Power System Overhaul Proposal

[Nauvran]

This sounds very interesting and so far I like it, just remember to test it thoroughly so it doesnt end up breaking the game :u

 

[Admiral_Kirk]

This is a proposal; we're looking for feedback on this system so that we can develop the best power system with assistance from the community. We realise that we may have overlooked some aspects of gameplay, this is why we're sharing our idea. Let's work together to create something great. Posts that aren't contributing to the discussion here will be removed, let's keep it clean. - DukeofRealms

Introduction

The power system was a point of contention for as long as StarMade existed, and there was never a real consensus on a specific solution. We went through every possible way to rebalance the current system, but each of them would create a problem elsewhere. We realized that we would have to redo a big portion of that later and waste even more time on things we can resolve right now.

Instead of trying to keep a broken system alive, we decided to make a cut and redesign it from the ground up. This solution would be drastic and would require you to refit power in almost all of your ships. However, in the long run this would still be better as changes in the new system would require a lot less adaption from this point on. So instead of frustrating players with small changes that likely wouldn’t fix the problems to begin with and would require players to refit their ships every time, we decided that it’s better to do one big change to solve the core problems once and for all. It’s important that we get this right from the start which is why we’re asking you for more feedback.

Since a news post is probably not the best place to discuss it, we moved it to here. We will be making more of these threads to keep you in touch.

Please keep in mind that everything is subject to change if there is a valid reason to do so. We kindly ask that you keep the discussions civil. These threads will be heavily moderated to ensure the most productive discourse possible.

The way we went about designing this new system is a relatively straightforward procedure:

1. Identify the problems
2. Find out what causes the problems
3. Try to eliminate those causes with new mechanics

Problems with the current power system

According to our own experience and player experiences shared on the forums, we have identified the following problems.

1. Forced design choices
2. Lack of complexity
3. Too many blocks involved (number, not types)
4. Focused on regen

Some of these overlap a bit though.

Forced design choices

StarMade has a great build system with endless options when it comes to decorating your structures or creating complex interiors, yet making a ship functional with all our systems can take a while and is usually a less creative process.

It’s not only the power system that suffers from it, but every other functional system that follows its design principles. Currently, most ships have a non functional ‘skin’ and everything else is filled to the brim with systems.

Filling your entire ship with systems is the most optimal way to make a ship. Making any interior or extra decoration creates weaknesses on your ship. It also favours one ship shape over another, in order to fill it with as many systems as possible; Doom cubes.

More systems and power means a better ship, and there is no incentive or mechanic that would ever make a pretty ship with interior as good as one filled with systems.
​

Lack of complexity

Our current power system has only 3 different block types which would be fine if it mattered more in how you placed them. That’s not always the case and usually there’s little to do besides changing the amount of a certain block when necessary.

This gets very tedious at larger scales. Fitting a bigger ship with power blocks is just a matter of finding the space for it. There doesn’t have to be any thought about placement and possible consequences. Additionally there is no way to customize your ship’s power systems.

The current system makes power and systems purely a game of ratios, which doesn’t offer much complexity and increases the total number of blocks.
​

Too many blocks involved

As the system forces you to balance the amount of blocks placed on your ship between 3 power block types, you constantly end up removing one type to replace it with another unless you calculate the amount of blocks needed for each type. Even then you have to roughly know how many blocks your ship can fit.

This is fine for ships where only a few hundred blocks are involved. You usually remember where you placed them and changing ratios isn’t a long process. Each system block matters a lot more in this case.

It’s not fine when your ship size becomes larger. Most ships have more than 100,000 blocks and it’s impossible to know where you placed all your blocks down. Filling your ship with the correct amount of blocks per type is a tedious and long process. Not to mention that changing it afterwards is even more frustrating where you have to dig for specific block types and you end up with a complete system mess.

Although additional build tools could alleviate some of these issues, it would never be completely resolved and any new system we add here would inherit this fundamental problem.

The current system makes power and systems purely a game of ratios, which doesn’t offer much complexity and only gets worse with a higher total block count. Also, the volume to surface area does not scale favorably for balance, and there is no incentive not to fill up a ship with systems. The larger your ship, the more volume you usually have compared to your surface area.
​

Focused on regen

Currently you will always care more about power regen than capacity, mostly because it’s scaled that way. In almost every case, you want to equalize your power regen with your total consumption during combat. Your capacity would be increased to have a small reserve that equals this consumption so that you can use all your systems at once and regen the power within a few seconds.

This results in a boring way of building ships since there’s little difference in power systems for any ship you create, it’s a simple equation and can result in a lot of frustration to achieve that goal.

Not to mention that it’s hard to make the AI use this system when their capacity is always too low to work with.​

Solution

To get rid of the aforementioned problems, we need to turn the entire power system upside down. This will break most if not all current ships but to us, it’s a necessary step to continue on game mechanics without always having to find workarounds.

As redoing the systems now will be easier, yet more complex, we hope you will find it a refreshing and fun building process. Additional build tools will speed up that process where you refurbish any of your ships.

A short summation of what we’ll do:

• Systems (weapons, thrust, power, etc) will take a considerably smaller amount of space on your ship. This could be ranging from 5% (large ships) to 50% (small ships) of your total block count. The way we will achieve this is described in the section below.

• Due to systems being a lot smaller, there will be a lot more empty space the larger a ship gets. The player is free to leave it empty, or put in decoration and interior at a very low cost to mass.

• We will also offer a block to serve as an “inner hull”, which will be a low mass, low HP block. You could use it to fill empty areas in your ship, or replace it with real interiors without making the ship weaker by doing that.

• Normal hull (armor) will add enough mass so it would not be viable to fill your ships with it.

• Making sure that most systems are usually clustered together and not spread out all over the ship in small amounts. This makes defending specific areas of your ship more important and could be incentive to add more inner armor to those locations.

• As the amount of blocks involved is a lot less than before, we can add extra mechanics to the placement of system blocks. That will introduce complexity on a small scale since every block you place is equally important.

• Provide context based information to the player and add “logical” mechanics to a ship to make it easier for players to get started. Also keeping the new system easy to use for small ships.

• Change armor so that it scales accordingly for weaker and larger ships, without adding extra thickness to your ship.

• Weapons will also be adjusted although that’s for another thread.

Reactor design

The new power system is of a modular design. Depending on your reactor size, you’ll have 1 or more components that influence the final result and define your ship’s capability:​

• Reactor core:
• Reactor chamber types:
  • Reactor rod system that requires built-in coolant
    
  • Heat shielding
    
  • Coolant Tanks
    
  • ...
• Conduits to connect the chambers

The reactor core (a relatively small cluster of blocks) defines it output. The bigger your reactor is, the more complex it will get. This means you will have to add and connect additional chambers to your reactor at certain points to keep it from producing additional heat. When considering new players, this ensures that building power for a very small ship is still easy. It’s complexity grows with ship size, so the learning curve for players will not get too steep.

Heat

We remove “power regen” and “power capacity” as we know them right now and replace it with only one value you would see on your screen: Heat, 0% to 100%

Anything that previously used power, will now generate heat instead. Depending on your reactor size and how you build it, the heat you accumulate will be manageable...or it won’t be.

If your reactor is too small for the systems you want to use, they generate more heat than usual:

• Reactor has X output depending on reactor core (optimally built reactor)
• Needs Y power depending on systems (weapons, thrust, etc)
  • Y - X = deviation
• Heat generated is deviation + defaultMinOfSystem

If your reactor is too big, you would not generate extra heat, but you would be wasting power and space due to the new “heat influence area” or “hear boundary” system we will talk about below.

Heat generation will be available to the player in percent by value. We will also break down for the player, what they can do to improve their reactor.
​

Cooldown

Heat cooldown will be constant and independent of how big your reactor is. What changes is the speed in which a ship accumulates heat depending on how optimal their reactor is built. Accumulating too much heat will affect your systems, and if you keep pushing to the limit, systems would even shut down completely. We could introduce all sorts of ways to have Heat influence your ship, or even have Stars influence your Heat if that would be a nice addition.

With this system, detach the system from large numbers since your Heat levels will always be between 0% and 100% and your heat dissipation will be a % per second.

You are not limited to only one reactor core on your ship though, you can put down more of them but the heat generated by your systems would be increased per additional reactor. Putting additional reactors down will ensure that you have backups running if one or more reactors get damaged or destroyed during battle so it’s a nice balance between efficiency and sustainability that you can define.
​

Heat Influence Area

Each reactor core has their own “Heat” influence area or boundary box, which takes the shape of your ship’s dimension box and its size is determined by the reactor core block amount. If this Heat boundary box overlaps with any other system, or another reactor core, extra heat generation penalties are added. This forces you to think twice where to place your reactors and it limits the amount of blocks you can use in your reactors. Your weapons/thrusters/etc cannot be within those heat boxes or you will suffer a large efficiency loss.

This does create a lot of empty space between your systems, space that can be filled up with something that isn’t systems like interior.

The designer is of course free to chose if they want to have an interior. We will also offer a“Inner Hull” block which will be cheap, have low mass and no armor, with a few block hp to not directly expose your inner systems on a hull breach.

Their collective mass would be negligible compared to what your systems and armor add to the ship and they would also not add enough protection to where it’s better to fill up a ship instead of having an interior.

We will also have some extra build tools to help you out with filling/removing that particular block type.
​

Other systems

Shields could be their own “reactor” with its own chambers etc and we could do something similar to thrusters.

They could also just be a few chambers that use a Power reactor.

We’re not sure about that yet though, it doesn’t matter too much as long as those system’s block count is kept small. Both are limited by their Heat generation so we don’t need to do anything besides buffing their values per block and adjusting the heat generation to make them work for now.​

Reactor mechanics

The bigger your reactor gets, the more requirements it will get to keep heat generation to a minimum. This means that you could build a small fighter without having to worry about reactor placement at all. Also, building the iconic core + power + thrust stick will still be possible.

When you build medium sized ships, not only will the heat influence area already affect the placement of your systems a little, but you will also get more heat generation in general. To keep this heat generation low, you can add an additional chamber to your reactor. And the more core blocks the reactor gets, the more chambers can be added to keep heat generation low.

The Core and Chambers each have their own local heat area which is only relevant to the reactor design. The size of those areas will be its groups dimensions multiplied by a factor depending on balance. If this box overlaps with other local boxes, you get a rather big efficiency loss. This means each chamber will have to be independent.

Core

As this is the base component, its size defines the base statistics/output of your ship. Currently there’s only one block type for it right now so you just end up placing them together as a small group.

A bigger reactor core group can be connected to other chambers in order to combat growing heat generation, add additional output or achieve a different effect. We haven’t fully decided on the specific types of chambers yet.
​

Chamber

A chamber is essentially an upgrade to your reactor. Each chamber will only be effective at a certain minimum size of reactor. It could combat heat generation, amplify output, redirect that output to another system (shields?) or just be a necessary component to be there or else a Reactor core wouldn’t do anything.
To keep your reactor optimal, you’ll require more chambers the bigger your reactor core goes. The specifics aren’t fully set in stone of course.

The base mechanics stay the same however, each chamber type has its own build restrictions and requirements in order to be valid.
Example: A reactor chamber could be reactor rods, to maximize output for a mid-sized reactor core. It would generate heat, if water is touching them that heat would be less. They have to be in a single group or there would be penalties.

The total heat versus the total amount of rod blocks determines its efficiency, stability, heat radius, throughput and more… It doesn’t matter too much what we do with this since we can easily change it between updates without messing people up.

A chamber will orientate on the size of the reactor core. That’s easy to adjust if needed.

Chamber shape and placement could also be an important factor to keep in mind. A “Thruster” chamber (if we’re going to use that) could be great for rotation when placed near your Center of Mass. And great for a particular thrust direction when placed the furthest away from your Center of Mass on that axis.
​

Conduit

The block you use to connect chambers with other chambers, or connecting them back to the reactor core is done by using Conduits. A single conduit block has a fixed throughput but the longer a line is, the more throughput loss you get.

You would prefer to have these conduits as short as possible.​

Kupu made some info graphics of this current system and how it might look like if implemented:

• Example of a reactor

• Below is an example of how it could look like in-game for a ship. Any not used space would either be inner hull or interior. You could also make interior within the heat boundary boxes since those only affect systems.

• Keep in mind that the heat boundary box doesn’t go out of the ship dimension box. Putting your reactors on the edge of your ship will make the heat boundary box move till it’s not overlapping with the edges. It’s basically forcing the heat boundary box to be more inside of the ship than the reactor itself.

AWESOME IDEA! I think Everyone Will love it! You should do this update! I would also make some Reactor types such as Pool Reactors and etc... And Possibly Fusion Reactors. But AWESOME IDEA! I THINK EVERYONE WILL LOVE IT :D

:D

I know mostly all my friends on the Brierie server Want this update!

This is exactly what everyone has been waiting for :D

 

[Criss]

docked reactor spam

Well I believe we disabled docked reactors anyway. Power supply beams cannot fire at their mothership.

 

[kikaha]

Well I believe we disabled docked reactors anyway. Power supply beams cannot fire at their mothership.

Mine does...

Got a live version to see on the cake server.

 

[Admiral_Kirk]

Reactors - You Should Make Different Kinds:

SUCH AS:

- POOL REACTORS
- FUSION REACTORS
- NUCLEAR REACTORS
- Sci-Fi Star Trek Warp Core Reactors that could be eject able with Logic.

Search up different kind of Reactors.
I have a book all about reactors that was made around in 1940's It has decent kinds of reactors.

These are some of them in the book except of the Warp Core which is not in the book.
But there are more kinds of Pool Reactors and another reactor called a Chain Pool Reactor. Which is when a Chain Reaction happens inside of a
Radio Active Pool that makes energy really interesting when you read about it in death.

But these are some ideas for to add-on to the Reactor Proposal.

But anyways Great, Idea, I love it, I think Almost Everyone Will LOVE it. I suggest to start the Dev Work And Lets Make Starmade Better :D

 

[Criss]

Schine if you want a real feedback upload a Dev build and let us play a bit to understand better your point at the change of mechanics at energy stuff

First, I have yet to see evidence supporting the new meta will be this new ship shape. The details of the system have not been established and it may prevent such meta if and when it is put into the game.

We would be happy to share a build with these changes in place, however this is just a proposal. No work has been done yet on this new system.

 

[Admiral_Kirk]

First, I have yet to see evidence supporting the new meta will be this new ship shape. The details of the system have not been established and it may prevent such meta if and when it is put into the game.

We would be happy to share a build with these changes in place, however this is just a proposal. No work has been done yet on this new system.

I agree with you Criss about the evidence about the new ship shape. I don't know Why it really matters at all about the New Ship Shapes.

 

[Philiquaz]

From what I see, a lot of problems would be covered by creating a critical density of system blocks that simply makes filling a ship impractical.
Heat, or radiation perhaps, is a simple way of generating a measure of density with which to debuff further elements.
This lets us have a smaller power-system be the desired setup (and thus we're no longer packing ships)

Outside of that, we're drawn to a question of how do you actually make the power system more interesting than just putting reactor blocks in lines or cubes.
And the answer to that can be tied to that heat/radiation system- allowing players to rearrange the heat allows the core powering elements of their system to work with less debuff (and minimising the debuff on your superpowered critical reactor blocks would provide a huge leap in output)

Suffice to say; an old ship packed to the brim could be left functional if the latent heat/radiation debuff of a generally-packed system debuffs the system to slightly below the new levels reactors will generate.

 

[NeonSturm]

Well I believe we disabled docked reactors anyway. Power supply beams cannot fire at their mothership.

A small reactor to power a turret does not need e-supply beams.​

I have no problem on that change for big ships [they have the space], the problem is into small ones [they have NOT the space], but until Schine let us play with a Dev build we can only guess.

Perhaps we should make a 2D SM-Reactor-Simulator with guns on a 2D plane (like shellcore command)

Shine has no chance but to release a dev build soon. I have done bezier-curve art and 2D physics in JS+Canvas before.​

 

[Gasboy]

That is the reasson if some shape is supperior of other shape, people are going to tend to build on that shape, read the Lecic post on this treath to understand why that chandelier shape is OP.

I have no problem on that change for big ships [they have the space], the problem is into small ones [they have NOT the space], but until Schine let us play with a Dev build we can only guess.

First off, this power overhaul is still in the conception stage. The candelabra ship concept is similarly just an idea. We don't know what the final form of either idea will be.

If this ship idea turns out to have merit, obviously it can dealt with before anything becomes finalized. People keep bringing this up like it's the end of the world, and without giving suggestions as on how to prevent this inside the confines of the concept as given in the OP.

Secondly, it has been suggested in the OP that smaller ships will need the cores only, while the larger ships may require multiple coolant areas and conduits. The whole idea is more power in less space. Small ships most certainly have room for something that takes up less space for the same power generation. And it was further suggested that other systems (shields, weapons) will take up less space as well. Which benefits all ships, but will be incredibly beneficial for smaller ships.

I do agree that we should have a lengthy amount of time to play with this on the dev build, and I do believe it's Schine's intention to allow us this time.

Duke has admitted in his addendum to the original post that the devs understand they may not have taken every last detail into account. It's on us now, as players and community contributors to contribute ideas and suggestions without the 'gloom and doom' angst, and it is doubly on us to PLAY THE HECK out of the dev build when it becomes available.

It's a huge change and upheaval, I'm not looking forward to gutting every ship I have. But we can make this a good change if we put our heads to it.

 

[Admiral_Kirk]

Is not an awesome idea, apparently all ships shapes of less 50 meters are going to be useless when that appears, not the real big ships. And the chandelier shape are going to be the next best shape for ships.

Schine if you want a real feedback upload a Dev build and let us play a bit to understand better your point at the change of mechanics at energy stuff

I agree with you completely because I would like to try a Dev Build. And Try it out, and I will really decide what should be added and what should be changed. Because From the Proposal I love the sound of it. And It will make the Life OF Starmade a Lot of easier and better. And it makes the game more Sci-Fi than Not Sci-Fi.

 

[epicface0107]

oh? it appears like I've found something good... i really want a devbuild of this so we can see what it would be like before actually putting it in the game

 

[winggar]

I don't like the idea of having large parts of ships made of just useless interior hull. I believe that the reactors shouldn't generate heat boundaries when they are very small, like when put in small fighters, but should in larger ships. I also think that for this system to work, heat sinks and heat "armor" (To block areas from the heat) will be necessary.

 

[NeonSturm]

winggar
The problem of current ships is that 3D cubes/spheres are unmatched in efficiency, except when a slightly extruded 2D plates/circles will provide more evasion.

Every cubic metre of your ship which isn't used is for a free shape.
Just let the heat volume be in empty space, have a box with your reactor + cockpit, slab armour on it and add a spike left+right from it for your weapon mounts.​

 

[NeonSturm]

Arkudo
Small ships have few blocks = few heat.
Large ships have many blocks = much heat.​

 

[NeonSturm]

Arkudo
As far as I understand the OP it can also be like this:

8 gun blocks = 1 reactor block.
64 gun blocks = 8 reactor blocks
512 gun blocks =/= 3x3x3 reactor, but 2x2x2 with a 19 block chamber = 3*3*3=27 blocks
​

The block count could scale linearly, but the more blocks you have the more these proportionally more blocks are separated to chambers.
There might be one type of chamber which does the same as a core block, but other types can be used instead to specialize your reactor.

It is not necessarily Big=better or small=better.​

 

[Gasboy]

I don't like the idea of having large parts of ships made of just useless interior hull. I believe that the reactors shouldn't generate heat boundaries when they are very small, like when put in small fighters, but should in larger ships. I also think that for this system to work, heat sinks and heat "armor" (To block areas from the heat) will be necessary.

Have you fully read the original post? They specifically said (and implied in some parts) that smaller ships will only require the core (implied) since their power requirements (and thus heat) are much less than the larger ships. Also other systems (weapons, shields, armor) will be scaled down as well (as in take up less room).

The "chambers" in the diagram are coolant chambers, heat sinks. And the heat armor is the "inner hull" block they've announced.

 

[T_Lex]

Idk if it can be relevant in any way but...

In OP it is mentioned that having multiple reactors will have penalties, shall we agree on a number of reactors where this penalty is minimal?

I think this number should be 3. Reasoning behind this is: main reactor + backup sounds a bit too simplistic to me and pretty much only covers for a basic scenario of a missile hitting one of your reactors. What i thought of as an example is that each of 3 reactors would cover for about 50% of the ships needs so u can loose one allowing for greater survivability.

3 generators would allow for more placement options like left, central and right reactor, or fore, middle and aft etc. I'd like to believe 3 a reasonable number of reactors in terms of max number (or soft cap) where the penalties of having more reactors kept relatively low.

 

[Spartan4845]

Reactors - You Should Make Different Kinds:

SUCH AS:

- POOL REACTORS
- FUSION REACTORS
- NUCLEAR REACTORS
- Sci-Fi Star Trek Warp Core Reactors that could be eject able with Logic.

Search up different kind of Reactors.
I have a book all about reactors that was made around in 1940's It has decent kinds of reactors.

These are some of them in the book except of the Warp Core which is not in the book.
But there are more kinds of Pool Reactors and another reactor called a Chain Pool Reactor. Which is when a Chain Reaction happens inside of a
Radio Active Pool that makes energy really interesting when you read about it in death.

But these are some ideas for to add-on to the Reactor Proposal.

But anyways Great, Idea, I love it, I think Almost Everyone Will LOVE it. I suggest to start the Dev Work And Lets Make Starmade Better :D

Kirk... I love ya,

We also need reactor breaches... cause

WARP CORE BREACH!!!

 

[Gasboy]

Where is there the heat gain? When it comes to light that new "energy system", It going to be the real limiting factor, in what you can or can not put on a ship.

Which is exactly what power is right now, a limiting factor on what you can or cannot put into a ship. Except the new system will require LESS space than the current one.

Small ships [less 50 meters] tends to be more compaq than big ones, if all systems generated heat gain that means to me that if Schine do not manage correct is going to be a nerf to those ships.

Since many systems will require less room, this is a direct buff to small ships, not a nerf.