Some Final Words on the Power Thread

[Jake_Lancia]

Maybe someone knows of a stream/video where designs have been tested or maybe actual battle footage with apparently very different concepts shown?

 

[Winterhome]

I kind of disagree that internal armoring and layering matters...

I know which one I would rather have on board my ship.

One works afterwards. The other doesn't.

 

[Ithirahad]

This is being pushed by replica design that wants to make star trek/wars replicas, and since those ships have tiny tiny turrets all over the place, thats how they build turrets, but those are too small to be viable anti-fighter turrets in starmade, and good thing too, because nothing prevents us from caking our ships in thousands of little turrets.

Star Trek or Star Wars yes... Or EvE, or Babylon 5, or nearly anything with turrets. No designer really draws starship-sized turrets or guns on their starship, as that would look silly and honestly not make any sense. Not many people building original ships in StarMade really want to build starship-sized turrets either... It's hard to incorporate giant swiveling parts onto all but a very small number of designs. Changing to smaller weapons is good for every building-oriented player, not just the replica builders, as long as they are balanced.

 

[Winterhome]

Star Trek or Star Wars yes... Or EvE, or Babylon 5, or nearly anything with turrets. No designer really draws starship-sized turrets or guns on their starship, as that would look silly and honestly not make any sense. Not many people building original ships in StarMade really want to build starship-sized turrets either... It's hard to incorporate giant swiveling parts onto all but a very small number of designs. Changing to smaller weapons is good for everyone, not just the replica builders, as long as they are balanced.

tbh that's because the actual gun systems in those turrets are predominantly under the deck like on actual real ships

if Starmade could implement a method by which we could put the gun systems in our turret bases, then we'd be all set for that

 

[Scypio]

System layering is indeed an interesting concept, but I have my doubts that there are multiple different ways of doing it that are all equally viable.

As a vertical ship addict i suggest you to try building, or simply in paper, with a vertical ship using the particular mindset you have given, that pretty muchy doesn't work for the obvious reason that you don't have enough blocs to do the sponge against shots. Vertical ship are even better thanks to the fact that they are different from what people are used to play with/against, using that fact you can work around.
So no, there isn't one system layering that work everytime, though this one is good and finding something different that can compete with need much more thoughts.

Star Trek or Star Wars yes... Or EvE, or Babylon 5, or nearly anything with turrets. No designer really draws starship-sized turrets or guns on their starship, as that would look silly and honestly not make any sense. Not many people building original ships in StarMade really want to build starship-sized turrets either... It's hard to incorporate giant swiveling parts onto all but a very small number of designs. Changing to smaller weapons is good for everyone, not just the replica builders, as long as they are balanced.

Hard but not impossible. Turrets here are oversized here but still look good.

 

[Tunk]

Internal armour and redundancy is vital (as well as armour scheme, theres a reason for 2-3 sandwich layers of armour on some ships and bulge/void spaces, fins, extrusions ect).
Aux without armour is just free damage once your shields are down and penetrating shots start getting through.
Aux with armour or other systems to mitigate the damage is beneficial, right up until the ship finally dies and isn't going to cause extreme SHP damage or internal systems damage as it blows.

Proper redundancy and internal armouring and system placement is the difference between being able to restart a ship, in combat ready condition 3-4 times and a ship just being completely thrashed the moment someone pokes a pin hole through it as with Aze's example above with aux.

The current power system actually can work brilliantly, if someone designs their power system with redundancy in mind (due to the way the calc handles multiple groups).
Hell even though supply reactors are no longer a thing, inline reactors are still tremendously useful as well.

I am all for a new reactor meta, but adding something as retarded as a heat box/zone imo is a bad move.
Add heat as something on top of power maybe as a separate mechanic, but renaming power to heat and inverting the mechanic is just retarded.
Heat boxes are also a lose, lose, lose situation because regardless of what you do in regards to cross entity heat zones I can exploit them for gains in various ways.

Reducing the amount of systems required as a result of the new reactors will mean I (and many others) will abuse those design issues and just have a ship of equal size but significantly higher combat power, or use the issues to create a weapon capable of disabling ships via those design issues (hell already thought of concepts of various heat weapons, based on how heat zones may propagate and schines previous and current design choices).

As for turrets, well thats a side effect of the current control scheme and crappy turn rate issues we face, its a symptom of a problem other than direct systems design.

Can only select 1 weapon at a time and fire it?
cool, we'll have several player use situational weapons (main cannon, ion weapon, missile weapons etc).
Rest goes to turrets because they are automatic and won't take our attention, dps turrets, AMS turrets, missile turrets etc that we can't be arsed with as long as they point our weapons at the target and fire.

In a ship bigger than a twig?
Turn rate is probably comparable to the titanic without a rudder, drop weapons on turrets to improve weapon mobility and reduce train time.

Its also because its more energy efficient as well, but thats not really high on the totem pole other than certain types of weapon constructs.

 

[Captain_Boroski]

As in, "no-one knows different".

Feel free to post an example that proves me wrong....should be simple, right?
[doublepost=1487312906,1487312700][/doublepost]
Sounds good in theory, but show it to be the case in practice.

You've shown your lack of comprehension of the game mechanisms and intricaties and are unwilling to admit that you're wrong and now you're being a lazy little cunt and telling us to do all the work for you. With your attitude you're clearly not doing this so that you can learn anything, just to try and nitpick your way through whatever proof we give you and post another salty response about how you're not wrong.
Yeah, I get you. We've had folks like you here before.

So let me ask you something;

How many times have you been smeared in shit whenever you went to the zoo to try and make chimpanzee understand math?

I specifically asked for something pre-existing, not made for the purpose. And no need for them to be yours, or private.

Show that in practice, significantly different system layering is used, and is competitive against each other at similar mass.
Show that the decision space for the current power system is significant large to not be labelled boring.

Here's food for thought; There's absolutely no reason for not having your systems in separate bulkheads that aren't connected to each other physically. The reason why few people do this is for purely A E S T H E T I C S

Oh, and start watching videos
Plenty of ships that fit your criteria of "two existing ships of similar mass that have fought each other and are reasonably evenly matched", which we all do know exist and even have been recorded in combat. There's no "correct" answer, merely possibilities and design choises to go with chosen doctrine.

 

[Tracy Linn Dashevsky]

I have been watching the posts on power update for a while. I love this game and have played it for a long time. I care about the future of Starmade. I love the idea of interior blocks and the new power system but there is one thing I have to say. Time is of the essence. Coming from a few different servers chats there seems to be a bunch of concern regarding everything they have built and further building until the update is released. The quicker this is released the better. It is not changing or tweaking some weapons systems. This is not adding a few new blocks to play around with. This is changing a few core structures that are vital to every ship, npc, base, and blueprint in the game. The people are setting the clock and waiting halting production until its release. The longer this takes the more devastating it will be. There are a lot of competitors and breaking a primary game system and putting the player base on pause will promote them to go to other games. We do not need a No Mans Sky failure in the middle of Starmade's development because it will bury this game. The new systems need to be implemented quickly and efficiently not several months from now like the NPC faction update which was awesome however these are CORE systems. Shields, power, mass. This is not small potatoes. All past ships and all current ships are scrap. Once again I love this game and I care about its future I do not want to see the playerbase die because of this even if you are banking on future players to join the longer it takes the more negative reviews it will get and it will become buried in a field of negative reviews. Recovering from that is very difficult if not impossible. Do not forget you do have competitors the more this game looks unappealing the more you loose. So please roll out this core system update asap.

 

[Ithirahad]

Hard but not impossible. Turrets here are oversized here but still look good.

Those are pretty sweet, but they look like they should be heavy siege turrets for destroying stations and ships significantly larger than that. Besides, those turrets wouldn't look good on every ship; come to think of it, thin vertical designs have a bit of an advantage in that area as you can mount turrets that size or even significantly bigger and have it look fine. (You could actually build a single, centered pair of turrets up to, like... 1.5x the size of the main hull! If done properly it'd look awesome.)

 

[Magrim]

Primarily weight would be the reason to not put it under a traditional hull. However, there would also be plenty of hull covered chandeliers. It's more of an issue of the systems being incredibly spread out and this system taking the most advantage of systems in a certain volume, making it both extremely powerful and difficult to kill.

If we were to compare ships of a given volume, the chandelier would definitely be more effective. The question now is; Why would the baseline of ship comparison, that is most commonly used, change from mass to volume with the proposed energy system?

 

[Zyrr]

The argument Schine currently seems to be riding on is "we are increasing the depth of systems by adding this new power system". But I have yet to see how they suggest this new system will be deep.

To speak on chandeliers and their origin here, it was a concept myself and a few others came up with simultaneously when we read that Schine intended to do two specific things with systems - heat boxes, and systems that need only make up a fraction of the ships mass (the thread suggested 5-15%). So what are the benefits of a chandelier design?

First off, it's simple and straightforward, which is why I think a lot of us came to the conclusion so quickly. If you don't need many system blocks to achieve the same effect, and you're limited by some external variable in simply adding the same amount of systems before but with massive performance increase (this is giving Schine the benefit of the doubt; I don't think there really will be any incentive to not replace everything 1:1) it follows common sense that you either build smaller or build things further apart, so they cannot all be hit by the same weapon at the same time. Heat boxes further this thought by introducing an actual gameplay negative to building near power, so the concept is pushed further.

The net result is a ship that resembles a chandelier, as you may have guessed, with the larger and more important systems near the back, away from fire, and a myriad of smaller systems all built separately and away from each other. Whether or not it is encased in dozens of meters of filler block is irrelevant, because the effect is the same - a ship with massively spread out systems that is much harder to kill in a single hit or a series of concise shots.

"Concise shots? What does that mean? I don't do that!" Since there's someone here who is a stickler for examples, and because this may not be as obvious to some as others, let me provide an example. This was a test battle carried out between myself and Azereiah - me in a slightly newer ship that embraced concepts we had learned, developed or already known a little more completely than his. Shown below is his ship.

Specifically, this picture -

As you can see, the vast, vast majority of shots I landed were directly down the middle of the ship. With the way systems work now, that is a safe bet - most people build ships that are larger volume-wise down the center line, and ergo put more of their systems down the center line than elsewhere. So damage of this magnitude to the center line would, in theory (and in practice here) disable the ship. This is not a bad thing - armored warfare since the advent of the wooden galleons of old has emphasised this fact; put the important parts in the thickest area of the vessel, and shoot for the thickest area of the enemy vessel. Indeed, this kind of thinking can right now be utilised to "bait" someone into shooting an area you want them to, a place filled with non-important systems, while you return the favour but against systems that are important.

But now consider if this ship's systems were replaced with the suggestion we are discussing. He could place his small reactors anywhere he wants, and string his systems through the smaller areas such as those very thin wing endings on the sides. The majority of his ship would now be filler, and a similar amount of damage could do nearly nothing to him. This concept is specifically what we're elaborating on - ships could become unreasonably strong with the right amount of effort, because there is so much effectively wasted mass.

Another thing I feel is necessary to explain from the above is that much of StarMade's combat revolves around disabling your opponent, not necessarily killing them outright. In a real server, the materials you can gain from a ship are important, so blowing it to smithereens isn't as useful as simply destroying the important parts. For this reason, redundancy and system placement are important to a level I don't think I can emphasise enough. Lancake, the point of us building systems in a certain way, with some blocks used as "filler" is to maintain the maximum amount of combat efficiency for as long as possible (in some ships, this can be right up to the moment they overheat. Many, many, many duels and fights have ended with the ship with a lower amount of SHP or AHP has won, because their ship had more or better redundancy that had effectively disabled an opposing ship with, on paper, more health. The system that we have now very much encourages effective redundancies in systems that allow ships to fight far past what you would think they would be capable of.

Proper redundancy and internal armouring and system placement is the difference between being able to restart a ship, in combat ready condition 3-4 times and a ship just being completely thrashed the moment someone pokes a pin hole through it as with Aze's example above with aux.

Tunk mentions this too here. There is a specific example (that I regret not recording) of an internal 4v6 skirmish where one of our members was able to reboot his ship not once, not twice, but three times and still be able to move and do damage significant enough that it necessitated Tunk completely obliterating his ship to nearly zero blocks. This sort of redundancy can carry fights (though, it didn't for them unfortunately, but the point still stands).

 

[nightrune]

#1

But now consider if this ship's systems were replaced with the suggestion we are discussing. He could place his small reactors anywhere he wants, and string his systems through the smaller areas such as those very thin wing endings on the sides. The majority of his ship would now be filler, and a similar amount of damage could do nearly nothing to him. This concept is specifically what we're elaborating on - ships could become unreasonably strong with the right amount of effort, because there is so much effectively wasted mass.

#2

Another thing I feel is necessary to explain from the above is that much of StarMade's combat revolves around disabling your opponent, not necessarily killing them outright. In a real server, the materials you can gain from a ship are important, so blowing it to smithereens isn't as useful as simply destroying the important parts. For this reason, redundancy and system placement are important to a level I don't think I can emphasise enough. Lancake, the point of us building systems in a certain way, with some blocks used as "filler" is to maintain the maximum amount of combat efficiency for as long as possible (in some ships, this can be right up to the moment they overheat. Many, many, many duels and fights have ended with the ship with a lower amount of SHP or AHP has won, because their ship had more or better redundancy that had effectively disabled an opposing ship with, on paper, more health. The system that we have now very much encourages effective redundancies in systems that allow ships to fight far past what you would think they would be capable of.

Both of these are really good points.

For #1 Is it not stronger just because you don't know where the systems are? Would that change if you could identify which ones and where they are?

For #2 Given the change above. Would the player be given more choices on what to disable, if they systems were more consolidated?

 

[Zyrr]

#1

#2

Both of these are really good points.

For #1 Is it not stronger just because you don't know where the systems are? Would that change if you could identify which ones and where they are?

For #2 Given the change above. Would the player be given more choices on what to disable, if they systems were more consolidated?

Giving players the option to scan systems with a specialised tool could be interesting, but it doesn't change much of the issue - even if you know exactly where everything is, you would still have to shoot through meters and meters of filler to get one spot, and then move on to the next. Extremely time consuming, somewhat tedious and not exactly an interesting addition to the meta.

 

[Crashmaster]

As for my build process...
I build a ship's shell, I armor it up while doing so, I fill it with a random block to see how much it can fit, then I do some basic match to figure out what I want and I just do that.

I see your building style as primarily aesthetic - people build a ship shell that looks the way they want it to and then see what it can do. This is a fine building style for StarMade the way it is now - primarily a ship building game and would be benefitted greatly by systems volume reduction for (seemingly extreme) simplification of placement.

On the other hand, people can have or predict a need for a ship, engineer a system or systems that will accomplish that goal, then build a hull to suit the components needed for that ship's mission type. This is the way I would think people would be playing the actual game part of the game if it is ever finished and if there is any challenge to it AI-wise and resource-acquisition-wise.

While the new idea would not hinder them in doing this, Schema has previously via updates implied intent to have specialized ships and reasons for building them. IMO having small volume easy-to-place systems and large volumes of wasted space will discourage many of the unique ships of StarMade and promote refits of the same hull doing every job in a fleet or worse, on-the-fly refits while the ship is being flown, once there are resource and time limitations on the player.

*ignoring new posts and posting*

 

[DrTarDIS]

System layering is indeed an interesting concept, but I have my doubts that there are multiple different ways of doing it that are all equally viable. That's to me a lack of depth. I don't believe there's a reason why you would use thrusters as a buffer, and put shields in the most protected parts of your ships.
Your choice in what system to put if you want the ship to perform well.

Somewhat agree with you, but I think that's more a result of blockmass:function imbalance. An off the cuff "solution": Remember the old weapons system from the SD-BB days? How you ran sliders on your cannon arrays to do what we now do with ratios? What if "systems" were just one big fat pool, and (while docked to a shipyard) you could just "play with sliders" to do your system tweaking? Certainly would be easier.

Yep that would be great, preferable ships that deviate from what I described (shield cap as first buffer, recharge as second, the rest is placed behind strong armor and/or in unlikely to hit positions).

Armor layering is something else though, and putting armor between systems isn't "System layering" to me. It's just creating additional protection on your ships on different levels. Which is more complicated of course than it sounds.

Unfinished theory-craft ship design here (a replica altered to "starmade size") Surprisingly it can survive for upwards of 4 minutes in the heart of a star, even in it's unfinished state.
This one's relying on a "systems tanking" methodology I theorycrafted a while ago, since the BHP:SHP:mass ratio of scaffold(and now girders) is REALLY favorable to taking damage. Especially with how the preset penetration damage values of projectiles and SHP-damage-penalty work. It does suck that it takes maneuvering penalties from it's larger ship dimensions, but that's one of those trade-offs that make pretty ships less PVP viable to begin with.
For me "survive flying through a star" is a good benchmark for PVP suitability. Try it out for yourself with the other ships. Beware entity-dedock lag-spam(be nice to get teleport-out-of-collision again...)

As for the power aux, yes they were added to allow more complexity on larger ships (while also replacing docked reactors) where their placement and protection is crucial. I don't deny that and I'm happy that you think the same way, I was under the impression Power Aux wasn't liked at all because most didn't believe it added complexity.

It's different for sure. I like that hitscan lag has been delt with, but really, just making dockers as invulnerable as cores while they are active would have done the job and fixed turret/door de-docking lag too.

I was referring to the lack of choice in this matter, see the first paragraph of my post. To me only particular system layer is viable, and anything else decreases performance. I can be wrong of course and I hope your examples will show that

As for what the new system would change:
It would offer more ways for us to add different block types related to power, and how they would affect each other if all of that was put inside a small package -> A reactor that takes little space, but represents a large area on your ship.
As our proposal was very vague on that, it's for now really just a promise that we're able to add more depth/choice on larger ships since you only need to adjust a small amount of blocks to change behavior.
That probably doesn't explain it well but it's 2:30 AM here and I want to get some sleep. I'll come back to it later but felt like leaving this post to not keep you hanging for 12+ hours

Sounds to me like a buff to the exisiting values, removing the "nerf after ~2mil" scale, and making it so the boxdim of a reactor actually projected a boxdim of "virtual blocks" that all had the expanded dimension bonus would be an ezmode implementation. To keep backwards compatibility make it so that blocks inside more than one boxdim nerf down to base 25 e/sec and bam-done.
Aux: dense efficient and dangerous power. Reactors: wide, efficient, safe power. Caps like they are.

In the end all "heat" seems to do is flip&rename the power bar top/bottom and make "full bad" instead of "empty bad."

For me, this is 'depth' (actually not depth so much as a minmaxing technique) in the wrong direction. This is just prioritizing what systems are safer to kill than other systems, which has no real effect on their functionality when they aren't busy being ripped to shreds. (If it does it's 99% of the time because your systems are built wrong and are working suboptimally, not because you made a conscious choice to go for a different layout for some other advantage) There are no meaningful tradeoffs here, just a rough optimal order of systems that will preserve the important stuff for longer.


This is good, yes. But then, what's the point when your aux will still all disappear/become useless once it's shot unless you use a certain (fairly straightforward) exploit that has no real depth to it at all? Besides, there's not much choice in how you deal with aux. Either your armor it externally, or you leave it unarmoured like an idiot and watch it rip through your systems; there's no choice in the matter.

Interesting thing about AUX: in you build a tube-shaped aux 1-2 blocks wider diameter than the explosion radius of it's size you get a relatively boom-proofed aux. Adding armor-rods or armor waffle along the inside of the resulting tube-wall further boom-proofs it. Shape does matter in those things, but in an "evolved gameplay" way. Moredetailed runthrough of that in my sig-thread.

I like the new reactor concept but I strongly disagree replacing power with heat alone. I recognize it as a platform from which to further develope the power and supply requirements of a ship, but right now the concept put forth is just hamfisted.

That's just lack of imagination.

Somewhat agree. and for that reason I think we should really give Shine a standing ovation for discussing it with the playerbase before wasting any coding-hours on it. Seriously.

 

[nightrune]

Giving players the option to scan systems with a specialised tool could be interesting, but it doesn't change much of the issue - even if you know exactly where everything is, you would still have to shoot through meters and meters of filler to get one spot, and then move on to the next. Extremely time consuming, somewhat tedious and not exactly an interesting addition to the meta.

Perhaps, but assuming 1hp a block it takes one cannon module in the current game to destroy 10 blocks. You could swap to armor but then the speed/thrust decrease comes into play and it would depend on the heat box for how much filler you'd want.

The way I'd imagine my idea system is one with several spokes around a circle. Where the tip is 100% effectiveness of one and only one system, and the climb to that is exponentially hard for any shape of an entity. Which of course can contribute to lots of small entity. I don't feel like the current system works this way. It seems rather easy to just put whatever you want on a ship and have it be decently effective.

Since you've done a lot more combat Zyrr, Another question I'd like to ask. Can you effectively disable a ship without destroying it? This to me is a larger gameplay issue that I'd like to see be possible in starmade. Where you can effectively disarm a ship and let it go on its merry way as a way to build relations. I'm aware that's a subtle nuance of diplomacy but currently with the way ships work I don't see that as an option.

 

[Scypio]

Perhaps, but assuming 1hp a block it takes one cannon module in the current game to destroy 10 blocks. You could swap to armor but then the speed/thrust decrease comes into play and it would depend on the heat box for how much filler you'd want.

You got a maximum of block penetration by shots, resulting in wasting damages if you overdo it.

 

[nightrune]

You got a maximum of block penetration by shots, resulting in wasting damages if you overdo it.

That's just part of designing your weapon though isn't it?

 

[Zyrr]

Perhaps, but assuming 1hp a block it takes one cannon module in the current game to destroy 10 blocks. You could swap to armor but then the speed/thrust decrease comes into play and it would depend on the heat box for how much filler you'd want.

The way I'd imagine my idea system is one with several spokes around a circle. Where the tip is 100% effectiveness of one and only one system, and the climb to that is exponentially hard for any shape of an entity. Which of course can contribute to lots of small entity. I don't feel like the current system works this way. It seems rather easy to just put whatever you want on a ship and have it be decently effective.

Since you've done a lot more combat Zyrr, Another question I'd like to ask. Can you effectively disable a ship without destroying it? This to me is a larger gameplay issue that I'd like to see be possible in starmade. Where you can effectively disarm a ship and let it go on its merry way as a way to build relations. I'm aware that's a subtle nuance of diplomacy but currently with the way ships work I don't see that as an option.

Many fights that started on friendly terms will end when one side concedes. Poorly built weapons, or non-redundant power, popped auxes, destroyed thrusters, etc - lots of times fights will end before overheat. Of course, a large portion of people will continue attempting to fight or the still combat viable opponent will just blow the enemy ship to smithereens, but the fight itself was over.

I wouldn't exactly say its currently possible to disable a ship's weapons consistently. Right now, even on a poorly designed ship where that could occur, it's certainly more dumb luck than anything. If system scans or something to that extent ever occur, perhaps, or if Schine takes the concept of system outages further, maybe.

 

[nightrune]

I wouldn't exactly say its currently possible to disable a ship's weapons consistently. Right now, even on a poorly designed ship where that could occur, it's certainly more dumb luck than anything. If system scans or something to that extent ever occur, perhaps, or if Schine takes the concept of system outages further, maybe.

Its not just weapons, but any system. More like giving you choices on how to defend yourself, limit the damage you take, maximize destruction of the enemy, also getting to the cargo of a ship, or capturing a ship? I'm not sure any of those nuances are possible with the current combat system.