StarMade Ship Systems 2.0

[GDPR 302420]

Yo devs, hit me up if you need some help testing

 

[Malacodor]

I have a solution, one that will make everyone happy I think and is also very simple: Replace shields with automatically regenerating blocks and make systems able to fail.

This simple change will solve a multitude of problems;

1. Small ships will be able to defeat large ships.
2. Armor would be useful
3. Cloaking would be useful
4. Repair beams would be useful
5. Shipyards would be useful
6. Character weapons would be useful (I'll explain)
7. Ship to ship boarding would be a thing (I'll explain)
8. Interior ship defenses would be a thing because of boarding
9. Ships with large crews of players would be a thing (I'll explain)
10. Ship design would make a difference
11. No more massive sloppy borg cubes
12. It'd still be easy enough for the casual players/noobs
13. People who don't enjoy building ships would play this game

With the current system the only thing to do is have as much shields and damage as possible and plenty of warp modules to be able to retreat. All you do is pop in, hit your weapons, and run if your shields drop too low. Large ships only fear larger ships. There is no reason to strategically design anything, or have armor, so long as you leave before your shields run completely out. God forbid you have a nicely designed/nice looking ship and your shields drop. Might as well completely reload the blueprint because of the amount of effort it takes to find and repair every single bullet worth of damage, especially piercing rounds.

Now, take away shields and replace with blocks that regenerate, or more specifically after the player makes changes in build mode the ship is saved and upon taking damage it slowly reverts back to the last save. Healing beams from un-docked ships that are at a minimum distance (otherwise you just undock a healer inside your ship) and shipyards greatly increase the speed of repairs. Shops could also repair ships for a fee. However being required to carry around every single type of block you have would discourage the use of a wide variety of blocks, so instead in addition to power a sort of currency could be used to replace blocks. A inexpensive and expensive version, for balance. Now that fixes quite a lot of problems, but I'm not done yet.

Systems need to be able to fail. All of them. Multiple ways preferably. Without this the best strategy is still brute force. With it, a small agile ship with a skilled pilot could overtake a large ship by taking out its systems with precision attacks. Why should they fail? Too much damage, obviously. More interestingly there could be a "critical block/s" like a core for each system that if damaged shuts down the system, or if accessed by a friendly player, in person, could repair the system much faster. These cores could also be accessed by enemy players to shut down the system. This would both promote multiple players per one ship but also boarding parties and the use of character weapons, which as of now are completely pointless. It would be nice if it could be required that modules be within a certain range of the core, depending on how many there are, that way people aren't able to just slap all their cores in one spot. Why should there only be one core for each system? No reason! Do not limit players. I'd be awesome to have multiple reactors, multiple engine room cores, etc. You'd set them up like modules to computers, when one fails you lose all the function of the modules attached.

Now that ship boarding is a viable strategy why not allow players to take over cores? If a person can get to another players core, they should be able to hijack it, even with the enemy player inside. It could take longer depending on how large the ship is or how much power is currently being generated or whatever. That way players would have plenty of time to defend themselves, even in poorly designed ships.

Scanning should reveal a ships system cores. Otherwise having a massive ship would still be the best strategy. A player should be alerted when and by who they are being scanned.

Finally being able to "re-route power" to different systems mid-battle would make for more dynamic, strategic, and interesting battles. However too much power for too long would overload the system, greatly increasing the strength of the system for a short time before resulting in total system failure.

The amount of strategy that would open up with just these simple changes would be fantastic.

The day when a small ship will be realistically able to defeat a much bigger ship, that isn't badly designed, will be the day I'll delete the game, and I'm sure I won't be the only one.

You could have a cloaked ship with multiple players use warheads to slam a hole into an enemy capital ship, board it, disable systems and capture it.

Griefers' paradise - no thanks.

 

[Optapodamus]

The day when a small ship will be realistically able to defeat a much bigger ship, that isn't badly designed, will be the day I'll delete the game, and I'm sure I won't be the only one.


Griefers' paradise - no thanks.

In many games/sci-fi genre's bombers are the natural counter to capital ships. Rts games like the homeworld series for example use a rock paper scissors style counters where capital ships beat frigates, frigates beat fighters, fighters beat capitals. Starcraft is another example, battlecruisers are countered by fighters, Starwars empire at war, star destroyers by bombers.

Griefing is defined as " a person who harasses or deliberately provokes other players or members in order to spoil their enjoyment."
Ship boarding actions would be defined as pvp. Starwars battlefront 2 was very popular for similar boarding mechanics. One could attack the enemy capital ships hard points from the outside using a fighter or land in the launch bay and attack the systems from the inside.

 

[jontyfreack]

I have a solution, one that will make everyone happy I think and is also very simple: Replace shields with automatically regenerating blocks and make systems able to fail.

This simple change will solve a multitude of problems;

1. Small ships will be able to defeat large ships.
2. Armor would be useful
3. Cloaking would be useful
4. Repair beams would be useful
5. Shipyards would be useful
6. Character weapons would be useful (I'll explain)
7. Ship to ship boarding would be a thing (I'll explain)
8. Interior ship defenses would be a thing because of boarding
9. Ships with large crews of players would be a thing (I'll explain)
10. Ship design would make a difference
11. No more massive sloppy borg cubes
12. It'd still be easy enough for the casual players/noobs
13. People who don't enjoy building ships would play this game

With the current system the only thing to do is have as much shields and damage as possible and plenty of warp modules to be able to retreat. All you do is pop in, hit your weapons, and run if your shields drop too low. Large ships only fear larger ships. There is no reason to strategically design anything, or have armor, so long as you leave before your shields run completely out. God forbid you have a nicely designed/nice looking ship and your shields drop. Might as well completely reload the blueprint because of the amount of effort it takes to find and repair every single bullet worth of damage, especially piercing rounds.

Now, take away shields and replace with blocks that regenerate, or more specifically after the player makes changes in build mode the ship is saved and upon taking damage it slowly reverts back to the last save. Healing beams from un-docked ships that are at a minimum distance (otherwise you just undock a healer inside your ship) and shipyards greatly increase the speed of repairs. Shops could also repair ships for a fee. However being required to carry around every single type of block you have would discourage the use of a wide variety of blocks, so instead in addition to power a sort of currency could be used to replace blocks. A inexpensive and expensive version, for balance. Now that fixes quite a lot of problems, but I'm not done yet.

no.

Reasons include those already stated in another thread by the likes of redalert, and I do not have to expand on those reasons.

However I myself at somepoint thought that something like regenerating blocks would be cool, but I asked myself "how on earth would this work" and realised that regenerative blocks would make fighting completely pointless apart from some form of fun if people like shooting things and not gaining anything from it. But I can see where the ideas for stuff like this comes from and it is in regards of ships being too easy to destroy and ships being to easy to destroy things with, the only real solution for this is to change the balance of the game somewhat, and I have faith that systems 2.0 can help somewhat.

In many games/sci-fi genre's bombers are the natural counter to capital ships

Well a fighter/small ship would do absolutely jack against a large ship, the only reason in some sci-fi bombers can damage capital ships is because they carry absurdly overpowered weapons and bombs for their size. In some cases bombers are used to bomb ships once their shields are depleted because, well, bombs destroy more than pin-point lasers. Essentially a small ship should pose no threat whatsoever to a larger ship as long as the larger ship has shields, SM already has warheads that are sometimes used effectively against larger ships as an annoyance to either: drive the larger ship away because they are pissed, drive the larger ship into a full on assault by several other large-ish ships, destroy dockers on ships, Debby.

All in all, a basic non-optimised small ship will be able to fight other non-optimised small ships and maybe pose a threat to something twice its size, but never something around 2m mass (unless it is optimised extremely to do just that and basically nothing else)

 

[Optapodamus]

no.

However I myself at somepoint thought that something like regenerating blocks would be cool, but I asked myself "how on earth would this work" and realised that regenerative blocks would make fighting completely pointless apart from some form of fun if people like shooting things and not gaining anything from it. But I can see where the ideas for stuff like this comes from and it is in regards of ships being too easy to destroy and ships being to easy to destroy things with, the only real solution for this is to change the balance of the game somewhat, and I have faith that systems 2.0 can help somewhat.



Well a fighter/small ship would do absolutely jack against a large ship, the only reason in some sci-fi bombers can damage capital ships is because they carry absurdly overpowered weapons and bombs for their size. In some cases bombers are used to bomb ships once their shields are depleted because, well, bombs destroy more than pin-point lasers. Essentially a small ship should pose no threat whatsoever to a larger ship as long as the larger ship has shields, SM already has warheads that are sometimes used effectively against larger ships as an annoyance to either: drive the larger ship away because they are pissed, drive the larger ship into a full on assault by several other large-ish ships, destroy dockers on ships, Debby.

All in all, a basic non-optimised small ship will be able to fight other non-optimised small ships and maybe pose a threat to something twice its size, but never something around 2m mass (unless it is optimised extremely to do just that and basically nothing else)

Regenerating blocks: I wasn't insinuating that ships be able to completely heal while in the middle of battle. Maybe be able to make some minor repairs in a long drawn out battle, being able to bring some systems back up for keep them from failing with some effort, like star trek. I thought I made it clear that the ship would take a long time to repair on it's own even after the battle, which would facilitate the use of shipyards, and ships with repair beams.

Fighters designed to destroy larger ships in popular games: Star wars, Y-wings, Tie bombers. Star wars empire at war; bombers were the greatest counter to capital ships and excelled at destroying "hard points" like shield generators, engines, and individual weapon batteries. Starcraft: The counter to battle cruisers: Anti-air fighter craft. Homeworld: Heavy cruiser is most vulnerable to fighters.
The argument might be made that most often in sci fi very large ships are countered by small bombers.

 

[Lecic]

Fighters designed to destroy larger ships in popular games: Star wars, Y-wings, Tie bombers. Star wars empire at war; bombers were the greatest counter to capital ships and excelled at destroying "hard points" like shield generators, engines, and individual weapon batteries. Starcraft: The counter to battle cruisers: Anti-air fighter craft. Homeworld: Heavy cruiser is most vulnerable to fighters.
The argument might be made that most often in sci fi very large ships are countered by small bombers

Small ships can already put out a huge amount of DPS for their size, and this is a voxel game. We cannot balance things in the same way.

 

[silverfoe]

I have a solution, one that will make everyone happy I think and is also very simple: Replace shields with automatically regenerating blocks and make systems able to fail.

This simple change will solve a multitude of problems;

1. Small ships will be able to defeat large ships.
2. Armor would be useful
3. Cloaking would be useful
4. Repair beams would be useful
5. Shipyards would be useful
6. Character weapons would be useful (I'll explain)
7. Ship to ship boarding would be a thing (I'll explain)
8. Interior ship defenses would be a thing because of boarding
9. Ships with large crews of players would be a thing (I'll explain)
10. Ship design would make a difference
11. No more massive sloppy borg cubes
12. It'd still be easy enough for the casual players/noobs
13. People who don't enjoy building ships would play this game

With the current system the only thing to do is have as much shields and damage as possible and plenty of warp modules to be able to retreat. All you do is pop in, hit your weapons, and run if your shields drop too low. Large ships only fear larger ships. There is no reason to strategically design anything, or have armor, so long as you leave before your shields run completely out. God forbid you have a nicely designed/nice looking ship and your shields drop. Might as well completely reload the blueprint because of the amount of effort it takes to find and repair every single bullet worth of damage, especially piercing rounds.

Now, take away shields and replace with blocks that regenerate, or more specifically after the player makes changes in build mode the ship is saved and upon taking damage it slowly reverts back to the last save. Healing beams from un-docked ships that are at a minimum distance (otherwise you just undock a healer inside your ship) and shipyards greatly increase the speed of repairs. Shops could also repair ships for a fee. However being required to carry around every single type of block you have would discourage the use of a wide variety of blocks, so instead in addition to power a sort of currency could be used to replace blocks. A inexpensive and expensive version, for balance. Now that fixes quite a lot of problems, but I'm not done yet.

Systems need to be able to fail. All of them. Multiple ways preferably. Without this the best strategy is still brute force. With it, a small agile ship with a skilled pilot could overtake a large ship by taking out its systems with precision attacks. Why should they fail? Too much damage, obviously. More interestingly there could be a "critical block/s" like a core for each system that if damaged shuts down the system, or if accessed by a friendly player, in person, could repair the system much faster. These cores could also be accessed by enemy players to shut down the system. This would both promote multiple players per one ship but also boarding parties and the use of character weapons, which as of now are completely pointless. It would be nice if it could be required that modules be within a certain range of the core, depending on how many there are, that way people aren't able to just slap all their cores in one spot. Why should there only be one core for each system? No reason! Do not limit players. I'd be awesome to have multiple reactors, multiple engine room cores, etc. You'd set them up like modules to computers, when one fails you lose all the function of the modules attached.

Now that ship boarding is a viable strategy why not allow players to take over cores? If a person can get to another players core, they should be able to hijack it, even with the enemy player inside. It could take longer depending on how large the ship is or how much power is currently being generated or whatever. That way players would have plenty of time to defend themselves, even in poorly designed ships.

Scanning should reveal a ships system cores. Otherwise having a massive ship would still be the best strategy. A player should be alerted when and by who they are being scanned.

Finally being able to "re-route power" to different systems mid-battle would make for more dynamic, strategic, and interesting battles. However too much power for too long would overload the system, greatly increasing the strength of the system for a short time before resulting in total system failure.

The amount of strategy that would open up with just these simple changes would be fantastic.

You could have a cloaked ship with multiple players use warheads to slam a hole into an enemy capital ship, board it, disable systems and capture it.

A small ship with a great design and a skilled pilot could disable systems one by one on a large ship with superior dog fighting but being as how it'd take too long to completely overload the core or board the ship and capture it they could just demand money, or demand they drop their cargo. (Piracy)

There could be two capital ships with multiple people on each, both ships could be fighting each other while having battles going on inside each ship. A solo player could put his ship on auto pilot and run and fix an important system that is failing, or fight enemy boarders mid battle. Hell, if they're really ballsy they could go board the enemy ship lol

The tides of a battle between ships of equal strength could turn do to skill or strategy.


I believe this strategy better fulfills your goals. Thanks for reading.

​

My question to you is:
Why would you then bother investing in a big ship to begin with?

 

[JumpSuit]

Can this thread just 'let die', as the band Green Day would put it

 

[MeRobo]

Star wars empire at war; bombers were the greatest counter to capital ships and excelled at destroying "hard points" like shield generators, engines, and individual weapon batteries

But that is where a big problem with that game came from. Due to bombers (and other ships with torpedos and iirc missiles) being able to circumvent shields, you could use bombers to leave the enemy with ships consisting of nothing but engines snd shield generators.

Why your suggestion supports griefing: You give players a cheap way of destroying expensive things of other players and I'm pretty sure, having your stuff destroyed by something which only requires a fraction of the destroyed ship's cost will spoil your enjoyment. And people would know this.

 

[Optapodamus]

Small ships can already put out a huge amount of DPS for their size, and this is a voxel game. We cannot balance things in the same way.

I was giving examples to people who claimed that the idea of small ships beating larger ships was ridiculous

My question to you is:
Why would you then bother investing in a big ship to begin with?

Because the big ship would theoretically be best against destroyer/frigates. You'd then want anti-fighter frigates to accompany your capital ship, etc etc. So as to promote diverse fleets with ships in specialized roles.

Can this thread just 'let die', as the band Green Day would put it

Sounds good to me

But that is where a big problem with that game came from. Due to bombers (and other ships with torpedos and iirc missiles) being able to circumvent shields, you could use bombers to leave the enemy with ships consisting of nothing but engines snd shield generators.

Why your suggestion supports griefing: You give players a cheap way of destroying expensive things of other players and I'm pretty sure, having your stuff destroyed by something which only requires a fraction of the destroyed ship's cost will spoil your enjoyment. And people would know this.

It is less safe, that would make it more fun actually lol. A pawn overtakes a queen in chess, it's frustrating but I don't think the pawn is to blame, I think my poor strategy is. In my opinion, which I mistakenly thought was the consensus, the game lacks strategic variety.

 

[Ithirahad]

Why your suggestion supports griefing: You give players a cheap way of destroying expensive things of other players and I'm pretty sure, having your stuff destroyed by something which only requires a fraction of the destroyed ship's cost will spoil your enjoyment. And people would know this.

Or, it might stop people from flying titanic ships and feeling invincible in them. I have to agree that the idea isn't altogether a good one, but the repercussions wouldn't be all bad, either. People couldn't fly massive ships alone willy-nilly any more; they would only deploy such things, and the sheer firepower that they can carry, if they have a sufficient defense against smaller vessels.

 

[deathsoul097]

Personally i quite like the idea of Bombers, and it isnt actually a griefing tool, and let me tell you why. If you arent putting Point Defence on your ship, then you deserve to die from enemy bombers. Its not like they cant be killed, and one bomb wont be effective on its own.

This is something that already has a pre-existing natural counter in the game, that you don't see simply because there is no reason to utilize it. Bombers are gonna be a ship like any other, and making a bomber swarm so big they can overwhelm a small fleet's Point Defence is going to be so expensive that it will be almost infeasible.

 

[Malacodor]

In many games/sci-fi genre's bombers are the natural counter to capital ships. Rts games like the homeworld series for example use a rock paper scissors style counters where capital ships beat frigates, frigates beat fighters, fighters beat capitals. Starcraft is another example, battlecruisers are countered by fighters, Starwars empire at war, star destroyers by bombers.

You won't destroy anything big with a single fighter in these games. What you do is defeating few big ships with many small ones for the same resource cost as the big ones. And that is exactly what we already have in StarMade for quite some time.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I'm way late to the party, but I have some concerns:

1. More time spent designing the reactors than, you know, the actual ships they power.
2. Single active reactor limit is arbitrary and leads to a few problems
   1. Need to micromanage to switch to backups
   2. Having more backups is probably generally good, will lead to cramming in reactors anyways
   3. Exploits will be developed by switching to different reactors, possibly involving something like a ship with a crazy weapons system that fires once, then swaps to its crazy ability to jump away or cloak
3. Adding stabilizers will be tedious and lead to lots of ships with just hulls filled with them
4. Tech points nonsense introduces weird restrictions

I think that multiple active reactors can be balanced via the explosive aspect. Basically, damage done to the ship would hurt the nearest active reactors (even through shields to an extent), making extra reactors (even big ones) a liability. You'd want to power up auxiliary reactors only when the main reactor is about to go down.
Add up some size-based startup time, and you discourage switching rapidly between bigger reactors.
This wouldn't fix the micro that much, but it would make extra reactors mostly liabilities besides some dinky auxiliaries.

 

[GnomeKing]

"You won't destroy anything big with a single fighter in these games. What you do is defeating few big ships with many small ones for the same resource cost as the big ones. And that is exactly what we already have in StarMade for quite some time."

Except that fleet commands/targeting are very limited, crippling drone-collision and turret detachment spasms common, and severs brought to their knees by any kind of mass combat...
Not being able to properly anti-missile turrets on fleets (due to above problems) means drone vs meta fight can soon become drone popping missile parade. :/
[doublepost=1508581309,1508581038][/doublepost]Fixing some of these would be very helpful, and do much to balance issues with 'large' ships > consequently it would impact builds because 'just making it bigger/more powerful' would not be the only viable option.
[doublepost=1508581417][/doublepost]in turn this would effect what players feel is 'enough' power in a ship of a particular size > when the pressure is always upwards, then there will never be enough power....

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

...when the pressure is always upwards, then there will never be enough power....

I think as long as offensive systems somewhat outstrip defensive systems, there's an incentive to not waste a ton of resources on a huge ship because it'll just get munched anyways.
That said, I think Starmade's weapons systems make make things favor a Star Trek approach (where small ships pretty much only exist for non-combat roles) more than even a Star Wars approach (where most all sizes are viable because a big ships defeats a smaller ship, but several tiny ships defeat a huge ship).

 

[Hugoba]

With reference to this threat:
Answers + Clarification to Ship Systems 2.0

Question: Which prevents me from making high armoured power reactor capsule with stabilizers quite far away from ship (and propably armoured as well)?

You could put your stabilizers outside of the ship but it does not give you any benefit. The reactor itself is what you will be able to track down with information warfare systems. Targeting that will quickly reduce your power recharge without even touching the stabilizers.

Well, but i can still retain high shields regeneration (with my big strong and well stabilised reactor) and relativelly small hull. Stabilizers are not trackeable so I dont need to worry about them a lot.

Is there at least any neccessary conduit connection between reactor and stabilizers?

 

[Ezekial Alexander]

This seems to be the reason why they made the shield's area-based, so you couldn't stick something way the hell off in the middle of nowhere.

Also, on my last testing guided missiles track the stabilizers, like any other system block

 

[Lecic]

This seems to be the reason why they made the shield's area-based, so you couldn't stick something way the hell off in the middle of nowhere.

Also, on my last testing guided missiles track the stabilizers, like any other system block

What prevents me from scattering all my stabilizers as random blocks in space throughout the 3km cube of mostly empty space that comprises my ship, making it nearly impossible to hit them with weapons, and any hit will only result in that one block being removed?

 

[Hugoba]

This seems to be the reason why they made the shield's area-based, so you couldn't stick something way the hell off in the middle of nowhere.

Also, on my last testing guided missiles track the stabilizers, like any other system block

Yes, but if I have frontal part well armored and somewhere far beyond in space could be stabilizer part? My frontal par will protect my vulnerable stabilizers from frontal fire well Problem solved