Remove the diminishing Power regen

[Will Valent]

I honestly think they should do anyway with the diminishing power regen for multiple groups of reactors. You might be wondering why, well here's why, I spent a week designing a 350000 block ship that I had wanted to make for a while, notice I had the idea for the ship before I played starmade, but had nothing to make it in. Well when I found starmade I instantly wanted to make it, After working on it for a week, and thinking I had efficient power systems that I got from the wiki, I looked at the power and found after running some numbers that I was getting less than 1/6 the calculated power that I should be getting. This is because of this diminishing power game mechanic. After thinking about it I am just left wondering what the purpose for this mechanic is. I just can't find anything it adds to the game other than frustration that your idea for a ship wont work because of this game mechanic. In a game like this the power, weapons, engines, and every other system should be implemented in a way that you can have an efficient ship that still has role play value such as the ship I designed. While how you set up your systems should effect their efficiency it should not be in a way that prevents you from making the ship you've always dreamed of.

 

[CyberTao]

The reason we have a softcap is because a certain someone once made a ship that reached the power cap (absolute maximum the game could do) of 2.14 billion regen, on a 600some meter ship or something (that cap is increased now btw). It just got stupidly absurd and made large ships vastly superior.

You can edit that your in the blockBehaviourConfig.xml found in starmade/data/configs.

Is half of the power formula (grouping bonus), and below is the config values;

The formula is for the grouping bonuses of a reactor group (the softcap for dimensions), added to that is the flat rate (25 e/s per block).

Changing the PowerDivFactor would probably change the equation to what you want (I think), though just raising the PowerCeiling could also work to some extent.

 

[Will Valent]

The reason we have a softcap is because a certain someone once made a ship that reached the power cap (absolute maximum the game could do) of 2.14 billion regen, on a 600some meter ship or something (that cap is increased now btw). It just got stupidly absurd and made large ships vastly superior.

You can edit that your in the blockBehaviourConfig.xml found in starmade/data/configs.

Is half of the power formula (grouping bonus), and below is the config values;

The formula is for the grouping bonuses of a reactor group (the softcap for dimensions), added to that is the flat rate (25 e/s per block).

Changing the PowerDivFactor would probably change the equation to what you want (I think), though just raising the PowerCeiling could also work to some extent.

Ok I see the reasoning behind it now but it just seems that the way it works can ruin ships like the one I made where its not reasonable to put the blocks into a pattern that lessens this diminishing affect I get why we have it but I still say that it can really hurt ships not designed around the game mechanics. Also I understand you can change a number of this things in the starmade data config file but if I want to play on a server other than my own, my ship could become useless in any area other than role play. The thing is that even if you use maximum efficiency layouts, if you have more than one reactor group on your ship the efficiency goes down, since most ships are going to HAVE to have more than one group, it means that the game mechanics eat away at your ship , even while you're doing things that are necessary to the ship. This system punishes those who have not designed their ship around the game, it punishes those just trying to build a simple ship and it doesn't reward those who use it. In its current form I just don't think it works with the game, that's not to say there isn't a good reason behind it I just think it creates more and worse problems than it fixes, but thanks for telling me how to change the values on my own servers, as I will play mostly on my servers, I brought this up for the most part as I can see a number of new players creating ships possibly on multi-player servers then realizing that the ship wont work properly because of this mechanic and they just spent large amounts of time on something that they can't use.

 

[CyberTao]

I can see your point, but I believe this is the first time I recall seeing someone ask for a higher power cap. Power is one of the rare systems that no one has ever really complained about. Generally speaking, people just learn to adapt to this and have been building just fine, save for some replica ships I suppose.

You'll see all kinds of opinions and thoughts of how it should work though, some people even want a more restrictive power system, make people rely on power tanks and smaller ships (A system I wouldn't mind to try someday), the reason we have the configs to edit like this is because Schine (the devs) knows they can't please everyone.

Something else you might consider trying, is docked reactors on larger ships that need far more than the softcap. Basically it's a docked 'ship' with power supply beams that is more efficient than just filling that space reactor blocks.

You could also consider asking/looking around and seeing is you can get a server to try a increased power system. I dislike the idea that people need to be able to go from 1 server to the other without much change in ship design because "muh buldz", if your system works, they will come regardless, and it would add more diversity to servers. Just be aware that better power regen means bigger ships, and more lag or issues for a server.

 

[Creeper__God]

The balance is there for a reason so I'm not going to argue with it. I would like to say though, as a dedicated builder, it is completely 100% possible to make an RP ship that is useful combat. In fact some of the best combat ships I have seen were also RP ships. You just have to know what you are doing and experiment with your weapons and shields to get a good balance for your ship.

 

[EtherEel]

The harsh curve-rate after achieving 1-million power regen could be softened a bit. In my latest "Diamond-Jellyfish" ship, I easily got to the 1 mil mark before finishing my 2nd regen array.... Then, determined to get to 1.1 million proceeded to have to make 9 (iirc) (just to see what it would take) -- and that ship has big dimensions (296 x 150 x 150 I think). 8o million in the tank easily, but only 1.1 regen scratching and clawing to get there. Of course, I'm just a beginner at all this, so what do I know. And OF COURSE there hadda be someone who found the absolute maximum-overkill-exploit....

 

[BDLS]

Do some research on docked logic power supply batteries, OP. The latest patch made them viable again.

The softcap is a good thing. As has been said time and time again....been there done that. It was awful for balance when big ships had near-infinite power generation back in the day.

 

[EtherEel]

Of course, however, I'm curious why the softcap was set to 1 million, as opposed to, say 2 million. Was there an actual reason for that # or was it merely arbitrary?

 

[jstenholt]

It's actually 1.2 million, which was an arbitrary number at the time. Now it could probably stand to be raised a bit, but that soft cap is one of the only things that keep massive ships from being completely overpowered. Imagine if you could dedicate all that space you need for blocks of power regen to shields. Ridiculous.

 

[Will Valent]

Ok I see why the softcap is there but its a little low and why did they decide that limiting the power is the best way to balance large ships, There should be legitament reasons why you can't build large ships , such as they're slower, harder to operate, harder to make, rather than just putting this softcap on power that basically limits the size of your ship. I don't plan on playing on any server that isn't my own, but I think there are better ways of balancing large ships rather than simply making them unusable.

 

[CyberTao]

It's actually 1.2 million, which was an arbitrary number at the time.

Yes and no, the power formula is a combination of a flat rate and a group bonus. The flat rate is 25 e/s per block, and the grouping bonus curves and caps at 1 million, it's because of the other reactor blocks used that increase it to over that. 1.2 million is just a rough guide for most setups, you'd need more or less depending on the size of your groups.