Power System Overhaul Proposal

[Zerefette]

Closing the thing in a room of armor is ok, sinking it is not.

 

[kookster]

I think this addresses the big issue with cubes of death. That is you have to space systems out. You can't cram everything together. Though I dont think we should have a "total heat boundary" for the reactors. The reason being that would lock us into a optimal set distance between cores/chambers. This would limit the creativity in our design appearance. And maybe a have a benefit to having longer conduits, this benefit should only be enough to counter balance the use of a block. So in summary I am proposing that there is no benefit to having cores/chambers closer to each other, there is only downsides to having them too close, and no downside to having them farther apart.

This system would make something I have wanted for a while more possible. Not have ship wide power, but make it so you have to power each system. IE I could have a reactor system for just my thrusters. How you could make this work is by having a block for connecting them to a reactor. It must be physically connected. To not make it impossible for smaller ships, make it so all system blocks can transfer power. I won't be hurt though if you don't do this.

TLDR Suggestions:

• Only have "sub heat boundary", and not a "total heat boundary", to give greater build freedom.
• Add a power cable system, and you must directly connect systems to power.

Cheers

 

[Fellow Starmadian]

What I meant by my proposal was not to force space, but to have a bonus to having an interior with a crew, not an AOE "heat zone" that makes things less effective for being inside of that zone.

Dead space is akin to dead weight, completely useless. Which is what we would need to add to ships to work around this heat zone.

The problems described in the main post that this update "fixes" are non-existent. To say that ship building is over complicated is just incorrect, as well as to say that this system will fix the idea that ship building is too complex. This update just makes ship building weird, with having to avoid an AOE heat zone that encompasses a majority of the ship, and having a very small number of system blocks. Even if the statements about removing power regen and capacity are retracted, the proposal is still a bad idea.

How would crews need to be drastically changed? And what part of this game hasn't been rewritten over the years? The programming process is one of constant change, and while it's nice to only have to touch a block of code once, it is highly unlikely that that would be a good idea.

This is not bickering, it is a discussion. I am not talking about a specific portion of the proposal, but the entire idea.

Spoiler: im gonna post this every time instead of working on a special response for every post.

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.
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.[/I]

so force players to use a different, less realistic system. That's totally the correct solution.

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 complex huh? How about a system that uses reactor block types and chambers instead of power regen and capacitors?

Too many blocks involved[/SIZE][/B]

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.

SO replace a majority of system blocks with an AOE heat zone, essentially making a large portion of your ship unavailable to you for anything other than interior? Also doesn't remove the problem of min/maxing. Chandelier ships FTW. Plus, making system blocks more powerful and reducing their quantity does not make things easier, as each block counts for more it will make those design choices all the more tedious. It is fairly simple to make effective systems in the current game, and it is fairly easy to replace block types for another to change the percentages using the tools currently at our disposal.

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.

How would introducing a heat mitigation system alleviate tedium? It doesn't even make sense how a larger reactor = more heat reduction on weapons. Even if it's just a language gap at the cause of those statements, why would you remove a perfectly logical system and in it's place put something so preposterously unrealistic? Since this update seems to pander to RP players, since you want to force players to make unnecessary interiors, why not make the system MORE realistic?

[doublepost=1487096903,1487096078][/doublepost]Ok so you guys really need to rein your ideas in, there is no real feasible way to make "RP" style reactors actually useful for the game. They all use such different styles and "means of power generation" that being able to accomodate all of them would just be silly from a programming stand point. Why not leave that as a cool looking decorative piece, but have all the power lines (or whatever system is introduced) focus on the "engineering" section? If you require RP then there you go. one missile to that area once shields are down and you lose your power regen.

There comes a time when these suggestions stop becoming good, and go into the category of "pipe dreams".

 

[GalactusX]

I agree with all the changes suggested in the game with the new system of energy generation, the only thing I disagree with is to implement a "hot zone" surrounding the CORE, that forces the players to have A space in their ships in which they can not position other systems (because it has penalties). Many, if not all, science fiction series, and even real systems, have ways to mitigate that excess "heat", whether using cooling or physical shields.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Having not read all 32 pages of this topic (wow)...

I think the idea is a step in the right direction but obviously needs some refinement, which is to be expected since schema basically said "We want to change things and here is a partial idea on what we might do." But I don't really have any specific ideas to improve it, might have to wait until something like this hits the dev build and I can actually play around with it first.

 

[Fellow Starmadian]

I agree with all the changes suggested in the game with the new system of energy generation, the only thing I disagree with is to implement a "hot zone" surrounding the CORE, that forces the players to have A space in their ships in which they can not position other systems (because it has penalties). Many, if not all, science fiction series, and even real systems, have ways to mitigate that excess "heat", whether using cooling or physical shields.

But it isnt a system for energy generation, it's a system for reduction of heat generation from weapons and systems using reactors. Read through the post again and try to visualize this heat system, using schema's words. I do, however, agree with the idea of a reactor system (could be interesting) and I totally agree with your opinion on the AOE heat zones.

 

[NeonSturm]

I think "chamber heat boxes" and enforcing a block count much lower than the volume of these boxes will make prettier and more balanced reactors.

More balanced because you have a fixed distance for armour chasing
better because you have many small heat-boxes instead of one big
more challenging because you have more heat-boxes to manage.
​

Calm down - the solution is in sight.

 

[Fellow Starmadian]

I think "chamber heat boxes" and enforcing a block count much lower than the volume of these boxes will make prettier and more balanced reactors.

More balanced because you have a fixed distance for armour chasing
better because you have many small heat-boxes instead of one big
more challenging because you have more heat-boxes to manage.
​

Calm down - the solution is in sight.

How remarkably sure of yourself you are. Could you explain a little more concisely what you are saying in that post?
Major confusing sentences:
>"I think "chamber heat boxes" and enforcing a block count much lower than the volume of these boxes will make prettier and more balanced reactors."
>"fixed distance for armor chasing"

 

[NeonSturm]

Fellow Starmadian - can you not break down sentences?

I think

"chamber heat boxes" and
enforcing a block count < 2/3 "chamber heat box"-volume in these boxes​

will make prettier and more balanced reactors.

More balanced because you have a fixed distance for armour chasing (no buried reactors)
better because you have many small heat-boxes instead of one big
more challenging because you have more heat-boxes to manage.
​

Calm down - the solution is in sight.​

 

[Fellow Starmadian]

Please don't resort to personal attacks on me, if you thought I attacked you it was just because of that interesting last line of text in your post. "calm down - the solution is in sight"
Maybe it's your formatting, but I still can't understand, I'm sorry :/

Is this a good translation of what you said?

Fellow Starmadian - can you not break down sentences?
(the quote stops here, a questionable translation follows)
I think a good idea would be to have chambers for heat, instead of having an AOE debuff. I also think that enforcing a block count that is less than 2/3 of a chamber heat box, minus the volume of the boxes, will make reactors more pretty and balanced.

>More balanced because... "armor chasing(no buried reactors)" what? sorry :/
Better because you have many small areas of heat debuffing, instead of one large area. You can also manage the area that is debuffed using this method.
It also adds challenge to the game, because there is more to manage instead of the current power system.

I'm not going to comment on this until I understand it fully, mind explaining what the "armor chasing" thing is all about?

 

[ToxicBoxes]

I agree with just about everything in the original post, except I don't like the idea of reactor heat directly affecting systems. Using systems would cause the reactor to heat up, which would reduce the effectiveness of systems, meaning that a player's ship would have reduced performance simply because a player was using it.

A suggestion, though: add a Power Management tab. If power is simplified to "Power Generated" and "Power Consumed", give systems reduced performance based on any deficit. If a ship's reactor only gives half the required power for it's systems, then the ship's systems only operate at 50% effectiveness. The Power Management tab would allow players to allocate power between different systems, so a player could, for instance, manually reduce the power from their ship's weapons when they were not in combat, and then reroute power from the engines if they were attacked, or send more power to the jump drive if they needed to escape. There could even be logic blocks that would be set with preset power values, so a player could change the values with the hot bar or automatically with sensor blocks.

Heat could still be a factor, however. Heat would be a value from 0% to 200%. 100% would be the maximum "safe" heat for a ship, and the value for when all of a ship's power is being used. Using certain systems, like firing weapons, would generate heat that would slowly dissipate. If a reactor was overburdened, and a ship was generating too much heat from systems, the the heat value would go above safe levels. The further the ship went above 100%, the slower the heat would dissipate, requiring a total systems shutdown to cool the reactor if the level of heat was too high. Reaching 200% would cause a meltdown, destroying the reactor, and possibly the ship. If heat was shared between docked entities, then it would be beneficial to build reactors docked to the ship so that they could be ejected in the event of a runaway reaction.

This would only be a problem if the reactor was too small to produce enough power for all a ships needs. An oversize reactor would have spare heat containment and power generation, so all systems could be at full performance at the same time. But, a reactor capable of doing that would be rather large and expensive. So, there would then be multiple ways to build reactors, either where they need careful management but take up very little space, or where they can operate all systems safely and effectively at the cost of size and expense. Players could also carefully balance their reactors to only give as much power as their systems need and no more, providing a balance between the two.

To finish up, weapons would only use power when reloading, and allocating less power to them would slow their fire rate. One-shot heavy weapons could be set to recharge between battles, but not drain any power during battles so other systems could get a boost. AI Crew has been mentioned a few times here, an that could work with this system, such that crew were ordered to alter power configurations based on what systems are being used, or how low the shields are. This could be done without crew using complex logic setups, but players could decide which they would rather use.

Sorry if this post got a bit too long, but I think it could be a good alteration to the proposed reactor system.

 

[Fellow Starmadian]

I already explained this in more details, but dont blame you for not reading the entire thread... Power System Overhaul Proposal

I play to solve design problems, when design is made easier, such as removing space limitation, you're eliminating what makes the game fun. Things like designing a flight deck or a turret socked doesn't matter if internal space is plentiful everywhere.
Creative freedom means you can make whatever you want, but it removes the purpose for ships being built until they're all the same mechanically and only aesthetically different.

Look at it this way: If ships require fuel, we have a purpose to build tankers and refineries. If cargo didn't compress it's content so much we would have cargo ships instead of shuttles, or just fitting 0.01% of a ship with cargo and doing it that way.

I can see the logic in what you said. Essentially you like doing what is being called "min/maxing" or making an effective ship. I thought you were advocating for more control in terms of how to build things, not advocating against making things simpler.

 

[Snowtiger256]

Maybe it's your formatting, but I still can't understand, I'm sorry :/

Don't worry, I'm having trouble understanding him as well, his formatting and odd wording choices make following his train of thought confusing at best...

 

[Fellow Starmadian]

Don't worry, I'm having trouble understanding him as well, his formatting and odd wording choices make following his train of thought confusing at best...

snowtiger at it again with the personal attacks
I can flame with the best of the forum warriors, but for something as important as this proposal, we need to try and keep this cordial.

 

[Snowtiger256]

snowtiger at it again with the personal attacks
I can flame with the best of the forum warriors, but for something as important as this proposal, we need to try and keep this cordial.

To be honest with you, I wasn't trying to attack anyone. I thought I was being cordial and agreeing with you on the fact that NeonSturm is not the easiest to understand. Should I resort to only tagging likes and agrees so I have a lesser chance of being misunderstood like this?

 

[Fellow Starmadian]

lol, point taken. I just hate to see threads devolve into squabbles. Post away, I apologize for the chastising

 

[NeonSturm]

Fellow Starmadian - can you not break down sentences?

I think

"chamber heat boxes" and
enforcing a block count < 2/3 "chamber heat box"-volume in these boxes​

will make prettier and more balanced reactors.

More balanced because you have a fixed distance for armour chasing (no buried reactors)
better because you have many small heat-boxes instead of one big
more challenging because you have more heat-boxes to manage.
​

Calm down - the solution is in sight.​

Please don't resort to personal attacks on me, if you thought I attacked you it was just because of that interesting last line of text in your post. "calm down - the solution is in sight"

​

Maybe it's your formatting, but I still can't understand, I'm sorry :/

@Fellow Starmadian - can you not break down sentences?
(the quote stops here, a questionable translation follows)
I think a good idea would be to have chambers for heat, instead of having an AOE debuff. I also think that enforcing a block count that is less than 2/3 of a chamber heat box, minus the volume of the boxes, will make reactors more pretty and balanced.

>More balanced because... "armor chasing(no buried reactors)" what? sorry :/
Better because you have many small areas of heat debuffing, instead of one large area. You can also manage the area that is debuffed using this method.
It also adds challenge to the game, because there is more to manage instead of the current power system.

Is this a good translation of what you said?

I'm not going to comment on this until I understand it fully, mind explaining what the "armor chasing" thing is all about?

It was not a personal attack, but frustration - maybe I would have understood you better if you told me about that "armour chasing" problem earlier.

Your computer is a box with a mainboard, power unit and hard drives in it. The whole box is the casing (but I see, I have had the wrong word in my mind - chase and case sound similar, probably because I mentally connected chamber-chase).
––––––––––––––––
I think

"chamber heat boxes" and
enforcing a block count < 2/3 "chamber heat box"-volume in these boxes​

will make prettier and more balanced reactors.

More balanced because you have a fixed distance for armour casing (no buried reactors)
better because you have many small heat-boxes instead of one big
more challenging because you have more heat-boxes to manage.
​

We can calm down - a solution is in sight ​

 

[HolyCookie]

This is I think the kind of challenge I need to start creating ships. I would very much like a more complicated system

But some might not.... I do not know.
As a non-builder, I think my opinion shouldn't be counted too heavily.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

Well, rather than fill up a post here, I posted a suggestion.
Power System Ideas

Some things I've thought about before and quickly put them down now before I forget again.
Hope that's ok with you guys.

 

[Speedybst]

First and foremost I would like to let it be known that my only experiences with StarMade have been local servers and solo survival play since about 2013 through till now, so my experience with the wider community with regards to PvP and RP environs is limited at best. Secondly, whilst aesthetics certainly do play a major role in my ships, I am aware that I’m making a trade-off for the visual/RP appeal of such in my actual effectiveness as a combat ship. Thirdly, it has been some time since I checked what ship designations equated what block ranges, but for reference my personal ships tend to fall within about the 50h*75w*200l sizing for the most part, so most of my observations about mechanics fall to about that size, or parasite craft for that sizing. Lastly, I do apologize for any repeated sentiments – one of the “perks” of country living is only being able to check into forums every few days, and not being able to read any posts in-between times in town proper.



I am in support of the proposed changes to power generation towards the central reactor designs and disagree with the idea of the heat boxes in the OP as a disincentive to build systems close to the reactors.

The appeal of not having to juggle what at times feel like unusually large numbers with the power regen/cap is very appealing, as well as no longer having to place long, convoluted strings of power blocks around my vessels to achieve maximal power generation. As has been brought up a few times in this discussion, the reactors proposed echo the IC2 style nuclear reactors in their balance between efficiency and sustainability and offer more possible variations than the current system with their design considerations – do you make a single large reactor or several smaller reactors, a reactor that will redline in combat but allow alpha-weapons or one that can win a fight by endurance, etc. It’s on par with the current thinking for complexity to my way of thinking, which is working out the most efficient way of lining your ship with XYZ powerplants whilst still maintaining redundancies against lucky shots breaking a line in them and causing efficiency loss (which isn’t really too different to having a single “weakness” in the form of a core reactor in larger ships). This is replaced with the considerations of heat dispersal and redundancies and non-predictable positioning of the reactors.

There was also mention of penalties for not having chambers in one group, and it was very quickly misinterpreted to be that having multiple reactors would have a penalty attached to it. From what I’m gathering from the OP, this isn’t a direct “Have two coolant chambers and have a penalty levied against you” deal, but more of a “The coolant chambers don’t scale in that way, so having two size-10 coolant chambers is not equal to a single size-20” deal.

I definitely would like to see some more statistical sheets before the tech build, and hopefully inclusions of ideas from the discussion (Both Matt_Bradock on page 24 and Edymnion on page 26 had rather interesting ideas that I’d happily support if it came down to popular vote)



However, the heat boundary system doesn’t feel like a welcome addition to me. Since no numbers regarding their size nor penalties were given by any develops at any point, and seem to have been inferred several times by members of this discussion, I am just going to operate under the assumption (and of course the possibility of being made an ass of later on) that it will work similar to the old docking systems, and steadily grow in its bounding sides as more linked blocks are added. Being required to leave increasingly large open spaces around my reactors doesn’t sit well with me, as it means that my aesthetic and mechanical design is dictated by something outside of my control to prevent without sacrificing efficiency willingly to an as-yet unknown amount. I do find this vaguely disgruntling overall, since it’s taking away from my creative control as method of controlling pure efficiency designs (Which are an unavoidable element of any game as long as players as involved, q.v. Legal MinMax monks in Pathfinder or D&D) and I resent this in a manner similar to view expressed PvP players previously in this discussion. However, if it were shown to be reasonable within its approach to heat boundaries, I think I’d be willing to give it a go – much like the weapons system overhaul a while back now. Starwars1981 presents an interesting idea for this on page 28, which makes heat boundaries more of a design consideration rather than a limitation – do you plan around your ship overheating and set it up to minimize the damage or do you try to ensure it won’t happen and suffer the consequences if it does?

Overall, I’d be really happy with this change to the power generation, and would be very enthused to have testing builds for this in the future. The vulnerability of having one or more centralized reactors being taken out by a lucky shot isn’t really all that different to a lucky shot taking out part of a sprawling XYZ power generator currently, less blocks required to achieve the same end goal isn’t a bad thing, especially for newer players, and the possibility for server owners to be able to create their own custom chamber blocks for various needs is exciting as all get out. Am I as enthusiastic about having to redesign my ships around this? Of course not, any more than I was about having to do it for the updated weapons, docking and cargo systems – but at this point there is not a chance I’d ever go back from those updates. I think I’d happily get over this upheaval like I did those ones at the end of the day and integrating the new system in seamlessly within a few months at most. As has been pointed out a variety of times in the discussion, this is still an alpha game, and this won’t be the last “game-breaking and game-killing” change to happen – it seems to have survived the mineral, weapon, cargo, planetoid and docking changes without dying off, and whilst the hard work of ship designers has been lost to all of these, there are still plenty of shipwrights that didn’t give up at them.