StarMade - Devblog May 22nd 2017

[Ithirahad]

I believe those 'survival aspects' refer to ship upkeep rather than player upkeep, which in itself can go a ways toward keeping people mining and trading.

Same point applies. Keeping an entire empire's worth of ships fueled up is not any fun.

 

[Alphajim]

I haven't heard that Starmade won't eventually have survival aspects, and that's too bad if true... There is a lot of potential for interesting stories to emerge on a galactic scale. But even still, I'd like to see a greater sense of progression and for Starmade to eventually be a full-fledged game wrapped around a sandbox skeleton - modders will eventually make it happen, even if official development doesn't. I do agree that all options should be configurable to appeal to a wider range of play styles

I'm not against some good survival aspect. I just don't want useless and/or time eating features like hunger, fuel, any form of blocks (un)locking or too much management.

Those who want that must think about the players who can't live behind their computer, or have barely 1h / 30 minutes on a day and just want fun. Like taking a ship and fighting someone or a mob, not being forced to refuel each defense ship, then eat, then sustain his crew, and then only he can have fun (wasting time).

 

[AlabasterJazz]

I'm not against some good survival aspect. I just don't want useless and/or time eating features like hunger, fuel, any form of blocks (un)locking or too much management.

Those who want that must think about the players who can't live behind their computer, or have barely 1h / 30 minutes on a day and just want fun. Like taking a ship and fighting someone or a mob, not being forced to refuel each defense ship, then eat, then sustain his crew, and then only he can have fun (wasting time).

I have a full time job, plus I'm a parent of 2 kids, I certainly can't afford to "live behind my computer". However many of those things you say you don't want are among the few ways I can conceive of adding survival aspects to the game. Still this game already has an excellent bridge between creative building and survival with the shipyard, has a great time-saving building system with the advanced building and copy/paste functionality, and could always be played in creative for those who don't want any restriction to blocks or don't want any form of micro-managing.

Anyway it appears that many players, like yourself, seem to want Starmade remain as only a sandbox, with very little actual game to it - No progression, little excuse to explore, little reason to trade, no need to play tactically; just a game of blocks where you can build epic-looking ships; and maybe test them in limited battle scenarios

I on the other hand want the gameplay aspect of Starmade to eventually outclass the sandbox side of things. It should be able to play like a complex RTS 4X space sim, like Sins of a Solar Empire or Master of Orion in addition to being a great sandbox game. There is no reason why we can't have robust resource management, automation, crew management, fleet management, government and foreign affair policies, multi-tiered technology trees based on research & development, even detailed race creation on top of what we already have.

Again, config options are the key here, and the current config options leave me confident that we will be able to tailor the game to our individual concepts of fun, however the content still needs to be there to satisfy both styles of play. Perhaps a set of config "presets" or gamemodes could streamline the process

It could be that I represent the vast minority and so few people desire this that it will never be done... I'm ultimately OK with that, since Starmade is already decent as-is without any future development - I've already got way more than my money's worth - and I have an active imagination, so I can always roleplay that these things exist. However this game could be so much more and that is what I hope for, not just a world-class shipbuilding sandbox, but a world-class game. At the very least the galaxy needs way more life; it currently feels like a barren wasteland that exists only to harvest asteroids to either sell or pump through a simple factory system for more parts to build a bigger ship, to rinse and repeat ad nauseam, and I certainly don't find that fun.
[doublepost=1496115760,1496115263][/doublepost]

Same point applies. Keeping an entire empire's worth of ships fueled up is not any fun.

This would simply require an occasional stop at a stocked shipyard for repairs and refueling, or having supply/repair ships in your fleet, and could be easily automated. This is no less "fun" than harvesting asteroids for other materials

 

[Criss]

If there are any sort of survival aspects, it will be for crew, keeping yourself equipped properly in astronaut mode, or in a very large sense, ensuring your space empire is self sustaining. Will we ask you to feed yourself and maintain energy? No, probably not.

 

[Alphajim]

AlabasterJazz
I agree, but not with tedious things. Like fuel (or it must be something I don't have to care more than an automated refuel, which I pay at each faction turn).
That will never make a game. You don't play any 4X game just to have fun refueling each of your ship, don't you ?
A game with a complete gestion of the fuel is a simulator.

So, this time I'll explain you why :
- hunger : useless (just for buffs)
- oxygen : might be a good addition, but that can be difficult to implement properly, and CPU intensive on ships' atmospheres.
- fuel : if it's only a cost and not a real concern, and a config option. If not, tedious and more a "boring" simulation for those who don't want.
- any kind of forced blocks unlocking / progression : only limits the game, or make it so it only acts for specific blocks (superweapons for example), and never lvl / XP / skill based.

Even devs seems not wanting a deep fuel system (and survival aspect in general) btw.

 

[Raisinbat]

With the current in-game power system, the main reason why people use docked reactors, is to bypass the softcap limit that is set per entity. It gives you more favorable power production per block by spreading it out over multiple entities. Anyone that doesn't do this, such as just sticking with a single big ship, will be at a severe disadvantage.

This is only one of the reasons for building modular ships. Power systems account for ~1% of ship mass even if it's auxilliary power past the soft cap, so the benefit has more to do with avoiding the exploding interior than raw mass benefit, which while there, isn't all that significant.

At the same time modular designs have to include more capacitors for lag compensation and are notoriously vulnerable to EMP damage. Consider two ships; a single entity ship with 5 mil power generation and 20 mil capacity vs a modular ship with 3 entities of 1.8 mil power generation and 8 mil capacity.

Shooting at the ships with 2mil EMP damage will cause the regular ship to cut jammers/propulsion a bit but it remains able to fight.

The modular ship will take a 2mil damage to its external entity which doesn't have enough power to fully compensate even if there's no consumption on the entity, but if there is you have no direct control over it, so either your ship is required to have some security measure in place that cuts power draw when your ship is hit with emp damage, requiring more capacity to detect abnormal power drain since it'll drop naturally with normal use, but then your entity is already near depletion so it's outtaged in seconds anyway and you probably wanted that entity active, so you don't have an option for what systems you're cutting power to; it has to be the external entity first. On top of that, if the security is manually controlled you have to make the switch in advance since you wont have time to respond before you're already disabled.

Once that's outtaged, the second entity in the docking chain now has to absorb the incoming 2mil emp in addition to the power drain coming from the first entity. If you have security measures that will typically be zero, but then you're still faced with the 2mil emp draining your entity. If you do not have security measures there's now 4 million drain on a 2mil generation entity and it's disabled in 2 seconds.

Then moving on to the final entity which you can assume to be drives scanners and jammer your ship is unable to shoot and there's no way to compensate for the EMP damage, leaving your ship completely disabled with no way to recover without outside help.

The big ticket benefit for modular ships is the cost in defensive effects and scanners, which depends on the size of the entity they're placed on. Take a basic ship setup like 15% mass in weapons, 20% in shields, 15% thrust and power 20% armor and 30% scanner and passive effects. If you split this ship into seperate entities for shields, thrust, weapons and armor, the scanner and passive effects can be cut to 80% of their original mass; take 20% of 30% and you get 6%, leaving us 24% extra mass we can use wherever we want, allowing us to DOUBLE the ships weapon or shields systems, effectively making the ship twice as strong.

THIS is what makes modular ships so much stronger, not power!

Aside from this there's also the benefit to docked armor, since it allows you to protect the ship's shield generation under the armor, aside from bugs making the ship immune to stop/pull/push effects.

And finally, which also gets ignored here, by having your thrust/scanner/jammer on a seperate entity, you can make this drive entity much more agile because turn speed is based on size rather than total mass like thrust is. By keeping the drive a small dense box your ship gets much faster turn rates, once again at zero cost.

While the new suggestion does get rid of the mass benefit from passive effects, it's by forcibly removing players access to the exploit, not removing the exploit as you should; now every time you add a new system to the game you risk reopening pandoras box; like what's going to happen if you implement magnetic docking or an alternative power system?

And you still have the docked armor and turn rate advantages but i'm sure you can work those out.

 

[Lecic]

Power systems account for ~1% of ship mass even if it's auxilliary power past the soft cap, so the benefit has more to do with avoiding the exploding interior than raw mass benefit, which while there, isn't all that significant.

Not even close bud. Let's take the ~2 million power that a 10k aux group gives you. How much weaponry does this power? About 20k blocks, assuming single output non-OD. That's not 1% of ship mass. That's 50% of ship mass. Now, of course, ships are hardly just weapons and power, but claiming a ship is only 1% aux past the soft cap is just ridiculous. With efficient docked line reactors it's only about a 1000, 1500 modules to generate the 2 million power to fuel those 20k weapon modules. Don't even pretend that docked power isn't about insane mass and space savings.

At the same time modular designs have to include more capacitors for lag compensation and are notoriously vulnerable to EMP damage.

Modular designs? Vulnerable to EMP damage? Are you fucking serious? EMP is USELESS against modular ships. Let me run you through an actual flowchart of what happens when you try to use EMP on a modular ship.

Fire EMP -> Hit Docked Hull -> Only do 50k EMP damage because that's all the power capacity the docked hull has

That's it. End of story. Unless you want to slap on another output for every 50k EMP damage you're doing or use an insane amount of AI, a modular ship instantly kills your EMP boat's effectiveness. Even if they don't have a docked hull (nearly every one of these ships does, though) the majority of their turrets will continue to fight you until you destroy them, because you are at most locking down the main ship and one or two turrets, and the rest will work perfectly fine because they are SELF POWERED.

Not to mention how modular ships also halt all momentum effects and seriously dampen the effectiveness of explosive weapons due to issues in cross-entity explosions.

 

[PizzaPress]

Modded Minecraft

balanced

uh, no.
Also, translating the base mechanics to ship mechanics will not work well.

Draconic Evolution

DE outdoes everything else and outprices everything else. Not a good idea for StarMade.

 

[DevajC]

I

I have a full time job, plus I'm a parent of 2 kids, I certainly can't afford to "live behind my computer". However many of those things you say you don't want are among the few ways I can conceive of adding survival aspects to the game. Still this game already has an excellent bridge between creative building and survival with the shipyard, has a great time-saving building system with the advanced building and copy/paste functionality, and could always be played in creative for those who don't want any restriction to blocks or don't want any form of micro-managing.

Anyway it appears that many players, like yourself, seem to want Starmade remain as only a sandbox, with very little actual game to it - No progression, little excuse to explore, little reason to trade, no need to play tactically; just a game of blocks where you can build epic-looking ships; and maybe test them in limited battle scenarios

I on the other hand want the gameplay aspect of Starmade to eventually outclass the sandbox side of things. It should be able to play like a complex RTS 4X space sim, like Sins of a Solar Empire or Master of Orion in addition to being a great sandbox game. There is no reason why we can't have robust resource management, automation, crew management, fleet management, government and foreign affair policies, multi-tiered technology trees based on research & development, even detailed race creation on top of what we already have.

Again, config options are the key here, and the current config options leave me confident that we will be able to tailor the game to our individual concepts of fun, however the content still needs to be there to satisfy both styles of play. Perhaps a set of config "presets" or gamemodes could streamline the process

It could be that I represent the vast minority and so few people desire this that it will never be done... I'm ultimately OK with that, since Starmade is already decent as-is without any future development - I've already got way more than my money's worth - and I have an active imagination, so I can always roleplay that these things exist. However this game could be so much more and that is what I hope for, not just a world-class shipbuilding sandbox, but a world-class game. At the very least the galaxy needs way more life; it currently feels like a barren wasteland that exists only to harvest asteroids to either sell or pump through a simple factory system for more parts to build a bigger ship, to rinse and repeat ad nauseam, and I certainly don't find that fun.
[doublepost=1496115760,1496115263][/doublepost]
This would simply require an occasional stop at a stocked shipyard for repairs and refueling, or having supply/repair ships in your fleet, and could be easily automated. This is no less "fun" than harvesting asteroids for other materials

I agree with you completley except for the fuel thing. We should be able to refuel at shops for 30x the price of station/fleet refueling. But damn a fleet refueling ship would be amazing!! And seriously yes, it all just needs to be config options! Schine should add all the hunger/fuel/oxygen blocks and then implement a menu option per player (not server wide) to turn off "hardcore" or something which lets you toggle if your astronaut requires upkeep. Otherwise it stays a sandbox.
[doublepost=1498478350][/doublepost]

AlabasterJazz
I agree, but not with tedious things. Like fuel (or it must be something I don't have to care more than an automated refuel, which I pay at each faction turn).
That will never make a game. You don't play any 4X game just to have fun refueling each of your ship, don't you ?
A game with a complete gestion of the fuel is a simulator.

So, this time I'll explain you why :
- hunger : useless (just for buffs)
- oxygen : might be a good addition, but that can be difficult to implement properly, and CPU intensive on ships' atmospheres.
- fuel : if it's only a cost and not a real concern, and a config option. If not, tedious and more a "boring" simulation for those who don't want.
- any kind of forced blocks unlocking / progression : only limits the game, or make it so it only acts for specific blocks (superweapons for example), and never lvl / XP / skill based.

Even devs seems not wanting a deep fuel system (and survival aspect in general) btw.

If they didnt add any of these things what would they add to turn this game into less of a 100% sandbox?
[doublepost=1498478522][/doublepost]

If there are any sort of survival aspects, it will be for crew, keeping yourself equipped properly in astronaut mode, or in a very large sense, ensuring your space empire is self sustaining. Will we ask you to feed yourself and maintain energy? No, probably not.

"It all just needs to be config options! Schine should add all the hunger/fuel/oxygen blocks and then implement a menu option per player (not server wide) to turn off "hardcore" or something which lets you toggle if your astronaut requires upkeep(food for starters.) Otherwise it stays sandbox only"

Is this possible to do? It would make everyone happy I think. It doesnt have to take precednt but I think it should be in the roadmap.

 

[Alphajim]

If they didnt add any of these things what would they add to turn this game into less of a 100% sandbox?

Anything needed, except tedious things. I believe I don't need to explain that.