Space battles should be more epic

[Angus and Alexis]

While a Dreadnaught shoud be one of those \"ready the fleet with everything we have\" type things, it shoud be very vulnerable to an attack by several Battlecruisers (Battlecruisers are cruisers with battleship grade weapons if you need to know.)

I also suggest that ALL acceleration should be nerfed.
Yes, even the already slow battleships.
Why?
I believe that large spaceships should be lumbering juggernaughts that tank stupid levels of damage, but are easy to evade.

So acceleration should be limited by mass, but max speed limited by a equation of thrust and mass. (Not realistic, but leads to some very unique ideas and builds)

Also, as more hull is added to a ship, it should increase that HP of all other hull blocks in a very slow linear fashion. So a giant borg cubes hull will be 2-5K a block, while a fighter still has 100-200.

Weapons should have splash, with fighter guns having 1-5 splash and capitals having \"nice ship *BOOM*, ohh where did it go?\" guns.

 

[FlyingDebris]

I heard from schema that he\'s working on a fast travel method.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

I like cruise engine ideas.

Like, you charge up for about 30 seconds, then start traveling at 500 MPS, but if hit, you lose the speed and suffer shield regen nerf for a while, so it cannot be used to escape.

 

[FlyingDebris]

That\'s a pretty good idea. However, the charge tkme should be varying, based on the distance between you and the target point on the nav? That way, you could go 10 sectors in a 10 second charge up, but it\'d take 100 seconds to charge for a 100 sector distance? I\'m not suggesting instant travel, but a speed of at least 750 would be reasonable.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

If fuel was added, fast/cheap scouts would be useful and \"fighter vs. fighter\" fights would be more common.


This is true, but at the same time this makes players upset. Fuel only appeals to a few people. There aren\'t many topics about fuel being wanted. I digress, fights would happen more often but there are a few things wrong with this senario.

Say there are two fighters. Neither have an advantage over another armament/armor wise. Ship 1 is browsing a shop\'s items. Ship 2 comes within nav range and sees the targeting diamond. What will it do? Does he attack it for fuel? Is Ship 1 part of a rival faction? If he attacks for fuel, he will most likely shoot the block holding the fuel and lose the location of the dropped fuel items. The other option was Ship 1 being in a rival faction. Ok, Ship 2 calls in for backup. A few other fighters arrive and crush Ship 1. Gratz. Ship 1 notifies his buddies and go the the shop. If Ship 2 and his friends were smart (which I\'m sure they are) they would have gone to another shop knowing that Ship 1 will be bringing friends.

Assuming there is a proper economy, the loss of Ship 1 would have been somewhat of a concern financially. That would give reason to destroy that ship. Other than that there still isn\'t a reason to attack others. This would really only work Faction vs. Faction. Solo players have less of a reason to attack others then because they are wasting fuel, most likely get a good bit of ship damage, and get a not-so-good return on investment from the broken ship.

Fuel isn\'t the answer in my opinion to balance fighters in general. I think that an insane price tag for big ships is key to balance. Right now, anyone can spawn them from about 30 minutes of gameplay. Pirates should drop less loot, and pirate bases should have far less loot. Add this to high prices for ship components, and there you have a start to a good economy. Next we need planets that only produce one type of ore, and that ore regenerates after it has been mined. Only the minerals regenerate, not the rest of the planet. This begins to form a legitimate alternative to buying things from several shops.

Imperial, are you talking about factories? Those are terrible right now! (Continue reading)

But Imperial, ores are useless, unless you sell them in bulk! The only ones that give you any profit are LV3-LV5 ores, and those you only get from fighting pirates!

Like I said, pirates need to drop much less loot. Also minerals should be the base component in factory systems so nothing can be made without them. So you take out the protein and processors etc. (everything between ore and final product) out of the shop, and just leave their recipes for sale. AMCs, thrusters and others will still be purchasable, but for a much higher price than what they are now. That way it would be in your best interest to mine ores to make stuff. For example:

You are playing minecraft and you want to make an iron helmet. You have mined the ores, smelted them, and made your helmet. Now you want to make some iron boots. You see your friend Tomatohead selling iron boots across the street. Instead of mining for ores, you just buy the iron boots from him for a lowish price.

This defeats the purpose of mining. I suggest that the final product (AMCs, thrusters, etc) should have a much higher price than what they are now. This would encourage mining and make factories actually important.

Question, comments, concerns, or conundrums?

EDIT: Also fighters should be faster than bigger ships. It\'s basic balancing. Big, heavy hitting ships should be slower and far less agile compared to ships of a smaller variety. Being unable to turn very well, they need turrets to protect themselves from fighters/bombers. To combat bigger ships, fighters need to work together in swarms to defeat them.

 

[Brain_Dawgs]

Having one block that ends all combat is just silly. It takes space combat and reduces it to just pointing your nose at the enemy and tunneling untill someone dies. There is pretty much no reason to manuver.

 

[ardiel]

For real life \"air vs. sea\"; the aircraft can do damage against the ship because the ship has no shields at all. It doesn\'t have anything at all to do with StarMade (e.g. I\'m fairly sure nobody is suggesting that all shields should be removed from the game completely).


Oh really.

Tell me, how much does your best and biggest ship actually cost in credits?

 

[Imperial_Gold]

That is really space combat in a nutshell. Unless you want to cripple someone, you just aim for the bridge typically.

 

[ardiel]

That only works in movies on poorly designed ships.

A ship should not require the bridge to function. At most this should only weaken the ship slightly by taking away some of its vision. If the commander is on the bridge you\'d probably kill them and cause some havoc on the ship but it should be far from dead because any good ship should be controllable from the engineering area, and battle stations should remain functional because you want them to not be near the bridge at all.

 

[Ithirahad]

Nerf unmultiplieed shields, as in make fighters worthless? If small default-dock-box fighter shields can\'t take a single beefy AMC hit if the fighters look decent, and hulls can barely handle the damage from a squirt gun, isn\'t that kind of counterproductive to both carriers and individuality as a whole?

 

[Imperial_Gold]

Very true indeed.

 

[mtech47]

Being the owner of a capital ship mid-build I\'m a little concerned about (where I think) this topic has been going

In my own arrogant opinion The Biggest capitals should only be vulnerable to sustaned assults no matter what they are up aganst, else (other than ego stroking) what is the point of building them?

Yes a wing of bombers should be able to do a respectable amount of damage if they catch a big ship unprepared, but a battle should not be won by a handful of bombers preforing a lighting strike to which there can be no possible defense

Yes smaller ships have to have a role, and no a supership horde is not how warfare should look, There has to be some inbetween that allows for fun gameplay.

Everything after this point is In my incredibly arrogant opinion

AMCs need to be nerfed, so that a game killing mega death array is not possible (last I checked guns fired fast or powerful, not both)

sheilds should regenerage --but a a reduced rate-- during combat, death by a thousand beestings or death by crowbar to the head are good, however death by one determined bee is not acceptable no matter how determined the bee, that is just the advatage of being big

The Ship core should not anounce \"shoot here to kill me\" I think that haveing multipul ship cores that have to be destroyed would be a good measure to ensure that large ships are immune to core drilling but the things like where you get in/out and everything else determined by the ship core currently should be determined by the original shipcore, as well the radar target should be in the center of dimensions of the ship not at its core

Hull needs to be buffed so that they is a reasonable defense after sheilds go down (possibly to the point where people could fesably not put sheilds on a spcelised build (like the ships mass is 80% hull))

There should be a defferance in arlament between the large ships and small ships with medium ships being able to combine the effects imperfectly: bombs that have a damage limit and bypass sheilds for the smaller ships and weapons that are fit to have a slug fest with for the larger ships that smaller ships can avoid.

Also Huge ships should be more expesive to produce (time/resources) that their loss/sever damage could be devastating to the side that losses them, the superships should be just as much a deterant from a major engagment as they are a force in that engagment. In any other game bosses don\'t come one after another after another there is significant time between them

I would also like to have some sort of cinematic capability to watch/record a battle from a battle overview so that I can see all the epicness happening, not just the epicness around my ship

As much as (I think) it would be a coding nightmare, Carriers might be fesable if players could act as wing leaders for a squad of drones that way you could have smart groups of ai ships that could comeback one thier own (sorta). By limiting the amount of mass that can be grouped that way it would prevent supership squadrons



Just to wrap up my rant I would like to say that I am entirly new to internet forms and would much appreciate if someone could inform me how I am screwing up (because I have this intuation I am screwing something up)

 

[Angus and Alexis]

Please read over what i have said on this thread.
I have virtually said everything you did, but actaully described HOW to do it.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

That\'s a pretty good idea. However, the charge tkme should be varying, based on the distance between you and the target point on the nav? That way, you could go 10 sectors in a 10 second charge up, but it\'d take 100 seconds to charge for a 100 sector distance? I\'m not suggesting instant travel, but a speed of at least 750 would be reasonable


This could work, longer distance=longer charge, thus disabling it for escapes.

Also on the discussion of core=one hit kill.
I suggest the ability for adding one extra core for every 1000 mass your ship has, so a giant 50K mass ship needs to have 51 core destroyed before critical failure.

 

[mtech47]

We have covered many of the same points and I have read your posts as well as the rest of the thread, the differance is elaboration on different points

 

[Saria]

The issue with having one core that\'s hidden is one that I find obvious: Turrets and AI will either be completely useless or ridiculously overpowered, because you make it where they either target the core or they purposely aim away from it depending on range.

So you\'d be able to place an auxillary core every 10k*2(X-1) mass (with X being the number of cores you already have) for a maximum of 5 critical locations on your ship. You would place them down, and you could name them whatever you wanted for the sake of RP. Built a neat engineering room? Put an auxillary core and name it \"Engineering.\" Now everyone can see what that room is because it\'s clearly labeled, and it\'s also a useful room in your ship because it gives you access to the core when you need to replace or repair it.

I imagine it\'d look something like this:



Locking onto a ship would highlight the main core and it would also highlight all the other cores on the ship. Turrets would work by selecting a core and shooting lasers at it. Literally nothing about turrets would have to change but they\'d immediately be made less overpowered because they\'d have to fire all over the ship for a kill just like anything else.

For all intents and purposes, the main core is still the one and only core of the ship. The only difference being that you only die and your ship is only destroyed when the main core and all of the auxillary cores are overheated or destroyed.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

I would rather remove the big massive diamons saying \"SHOOT HERE\".

And instead just highlight the entire ship.

Or perhaps make scanning ships viable to target weakpoints for a fleet.

Maybe make scanner nullifying blocks that hide the core diamond?

 

[Saria]

if you\'re saying you dont want the weakpoints to be revealed or that you dont want the system altogether

i guess it might work better if the weakpoints were only revealed when you got close to their ship? again you have to take turrets into account. making where they purposely aim away from the core the further they get away from a ship would make turrets pretty stupid and less useful than just making a giant shotgun AMC that you can fire yourself. making the turrets always aim for the weakpoints in this case would make turrets a lot better than manually-aimed guns, so it\'s a touchy subject and I honestly prefer just to have multiple weakpoints that you can see because when AMCs get their inevitable nerf we wont have to worry about battles being too quick on account of core visibility.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

I am saying make a dedicated system for finding weakpoints, or just dont have it.

The ability for any chump in a ship to find where to one hit KO a dreadnaught is stupid.

Now if said chump has a radar dish, scanners, etc and can find where it is, fine.

But there needs to be jammers, ECM, chaff, decoys, scan resistant blocks, etc.

 

[ltmauve]

@imperial_gold: loot dropping is setable in the server config. Taking stuff out of the shops would work to an extent, but you should probably still have the ability to sell stuff to the shops. The merchant faction needs materials to build their own ships, right? However, it wouldn\'t completely work: pirates would still drop plenty of parts. The loot amounts should be skewed toward the lower end of the factory tree (L1 ores) as opposed the high end (ship blocks)

@mtech47: let me go through your ramble with my own opinion:

First, uberships should not be as invincible as they are. Suprise attacks should be capable of destroying ships, not just crippling.

AMC nerfs are being disussed elsewhere in this forum. You may want to read them and then weigh in.

Shields do in fact regenerate during combat.

As for the ship core thing: I put my ship cores in the middle of my ship, silly me. I would prefer having a beacon block. You can only place one per ship, but it sets the location of the IFF marker and where the missles hone to, even after it is destroyed. The IFF marker only changes locations when another one is placed. This means I could put my beacon block above the top of my ship, and just wait while AIs pounded the heck out of empty space.

Balencing hull, shields, and AMCs is being discussed. I see you favor hull

Different weapons for different sizes of ships? Your mean something like: AMCs are much slower and only become effective at high numbers of blocks, but boy are they effective. Meanwhile, a laser cannon comes into exsistance, much faster but ineffective above thirty blocks. You mean like that?

On squadrons: yes, it would be a proper nightmare to code. Probably not to run, no more than turrets. Supership ai squadrons? Keep in mind that since the economy needs to be balenced anyway, getting uberships is too easy. Once they become hard to get, people would not want to throw them away by putting them on AI mode.

Here\'s my point: Once fast travel is implemented, ships can have max speeds based on their mass, meaning fighters will finally be able to get behind the heavy weapons of uberships and take them out from behind.