Suggestion on repair mechanics in general

[taisong]

I started this out as a reply to Sven's thread, but realised that it encompassed beyond what he originally intended to talk about, so I make a new thread.

Right now, fixing something without shipyards are super time-consuming and annoying. Say, you made an entity, a pirate wrecks it to 80% structure HP. You reboot the entity, and you get back your Armor HP(Station reboot) and Struc HP. Now, you face with a challenge. You need to manually find all damaged blocks and replace it with a new one. Now imagine doing that on a pirate nexus. It would be faster scrapping that station and make a new one with a blueprint.
Even using a blueprint could be annoying too. What would happen when you need to add 1,000,000 blocks of Advanced armor? Maybe you can do it in time, but it takes time and a lot of mouse clicks. I, at least, am not patient enough to do that.
Shipyards are not user-friendly, as Sven said. Whenever I load my ship, it takes a few tries. You cannot tell a fleet to dock onto it. It is hopeless right now.

So, How are we gonna fix dis?

Blueprints
Blueprint mechanics need to be reworked. I think it will be much better to restrict SHIP blueprint use to shipyards, at leas to some point. This way you will not need to worry about putting 1,000,000 blocks into a blueprint by hand, and it is much more realistic. Popping a massive ship out of a tiny little blueprint is... Creepy. As for the smaller ships, (namely >1000 blocks) I think the old mechanics would work okay. It is just the big ships that I am worrying about.

Brand new Repair mode
Adding a new build mode would be good. A new mode, with the name "Repair mode". It prompts you to choose a blueprint, and selecting it will highlight all damaged blocks and missing blocks (compared to the blueprint). It also tells you how many blocks are missing. This will make the hand-repair easier, and much more efficient.

Astrotech? more like, what the hecktrotech?
Garbage jokes aside, Astrotech modules are in a hard place right now. Starmade ships are so complicated that a single repair beam would not do much. Besides, hand-repair is much better than using Astrotech modules. That is the main reason why Astrotech sucks right now.
So, lets make astrotech modules repair the entire ship!
You point your astrotech module on your broken ship, and it would heal all block damage that ship has sustained. It will not repair armor/struc because of its usefulness in ship combat. Still, it would be much easier to repair ships.

Auto-Rebuild of stations
Rebuilding a broken station will drive you crazy sometimes. Especially when you have something like "shangra-la" or "pirate-nexus". They are complicated and is very hard to rebuild by hand. Most people reconstructs it with the blueprint, but I think adding an auto-rebuild to a station would not hurt.
You will set a blueprint on a station, and you will supply necessary blocks from your inventory or cargo. Then, watch as your station repairs itself. Doing this will probably need a new block or two, but seeing a station slowly built back is always cool.

That is some of the ideas I have for the repairing issue. Please add to this, or give me feedback about this.
p.s. thank you for reading this wall of text!

 

[Jojomo]

The answer to all these issues is: fix shipyards.

 

[Gmodism]

Yes pleas I'd love to use shipyards, if they worked and had useful functions,
Also when I have made a ship I want the AI to take the ship to a designated sector, and line them up for me, industrial ship printing!
I agree with your suggestions in that and the current "repair"(?) beam

 

[Micro753]

Blueprints
Blueprint mechanics need to be reworked. I think it will be much better to restrict SHIP blueprint use to shipyards, at leas to some point. This way you will not need to worry about putting 1,000,000 blocks into a blueprint by hand, and it is much more realistic. Popping a massive ship out of a tiny little blueprint is... Creepy. As for the smaller ships, (namely >1000 blocks) I think the old mechanics would work okay. It is just the big ships that I am worrying about.

Definitely needs to be done. I've yet to use shipyards outside of experimenting in creative mode because it takes less work to use a blueprint instead of setting up a ship yard. This would give me some incentive to actually build one.

Brand new Repair mode
Adding a new build mode would be good. A new mode, with the name "Repair mode". It prompts you to choose a blueprint, and selecting it will highlight all damaged blocks and missing blocks (compared to the blueprint). It also tells you how many blocks are missing. This will make the hand-repair easier, and much more efficient.

That would be great for when you first start out, but will get tedious on huge ships. If you can afford a huge ship, then you should have enough credits for some NPC crew, and they could help out as well. I made a post about this that here: NPC Crew Repairs

 

[foodoman]

I enjoy using shipyards. I haven't had any problems with them as of yet. And the repair function is useful...as long as you have the design. I haven't had much experience needing to rebuild a station though

 

[Lone_Puppy]

I too have wanting this for a long time. It would make more sense that shipyard stations existed or were incorporated into shops. Which looks like this is where Schine is heading.

The repair diagnostic solution you mentioned has been suggested before and is definitely something we need.

I like your idea for the Astrotech module. Not sure if makes sense though. It would be like a doctor touching your nose to heal your toe.

 

[Mikeyike]

The idea of using a preset blueprint to remember an object's design and materials has been done before in another game, which I cannot remember, but all in all is a must have for a space build game that incorporates a lot of building and complex systems of either logic/subsystems that cannot be repaired efficiently nor effectively outside of creative mode. Shipyards being capable of constructing blueprints or repairing ships using blueprints is not far fetched, and is definitely needed for this game.

As for shipyards on ships... it comes back to age old idea of factory-vessels being over powered and pretty much the meta. A mobile base destroys all need for ground based factories or orbital stations, as you now have a means to flee from the enemy, as well as being able to produce vessels to fight back using materials from your massive mega mining laser factory. Balancing is a huge issue here, so before we delve into the idea more, it's important to remember we need to make sure there are some definitive de-buffs to making mobile manufacturing facilities.

 

[ryan.hanson1996]

I think that the invulnerability of faction home bases will keep stations and ground bases in the game as long as this isn't extended to capital ships as well.

 

[Mikeyike]

I think that the invulnerability of faction home bases will keep stations and ground bases in the game as long as this isn't extended to capital ships as well.

No doubt. That being said, if you're in the middle of deepspace with home far away, a mobile base is still better than no base.

 

[taisong]

The answer to all these issues is: fix shipyards.

Schine is definitely working on this, and I think shipyards will be the primary repair method when you have a decent station.
The reason I proposed other methods are for the newbies who does not have stations, or warriors who want a quick fix for his fighters.
The new astrotech mechanic is for overwatch players who main mercy. I mean, supports.

The repair diagnostic solution you mentioned has been suggested before and is definitely something we need.

I like your idea for the Astrotech module. Not sure if makes sense though. It would be like a doctor touching your nose to heal your toe.

It will obviously be very useful for fighters/corvettes, or new players who does not have shipyards ready.
As for the new astrotech, it is... Nah, I have no words to say about it. Lets hope the astronauts in Starmade has figured out a way to use nanites.

As for shipyards on ships... it comes back to age old idea of factory-vessels being over powered and pretty much the meta. A mobile base destroys all need for ground based factories or orbital stations, as you now have a means to flee from the enemy, as well as being able to produce vessels to fight back using materials from your massive mega mining laser factory. Balancing is a huge issue here, so before we delve into the idea more, it's important to remember we need to make sure there are some definitive de-buffs to making mobile manufacturing facilities.

Right now, there is nothing that separates ships from stations, other than that the stations are immobile, and you can make it immortal. This makes it harder for stations to go against capitol ships, and straight up immortality on stations are far outdated on this faction era.
That is the reason why I want the auto-repair on stations. Something that stations can do, and ships cannot. Besides, if the blueprint uses are restricted, capitol ships would have a hard time repairing/building. Thats another thing too.

 

[Comradecolonel]

Astrotech would still be pretty useless at repairing ships unless they were able to replace damaged blocks. Most effective weapons take a few blocks with them even it they leave some partially damaged. You lose armor hp either way and when that is spent your ships is far more fragile. Being able to only heal 254 max hp per block makes the effect rather small. You cant recover armor hp or structure hp and eventually your outer layer of armor provides less and less protection. I'm sure that an attacking ship could pretty much ignore an astrotech beams on a support ship and it would not notice much difference in its destructive capability.

Here are two ways that could make astrotech viable.
1. Astrotech restores armor hp and heals damaged blocks. It would be able to help a ship hold its own in battle and give it more durability.

2. Astrotech restores destroyed blocks but no armor or system hp. This would allow ships to recover from critical hits to systems. It would also have the ability to heal damaged blocks across the ship. The ship using the beam would need to have the blocks on hand otherwise no block would be replaced.

Shipyards should always be the best option for repairs but you obviously can't have them lying around everywhere. Astrotech should be a viable way to keep ships in the fight at the the cost of overall efficiency and capabilities of the repair.

 

[taisong]

Here are two ways that could make astrotech viable.
1. Astrotech restores armor hp and heals damaged blocks. It would be able to help a ship hold its own in battle and give it more durability.

2. Astrotech restores destroyed blocks but no armor or system hp. This would allow ships to recover from critical hits to systems. It would also have the ability to heal damaged blocks across the ship. The ship using the beam would need to have the blocks on hand otherwise no block would be replaced.

Shipyards should always be the best option for repairs but you obviously can't have them lying around everywhere. Astrotech should be a viable way to keep ships in the fight at the the cost of overall efficiency and capabilities of the repair.

This is probably the hardest place to balance, because Astrotech module uses no resources at all on fixing. Right now, ships does not remember its original structure, and this causes the "restore" method quite hard to use. Also, adding blocks where you shoot always leads to somebody trolling. Even if somebody is not trolling, a single mistake might cause more mayhem than good.

Armor values come from extensive use of fertikeen ores. If we are going to fix armor in any way, we should make the astrotech consume resources. Not credits, mind you, because you cannot fix anything with digital currency.

 

[Comradecolonel]

You could use resources too. My main point is if astrotech can replace blocks there should be real costs to the player.

I realize that all entities are a one-off in starmade, meaning the retain no memory besides undo.You could however have astrotech beams replace block based on a design, similar to a shipyard.

 

[jayman38]

It makes logical sense that a tech-beam system that replaces blocks would use a blueprint to understand what blocks are placed when there is an empty space in a given voxel.

After all, if we were to make a computerized repair robot in real life, we would not rely on some AI algorithm to "figure out" how to repair something. No, we would explicitly program it with a "blueprint" design, so that it knows precisely where to put replacement parts that are missing or damaged.

Just like with digital data, it will be best for a player to back-up their updated designs early and often, to avoid having the repair robot run a big, bulky pipe down through the Broadway Corridor, making it impassible. Or filling the command section with shield generators.

 

[taisong]

Starmade really needs the blueprint-in-a-ship mechanic.
When you take armor/structure damage, the game will save the ship blueprint in the core. It will save the ship before being damaged, and you can tell shipyards/shops/repair-mode or whatever to use that blueprint.