I played this game a year or two ago and I remember enjoying the complexity and depth of the ship design constraints. There were so many soft caps and balances to try and build around and cheese your way out of that building was this beautifully arcane art. I remember docking hulls with hardening module on them to avoid paying energy for the whole ship. Building detection logic and power transmission. I came back on the memory how much fun I had making ships.
Unfortunately modules at this time are cut and dry. You have a set amount of reactor space and if you cant fit your feature plan in your allotted space then you are straight up out of luck. There is no trade of, there is no reactor redesign, there is no "If I did X I could maybe squeeze out a few more units of space" the complexity is gone. What I loved about the game is missing.
I feel like where the stabilizer system removed some depth, it also added new depth and in that way would be fun to explore. But energy use seems to have been boiled down to thrust, shields, and guns. The alternate expenses were rolled into a system that is rigid and by extension shallow.
This isn't meant to be an "I'm leaving" I was already gone for other reasons and ill probably check in again in 6 months or so. Rather it is a plea to bring more depth to this new system so that when players look at it "does the reactor system allow this?" becomes "can your reactor design have enough space?"
In theory you have indeed a set amount of reactor space and regeneration for any ship, and that would also be the most power you could get out of it. Doing that though, should leave you in either a costly, non efficient situation, or one where many of your systems are awkwardly located and are most likely in a vulnerable spot to weapon fire.
Going with a lower regeneration output but with more sustainability on it might be the new sweet spot you're looking for. The previous system also had hard limits were you could not get passed, if a ship was filled with your most efficient power design, you could not get more without expanding the ship.
More often than not, that way of building also resulted in a fragile ship as cutting the power regeneration lines would result in a big drop of power, and similar if any of your docked reactors were hit. In that case though, lag was your main issue as suddenly undocked reactors do not like to cooperate with the server.
That's my point of view on it though, the new system hasn't been in use for long so I imagine many players are still figuring out the pros and cons of a certain build style.
Could you elaborate a bit on the lack of trade off, or the lack of complexity within it? You could compare it with old power examples perhaps, as that's something we're all familiar with.
not that I've actually tested it in game yet but seems like with the new effect config editor, under tools in main menu, you could modify or create a chamber to allow shield recharge while under fire (one of the available 'elements') as a chamber effect, might be an attractive option to server admins while waiting to see how the weapons update impacts current shields. They do feel pretty weak now in comparison to older versions imo, and any sized rapid firing weapon in range can disable shield regen with outage redux chambers, minimal investment to counter an upgraded chamber, replacing redux with in combat recharge would make it a much more meaningful upgrade in the current gamestate.
Could you elaborate a bit on the lack of trade off, or the lack of complexity within it? You could compare it with old power examples perhaps, as that's something we're all familiar with.
Specifically the features like ion, cloak, jump, scanning, and hardening had soft limits in the form of how much energy you could design a reactor to generate relative to their cost. With this current system it seems these reactor features have hard limits. There is a fixed cost regardless of reactor or chamber size or design. There is no design trade off here.
Specifically the features like ion, cloak, jump, scanning, and hardening had soft limits in the form of how much energy you could design a reactor to generate relative to their cost. With this current system it seems these reactor features have hard limits. There is a fixed cost regardless of reactor or chamber size or design. There is no design trade off here.
Jump drive, scanner and stealth drive do depend on your mass still though, their energy cost is not the same for a small or large ship. You will still run into more power problems related to those parts if you make the ship much heavier than it has to be.
The cost for chambers is fixed, that is true, but isn't that the design trade off? If you go for specific chambers, that means you have to trade in other chambers as there's a limit to what you could have.
From the way you describe it, the issue you're having is that there's less fine control over such systems, but the control is still there though.
They do feel pretty weak now in comparison to older versions imo, and any sized rapid firing weapon in range can disable shield regen with outage redux chambers, minimal investment to counter an upgraded chamber, replacing redux with in combat recharge would make it a much more meaningful upgrade in the current gamestate.
That's indeed the case with a single shield group. With multiple smaller groups it's possible to have several still recharging (especially with the 1 second cooldown if upgraded) which can lead to some more interesting builds that keep having sections of their shields up.
Whether that is an actually viable way of using them or not, is hard to say.
A safer choice would be to fall back to regen under fire, although I would change it a bit as that system had 2 flaws in my eyes.
The first issue I have with it, is that the regeneration goes from 100% to <20% immediately after a hit. It's pointless to have this jump as regen out of combat barely happens and this just leads to misinformation.
The second issue is that it actually increases your regen the lower your current HP goes. That sounds neat, but it also leads to situations where an opponent, after shooting your shield for a boring few minutes, suddenly notices he has not enough damage to go through the now increased shield regen. Such a stalemate is boring, and most ships already heavily relied on alpha weapons to blast through capacity entirely so it was not that much of an issue in previous releases. He should know immediately if your shield is too strong for him, instead of after a few minutes.
It's much better to just start from 100% and gradually go down over time, of course the default regen value would be several times lower to compensate for that lack of drop to <20%. That and you won't get a stalemate after a few minutes as it only gets worse for your shield overtime.
We have some interesting plans for extra shield modifiers, as it will work well with the different environments we'll have in the universe update. Those would apply much better on a gradual regeneration decrease, than on an all-or-nothing mechanic. That in combination with chamber that modifies the damage received on shields, can lead to some interesting choices.
Could you elaborate a bit on the lack of trade off, or the lack of complexity within it? You could compare it with old power examples perhaps, as that's something we're all familiar with.
Game is fucked and unlikely to ever get unfucked, so heres a detailed tutorial of how I used to build a ship vs the new system:
Old (tremble before my wall of text):
Okay, I start of with a quick calculation based on how many weapons I want to get the power I'll need, I add a little more so that I can run shields and thrust. Next I estimate my final mass and multiply it by 1.5 to know how much thrust I'll need. Then comes placing blocks, I make about 10-15 vertical lines of reactors using it to dimension my height, I never go below 300m H on a ship above 50k because power lines become too inefficient for my taste, there a bit of redundancy built in too. Then I place roughly 10k block aux reactors 7 blocks behind the power lines, so that I don't have to worry about their explosions, I usually put them in pairs, so Ill put two next to each other, go 7 blocks above those ones, place two more, until I have enough e/s. Then I take power capacity blocks and place them around my power system, creating a shell, upon which missiles can hit and will do minimal damage to my aux reactors. The cap shell is usually about 5 blocks thick and 7 blocks away from the aux, not enough to stop a big missile hit. Now I decide on how many shields I want, I take approximately 60% of the recharge and 50% of the capacity and put it on the main entity, usually on the front, assuming I've covered everything I needed to with the power cap blocks earlier. Now comes docked stuff. I will have 4 main docked pieces: a primary docked hull, a docked thrust unit, and a left and right missile plate. The docked hull's primary structure will be spaced apart from the main ship in the same way the power cap shell was built around the power system. I'll put maybe 5 blocks of space inbetween docked hull and main entity. The docked hull gets the other 40% of recharge and 50% of capacity, I also give it about 20% of my thrust for safety. Then I usually do the docked thrust unit, it gets the other 80% (the 20% on the docked hull was in case the thrust unit fell off in combat) and thats really all it needs, maybe add 1 recharger for that free 220 shields. You offload the thrust so that you arent paying for it with od and ion effect passives. Ok, now we move on to the missile plates, they'll be docked to the docked hull (to decrease lag potential if docked hull comes off), basically just cover up most of the sides of your ship with shield caps and recharge, then add ion effect. These plates should have between 1-5 mil capacity dependent on ship size, and comparatively little recharge. They are supposed to only take block-damage-focused missile fire, and as such should not be easily hit when someone is shooting you from the front so that they stay up long enough to do their job (this is my most recent addition, and as such I never got to fight with them). Next we go back to the main entity and add interior, scanner, ion and od, chaindrive and jump inhibitors, all the sub-systems we skipped earlier. Ok, back to docked hull, now I begin making the actual exterior, which takes a long ass time (up to this point I may have put in maybe 2-4 hours, this step is at least another 4-8). Exterior needs to be at least 20 blocks away from the current surface of the ship, so that missiles that hit it wont damage anything underneath, and so that it covers the missiles plates, so that they can be of use later on. Now we add ion effect to the docked hull, it has 50% of my shield cap for a reason, it allows me to increase the total amount of shield coverage that I have on my exterior, if all my shields had been on main entity, I'd get 75% of that to protect the docked hull, if i put 50% on my docked hull, and inhereit 75% of the other 50% i get more total shields on my exterior. This may contradict the reasoning many people have behind using docked hulls, but I use them more for mass and health offloading than anything else, plus maybe some other stuff I don't want to tell. At this point the ship should be stupidly durable, while still staying nearly exploit free (depends on how you feel about docked hulls). For safety, I go around and place girders over surfaces that have animated blocks, decreasing lag considerably. Now for weapons, they sit on floating turrets above my hull, not only for the ease of angle usage, but also to act as another bit of spaced armor, sometimes I even give them spaced armor floating above them. Usually I have BBI and Missiles, supported by some cc, cb and bc.If I've got the time, I'll add something dumb like an enemy detector wired to a display near my viewing camera.
Sorry, I got tired towards the end of this, so I probably missed something, as I normally do with my ships.
If I'm lucky, I end up with something like this:
Two hangers and a 31 room interior, 315k mass. Good tmr, powerful alpha. Pretty much exactly what I think Schema would be proud of, seeing how seriously we took this game and made complex designs that fill rp and pvp roles well. This is the kind of stuff all the meta builders were making, and tons of people were aspiring to make (could be a little prettier though).
New power:
Docked shields don't work, so I cant use complexity with that. Shield spheres are too big for me to do anything creative with them without getting a stupid shape. Designing my power system to be complex and durable also doesn't work, because my reactor has to be all in one group, and therefore cant be effectively hidden, dispersed, or placed somewhere not obvious. No power cap, so I'd use a low mass block instead to add space, except I can't, cause you made them all heavy. Can't even use turrets right, because they don't fire in the right direction part of the time, and even if they do, they shred a reactor to the point that they cant actually hit it enough to overheat it because its com or whatever its target is becomes unrepresentative of the reactor. The one place I do see creativity is with chambers, but its not something that you can do fast, plus I don't play space lego games to stare at a menu, they also restrict you because they have set rc consumption numbers rather than being a system where a player can very precisely choose how much of what they want. So basically the only thing thats keeping me around right now is the scale the game has. No other game that I know of allows me to build a full scale Valdore, yet.
Also, no apologies for the wall of text, if you can't be bothered to read it, you don't deserve to know.
Jump drive, scanner and stealth drive do depend on your mass still though, their energy cost is not the same for a small or large ship. You will still run into more power problems related to those parts if you make the ship much heavier than it has to be.
The cost for chambers is fixed, that is true, but isn't that the design trade off? If you go for specific chambers, that means you have to trade in other chambers as there's a limit to what you could have.
From the way you describe it, the issue you're having is that there's less fine control over such systems, but the control is still there though.
My point was that the trade-off itself is fixed. It is a hard cap. You can't max out jump and then put another system on. You cant stealth and jam. Most importantly, you cant build your way around these limits. They just are and are hard feature limits. The old system had limits, but they were soft limits. You could sacrifice some firepower or thrust or shields for more support, you could change your reactor design to be more or less efficient and that affected how many support systems you could run. This system has a fixed feature limit, it removes a whole dimension of tradeoff from design.
A commentary on nons description of power 1 building is that he described an entire wall of technology without a single thing that comes from a menu. Just pure player innovation. the merc dragon technical design manual is over 30 pages long of stuff like that and would be another 10-15 if it included some of the more faction specific stuff I don't let most of my guys know about. On top of that, non does stuff very differently than I do, which is different than vielth, which is different than flying debris, etc. So each faction develops a culture of technology that is literally invented over time. In new power, all of the nueance that makes that kind of "tech" is gone because it's all blocks and leveled
A commentary on nons description of power 1 building is that he described an entire wall of technology without a single thing that comes from a menu. Just pure player innovation. the merc dragon technical design manual is over 30 pages long of stuff like that and would be another 10-15 if it included some of the more faction specific stuff I don't let most of my guys know about. On top of that, non does stuff very differently than I do, which is different than vielth, which is different than flying debris, etc. So each faction develops a culture of technology that is literally invented over time. In new power, all of the nueance that makes that kind of "tech" is gone because it's all blocks and leveled
Theres also morality in this game. I don't know how well I do it, but I've worked hard to get where I am without the use of proper exploits (one of the things I do with my docked hulls gets a bit close, but I dont think its over the line, also possible I do something without knowing ti). Different factions have different stances on whats ok and its cool. Vaygr had no bounds and it added to the lore. There are several large factions that operate in a grey area. Now admittedly this isn't something thats going away, power 2.0 has a ton of exploits that are easy to find, buts I thought it was worth noting regardless.
Problem was that in power 1.0 true exploits, and even simple meta was all very esoteric and hard to discover... Now there is a whole stack of them as plain as day, and players are becoming more resistant to report them because the "work arounds" to get rid of them feel like they are just getting more and more limiting.
[doublepost=1517795783,1517795160][/doublepost]Case and point, I recently reported the od missile exploit to an admin to pass along to schine so they could fix it. Instead, they removed od which broke all of my honestly designed od turrets... This makes me not want to report bugs at all.
Yeah, this kind of thing tends to happen with brand new systems. Remember how long it took for pre-0.200 to get to the state it was in with regards to basic bugs and exploits... and that even then plenty of old bugs and some exploits were still around.
Instead, they removed od which broke all of my honestly designed od turrets... This makes me not want to report bugs at all.
If they removed OD instead of taking the time to fix it, that means it'd be gone when the weapons update comes out anyway. Your turrets were already doomed.
Yeah, this kind of thing tends to happen with brand new systems. Remember how long it took for pre-0.200 to get to the state it was in with regards to basic bugs and exploits... and that even then plenty of old bugs bugs and some exploits were still around.
If they removed OD instead of taking the time to fix it, that means it'd be gone when the weapons update comes out anyway. Your turrets were already doomed.
But for an update that is how far off? Just fixing the bugs in power 2.0 will take months. Pushing a major weapons update before that is done is a really bad idea because it makes bug tracking that much harder. So, yes, they are a doomed turret design, but so were the ships we all made in the past 1/2 a years while waiting on power 2.0.
Power is new and will need tweaking, they're already tweaking it (see last patch), it'll get there as they get more real-world data to see whats actually an issue and what is over-reacting. There's an imbalance in power generation vs. weapons power right now, because its Power 2.0 forced into a shotgun wedding of Weapons 1.0, but we know thats going to be fixed, and that its the next thing on the list.
We're not doomed, its not the end of the world or anything. Its just a transition period. Transition periods are rough. It is, however, a great time to work on your shipbuilding aesthetic, or to work on station designs, to pre-build cargo ships, scout ships, and other misc. things to have ready for future updates, etc.
Bleeding edge competitive PvP is rather borked at the moment, but thats okay because there's plenty of other things to do in the game in the mean time.
My point was that the trade-off itself is fixed. It is a hard cap. You can't max out jump and then put another system on. You cant stealth and jam. Most importantly, you cant build your way around these limits. They just are and are hard feature limits. The old system had limits, but they were soft limits. You could sacrifice some firepower or thrust or shields for more support, you could change your reactor design to be more or less efficient and that affected how many support systems you could run. This system has a fixed feature limit, it removes a whole dimension of tradeoff from design.
You actually can have a good jump drive and other effects. The trade off is you cannot have all chamber branches active at once but you can do more as long as your willing to build the chamber trees. There is nothing stopping you from having a smaller reactor dedicated to jumping around or a few extra branches on your main reactor that you switch on and off as you need them. I hope they add logic interaction so we can actually build our ships to "divert power" on the fly.
The ability to have multiple systems that you slide on and off is cool, but the issue may really be just that the hard cap of what can be active at one time is too low. While it makes sense to not be able to max out all the things, it seems odd that you cant even fully build out a single tree and get stealth and jam simultaneously, let alone with minor effects from other systems.
If we could raise that hard cap (or lower the specific reactor requirements for all the systems) it would allow more mixing and matching that just isnt doable right now and add back a significant degree of that lost complexity.
I think a chamber that lets us combine multiple reactors at a scaling malus, to effectively increase the cap ( requires 10% per additional reactor , get 50%/ 30% /20% more cap might) be a great addition.
Or a Chamber that allows us to switch reactors automatically , faster under certain circumstances.
The good point of this power 2.0 is its modularity wich can be expanded upon.
This one of the rare cases, a dedicated pvper explains in depth how his ship works, to prove that the old meta was better than the new power.
Many of the "pro-pvp" players held back the design details of their own ships just like you. This one of the reasons the majority of the gamers and developers did not have a deeper clue about the possible complexity, this game actually had for you guys.
I don't want to say, that you guys missed out an opportunity for a good argument point. But it would have helped the not-veterans to understand you guys easier.
And I just noticed that this is the first time I see a really big pvp ship in its design details. I am just asking why the motivation to keep design-details secret has a higher priority, than the potential to influence the game with facts (and to help other players in keeping up) about the complex meta-mechanics?
The ability to have multiple systems that you slide on and off is cool, but the issue may really be just that the hard cap of what can be active at one time is too low. While it makes sense to not be able to max out all the things, it seems odd that you cant even fully build out a single tree and get stealth and jam simultaneously, let alone with minor effects from other systems.
If we could raise that hard cap (or lower the specific reactor requirements for all the systems) it would allow more mixing and matching that just isnt doable right now and add back a significant degree of that lost complexity.
From what lancake told us, it was intended for the Cloak chamber to have an in-built jammer.
However that is buuged atm, and will likely be fixed next patch.
Thus you can get Jamming for low cost, or get full cloaking for more usage (which also includes jamming as cloaking is useless without it)
the latest change with the lesser distance just made it worse LUL befor I had 100% stabilization now 30 the minimum distance just was innreased by 6 CAN U FUCKING STOP LIMITING CREATIVITY
Everyone seems to think that there should be a way to increase RC, but you have to always consider balance.
In terms of RC increases, what happens when your reactor and ship reach a certain size? You'll then be able to fully upgrade every chamber and use every effect on a single reactor, which is a bit broken and over powered in my opinion. You also have the problem that larger ships then have a massive functional advantage over smaller ships, which we probably don't want, either. The chamber setup is meant to provide a way to let any ship specialize for a certain range of tasks, which the player can pick and choose from, but not have all of. If it were possible to then have more RC in your ship with a bigger reactor, that would then become the minimum reactor size for PvP, as anything less would put the player at a huge disadvantage, effectively "limiting" building in the same way pre-bonus stabilizers limited building.
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