Space battles should be more epic

[Saria]

Alright so without a doubt my biggest gripe with the game at the moment is how short and disappointing battles between huge ships are. I mean you've seen it in the movies and games where two capital ships slug it out in the background of some epic drama and it looks really awesome. If you try to recreate something like that in Starmade, you end up with two ships instantly dropping each other's shields and having one of them die because a pinhole-sized opening was drilled into their core.

More Shields

Shields should be buffed considerably. A ship with 6 million shields should have 20 million, a ship with 3 million should have 10 million, etc etc. Ships of these sizes generally do close to half a million DPS, so it's not like ship battles would take forever. You'd just be able to blink without missing them.

Multiple Cores

Again it's kind of lame when you kill a giant capital ship and and it's hard to tell that it's even dead because the only damage is a small 1x1 tunnel you drilled into its core. It's a little anticlimatic to say the least, it's not very satisfying, and it doesn't feel fair when you're dead but 99% of your ship is intact.

What I suggest is that for every 10k*2(X-1) mass (with X being the number of cores you already have), you're allowed to place another core on your ship. Your ship will only die when all the cores are destroyed, and you can spread the cores throughout your ship. This way a ship with 120k mass (1.2 million blocks) could spread 6 cores throughout its ship, which means that if the ship is actually killed there will be 6 huge chunks blown out of it rather than a teensy hole drilled towards the cockpit on a massive titan.

Fires

When one of the multiple cores begins overheating, it will generate a fire that will slowly spread and begin to damage nearby blocks. A player can extinguish the fires by pressing R on them, and they can make field repairs to the core, but doing so requires them to leave the cockpit of the ship and physically walk over to the damaged core. This way interiors will be important in a ship because players will need rooms to put cores in that are accessible from the inside and can be accessed without being shot.

Fighters/Carriers Should be Relevant

Aircraft carriers, fighters and bombers are absolutely essential in naval warfare, but in Starmade hangars are a waste of space and fighters die instantly to turrets and no human player would want to fly a dinky little fighter in PvP against titans and battlecruisers.

What I suggest is to allow Bobby AIs to return fighters to their docking bays after a fight. That way you can load up your hangar with AI fighters and unleash them on your enemy, and once no more enemies are in sight they'll return to your ship where you can repair them and get them ready for the next fight. This would allow carriers to be actual threats in PvP and hangars to have a purpose beyond being purely cosmetic.

It'd also be really, really awesome.

 

[Zyrr]

Space battles SHOULD be more epic, but extra cores and bigger shields aren\'t the answer. Nerfing AMC\'s is.

At the moment, AMC\'s burn through hull as if it was tissue paper. Shields... well, you need a lot of them. The damage that AMC\'s do just needs to be scaled back, period.

As for shields, making them any stronger would hurt fighters. I\'m not one to say 1 fighter > 1 titan, but a squad of fighters should be able to take down cruisers, eventually.

As for carriers, I completely agree, AI needs a rework. A \"return to previous dock\" would be a good feature, as you suggested. Mostly so you don\'t have to refill your hangars after each engagement.

Don\'t fear, however. Schema knows about these problems and will get to them in due time.

 

[Saria]

Fighters aren\'t meant to take out big ships, they\'re meant to stop bombers from taking out big ships.

What if there was a new weapon that dropped a bomb, basically like a dumbfire missile who\'s direction is based entirely on the ship\'s momentum and that ignores shields. This way a small bomber could fly in and drop a bomb that would actually do a bit of damage while a big capital ship wouldn\'t be able to aim it at all, but would still be able to do something super awesome like carpet bomb a planet.

This way, bombers become an actual threat, fighters become useful for stopping bombers and battleships get an awesome planetary assault weapon. Everybody wins.

 

[questorhank]

And ships should start exploding when the core is going down, and an explosion relevant to te size of the ship, and debris. So capitals and titans will have giant chuncks coming off if them and having explosions that wipe out half a fleet

 

[Zyrr]

the problem is, it would ignore shields. This could be exploited quite easily, unfortunately.

Also, by fighters, I was generalizing bombers/fighters/attackers/figher-bombers. Atm, their game purpose is to kill turrets, and attack ships that have no shields.



Well, that\'s what I think anyways.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

It seems like you are a new player. If you weren\'t, you would know that you can undock disintegrators while you fly to make a \"bomb\". Disintegrators go a great amount of damage to both hull and shields. But hey, you are new, I wouldn\'t expect you to know that. Anyway, anything that ignores shields defeats the purpose of having them. Even if they only work in few, and unlikely to happen circumstances, the weapon would then be underused and forgotten. As for multiple cores, that can be a sketchy idea. It could work depending on how it is implemented. Oh, here is something you might like. It is a really nice AMC (antimatter cannon) suggestion. After you read the man post, scroll down and you will see pics of what the suggester thinks it would look like. I was typing on a tablet so my spelling may look weird. Proofreading on a mobile device stinks.

EDIT: lol I forgot the link http://star-made.org/content/my-take-new-amc-system

Nice of a new player to suggest mechanics.

 

[Saria]

on the individual bomber. Say one block of bombs would cause 50 damage in a 1 block radius with a 4 second cooldown, and it would cap out at say 15 blocks that did 200 damage in a 5 block radius with an 8 second cooldown

It would be something that would only be really effective on a very specialized ship, and it\'d bring a lot more diversity to the battlefield.

I mean, yeah the bombs would ignore shields but at the same time if someone made a capital ship that did nothing but drop 10000 bombs would be shredded by AMCs and kited before they could ever do any damage, so it\'d make sense that the fighting would be done primarily with AMCs and missiles while the bombing is left to fighters. I think it\'d create a great dynamic and it\'d make little things like point-defense turrets and hangars play as much of a role as AMCs and Missiles.

 

[JAS_Engineer]

Maybe if AMCs have a sort of \"spread\" with the bullets to make them less accurate, that could eliminate the \"boring old 1x1 hole to the core\" and there could also be a setting in the weapons menu to make the spread more or less. It would be great for destroying turrets, by just obliterating them, and it would make battles last longer and seem more tense.

 

[Mariona]

what if the sectors where larger! much larger to fit more ships being able to see eachother. Too bad we cant just have the entire star system at 1 big sector. That would give the game massive epic battles.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

The post above describes accuracy in AMC fire.

 

[Alviss]

I agree with Zyrr on the AMC matter. When you\'re watching a movie or playing a game with space battles (homeworld/star wars/star trek) you see large ships with lots of turrets pounding each other for a long time (bow chika wow wow). it\'s more realistic.

Only in SOME scifis do you see large ships that are essentially guns with engines, not satisfying in the least bit.

Thats the solution, nerf large AMC arrays and make their power consumption utterly unsatiable. That way shields dont get unbalanced and render smaller ships obsolete.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

More shields, stronger hulls and more missile damage; or weaker AMC - either way it\'s the same end result and is needed.

Multiple cores isn\'t going to happen - it\'d cause too many changes to far too much of the game\'s code, because core location is used for everything (ship rotation, docking, centre of mass, the origin of the ship\'s data, etc).

Fires don\'t make sense - in space there\'s no air/oxygen so fires are impossible. Modelling thermal dynamics (heat that spreads to nearby blocks) would be nice in theory, but quite frankly I doubt the server\'s code could handle the load caused by something like \"update temperature of every block in every ship every 10 seconds\".

For core drilling, let\'s be honest - once your shields are down you\'re dead and it doesn\'t matter if your attacker uses core drilling (to maximise their profit from salvaging your blocks) or if they wipe your ship out with a missile storm that shreds your corpse.

Sadly; naval ships have difficulty flying through air. For this reason it makes sense for a naval ship to carry things that can fly through air and go places that a naval ship can\'t.You don\'t see \"naval ships that carry naval ships\" being used for naval warfare though, because there\'s no real advantage of doing that.

 

[Ithirahad]

Sadly; naval ships have difficulty flying through air. For this reason it makes sense for a naval ship to carry things that can fly through air and go places that a naval ship can\'t.You don\'t see \"naval ships that carry naval ships\" being used for naval warfare though, because there\'s no real advantage of doing that.


Yes, but you definitely could see smaller starships being launched from larger ones, for the simple reason that they just don\'t have the stupid amount of inertia large craft would. It\'s kind of hard to cut through turret docking using a dreadnaught; however, a carrier\'s fighters could easily cut turret mounts to shreds, not to mention stay within turret blindspots on some craft. The same goes for getting a good angle on a core (Usually the bottom, rear, or some small hole). If boarding becomes a thing sometime (Which would require there to be an incentive to have a ship interior and crew first, a topic I\'m currently thinking about) then small craft would be perfect for that.

Come to think of it, fighters (And light frigates, and corvettes, and shuttles, and so on) are still the only ships that can fly.





...The issue in the game is really the lack of gameplay in battles in general. There are no fun mechanics - just shooting towards the core until the shields go down, then the hull, then the core. There needs to be some kind of incentive to boarding, destroying other parts of a hull, hangars, etc. that there just currently isn\'t.

 

[Saria]

Multiple cores isn\'t going to happen - it\'d cause too many changes to far too much of the game\'s code, because core location is used for everything (ship rotation, docking, centre of mass, the origin of the ship\'s data, etc).


They wouldn\'t be literal cores, just additional points that would have to be destroyed with similar functionality to a weapon\'s computer.


Fires don\'t make sense - in space there\'s no air/oxygen so fires are impossible.


Not necessarily true. In the event of a hull breach there would be air leaking from the ship which would feed the fire, and with all the science fiction elements in play I\'m sure they could make up some kind of compound that would be flammable and could catch fire as a result of catastrophic damage to the bulkheads and auxillary cores.


For core drilling, let\'s be honest - once your shields are down you\'re dead and it doesn\'t matter if your attacker uses core drilling (to maximise their profit from salvaging your blocks) or if they wipe your ship out with a missile storm that shreds your corpse.


Yeah... that\'s sort of the problem that we\'re trying to solve.


Sadly; naval ships have difficulty flying through air. For this reason it makes sense for a naval ship to carry things that can fly through air and go places that a naval ship can\'t.You don\'t see \"naval ships that carry naval ships\" being used for naval warfare though, because there\'s no real advantage of doing that.


I realize that you\'re being condescending in an attempt to sound intellectual, but it\'s a pretty idiotic line of reasoning barring the pretentiousness. The reason naval ships field fighter planes and bombers isn\'t because the boats themselves can\'t fly, it\'s because the planes are fast and can deliver payloads to vulnerable areas inaccessable by a ship. They\'re also hard to shoot down and are most effectively countered with other planes rather than ship-mounted weaponry.

There\'s no reason why big ships in space with all the same limitations wouldn\'t resort to using starfighters if the technology were available.

 

[Ithirahad]

I see two, maybe three, main issues with combat, and indeed, the game in general. One, it\'s all about the core. You build around the core, rotate around the core, inexplicably \"get into\" and see out of the core to pilot the ship, and if it\'s destroyed you and your ship die. Also, it\'s all about AMCs, missiles, turrets and evading said weapons. There is no other weapon, and no disadvantage to using AMC turrets wherever and whenever possible. Finally, there\'s nothing to combat but core drilling as fast and hard as possible: No real reason to kill anything else aside from possibly turrets.

While of course the idea of multiple ship cores is simplistic and seems like a weak and ineffective \"quickfix, \"separating radar targeting and ship core location is a good start to fixing the first issue. Perhaps further changes could include possibilities of \"subsystem\" or unit damage if you manage to hit that system, perhaps with specific weapons: Hit a big cluster power and/or tanks, particularly with a missile or drain beam, and you have a chance to shut down power or (rarely) shield regen, or even cause a power leak, for a while. Hit the primary drive module hard enough with antimatter pulses and you just might nerf acceleration or turn rate by a painful amount for quite some time. Hit an AMC array (or many) with a really big boom and you just might... well... yeah, you get the point. Of course, for this to be worth it or even any fun, hull needs to get a lot harder. And possibly hardened hull a bit heavier to counterbalance that. (Personally, I\'m against making shields more powerful, because that just nerfs small craft even more.)

In addition, I\'d also like to see the actual piloting and commanding of ships done from a necessary pilot\'s chair and set of three-ish consoles (possibly just a variation on the current Computers) of some kind, which would give at least a tiny incentive to having a ship interior of some sort, even in Doom Boxes, but also make boarding, killing the pilot, and stealing the ship a possibility.. I\'d also like to see it seperate core overheating from player death... If the player can get out of the ship before the core and all power, shield, and weapon blocks detonate, and avoid the random explosions (which should do a bit of actual damage), they should have a chance to at least exit the ship alive when their core overheats.

Another thing that might spice combat up a bit more, though this is off-topic from my post and already suggested, is the ability of hangar pets (excuse my Star Trek Online-speak) to redock with your ship, perhaps from proximity to the ship rather than actual docking range and line of sight due to AI issues.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,


Yeah... that\'s sort of the problem that we\'re trying to solve.


I think we\'re mostly trying for completely opposite things here.

I want the economy fixed, so that players need to kill ships (without destroying too many blocks) and salvage to get good profit (to build bigger ships). You want to make players destroy their own potential profit and make their credits in other ways to remove the main point of bothering with combat.

I want the game to be sort of realistic-ish; where a player might have precision lasers used like a scapel to take out critical systems and the core. You want players to use \"futuristic space weapons\" with worse accuracy than a world war II rifle.

I like the current \"ship disabled, followed by swift merciful death\" approach. You want \"ship disabled, followed by a long and agonising death that is boring for both attacker and victim\".

There are only 2 problems with combat - weapon damage, shield strength and hull strength are unbalanced; and the game can\'t handle the load combat causes. Preventing core-drilling doesn\'t fix either of these problems and only makes the game worse.


There\'s no reason why big ships in space with all the same limitations wouldn\'t resort to using starfighters if the technology were available.


I wasn\'t being condescending, I was trying to get you to think of reasons why \"big ships carrying little ships\" is logical for (realistic-ish) space combat. I honestly can\'t think of any reason why this would make sense. Carrying smaller craft just makes the larger craft heavier and less manouverable and the smaller craft serve no practical purpose that isn\'t better served by either missiles or turrets.

The only case where carrying smaller ships makes sense is if they are able to do something that the larger ship can\'t do (with missiles and/or turrets). The only things I can think of is scouting (e.g. carrying a small perma-cloaked scout ship) and escape pods.

Note: Please don\'t allow yourself to be decieved by \"science fiction without the science\" movies, where space ships have aero-dynamic wings(!) and no forward thrusters(!), and massive death stars can be taken down by jamming a small suppository up its exhaust pipe(!), and small agile fighters can out-manoeuvre even smaller and more agile turrets(!).

 

[Saria]

I think we\'re mostly trying for completely opposite things here.

I want the economy fixed, so that players need to kill ships (without destroying too many blocks) and salvage to get good profit (to build bigger ships). You want to make players destroy their own potential profit and make their credits in other ways to remove the main point of bothering with combat.


The point of combat is to destroy somebody\'s stuff, not to salvage their ships. That\'s a terribly ineffecient and awful way to make money, and it\'s downright stupid to argue that ship to ship combat should be solely about trying to loot peoples\' ships. Salvaging your enemy\'s ship (if you think it\'s actually worth the effort) is just bonus loot, most actual pvp is done just for the sake of it or because of faction grudges. Once planets are made useful people will probably fight over planets too. All pvp combat in the game won\'t suddenly stop because there\'s less of your enemy\'s ship to salvage at the end of a battle.


I want the game to be sort of realistic-ish; where a player might have precision lasers used like a scapel to take out critical systems and the core. You want players to use \"futuristic space weapons\" with worse accuracy than a world war II rifle.


This paragraph is complete bullshit. I never said I wanted AMC accuracy nerfed, I said I wanted shields strengthened and to have multiple critical points on a ship. I think it\'s a hell of a lot more realistic to reason that you\'d have to destroy a number of systems to take down a dreadnought rather than using your cannons to snipe the pilot. But hey, to each their own I suppose.


I like the current \"ship disabled, followed by swift merciful death\" approach. You want \"ship disabled, followed by a long and agonising death that is boring for both attacker and victim\".


Do you have like downs or something? What the hell are you even talking about?


There are only 2 problems with combat - weapon damage, shield strength and hull strength are unbalanced; and the game can\'t handle the load combat causes. Preventing core-drilling doesn\'t fix either of these problems and only makes the game worse.


Why? Explain to me why core-drilling is such a sacred and enjoyable game mechanic and why shying away from it would make the game worse.


\"big ships carrying little ships\" is logical for (realistic-ish) space combat. I honestly can\'t think of any reason why this would make sense. Carrying smaller craft just makes the larger craft heavier and less manouverable and the smaller craft serve no practical purpose that isn\'t better served by either missiles or turrets.


That\'s easy, especially in the Starmade universe where radarjamming (which would make the fighters untrackable by turrets) is only effecient on tiny ships. Having a bunch of untrackable bombers delivering deep-impact explosives is a clear advantage. All we need is a specialized bomb (like I described earlier) to be added and bombers would immediately make a lot of sense gameplay-wise.




I wasn\'t being condescending



Note: Please don\'t allow yourself to be decieved by \"science fiction without the science\" movies, where space ships have aero-dynamic wings(!) and no forward thrusters(!), and massive death stars can be taken down by jamming a small suppository up its exhaust pipe(!), and small agile fighters can out-manoeuvre even smaller and more agile turrets(!).


Are you kidding me?

 

[Comr4de]

I wasn\'t being condescending, I was trying to get you to think of reasons why \"big ships carrying little ships\" is logical for (realistic-ish) space combat. I honestly can\'t think of any reason why this would make sense. Carrying smaller craft just makes the larger craft heavier and less manouverable and the smaller craft serve no practical purpose that isn\'t better served by either missiles or turrets.


That\'s the thing though. You ARE being condescending. A smaller mass object WILL accelerate faster than a larger mass object. Furthermore, smaller craft would be more maneuverable and harder targets for enemy PD to hit.



If we want to get realistic, larger ships like you describe would be completely fucking useless. They\'d be outmaneuvered by smaller, more nimble craft.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

I\'m not sure that you\'ve actually played StarMade before, so I\'ll explain it to. If you want to salvage blocks; then you core-drill. If you\'re only trying to destroy someone\'s stuff then you don\'t bother with core-drilling - this is what missiles are for.

For an example, my ship has 48 d1000 missiles each capable of blowing a 30-block wide crater in a ship (once shields are down). When you fire these missiles they all focus on one point and one blows a hole that the others pass through, resulting in many missiles devestating the innards of the target from multiple angles, and often resulting in the entire opposite side of the ship being vapourised. If I don\'t want to core-drill, do you honestly think multiple cores are going to matter? Of course not.

Once shields are down you are dead. Core-drilling is irrelevant unless the attacker is salvaging blocks.

Salvaging blocks is a great way of getting fast cash, and also a great way to get blocks for factories/recipes. If you don\'t know this then perhaps you need to work on your salvagers. I know I\'d rather spend 2 minutes salvaging an enemy ship to get hardened hulls than spend 2 hours going from one shop to the next just to get enough blocks for a recipe.

Sadly, for fast cash the game is hideously broken and there are much faster ways (e.g. I have 2 factories on 2 different servers, both pumping out L5 ores faster than I can sell them). Hopefully one day this will be fixed and people will actually have to earn credits instead of just generating free credits. If/when this happens, salvaging will become much more lucrative.

For your silly/tiny radar-jamming ships, the only thing they\'ll do is increase server load. A single ship like that won\'t (and shouldn\'t) do enough damage to notice, and if you think making the server crash by unleashing hundreds of them (in the hope of causing a noticeable amount of damage) is a sane idea then you\'re beyond help. If you invent a new bomb that does enough damage and ignores shields, then it\'ll get exploited used to wipe out carriers before they can launch their (justifyably worthless) \"fighter chaff\".

Now let\'s try something different. How about you go and spend several weeks building a large (5 million blocks or more) capital ship, then come back and tell us exactly how quickly some noob that joined the server 10 minutes ago should be able to destroy all of your hard work with their little fighter and \"mega-bomb\" that they got with their starting credits.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

Sadly, a lot of people are stupid and think a massive ship with a massive amount of thrust should be slower than a small ship with a small amount of thrust. Physics/reality doesn\'t work like that at all (and neither does StarMade), especially when there\'s no drag (e.g. in space).