So far I've managed to read every single post up till page 35, it's hard to catch up so I'm making a post right now and read the remaining part afterwards.
As our proposal is vague at best, a lot of you are filling in the gaps with mechanics we wouldn't put into the game. That's to be expected and it also gave me better insight to what some players are concerned about.
Forced Design: The way we worded it, was wrong indeed. Forced Design does work when applied properly and we were of an opinion that right now, the forced part doesn't contain enough variety or other viable ways of building. That isn't necessarily true as some pointed out so it's definitely going to be a point of discussion again. The forced part in our proposal could use some work too.
Lack of complexity: It seems all of us have their own opinion what "complexity" was about. To us it was more like a lack of depth, especially when you build larger ships. The only system that requires some creative thinking is the power system and that's not the case for every ship. Of course making turrets and some having to work with exotic ship shapes make a build process more complex but overall, it was too easy to get something work well without having to think about it a lot.
Too many blocks involved (amount, not types): Most posts disagreed with that but perhaps we didn't explain it too well? It's a mix of both types and amount, with the 5 most prominent system blocks you usually end up using a few types as filler and together with the remaining types, you have to juggle with each amount to get it right. With ships that have a limited amount of volume to play around with, this can be an interesting enough to keep you busy and entertained.
This idea of building just doesn't scale well though, when your ship size gets bigger, the volume increases too.
The amount of blocks you can put down increases and there is little reason left to use a specific way of placing them down. Even power past its soft cap has no real design philosophy besides putting it somewhere deep and safe inside your ship. Although I doubt we did it on purpose back then, but it makes sense that it is all rather simplified at this scale. How can we add interesting build methods to improve its efficiency when you need to apply it on that many blocks?
Imagine a specific pattern for shields to improve its efficiency, do you really want to put shield lines down for your whole ship if there are 400 000 of them? Copy paste and symmetry speeds it up, but you might as well keep what we have right now since almost the same amount of thinking goes into it. You make a decent pattern, and you put it all over your ship.
Regen vs Capacity: This is something most agree on but not for the reason said in our proposal. This relation between having power to fire and needing to regenerate while it's on cooldown is indeed wrong.
For example 2 important things that were pointed out:
- For every slow firing weapon, you need the same amount of power used by a fast firing weapon in a given amount of time (cooldown of the slowest weapon). As the DPS is equal for both weapons and the block destruction favors the fast firing weapon It makes the slow firing weapon a bad choice, especially when you need to place down more capacity blocks in order to use it.
- Instead of consuming the power needed when fired, it should consume power over time during its cooldown.
Heat boundary box: The
only thing we wanted it to do, was to represent a larger amount of blocks without you needing to place them down. In order to enforce that, any system placed within the heat boundary box would need to be penalized. I've seen some great suggestions to either replace this system with something else, or adjust how this area would work/scale to improve it. The name for this wasn't exactly chosen well either, some suggested "Magnetic/Electric interference area" which does fit it a lot better with its current function.
Example of what we tried to do: a 50 x 20 x 20 Power block system (assuming you're past the soft cap and you don't want to put power aux down, or rely on docked reactors) would be you putting down a 5 x 2 x 2 reactor and its heat boundary box volume would contain 50 x 20 x 20 blocks.
Also this heat boundary box would only be on the power blocks to minimize the amount of influence areas to care about. Without power you can't use any other system. You could fill your ship with shields, thrusters and weapons but if you can't power them, they're useless.
Some people suggested buffing 1 or more systems so they're better per block, but that only buffs each ship and the amount of blocks placed down remains the same. If your filled ship has 5 000 power blocks and we make them 10 times stronger, then your power is 10 times better. If we alse make power blocks heavier, you would use more thrusters on your ship while reducing the power block amount. There are more thrusters than power blocks then, but the amount of system blocks on your ship remains the same.
Heat and Docks: Heat boundary boxes would care about other heat boundary boxes on docked entities. Some flaws were mentioned with that such as: docked ships interfering with your main ship (like what carriers would have) which can be resolved by "turning ships off" when they're docked and ignoring them with heat penalty. Or simply ignoring their heat boundary box if the ship isn't doing anything to create heat itself. Even these suggestions have loopholes which requires more finetuning to get it to work.
Another flaw which was pointed out, was that the heat box on rotating entities could be moved out of the way when needed which is indeed a serious concern, thank you for pointing that out
Raisinbat.
Losing a reactor: Most assumed that having a damaged reactor or a completely destroyed one also meant that you lost its entire functionality. This wouldn't be true, we would either just penalize the stats of what that reactor offered when it was back at 100% SHP or make sure that your ship could still do "something" when reactors were taken away. How exactly we do that is up for discussion.
Other Flaws: The first mentioned one was the "Chandelier" ship shape that would avoid a game mechanic by using spikes or just blocks to expand the dimension box area. Others pointed out that some mechanics are illogical. Possible performance issues were mentioned, the heat boundary box shouldn't be a problem although the lack of occlusion culling would indeed decrease the framerate for ships made with the new systems if you decide to not fill it up.
The heat boundary box changing while adjusting or building on a ship is also a significant flaw that would turn out to be frustrating.
Other concerns such as Armor and Weapons needing change to work properly with the new system and how strange the filler block would be are valid too.
Most seem to agree that the current in-game system has flaws and believe it can be resolved with less drastic changes. The proposed system would improve on some areas and be worse in others. It's hard to say if that's true or not but if possible, we prefer less work if the result is the same or even better.
We'll discuss our proposal internally and adjust it to better fit all your concerns. Some parts will be scrapped entirely, some will be refined more or we might redoing everything. When we're done with that, a new thread will be created for more feedback where you can help us further refining ideas and point out flaws we've missed. I estimate this can take us up to 2 weeks to do so depending on how much additional research we need to do.
I'll also be contacting a few users personally to get additional information on some of their posts or opinions.
