Teired System For Mainline Ship Systems

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    Ok before I get to the main post I would like to post some disclaimers:
    -I may not be the first to post something similar to this, I have not seen any other posts along this line, and as such I am creating this to raise awareness of the possibility of this.
    -As the idea develops further I will post edits to describe what could be, at the initial time of post it will have very little in the way of exact numbers, functions, and names for blocks, and anything that is on here is subject to change.

    Ok, onto the main idea:

    - Summary of the idea:
    Blocks like thrusters, power reactors, power storages, shield rechargers, shield capacitors, and possibly jump drives would be changed into a multi tiered system for each respective block. Within this tiered system, each tier of these blocks will have their own special positive and negative effects to the entity in question. With this system in place, more dynamic ship building practices would become apparent as the builders would have to be aware of what they want their ship to be capable of, and as such know which tier of these blocks they will use.

    -Initial Specifics: (Remember No tier is final, nor are its effects or stats)
    -Tier 1: Basic Thruster
    Positive Effect: Reduced Energy draw when in a group up to 50
    Negative Effect: Reduced maximum speed by 15%
    Same Base stats as current thruster

    -Tier 2: Compact Thruster
    Positive: Reduced energy draw by 25%, reduced mass
    Negative: Reduced thrust per block (when in groups larger than 5 thrust per blocks halves), exponential mass increase when grouped

    -Tier 3: Large Thruster
    Positive: Increase turning speed by 15%, when in groups larger than 1000 power usage is reduced to 50% increase compared to base thruster
    Negative: Mass increased by 3x compared to base thrusters, use 75% more power
    These thrusters power usage is based on individual groups of them, meaning that an efficient group will not affect the power usage of an inefficient group.

    -Tier 4: Afterburner Thrusters
    Positive: When activated provide a 25% boost to maximum speed (stacks with overdrive), Increases acceleration by 50% when active.
    Negative: When activated, increases power usage of all thruster systems by 115%, along with adding its own power usage in; this system will provide no thrust increase when not active

    -Tier 5: Cruise Thrusters
    Positive: Increases maximum speed by 35%, When afterburners are active with this thruster increases maximum speed by 150%
    Negative: Decreases turn speed by 30%, and by 75% when afterburners are active; When above 50% normal server speed shield regen is disabled along with weapon systems

    -Tier 1: Light Reactors
    Positive: Reduced Mass by 60%, Increased ship resistance to explosive weapons by 20%
    Negative: When built in more than 1 dimension efficiency is decreased by 30%, with a cost of 20% less power per block; Reduced baseline power production by 35%; Beam weapons have a 10% chance to cause system cycle.

    -Tier 2: Ionic Reactors
    Positive: Per block power production increase by 35%, when build in multi-dimensional groups efficiency of this increases by 30%.
    Negative: When built in only one dimension efficiency decreased by 60%;
    This type would work in tandem with the way the current ones work in terms of how to make it efficient, with the exception of single dimension builds.

    -Tier 3: Fission Reactors
    Positive: When in block-like groups efficiency is increased by 75% (Only when above 3000 blocks), baseline power production is increased by 50%
    Negative: When in groups smaller than 500, efficiency is reduced by 60%, between 500 and 2500, by 40%, and between 2500 and 3000, by 20%; Upon any received damage to block, has a 75% chance to explode, causing a 10 block radius explosion, and each explosion counts as damage to this reactor.

    The Power Reactors and Shield Rechargers in particular will be what I request the most feedback on balance, as they are the hardest to find a good balance for with what they are designed to do.

    -Shields

    TBD

    -Power Capacitors

    TBD

    -Jumpdrives

    TBD



    In some hours from the time of original posting I will further expand the areas in which are currently blank, I felt that I wanted to get the general idea off my head before delving into the major specifics of all the blocks I feel would benefit from this change
     
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    alterintel

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    Nice Idea, I do like the idea of being able to alter the atributes of systems based on the needs of the ship. IE, cloak ship should be very light, where a battls ship should be hardened. Being able to modify mass vs efficiency would be very helpfull in ship design.
     
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    What if you just set them up in a linking system, like weapons currently are?
    System + Othersystem + optional support
    Just a thought.
     
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    I agree with lxalite, a combo system would work beautifully for this.

    I wouldn't call these tiers, however. I'd call them different classes of the same system. Another thing you should add: Each entity is limited to one class of each system. So you can't have all thruster types on a single ship - if you place one, you have to live with that one, or remove them all and place a new type.

    This is probably the most solid way different versions of the same systems has been suggested.
     
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    Yeah, I did forget to add in that only one of a type of thruster is allowed on a ship, the only exception would be the afterburner thrusters as they would be considered more of a subsystem addon to the thrusters
    [DOUBLEPOST=1439552200,1439551444][/DOUBLEPOST]
    What if you just set them up in a linking system, like weapons currently are?
    System + Othersystem + optional support
    Just a thought.
    If this is how a tiered system was inplemented, it would work as the weapons using this system work well with it. This also creates an easy way to prevent multiple types of thruster systems being on ship at once as you would only be able to bind one type of support system to it. However, for the afterburner thrusters, I can forsee that needing to be a seperate block as to prevent issues from occuring due to its properties
     
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    Ithirahad

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    I like this... The idea of having more choices than just "more thrusters or less thrusters" or "more shield recharge or more shield capacity" sounds great and would add a lot more depth to systems engineering.
     

    The Judge

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    I can agree with this.
    Possibly a thruster that provides more thrust in a single direction?
     

    Valiant70

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    I think "afterburner" would be better handled by reworking the overdrive effect. I kind of like where this is going, though.

    I'd try to stay away from one type of system being better than another. It would be better to simply have tradeoffs for all types. I like differentiation, but I don't really like true tiers.
     
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    Yeah, I just went with the name tiers since it was the first thing in my head, so went with the idea of you go up a tier or down, you gain some positive effects and some negative effects. But I am open to ideas on how something like this could be accomplished, soon I'll go through and add in some types for a few of the other blocks to start allowing for improvement of the overall idea.
     
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    +1 to the OP, alternate equipment types is something I've always wanted here.
    In much the same way We already have different tiers of armor, different classes of equipment would add a lot to this game.

    I had an idea a while back for power systems:
    - Imagine a reactor block that had three times the power generation of the basic one, but had no bonus multiplier when placed with other reactor blocks, and in fact had a severe diminishing returns penalty if to many are equipped (an exponential curve). Something like this would be desirable on small vehicles like fighters, drop shuttles, escape pods, etc, but would suck ass on anything bigger.
    - Another reactor block would be the opposite; One that had less power gen then the current one, but possessed an excellent bonus multiplier that kicked in if You have a crap load of them in a ship. This type of reactor could be useful on large-scale ships where physical space is in surplus, but would be awful on small ships.
    - Still another reactor would be just plain better in all aspects then the default one, but would be expensive as hell, several times the mass, and would be highly volatile, that is, there would be a chance of explosion if hit by weapons fire. This would of course have the risk of a chain reaction with the rest of the reactors on board. High risk vs high reward.

    If fuel were introduced to the game, then different reactors could also have different levels of efficiency in regards to fuel/power output. IF fuel were in the game.
     
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    Lecic

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    Tiers, no. Different variations with pros and cons, with no variation being flat out better? Maybe. This is a lot of blocks, and I'm not sure how much it really adds to the game that just using different block ratios can't achieve.
     
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    Ithirahad

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    Tiers, no. Different variations with pros and cons, with no variation being flat out better? Maybe.
    These seem more like the latter, just with tier numbers slapped on them for whatever reason.

    Anyway, IMO I just realized that your proposed afterburners would probably be a better replacement for the current Pull Effect passive. I don't know if anyone really cares to have an entire system whose only function is pushing them backwards, so it shouldn't be much of a loss. :P
     
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    Ok so, for one I have implemented the base line for the power reactors, which I will say now will not remain the same as it is now as I gain feedback from responses.

    Also, as a general question, who would like to see a log of edits to the OP be implemented for legacy purposes?

    These seem more like the latter, just with tier numbers slapped on them for whatever reason.

    Anyway, IMO I just realized that your proposed afterburners would probably be a better replacement for the current Pull Effect passive. I don't know if anyone really cares to have an entire system whose only function is pushing them backwards, so it shouldn't be much of a loss. :p
    Yeah, as I said earlier, tiers were the first word to come to mind, so that's what I went with.

    And I've already seen many good suggestions, just like yours with the afterburners being a substitute for the pull effect, which is exactly what I wanted when I posted this. I will modify parts of the original post as to fit with what most people seem to think something should be. The end goal here is to create a full blown data sheet for the dev's to use should they choose to, as to implement this system.
     
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    alterintel

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    Anyway, IMO I just realized that your proposed afterburners would probably be a better replacement for the current Pull Effect passive. I don't know if anyone really cares to have an entire system whose only function is pushing them backwards, so it shouldn't be much of a loss. :p
    I know this may be a bit off topic, but I actually currently use the pull system as a tractor beam and also as a afterburner. As a tractor beam just link it to a beam/cannon at a 100%. For a afterburner make a tractor beam on a docked entity that docks backwards and fires at the mother ship. Use a wireless block and an inner ship remote to trigger it. Depending on the size of the mother ship it may take a lot of pull blocks though. :)
     

    Lecic

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    I know this may be a bit off topic, but I actually currently use the pull system as a tractor beam and also as a afterburner. As a tractor beam just link it to a beam/cannon at a 100%. For a afterburner make a tractor beam on a docked entity that docks backwards and fires at the mother ship. Use a wireless block and an inner ship remote to trigger it. Depending on the size of the mother ship it may take a lot of pull blocks though. :)
    Yeah, but you can also do that with push beams. Besides, this wouldn't change the weapon effects of push, just the passive.
     

    alterintel

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    Yeah, but you can also do that with push beams.
    Probably is the same, but I feel that I get a bit more control with pull vs push. I've been experimenting with a full range movement manned turret that controls the mother ship's movement via pull beams.

    But your right we're talking apples and oranges, since the active effect is what would be used.

    anyways, back to the OP topic... :)