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- Apr 3, 2017
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INTRO
Plenty of posts all around describing the concerns regarding overhaul 2.0 plans. Not going to go too much into that apart from the following:
1. Out of all the things the new system sets out to do, the only thing apparently achieved seems to be to force people to have empty space on their ships. My biggest problem with this: It still doesn’t encourage creative/beautiful designs. People will still build DeathRectangles, they’ll just be longer now to accommodate the empty space. Please drop the whole empty space idea. Crew will give interiors an ingame advantage, don’t make a system now that makes our only logical design choice in the future to have our crew housed (and work as much as possible) between our reactor and it’s stabilizer.
2. Reactors now generate TechPoints (or whatever)? Why do they do that? What drunken engineer designed that? If they’re that desirable a resource why hasn’t anyone built a dedicated tech point generator?
3. Everything in the game is C-V to link stuff up, except for power which is now… well… the whole overhaul 2.0 thread. To have power function so differently from everything else in the game sounds illogical and counterintuitive to me. If you need two four page threads to explain the core concept to experienced players, how will a noobie get it?
So I’d like to propose an alternative that fits a little more with the current game mechanics.
I’ve spent three hours now going over the post below and all possible scenario’s and exploits, trying to tweak the proposal into perfection. Please keep in mind that I’ve tried to make this so that everything is possible, the undesirable stuff (500 reactors per ship, 200 reactors per turret, “bigger ship will win tactic”, very big hollow ships, ships completely crammed full of a block type, etc) is just not very effective.
POWER
One Reactor Core block is C-V linked to one or more Reactor Blocks. All Reactor blocks linked to one core must be touching each other / only one reactor block group per core is allowed. Power output is linear and there are no limits. Add a block, get X power. Simple. Makes sense.
Reactor blocks are volatile. Very. A group has a shared HP pool based on its size, when that is depleted…
Big Bada Boom.
To encourage well-placed reactors, and to give small ships a little edge: Reactor cores on an entity suffer a penalty (10%?) based on their size “number” and the size of the biggest reactor. Equal size reactors get their number randomized (doesn’t matter which is 1 and which is 2).
Reactor max output = (BlockCount * BlockPowerValue) – (ReactorNumber * Biggest Reactor Output * 0.1)
Example below. Let’s assume 100 power per reactor block. A Station with four reactors.
A reactor goes boom; the second-biggest reactor becomes the primary. This ensures that backup reactors have a purpose, but they’re not very efficient in terms of power per block until the main reactor goes down. Scale numbers above for balance.
So what’s stopping me from just docking a big-ass reactor to my ship and running the most powerhungry systems on that, avoiding the penalty?
You’d need to armour both your main and docked entity’s power system. Both systems would need their own heat management (see: Heat). It just wouldn’t pay off. Since power generation is linear per block added to a reactor you might as well add some size to your main ship's reactor.
This only re-introduces a bonus to well-designed turret bases with their own power core for bigger ones only. Also making big turret bases a volatile target. It has some drawbacks to have self-powered turrets though (see: Heat).
POWER CAP / RECHARGE.
Systems have their own internal power cap big enough for one shot/cycle. As suggested. As well as a small drain when “off” or “fully charged”.
Reactors produce power as requested. If an entity is at max power production it will start leeching off the next entity up the entity tree, if it can’t get any there stuff will start failing based on a customizable priority list (per entity).
SHIELDS.
Okay, looks logical, but how does this solve the “cram your ship full-o-blocks” buildstyle? Instead of power reactor lines and power cap clusters will I now spam shield rechargers and shield caps?
Well, you’ll never completely stop people from attempting that with one block type or another, but the section below and the one after that will discourage it.
Shield capacitors and rechargers are the other spam-a-lot blocks. No more need for lots of power lines and power caps will just create room for more of these.
There needs to be a diminishing return on placing more shield cap / shield recharge blocks, the severity of which is based on your ship's total block count (including lower-tier docked entities).
HEAT.
This will be what needs careful managing, the below suggestion (I feel) fits nicely within the current game structure.
- Power travels down an entity tree.
- Shields travel down an entity tree (until the host entity is at 50% at which point it stops providing).
- Heat travels up an entity tree (until the host entity is at 50% capacity at which point it stops accepting).
Heat is generated by:
- Recharging weapons.
- Active shield rechargers.
- Active factories/refineries/etc.
- Charging jumpdrives.
- Active ship systems
- Active thrusters.
- Reactors (based on block count, not efficiency after penalty)..
A small base-number of heat is generated by:
- Passive shield rechargers.
- Charged jumpdrives.
- Charged weapons.
A ship has a heat capacity based on its mass. Further customizable with ship systems.
Thermal radiators (new block, very high mass) beam heat away from your ship and into space/another dimension/wherever. They become less effective the more there are on an entity.
The priority of where heat goes is 1. Radiators. 2. Host Entity. 3. Heat capacity. Once you produce more heat than you can radiate or pawn off your capacity starts filling up.
An entity that is at full heat capacity shuts down all of its reactors and stops accepting power from other sources until heat drops back down to below 75%. During this time heat dissipation is at 50%. When at 100% heat capacity a timer starts running, if you do not regain reactor functionality before this hits 0 your ship starts taking block-damage.
Just realized “Overheating” is now really a thing. Bonus.
Radiators/ capacity systems on docked entities prove an interesting dilemma. They’re more effective, so you’d want them, however they don’t dissipate/store heat from anything other than that entity itself, while if the radiator/Thermal storage system had been on the host entity it would dissipate/store heat not only from the host entity but also other docked entities. Gave it a lot of thought and tossing it up in the air as a design-choice until someone comes up with a serious exploit.
Remove sun-damage. Instead your ship accumulates heat the closer you are to a sun. Well-designed ships could get very close to a sun if they run thrusters only while others would not be able to follow.
BOTTOMLINE
Above proposal requires quite a bit of number tweaking, but it’d make for some very interesting design choices. If the numbers are tweaked correctly; what would you spam your interior full of?
What this means for...
Small ships will dissipate their heat much more efficiently (they generate less, need less Radiators, and therefor have a higher efficiency per Radiator block).
A turret for a medium ship is not only smaller, but a lot easier to design too. No need for a dedicated power core (it’s not that big). No need for its own Thermal Radiators (main ship is medium therefor has effective heat management). It’d give the game more of a learning curve than a learning cliff.
It’d also put a soft cap on ship size (although supertitans are still possible). At some point you just can’t manage the heat from a ship that size. You’d only be able to fire the thrusters or fire the guns, but not both for very long or you’d overheat. And when a ship that size takes fire and the shield rechargers kick in… Better have taken that into account.
It’s a rough draft still. I’ve bounced the idea off a few people but no doubt there’s aspects overlooked. Feel free to take a shot at the idea above and see what sticks.
Plenty of posts all around describing the concerns regarding overhaul 2.0 plans. Not going to go too much into that apart from the following:
1. Out of all the things the new system sets out to do, the only thing apparently achieved seems to be to force people to have empty space on their ships. My biggest problem with this: It still doesn’t encourage creative/beautiful designs. People will still build DeathRectangles, they’ll just be longer now to accommodate the empty space. Please drop the whole empty space idea. Crew will give interiors an ingame advantage, don’t make a system now that makes our only logical design choice in the future to have our crew housed (and work as much as possible) between our reactor and it’s stabilizer.
2. Reactors now generate TechPoints (or whatever)? Why do they do that? What drunken engineer designed that? If they’re that desirable a resource why hasn’t anyone built a dedicated tech point generator?
3. Everything in the game is C-V to link stuff up, except for power which is now… well… the whole overhaul 2.0 thread. To have power function so differently from everything else in the game sounds illogical and counterintuitive to me. If you need two four page threads to explain the core concept to experienced players, how will a noobie get it?
So I’d like to propose an alternative that fits a little more with the current game mechanics.
I’ve spent three hours now going over the post below and all possible scenario’s and exploits, trying to tweak the proposal into perfection. Please keep in mind that I’ve tried to make this so that everything is possible, the undesirable stuff (500 reactors per ship, 200 reactors per turret, “bigger ship will win tactic”, very big hollow ships, ships completely crammed full of a block type, etc) is just not very effective.
POWER
One Reactor Core block is C-V linked to one or more Reactor Blocks. All Reactor blocks linked to one core must be touching each other / only one reactor block group per core is allowed. Power output is linear and there are no limits. Add a block, get X power. Simple. Makes sense.
Reactor blocks are volatile. Very. A group has a shared HP pool based on its size, when that is depleted…
Big Bada Boom.
To encourage well-placed reactors, and to give small ships a little edge: Reactor cores on an entity suffer a penalty (10%?) based on their size “number” and the size of the biggest reactor. Equal size reactors get their number randomized (doesn’t matter which is 1 and which is 2).
Reactor max output = (BlockCount * BlockPowerValue) – (ReactorNumber * Biggest Reactor Output * 0.1)
Example below. Let’s assume 100 power per reactor block. A Station with four reactors.
Reactor 0. 100 blocks. 10.000 power.
MaxOutput = (100*100)-(0)
Reactor 1. 90 blocks. 8.000 power.MaxOutput = (90*100)-(1*10.000*0.1)= 8.000
Reactor 2. 80 blocks. 6.000 power.MaxOutput = (80*100)-(2*10.000*0.1)= 6.000
Reactor 3. 80 blocks. 5.000 power.MaxOutput = (80*100)-(3*10.000*0.1)= 5.000
A reactor goes boom; the second-biggest reactor becomes the primary. This ensures that backup reactors have a purpose, but they’re not very efficient in terms of power per block until the main reactor goes down. Scale numbers above for balance.
So what’s stopping me from just docking a big-ass reactor to my ship and running the most powerhungry systems on that, avoiding the penalty?
You’d need to armour both your main and docked entity’s power system. Both systems would need their own heat management (see: Heat). It just wouldn’t pay off. Since power generation is linear per block added to a reactor you might as well add some size to your main ship's reactor.
This only re-introduces a bonus to well-designed turret bases with their own power core for bigger ones only. Also making big turret bases a volatile target. It has some drawbacks to have self-powered turrets though (see: Heat).
POWER CAP / RECHARGE.
Systems have their own internal power cap big enough for one shot/cycle. As suggested. As well as a small drain when “off” or “fully charged”.
Reactors produce power as requested. If an entity is at max power production it will start leeching off the next entity up the entity tree, if it can’t get any there stuff will start failing based on a customizable priority list (per entity).
SHIELDS.
Okay, looks logical, but how does this solve the “cram your ship full-o-blocks” buildstyle? Instead of power reactor lines and power cap clusters will I now spam shield rechargers and shield caps?
Well, you’ll never completely stop people from attempting that with one block type or another, but the section below and the one after that will discourage it.
Shield capacitors and rechargers are the other spam-a-lot blocks. No more need for lots of power lines and power caps will just create room for more of these.
There needs to be a diminishing return on placing more shield cap / shield recharge blocks, the severity of which is based on your ship's total block count (including lower-tier docked entities).
HEAT.
This will be what needs careful managing, the below suggestion (I feel) fits nicely within the current game structure.
- Power travels down an entity tree.
- Shields travel down an entity tree (until the host entity is at 50% at which point it stops providing).
- Heat travels up an entity tree (until the host entity is at 50% capacity at which point it stops accepting).
Heat is generated by:
- Recharging weapons.
- Active shield rechargers.
- Active factories/refineries/etc.
- Charging jumpdrives.
- Active ship systems
- Active thrusters.
- Reactors (based on block count, not efficiency after penalty)..
A small base-number of heat is generated by:
- Passive shield rechargers.
- Charged jumpdrives.
- Charged weapons.
A ship has a heat capacity based on its mass. Further customizable with ship systems.
Thermal radiators (new block, very high mass) beam heat away from your ship and into space/another dimension/wherever. They become less effective the more there are on an entity.
The priority of where heat goes is 1. Radiators. 2. Host Entity. 3. Heat capacity. Once you produce more heat than you can radiate or pawn off your capacity starts filling up.
An entity that is at full heat capacity shuts down all of its reactors and stops accepting power from other sources until heat drops back down to below 75%. During this time heat dissipation is at 50%. When at 100% heat capacity a timer starts running, if you do not regain reactor functionality before this hits 0 your ship starts taking block-damage.
Just realized “Overheating” is now really a thing. Bonus.
Radiators/ capacity systems on docked entities prove an interesting dilemma. They’re more effective, so you’d want them, however they don’t dissipate/store heat from anything other than that entity itself, while if the radiator/Thermal storage system had been on the host entity it would dissipate/store heat not only from the host entity but also other docked entities. Gave it a lot of thought and tossing it up in the air as a design-choice until someone comes up with a serious exploit.
Remove sun-damage. Instead your ship accumulates heat the closer you are to a sun. Well-designed ships could get very close to a sun if they run thrusters only while others would not be able to follow.
BOTTOMLINE
Above proposal requires quite a bit of number tweaking, but it’d make for some very interesting design choices. If the numbers are tweaked correctly; what would you spam your interior full of?
What this means for...
Small ships will dissipate their heat much more efficiently (they generate less, need less Radiators, and therefor have a higher efficiency per Radiator block).
A turret for a medium ship is not only smaller, but a lot easier to design too. No need for a dedicated power core (it’s not that big). No need for its own Thermal Radiators (main ship is medium therefor has effective heat management). It’d give the game more of a learning curve than a learning cliff.
It’d also put a soft cap on ship size (although supertitans are still possible). At some point you just can’t manage the heat from a ship that size. You’d only be able to fire the thrusters or fire the guns, but not both for very long or you’d overheat. And when a ship that size takes fire and the shield rechargers kick in… Better have taken that into account.
It’s a rough draft still. I’ve bounced the idea off a few people but no doubt there’s aspects overlooked. Feel free to take a shot at the idea above and see what sticks.
