Read by Council Tech Progression, Alien Ruins, Other Stuff

[Reviire]

At some point I need an admin to merge this thread with my asteroid/mining thread, since all the ideas are for the same reason.

So as with my previous thread, the intention of these ideas is to add more strategic elements, giving players an incentive to fight or work together. Not only that, but to also flesh out the universe, and how you interact with it.

The main ideas I would like to talk about, as the title would suggest, are alien ruins, and tied into that for reasons I will explain, some form of tech progression. Although after I have covered that, I will post some other small ideas I've got.

Alien ruins, as the name implies, are ruins left by some ancient alien civilization, that is no longer here for one reason or another. Various things will be found inside, such as ancient tablets and engravings, things that give you some insight into the past of the universe, and give it some backstory. Other than that, you will also be able to find "Alien data fragments" or some such, and possibly, various different unique weapons, systems and blocks that cannot be produced but are strong, maybe even with downsides. I will expand on this later.

With these alien ruins, a form of research will be added. To encourage exploration and PVP, or teamwork, players will be required to setup a research base in alien ruins, and over time (Configurable by server admins) unlock some new technology or weapon. It will not be possible to claim these, so players need to defend it. For reasons, the ruins will be invulnerable until their secrets are unlocked. When a faction has a tech unlocked, it will share it with all their allies, but the allies will lose it if they ever break the alliance.

So the general idea for the tech tree, is that you start with basic things. Cannons, missiles, basic hull, basic armor. When you unlock one of these alien research vaults, it would give you a "point" in one tech tree, which is randomly allocated into one of the branches. It gives players some more goals, and adds a new feature for mods to work with.

The tech wouldn't be straight up upgrades, except for the usual armor progression we have. Hull and armor would be split, with hull being weak and light, providing structure HP rather than armor, and armor being well, armor. Thick heavy plates. Progression for hull and armor is basic > standard > advanced. Weapons would be the same, cannons going from your standard cannon, to maybe a particle cannon. Different effects for the projectiles. The straight up upgrades will also have downsides, i.e weight and power usage. Although, there will also be various "branch" techs, having their own functions, advantages and disadvantages. A branch of cannon could be flak, or railguns. Missiles might branch into torpedos, mines and different types of missile? Other improvements, turning cluster missiles from heatseeking to lock on.

As for unique items, they would be extremely rare variants of existing items. With cool effects, and randomly generated statistics and traits. For example, a swarm missile launcher. The specific launcher may have the effect where all missiles fire out at once, and fly in a specific pattern, other unique swarm missile will have different fight patterns. The damage, hp etc would be decided randomly, within limits. But the unique thing, is the traits. Somewhat RPG style, these traits might be things like innate damage changes (half damage to emp), special effects (When close to target missiles split into several, weaker missiles.), or disadvantages (Missiles may target self, drains shields when hitting the enemy).

I think this would be a good addition to the game, because not only does it add new goals to reach, it also adds new features for mods to use and more incentives for players to either fight or work together, leading to more interactions as a whole. It also gives new opportunities to flesh out the game universe, backstory etc.

Other shit:
Changes to map generation: Remove other galaxies, just straight up. Make the default galaxy much bigger, and each grid space should only have a chance to spawn a star system. There should be voids between each system, maybe some are close together, maybe some aren't. Spawn rates configurable.

Slight changes to projectile scaling: Projectile size should be determined by the output size, while the maximum projectile size should be determined by damage.

I'll probably throw other shit I think up here whenever.

 

[starhaiden]

Instead of that I would like the current factory system to change. Instead of the factories being easy to make and modular based I would like the more advance factories to be hard to make and multiply different blocks can be crafted in the same factory.

 

[jstenholt]

I'm seriously asking this, have you played Starmade?

 

[Reviire]

I'm seriously asking this, have you played Starmade?

You must not know what a suggestion is.

 

[Dragleones]

Does Starmade need a progression system? Exspecially a tech-system that would include "jumps" rather than gradual progression.

Hull/standard armor/advanced armor aren't a really progression. They are just entirely different.

HP: 75/100/250
Armor (in %): 0/60/75
effective HP: 75/250/1000
Armor HP: 50/75/100
Mass: 0.05/0.15/0.25
Base Price: 50/125/1000

I tend to mostly avoid advanced armor, since its very cost inefficient and heavy, but its awesome to use for small turrets/small vessels where you need to get the maximum survivalbility out of a minimum of space. In addition to that it can be used for case hardening© by HellishEnt.
Standard armor provides good cost/protection efficiency, high % armor and is usually the way to go.
Hull is really cheap and lightweight. It has decent HP, but gets shred pretty fast. But as indirect protection its by far the best way to stack insane amounts of armor hp.

If you really want to insist on seeing this as a progression system. Fine.
But how would something like this work for weapons?
The next "tier" just having improved damage at higher ressource cost?
Improved damage with better/worse power efficiency?
Would it actually even matter? Usually the power is the bottleneck for weapons anyways...

Starmade in fact already has a build in progression system based on ressource collection.
More ressources mean bigger more powerful ships, more drones, a bigger fleet and increased ressource collection, resulting in bigger more powerful ships, more drones, a bigger fleet and increased ressource collection, resulting in ...

In my opinion a tech system might be a good idea for a mod, but not for the default game.

 

[Benevolent27]

At some point I need an admin to merge this thread with my asteroid/mining thread, since all the ideas are for the same reason.

So as with my previous thread, the intention of these ideas is to add more strategic elements, giving players an incentive to fight or work together. Not only that, but to also flesh out the universe, and how you interact with it.

The main ideas I would like to talk about, as the title would suggest, are alien ruins, and tied into that for reasons I will explain, some form of tech progression. Although after I have covered that, I will post some other small ideas I've got.

Alien ruins, as the name implies, are ruins left by some ancient alien civilization, that is no longer here for one reason or another. Various things will be found inside, such as ancient tablets and engravings, things that give you some insight into the past of the universe, and give it some backstory. Other than that, you will also be able to find "Alien data fragments" or some such, and possibly, various different unique weapons, systems and blocks that cannot be produced but are strong, maybe even with downsides. I will expand on this later.

With these alien ruins, a form of research will be added. To encourage exploration and PVP, or teamwork, players will be required to setup a research base in alien ruins, and over time (Configurable by server admins) unlock some new technology or weapon. It will not be possible to claim these, so players need to defend it. For reasons, the ruins will be invulnerable until their secrets are unlocked. When a faction has a tech unlocked, it will share it with all their allies, but the allies will lose it if they ever break the alliance.

So the general idea for the tech tree, is that you start with basic things. Cannons, missiles, basic hull, basic armor. When you unlock one of these alien research vaults, it would give you a "point" in one tech tree, which is randomly allocated into one of the branches. It gives players some more goals, and adds a new feature for mods to work with.

The tech wouldn't be straight up upgrades, except for the usual armor progression we have. Hull and armor would be split, with hull being weak and light, providing structure HP rather than armor, and armor being well, armor. Thick heavy plates. Progression for hull and armor is basic > standard > advanced. Weapons would be the same, cannons going from your standard cannon, to maybe a particle cannon. Different effects for the projectiles. The straight up upgrades will also have downsides, i.e weight and power usage. Although, there will also be various "branch" techs, having their own functions, advantages and disadvantages. A branch of cannon could be flak, or railguns. Missiles might branch into torpedos, mines and different types of missile? Other improvements, turning cluster missiles from heatseeking to lock on.

As for unique items, they would be extremely rare variants of existing items. With cool effects, and randomly generated statistics and traits. For example, a swarm missile launcher. The specific launcher may have the effect where all missiles fire out at once, and fly in a specific pattern, other unique swarm missile will have different fight patterns. The damage, hp etc would be decided randomly, within limits. But the unique thing, is the traits. Somewhat RPG style, these traits might be things like innate damage changes (half damage to emp), special effects (When close to target missiles split into several, weaker missiles.), or disadvantages (Missiles may target self, drains shields when hitting the enemy).

I think this would be a good addition to the game, because not only does it add new goals to reach, it also adds new features for mods to use and more incentives for players to either fight or work together, leading to more interactions as a whole. It also gives new opportunities to flesh out the game universe, backstory etc.

Other shit:
Changes to map generation: Remove other galaxies, just straight up. Make the default galaxy much bigger, and each grid space should only have a chance to spawn a star system. There should be voids between each system, maybe some are close together, maybe some aren't. Spawn rates configurable.

Slight changes to projectile scaling: Projectile size should be determined by the output size, while the maximum projectile size should be determined by damage.

I'll probably throw other shit I think up here whenever.

Hmm.. Well, first to start I suggest you remove the cusswords, remember there are lots of people of various ages frequenting these forums.

But that aside, as we were talking about earlier in chat. I love the idea of alien ruins and technology that can only be obtained by exploring. I also like the idea of having to research to obtain new types of blocks and weapons. Though I would like to see new game mechanics for these items, rather than simply recycling existing effects. For your "Other" paragraph, I think giving admins the ability to only have one galaxy, and to control the size of that galaxy would be good, as well as only giving a certain chance to spawn a star within each system (thus allowing more uneven distribution of stars). I think scaling of projectile size based on damage would also be cool.

I have a few ideas on what alien technology might be and how you acquire it. When you find a ancient alien ruins, you'd find devices that are like storages. They contain items, but look strange, and may have different properties to them. Perhaps some are boobytrapped, others are radioactive, and others are simply storages. Inside there could be blocks, personal weapons/tools, and "artifacts," which would basically be mysterious shreds of information.

1. Blocks:
You would be intended to be research these at your base. They could be anything, from new ship weapon types to thrusters to other mysterious items. To be able to replicate them, you'd need to break the item down into it's elements first, and then research those elements in different kinds of computers. Each element would take time to research. But once done, you'd have a recipe for that element. You could then place element recipes into a special type of replicator. This replicator would use familiar capsules and then create the alien raw materials necessary to construct the alien technology. However, all of the alien technology will remain uncraftable until you find an alien crafting factory. Though you could break down the alien factory to learn what base elements it needs (and to be able to reproduce those elements), you'd definitely want to save your first one so that you could start crafting alien tech. These factories would use alien elements to create new block types. But there would be a catch. Everything in this factory would be written in an alien language, with an odd GUI that you'd need to figure out. Each item you create will be a mystery to you till you create it and try it. There could even be tiers to the alien factories, the more advanced ones being rarer to find. Now there could be new types of blocks introduced, each one would be a mystery how it works. No stats would be provided. The only way to see what they do is to test them out.
A. Weapons: These might be ammo-based. They could be energy weapons that have strange effects, such as energy dampening (thus reducing the enemy's energy regeneration per second briefly). They may be a tertiary effect to allow weapon damage when you have only decreased enemy shields to 25%. Maybe they do DoT damage. Some of them may be like very powerful cannons. Some might even be useless, and are actually like the alien's fireworks. They just burst and look pretty. lol. This is just a partial list of ideas, I think we'd need to brainstorm this a bit.
B. Armor: These armor types should differently than traditional armor. Perhaps one type is as strong as standard armor, but regenerates slowly. Another may be as light as hull, but has as much armor as standard. Another uses a small bit of energy, glows, and is just like standard armor in all other respects. Another type might absorb some damage and convert it to energy, before it is destroyed.
C. Thrusters: This alien technology coulds provide additional thrust without being subject to the same diminishing returns of standard thrusters. Another alien thruster type might produce more thrust when you are under attack, but less thrust when you are not.
D. Other: These other types of blocks wold be a mystery until you try them. One example could be a slipstream computer/modules which puts you into a slow kind of jump. The longer you maintain the slipstream, the farther you go. This would end either when you let go of the button or when you run out of energy, whichever one comes first. Or perhaps a wormhole creator, which shoots a projectile out which explodes and sets one side of a wormhole. When you travel somewhere else, it creates the other side. You can then warp through one way or the other. These wormholes would destabilize over time and disappear automatically, perhaps only lasting for a few hours. A very strange item might be a dark colored beam that appears to do nothing.. until you shoot it at a star for a while, using up a lot of energy.. and then that star collapses to create a black hole. (There would be more or different things, of course)

2. Personal Weapons/tools:
These should look nothing like standard weapons. They may shoot laser-like projectiles which bend, spines that shoot out, or goo that sticks and causes damage. For support tools, perhaps they turn the astronaut invisible for a short time or maybe even teleport the player a short distance. This is just a short list of possibilities.

3. Artifacts:
These would be shreds of information, written in an alien language. They would need to be decoded and put together to make any sense. When you decode an artifact, it may reveals some of the history of the aliens, and also unlock some of the language. The alien technology would begin to be more readable the more of these you decode. When you use an alien factory, some of the words will become translated. Perhaps there could even be hidden coordinates inside some of these, where greater treasures reside. If you find more than one of the same kind of artifact, it will be useless to you, but it'd be beneficial to trade with someone else for one you currently lack. These artifacts would be named with different alien words, to differentiate them from each other and to enable you to trade them with others.

What do you think about these ideas?

 

[Reviire]

Does Starmade need a progression system? Exspecially a tech-system that would include "jumps" rather than gradual progression.

Hull/standard armor/advanced armor aren't a really progression. They are just entirely different.

HP: 75/100/250
Armor (in %): 0/60/75
effective HP: 75/250/1000
Armor HP: 50/75/100
Mass: 0.05/0.15/0.25
Base Price: 50/125/1000

I tend to mostly avoid advanced armor, since its very cost inefficient and heavy, but its awesome to use for small turrets/small vessels where you need to get the maximum survivalbility out of a minimum of space. In addition to that it can be used for case hardening© by HellishEnt.
Standard armor provides good cost/protection efficiency, high % armor and is usually the way to go.
Hull is really cheap and lightweight. It has decent HP, but gets shred pretty fast. But as indirect protection its by far the best way to stack insane amounts of armor hp.

If you really want to insist on seeing this as a progression system. Fine.
But how would something like this work for weapons?
The next "tier" just having improved damage at higher ressource cost?
Improved damage with better/worse power efficiency?
Would it actually even matter? Usually the power is the bottleneck for weapons anyways...

Starmade in fact already has a build in progression system based on ressource collection.
More ressources mean bigger more powerful ships, more drones, a bigger fleet and increased ressource collection, resulting in bigger more powerful ships, more drones, a bigger fleet and increased ressource collection, resulting in ...

In my opinion a tech system might be a good idea for a mod, but not for the default game.

Well the idea was that tech would have different disadvantages, while the benefits would be bigger than the previous tier. While armor gets stronger, it also gets heavier, for example. Other things would have branches that aren't really an improvement, but entirely new things, i.e flak.

Honestly the entire reason, is just for more variety. More things that do different stuff, while also not just giving it to you, making you go out and find it, adding an incentive to explore and fight.

 

[Zyrr]

 

[Dragleones]

Well the idea was that tech would have different disadvantages, while the benefits would be bigger than the previous tier. [...]
Honestly the entire reason, is just for more variety. More things that do different stuff, while also not just giving it to you, making you go out and find it, adding an incentive to explore and fight.

But then i think a tech system might be the wrong approach. I'm all for variety and such, but i heavily dislike the idea of blatantly better variations of the same block. As i stated in my post above. There already is a form of progression in the game. The more you control/mine, the better you can build/fight. The stronger bigger players/factions naturally have an advantage in this system. But since its a gradual progression its fair and not too harsh.

A research system that enables new better blocks would result in progression "leaps" onto the next tech level. In a roundbase game like a rts, moba and such, it would be fair and square. But starmade is a sandbox game. A tech system with better blocks would let the players/factions with a high amount of ressources snowball out of control, demolishing the weak.

(Example: Someone encounters a larger ship. If he doesn't get killed by tracking missiles and can dodge succesfully that player has good chances to escape, since big ships end up being sluggish due to the way thrust works.
What if the enemy has some advanced tier thruster, which are stronger than the standard thrusters the player uses?)

The game has to enable players to enter into a already existing world at any point. A tier system is not a good way to do so.



Now for the second point. I really like variaton. I'm sure everyone does.
Some players have pointed out that the current weapon system is kinda limiting, because since new additions have to have a combination its hard to implement relatively unique. but legitimate and enriching weapons (flak/mines/etc.)
Adding different and equal variations to other blocks through a tier system would be the best way to encounter the same problem everywhere else.
How about the other way around.
If there is an awesome idea for a new block, thats a completely new and fun variation on an already existing block, just propose that one.
Said block wouldn't be just a block filling a spot in a tier system, but a well thought out idea standing for its own.

For example: When thinking of shield recharges i can't think about another version aside a super energy inefficient variation providing heavily increased regen per block. I would dislike a tier system with 3 shield recharges all doing the same, but i really like that certain alternative shield recharger.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

I always liked how Supreme Commander dealt with tech progression. New tech levels supplemented old ones instead of replacing them. You got new units and buildings, but for the most part they were new things and not replacements of old things. I'd be interested if some kind of progression like that could be added to StarMade.

 

[Madman198237]

As far as I know, projectile scaling is planned (And has certainly already been suggested).
Void spaces are planned. No need to suggest them. We'll get variety in systems eventually.
Config for no other galaxies, sure. Good way to enforce "Don't go to other galaxies" rules. But it's probably been suggested before, and/or is planned. It seems logical.
Ruins and pre-generated structures have been suggested a lot. So have tech progressions.

 

[Lecic]

Tech trees are shit. Absolute fucking garbage. No. If Schine has a single pair of brain cells between the entire team, they will not be adding them. Tech trees do not work for a long term competitive PvP environment. Tech trees, even if the things are just "sidegrades," give massive advantages to long time players and fuck over new players in the process. As if long term players don't already have the advantage of established fleets, bases, resources, and territory.

Let's look at armor, for example.

Basic is not armor. It is tissue paper. There is almost no reason to use it unless you are incredibly poor and just want a little protection. If you increase its strength by even a small amount, however, it will now outclass standard in protection per mass, making standard absolutely useless. So, by making basic the only armor that new players can use, you are crippling their ability to survive in any sort of PvP situation, unless you buff it, in which case we might as well not even have three armor tiers.

Hull and armor would be split,

No. This is a MASSIVE waste of IDs. If you want to buff your structure HP with a lightweight inert block, use scaffolds.

Weapons would be the same, cannons going from your standard cannon, to maybe a particle cannon.

A branch of cannon could be flak, or railguns.

What's the difference between a cannon and a particle cannon? What's the difference between cannon/beam and a railgun?

Missiles might branch into torpedos,

What's the difference between a plain or rapid dumbfire missile and a torpedo?

You know, at first I thought jstenholt was just being a jerk, but now I have to agree- Have you played the game recently? Most of these are already covered by existing weapon types.

As for unique items, they would be extremely rare variants of existing items. With cool effects, and randomly generated statistics and traits. For example, a swarm missile launcher. The specific launcher may have the effect where all missiles fire out at once, and fly in a specific pattern, other unique swarm missile will have different fight patterns. The damage, hp etc would be decided randomly, within limits. But the unique thing, is the traits. Somewhat RPG style, these traits might be things like innate damage changes (half damage to emp), special effects (When close to target missiles split into several, weaker missiles.), or disadvantages (Missiles may target self, drains shields when hitting the enemy).

Because the occasional overpowered rare weapon isn't a broken concept in a game like this in the slightest. It's not like the large factions won't have much better chances of collecting and using the most overpowered rare weapons for themselves, snowballing them into even stronger positions.

Overall, this is barely even a suggestion. It's just a big wishlist that doesn't actually specify anything.

 

[jstenholt]

I may come off as a jerk sometimes, but I try to make sure it's deserved. Lecic

 

[SpaceChief]

Things I like:

• Alien ruins and ancient cities
  
• Rare items and artifacts

Things I don't like:

• Tech trees/progression beyond the limited scope of the game so far
• Limiting creativity by encouraging players to follow one specific path

I think a lot of what you're suggesting would work really well in a mod. I really don't want to see it in the vanilla game. Lecic has it right - right now the game has a few basic weapon types, there are different synonyms for existing weapon configs.

In the past someone suggested a "plasma" computer that makes all your weapons "plasma", which is more powerful and green for some reason. However, you can always RP a "plasma gun" with an overdrive effect computer and green light (or blue, red, whatever), but calling it 'plasma' doesn't really mean anything. You can call dumbfire missiles "torpedoes" and classify them as "light" "heavy" or whatever based on the damage they do, in the context of the server or game universe you're playing in. Keeping that superficial and cosmetic doesn't change the core game and doesn't detract from creativity.

To keep your suggestion of rare items fair, they would have to be completely excluded from blueprints and completely non-reproducible. This doesn't address Lecic's concern that on big PVP servers, a powerful faction could hoard artifacts and just take over. A possible fix: each artifact has a lifetime of so many seconds or so many uses before it self-destructs. Given how complicated this already is, this really should be in a mod, not the main game.

One more thing:

Changes to map generation: Remove other galaxies, just straight up. Make the default galaxy much bigger, and each grid space should only have a chance to spawn a star system. There should be voids between each system, maybe some are close together, maybe some aren't. Spawn rates configurable.

Don't remove other galaxies, do make the main galaxy much bigger. I'm pretty sure this has already been suggested, but right now galaxies are all spirals, I'd like to see some variety. Maybe the same amount of stars, but bigger and more voids in between systems.

 

[Reviire]

Tech trees are shit. Absolute fucking garbage. No. If Schine has a single pair of brain cells between the entire team, they will not be adding them. Tech trees do not work for a long term competitive PvP environment. Tech trees, even if the things are just "sidegrades," give massive advantages to long time players and fuck over new players in the process. As if long term players don't already have the advantage of established fleets, bases, resources, and territory.

Let's look at armor, for example.

Basic is not armor. It is tissue paper. There is almost no reason to use it unless you are incredibly poor and just want a little protection. If you increase its strength by even a small amount, however, it will now outclass standard in protection per mass, making standard absolutely useless. So, by making basic the only armor that new players can use, you are crippling their ability to survive in any sort of PvP situation, unless you buff it, in which case we might as well not even have three armor tiers.



No. This is a MASSIVE waste of IDs. If you want to buff your structure HP with a lightweight inert block, use scaffolds.




What's the difference between a cannon and a particle cannon? What's the difference between cannon/beam and a railgun?



What's the difference between a plain or rapid dumbfire missile and a torpedo?

You know, at first I thought jstenholt was just being a jerk, but now I have to agree- Have you played the game recently? Most of these are already covered by existing weapon types.



Because the occasional overpowered rare weapon isn't a broken concept in a game like this in the slightest. It's not like the large factions won't have much better chances of collecting and using the most overpowered rare weapons for themselves, snowballing them into even stronger positions.

Overall, this is barely even a suggestion. It's just a big wishlist that doesn't actually specify anything.

When I said particle cannon, I was just throwing out a word for something that would be better than the cannon in some ways, but worse in others (Drastically slower projectile, for example.). It would essentially be a cannon, being able to do all the same slaves, but it wouldn't be unlocked at the start, and be worse in some ways while better in others. Having it's own disadvantages doesn't make it better than the cannon by default, and still gives the cannon a role it can fill.

Granted the railgun was an oversight on my part. It was late at night, I was just throwing out words that sounded relevant. More than anything I just want to see new effects that we can use for weapons.

I probably should have elaborated on the torpedo vs missile part, we currently have no slow, hard hitting explosives, like torpedos. It's all agile and/or fast missiles.

I've played the game, for quite a few years. But I'm just throwing ideas out, for the sake of discussion. I think I've succeeded in the discussion, I don't really care if no one likes the idea. Better to discuss it instead of being a shit like that guy.

 

[jstenholt]

When I said particle cannon, I was just throwing out a word for something that would be better than the cannon in some ways, but worse in others (Drastically slower projectile, for example.).

You mean like a dumbfire missile? You are describing a dumbfire missile.

I probably should have elaborated on the torpedo vs missile part, we currently have no slow, hard hitting explosives, like torpedos. It's all agile and/or fast missiles.

You mean like a pulse-missile? Because you are LITERALLY describing a pulse-missile.

 

[Comradecolonel]

I believe research is in the game already. The only difference is that it isn't abstract and arbitrary. You actually have to do real research.