- Joined
- Jun 29, 2013
- Messages
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First off, this isn't a suggestion for going really fast. I believe a jump drive or similar limited-range (10-20 sectors maybe) teleport system should be implimented for that, as it would allow ships to get around while still limiting how fast they can fly in normal space (specifically, a "fast-travel" system which requires a 10-20 second "charge-up," during which shields, weapons, and engines are disabled, to discourage its use for running away from a fight).
Engines and movement.
The issue with movement currently is that it is scaled (and sometimes not scaled) in iffy ways. For instance, all ships effectively have the same top speed, and only differ based on acceleration. Additionally, the scaling for how quickly ships turn relative to their size is overtuned at present. Which is to say that ships become really slow at turning much sooner then they ought to (a small frigate barely turns any faster then a battleship, and even some fighter-looking ships feel like they are a large bomber or gunboat). This second thing
There are two ways to deal with engines. First is to continue having only one engine block type, but to have its numbers (and perhaps dimensions or other attributes of engine groups) be used to calculate things other then just thrust. Put another way, engine orientation could be used to determine which direction they add acceleration for (so you'd need to place them sideways to have much strafing power for instance). Somewhere, part of the calculations involved would also affect max speed. This aspect would have diminishing returns, and would scale against ship size naturally. If specific maneuvering thrusters or something similar aren't added, some manner of applying turning speed into the engine mechanics would be good too. Especially once you are dealing with ships that have a DIFFERENT acceleration and max speed for up/down or right/left then they do for forwards/backwards.
The other option is to just split up engines into several different blocks. One block type for acceleration (i.e. the current engines, but stronger then current ones because you need to replace some with the new types too). One block type for max speed (again, having diminishing returns and scaling against vessel size). One more block type for strafing acceleration (left-right and up-down). And a final block type for vessel turning speed.
This has the benefit of being simpler to build with, as you don't need to deal with engine configuration designs so much or worry about orientation as much, but has the cost of requiring 2-3 more blocks to clog your inventory, unless the inventory system gets shifted to something more like Minecraft's creative mode (i.e. you can carry ALL types of blocks at once). It also has another benefit in that it would be much easier to design a ship with specific movement goals in mind then with a single block type. For instance, going "all-in" for a fast ship, at the cost of not being able to turn very well or strafe/hover above planets. This would lend itself well to racing contests, actually.
Personally, I prefer the second idea more, since this adds more customizability to ships with regards to movement.
Ship movement in general:
One more comment on ship motion: Most of the famous "combat space sim" games like Freespace, Wing Commaner, and X-wing vs. Tie Fighter have it such that when you turn your ship, your momentum turns with you (like atmospheric fighters), rather then you continuing in that direction. They also sometimes have a key you can hit to activate a "glide" mode where you DO keep going in the same direction. It annoys people who know how physics work, but Starmade already HAS "space drag" anyway, so it wouldn't get much worse in that department. And personally, I feel that momentum turning with you like an atmospheric fighter would actually have the potential to liven up combat a bit.
Multi-directional shields, and how to impliment them easily.
If you have played space combat games before, you may notice that many have directional shields. That is, the shields have a separate "health" for different sides of the ship. Some games had only front and rear. Freespace used front, rear, left, and right. Some games have all 6 sides. Basic idea is that if you get through the shields on one side, you can damage the ship. But if the ship turns another side towards you, you have to get through that side's shields, or you have to get around to the side that turned away from you (which is easy in a smaller ship).
In Starmade, the addition of this mechanic would potentially increase how useful larger ships are, without making them too powerful for small ships to have any hope against (since the small ships are more maneuverable, they could stay on one side of the larger ship, whereas other large ships might have to attack and bring down multiple shields as their target turns to protect the side with lower shields temporarily).
Other games often use a mesh of sorts to represent the shields, and calculate which shield takes the damage based on that. In Star Made, this would be difficult to impliment, on account of the whole you-can-build-any-shape-you-want thing. Therefor, the simple solution is to simply check the angle a shot hitting a ship hits at. Based on that angle, the appropriate shield takes damage. So if the enemy ship is facing you, your shots will always hit the front shields no matter where on the ship you connect. Missiles that get behind the enemy ship and hit it there however will drain the rear shields. Or the side ones if they hit the sides. No 3D mesh to worry about, no messy troublesome things that can be affected by ship shape, just some simple trigonometry based on the target's heading and the heading of the shots hitting it.
Potential applications for it would include that mid-size and larger ships in combat with each other can turn a side away to regenerate its shields... IF you let them. Attacking a large ship with a medium-large ship and a fighter would allow the fighter to keep the shields down on that side if the large ship tries that, however. Or the fighter can soften up other sides so that the other shields won't protect the large ship when it tries to do that (particularly if a 200% shield 50% hull damage weapon were to get added or something, and the fighter happened to have those).
Armor.
Needs a buff. Thats all, really. Increase its armor stat a bit, increase its health a bit more then a bit. You could also nerf weapons if shields are also balanced accordingly, but just improving the hull blocks themselves would be nice.
Aside from that, if weapons get redesigned at some point, changing the way armor (the stat) works may also be interesting. Currently, armor as a stat just decreases damage by some percent. What if instead, armor decreased damage by a set amount? i.e. a basic armor block could reduce all damage by 20 points, rather then some percent. Ideally, there would be a maximum absorbtion (80 or 90% perhaps), so a shot that only did 20 damage would still do some small % of its damage.
Health.
The current system of the ship core taking damage being what destroys a ship is not the best, to be honest. I know I am not alone when I say we could use a more "legitimate" health system for ships. The ship's maximum hull strength could perhaps be calculated based on the number of "system" blocks in the total ship. And destroying system blocks would damage that health. This is to say that destroying armor blocks will not damage HP, or will damage it very little, and that adding more armor blocks will likewise have minimal effect on max HP. In this setup, the ship core would be effectively indestructible, but would perhaps inflict 1 HP damage to the ship's health each time it is hit, regardless of that hit's normal damage. (so attacking the core is not worthless).
The proper balance for this style of ship health may be up for debate a bit, but I think we can agree that "100% of system blocks" is a bad way to go. That is, you should not have to destroy all system blocks to destroy a ship. Somewhere in the 30%-60% range is probably good.
An alternative is to allow the destruction of ANY system block to damage the ship's HP, but for only one type of block to actually matter for the ship's default max HP. Perhaps some sort of "cooling system" block or something (doesn't have to be a cooling system, but that would fit best with the current "overheating" description of a defeated ship). Add this system to your ship to increase its max health. Your ship's health is damaged when system blocks (not armor, not decorative, not rocks) are destroyed. If it hits zero, it starts overheating like ships currently do.
To restore a ship's health to its maximum, you would have to either "buy repairs" from a shop (which may not actually change the ship's damaged appearance) to set your current health back to max, or you would have to use an astromech beam on the ship (which in addition to repairing damaged blocks would restore its HP, under the condition that it has not been hit by an attack in the past 5 seconds or so).
Well, that's that. Sorry for the walls of text.
Engines and movement.
The issue with movement currently is that it is scaled (and sometimes not scaled) in iffy ways. For instance, all ships effectively have the same top speed, and only differ based on acceleration. Additionally, the scaling for how quickly ships turn relative to their size is overtuned at present. Which is to say that ships become really slow at turning much sooner then they ought to (a small frigate barely turns any faster then a battleship, and even some fighter-looking ships feel like they are a large bomber or gunboat). This second thing
There are two ways to deal with engines. First is to continue having only one engine block type, but to have its numbers (and perhaps dimensions or other attributes of engine groups) be used to calculate things other then just thrust. Put another way, engine orientation could be used to determine which direction they add acceleration for (so you'd need to place them sideways to have much strafing power for instance). Somewhere, part of the calculations involved would also affect max speed. This aspect would have diminishing returns, and would scale against ship size naturally. If specific maneuvering thrusters or something similar aren't added, some manner of applying turning speed into the engine mechanics would be good too. Especially once you are dealing with ships that have a DIFFERENT acceleration and max speed for up/down or right/left then they do for forwards/backwards.
The other option is to just split up engines into several different blocks. One block type for acceleration (i.e. the current engines, but stronger then current ones because you need to replace some with the new types too). One block type for max speed (again, having diminishing returns and scaling against vessel size). One more block type for strafing acceleration (left-right and up-down). And a final block type for vessel turning speed.
This has the benefit of being simpler to build with, as you don't need to deal with engine configuration designs so much or worry about orientation as much, but has the cost of requiring 2-3 more blocks to clog your inventory, unless the inventory system gets shifted to something more like Minecraft's creative mode (i.e. you can carry ALL types of blocks at once). It also has another benefit in that it would be much easier to design a ship with specific movement goals in mind then with a single block type. For instance, going "all-in" for a fast ship, at the cost of not being able to turn very well or strafe/hover above planets. This would lend itself well to racing contests, actually.
Personally, I prefer the second idea more, since this adds more customizability to ships with regards to movement.
Ship movement in general:
One more comment on ship motion: Most of the famous "combat space sim" games like Freespace, Wing Commaner, and X-wing vs. Tie Fighter have it such that when you turn your ship, your momentum turns with you (like atmospheric fighters), rather then you continuing in that direction. They also sometimes have a key you can hit to activate a "glide" mode where you DO keep going in the same direction. It annoys people who know how physics work, but Starmade already HAS "space drag" anyway, so it wouldn't get much worse in that department. And personally, I feel that momentum turning with you like an atmospheric fighter would actually have the potential to liven up combat a bit.
Multi-directional shields, and how to impliment them easily.
If you have played space combat games before, you may notice that many have directional shields. That is, the shields have a separate "health" for different sides of the ship. Some games had only front and rear. Freespace used front, rear, left, and right. Some games have all 6 sides. Basic idea is that if you get through the shields on one side, you can damage the ship. But if the ship turns another side towards you, you have to get through that side's shields, or you have to get around to the side that turned away from you (which is easy in a smaller ship).
In Starmade, the addition of this mechanic would potentially increase how useful larger ships are, without making them too powerful for small ships to have any hope against (since the small ships are more maneuverable, they could stay on one side of the larger ship, whereas other large ships might have to attack and bring down multiple shields as their target turns to protect the side with lower shields temporarily).
Other games often use a mesh of sorts to represent the shields, and calculate which shield takes the damage based on that. In Star Made, this would be difficult to impliment, on account of the whole you-can-build-any-shape-you-want thing. Therefor, the simple solution is to simply check the angle a shot hitting a ship hits at. Based on that angle, the appropriate shield takes damage. So if the enemy ship is facing you, your shots will always hit the front shields no matter where on the ship you connect. Missiles that get behind the enemy ship and hit it there however will drain the rear shields. Or the side ones if they hit the sides. No 3D mesh to worry about, no messy troublesome things that can be affected by ship shape, just some simple trigonometry based on the target's heading and the heading of the shots hitting it.
Potential applications for it would include that mid-size and larger ships in combat with each other can turn a side away to regenerate its shields... IF you let them. Attacking a large ship with a medium-large ship and a fighter would allow the fighter to keep the shields down on that side if the large ship tries that, however. Or the fighter can soften up other sides so that the other shields won't protect the large ship when it tries to do that (particularly if a 200% shield 50% hull damage weapon were to get added or something, and the fighter happened to have those).
Armor.
Needs a buff. Thats all, really. Increase its armor stat a bit, increase its health a bit more then a bit. You could also nerf weapons if shields are also balanced accordingly, but just improving the hull blocks themselves would be nice.
Aside from that, if weapons get redesigned at some point, changing the way armor (the stat) works may also be interesting. Currently, armor as a stat just decreases damage by some percent. What if instead, armor decreased damage by a set amount? i.e. a basic armor block could reduce all damage by 20 points, rather then some percent. Ideally, there would be a maximum absorbtion (80 or 90% perhaps), so a shot that only did 20 damage would still do some small % of its damage.
Health.
The current system of the ship core taking damage being what destroys a ship is not the best, to be honest. I know I am not alone when I say we could use a more "legitimate" health system for ships. The ship's maximum hull strength could perhaps be calculated based on the number of "system" blocks in the total ship. And destroying system blocks would damage that health. This is to say that destroying armor blocks will not damage HP, or will damage it very little, and that adding more armor blocks will likewise have minimal effect on max HP. In this setup, the ship core would be effectively indestructible, but would perhaps inflict 1 HP damage to the ship's health each time it is hit, regardless of that hit's normal damage. (so attacking the core is not worthless).
The proper balance for this style of ship health may be up for debate a bit, but I think we can agree that "100% of system blocks" is a bad way to go. That is, you should not have to destroy all system blocks to destroy a ship. Somewhere in the 30%-60% range is probably good.
An alternative is to allow the destruction of ANY system block to damage the ship's HP, but for only one type of block to actually matter for the ship's default max HP. Perhaps some sort of "cooling system" block or something (doesn't have to be a cooling system, but that would fit best with the current "overheating" description of a defeated ship). Add this system to your ship to increase its max health. Your ship's health is damaged when system blocks (not armor, not decorative, not rocks) are destroyed. If it hits zero, it starts overheating like ships currently do.
To restore a ship's health to its maximum, you would have to either "buy repairs" from a shop (which may not actually change the ship's damaged appearance) to set your current health back to max, or you would have to use an astromech beam on the ship (which in addition to repairing damaged blocks would restore its HP, under the condition that it has not been hit by an attack in the past 5 seconds or so).
Well, that's that. Sorry for the walls of text.
