StarMade Prebuild 0.09439: weapon balance

[schema]

Hello players,

As some people pointed out, a main problem of weapons vs shields is that weapons work on a per-group basis and shields as a total. While there are new shield features (e.g. focus on direction while flying) planned, there was need to give the weapons something that would make the competition between shotgun builds (as many small weapons as possible) and more powerfull bigger guns a bit more fair.

Single weapon groups (connected to the same weapon computer) will not have increased power consumption per group.

The powerconsuption of a weapon was before: countOfTheWeaponBlocksInAGroup * 10 per shot

With the new system, for each new group of weapons each will consume 10% more power. So basically 10 weapon groups will result in: countOfTheWeaponBlocksInAGroup * 20 per shot of each one. The purpose of this is to have a value to scale down the efficiency of small-but-many-group aproaches for bug-but-few approaches to be able to compete with it.

Please keep in mind that this is just a test and in no way a final desicion.



I will have to release this version soon, even if the balance is not 100% ok, since there are servers that are still crashing from a bug that would be fixed in this version. Please tell me if you can live with the balance as it is now for the time the next update cycle takes.



Here is the prebuild:

http://files.star-made.org/build/pre/starmade-build_20131026_145302.zip

http://files.star-made.org/build/pre/starmade-build_20131026_183110.zip

- non turret local AI search range from 750 to 2500 (about what a player can target)
- Shield under-fire base value to 25%
- AI will now engage at a weapon range that is more sure to do damage
- implemented chaindocking to work with the blueprint system

(as always: "dev" is username/passwd. The build will be installed to "play.star-made.org:4242". Server admins: please be careful with installing pre-builds on your live server as they can contain game breaking bugs)



Thank you for playing StarMade,

- schema

 

[Fineleyconc]

Hopefully enough people will acutally test it. Althought your Test servers are not very large scale-Test friendly.

 

[aceface]

uh oh, Pristis is going to die D: better join the cannons together or something

 

[Braydoss of au]

cant wait

 

[davisev5225]

So given the same number of blocks, fewer larger arrays will be more power-efficient than multiple smaller arrays? This sounds like a large step in the right direction. =)

 

[alicheek]

Hey there schema just to say its still freezing for me , on the pre build just before this and i even tried with a new fresh server-database and it froze with only one person being on it.



Again works fine on 0.094 , something has changed after that which is not working now, at least not for my linux server.



Thanks.

alicheek

 

[warezit]

\"The powerconsuption of a weapon was before: countOfTheWeaponBlocksInAGroup * 10 per shot

With the new system, for each new group of weapons each will consume 10% more power. So basically 10 weapon groups will result in: countOfTheWeaponBlocksInAGroup * 20 per shot of each one.\" - schema

If the original number is 10, and the increase is to 20, then it would be a 100% increase in power consumption. If it were a 10% increase in power consumption, the final number would be 11%.

:D

 

[schema]

its basically baseConsumption * (1.0 + numberOfGroups * 0.1)

 

[schema]

did the client freeze or the server?

Can you maybe get me the logs or make a thread dump?

 

[warezit]

The final number would be 11, not 11%. Sorry.

 

[ThiagoTGM]

Wouldn\'t it be (10+numberOfGroups*1) ?

 

[schema]

Can you maybe send me a mail to schema at star-made.org

Those things are top priority to fix

 

[ThiagoTGM]

Oh wait my bad

 

[ThiagoTGM]

This seems to be a great change! Too big scatterguns usually cause laaaaaag

But just help me here a sec. I didn\'t had time to try the prebuilds lately, so I\'m kind of lost on how the weapons are working right now. I just need 2 basic aswers:

1) AMCs got a firing speed nerf when in big groups, but did they get an damage bonus?

2) Do big arrays do any kind of AOE? Is this a possibility, at least?

 

[alicheek]

Great im just uploading the logs folder to drop box for u to download, will send u a mail on the website when i have the link

 

[alicheek]

Thats me sent the mail on the website to u now with the links

 

[Stasis]

This update looks really good, it will be able to stop lots of OP shotgun builds. Also, are you planning to implement bigger amc projectiles, so with an enormous combined group it will create a projectile the same size as the group (width and height).

 

[shadyre]

Nice upgrade, AI can\'t use the powerdrain beam or it\'s me ? i try to make a planetary defense with AMC, D1000 and PowerDrain but AI don\'t use all weapon

 

[Masochist4Melons]

This looks very promising.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Taking a bit of a shortcut, our now s(t) is s(t) = 4*D*e^(-t/4) + S - 4*D where s(t) is the shield strength at time t in seconds, S is the shield capacity of the target ship, and D is the DPS of the ship attacking the target ship.

Here\'s some graphs showing 10000 shields with DPS of 10% shield capacity, 25%, 40%, and 50%:









Once again note that negative shield values are impossible, so just look for where about it hits zero.