Now let me set something straight right off, I'm very happy with StarMade. Yes it has it's problems and it's missing some stuff, but hey, it's an Alpha. I've been with the game for just over 3 months now and I believe I've gotten a fair way. However, this also brings up a few.. issues with the game. One being ship combat.
Ship combat itself, as of right now, is pretty friggin' cool, and fun. However, a few problems rapidly become apparent. One of which would be the way that a ship is actually destroyed. There can be a lot of tactics to the way to go about destroying your targets ship. For example..
You can begin picking away at their hull, tearing it apart piece by piece to expose the inner workings, and then launch a few well placed missiles inside and rip the ship in half.
You can target their engines to cripple their movement, and then tear open the weapons and destroy them.
You can begin blasting wildly at their ship, aiming for the most likely places to store the weapons computers.
You can force the ship to a full stop by draining the power and tearing it apart.
You can strafe run it with a smaller ship in the hopes of tearing into it enough to do some real damage over time.
But tell me.. Why would you do this? There are so many tactical options avaiable, so many paths to tear apart your target. Yet why would you do it, when you can just use a large cannon or missile array and drill to the core? Why do it when you can just tear that apart and destroy EVERYTHING, ignoring all other vitals and leaving the ship worthless, to be blown to oblivion by it's own destroyed core? I know that I myself have suffered from this tactic many times, coming back to StarMade after being away for a few minutes and finding a hole straight to my core and my ship destroyed, or even having one of my own ships in the hands of a pirate surprise attack me from above and blast my core to pieces.
So, I propose a fix. A possibly complicated fix, but a very good fix to this issue. I'm not sure if it's already being worked on, or already suggested or not, but this is my take on it. There are also quite a few ways to change the system to be more fair, and less sniper focused. I'll try and explain a few.
(1): Stregthened core based on ship mass. There were two topics suggesting this that interested me, and I'm sure that some of you have seen them already, but there was an issue I noticed. Small ships obviously would have a relatively weak core that won't stand up to much, encouraging swarms of such fighters or very small ships to overpower and make up for such a weakness. Larger ships (Frigates, cruisers, etc) would have much stronger cores due to their size, something more fitting. Each bit of mass increases the core's health slightly, so a massive ship would have an armored tank of a core, ensuring that an enemy ship may want to focus on other vitals before taking on the core itself. (As for the issue I noticed, it's that people were talking about the ship's core losing armor as hull was picked off. ...Why would losing some hull affect the strength of your core? The core's health should be based on the amount of hull/mass of the last time you went into build mode.)
(2): Downsize the importance of the core. The core is, obviously, a very important piece of the ship. But how is it less important than the engines? Or the guns, or shields, or power supply? All of this is needed for a proper functioning ship. If, say, you lose shields, your entire ship is exposed to weapon's fire. If you lose the power, you're dead weight. If you lose weapons, you're unable to defend yourself. Lose your engines, you can't move to dodge or even get to a repair station. The core wouldn't signal the destruction of the whole ship, but rather force the player to find a new command station to control the ship from, or perhaps get into a cockpit block in order to use the ship.
(3): Allow multiple cores. This would make targeting a ship's core far more difficult because you'd have to drill into multiple places with precision to destroy it. A disabled core would either sit idle, dissapear, or detonate, destroying a large chunk of ship around it. Larger ships would most likely require more cores to function properly.
(4): Universal ship health. There's a health bar when you enter a ship, but it only seems to pertain to the core. Instead, that health bar would account for all components of the ship. Hull, shield, power, etc. Whenever those start taking hits and you lose parts, you begin to lose health. This would also include parts that are sliced off entirely. Meaning, if you have an especially thin ship and a cannon cuts through a section entirely, cutting off, say, a wing, you would lose a large chunk of health. (This would also require Hull being more resistant to taking damage, or at least armored hull. Then again, I'd like that to be boosted anyway.)
If you have more ideas that you think are better than mine, do tell! I'd love to hear it.
My next problem would the AI system of the game. It's fun and all that, certainly, but there's a problem. The enemies don't exactly change course or slow down a lot in order to move more.. tactically, to engage their target. And if you stop, chances are they're just going to keep going straight on by. If you choose to follow and engage them, there's a large chance that you're going to be crossing a number of sectors, and possibly a star system border, disorienting the both of you and making it that much harder. This can make ship combat extremely irritating due to the sheer amount of space a battle can cover. Personally, I believe it would be far more fun to more.. dance with the enemy ship, metaphorically speaking, with random slow downs, manuevers, twists, etc. This would seriously cut down on the space required, as well as make you think more tactically to take out the enemy, and outsmart them, as well as use their movements against them. This could easily be done by adding a random algorithm to choose what sort of manuever the AI will attempt to do, or much less easily by adding an entire new AI function that would choose manuevers based on your velocity, direction and current aim point, as well as the location of the AI's allies.
Obviously, the latter solution is highly preferred, but the former can be used as an easy temporary fix to this issue.
And, once more, if you think you have a better solution, I'd love to hear it.
Ship combat itself, as of right now, is pretty friggin' cool, and fun. However, a few problems rapidly become apparent. One of which would be the way that a ship is actually destroyed. There can be a lot of tactics to the way to go about destroying your targets ship. For example..
You can begin picking away at their hull, tearing it apart piece by piece to expose the inner workings, and then launch a few well placed missiles inside and rip the ship in half.
You can target their engines to cripple their movement, and then tear open the weapons and destroy them.
You can begin blasting wildly at their ship, aiming for the most likely places to store the weapons computers.
You can force the ship to a full stop by draining the power and tearing it apart.
You can strafe run it with a smaller ship in the hopes of tearing into it enough to do some real damage over time.
But tell me.. Why would you do this? There are so many tactical options avaiable, so many paths to tear apart your target. Yet why would you do it, when you can just use a large cannon or missile array and drill to the core? Why do it when you can just tear that apart and destroy EVERYTHING, ignoring all other vitals and leaving the ship worthless, to be blown to oblivion by it's own destroyed core? I know that I myself have suffered from this tactic many times, coming back to StarMade after being away for a few minutes and finding a hole straight to my core and my ship destroyed, or even having one of my own ships in the hands of a pirate surprise attack me from above and blast my core to pieces.
So, I propose a fix. A possibly complicated fix, but a very good fix to this issue. I'm not sure if it's already being worked on, or already suggested or not, but this is my take on it. There are also quite a few ways to change the system to be more fair, and less sniper focused. I'll try and explain a few.
(1): Stregthened core based on ship mass. There were two topics suggesting this that interested me, and I'm sure that some of you have seen them already, but there was an issue I noticed. Small ships obviously would have a relatively weak core that won't stand up to much, encouraging swarms of such fighters or very small ships to overpower and make up for such a weakness. Larger ships (Frigates, cruisers, etc) would have much stronger cores due to their size, something more fitting. Each bit of mass increases the core's health slightly, so a massive ship would have an armored tank of a core, ensuring that an enemy ship may want to focus on other vitals before taking on the core itself. (As for the issue I noticed, it's that people were talking about the ship's core losing armor as hull was picked off. ...Why would losing some hull affect the strength of your core? The core's health should be based on the amount of hull/mass of the last time you went into build mode.)
(2): Downsize the importance of the core. The core is, obviously, a very important piece of the ship. But how is it less important than the engines? Or the guns, or shields, or power supply? All of this is needed for a proper functioning ship. If, say, you lose shields, your entire ship is exposed to weapon's fire. If you lose the power, you're dead weight. If you lose weapons, you're unable to defend yourself. Lose your engines, you can't move to dodge or even get to a repair station. The core wouldn't signal the destruction of the whole ship, but rather force the player to find a new command station to control the ship from, or perhaps get into a cockpit block in order to use the ship.
(3): Allow multiple cores. This would make targeting a ship's core far more difficult because you'd have to drill into multiple places with precision to destroy it. A disabled core would either sit idle, dissapear, or detonate, destroying a large chunk of ship around it. Larger ships would most likely require more cores to function properly.
(4): Universal ship health. There's a health bar when you enter a ship, but it only seems to pertain to the core. Instead, that health bar would account for all components of the ship. Hull, shield, power, etc. Whenever those start taking hits and you lose parts, you begin to lose health. This would also include parts that are sliced off entirely. Meaning, if you have an especially thin ship and a cannon cuts through a section entirely, cutting off, say, a wing, you would lose a large chunk of health. (This would also require Hull being more resistant to taking damage, or at least armored hull. Then again, I'd like that to be boosted anyway.)
If you have more ideas that you think are better than mine, do tell! I'd love to hear it.
My next problem would the AI system of the game. It's fun and all that, certainly, but there's a problem. The enemies don't exactly change course or slow down a lot in order to move more.. tactically, to engage their target. And if you stop, chances are they're just going to keep going straight on by. If you choose to follow and engage them, there's a large chance that you're going to be crossing a number of sectors, and possibly a star system border, disorienting the both of you and making it that much harder. This can make ship combat extremely irritating due to the sheer amount of space a battle can cover. Personally, I believe it would be far more fun to more.. dance with the enemy ship, metaphorically speaking, with random slow downs, manuevers, twists, etc. This would seriously cut down on the space required, as well as make you think more tactically to take out the enemy, and outsmart them, as well as use their movements against them. This could easily be done by adding a random algorithm to choose what sort of manuever the AI will attempt to do, or much less easily by adding an entire new AI function that would choose manuevers based on your velocity, direction and current aim point, as well as the location of the AI's allies.
Obviously, the latter solution is highly preferred, but the former can be used as an easy temporary fix to this issue.
And, once more, if you think you have a better solution, I'd love to hear it.