Okay we need to talk about these new combat changes, specifically the changes and fixes for beam weapons and explosive effect.
First of all, this is a good change. The game is better now than it was before, beams are easier to make and explosive effect works like it's supposed to.
But making this change was the wrong decision.
What does this change in the game? Everyone who made ships with the 10% effect limit now has to redo their ships or at the very least a big chunk of them. For me this is going to be between 8 and 20 hours of changing my current builds because weapon systems are the most obnoxious to fix, and since this involves changing component ratios, its easily the most complicated kind of work.
But that's fine. Fixes need to be made, and things are going to break from the fixes.
What isn't fine is that this new weapon balance IS STILL BROKEN. Why on earth would we use cannon weapons now when beams are hitscan versions that don't need any aiming to hit??? Why is the split damage penetration model still in the game, when all it does is make weapon design emphasize crazy amounts of spam and render armor totally useless because most weapons overkill against it anyway and you can just stack all the damage you want on a single block to get infinite penetration that armor cannot deal with, even from a ship <1% of it's size.
Look at ships like
LRSF-1 Orion and
RAI Valkyrie that split their beam weapons at 150 damage to avoid hitting the damage split threshold; they can go through thousands of blocks per second and are nearly perfectly efficient at handling advanced armor; this splitting is STUPID because it just makes good weapon designs spam projectiles and beams as hard as you can to beat the system, because anything above 2000 damage loses 50% or more damage, 90%+ at 10.000 when hitting a ships hull. Hell, ideally these ships should split at 25 damage per beam to be the most efficient possible; this system just encourages endless projectile and beam spam instead of letting people use bigger or slower weapons, because those simply cannot be waffled small enough to avoid overkilling. You even made this worse now that the overkill damage is completely erased and doesn't even apply to armor HP anymore. A weapon that does 100.000 damage should do 100.000 damage, not some weird random value between 50 and 10.000 split across 4 different HP values.
This has been the case for every good balance update you've made i can remember, while things like auxiliary power failed to address what it was intended for, the same effect could've been achieved by just switching reactors to 200e/sec base production without bonus, and ultimately just added a convoluted second power bar and made power systems more complicated. The gameplay changes being implemented are poorly thought out, and fail to address the big issues. Since fixing the big issues will involve overriding the current system, they're just temporary fixes that require rebuilds of our ships every time they're added.
Constantly adding these small nerfs is also leading to the game becoming needlessly overcomplicated. What started out neat and simple is starting to have so many except clauses and special rules to catch all the little exploits that starmade isn't really accessible at all, and this is only going to get worse.
Start working out fixes for the big core issues in the game; AI, power and penetration. Making these fixes will require breaking all ships that currently exist, which is why it should be a bloody priority; Not making these changes will doom starmade to never become a real game, so they have to happen, and delaying them while focusing on inconsequential stuff like cosmetics and interface is just delaying the inevitable, and driving people up the wall since everything we're currently building is going to become obsolete. It will also allow you to start fixing the simpler ballance issues with your game, because you can't ballance anything in the game until these systems are properly fixed.
But once you know what you're going to do, instead of implementing it right away
post what you plan to change on the forums. It's painfully obvious that the devs aren't really in tune with their combat system, so please listen to the people who build and play combat ships for this. You'll save yourself, and us, a lot of headaches.
