StarMade Ship Systems 2.0

    Lecic

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    New system punishes full systems by 80%+
    Uh... how, exactly? Stabilizers are the only system that lose effectiveness in proximity to reactors.

    How is a ship with 1% of it's mass in power generation going to function? Power generation needs to be spread further and further away but needs to stay the same % of mass for the ship to be functional; this wont work because the space between the ships grow faster than the space the reactor takes up = you're forced to have empty space on your ship.
    This could be easily solved by making the stabilizer distance scale based more on the likely volume of a ship with a reactor of that size rather than a linear distance.
     
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    Raisinbat

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    Uh... how, exactly? Stabilizers are the only system that lose effectiveness in proximity to reactors.
    I think you kind of answered this yourself? Other systems may be fully functional, but the ship will lose mobility to the point where it becomes useless.

    Huh. I guess if you dont mind being stationairy you can just make a base ship with no reactor on it and branch docked entities off it with their own reactors and stack chambers there as well. Just keep a disabled reactor on main ship and turn it on for jump drive...

    Either way docked entities will be back once we get magnetic docking i guess.
     

    Lecic

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    I think you kind of answered this yourself? Other systems may be fully functional, but the ship will lose mobility to the point where it becomes useless.

    Huh. I guess if you dont mind being stationairy you can just make a base ship with no reactor on it and branch docked entities off it with their own reactors and stack chambers there as well. Just keep a disabled reactor on main ship and turn it on for jump drive...

    Either way docked entities will be back once we get magnetic docking i guess.
    Shoutout to you for completely dodging my simple solution to this problem.
     
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    Olxinos

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    Besides, the penalty from suboptimal builds comes mostly from the increased mass cost of passive effects; solving THAT is the much more sensible solution.
    ...and thrust, I mean, passive effects "only" amounts to 5~15% of a ship's mass depending on how many you're running, thrust however amounts to 15~35% of a ship's mass... otherwise, agreed.
    By the way, I'm not convinced by them trying to address this issue by making passive effects depend on the reactor size. Not only passive effects' mass is often negligible compared to thrusters' mass (so the difference is likely to be nearly anecdotic), but if they applied the same "solution" to thrusters they'd run into the problem of costless armour (or ablative armour if they manage to take into account hull/armour/etc...). Not to mention reactor size is likely to grow with the thruster size to provide them with enough power... so if the chambers' size depends on the reactor size which in turn depends on thrusters' size which grows with that extra useless vanity mass... well, that's merely replacing a direct dependency by an indirect one.

    Current system punishes empty space by <3% efficiency.

    New system punishes full systems by 80%+
    While I'd agree on the order of magnitude of the 3%, those are completely arbitrary numbers. And whether that proposal will "punish full systems" or not is highly dependent on the numbers they'll choose.

    There is literally no performance difference between having empty space inside your ship or having it outside. It doesn't matter if you have some empty space unless its like 80% of a small ship[...]
    I wouldn't say literally, but yup agreed.

    How is a ship with 1% of it's mass in power generation going to function? Power generation needs to be spread further and further away but needs to stay the same % of mass for the ship to be functional; this wont work because the space between the ships grow faster than the space the reactor takes up = you're forced to have empty space on your ship.
    Well, it's true that if we assume all power costs to be linear, since a ship's volume tend to grow as a cubic function of its largest dimension, you'll need power proportional to a cubic function of its largest dimension, therefore, your reactor will be within a constant factor of a cubic function as well (since the yields are said to be linear). However, I don't think they said anything about the distance formula, maybe it's something like C*n^(1/3) where C is an arbitrary constant, and n is the largest reactor's number of blocks (I think that's what Lecic is referring to). Maybe I missed a part where they suggested the distance function would be linear though (in which case, yeah, you're right).

    Or you can welcome the new meta ships that's going to be two seperate hulls floating a few hundred meters apart and able to have as much power generation as they like.
    That indeed seems like a possible way to abuse their reactor/stabilizer mechanic, whether that'll actually be interesting depends on the numbers though.

    Honestly, this proposal doesn't sound to me like something which inherently punishes system-heavy ships.
    That said, I still am quite skeptical about it as I don't see it really improving things that much either.

    [edit: removed a leftover half-finished parenthesis]
     
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    I am STRONGLY

    AND I SAY STRONGLY AGAINST any and ALL soft caps to weapon based on reactor size. If someone wants to make what is essentially an alpha boat, let them. It is not like they can fire their weapons more than once under the proposed system where weapons come with their internal power bank attached.

    In addition, right now, a well designed small ship can take on a larger, poorly designed ship. The new system where everything is linear will probably just lead to titanmade again anyway.
     
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    My only question is, once the proposal has passed or seemingly accepted by the community (all of which I am fully ok with in this proposal) how long before it can be implemented into the game? I have basically put on hold all of my replica builds until this new power system is released so I don't have to go and dig out all of the old systems later.
     

    Az14el

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    I see no reason not to fill your hull under this proposal, only that power systems can't be heavy consolidated

    I see no difference to the dynamic between small & large ships, large ships will continue to be more difficult to balance on an engineering level leading to reduced performance, they will also continue to reap the benefits of inverse square laws when compared to smaller ships giving them greater potential to compensate, soft caps aren't in the way at the moment in the first place, they've been long since broken at all levels of construction. (which is, bad, right? working mechanics then are good? help me out here)

    Beating a long dead horse to some maybe, but then, some folks are still trying to ride it.

    broke system is broke
     
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    I see no reason not to fill your hull under this proposal, only that power systems can't be heavy consolidated

    I see no difference to the dynamic between small & large ships, large ships will continue to be more difficult to balance on an engineering level leading to reduced performance, they will also continue to reap the benefits of inverse square laws when compared to smaller ships giving them greater potential to compensate, soft caps aren't in the way at the moment in the first place, they've been long since broken at all levels of construction. (which is, bad, right? working mechanics then are good? help me out here)

    Beating a long dead horse to some maybe, but then, some folks are still trying to ride it.

    broke system is broke
    I have never seen the people promoting the suggested system do any meaningful PvP on any public server.

    Which is why broke systems stay broken.
     

    Raisinbat

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    However, I don't think they said anything about the distance formula, maybe it's something like C*n^(1/3) where C is an arbitrary constant, and n is the largest reactor's number of blocks (I think that's what Lecic is referring to). Maybe I missed a part where they suggested the distance function would be linear though (in which case, yeah, you're right).
    Yeah you're right i'm assuming it's linear or worse. Can we get a dev response to this?

    EDIT: No nvm it's in the infographics:

    information warfare.




    • Only 1 active reactor allowed on the entity and its chains
      Power and Chamber effects will inherit from the lowest active reactor (lowest == main ship) and any other active reactor will be forced to shut down or its power recharge/chamber effects will be ignored.

    • Updated infographics for previous change on 17th of May.

    Thanks for playing StarMade,
    ~ the Schine Team
    So it IS linear or worse.

    Shoutout to you for completely dodging my simple solution to this problem.
    There are infinite ways to solve it, but if it's intentional they obviously wont.
     
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    Az14el

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    well I can't say I promote it, just that what we have is a fookin joke, of which it's mechanics have become more 'unintended' exploit than intended function.

    This is not to say that they're actually just bad, it's that they're unsustainable and literally reward laggy design decisions above all else. I don't expect them to release a new power system and have it be perfectly balanced & with all the bells & whistles I'd like from right out the box, but I simply can't expect the current system to be fixed and in any way resemble something I'm already familiar with, it would require a major rework. Would much prefer change, even if I can't fully predict it.
     

    MrFURB

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    Howdy, just checking back to make sure everything is going grea- Oh. Oh okay.

    Anyways, there appear to be a few misconceptions and a lot of opinions. I can help with the former at least.

    1. No, this system does not encourage nor discourage empty space inside your ship. The ONLY block that will have limited placement will be the stabilizers.
    Now what you might have to worry about is that having limited stabilizer placement will result in overall lower energy generation and thus less ability to power a ship chock full of systems. That does sound like something Schine would do. Either people will find creative ways to get around that or adapt by replacing some of their energy hogging systems like weapons and thrust with things that do not require a lot of energy to run such as chambers, shield capacitors, or (god forbid) armor.

    2. Does this system mean 'gigantism' is coming back in style? The answer to that is... Who knows?
    It is common knowledge that a ship's maximum effectiveness is related to its power generation and it's real effectiveness is how well it utilizes that energy. The power softcap and progression of auxiliary power combined provide a sort of guideline to what ship sizes are capable of doing what. Ships too small to reach most of the way to the power softcap are behind the curve and overall less 'power'ful for their size. Ships that are at or about to hit the softcap are ahead of the curve. Ships that are past the softcap and relying on the more linear progression of auxiliary power groups tend to be right on the curve.
    We know for sure is that under the new system all ships will be closer to a linear power curve, however there are still a lot of factors we don't know. How hard will larger reactors be to defend? How obvious will they be to attackers? How space-inefficient is the reactor/stabilizer relationship going to be?

    3. Is the new system too complex? Is the new system too simple?
    You know, I'm tempted to say they're both true depending on who you are. If you just want something that has good power generation all you need to do is place some number of reactors on one side of your ship and stabilizers on the other.
    If you want a hyper-specialized ship with specific numbers for stats you'll be swimming in complexity and tweaking systems until the sun burns out.
     

    Raisinbat

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    Power consumption model
    Where is the option to toggle systems on/off? If you have a ship with two different weapons, like an ion gun and a punch-through gun they'll both drain the power generation making it extremely inefficient.

    The wording on the proposal is really vague on whether or not a fully charged system consumes 100% power so would like dev clarification there as well.

    If the charge rate is <100% that leads to alpha ships being able to support more weapons than other ships, since you can cut power to non-weapon systems and gradually charge each weapon in turn; if it's 50% the alpha ship can support 2x as many weapon blocks, 10% = 10x as many etc.

    Also where are the batteries? Adding batteries would allow ships to be designed around a limited combat timer where they have more power available than their opponent, but once they run out they're much weaker. It would also make carriers much more interesting by letting us design fighters with battery power for better efficiency, but they'd have to return to recharge and have very limited range from their mothership...

    You already have systems with internal power capacity so they shouldn't be hard to implement, just a fixed input/output rate

    Something like:
    • 150% in/out compared to a reactor, 1 minute capacity
    • 100% in/out compared to a reactor, 5 minute capacity
    • 50% in/out compared to a reactor, 2 hour capacity
     

    Raisinbat

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    Goals/Rules

    First thing we did, was figuring out which criteria our new system should fulfill.
    These are the ones we used for power and anything tied to power consumption:
    1. Predictability: Placing a block leads to predictable outcomes
    2. Simplicity: The game should only describe the rules to the player, not telling the player exactly what to do
    3. Make every block matter without losing its importance with different ship sizes
    4. Depth: The system needs to have equally viable choices within each possible situation, creating additional gameplay possibilities where possible, keeping complexity unchanged.
    5. Performance: Game limits must not be avoidable, using the least amount of these limits is better to minimize any potential exploits
    6. Performant: Must perform well from a game engine perspective
    7. Creativity: Allow as much creativity as possible
    8. Logical: Needs to make sense to the player
    9. Solution focused: Must solve any current game issues with that particular system
    Points 2, 3, 4, 7, 8 and 9 are far too vague; how would you compare two systems with regards to any of them?

    It's easy to add a mark like "10 : It's gotta be good!" but that doesn't specify anything.

    2 : doesn't have anything to do with the system itself but how it's presented.
    3 : what does this even mean?
    4 : What kind of choices and what kind of situations? How do you tell if you've succeeded in this?
    7 : again what does this mean in a practical sense? What is creativity and how do you measure it?
    8 : same as before

    for example, you could replace 4 with increased design space by, for example, giving player more trade offs; like fuel efficiency vs speed or power generation vs shield strength...

    I would also really like to know why these things are on the list; some of them are self explanatory like 1, 5, 6 and 9, but why 3?
     
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    TheOmega

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    2 : doesn't have anything to do with the system itself but how it's presented.
    And?

    3 : what does this even mean?
    Every block should have a noticeable impact on your design choices.

    4 : What kind of choices and what kind of situations? How do you tell if you've succeeded in this?
    This references the chamber system.

    7 : again what does this mean in a practical sense? What is creativity and how do you measure it?
    Not being forced to build a specific shape is pretty creative if you ask me.

    8 : same as before
    The system should be logical in its setup and use, like more blocks = more power in a predictable manner (more predictable if you think the other system was)
     

    Lecic

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    In addition, right now, a well designed small ship can take on a larger, poorly designed ship. The new system where everything is linear will probably just lead to titanmade again anyway.
    And why wouldn't this continue to be true? Do you think the only way a ship can be "well designed" in the current meta is by sinking to using extreme amounts of exploit systems? Come on. You should know there's more to systems engineering than using as many docked exploits as possible.

    I have never seen the people promoting the suggested system do any meaningful PvP on any public server.
    Wow, ok. Hey Mort, just for clarification, when's the last time you did any PvP? Elwyn in January sounds about right, yeah?

    There are infinite ways to solve it, but if it's intentional they obviously wont.
    Considering how much backlash they got from trying to force empty space with the last proposal and them agreeing it was a bad idea, what would make you think they're trying to force empty space again?
     

    Raisinbat

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    Considering how much backlash they got from trying to force empty space with the last proposal and them agreeing it was a bad idea, what would make you think they're trying to force empty space again?
    What else are the reactor stabilizers for? They're clearly intended to limit how many reactor blocks you can fit on a ship.

    The system lets you overfit power the same way docked entity ships currently do by stretching your ship to allow more of your mass to go into reactors. What's stopping you from fitting all overdrive weapons and 50% of your ship as reactor? Nothing but how long/wide/tall your ship is.
     

    Lecic

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    What else are the reactor stabilizers for? They're clearly intended to limit how many reactor blocks you can fit on a ship.

    The system lets you overfit power the same way docked entity ships currently do by stretching your ship to allow more of your mass to go into reactors. What's stopping you from fitting all overdrive weapons and 50% of your ship as reactor? Nothing but how long/wide/tall your ship is.
    Ships with an overly large percentage of their mass dedicated to reactors would need to be stretched out, making them much more vulnerable to flanking and side launched missiles. What's wrong here, exactly? Shouldn't glass cannon vessels be weaker? Assuming that reactor - stabilizer distance is properly balanced for normal ships, this only happens with power heavy designs, which will be weaker as a result.

    There is still the floating stabilizer issue, but this could be fixed by making stabilizers be a system that you can scan for, and by making them need conduits like chambers.
     
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    And why wouldn't this continue to be true? Do you think the only way a ship can be "well designed" in the current meta is by sinking to using extreme amounts of exploit systems? Come on. You should know there's more to systems engineering than using as many docked exploits as possible.



    Wow, ok. Hey Mort, just for clarification, when's the last time you did any PvP? Elwyn in January sounds about right, yeah?
    Last time I did pvp....

    May 3rd if you are asking for a fight worth recording. Yesterday if you count killing people on Brierie. Hope that answers your question.

    And define "exploit" systems. Because I dont use docked shields, chain docking reactors and what not. Though I have seen 1.1m ships with 40m shielding, etc.

    I am simply against any suggestion of soft cap to weapons based on weapon size/ reactor size.
     
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    Lecic

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    Last time I did pvp....

    May 3rd if you are asking for a fight worth recording. Yesterday if you count killing people on Brierie. Hope that answers your question.
    Ok, so why do you think it's ok to pretend like everyone in favor of the suggestion doesn't do PvP? Cut the pointless false personal attacks.

    And define "exploit" systems. Because I dont use docked shields, chain docking reactors and what not. Though I have seen 1.1m ships with 40m shielding, etc.
    If you know there's more than to engineering beyond exploit systems and that the quality of your systems beyond those matters, what's your point?

    I am simply against any suggestion of soft cap to weapons based on weapon size/ reactor size.
    The proposal doesn't say anything about this. You're fighting a straw man of your own creation.
     
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    The proposal doesn't say anything about this. You're fighting a straw man of your own creation.
    I actually mentioned one in response to people complaining about the possibility of people creating one-shot throw-away supergun ships(pg 17 I believe). It was just a suggestion in response to that, one worth consideration the way I worded it, leaving means for people to not be forced to use said cap in any way if they didn't want to by means of config options. It places some more of the server combat conditions into the hands of the players/server owners, and that's never a bad thing.