Revert to System HP with reactors as Critical Zones

[MacThule]

I thought about the OP suggestion here while working on a small station earlier - unfortunately, ships being super hard to kill is also one more disadvantage for stations. Station reactors are way easier to take out; they don't move around...

 

[Nosajimiki]

Same. Cockpit, systems, defense, turrets, decor, in that order. I'm not religious about sticking to that, but it is absolutely the best way to get a ship that performs well in my experience.

Usually I have a pretty clear idea for the finished ship's general shape when I start, and that helps me lay out systems. Then when I finally wrap it, the wrapping process allows some additional shaping and sometimes I'll tweak a few of the systems to improve the finish if it doesn't substantially harm performance.

I do think shape shouldn't really affect performance, but I find it appropriate that someone building for style will probably get curbed by a player building for performance. I think about the lengths to which players go to fine-tune their builds (character builds, or skill tree builds, or empire builds) on other games and it seems reasonable.

In Starmade the ship is your build, and no one is being forced to PvP where build even matters, but for those who are doing PvP making all build decisions equal would probably result a very bland game. But it might not be all bad - the idea of encountering a giant, purple chicken then having it surprise me by stomping the snot out of me in the end is also appealing...

Shape matters to the extent that is is a voxel game. Hit profiles, internal cavity shapes, and surface to mass ratios will never not be an issue as long as damage is based on the blocks your ship is made out of. But these are just some of the elements of good ship making. How you organize what you put under the hood matters even more than what you look like on the outside. In reality, a good player COULD make a giant purple chick that could curb stomp most other players, it would just never be as strong as if that same player designed around meta both inside and out.

If you look at the real world, pretty much every countries' tanks, fighters, and warships made in the past 20 years look almost the same with the exception of the ocational experiment because these shapes are real world meta. It is only natural that a game that reflects the same concepts of "engineering" would see the same trends over time. You can change the laws of nature in Starmade all you want, but as long as laws exist, there will be an optimal design.

I thought about the OP suggestion here while working on a small station earlier - unfortunately, ships being super hard to kill is also one more disadvantage for stations. Station reactors are way easier to take out; they don't move around...

Yup, rHP is a major hindrance to stations. Not only is the reactor a smaller target making it harder to hit on a moving ships, but an attack can maneuver to whatever vector puts the least material between his guns and the reactor, whereas a the ship can put its reactor on its back sides and place hundreds of meters of forward facing armor and systems to soak damage. As long as reactors are critical zones at all this will be an issue to an extent, but right now, a base can destroy half the attacking ship without landing a single meaningful blow as long as the attacker was smart about his system layout.

 

[MacThule]

I just finished the non-decorative (un-wedged, undetailed) wrap on an ugly little trade outpost, and I ended up thinking about this thread.

It's not really meant to put up a fight, so I thought about this issue with reactors and went ahead and just let its reactor be complete with 67% stability. Because 100% reactor stability is obviously tank AF.

It made me realize there was another double-bind happening here. We went from outrage over the ship shapes required to hit max stability, to ship reactors being too stable. Puts me right back to "maybe people just need to stop trying to min-max so hard?" Because all it means is that you don't actually need to go for 100% stabilization for a durable warship. If any ship with 90% or better stabilization essentially has enough "health" to qualify as a tank, it really leaves us with a lot of flexibility regarding shape meta.

Maybe instead of demanding Schine push us back to a more fragile baseline for ships, we should appreciate the shape freedom this situation actually provides, since that was a massive, massive, massive complaint?

My first thought was "make reactors more fragile," but just realized that what will almost certainly happen if we demand more fragile ships and complain about reactors being too tough, is that it will put more pressure on builders to hump whatever shape is most meta because that's the only way they can achieve sufficient toughness for their ships not to go down like glass compared to opponents.

Is there something between the system being so unforgiving that players are forced to meta or die, and being too forgiving for us to get clean kills?

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I think what power 2.0 needs is bleedthru to systems even with shields up. That way, you don't need to directly hit things to disable/destroy them, don't need to take out every layer of armor to go reactor block-hunting.

This could even replace stabilizers if the bleedthru scaled with system size.

The meta would be a central reactor and concentric spaced layers of armor in a 3D grid (basically interiors), weapons would be the most vulnerable, so fights would be about declawing and immobilizing your enemy before drilling to their center.

 

[MacThule]

You mean having weapons partially bypass shields, completely bypass armor, and go straight to the nearest system?

 

[Nosajimiki]

I just finished the non-decorative (un-wedged, undetailed) wrap on an ugly little trade outpost, and I ended up thinking about this thread.

It's not really meant to put up a fight, so I thought about this issue with reactors and went ahead and just let its reactor be complete with 67% stability. Because 100% reactor stability is obviously tank AF.

It made me realize there was another double-bind happening here. We went from outrage over the ship shapes required to hit max stability, to ship reactors being too stable. Puts me right back to "maybe people just need to stop trying to min-max so hard?" Because all it means is that you don't actually need to go for 100% stabilization for a durable warship. If any ship with 90% or better stabilization essentially has enough "health" to qualify as a tank, it really leaves us with a lot of flexibility regarding shape meta.

Maybe instead of demanding Schine push us back to a more fragile baseline for ships, we should appreciate the shape freedom this situation actually provides, since that was a massive, massive, massive complaint?

My first thought was "make reactors more fragile," but just realized that what will almost certainly happen if we demand more fragile ships and complain about reactors being too tough, is that it will put more pressure on builders to hump whatever shape is most meta because that's the only way they can achieve sufficient toughness for their ships not to go down like glass compared to opponents.

Is there something between the system being so unforgiving that players are forced to meta or die, and being too forgiving for us to get clean kills?

Reactors become harder to hit the more damage they take. That means the harder they are to overheat, the more important instability becomes in finishing one off. So, more resilient reactors force the 100% meta more, not less.

Also, you seem to have missed the point of people's arguments about rHP when it was first proposed. It was not about ships being to easy/hard to kill. It was that drilling meta becomes very one dimensional whereas a strucHP left a lot of options for various damage patterns.

 

[MacThule]

Reactors become harder to hit the more damage they take. That means the harder they are to overheat, the more important instability becomes in finishing one off. So, more resilient reactors force the 100% meta more, not less.

Also, you seem to have missed the point of people's arguments about rHP when it was first proposed. It was not about ships being to easy/hard to kill. It was that drilling meta becomes very one dimensional whereas a strucHP left a lot of options for various damage patterns.

I didn't realize that that was the crux of the issue. It doesn't seem like an issue to me though, which may be why. Reactors are too tenacious, OK. Making other systems more readily terminated might be nice. It seems more natural to be shooting for vitals to cripple or kill than to just spray a target completely at random until it dies though. This seems way more nuanced than SHP.

So I don't really know. As is I still agree that they do need to balance integrity more and possibly code in a shut-down condition for systems sufficiently damaged, or something along those lines, but if they do that... then I don't see a serious problem with the system on the whole. I don't think it's going to stay exactly as is, and if ship systems need to be more readily put out of commission I'm expecting that to happen eventually. I just think it's good that this feedback is coming out so they can get this weapons release balanced with the new power and have a functional combat model again at some point.

 

[Nosajimiki]

I didn't realize that that was the crux of the issue. It doesn't seem like an issue to me though, which may be why. Reactors are too tenacious, OK. Making other systems more readily terminated might be nice. It seems more natural to be shooting for vitals to cripple or kill than to just spray a target completely at random until it dies though. This seems way more nuanced than SHP.

So I don't really know. As is I still agree that they do need to balance integrity more and possibly code in a shut-down condition for systems sufficiently damaged, or something along those lines, but if they do that... then I don't see a serious problem with the system on the whole. I don't think it's going to stay exactly as is, and if ship systems need to be more readily put out of commission I'm expecting that to happen eventually. I just think it's good that this feedback is coming out so they can get this weapons release balanced with the new power and have a functional combat model again at some point.

Yes, individual system death is a good idea, and I think tieing that to current integrity models instead of explosions is a great way to improve performance and actually prevent spaghetti builds, but I think baseing ship death on total damage makes variant weapons more practical.

Right now, I can slam 50 missiles into the side of a light cruiser causing massive damage, but leaving the power system mostly untouched. On a spaceship, this should disable it because there would be enough somethings there that the ship needs to function regardless of what those things are be they wires, computers, cooling systems, life-support: something would realistically give that would render the ship un-usable even if the reactor is left intact.

If you combine these features, you make ships that can be effically and completely disabled by drilling the reactor OR through attrition of systems. This means how you attack a ship still matters, but without rendering half the weapons in the game meaningless. I think the optimal balance here would be to require somewhere between 60-75% damage to disable a system or 50% total damage to kill a ship.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

You mean having weapons partially bypass shields, completely bypass armor, and go straight to the nearest system?

Not the nearest system, any nearby systems, falling off with distance. Armor would decrease the bleedthru, serving to both prevent direct hits to systems and at least absorb most of the damage if close.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Not the nearest system, any nearby systems, falling off with distance. Armor would decrease the bleedthru, serving to both prevent direct hits to systems and at least absorb most of the damage if close.

So, basically, you are saying all weapons should use the missile explosion model for damage? I believe that is the whole point of Acid: to make a performant system with a similar effect.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

So, basically, you are saying all weapons should use the missile explosion model for damage? I believe that is the whole point of Acid: to make a performant system with a similar effect.

Doesn't acid only apply when shields are down? I haven't played the weapons update yet.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Doesn't acid only apply when shields are down? I haven't played the weapons update yet.

Shields are so ridiculously frail now, that that is a moot point. For example, a typical 50k ship can support 15-40 million shields, but can easily inflict 200-300 million alpha damage. Even if shield capacity were properly balanced, they no longer regenerate at all under fire anyway, so... you could still break through them quite easily over time.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Shields are so ridiculously frail now, that that is a moot point. For example, a typical 50k ship can support 15-40 million shields, but can easily inflict 200-300 million alpha damage. Even if shield capacity were properly balanced, they no longer regenerate at all under fire anyway, so... you could still break through them quite easily over time.

Still, I think we need system bleedthru thru shields so that shields aren't just plain better than armor and every shot matters, and shields may get buffed eventually.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Still, I think we need system bleedthru thru shields so that shields aren't just plain better than armor and every shot matters, and shields may get buffed eventually.

If shields go back up to the relative toughness of p.1, then maybe, but they are so much worse than armor now, that most people aren't even using them.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

If shields go back up to the relative toughness of p.1, then maybe, but they are so much worse than armor now, that most people aren't even using them.

Ah. I do prefer shields being a first line of defense, since then random bits of small damage don't force repairing all the time, there's no worries about super tiny boarders drilling in unnoticed without firing much of anything, and ships from Star Trek/Wars/etc can be reasonablish.