideas will have good chances of being tested by Schema and the devs. Cheers bud.

 

[Kaelum]

It was a good debate, but please add something to help spare core only ships used for transport, as schema may see this.

 

[Snk]

Just get out of the ship and replace the weapons computers.

Honestly, I think the only way boardering crews would be useful is that if there was a certain de-shielded around the core (dependong ont he size of the ship) so you could fight your way to the center and blast away.

Also, being able to hack gravity modules would be nice.

And this suggestion is pretty damn cool. +1, good idea. But the thing is, it still has people aiming for the core first and then disabling the other stuff. The game\'s main strategy would still be \"AIM FER DA COOOOOAR,\" but then \"AIM FER DA OTHER STERF.\" Not a very big difference.

Just make it so the core is the starting point of the ship, nothing more. The idea that the whole ship centers around one block is kinda dumb. If you want true strategy, remove the core and simply make it the starting point of a ship. You shouldn\'t even be able to enter it.

Have it so you could enter flight mode through cockpits, and build mode through hangers and stuff. But that\'s a completely different idea alltogether.

 

[McDili]

Yes, adding a lot of hull would slow you down, but in your suggestion with having the ship-core have HP based on mass, then I don\'t actually have to put armor around my ship core. I could make a 1000x1000x1000 block of ice rocks and have my ship core completely exposed and it would take a long time to destroy it. That\'s goofy.



Having the ship core have HP, no matter how much it has, only changes how long it takes to focus fire a ship-core. If it\'s based on the mass of the ship as well, it doesn\'t actually make any other systems in the ship any more important than they are now, because time you don\'t spend on hitting the core\'s HP is time wasted, even if the max HP is dynamic in relation to the ship\'s mass, that doesn\'t make it any more important to attack thrusters or power or weapons, it only makes it imparitive that you destroy mass of the ship to speed along the process of focusing down the core. So, you\'d just focus the core with AMC\'s, shoot some missiles, and go back to focusing the core with AMC\'s.



In the suggestion that involes a shutdown sequence, even if your first instinct is to attack the core, once you make it overheat you have the rest of the ship to deal with. You don\'t have to deal with anything mass-related, and you must continue doing damage to the ship itself. So you try to find the engines, power, and/or weapons systems to disable the ship further. It isn\'t the ultimate form of strategy, but it\'s a good first step forward.



And it doesn\'t make the core some \"Overpowered god core of armaggedon.\" It makes an attacker actually have to take into consideration all of the other systems of the ship, which makes missiles actually useful, makes building a good ship actually take planning, and generally makes combat a whole hell of a lot more intense. Two giant capital ships shooting each other won\'t be some battle of whoever brought the most shields, the winning ship would leave the battle with some very potent battlescars. And if the shutdown sequence happens to go on for the full duration of 100 seconds, then the battle of whatever ships were present was probably an insane awesome memory, rather than someone focusing down a core the whole time.

 

[provet]

What if the \"target\" representing the enemy is based on the enemy ship\'s center instead of the exact position of the core?

Or instead of the above

Have some kind of Core-Unfinder that make the core-target sight move, or multiply, so it\'s harder to know where the weakest point (the core) is.

Thus, its no longer possible to focus the fire on the enemy core, as you dont know where on the ship it is placed. So your new focus would be to shot at the ship or it\'s exposed parts (engines, weapons etc).