StarMade Ship Systems 2.0

[Chckn Wildstyle]

So basically, you want StarMade to be every other spaceship building game. Go play Avorion if you want to see how annoying/dull this mechanic is. That's my biggest complaint about that game.

Turrets are normally, in any Sci-fi or real life ship, the main armament. They are easy to see and easy to target and therefore should not be nerfed just because. Turrets would still be weak points even if they had 100% shield share because they are easily targetable.

StarMade is different from all the other space games because of its customization, treating turrets a little less like 2nd class citizens wouldn't reduce that customization.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

They are leaning on one active reactor per ship... period. The original proposal (2.0 proposal) was to alloy docked entities to have reactors, but limit them to bounding boxes ("heat zones" in the original) and the newest thread states they are considering 1 reactor per ship.

I guess the bonus would mean turrets would not need huge power banks like some people use.
Although, if you were docking a ship it would start to drawing power from the main ship. This would be the ideal time to strike as there would be a power spike. Unless you prevent power and then the docking ship could possibly be defenseless apart from maybe shields.

 

[Andir]

Why should turrets not be looked at like normal weapons that can aim on their own? Why do you want turrets to just be drones glued to the ship?

Creativity. What if I wanted to have a drone carrier? What if I wanted to have a beefy mobile platform with interchangeable turret parts? Maybe I have a collection of missile pods that do/don't need as much power as the laser pods. Maybe I want to have a "first strike" turret that does a lot of damage, but takes time to charge. Maybe I want to replace that turret with a set of smaller ones that fire rapidly. By the new system, those would be entirely different ships because they all have different power needs. Some need quick recharge. Some need massive batteries.

 

[DeepspaceMechanic]

I love the power management.

Does that mean 1 active reactor for the entity and it's chains or 1 reacter on the entity and 1 active reactor on each docked entity individually?

The infographic pictures attached to the main post suggest that each individual entity can have one active reactor, either if it's a mother ship or a docked entity, so one active per core (at least it comes across like so, because there's an option illustrated up there regarding manual deactivation of turret reactors, as well as auto-deactivation as a penalty for incorrect building).

 

[Andir]

A lot of this feels like changes for the sake of PvP as well. This is something I give no care toward since I will never participate.

The infographic pictures attached to the main post suggest that each individual entity can have one active reactor, either its a mother ship or a docked entity (at least there's an option illustrated up there regarding manual deactivation of turret reactors, as well as auto-deactivation as a penalty for incorrect building).

This was amended in the response thread making it invalid...

For now we’ll simply not allow docked reactors to work at all, it may be re-introduced later if we can make it work. If you have any suggestions to do so, make sure to leave a response on the Ship Systems 2.0 thread.

 

[Lecic]

What if I wanted to have a drone carrier?

The drones would pull power from the main ship until they were undocked, at which point their own reactors would engage.

What if I wanted to have a beefy mobile platform with interchangeable turret parts?

Uh, you'd build it? There's nothing stopping you from doing this any more than there's anything stopping you from making a ship where you swap out a cannon system for a beam system or whatever.

By the new system, those would be entirely different ships because they all have different power needs. Some need quick recharge. Some need massive batteries.

Please reread the OP. Normal power capacity is removed in this, with weapons having their own internal power that is recharged by the ship's regen. An alpha turret and a DPS turret would have the same power burden on ship it's mounted on.

 

[Andir]

The drones would pull power from the main ship until they were undocked, at which point their own reactors would engage.



Uh, you'd build it? There's nothing stopping you from doing this any more than there's anything stopping you from making a ship where you swap out a cannon system for a beam system or whatever.



Please reread the OP. Normal power capacity is removed in this, with weapons having their own internal power that is recharged by the ship's regen. An alpha turret and a DPS turret would have the same power burden on ship it's mounted on.

The mobile platform would have different power needs based on what types of turrets I put on it. With it being a separate entity, all I would need to worry about is mobility and shielding. Then each turret could be catered toward it's purpose. With the proposal, the platform will need to accommodate the most power hungry turret I made times the number of mounting points I could put it on.

Imagine a ship with 100 turret docking points. Let's say I make a heavy strike turret that overlaps 4 docking points. I could only put 25 of those turrets on the platform. If I wanted to have another use for that platform or produce several of those and instead outfit that same platform with 100 small anti-fighter turrets... that's a different power demand. What if I wanted 5 large turrets and 80 anti-ship turrets? You're basically telling me that the component based ship builds are either doomed to build out to a maximum power demand or suck it.

 

[Lecic]

The mobile platform would have different power needs based on what types of turrets I put on it. With it being a separate entity, all I would need to worry about is mobility and shielding. Then each turret could be catered toward it's purpose. With the proposal, the platform will need to accommodate the most power hungry turret I made times the number of mounting points I could put it on.

Imagine a ship with 100 turret docking points. Let's say I make a heavy strike turret that overlaps 4 docking points. I could only put 25 of those turrets on the platform. If I wanted to have another use for that platform or produce several of those and instead outfit that same platform with 100 small anti-fighter turrets... that's a different power demand. What if I wanted 5 large turrets and 80 anti-ship turrets? You're basically telling me that the component based ship builds are either doomed to build out to a maximum power demand or suck it.

So a ship with massively different systems shouldn't have to deal with that? Modularity makes your ship able to be a jack of all trades, but there should be downsides to that. I don't think ships should be basing their turret counts and strength off how much surface area they have for mounting them, I think it should actually require some level of design instead of just slapping as many self powered guns as possible onto a ship.

 

[Andir]

So a ship with massively different systems shouldn't have to deal with that? Modularity makes your ship able to be a jack of all trades, but there should be downsides to that. I don't think ships should be basing their turret counts and strength off how much surface area they have for mounting them, I think it should actually require some level of design instead of just slapping as many self powered guns as possible onto a ship.

It was an example. Surface area was the easiest way I could explain it. With the Chamber bonuses... who's to say they don't have a chamber that adds fire rate? Or range boost? With independent turret based power systems, you could make an anti-ship turret with faster recharge, but a sniper cannon that needs range. The clarification thread just says to have a separate reactor branch to handle these different scenarios and turn them on or off, but now my mobile platform needs to have reactor paths for each and every situation I would place a turret on my ship and I would only have some enabled? Seems like wasteful design and makes modular ships pointless. With the turret handling it's own bonuses and power, I don't have to worry about that on the mobile platform and can concentrate on making the turret a self sustaining entity.

On top of that, I could take the same turret and use it on a base or repair another ship by swapping parts and the host ship doesn't need to worry about my "weapon bonus" demands.

 

[TheWurm]

So as far as I can tell we're leaning toward no on docked reactor's to keep the TP limit for the ship, yes? This is disappointing but understandable. For what it's worth, I'm in favor of the originally proposed system with bounding boxes, with a tweak where smaller reactors have less than the max tech points. If you're bounding box is already small enough not to interfere with a turret, then either A) the turret is exposed and easy to hit or B) you aren't using the full available space for your power system, so you've made a choice to sacrifice the ship's power for a little customization on your turret. Either way I get it.

Also, might I suggest Specialization Points? It's descriptive of what tech points do, and... no, that's about it. But if you're going to have an abstract system, at least make it easy to guess what it does, amiright?

 

[JinM]

Just for my own clarification, because I am not a native tongue: If I have a turret with a reactor in it, the generated power from the turret will equal zero, as long as there is an active reactor on the ship?

 

[Deleted Account]

I don't believe that it makes sense to think about tech points as a physical resource. Instead, call it bandwidth, and express it as a percentage.

I think this actually kind of makes sense: each chamber uses up a certain percentage of the reactor's bandwidth. The reason I like this name is because instead of just seeming like an arbitrary imposed limit, you could actually imagine that in "real life" a reactor would have a limited amount of bandwidth with which to control chambers. Plus, I think it sounds "techy" enough without being too cryptic.

Now, I realize that the idea of waiting for chambers to fill up with "bandwidth" doesn't work at all, because bandwidth is not a physical resource. However, it was kind of arbitrary to give tech points the job of being built up in chambers before they can be used. Therefore, just give chambers a startup time or warm-up period. This also removes the need for tech points being unrealistically "dumped back" into the reactor all at once when a chamber is disconnected, because bandwidth is not a physical resource. Instead, when one is disconnected, it just frees up bandwidth for the reactor to use elsewhere.

So basically, once you connect chambers to the reactor, they take a certain amount of time to start up, and then the reactor uses a certain amount of its bandwidth to continue to control them and receive their effects. The reactor only has so much bandwidth to allocate.



Separate but related idea...
With the current systems overhaul proposal, if you run out of tech points, you can't use any more chambers. However, it would be much less limiting if we could add as many chambers as we want, but with smaller and smaller efficiency. This works with the idea of "bandwidth" because it makes sense that once you go past using up 100% of the reactor's bandwidth, the reactor has to reduce the amount of bandwidth available to each chamber in order to keep up with its load. Thus, there would be more chambers, but they would be less efficient because they don't have as much bandwidth.

The reason why this would be so great is because it would allow for a much wider range of ships. In the current proposal, you get to specialize in a few systems of your choice, but that's it. With this implemented, you would see more variety in ship systems; they would range from ones that are decent at most everything to highly specialized ships and everything in between.

This would also allow for some interesting customization of systems. You could manually allocate certain amounts of bandwidth to certain chambers to give them greater effect, whether through a control panel/menu, simply by building the chamber bigger, or by hooking them up with more conduits. Overall, this idea of diminishing returns with chambers would give players more flexibility than simply picking their six favorite chamber boosts, and flexibility is what StarMade is all about.

 

[Lecic]

With the Chamber bonuses... who's to say they don't have a chamber that adds fire rate? Or range boost?

Because weapons use the M/S/E system and, if they used the chamber system (which they currently are not planned to), it would likely be for each individual weapon system, not part of the reactor.

On top of that, I could take the same turret and use it on a base or repair another ship by swapping parts and the host ship doesn't need to worry about my "weapon bonus" demands.

The new system still lets you do that, though?

The whole of your argument essentially comes down to "why should my ship have to power its own systems?" It has to because they're its own systems. Them NOT being needed to be powered by the main ship is ridiculous.

Just for my own clarification, because I am not a native tongue: If I have a turret with a reactor in it, the generated power from the turret will equal zero, as long as there is an active reactor on the ship?

Yes.

 

[Ghoulshroud]

I am a little worried what this will do to smaller ships and the freedom of ship design in general. That this new system will favor bigger, longer ships that hulls can house more systems/Stabilizer/Chamber Tree. I hope this is not the end of smaller ship/fighters/drones that don't have the excuse amount of space to add the new layout. That this new system will make smaller ships weaker than they already are.

 

[Crusade]

this new system will favor bigger, longer ships that hulls can house more systems/Stabilizer/Chamber Tree.

Nah, energy regen was stated to be linear - not favouring any specific ship size for the sake of efficiency.

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

We've read a large portion of your feedback and answered your questions here: Answers + Clarification to Ship Systems 2.0
There's also some extra clarification where needed.

The original post here will also be updated when changes are done (with changelog provided).

To make one thing clear:
Allowing only one reactor per entity structure would eliminate the ability to make turrets constant across different ships. If each and every ship has to power all turrets on it then there will need to be an energy system tailor made for every ship with turrets on it. What I mean is that the builder will always have to place the turrets on the ship first, then make the power system. Exchanging turrets would be impossibly tedious as with every different turret from the original turrets mounted on the ship, the power requirements would change and you would have to redo the internals of the ship.

Example:
Ship A has Turrets of Design X
Ship B has Turrets of Design Z
Ship A and B are reasonably similar in Mass/Size

If you take Design Z and put them on Ship A, then the ship needs a complete power redesign to adequately and efficiently support the new turrets. Same with X on Ship B.

If turrets cannot power themselves then the modular nature of turrets is taken away. Each ship will need turrets purpose built for it, or rather the other way around because the turret will define the power draw, then you have to make a reactor to supply it.

I cannot express how much I am against the idea of disabling reactors on turrets. Easily 1/3 of my blueprints are turrets which are used across many different ships, some as an afterthought, some as a main feature. My point is that this not only kills the creativity involved in turrets, it also makes their very existence cumbersome and unwieldy. The entire turret section of the CC would pretty much become useless. You would have to pick the EXACT turret you want to use first, then build your ship, versus the way it is now where you find one of appropriate size and judge it on its own merit.

Again, this is specifically my concern with turrets, not docked guns/armor/shields.

 

[refirendum]

the chamber thing makes zero sense to me.

 

[Top 4ce]

the chamber thing makes zero sense to me.

They're just specialization blocks that give the ship some sort of bonus, that is connected to the reactor and has it's own (poorly named) resource.

 

[refirendum]

They're just specialization blocks that give the ship some sort of bonus, that is connected to the reactor and has it's own (poorly named) resource.

why does it have to be connected to its own reactor? if it's a specialization bonus thing, why does each one have to have its own reactor? and what is up with only one reactor active at a time? doesn't that mean that the main reactor has to be shut down when using a chamber and its connected reactor? the explanation is a confusing mess of unplanned writing.

 

[Top 4ce]

why does it have to be connected to its own reactor? if it's a specialization bonus thing, why does each one have to have its own reactor? and what is up with only one reactor active at a time? doesn't that mean that the main reactor has to be shut down when using a chamber and its connected reactor? the explanation is a confusing mess of unplanned writing.

From my understanding, you can connect as many chambers as you like to a single reactor, but the reactor only produces a set amount of TP (ugh).