Reactor chambers

[diremage]

One of the concerns that I've seen regarding the power update is that it introduces a lack of depth into ship design. Today small ships play a role in combat against larger ships, but these days are numbered. Soon, bigger will be strictly better.

To address this concern, I propose the power chamber. This chamber provides a simple multiple of the otherwise-linear relationship between ship size and power generation. Having multiple such chambers increases the multiplier. So, for example, suppose a ship produces one million power. With one power chamber, that same ship might produce 1.25 million power; with two chambers, 1.5 million power, and so on. This is a direct trade-off between the ability to specialize a ship for a purpose, such as scouting, versus specializing the ship towards having bigger, beefier guns.

This proposal would allow players to field small, specialized bombers or destroyers with disproportionately large amounts of damage, at the cost of not being able to field the other chambers such a ship would normally use. A larger ship would be able to have a more diverse system of chambers and thus still be useful even if it did not specialize in power generation.

 

[DrTarDIS]

But wouldn't all ships just take such a chamber by default, resulting in no need for it in the first place?

 

[Zekester81]

So, a bigger ship, with bigger reactor chambers or more of them will no longer field a planet killing weapon, but a solar system killing one? Bigger will still be better, this just adds a way to increase power at any size. I honestly don't think there is any viable solution to that problem that doesn't involve weapon power/shield caps, as much as I hate caps.

 

[diremage]

Would you rather your 500k mass ship be able to have 60% ion passive or an extra 25% power and 0% ion? The ability to cloak and scan down ships or 50% more power? The point is to make it not a trivial design decision where you just cram as much extra power on as possible, but actually a tradeoff with viable alternatives all around.

 

[Daro_Khan]

The new power system with the chambers adds many options of all ships! its a general rework of the whole system. But i see many points that can make ships more specialized for intended use. I have several ideas for small ships that I wouldn't not have had before this new power update. Stealth ships will be a thing for all sizes!! But we will have ships that are made to counter stealth ships. Ship made to stop FTL sHips made to be hard to catch. Ships made for certain fighting styles and on! Its not about cramming shit into your ship anymore. Defensive effects AFIAK are being removed and being added into chambers. They will still be a thing for weapons however :P

Ships will be able to do more on all sizes now. Since the amount of space we are saving with the new power system is huge!.

You now have options however to make your reactor even more durable by making backups. Different modes with different chambers. Sure One can worry that the time to kill will be made shorter. But the bonus in space for shields armor and weapons and these chamber will be nifty.

I for one cant wait to test this.

After all the game is nothing but in testing.

 

[Zekester81]

Maybe I misunderstood, but I don't think I did. Let me ask for a little clarification. You are proposing a reactor chamber that will boost the output of the main reactor by a multiplier, correct? Will these chambers exclude other chamber types from being placed or used on a shI ask because you state "This proposal would allow players to field small, specialized bombers or destroyers with disproportionately large amounts of damage, at the cost of not being able to field the other chambers such a ship would normally use. A larger ship would be able to have a more diverse system of chambers and thus still be useful even if it did not specialize in power generation."

And then "Would you rather your 500k mass ship be able to have 60% ion passive or an extra 25% power and 0% ion? The ability to cloak and scan down ships or 50% more power?"

Wouldn't a large enough ship be able to do all that? If the reactor chamber excludes the use of other chambers, the little ship is still outclassed in every area except manueverability as the big ship would get more out of that multiplier if both went for power. And if they are excluded and both ships diversify, the larger ship will still have more power, more effect power, more weapon power. The little ship is once again outclassed in every area except maneuverability. Third case, they are not mutually exclusive, the big ship can do more power getting more from the multiplier, as well as being able to field more and larger chambers for the other stuff. Small advantage: Still only maneuverability. Best case scenario, large and small ships reach parity in all areas except power gen, firepower, and maneuverability and two of those advantages to to the bigger ship.


I just don't see where your proposal does anything to level the playing field between large and small, as your goal is closing the gap between ship sizes. "Today small ships play a role in combat against larger ships, but these days are numbered. Soon, bigger will be strictly better."


Edit: That may have been harsh, but it's true. I don/t maen to disparage you, and im a littler drunk right now. Ideas like this have merit, they just need to be thought out to conlusion. If a way to balance your suggestion comes to friont it has usesw, it just needs something to really balance it. The dev blog mentions ships being able to field weapons lagerer than what they can power, you just need something besides manueverability to beat bigger ships, though that's what beats them now. If you're trying to give them an advantage, you need on they dont already have. keep trying, the more ideas the better.

Edxit 2: i read that, I'll spell check when I'm sober.

 

[diremage]

Maybe I misunderstood, but I don't think I did. Let me ask for a little clarification. You are proposing a reactor chamber that will boost the output of the main reactor by a multiplier, correct? Will these chambers exclude other chamber types from being placed or used on a shI ask because you state "This proposal would allow players to field small, specialized bombers or destroyers with disproportionately large amounts of damage, at the cost of not being able to field the other chambers such a ship would normally use. A larger ship would be able to have a more diverse system of chambers and thus still be useful even if it did not specialize in power generation."

And then "Would you rather your 500k mass ship be able to have 60% ion passive or an extra 25% power and 0% ion? The ability to cloak and scan down ships or 50% more power?"

The chamber system as outlined uses a finite resource, called tech points (or whatever they're calling it this week); each chamber uses a portion of this finite resource and upgrading chambers use more of it. So your power reactor will use some tech points, your ion passive uses some tech points, and your chain drive uses some tech points.

Wouldn't a large enough ship be able to do all that? If the reactor chamber excludes the use of other chambers, the little ship is still outclassed in every area except manueverability as the big ship would get more out of that multiplier if both went for power. And if they are excluded and both ships diversify, the larger ship will still have more power, more effect power, more weapon power. The little ship is once again outclassed in every area except maneuverability. Third case, they are not mutually exclusive, the big ship can do more power getting more from the multiplier, as well as being able to field more and larger chambers for the other stuff. Small advantage: Still only maneuverability. Best case scenario, large and small ships reach parity in all areas except power gen, firepower, and maneuverability and two of those advantages to to the bigger ship.

A large enough ship might be able to have more tech points than a smaller ship, we don't know yet.

I just don't see where your proposal does anything to level the playing field between large and small, as your goal is closing the gap between ship sizes. "Today small ships play a role in combat against larger ships, but these days are numbered. Soon, bigger will be strictly better."

Small ship has power reactors that output 2.5 million power, but doesn't have ion, stealth, or jammer because it's using power reactors to double its power gen. Bigger ship has 2 million power and also has ion and radar jammer, because it can use its tech points for other things. Smaller ship can match bigger ship for raw damage but smaller ship is a specialized destroyer class, while bigger ship is able to tank more and fill a more general role.

 

[jayman38]

...
A large enough ship might be able to have more tech points than a smaller ship, we don't know yet.
...

My understanding, obtained from this post, under the section "Chamber Tree", under subsection "Main Reactor", is that all entities will get the same number of tech points, specifically so that larger ships cannot be all-in-one juggernauts.

Quoting Schema's Post Directly
"Each entity gets the same limited amount of ‘Tech Points (TP)’ to spend and only 1 active reactor group per entity is allowed at any given time. You do have the ability to put other inactive reactor groups down that you can switch to later for robustness and versatility. You spend these Tech Points for each Chamber that is connected to the current active reactor group."

 

[diremage]

My understanding, obtained from this post, under the section "Chamber Tree", under subsection "Main Reactor", is that all entities will get the same number of tech points, specifically so that larger ships cannot be all-in-one juggernauts.

I want to believe that's accurate but based on the dev video, the small ships had enough tech points for only one, maybe two reactors. If you want more than that you need to start building in different reactors and eat a reboot period every time you switch. I have a hard time believing that a 500k-mass dreadnought is going to need to pick two reactor specialties and that's all it gets...OR that it's going to have half a dozen separate power plants and only run one at a time. OTOH there's now nothing stopping you from making that dreadnought a specialized stealth warship which takes 50k scanner modules to decloak.

But wouldn't all ships just take such a chamber by default, resulting in no need for it in the first place?

Would you rather have double power gen, or permacloak + radar jam for your default option?

 

[DrTarDIS]

I want to believe that's accurate but based on the dev video, the small ships had enough tech points for only one, maybe two reactors. If you want more than that you need to start building in different reactors and eat a reboot period every time you switch. I have a hard time believing that a 500k-mass dreadnought is going to need to pick two reactor specialties and that's all it gets...OR that it's going to have half a dozen separate power plants and only run one at a time. OTOH there's now nothing stopping you from making that dreadnought a specialized stealth warship which takes 50k scanner modules to decloak.



Would you rather have double power gen, or permacloak + radar jam for your default option?

I want to believe that's accurate but based on the dev video, all ships had enough tech points for only one, maybe two reactors.

fixed?

I saw 2 reactors(1 backup?) and 2(?) chambers on the large ship in the devstream.

From what i saw, each reactor has it's own Points to spend. Each chamber "color" has functions it can gain, some need you to have certain levels of prerequisites.
once you have spent all your "points", if you want another "build" you need to make an unconnected reactor with it's own points.

This seems to mean you could have:

1. one "travel mode" reactor specialized into mobility
2. one or more "combat mode" spec.'d into scanning/targeting, shield/armor buffs, interdiction
3. one or more "stealth mode" spec.'d into jamming, scanning,

As each "branch" of the tree costs points, you can only have"some" active at one time. any extra options are expensive dead weight.
eg a stealth ship might have to choose between scanners or mobility: 7stealth+ 7scanners=slow, 7stealth+ 7mobility=short-sighted, 7scanners+7mobile=0stealth


so 2 reactors might share stealth3+scanner3 between them(conduits), but 1reactor powers 8 points into mobility, 2 reactor powers 4 points defensive ion and 4 points armor buff.

So multiple builds/stages like the boss ship of FTL are possible, but expensive. it might be better to build 2 sepeate ships, one "cargohauler" and one "guardship" if you're an established faction. if you're a solo-player, it's probably better to have both options in one ship.

At least, that's how I interpreted the info.

 

[diremage]

I want to believe that's accurate but based on the dev video, all ships had enough tech points for only one, maybe two reactors.

fixed?

I saw 2 reactors(1 backup?) and 2(?) chambers on the large ship in the devstream.

From what i saw, each reactor has it's own Points to spend. Each chamber "color" has functions it can gain, some need you to have certain levels of prerequisites.
once you have spent all your "points", if you want another "build" you need to make an unconnected reactor with it's own points.

...
As each "branch" of the tree costs points, you can only have"some" active at one time. Any extra options are expensive dead weight.

...

so 2 reactors might share stealth3+scanner3 between them(conduits), but 1reactor powers 8 points into mobility, 2 reactor powers 4 points defensive ion and 4 points armor buff.

...

At least, that's how I interpreted the info.

So the key point here is that you've got limited options and if you want to switch between them, you need to shut everything down for a bit while your new reactor spools up -- probably not a good idea in the middle of combat.

So let's go back to your yellow/orange reactor example. Instead of 8 points in mobility, maybe reactor 1 has 4 points in mobility and 4 points in raw power gen, and reactor 2 still has 4 points defensive ion and 4 points armor buff. Now you can switch between a big offense and a big defense BUT you can't have both at once, and toggling between the two means you're dead in the water for some amount of time (like 15 seconds for example, or whatever number the devs land on).

 

[jayman38]

This is where having a fleet comes in: different ships in the fleet around you have different features, mostly in use by AI, unless you have human friends along with you in your fleet.

Example 5-ship fleet:
Two defensive-focused shield-tank ships are in the lead, followed by a pair of heavy-hitting weapon platforms, with an interdictor bringing up the rear.

 

[Calhoun]

This is where having a fleet comes in: different ships in the fleet around you have different features, mostly in use by AI, unless you have human friends along with you in your fleet.

Example 5-ship fleet:
Two defensive-focused shield-tank ships are in the lead, followed by a pair of heavy-hitting weapon platforms, with an interdictor bringing up the rear.

This scenario falls apart when you bring players into the mix. Most people aren't stupid and are going to work out fairly quickly where most of the damage is coming from, and ignore the tanks in favour of popping the damage dealing drones.

 

[jayman38]

This scenario falls apart when you bring players into the mix. Most people aren't stupid and are going to work out fairly quickly where most of the damage is coming from, and ignore the tanks in favour of popping the damage dealing drones.

That was just the simplest of examples, with min-maxed ship types to illustrate the point. Most real fleets will probably be much more dynamic than that. The point being that fleets are the key element to overcoming chamber limitations.

 

[Nickizzy]

This scenario falls apart when you bring players into the mix. Most people aren't stupid and are going to work out fairly quickly where most of the damage is coming from, and ignore the tanks in favour of popping the damage dealing drones.

Hey, it works in EVE. Why can't it work here.

 

[diremage]

A point of interest is that AI is "pretty dumb(tm)". If you've got a fleet of drones and the opponent has a fleet of drones, aren't they pretty much just going to kill each other's tank and there isn't a lot the player can do to direct them to a more useful target? I don't think we have an 'attack my target' command yet (although I could be wrong).

 

[Zekester81]

A point of interest is that AI is "pretty dumb(tm)". If you've got a fleet of drones and the opponent has a fleet of drones, aren't they pretty much just going to kill each other's tank and there isn't a lot the player can do to direct them to a more useful target? I don't think we have an 'attack my target' command yet (although I could be wrong).

Which makes the player controlled ships the most potent part of the fleet until we get some AI updates, being that it's the only ship that will target what you want it too. Pretty sure there's no "attack my target" command yet, but I haven't played with the fleet controls in a while.