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- Jul 4, 2013
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Tl;dr: Damage bleeds through to nearby systems at a distance scaling with ship mass and dimensions, so you can individually target engines or reactors or whatnot. You take out a ship by taking out its systems, not by taking out some abstract shipwide HP. This gives a reason to have layers of armor and empty space and systems deep in the ship instead of taking up most of it.
I'm very disappointed in the new power system and have been tossing this idea about pretty much everywhere, so I figured I might as well make a thread and refine my ideas a little.
The main problem this is trying to solve is ships being mostly systems, which comes in two forms:
The first form is a lot of the impetus for various systems.
I think the best way to punish players is not by restricting arbitrary with "you need x ____ or your ship doesn't work", but instead by making them unfavored in combat. Think of why you wouldn't have your warp core hanging off the ship in Star Trek and instead want it deep in the center of the ship. Yeah, because it would instantly get shot up and you'd be dead long before your shields go down.
I propose a system like this in StarMade, where damage, shields up or down, bleeds through to nearby systems.
Now, of course there's the question of what constitutes "nearby". I think this should be based on ship mass and dimensions so that as you add more systems to your ship, you need to expand it outwards with more layers of armor.
Doom cubes would suffer from getting shut down from systems being near the surface, while spaghetti monsters would get shut down pretty much the moment anything touches them.
The ideal ship would have hollow space between armored systems and an outer hull, with interiors optional (slightly increases mass, but provides slight armor).
Also, you could target weapons or engines or shields with information warfare.
In regards to scaling by both mass and dimensions, scaling by mass is what a lot of people want, and it would make it bad to stuff a ship with systems, but dimensions also matter so that people don't cheese it with a ridiculously-large outer shell. The exact balancing could be tuned to favor a certain approximate density of ship.
As a bonus, if multiple reactors were allowed to be active, and docked entities could have their own, turrets could be disabled by smaller amounts of damage, allowing very small ships somewhat of an advantage against slow-moving behemoths that rely on turrets.
I'm very disappointed in the new power system and have been tossing this idea about pretty much everywhere, so I figured I might as well make a thread and refine my ideas a little.
The main problem this is trying to solve is ships being mostly systems, which comes in two forms:
- Doom cubes (big blobs of systems with a thin shell of armor)
- Spaghetti monsters (long strings of systems, even unconnected, so that shots fly between bits of them)
The first form is a lot of the impetus for various systems.
I think the best way to punish players is not by restricting arbitrary with "you need x ____ or your ship doesn't work", but instead by making them unfavored in combat. Think of why you wouldn't have your warp core hanging off the ship in Star Trek and instead want it deep in the center of the ship. Yeah, because it would instantly get shot up and you'd be dead long before your shields go down.
I propose a system like this in StarMade, where damage, shields up or down, bleeds through to nearby systems.
Now, of course there's the question of what constitutes "nearby". I think this should be based on ship mass and dimensions so that as you add more systems to your ship, you need to expand it outwards with more layers of armor.
Doom cubes would suffer from getting shut down from systems being near the surface, while spaghetti monsters would get shut down pretty much the moment anything touches them.
The ideal ship would have hollow space between armored systems and an outer hull, with interiors optional (slightly increases mass, but provides slight armor).
Also, you could target weapons or engines or shields with information warfare.
In regards to scaling by both mass and dimensions, scaling by mass is what a lot of people want, and it would make it bad to stuff a ship with systems, but dimensions also matter so that people don't cheese it with a ridiculously-large outer shell. The exact balancing could be tuned to favor a certain approximate density of ship.
As a bonus, if multiple reactors were allowed to be active, and docked entities could have their own, turrets could be disabled by smaller amounts of damage, allowing very small ships somewhat of an advantage against slow-moving behemoths that rely on turrets.
