Power 2.1 doesn't suck.

[GDPR 302420]

If size were not a balance issue, then the meta for competitive combat ships wouldn't have been ships perpetually on the bleeding upper edge of the size spectrum to the point that they frequently lagged & even crashed servers when jumping to large bases to to each other if (god forbid) one or two players happened to mining real hard someplace else at the same time.

Meta has absolutely nothing to do with size, any ship can be meta for its size and it seems that is something you don't quite get.

Meta by definition is Most Effective Tactic Available, and for the most part the current meta for 2.0 is applicable to all ships regardless of size class.

As for lag, that is an issue with the games abysmal optimisation and not an issue with size in itself.

Size has been an OP meta throughout the entire history of the game. No softcap or other penalty imposed has changed that enough to see a real change in the result. To say the relationship between size and power in 1.0 is not actually an issue is incorrect.

Size is only overpowered when you take a 10k mass dingy to fight a 1m mass titan and expect to come out on top.

Larger ships generating more power to power larger systems which require more power isn't an issue, this is not an opinion, this is fact.

The proof is in the pudding - tell me which server without admin-enforced limits had a PvP meta that saw decreases of size in combat ship preference over time as players improved their meta. It's never happened.

Nice try MacThule, but you and I both know that the reason servers did not see an overall decrease in mass used was due to a majority makeup of the players on these servers had absolutely zero experience with the meta and thus did not apply it, which is why they still believe size = effectiveness.

You can point to Veilith and others using smaller ships to wreck noobcubes, but those are poor examples because of the tech & experience differences, and did not - could not - result in a change to the size meta because as opponents adapted to new technology that slipped out, they still trended towards larger ships to outclass opponents with relatively similar tech levels.

Firstly, Veilith's designs are still very much effective against larger ships that are very much up there with the meta, Veilith's size tech advantage allowed him to fight when he was outmassed against both less experienced players and more experienced players alike.

Secondly, opponents who adapted the meta did not slip towards larger ships, the opposite occured, they went smaller because they relised that they could use less resources to do more. The only exception to this is Vaygr Empire, because they didn't have to worry about resource costs because up until recently every ship that had was created with exploits.

The people who were leaning towards larger ships were not the people who took on the meta.

Size in Starmade is - and has always been - imbalanced.

This statement is factually incorrect.

Until there are equally valuable reasons to go small, and those reasons are valuable enough to show themselves as such by a change in the way people play, an imbalance is indicated and no argument about the math of mechanics, no tossing around emotive terms like "nerfed" and "penalized" to paint large ships as picked-on and gimped, none of that can dispel the actual evidence of how good players wage war against each other.

Oh please MacThule, what is this "actual evidence" you speak of? Because so far all your arguments have been debunked.

There are several reasons to go smaller, some include:

• Smaller ships are more fun to fight with
• Smaller ships cost less resources
• Smaller ships are better with speed tanking builds, which is the current meta over absolute defences
• Smaller ships are better suited to offence focused builds, which is the current meta over balance between offence and defence

The reason player behaviour has not changed is because most players are not even bothering with the meta.

You don't see ships under 20K at a serious fight, because they are too underpowered.

I can tell you have not been involved in serious fights in well over a year, several fights under 20k have occured that were very much serious.

LAS, the faction I was in ran entire campaign on LvD with 3k mass ships and were very successful and Veilith has hosted 5k tournaments on LvD and streamed them, he has a few on youtube.

To say that 20k ships are not seen in serious fights is a factually incorrect statement.

Also, smaller ships are not underpowered, any ship of any size can be meta for its mass, what I think you are having an issue with is that you expect a single fighter to kill a titan.

The temptation may be to argue that this is "just natural" or "common sense" because "bigger is stronger," but ebola is a single-celled organism. We don't make fighters IRL as big as possible for more power, we don't group troops in clusters as large as possible for combat, many animals & plants have evolved to smaller sizes over time to take advantage of the benefits.

What the heck are you even talking about? None of the real life examples you are talking about are in any way applicable to StarMade.

mall size has legit advantages. That's a fact in life as well as in fiction, and this game has never reflected that reality.

Small sizes are very much effective in StarMade, as I said before, don't expect to win against a titan in a single fighter.

New systems fundamentals designed to change the actual gameplay value of size (and other issues) was absolutely necessary.

This statement is factually incorrect as proven by the text above.

Size is king for the most part, mainly because people didn't use fleets/drones and it was the easiest way to scale.
A fleet of drones with 10% mass value can decimate any titan, and many of the more experienced PVP factions used them extensively (vagyr for example loved spamming 16-20k destroyers).

Thryn for another example had the votaries designed by Zyrr running in the 2-3k range, lovely little beam platforms each outputting hundreds of thousands of DPS.
A swarm of 10-20 of them literally ate ships like a swarm of piranha.

This is a good example of what I am talking about, size doesn't always mean better, fleets are one of the many ways where smaller wins against bigger.

Your assumption is based on pre-integrity shield mechanics.

No they are not, this isnt an assumption nor it is based on anything.

Your assumption is based on pre-integrity shield mechanics. If spaghetti shields take multiplied damage just like spaghetti systems, then a basic waffle gun will hit it enough to kill the shields and start disabling systems. If you you look at either of my suggestions on the matter, a true spaghetti ship should suffer ~100 x damage to systems, so it would only take 1-2 lucky missiles or a strafing from a waffle gun to bring one down. Based on my fights with spaghetti using non-spegetti ships, I'm fairly certain that that is about their ratio of combat effectiveness to a "normal and rational" ship design.

From actual testing, a Spaghetti ship can still evade waffles with relative ease, the only time I have found where it is easy to hit a spaghetti ship with waffles is when they are at point blank knife fighting range and are almost motionless.

As for missiles... well...

They don't like to shoot at their target.
[doublepost=1519329569,1519329298][/doublepost]Let me give you a quick TLDR with an analogy for ya MacThule

So we got a fully armed and crewed battleship, going up against a fully armed and crewed dingy.

Who wins? The battleship for obvious reasons. Do you consider that result to be a balance issue?


Now, here is another example using the same analogy.

A fully armed and crewed battleship is going up against an identical copy of itself as its foe, they are both evenly matched even thought they are larger then a dingy and both are well even through the fight.

In the end, both destroy eachover because they are both evenly matched large ships. Do you consider this a balance issue?

 

[Nosajimiki]

Meta has absolutely nothing to do with size, any ship can be meta for its size and it seems that is something you don't quite get.

Meta by definition is Most Effective Tactic Available, and for the most part the current meta for 2.0 is applicable to all ships regardless of size class.

As for lag, that is an issue with the games abysmal optimisation and not an issue with size in itself.



Size is only overpowered when you take a 10k mass dingy to fight a 1m mass titan and expect to come out on top.

Larger ships generating more power to power larger systems which require more power isn't an issue, this is not an opinion, this is fact.



Nice try MacThule, but you and I both know that the reason servers did not see an overall decrease in mass used was due to a majority makeup of the players on these servers had absolutely zero experience with the meta and thus did not apply it, which is why they still believe size = effectiveness.



Firstly, Veilith's designs are still very much effective against larger ships that are very much up there with the meta, Veilith's size tech advantage allowed him to fight when he was outmassed against both less experienced players and more experienced players alike.

Secondly, opponents who adapted the meta did not slip towards larger ships, the opposite occured, they went smaller because they relised that they could use less resources to do more. The only exception to this is Vaygr Empire, because they didn't have to worry about resource costs because up until recently every ship that had was created with exploits.

The people who were leaning towards larger ships were not the people who took on the meta.



This statement is factually incorrect.



Oh please MacThule, what is this "actual evidence" you speak of? Because so far all your arguments have been debunked.

There are several reasons to go smaller, some include:

• Smaller ships are more fun to fight with
• Smaller ships cost less resources
• Smaller ships are better with speed tanking builds, which is the current meta over absolute defences
• Smaller ships are better suited to offence focused builds, which is the current meta over balance between offence and defence

The reason player behaviour has not changed is because most players are not even bothering with the meta.



I can tell you have not been involved in serious fights in well over a year, several fights under 20k have occured that were very much serious.

LAS, the faction I was in ran entire campaign on LvD with 3k mass ships and were very successful and Veilith has hosted 5k tournaments on LvD and streamed them, he has a few on youtube.

To say that 20k ships are not seen in serious fights is a factually incorrect statement.

Also, smaller ships are not underpowered, any ship of any size can be meta for its mass, what I think you are having an issue with is that you expect a single fighter to kill a titan.



What the heck are you even talking about? None of the real life examples you are talking about are in any way applicable to StarMade.



Small sizes are very much effective in StarMade, as I said before, don't expect to win against a titan in a single fighter.



This statement is factually incorrect as proven by the text above.



This is a good example of what I am talking about, size doesn't always mean better, fleets are one of the many ways where smaller wins against bigger.



No they are not, this isnt an assumption nor it is based on anything.



From actual testing, a Spaghetti ship can still evade waffles with relative ease, the only time I have found where it is easy to hit a spaghetti ship with waffles is when they are at point blank knife fighting range and are almost motionless.

As for missiles... well...

They don't like to shoot at their target.

Okay... when missiles worked, they could hit spaghetti on a luck shot often enough.

[EDITED FOR ACCURACY] As a case study, since we have different experiences, I was able to damage until it ran away a 35k spaghetti in a 300k MK-2 ddraig, and it was about a fair fight. It was against BDoW's Crystal-Entity-class DemonBorn, which is very similar density and function to the Fair-and-Balanced. For people unfamiliar with the ddraig, its tech level was about on par with most middle-tier meta ships today, but definitely not on par with the high end stuff like MagicTech or my latter Scylla class.

I was only able to hit the DemonBorn with a small % of my shots, not enough to same mass him, but enough that when coupled with my own resilience of size advantage made it feel a lot like fighting a same mass ship. Even at just x10 weapon mass, I was able to keep his shields down easily, but the real challenge was block damage which was mostly handled by my missiles being able to hit "often enough". Basically, I was doing x10 damage to make it a fair fight against a ship 1/10th my mass; so, had I been doing x100-125 damage, then I would have theoretically been able to same mass him all else being the same.

As for the size commentary: 2 smaller ships almost always beats 1 same mass capitol ship when all other factors are the same. Trinova and Vaygr both proved this point very often by killing larger, more technologically advanced ships through well coordinated flanking and maneuvering tactics. Also, certain meta things did not scale up well. Laminar armor is unviable on larger ships due to collision tics. Hyper arrays lose efficiency on larger ships due to damage tables and server limits, etc. Missiles hit a hard fall-off in effectiveness on ships over 500k mass.

PvP players don't like their fights lagging to shit and they don't like inefficiency; so, most of us either went smaller to take advantage of the common meta or we had to go off the beaten road with different less well known metas to build big without building trash. All said, between Jan 2017 and Jan 2018, I actually saw most PvP factions drop their average ship sizes by 60-75%.

 

[MacThule]

Meta has absolutely nothing to do with size, any ship can be meta for its size and it seems that is something you don't quite get.

This is only true if you are prejudiced to size as a natural decider of victory. I get it, I just disagree - and believe that others do as well - based on the way both the real world and most semi-realistic fictions operate. Yes; very often greater size means victory in a conflict, but it is not rare in the slightest for smaller combatents to win.

The meta can be (and in many ways mostly has been) as abstract as lag. It can be ship length. It can be loadout. It can be ship size. It can be turn speed. It can be regen. Whatever works.

The real threat 2.0 presents is to the lag family of metas, and the players bound to it. It is, at its heart, a performance update, and one very small part of that update might be deliberately discouraging ships from pushing the bleeding edge of engine performance.

As noted in past threads here, capping the lag would obsolete many of the dominant build strategies in common use til late. I think that a lot of the kickback is about the perceived change in the culture of the game from a big boss dynamic to something a bit less pinned first and foremost on one main factor (ship size).

I think many people enjoy the convenience of that, and practiced builders here reap the short-term rewards, but I do believe the game holds a much broader and more unique potential. I am glad to see Schema taking the risk on doing something truly new, despite fair chances of failure.

Size is a meta, as much as lag is meta and the two are married. Large ships are awesome for many reasons, but I am 100% behind creating natural resistance, within the code, to a pure dominance of large ships and any tendancy to encourage every player to push the limits of performance with every ship or be outmatched.

 

[paladin.oa]

This is only true if you are prejudiced to size as a natural decider of victory. I get it, I just disagree - and believe that others do as well - based on the way both the real world and most semi-realistic fictions operate. Yes; very often greater size means victory in a conflict, but it is not rare in the slightest for smaller combatents to win.

The meta can be (and in many ways mostly has been) as abstract as lag. It can be ship length. It can be loadout. It can be ship size. It can be turn speed. It can be regen. Whatever works.

The real threat 2.0 presents is to the lag family of metas, and the players bound to it. It is, at its heart, a performance update, and one very small part of that update might be deliberately discouraging ships from pushing the bleeding edge of engine performance.

As noted in past threads here, capping the lag would obsolete many of the dominant build strategies in common use til late. I think that a lot of the kickback is about the perceived change in the culture of the game from a big boss dynamic to something a bit less pinned first and foremost on one main factor (ship size).

I think many people enjoy the convenience of that, and practiced builders here reap the short-term rewards, but I do believe the game holds a much broader and more unique potential. I am glad to see Schema taking the risk on doing something truly new, despite fair chances of failure.

Size is a meta, as much as lag is meta and the two are married. Large ships are awesome for many reasons, but I am 100% behind creating natural resistance, within the code, to a pure dominance of large ships and any tendancy to encourage every player to push the limits of performance with every ship or be outmatched.

I do not understand, what is this lag META that you are talking about? Would you please explain or provide a link.

 

[Nosajimiki]

This is only true if you are prejudiced to size as a natural decider of victory. I get it, I just disagree - and believe that others do as well - based on the way both the real world and most semi-realistic fictions operate. Yes; very often greater size means victory in a conflict, but it is not rare in the slightest for smaller combatants to win.

This was already true of Power 1.0. A well built or well piloted smaller ship could beat a larger ship quite easily. A few good examples of this:

- The fight between my Nidhog Battleship and Event Horizon's Hammer-class Titan. The Nidhog was one of my old pure RP ship with no exploitative technologies; so, my tech was in no way better, but I was outmassed 2:1. It won the fight because I identified the Hammer's Op-Spec and piloted against it.

- The fight where me and Flying Debris flew a pair or low-tech 250k cruisers against a much higher-tech 500k battleship built by Aziel. We won because we were able to flank him and land WAY more firepower into his sides than one ship would have been able to in a head-to-head fight.

- Or my last fight before the power 2.o patch, I fought Valana's Svalinn-class with a Scylla MK-II. We both had the same mass, but I murdered the hell out of him without my shields ever dropping below 70% or even really trying to do any fancy manuvouring because I had the advantage of better tech.

- Then there is ofcourse the most obvious David and Goliath store in SM where Vielth killed a 200k using a 5k fighter using WAY better tech and pioleting.

People who've fought enough times know that the outcome of a battle cannot be predicted by size, tech, or piloting alone, but has to do with all 3. If you've never beaten a larger or more advanced opponent, then you were likely not piloting very well, but once size becomes different enough, then the big ship WILL and SHOULD win every time. That ship is more expensive, harder, to replace, and takes more time to design; so, those factors should be all rewarded. Games where tiny ships kill cruisers generally have a cost balancing mechanics like how in BSGOL a small fighter was the meta for killing heavy line-ships, but when you died, you just respawned in a new cruiser, so big deal.

The meta can be (and in many ways mostly has been) as abstract as lag. It can be ship length. It can be loadout. It can be ship size. It can be turn speed. It can be regen. Whatever works.

The real threat 2.0 presents is to the lag family of metas, and the players bound to it. It is, at its heart, a performance update, and one very small part of that update might be deliberately discouraging ships from pushing the bleeding edge of engine performance.

As noted in past threads here, capping the lag would obsolete many of the dominant build strategies in common use til late. I think that a lot of the kickback is about the perceived change in the culture of the game from a big boss dynamic to something a bit less pinned first and foremost on one main factor (ship size).

Your argument is actually self-contradictory because big ships allow you to trade off less efficiency for much less lag. For example, a 1-mil mass ship causes way less lag than 20 same tech 25ks despite being much more massive. It has less surface area, fewer moving parts, and puts less targets for the AI to cycle through. Size meta was MOSTLY about lag reduction, not just pushing lag to its limits as many ppl mistakenly believe; so, if a person is limited by how much lag they can field, then the outcome would be the opposite of what you seem to expect.

I think many people enjoy the convenience of that, and practiced builders here reap the short-term rewards, but I do believe the game holds a much broader and more unique potential. I am glad to see Schema taking the risk on doing something truly new, despite fair chances of failure.

Size is a meta, as much as lag is meta and the two are married. Large ships are awesome for many reasons, but I am 100% behind creating natural resistance, within the code, to a pure dominance of large ships and any tendency to encourage every player to push the limits of performance with every ship or be outmatched.

Again, you are 100% mistaken about what is meta. Laggy ships almost always cause their pilots more harm than their opponents. If you make a missile boat that fires 1000 missiles at a time, then YOU will be the one unable to hit when they come in and rip you up with a responsibly built ship. If your ship causes a lot of localized collisions, then it will affect you first. Experienced builders did a lot to offset the lag that their high-tech stuff caused, like zero-speed-rails, collision box optimization, cartesian-seamed armor, no-clip-point turrets, etc, and when they built stuff that was naturally laggy, they would build it smaller to make sure they could still fly it. Experienced pilots also knew how to approach high lag situations to give their game time to load things in before the fighting started.

Also, you may not know this, but PvP builders LOVED watching newer guys try to build big ships, because they always thought they could just win-by-mass, and they were proven wrong all the time.

 

[Tunk]

Lag meta basically consists of building to the limits that your PC/Server can handle.
As each optimization or increase in computing power comes out players can build larger and larger and more complex things.

Back in the early days 2k ships used to lag as bad as 1m mass ships, in that case 2k was the lag meta.

So now the game is at the point where literally several mega mass battles happen, and the only limitation is lag caused by all these ships being in the area.
Those with computers and/or connection capable of handling this aren't too phased by it, everyone else with a shoddy connection or PC will inevitably crash and/or lag out.

Things like docked armour/systems also play into this, back when docked generators were a thing blowing up larger ships literally caused servers to crash as stuff became undocked and blew up physics/collision calcs as well as the rendering/physics lag involved with them, regularly causing crashes on both clients and servers as well.

This also plays into ship speed and "speed tanking", honestly the game is horrible around sector interfaces and positioning in general when high speeds are involved and quite regularly collision detection is not handled properly at high speeds.

[edit]
Just thought I would add, that the current direction of starmade will INREASE lag in several ways.
Probably the most apparent one is Starmade has a particular problem with exposed face culling (a reason why docked reactors caused lag too, added lots of exposed faces across multiple entities that needed culling if internal), the current changes encourage a lot of empty spaced increasing exposed faces on a ship (lots of internal surface area inside of the ship).
Rejigging a ship with new reactors and systems, while not completely filling in the ship causes some pretty heavy client rendering lag, as well as server lag in combat with collision/ray calculations on hit.

 

[Scypio]

Vertical ships have plenty of other advantages such as turning with your straif, narrow targeting profile that make direct-fire weapons struggle to hit you while you straif, and a short profile that makes it difficult for missiles to side-swipe you... vertical builds still have enough advantages, that there is not reason to get upset that they now also have this one disadvantage that won't really effect you until you're already pretty badly mauled and likely losing the fight anyway.

I feen like you're this seller trying to give one hundred reason as why i should buy this car that is worse than the one next to it.
As long as it is just to hit and kill the ennemy reactor then everything that is vertical will sucks. You have basically three spots to hit to find out. The tips or the middle. You can just shoot the whole lengh to hit the stream to disable your opponent the time that your super beam recharge.

You're talking a lot about lucky shot so i'm talking about it too. One lucky shot and your ship goes boom. Hoping that the AI and my opponent will lag enough to avoid any damage isn't a satisfying way to play. If i want to play a game of luck then i'll play dice and not take hours to build a ship and loose on a bad roll.

Doesn't the recent stabilizer update fix that?

Red said it and you should have understood it. A vertical build can't rely on pure luck and as long as coring it is then vertical builds will sucks. Thanks to the stabs mechanics you even have spots where you should shoot to find out.
I can build a horizontal ship almost immune to drill weapons. I can't on a vertical one.

 

[kulbolen]

a lot of the things macthule is saying would make a lot of sense except power 2 isnt changing or fixing them, and could be making them worse.

also, the real life comparisons are silly. the reason small stuff kills big stuff in real life is because weapons outclass armor so much that a speedboat can fire a missile that might sink a battleship, and some countries... OUT TECH other countries. hmm.

 

[Benevolent27]

Okay... when missiles worked, they could hit spaghetti on a luck shot often enough.

As a case study, since we have different experiences, I was able to kill a 25k spaghetti in a 300k MK-2 ddraig, and it was about a fair fight. It was against BDoW's DemonBorn class which is very similar in scale, density, and function to the Fair-and-Balanced. For people unfamiliar with the ddraig, its tech level was about on par with most middle-tier meta ships today, but definitely not on par with the high end stuff like MagicTech or my latter Scylla class.

I was only able to hit the DemonBorn with a small % of my shots, not enough to same mass him, but enough that when coupled with my own resilience of size advantage made it feel a lot like fighting a same mass ship. Even at just x10 weapon mass, I was able to keep his shields down easilly, but the real challenge was block damage which was mostly handled by my missiles being able to hit "often enough". Basically, I was doing x10 damage to make it a fair fight against a ship 1/10th my mass; so, had I been doing x100-125 damage, then I would have theoretically been able to same mass him all else being the same.

As for the size commentary: 2 smaller ships almost always beats 1 same mass capitol ship when all other factors are the same. Trinova and Vaygr both proved this point very often by killing larger, more technologically advanced ships through well coordinated flanking and maneuvering tactics. Also, certain meta things did not scale up well. Laminar armor is unviable on larger ships due to collision tics. Hyper arrays lose efficiency on larger ships due to damage tables and server limits, etc. Missiles hit a hard fall-off in effectiveness on ships over 500k mass.

PvP players don't like their fights lagging to shit and they don't like inefficiency; so, most of us either went smaller to take advantage of the common meta or we had to go off the beaten road with different less well known metas to build big without building trash. All said, between Jan 2017 and Jan 2018, I actually saw most PvP factions drop their average ship sizes by 60-75%.

*The ship is called "CrystallineEntity", but that's an interesting name you gave it. Haha
*The spaghetti ship was 36k in weight.
*Compared to the "Fair-and-Balanced", it was almost half the weight, but in testing could kill the "Fair-and-Balanced" ship every time.
*You did not kill the spaghetti ship. I forfeited the battle by leaving the area when it became apparent I could not get close enough to continue doing damage. The ship still had a pretty decent amount of systems HP left. I even threw that ship into the middle of a fight between a bunch of 250k ships and it got torn up a lot more, and STILL hasn't overheated. I am still storing the highly damaged ship out in space somewhere. It will probably never get overheated, lol.

The nail in the coffin against the spaghetti ship was was due to your stop effect weapons and missiles. This was basically the counter to the kind of spaghetti ship, I created. Spaghetti ships will generally rely more on DPS weapons, which have shorter range than missiles. If they go and try to have a big enough capacity to support lock-on missiles adequately, then they can have their power capacity cut down too quickly as the lines are cut and the mass addition would reduce their total damage output quite a bit (for their size) AND would increase the amount of power necessary to maintain passives/thrust/etc.

I found that around 36k is about the best size for a spaghetti ship (I seemed to hit the nail on the head in my first test by luck), because past that it becomes rather difficult to support the power requirements without the addition of a lot of aux effect. The more aux effect that is added, the more unstable and easy to kill the ship becomes because each aux line only needs to be hit once before massive explosions.

Now, sure a spaghetti ship could reduce the reliance on power capacity with a missiles system, relying on AI to fire much smaller lock-on missiles and step-fire them as power is available, so this is potentially the best design for a spaghetti ship, but I wasn't really trying to build "the best spaghetti ship". My spaghetti ship was just a test of how it would fare with damage beams (since everyone was raving about how the weapons update made beams OP - so I figured I'd combine the two "metas"). It did much better than I was hoping, and this worried me that it would become the new style everyone would follow.. Thankfully that did not happen with most players, and it was good to see that your ship was able to effectively counter it. (Though it still worried me that people who did not use stop effect and missiles for damage could still very well be completely trounced by a similar design)

 

[Az14el]

and you still ran away from me in shredder dammit!

 

[Temeter]

stabilisers = limit power to size ratio (I don't know why, maybe encourage interior). they put the "depth" of the power system here : you have to choose if you put stabilisers at optimal distance or use more stabilisers (more mass) but have a smaller ship

I'm by no means and expert, but to me that seems pretty straightforward:
Shine wanted to keep the ship sized connected to power, but avoid the part where that means literally filling your ship with millions of blocks.

So the stabilizer means you just have to put blocks at the two ends of a ship (now up to six 'ends'), and there you go. Much easier and more comfortable than those millions of blocks. It's not really that different, they just removed the middle part.

Of course, as Valiant notes, as a result, as a result there is also a pretty big difference in how you kill ships now, adding specific weakpoints, so it's gonna be interesting how that'll turn out. The new armor/weapons will probably play a big role.

 

[MacThule]

This was already true of Power 1.0. A well built or well piloted smaller ship could beat a larger ship quite easily. A few good examples of this:

- The fight between my Nidhog Battleship and Event Horizon's Hammer-class Titan. The Nidhog was one of my old pure RP ship with no exploitative technologies; so, my tech was in no way better, but I was outmassed 2:1. It won the fight because I identified the Hammer's Op-Spec and piloted against it.

- The fight where me and Flying Debris flew a pair or low-tech 250k cruisers against a much higher-tech 500k battleship built by Aziel. We won because we were able to flank him and land WAY more firepower into his sides than one ship would have been able to in a head-to-head fight.

- Or my last fight before the power 2.o patch, I fought Valana's Svalinn-class with a Scylla MK-II. We both had the same mass, but I murdered the hell out of him without my shields ever dropping below 70% or even really trying to do any fancy manuvouring because I had the advantage of better tech.

- Then there is ofcourse the most obvious David and Goliath store in SM where Vielth killed a 200k using a 5k fighter using WAY better tech and pioleting.

People who've fought enough times know that the outcome of a battle cannot be predicted by size, tech, or piloting alone, but has to do with all 3. If you've never beaten a larger or more advanced opponent, then you were likely not piloting very well, but once size becomes different enough, then the big ship WILL and SHOULD win every time. That ship is more expensive, harder, to replace, and takes more time to design; so, those factors should be all rewarded. Games where tiny ships kill cruisers generally have a cost balancing mechanics like how in BSGOL a small fighter was the meta for killing heavy line-ships, but when you died, you just respawned in a new cruiser, so big deal.



Your argument is actually self-contradictory because big ships allow you to trade off less efficiency for much less lag. For example, a 1-mil mass ship causes way less lag than 20 same tech 25ks despite being much more massive. It has less surface area, fewer moving parts, and puts less targets for the AI to cycle through. Size meta was MOSTLY about lag reduction, not just pushing lag to its limits as many ppl mistakenly believe; so, if a person is limited by how much lag they can field, then the outcome would be the opposite of what you seem to expect.



Again, you are 100% mistaken about what is meta. Laggy ships almost always cause their pilots more harm than their opponents. If you make a missile boat that fires 1000 missiles at a time, then YOU will be the one unable to hit when they come in and rip you up with a responsibly built ship. If your ship causes a lot of localized collisions, then it will affect you first. Experienced builders did a lot to offset the lag that their high-tech stuff caused, like zero-speed-rails, collision box optimization, cartesian-seamed armor, no-clip-point turrets, etc, and when they built stuff that was naturally laggy, they would build it smaller to make sure they could still fly it. Experienced pilots also knew how to approach high lag situations to give their game time to load things in before the fighting started.

Also, you may not know this, but PvP builders LOVED watching newer guys try to build big ships, because they always thought they could just win-by-mass, and they were proven wrong all the time.

Anecdotes were granted; they don't respond to why nearly the entirity PvP combat activity revolved around ships over 100k mass.

They don't change the broad trend; a MP meta dominated by lag from constantly pushing the size envelope. If size weren't OP, size would not be the overhelmingly dominant trend over the past four years.

Did you change your signature? Wasn't it the one "When we first encountered lag it was like fire..." (talking about how, used correctly, lag can transform from a problem to a player's best tool) or was that someone else here I am thinking of?

 

[Nosajimiki]

I feen like you're this seller trying to give one hundred reason as why i should buy this car that is worse than the one next to it.
As long as it is just to hit and kill the ennemy reactor then everything that is vertical will sucks. You have basically three spots to hit to find out. The tips or the middle. You can just shoot the whole lengh to hit the stream to disable your opponent the time that your super beam recharge.

You're talking a lot about lucky shot so i'm talking about it too. One lucky shot and your ship goes boom. Hoping that the AI and my opponent will lag enough to avoid any damage isn't a satisfying way to play. If i want to play a game of luck then i'll play dice and not take hours to build a ship and loose on a bad roll.

Red said it and you should have understood it. A vertical build can't rely on pure luck and as long as coring it is then vertical builds will sucks. Thanks to the stabs mechanics you even have spots where you should shoot to find out.
I can build a horizontal ship almost immune to drill weapons. I can't on a vertical one.

Vertical ships can inherently shield & speed tank better since most missiles hit from the side and direct fire weapons are only as accurate as the width of a ship from the vector it is strafing. So, what you are criticizing is about what happens after your shields go down, but your shields are less likely to go down in an otherwise even fight; so, there is a definite bias towards what kinds of ships are ideal when done vertical/long, but there is now a balancing factor to consider where there was none before.

*The ship is called "CrystallineEntity", but that's an interesting name you gave it. Haha
*The spaghetti ship was 36k in weight.
*Compared to the "Fair-and-Balanced", it was almost half the weight, but in testing could kill the "Fair-and-Balanced" ship every time.
*You did not kill the spaghetti ship. I forfeited the battle by leaving the area when it became apparent I could not get close enough to continue doing damage. The ship still had a pretty decent amount of systems HP left. I even threw that ship into the middle of a fight between a bunch of 250k ships and it got torn up a lot more, and STILL hasn't overheated. I am still storing the highly damaged ship out in space somewhere. It will probably never get overheated, lol.

The nail in the coffin against the spaghetti ship was was due to your stop effect weapons and missiles. This was basically the counter to the kind of spaghetti ship, I created. Spaghetti ships will generally rely more on DPS weapons, which have shorter range than missiles. If they go and try to have a big enough capacity to support lock-on missiles adequately, then they can have their power capacity cut down too quickly as the lines are cut and the mass addition would reduce their total damage output quite a bit (for their size) AND would increase the amount of power necessary to maintain passives/thrust/etc.

I found that around 36k is about the best size for a spaghetti ship (I seemed to hit the nail on the head in my first test by luck), because past that it becomes rather difficult to support the power requirements without the addition of a lot of aux effect. The more aux effect that is added, the more unstable and easy to kill the ship becomes because each aux line only needs to be hit once before massive explosions.

Now, sure a spaghetti ship could reduce the reliance on power capacity with a missiles system, relying on AI to fire much smaller lock-on missiles and step-fire them as power is available, so this is potentially the best design for a spaghetti ship, but I wasn't really trying to build "the best spaghetti ship". My spaghetti ship was just a test of how it would fare with damage beams (since everyone was raving about how the weapons update made beams OP - so I figured I'd combine the two "metas"). It did much better than I was hoping, and this worried me that it would become the new style everyone would follow.. Thankfully that did not happen with most players, and it was good to see that your ship was able to effectively counter it. (Though it still worried me that people who did not use stop effect and missiles for damage could still very well be completely trounced by a similar design)

CrystallineEntity may be the class, but you had it named DemonBorn for our fight. You may have been feeling edgy that day :D. As for how the fight resolved: stop/range control was key to the ddraig's meta. The way that fight played out is very similar to how a lot of my fights went with same mass dps speed tanks.

And yes, you did get away, but you were taking enough damage that I would have killed it in what is a normal kill time for a Ddraig. The ddraig was designed to work as a front-line support ship for Jormungandrs to tank damage and shut down enemy mobility while the titan did its thing from afar; so, it's never really had a reputation for quick kills.

Not trying to criticize the CrystallineEntity, it was a VERY nasty piece of work, just using that fight as the only example I know of that set a precedent for what might be a fair fight between a spaghetti and normal"-ish" ship.

Anecdotes were granted; they don't respond to why nearly the entirity PvP combat activity revolved around ships over 100k mass.

They don't change the broad trend; a MP meta dominated by lag from constantly pushing the size envelope. If size weren't OP, size would not be the overhelmingly dominant trend over the past four years.

Did you change your signature? Wasn't it the one "When we first encountered lag it was like fire..." (talking about how, used correctly, lag can transform from a problem to a player's best tool) or was that someone else here I am thinking of?

Well... depends on your definition of PvP. For example:

• Most PvP competitions like the recent ones on LvD or the older Blood & Steel matches generally have mass limits well under what the servers can handle. (Often in the 4-25k range)
• Most PvPers use a ship in the 5-70k range for testing new weapons platforms and metas before scaling up to larger ships, and they will generally duel them by saying in general chat, "Hey, anyone want to Pew Pew a 40k?" and people who have things near 40k will generally respond; so, they are commonly built in those ranges with "friendly dueling" in mind.
• ~30-120k also seems to be the standard for interdiction ships. (Things where you are going to go blockade someone, attack mining operations, go after objective points, or otherwise put yourself in a situation where an ambush or strong counter attack is likely). These ships are also often given to newer members of factions as "support ships" so that they can contribute to major battles while still learning game mechanics. Mayflys, Toriks, IMSADs, Quarks, and Deathstalkers are just a handful of well known such ships that saw widespread deployment by various factions even though they had other much larger ships at their disposal.
• Most ships designed to be deployed as battle fleet drones (aka "frigates") ranged from 2-30k, When deployed in battle groups of 10-70 ships, these fleets are known to devastate single player ships of greater mass.

Then there are "capital ships" which seems to be what you are referencing typically 100k-500k+. Capital ships are the giant, spare no expense, behemoth ships meant to cram as much killing power under one piolet's butt as you can. Most factions only deploy Capital Ships as acts of war because they are expensive to replace. As I said before, a ship's power is a combination of Mass, Pileting, and Tech; so, if a player commits 10x as much resources as you do into a battle, then he has 10x as much too loose; so, saying he should be just as likely to lose is ridiculous.

As for my signature, you seem to misunderstand it's meaning. New players tend to push lag past the limits, and it burns them HARD, but once you understand the natural limits of the game engine, you can make better ships by stopping shy of that lag threshold. For example, a 400 beam miner can out-perform a 1000 beam miner because it lags less leaving an optimal amount of computer processing power for actual block removal, a ship that fires 100 missiles will do far more damage than the ship that fires 1000 because they can all hit without phasing through, and lag reduction tech like zero-railing, collision box optimization, and non-colliding turrets can make a ships FAR less laggy meaning you can go bigger without tanking the game out. For example, my old 1000k titan was one of the biggest ships ever made with docked armor, but it was less laggy than most 500k ships without docked armor because I optimized it. That meant I could field it without crashing the server, and not crashing servers is really important when you are trying not to lose a 1000k warship to a glitch.

 

[MacThule]

Fair enough. It is probably incorrect to characterize non-tourney PvP as an overwhelming majority of all PvP.

As far as PvP in MP scenarios without enforced limits - free fighting on server - the primary reason we see anyone at all ships under 100k (especially in the past 2 years, since performance improvements have driven up our size capabilities) seems to be because they are being handed those BPs partly or fully complete by a sponsor. Those seem to be stopgaps though; most express aspiring to a very large ship (and before the functional upper end did indeed seem to often be 75k-150k, but that was well over a year ago, maybe two, and before several of the latest performance upgrades. I was seeing a lot of ships in the 300k-600k - prior to the reboot - which are theoretically expensive but honestly most of the clans are exploiting to earn so the economics aren't really relevant). I read about smaller ships people like, and tourneys (with mass caps), but when you actually see an aggressive PvP player on an MP and they are either looking for trouble or responding to a threat, they are rolling over 300k and often in the 500k-1m range. That is the meta where players are just freely doing their thing with no mass limits and no real economy to make such ships prohibitively expensive.

It's just what I've seen though.

Really our talk about it in the forums is almost moot. Schine can get the logs, I believe, so I they can probably get a much more complete picture of what people actually fly and how frequently, and how engagements really play out.

 

[Az14el]

I would typically fly my 111k Mayfly in most cases, partly because LvD had mass limits of 1m then eventually 500k, still bad prospects vs a 111k but after a lot of trial and error it was well tuned enough to push the shields on most 500k ships encountered while still able to fly defensively & have reasonably powerful 2 layer recharge. That said I had a 650k which was *almost* as efficient by mass in every respect other than durability without shields (shp penalty) and obviously thrust.

Veilith/Kulbolen built 2 extremely similar ships at a similar size which were both able to fight pretty much any ship on the server with good favorability for its low mass (500k cap by this point). And beat up my somewhat larger mayfly in the vast majority of our fights too
He'd usually be seen flying those 85-100k things around as well rather than his 500k i imagine only a few of us had seen

Obviously i mentioned the mass limits a few times because whaddya know .199 really really needed sensible mass limits amongst other limitations too... But there's definitely something to be said for the "most efficient" metaship size being somewhere around the 100k mark as well, where much beyond that point dimishing returns tended to always hurt relative performance (up to around 2.5-2.7 shp penalty... then the stacking loss of potential really does start to flatline again, which is a huge problem for those servers... but lag would make it "inefficient" to use from most players perspectives by this point I would imagine)

Without limits & not considering the lag & engine limitations, ships past the point of shp penalty flattening can reap pretty much flat non-diminishing returns on shield strength & turret damage. And you definitely did see an arms race towards pure mass to some degree on servers that simply had no limits, FRU comes to mind for sure

I'm aware shp isn't a thing now but for the sake of talking about the old meta its mechanics were worth noting.

 

[Scypio]

Vertical ships can inherently shield & speed tank better since most missiles hit from the side and direct fire weapons are only as accurate as the width of a ship from the vector it is strafing. So, what you are criticizing is about what happens after your shields go down, but your shields are less likely to go down in an otherwise even fight; so, there is a definite bias towards what kinds of ships are ideal when done vertical/long, but there is now a balancing factor to consider where there was none before.

You're just reducing vertical ship to what they are in your opinions right now. Of course they're the best speed tanks available but you forgot why the meta was and how it shifted to this.

If you're fine with vertical ship being only glorified speed tanks then i'm not going to argue anymore. To me they're not because they had other things they do not have anymore.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Fair enough. It is probably incorrect to characterize non-tourney PvP as an overwhelming majority of all PvP.

As far as PvP in MP scenarios without enforced limits - free fighting on server - the primary reason we see anyone at all ships under 100k (especially in the past 2 years, since performance improvements have driven up our size capabilities) seems to be because they are being handed those BPs partly or fully complete by a sponsor. Those seem to be stopgaps though; most express aspiring to a very large ship (and before the functional upper end did indeed seem to often be 75k-150k, but that was well over a year ago, maybe two, and before several of the latest performance upgrades. I was seeing a lot of ships in the 300k-600k - prior to the reboot - which are theoretically expensive but honestly most of the clans are exploiting to earn so the economics aren't really relevant). I read about smaller ships people like, and tourneys (with mass caps), but when you actually see an aggressive PvP player on an MP and they are either looking for trouble or responding to a threat, they are rolling over 300k and often in the 500k-1m range. That is the meta where players are just freely doing their thing with no mass limits and no real economy to make such ships prohibitively expensive.

It's just what I've seen though.

Really our talk about it in the forums is almost moot. Schine can get the logs, I believe, so I they can probably get a much more complete picture of what people actually fly and how frequently, and how engagements really play out.

You're argument about cost has to do with a series of material exploits that have nearly all been fixed, and any that are left are bannable offenses on most servers. So, claiming that they make ship cost irrelevant is like saying, "How much a car costs doesn't matter cus I can always just rob a bank". Most of the factions that did not get banned and their assets deleted actually were building their wealth through months of mining, selling, and successful military operations. They earned it the hard way and have a real sense of loose when those 500k ships go down.

So, you are still not coming close to answering the basic question about why Mass/Cost should not be a factor in winning a fight?

You're just reducing vertical ship to what they are in your opinions right now. Of course they're the best speed tanks available but you forgot why the meta was and how it shifted to this.

If you're fine with vertical ship being only glorified speed tanks then i'm not going to argue anymore. To me they're not because they had other things they do not have anymore.

No, I think vertical ships (done right) have a very nice aesthetic. They also made it easy to mount lots of turrets without having to go all floating turret or cheese wedge, which I liked. That said, they were rather unbalanced, and would be even more unbalanced in 2.0 now that you no-longer have Aux to consider. The power stream is a pretty minor handicap for the advantages that you can capitalize on where shape is concerned. I think you're big concern is that logbois are a stronger meta now, but they have a distinct set of disadvantages that tallbois don't have that make them far more similar than you may realize.

 

[TheDerpGamerX]

I've been trying to get all my ships to be vertical. I think they have an advantage, not just targeting wise, but also because the human brain tends to like turning left and right better than up and down. So if you have really good turning speed on your horizontal axis, it may be a good advantage for the pilot.

 

[Calhoun]

I've been trying to get all my ships to be vertical. I think they have an advantage, not just targeting wise, but also because the human brain tends to like turning left and right better than up and down. So if you have really good turning speed on your horizontal axis, it may be a good advantage for the pilot.

 

[Az14el]

Most of the factions that did not get banned and their assets deleted actually were building their wealth through months of mining, selling, and successful military operations. They earned it the hard way and have a real sense of loose when those 500k ships go down.

I doubt anywhere near as many factions were privy to that exploit as people like to imagine, i was technically in odium at this time, the only group of players i know for a fact to have used it and still wasn't exactly shared knowledge, i only learned the specifics when it was leaked myself. So yeah there was an exploit that made it economically 0 risk to spam titans all day, yet from actually playing the online side & pvping regularly at the time I sure did see a shitload more <100k ships being used (not counting that shit when its made overt through fleet spam of course).

Were a lot of people guilty? yep, most likely
Were a majority of people guilty? to me at least, obviously no, there was a massive difference in production between the few factions known to have been utilizing this and the general community no matter how sneaky they tried to be about it

The general use average was certainly still ~100k or less, if not for economical reasons then for statistical ones, they're just generally higher quality ships at any stage of competence on .199 (with the supertitan tier shp scaling exception that wasn't realistic in MP use anyway)