Power System Overhaul Proposal

[Valiant70]

The heat boundary will turn every ship into a carrier.

Well, not if the boxes affect the fighters or vice-versa. You'd get lynched for causing lag for once thing, your ship would overheat too easily, and/or the fighters would overheat on the dock.
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Again with these made up issues.

Well, buddy, here's a problem that isn't made up: The current system sucks compared to what it could be. It could be a lot more fun and immersive, with or without the boxes.

 

[Raisinbat]

Doomcube has become a byword for any ship that is designed for perfect, meta-only function with absolutely no aesthetic value. That is what I meant.

And again no argument, no examples, just more uninformed drivel.

By your definition that is a ship with ZERO external plating, composed only of systems and docked entities. It also wouldn't be a solid shape, but a bunch of individual blocks and reactor lines floating around in empty space, since that makes dealing damage to it virtually impossible.

Well, not if the boxes affect the fighters or vice-versa. You'd get lynched for causing lag for once thing, your ship would overheat too easily, and/or the fighters would overheat on the dock.

So what if the heat boxes intersect, that won't matter after you launch them, and you don't need those systems out of combat anyway.

Theres virtually zero lag from docking a ton of fighters, and don't forget new system layout does not require enclosed space for your ship.

Well, buddy, here's a problem that isn't made up: The current system sucks compared to what it could be. It could be a lot more fun and immersive, with or without the boxes.

Not an argument in favor of new system. If anything that means we should discus it more instead of jumping on the yes train.

EDIT: also "it causes lag" did nothing to prevent docked reactors.

 

[Gasboy]

Not an argument in favor of new system. If anything that means we should discus it more instead of jumping on the yes train.

I very much doubt many people in the thread are fully on the Yes bandwagon. I see a lot of "No.", "No, but..." and "Yes, but..."

I'm just going to point back to the beginning and say make suggestions that work inside the confines of the proposal, or outside the box. Don't pretend that there aren't power issues, when everyone else will (probably) acknowledge that yes, yes there are.

 

[Magrim]

Does it really sit well with you that in order to build a good, working cloaking vessel, you have to use motherboard circuits and leave systems exposed, basically giving you a ship that looks like arse? Basically you leave it perma-cloaked because it looks terrible? More power in less space means you might actually be able to build a nicer looking, better performing cloaked vessel.

I think my little cloaker looks good

 

[Gasboy]

I think my little cloaker looks good

The shape is pleasing, yes. And it's odd looking, which adds to it's charm. However, I still detest having so many exposed systems like that, and heavy use of motherboard as outer hull. I know that's just opinion, my hangup, not yours. But I'd like to see cloaked vessels (along with a better minigame between cloak/jammer and scanners) that can be built with a normal hull.

 

[<SCRIPTKITTY>]

Reactors reducing heat is a little counter intuitive. But I'm sure that has been said quite a few times.
A few things I would like to see is:
-Passive heat dissipation, like radiators.
-Consumable fuel
-Cool Coolant vs Hot Coolant, heat has got to go somewhere. Radiators could be used to turn hot coolant into cool coolant.
-Coolant also cools weapons systems. Just kinda makes since.

Honestly I think heat and power should be two separate things though I like what you're trying to do with the 'heat is relative to the ship so people don't only build ships that reach the power cap thing'. I feel like 'reactors take away heat' would be a confusing thing to explain however. Perhaps what should be done is have coolant be its own system that is integrated to cool weapons and the reactor and the reactor power is shown as a percent efficiency and weapons power consumption is shown as a percent as well, this percent can be called Load. This system is relative and scale-able while also ambiguous. Load can be shown as a percent with brown-outs occurring or even reactor meltdowns if the load goes over 100%

My reasoning behind consumable nuclear fuel is simple. On servers your warships which will take the most power are going to be docked to a station for a good percentage of the time. They don't need to be on constantly. Fuel will be used up more often in mining vessels and other logistics vessels. which could mine fuel from asteroids or planets. This makes resource gathering something that must be done to maintain a large fleet of warships and makes territory more valuable. Fighting over fuel or more specifically the territory its in. Players could also mine and sell fuel in their shops, this would be a good way to make money for a large mining faction which would likely have way more than they were using anyway. In order to keep this from penalizing tiny ships that would only require a reactor core to function, ships which require only a reactor core shouldn't need fuel.

 

[Gasboy]

Reactors reducing heat is a little counter intuitive. But I'm sure that has been said quite a few times.
A few things I would like to see is:
-Passive heat dissipation, like radiators.
-Consumable fuel
-Cool Coolant vs Hot Coolant, heat has got to go somewhere. Radiators could be used to turn hot coolant into cool coolant.
-Coolant also cools weapons systems. Just kinda makes since.

Honestly I think heat and power should be two separate things though I like what you're trying to do with the 'heat is relative to the ship so people don't only build ships that reach the power cap thing'. I feel like 'reactors take away heat' would be a confusing thing to explain however. Perhaps what should be done is have coolant be its own system that is integrated to cool weapons and the reactor and the reactor power is shown as a percent efficiency and weapons power consumption is shown as a percent as well, this percent can be called Load. This system is relative and scale-able while also ambiguous. Load can be shown as a percent with brown-outs occurring or even reactor meltdowns if the load goes over 100%

I like these ideas. I really like some of the solar sails people have built in SM over the years, and I think having heat vanes that you can extend and retract for increase heat dissipation would be very cool.

I was in a stream a bit back where Criss and Saber were talking about various things that are going on in development, and the topic of food and fuel came up. Food is a very much a no, but fuel hasn't been decided upon. I think that they will have to work on water, and gas/ice giants. Water is the safest fuel, and all you need to do is apply a current and you can get hydrogen and oxygen gases, both very useful for shipboard operations. I'd love to see fuel scoops so that we can hang out by Jupiter and slurp up some fuel while getting a nice view.

I think that your cold coolant vs hot coolant idea is neat. Maybe these could be backup systems. The primary system would have the reactor core with coolant chambers (as per the diagram in the OP), and then you could have a conduit system linking the primary system to backup coolant systems elsewhere in the ship. Ooooor, you could link the primary system to heat vanes, which you extend when you want extra cooling quick.

 

[Raisinbat]

I'm just going to point back to the beginning and say make suggestions that work inside the confines of the proposal, or outside the box. Don't pretend that there aren't power issues, when everyone else will (probably) acknowledge that yes, yes there is.

I just explained why the new system is going to produce the new post-chandelier meta. You're going to see E-carriers that fill the void with fighters, since those fighters wont cause power issues after they're launched, raising PVP ships to 20x their current strength and doing nothing for RP ships. Discussion is over, i won. No matter how many silly people who don't understand mechanics keep posting here it doesn't matter anymore. This is why the popularity contest is dumb; because rp players don't understand or pay attention to mechanics you always end up making the game worse for yourselves in the end.

I'm not pretending there aren't power issues, but we're discussing schine's proposal here. They never asked for a thread with a million alternative suggestions, or feedback on cloaking. I've made several posts critizising the premise of their suggestion and adding concerns from the pvp side they haven't touched, so what is the point of your post?

 

[Madman198237]

The solution is likely not to increase the capabilities of larger ships to get larger. It's just not. We don't need to buff power per se. There are options where power is changed to make it work better (Ditch capacity and make everything work like a scanner, drawing power and storing it itself), losing the strange and counter-intuitive reactor lines for a more intuitive system (Block of reactors here makes power and heat. The power, the more heat. You use enough power, you must use new techniques for nullifying heat, by which time you will have progressed far enough to understand what you are doing. This means a gentler learning curve in many ways, and is a start towards helping with player retention).

Raisin, lower the hostility. PvP is not the end-all be-all of this videogame. We want a sandbox. This does not mean we want a desert, where you're going to die of thirst but have all the freedom you want, but rather a place where you've some stuff to do already and yet can still do nearly anything you want. We want a mission/interaction-filled galaxy with reasons to fight other people (Other than being a jerk/griefer/General Lee Annoying Person) yet also caters to those who want to go explore, build, all of that available in a single game. Don't be a selfish jerk and try to alienate everyone but those who PvP, and in response everybody else will hopefully accept that PvP is another playstyle this sandbox must have.

 

[Gasboy]

Again with these made up issues.

I'm not pretending there aren't power issues, but we're discussing schine's proposal here

Of course you're not pretending. Oh wait...

They never asked for a thread with a million alternative suggestions, or feedback on cloaking. I've made several posts critizising the premise of their suggestion and adding concerns from the pvp side they haven't touched, so what is the point of your post?

we're looking for feedback on this system so that we can develop the best power system

Yes, yes they DID ask for feedback, which includes alternate suggestions.

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.

They mention that other systems will take considerably less space, thus they are open up to feedback on these things, so yeah, they're going to take feedback on cloaking and other things. They knew this when they opened the thread.

I just explained why the new system is going to produce the new post-chandelier meta. You're going to see E-carriers that fill the void with fighters, since those fighters wont cause power issues after they're launched, raising PVP ships to 20x their current strength and doing nothing for RP ships. Discussion is over, i won.

The point of my post is that you seem to think that the proposal is set in stone and that Schine have the patch ready for next week. You seem to think that this new meta will emerge, but you can't know that, because you don't know what the final form of the changes will be. The point of the thread is to give feedback, which you've done, which is cool. But you continue to propagate a PvP vs RP argument, and you seem to think that they're doing NOTHING for RP ships, which is wrong.

 

[Magrim]

The shape is pleasing, yes. And it's odd looking, which adds to it's charm. However, I still detest having so many exposed systems like that, and heavy use of motherboard as outer hull. I know that's just opinion, my hangup, not yours. But I'd like to see cloaked vessels (along with a better minigame between cloak/jammer and scanners) that can be built with a normal hull.

There isn't much you can do about the exposed systems when using the current game mechanics, which is unfortunate and something I want changed about cloaking. She has hardly any motherboard on her tbh, something I don't like to see on most cloakers so I used it very sparingly. She was a bitch to work out and is riding the razor's edge of functionality, meaning, she can permacloak, fire weapons, fly and charge the jump drive but she is absolutely NOT combat effective.

Anyway, this is a point I wanted to bring up about power in regards to cloaking. You can build a combat effective permacloaker and perhaps even make it look ok, but as far as I can tell, it's impossible to have it look good (subjective, I know) and kick ass. Is this a problem with the power mechanic or is it a problem with the cloaking mechanic?

 

[Gasboy]

Is this a problem with the power mechanic or is it a problem with the cloaking mechanic?

Both. But, power is king. So, if we get a set of power mechanics that are useful and interesting, the cloaking system can be revamped along the same lines. And they can balance out the cloak, jammer and scanner, making it a better minigame in the end.

 

[Ithirahad]

I think my little cloaker looks good

It does, but it's just a weird boxdim shape that's partially covered... The problem isn't that it's impossible to make a decent-looking cloaker, it's that you're limited to one of very few designs. An Aethi engineer managed to make a flying ice-crystal ball cloaking ship, and it looks pretty awesome, but at the expense of having any meaningful systems. While I understand that cloaking ships should be "specialized" and have to make certain sacrifices, there is a point beyond which it's no longer fun. A cloakship should have to be substantially weaker defensively and not extremely powerful weapons-wise than a non-cloaking ship of its size, but it shouldn't be a flying reactor with a few fancy bits crammed on.

 

[admiral pheonix]

please understand this game is in development and your suggesting neutering its bright future because you cant be bothered with making a change without even realising how much better the reactor system will be have you ever even played minecraft tech mods like atomic science or reactorcraft? those two can give some direction as to where we are headed and its gonna be great.

Please understand i know its in development and its a pain in the Butt having to redo every system when something changes when i barely have any time to play to begin with. My Comment was mainly meant to give them the opposite side of the coin, since ALL of the Forum warriors and mega Builders love this idea. and for the record i have played minecraft and atomic Science that why i play starmade, Minecraft got BORING with all the damn mods, as i said "I Agree the system needs Revamped but not with this."

Just to Prove i have thought about this, here is some points just so you can see i have thought about it :

Points i like :
1. My Ships will be LIGHTER than they already are.
2. My ships CAN POTENTIALLY have more Power generation.
3. Gets rid of all those Power lines throughout my ship, giving me more room for COMBAT SYSTEMS.
4. Extra System/Armor HP and making my ship Tank better than they do now.

Points i Don't Like :
1. Gives my ship(s) an Achilles Heel for any Noob with a TORPEDO BOMBER to target.
2. The long REFIT TIME and no tool help strip everything all the systems out of a ship to become a bare shell.
3. RELEARNING everything then having to teach everyone on the server i play on.
4. More COMPLEX reactor Design.
5. Heat from Stars is a good idea, from a reactor that has POOR SHIELDING no.
6. Heat Affecting Ship Systems a balanced idea, but in the long run this just encourages MORE MEGA SHIPS which some PCs cannot load. ( I got more to say on this subject but i will hold my criticism until they have an idea what they are going to do )

I Rest my Case, so take your "because you cant be bothered with making a change without even realizing" Quote and rethink about it yourself some before jumping on my case about it.
Good Day
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I think this is another massive waste of time.. This game became playable 5 years ago and you're still talking about altering power mechanics when there are a million other things that actually matter that could be refined or optimized that doesn't require fundamentally altering the game all over again.
If you want to simplify system placement. You could create a tool in advanced build mode that would allow you to effectively and efficiently place large chunks of power caps and reactors within the hull of the ship using the exterior itself as the bounding box to make it much easier to fill every nook and cranny..
Then you give ships with an interior certain bonus effects like "improved power management" that increases efficiency due to having an NPC at a specific computer. (You do still intend to have actual NPC's right?).. These same "effects" could be applied to many other systems like weapons and shield systems and would put them on level playing field with ships that have no interior and wouldn't require fundamental core aspects of the game to be completely altered ruining half a decade worth of ship builds while also potentially chasing off the last vestiges of original players whom you haven't already chased off from the other half dozen core changes you have made over the years that made some things better while making others worse...

STOP TALKING ABOUT CHANGING EVERYTHING 5 YEARS ON AND FOCUS ON MAKING THE GAME MORE OPTIMIZED WITH FUNCTIONAL PLANETS, DECENT AI AND MISSION SYSTEM TO BREATH TRUE LIFE INTO THE GAME AND LAUNCH IT WITHIN THIS DECADE...

(Edit: All of this pandering to RP players could be alleviated with a simple NPC and computer effect system that grants bonuses to those who would rather have an interior that could give them the same output as a ship with no interior.. The NPC would require a bed room. dining area..etc to fulfill its needs. But would provide a bonus in proportion with the ships size)

Thank you at least some one agrees with me.

 

[Jojomo]

This is not how a discussion works. Schine asked for a discussion, if all they wanted was a popular vote they could've made a poll, but they didn't.

Well done, correct! Perhaps you should have told that to Fellow Starmadian when he started posting about how many PvP players would or wouldn't something or other, instead of Liking his post, which is what you did instead.
Try to behave consistently, regardless of whether you're responding to a post you like, or a post you don't like.

In a discussion you post arguments. The only arguments that's come out of the RP community <snip>

I'm not interested in RP, so please stop talking to me about it. I just don't care.

You don't care about mechanics, we get that,...

Is that what i said? Or did I imply the opposite to that?

...but you're tiny, insignificant minority in the scope of people who play videogames.

As an individual, yes. If you're talking about a group I'm a part of I have absolutely no idea what group it is.

The majority of players want actual games to play, not a modeling tool or a digital dollhouse, and i'm sure schine are more interested in having a game that will draw new players in, rather than continously pandering to the shrinking leftovers.

Leftovers like yourself? I'm a newer player than you are.
You know one of the goals stated in the OP is to make a system that's more intuitive to new players, right?

Do you have any argument at all for why the new system should be implemented? And no, because you like it, is not an argument.

There's a list of them in the OP (read it), but for me personally the highlight is added complexity.

 

[Magrim]

It does, but it's just a weird boxdim shape that's partially covered... The problem isn't that it's impossible to make a decent-looking cloaker, it's that you're limited to one of very few designs. An Aethi engineer managed to make a flying ice-crystal ball cloaking ship, and it looks pretty awesome, but at the expense of having any meaningful systems. While I understand that cloaking ships should be "specialized" and have to make certain sacrifices, there is a point beyond which it's no longer fun. A cloakship should have to be substantially weaker defensively and not extremely powerful weapons-wise than a non-cloaking ship of its size, but it shouldn't be a flying reactor with a few fancy bits crammed on.

This is one of my main gripes with the current power mechanic. Building a normal ship I don't have this problem as much, but if I want to build an effective stealth ship it's forced to look a certain way. A change is needed for energy and judging what they said in the op, it has to change first before other systems are worked on.

 

[Raisinbat]

The point of my post is that you seem to think that the proposal is set in stone and that Schine have the patch ready for next week.

So you're a mindreader?

You seem to think that this new meta will emerge, but you can't know that, because you don't know what the final form of the changes will be.

It will emerge based on the description of the system they have provided. What on earth is your problem with that? Are you part of the indecision inquisition here to prevent me from making assertations that may conceivably in the future be wrong if the premisses established in the original post were to change, and if so, how are we supposed to discus the suggestion in the first place if reasoning about the suggestion as it is is tantamount to heresy?

But you continue to propagate a PvP vs RP argument

Because our stances is incompatible. I'm not propagating a PvP vs RP argument, we want polar opposite things. Are we supposed to just shut up and lie down to preserve harmony? Meanwhile people like you attack the PvP side for having a different opinion, because that disrupts the harmony of your hugbox. Why is the blame laid on the PvP side while the RP side can apparently do no wrong, even when they contribute nothing to the discussion, never posting arguments and telling the PvP side that we can just deal with it and all our concerns don't matter because there's more of them? We're treated like criminals for criticizing schine's suggestion in a thread dedicated to criticizing schine's suggestion, you refuse to engage in a discussion attacking our motivations for posting instead and then you wonder why pvp players are outnumbered on these forums?

and you seem to think that they're doing NOTHING for RP ships, which is wrong.

More fascinating details about his personal opinios.

Arguments contained in your post: 0

 

[Gasboy]

So you're a mindreader?

I've never claimed to be.

 

[Jojomo]

It will emerge based on the description of the system they have provided. What on earth is your problem with that?

The problem is it's incomplete. You're getting scared about something you don't even have details for.

Because our stances is incompatible. I'm not propagating a PvP vs RP argument, we want polar opposite things.
Are we supposed to just shut up and lie down to preserve harmony? Meanwhile people like you attack the PvP side for having a different opinion, because that disrupts the harmony of your hugbox. Why is the blame laid on the PvP side while the RP side can apparently do no wrong, even when they contribute nothing to the discussion, never posting arguments and telling the PvP side that we can just deal with it and all our concerns don't matter because there's more of them? We're treated like criminals for criticizing schine's suggestion in a thread dedicated to criticizing schine's suggestion, you refuse to engage in a discussion attacking our motivations for posting instead and then you wonder why pvp players are outnumbered on these forums?

The (RP) and (PvP) groupings of the community are not the same groupings as the community [in favour of this] and [opposed to this].

 

[Deserea]

Im more curious of /when/ this is going to hit....ive got 5 ships im working on as frames, and i dont think i want to put systems in until this system is implemented ;-; i really do hate redoing everything.

In other things, one of the biggest downsides i see, is that if anything ships will become bigger, at least thats how it seems to me ;-; may be wrong, but i dont know