StarMade Ship Systems 2.0

[BiGEdge]

Hey why not starting a Vote or something how to name the new "Techpoints"?
I read, mny people are disappointed with the given Name...

When can we expect the final release update?

 

[MacThule]

Because a gun on a stick is completely unappealing

So are reactor lines, but every ship manages to get over that.

Fill in with decorative or shield blocks. Simple. Aesthetic appeal is not good cause to leave open a window for exploits when it's easily cured in a dozen other, safer ways.

 

[Malacodor]

My first impression is that having multiple reactors is punished too hard.

 

[Calhoun]

Have you considered just turning off power sharing up if the entity above has an active reactor? That would still allow self powered turrets (provided the reactor powers the whole thing) and prevent the chain docked exploity guns.

 

[UrstMcRedHead]

Stabilizers are just clumps of blocks x distance from the active reactor.

Yeah I had to watch the video again to confirm.
I thought that the reactor/stabilizer modules had to be physically connected with conduit blocks to be effective which would make your nightmare ship extremely impractical.

Personally as the new system stands. I still think that it's not going to be very useful because:
Mega-turrets wouldn't provide a lot of ablative armor
maneuvering an "agile" ship that's extremely lopsided would suck and be inconsistent depending on server.
Scanners could draw attention to the parts that are outside of the ship

Alternatively placing the reactor/stabilizer modules so that other modules (i.e weapons, engines) are surrounding them would be much more effective since it lets you use less important blocks as ablative armor, which you wouldn't get with your design.

That would also turn the standard DOOM-CUBE design into a doom-cylinder/doom-peanut/doom-doggiebone.

 

[MattDavidS]

Please no tech points, or anything intangible, love the reactor idea, but the system boost seems dumb, I would rather just have more complex reactors, with more intricate engineering and set-up.

 

[Gamel]

after reading Answers + Clarification to Ship Systems 2.0
two more questions:

Conduits being disconnected in combat

There seems to be a misconception here. Conduits only matter when you’re building the reactor and its chambers. As soon as you take damage, it will remember that and even if conduits get damaged/disconnected, the disconnected chambers will still work just fine.

It’s why RHP% is there and disables certain chambers if it reaches a RHP % threshold.

But can we have this the other way around? chamber will be disconnect when conduits get destroy and cause disconnection?
So people would have to build backup conduit, or make use of NPC in the future to repair conduit in battle?
Or maybe not totally disconnect, but reduce in efficiency when tech point is leaking from conduits.

Second Question,
the whole system seems good, details can be change in the future.
When will we receive this system in game for test? How soon is SOON™ this time?
I have been stop playing since you announces the incoming change on power system.

With the reactor-stabilizers-chamber system. It would make a huge different compare to the current power system on interor designs

 

[El_Poulpy]

concerning the generator/stabilizer mechanic to limit the generator size/ship size ratio. Couldn't it possibly be replaced by a heat mechanic ?
the generator produce heat and your ship dissipate heat depending of its AHP (the bigger the ship, the more hull block it has, bigger is its AHP) or using heat sink, very massive (explosive ?) so you can have an enormous generator on a small ship but it will be a sitting duck.

 

[Zekester81]

I can solve all the "I built a derp gun with just enough power to fire once" that could come from this proposal. Add a per group block count limit to weapon blocks linked to a weapon computer. Give people the ability to go over that limit somewhat with chambers. And MOST IMPORTANTLY, make that block count limit configurable. A line in the config options for it, with a value of "0" being unlimited. You know some people are cool with one shot derp guns.

This puts combat condition control in the hands of the player and server owners. It would allow planet killers for people who want them, and remove the ability for people who don't. This could have a huge impact on PVP and time to kill in battle. Of course, shields may need to be limited in a way that scales when weapon block count limit is active.

As for the proposal, it has upsides and downsides. Its definitely different, and is much better than the last proposal.

Edit: Oh, and I don't like the single reactor active thing. That makes no sense at all.

 

[Raisinbat]

I have a question, are you trying to make a game or a modelling tool?

Reactor <-> Stabilizer

Since it appears a lot of people missed this, it's a repeat of last proposals forced empty space:

From what the proposal says, a long tube with the reactor in one end and the stabilizer in the other gives the smallest possible bounding box for the ship, but since the distance between them grows with reactor size, the volume between them grows relative to reactor size. Since ships can't function without a certain percentage of the ships mass being reactor, this means more and more of the space has to be empty to keep it functional.

The entire premise for forcing empty space into designs is bollocks. Right now there are restrictions on how you're able to build due to reactor lines, and the fact that space comes at a premium. Turrets need space to rotate without bumping into each other, weapon outputs require significant space as well, and often you'll want to armor the areas around them. Meanwhile, taking up space means they start bumping into reactor lines, and trying to ballance what goes where is the greatest engineering challenge in starmade.

Spoiler: Examples

A small ship with a large inline turret fitted to it. Because of the turret's size and location not running reactor lines through it would severely reduce power generation, but how to do it?

Encasing most of the turret inside a tube of reactor lines gives the most space for power and makes the turret much harder to disable since all the internals are protected by 100% of the ships shielding, but restricts the space available for slaves and effects the most, by forcing them into a spherical shape.

Making a small tube running through the center wastes a lot less space, but makes fitting the top docker dificult and doesn't offer any added protection.

Finally, not fitting reactors through the turret and leaving them int he front of the ship gives the best space efficiency for the turret, but requires a lot more space for power and since they're all concentrated in one part of the ship, the part most likely to get shot at, the ship will go down a lot faster in combat.

With the new system, what's there to do? It has no constraints or challenges to it, since empty space is enforced turret size becomes irrelevant since we have plenty of room. Without reactor lines the turret doesn't have to share any space and so with no problem there are no different solutions, we just go with 3.

Turret base for power stable capital turret.

Had to stick a 50 block deep reactor tube through a ship, intersecting the interior. There is a lot of complaining by creatives on the forums that turrets are "too big" and "don't fit on their ships", but i think that has more to do with their design process treating turrets like nothing more than accessories stapled to the outside of the ship wherever there is room, and not as an integral part of the ship's design.

I'm not a cosmetic builder, but is there something about this kind of setup that ruins their builds?

With the current setup this base produces 1.82 mil e/sec, enough to power the weapons while blending into the ships interior and allowing turret access without leaving the ship, but with new system it wouldn't do anything. How would this even work with current system when there's no system blocks to fit in the base, and don't say shielding; putting shields on turrets is so much worse than leaving them with the main shields where they benefit from ion effect and protect all the turrets instead of just 1.

Inline turrets for armor tanked NPC ship.

Unlike 1. example this ship doesn't run power through the turrets for two reasons; it's an armor tanker that will take a lot of damage to the ships front, and the turret bases need to be heavily reinforced so the turret doesn't die immediately, while still fitting power regen inside the bases.

Since i filled the compartments between turrets with interior (it's an armor tanker and empty space + hull blocks is great defense) i made a corridor through the turret that remains accessible regardless of turret position:


Without power systems to fit in the bases, this design like before can't exist. The base is it's own section because the space required by the turret forces this design, but if the base can't serve it's purpose anymore you'd simply run system all the way through, and stick the turret on top, with the base being nothing more than skin on top of the main ship. Corridor becomes trivial and design options lose their purpose and die.

Games have rules.
Games have limitations, challenges and rewards. Eliminating power lines from starmade removes all of these things from starmade, and turns it into a modelling tool.

There is a war on these forums, not between PVPers and roleplayers, but between people who want starmade to be a game and people who don't. When i bought starmade it was a game, and it looked like it would continue being a game, but the past two years has seen the game side stagnate while nonsense features (i had completely forgotten about boarding, shipyards and teleporters before writing this post) and cosmetic features are added. As a result of this the people who want a game are losing faith and leaving the forums, or get banned when they speak out, while modellers stick around because they don't care.

Despite not playing the game, modellers keep butting into gameplay discussion and requesting ballance changes (remember the call for double power generation before aux?) i think out of some strange entitlement that their ships ought to be on the same level as someone building ships to be used in the game. The only way this will ever be achieved is if any way to make good or bad ships is eliminated, because that is the only way someone trying to make a good ship and someone that isn't will get the same result.

In addition, because they have no experience with the gameplay part of starmade, their suggestions are typically based on flawed assumptions, like bigger ships always win, competitive ships can't have interiors (despite most PVP ships having interiors) or empty space in the ship makes it weaker, but empty space around the ship is fine. This also means when they have legitimate complaints, like interiors making ships irrationally weaker, or turrets being too big, their proposed solutions end up backfiring and making the problems worse.

This proposal reeks of this issue; power lines are probably the single best piece of game design in starmade:

• They encourage ships to be physically linked together instead of floating balls
  
• Introduce depth by limiting the physical placement of moving parts
• Offer risk/reward by incorporating vulnerability into design by spreading critical blocks all over the ship for higher power generation (example 3 only has power in the rear 50% of the ship)

This creates real choice in ship design, not arbitrary +5 scanner systems, while being really simplistic and easy to pick up (it's just poorly explained). It's what seperates starmade from the blob designs of space engineers, empyrion, galactic junk league and avorion. You have all the creative freedom you can ask for in those games, that's why it sucks. Nothing matters and everything is "ballanced" to ensure there are no ways to stand out or fall behind

The problem with the current system was the power bonus, you don't need to throw away reactor lines to get rid of it. Besides, as this thread shows, a lot of complaints are from people who are more concerned with what blocks are called than what they actually do.

How about keeping the new reactor blocks, but making reactor lines out of stabilizer blocks. Just keep the linear generation but the stabilizer output is powerline dependant. I think a lot of the complaints with reactor lines was the same name nonsense; that it doesn't make sense for "reactors" to be running through ships in lines. Just rename the power block "Power Grid Block" or "Power Distribution Block" or "Power Cable Block" or "Autistic Nirvana Block" or whatever will shut them up.

As for empty space, there is currently very little stopping you from adding interiors to your ships, unless you're trying to fit 80% empty space on a fighter it doesn't really matter that much; 5-15% of a 10k mass ship the armor layer, so if you have 20% of your interior space empty (and that's a lot) that's 1.5-4% of your mass cost, and this drops dramatically the larger your ship is. Forcing empty space is not only not necessary, but like my examples there are different costs for empty depending on where in your ship it is. By forcing empty space basically everywhere the places where empty space is at a premium (turret arcs, weapon outputs etc) lose their value leading to overly simplified design.Empty space in these places can also be converted into things that DO improve your combat ability, without adding systems, like fitting a bunch of these:

Adding empty space for the purpose of adding empty space doesn't really penalize your ship that much, but having empty space when you don't want it opens a lot of new opportunities. That's why this is a bad idea.

Creativity takes a back seat to balance. Allowing players to have docked guns that can bypass limits put on the main entity is a bit busted. Turrets should really be treated like any other weapon system.

What kind of balancing are we talking about here? If all ships have the same accuracy, dps, speed, hp etc so they're perfectly ballanced, what are we going to do? I've seen a lot of promising games sacrificed on the altar of ballance, and ballance just isn't always fun...

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.

I

These proposals are getting really complex... Why not come up with a simple system that works? Questions like "what will prevent a player from doing X?" should be answered with how the design works, not with parches on top of it. Like creating random resources as "tech points" or imposing arbitrary limitations to fill the design gaps and incoherences.
I have a few ideas and most people do, but these won't fit the way you want your game to be played.
And that's the main problem, you are making a game where players can build anything and you want to force them to play it in a certain way, but you are unable to come up with a design that merge both aspects.

So my best advice is to take two steps back and rethink what do you want the game to be like.

LOVE

I think it's more ridiculous, actually, that some people want to hamstring turret construction by making them into little parasites that you glue to the outside of the hull instead of a fully-integrated component of the ship.

YOU!!!

 

[TheOmega]

Wall of text about forced empty space.

It's only empty space if it needs to be empty. They specifically mentioned somewhere that you could easily fit systems between reactors and stabilizers, and only those two blocks affect each other. You could fill an entire ship with whatever as long as the reactor can support it. Heck, you don't even strictly need stabilizers, they are just extremely helpful.

Again I propose a live QnA, so we can in REAL TIME hear devs talk about what they plan to accomplish with this system, and clear up as many misconceptions as possible, because the clarification thread is missing quite a bit.

 

[Blakpik]

"Boost fuel" or *something*, but please not tech points.

When you described the chambers it the first thing I thought of were that they were some sort of upgrade drive inserted into the ship. Which got me thinking, would something like 'Drive Points' be slightly less offensive to everyone than 'Tech Points'?

 

[taisong]

So, do we lose the power bar at the right of our screen?

I'd rather want to see how much power my reactor is generating, and also how much power is being used by ship systems.

 

[TrainDodger]

If this power proposal is anything like I think it is, it would actually make titanic dreadnoughts a lot more powerful than before, because getting rid of powercap blocks means you can stuff the empty space between reactors and stabilizers with that many more shieldcaps.

This is an old, unfinished dreadnought I was working on, compared side-by-side with a picture of the PoA from Halo:

Spoiler

It was a good 13-million-plus blocks. Nowhere near practical for actual combat. It had 1,230,000,000 power cap and like 60 million regen, 100+ million shield cap, a few million shield regen, etc.

Before the nerf, the 900,000-block punch-through cannon array would punch through many kilometers of solid armor. The nacelles were completely full of blocks. Now, if it had reactors in the middle and stabilizers at the ends, and everything in-between filled up with shielding, it would probably be near-invulnerable. Getting rid of powercap blocks and giving each weapon and device its own dedicated buffer gets rid of the need for millions of blocks in this design, allowing for more to be allocated to defense.

 

[Markus_McCloud]

This is all well and good, but what about legacy compatibility? If this system is implemented, will the current power system go the way of the old docking system (i.e., still in the game but depreciated), or will it completely replace the current IDs of the Power Reactor, Power Capacitor, and Aux. Power?

In other words, if I download a .sment today, would it still run after the power update?

 

[MacThule]

What kind of balancing are we talking about here? If all ships have the same accuracy, dps, speed, hp etc so they're perfectly ballanced, what are we going to do? I've seen a lot of promising games sacrificed on the altar of ballance, and ballance just isn't always fun...

I feel your general position, but this game has bled for years from a problem that goes by many names from doom-bricking, to titan-trolling and it prevents real gameplay in multiplayer. Allowing ships' systems to scale infinitely prevents this from ever being a multiplayer game except in set matches & duels with a list of rules about mass and docked entities. Because I can make a 1/2M mass base ship and dock several other 50K mass turret-ships to it, install anti-boarding measures and heavy point-defense and no basic ship from players who haven't studied this game for at least several months can approach it.

When I first started Starmade, I thought that was just fine. Great, even - leveling through learning and skill acquisition, right? There's more to it though, because when someone who has learned enough of the game brings a ship of similar size and complexity in to combat with my titan, the 'combat' that results is suck. Clients and servers stutter and crash, and at that size range, the fight rarely lasts beyond the first minute... maybe two before I realize that either my opponent's ship is a total joke and not even fun to fight, or I'm eating massive system damage and the fight is lost. Typically either way I've done very little in terms of active combat, and could not if I wanted to because I get an opponent in my sights and he suddenly appears elsewhere. I've gotten so tired of even trying to fight that I 100% understand why most advanced players focus almost entirely on their turret builds. Because the meta for advanced ships makes "primary" weapons a joke. It makes maneuver and pilot skill a non-issue and take engineering (specifically turret engineering) from being a factor in achieving victory to being the entire meta. It makes the real meta a proxy battle by AI, and that may be a lot of fun for some people, but it's super boring for me.

The result is that in MP servers are all dominated by an elite handful of mega-scale builders who rely entirely on AI turrets and not engaging each other. Many can't even comprehend the idea of playing Starmade in a situation where a super-optimized AI turret proxy is not the ultimate key to victory because infinite scaling through docked power has made that the status quo for so long that to them that is the game. Starmade's MP servers are all oppressed by lag exploiters, and the arms race to achieve Weapons of Massive Lag capability. There is no small or medium ship combat except between new players, and there is no massive ship combat except against noobs who know no better or as a fun way to discard a ship someone is planning on replacing. The reactor turrets are essentially a kind of "power inflation" and just like economic inflation their effects are extremely unpleasant. The more power scaling the game accommodates, the more it alienates new players and adept players just scale their power until the power economy crashes and none of it is worth anything because you can't play with it. Not in the sense of having anyone to struggle against.


So.


I need to directly respond to your feeling that balancing and leveling the playing field will result in all ships "all ships have the same accuracy, dps, speed, hp etc so they're perfectly ballanced." That is not what is meant by balance. It is not what anyone is asking for or what will result from attempting to level the playing field.

You assert that you've seen promising games "sacrificed on the altar of balance," but that notion is absurd. It is clearly not proper balance that destroyed whatever games those are because

Every popular, commercially successful game in the world is properly balanced.

Now improper balance... failure to balance... yes - these will destroy games and often they go down in a meta-firefight over balance issues which I'm assuming is what you have interpreted as the effort to balance them killing them, but it's the failure of the balancing effort that kills, not making the effort.

Balance is absolutely essential to success in a game. It does not involve making all things equal and that is not what any balanced game looks like, nor will you find many examples of multiplayer games with sustained, wide popularity where one build or character or faction is the only way to go because no other paths are balanced to oppose it.

Starcraft factions are substantially different but overall balanced. Characters in Diablo or WoW are overall balanced with and against each other in various ways. DOTA, Star Battle (my favorite) and other good MOBAs are also excellently balanced, which is why they are popular. Races in MOO, Stellaris, civilization in CIV, these are all different but balanced. That is what balance is - options. Not equal or identical, but balanced across a spectrum of considerations.

If only one path (such as AI turrets on oversized entities) can result in victory, that path is OverPowered and not in balance. Starmade is out of balance. Maneuver is an intended path and penalties to maneuverability are intended to balance against other decisions but fail to do so because of ship-stacking (ie piling additional ships onto a primary ship in the form of ship-scale turrets each also with its own ship-grade power source) until performance changes destroy maneuverability, destroy balance by negating the penalties the developers have implemented to balance build paths. That is an exploit - no two ways about it.

I feel like the extended multiplayer stasis of Starmade resulting from the inability to balance for all players on a server at once (except voluntarily) has now cultivated to a class of players that simply enjoy logging on and dominating a chatroom through force of lag+turrets so much that they've formed a vocal faction here against progress. They prefer to remain in the static pseudo-bliss of lording it over their quiet little fiefdoms rather than see the field opened up to a broader range of challengers as would happen if their gimmick were brought into balance by enforcing the existing maneuverability penalties and other game dynamics intended to resist performance-damaging gigantism. That is not a game and there is little to no 'play' in most MP servers. Just chat and arranged duels.
[doublepost=1495220533,1495219924][/doublepost]

Framerate lag should not be something used to justify your point as that is entirely something that will be fixed with game code optimization.

That may well be the most absurd thing I've ever read on this forum. Code can physically never be optimized enough to accommodate infinite scalability of ships.

If the physics aren't argument enough, we have proof in looking at what actually happened every time performance has been improved in the past. Code has been repeatedly optimized and this serves only to inflate gigantism. Code optimization can only enforce the existing maneuverability penalties against oversized/hyper-complex entities if scalability has a ceiling somewhere because processors are limited by the laws of physics.

The developer statement dictates one active reactor per entity. Advocating for reactor turrets is nothing more than begging for a workaround to prevent a cap on scalability that will end AI-turret dominion-through-lag. All the tangents and side-arguments don't break this simple fact.

The stated intent is one reactor per entity. Exceptions will very likely render the entire overhaul moot.

 

[Lecic]

I will clarify my statement I made before. I honestly see no reason as to why weapons that are docked and powered by themselves are bad if they have 75% shield share.

But docked entities SHOULD have 100% shield share. There are tons of exploits based around them not sharing 100%.

Sure, someone could mount turrets in their ship and lock them in place, but that would only do the same thing as I mentioned above + a negative too. They would trade decentralization for being easier to destroy and would drain the enhanced mass from ACTUAL turrets that are mounted elsewhere.

Mass enhancers are a system that requires very little block count or power in the large scale.

Maybe I missed something, but why this is even an issue? If power is linear, than self powered turrets do not abuse power mechanics in any way.
As for TP, the easiest way is just to forbid the usage of these on docked entities.

Self powered turrets can continue to fight even if the reactor of the main ship is damaged, ignore EMP, and generally put very little strain on the ship they are mounted on.

 

[TrainDodger]

ITT: People who actually want to do Luke's Death Star trench run and not get immediately creamed by a turbolaser like they would if it were real life.

If I spent months and months engineering a kilometer-long dreadnought, ten piddling bombers shouldn't be able to casually enter the arcs of its turret network unchallenged.

Most servers that want competition between corvettes and frigates have block limits on ships that are geared towards newcomers. These block limits can be as arbitrarily low as the server owners like. 250k. 100k. Whatever.

First, they nerfed waffles by altering power consumption. Then, they nerfed turning rates. Then, they nerfed thrusters so that they only put out two-thirds of what they did before. How much "balance" is enough? What about us super-ship builders? Who advocates for us? The fighter mafia won't be happy until every ship larger than 100,000 blocks is a wheezing paper tiger that can't move, turn, shoot, or do anything useful but just sit there.

 

[Lecic]

ITT: People who actually want to do Luke's Death Star trench run and not get immediately creamed by a turbolaser like they would if it were real life.

If I spent months and months engineering a kilometer-long dreadnought, ten piddling bombers shouldn't be able to casually enter the arcs of its turret network unchallenged.

Most servers that want competition between corvettes and frigates have block limits on ships that are geared towards newcomers. These block limits can be as arbitrarily low as the server owners like. 250k. 100k. Whatever.

First, they nerfed waffles by altering power consumption. Then, they nerfed turning rates. Then, they nerfed thrusters so that they only put out two-thirds of what they did before. How much "balance" is enough? What about us super-ship builders? Who advocates for us? The fighter mafia won't be happy until every ship larger than 100,000 blocks is a wheezing paper tiger that can't move, turn, shoot, or do anything useful but just sit there.

....what?

 

[MacThule]

First, they nerfed waffles by altering power consumption. Then, they nerfed turning rates. Then, they nerfed thrusters so that they only put out two-thirds of what they did before.

Exactly. They've been trying to fix the problem for a long time.

I think an appropriate amount of balance would be as much as is needed to allow a variety of playstyles and end the dynamic of size=win. Dreadnaughts should totally shred AI fighters but not necessarily a player-piloted one - a good pilot should be able to dance through firing arcs like a jedi because flying a fighter should at least be an option that isn't a hilariously noobish suicide option. Because fun. Variety.

The player piloted fighter shouldn't be able to kill a dreadnaught toe to toe, no... but a squadron of 3-5 skilled players in high-quality fighters & bombers should absolutely be able to bring down a solo player-piloted ship of any viable size.

Otherwise the only path is dreadnaughts and that's the only option an intelligent player will choose. That's what's being fought against here - by community members and devs. Super-ships cannot be so OP that every other build style sucks or there is no game.