Starmade PVP

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    Hi. I've been playing the game on and off for 3 years, but in all that time I've never really understood all of the mechanics in the game. The thing I've been most confused about is the combat in Starmade. I'm not looking for an explanation into it but I was wondering what you all thought of it, what you like, what you'd like to see change, anything.
     
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    • Purchased!
    • Community Content - Silver 1
    • Legacy Citizen 8
    ... well... PvP and beyond...
    bugfixes and optimization would make a ton of people happy with the game "as-is".
    PvP servers simply need limits... cant all be flying around in 250k+ destroyers with a drone-fleet and expect an "alpha-game" to handle it.
    ... but sadly seems it'S not on the "todo" list.
     

    DrTarDIS

    Eldrich Timelord
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    PvP has been at times great and at times impossible. Around 2014, just before beams were introduced, was the most "stable" I've seen combat. It wasn't perfect but it very rarely devolved into rubber banding and/or chunk anomalies that became common around 2016/17. (as long as the server wasn't running on a toaster)

    I think a lot of gameplay issues with combat are directly related to bandwidth and FlOps available to the server. As in, StarMade as coded in 2016 needed premium 2018 hardware to run "well" with more than 2 players. With hardware being more and more optimized for multi-threading instead of frequency ramp since the 2018-19 hardware standards the engine itself probably doesn't see much benefit from the newest hardware...but that's an issue for asynchronous functions if they're ever added.

    For example, massive chunk updates(like from giga-miners or missile spam) screwing over a couple 300 block ships trying to have an unrelated dogfight halfway across the galaxy is/was an issue with threaded workload code. Who knows, AMD and Nvidia's push to cut the CPU out of the storage loop might make Java get more butter-smooth in a year or two and make combat great again. 5+GHz cores running the instance couldn't hurt either.

    The actual BALANCE of combat (was always) a rats nest, but that's a long discussion that's been had from many angles over the years if you bother to use a search function.
     
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    DrTarDIS

    Eldrich Timelord
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    To be clear, I'm talking SERVER instance there for 5+GHz core clock. Game runs fine solo-play or as a client on a sub $300-$500 PC from 2019 last I checked. Edit: Well, fine if certin NPC mechanics are properly pruned...
     
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