The Bundle - Design, Weapons, Armors, Block positioning, AI, etc

[Battle]

Hello,

===> Before I start, a shorter summary of the ideas is some posts below!

I started to play this game since several days, and I was really impressed about its potential. I also like Minecraft, building stuff in general, combining design and function to seek perfection in my creations.

Anyways, as this game is full of potential for creativity, action and wars, I would like to contribute by giving some suggestions about the already existings items and blocks.

I also want to remark, I damnly admire the bold use of exponentials in the formulas, which is, in my opinion, a too rarely used key to improve a high amount of games. Let me start. (Any numbers are fictional numbers to represent relation inbetween, and not actual values from the game content itself.)




Design of ship sizes, damage and durability

In this case, it is important to give all ships of every size functions and not leave them simply outclassed by bigger ships. These factors are to be considered in this case: Invested credits into the ship, size, speed, damage output, armor.

- Anti Matter Cannoncs should be reworked: There should be reasons to have both, cannons with smaller stack amount and cannons with higher stack amout (stack => if mulitple cannons are connected, this is the number of those cannons). Increasing the stack amount should cause the following: The damage per second (dps) increases linearly, the cadence decreases exponentially slightly (4% per stack) (it will be compensated in the damage to make it increase linearly), the range increases exponentially (5%) and capped to prevent extreme values, the bullet speed decreases exponentially slightly (3%), the explosion radius increases expontentially slightly (5%, but beginning with no explosion radius at all by 1 stack) and a penetration rating should increase (penetration is a value to increase the efficiency of "larger" weaponry against high armor and shields). Also the size of the bullets need to be scaled and maybe the sound altered.

=> This has the following results: Smaller ships will be able to survive by dodging the shots of much heavier ships as these are slower and harder to hit. Bigger ships will still be able to hit smaller ships (or be stronger overall against them), but huge ships won't hit tiny ships so they will need to rely on other weaponry like own interceptors, turrets or support from escorts. The penetration value will face a armor/shield value. A huge cannon should cause full damage on a ship of the same size and appropriate defenses, while a smaller cannon should cause reduced damage to them.

- The altering of weapon statistics is a good idea, however I would recommend to leave that part away. It makes the game too mathematical (this kind of math needs to be hidden ingame!). I think with the alterations above this part gets obsolete. However, if you want to keep this at all costs, alter it to have like bars of 5 chunks to each attribute (speed, damage, cadence, range), so you don't adjust it from 25% to 37%, you rather adjust it from 3 to 5 chunks. At the end the relations inbetween are calculated, don't restrict the settings to be capped at x points (now it's 100%). If there is a distribution of 3/5, 2/5, 0/5, 0/5, it means 60%, 40%, 0%, 0%.

- The AI needs improvement, that's clear anyways. However, if you buy a ship from a blueprint, its settings regarding AI and controlbar (0-9) should also be saved and auto-activated. If there are turrets, don't force the player to activate the AI for each of them. If there are ships docking, make it possible to use them as interceptors, if the AI has been set so. The more interesting part will be the re-docking of those, this should also be automated. Use the controlbar to undock interceptors or to redock. Give the undock a cooldown of like 20-30 seconds, and allow the redock to be a beam (on left click) which redocks the hit interceptor if it is assigned to the carrier. Its docking slot needs to be reserved for that time, so nothing else can dock there as long as its alive.

- The price increase of items to a higher quality has to increase more than its utility. Meaning, while the efficiency of an item increases by 40%, the price should increase by 100%. Also, the basic item should not get rendered as worse in every aspect, there should still be a small advantage in having them built in except the lower price. Make worse hulls for example have much less weight.



Items and blocks, positioning, battles

- Energy generators have a really good formula. However, if you use the same amount of generators 1-stacked each instead of stacked together in the appropriate pattern, they are more efficient, but do not even need more place or do not even interfere with the stacking of other parts (you can fill the holes with shields which need no coherence). Adjust the formula, so that they are less efficient if not stacked together and more efficient if you stack them correctly together. Maybe think about making energy "using up" the cuboid they are occupying with their dimensions, so that more generators will generate much less energy (but still some). => This will kind of transform inner space, which should (but does not have to) be surrounded (more to that later) by hull pieces, directly into energy. Additional separate generators should not generate additional energy in that cuboid area. This will allow a mechanism to limit the number of inner parts of a ship.

The optimum is, as of it now, to fill the ship with as much stuff like shields, energy, weapons to maximize the efficiency - remember, "potential" in games is easily converted to "necessity", if you CAN do something to improve something, you will HAVE to do it to maximize the utility. This is not a mechanism which is fun, as it forces you to do things only because the game mechanism dictates so. The way with the energy generators would rather allow the player to focus on decisions about how to adjust the ratios of things. So you can build a well balanced ship, a devastating weapon platform or a sturdy bulwark or anything inbetween. Also you can leave free space in the interior of your ship to walk around without having the thought of inefficiency!



Battles should not only be about destroying the ship core. One should always seek to weaken the enemy and dismantle him from his ship parts. Fights between small ships (length ~5-10 blocks) should not take much time... maybe like 0-2 minutes, depending on the skill of the pilots. Fights between medium ships (length of 15-25 blocks) should take some more time, like 2-6 minutes. Fights between heavy ships (length 30-50 blocks) should take like 4-10 minutes. Anyways... it's not about the time by itself, it's more about the epicness of the fights. The larger the ship, the sturdier it should be, especially without shields! While the fight beginnst, the shields are the first line of defense. After that, the armor should get damaged, but not simply destroyed (like one-shotted nowadays), it should use armorpoints/hitpoints up! As soon as the hitpoints fall to zero, the blocks itself will be vulnerable and can be destroyed (hint: think about a function to rebuild ships with repair tools or via a repair pod on a station or just simply by a shop) (all hull blocks get also destroyed... fire and explosions everywhere on the outsides!). Blocks which are destroyed will get kind of almost transparent (by having holes) and they ignore collision and everything can shoot through them. This should let ship parts look like wrecks.

- The hull: It is also a thing you can and should spam if you feel like having space left over in the inner space and want to reinforce your core. The hull should mostly rather be only at the outside of a ship. To accomplish this, the solution might be the following: Everything which is inside of the outer hull parts (and themselves too) will add hitpoints. To program it, this might be the needed hint: Every block which is surrounded by at least 4 (Not more or less! This is for ship designing purposes! 5 could also be acceptable, it just needs to be checked if that can be exploited.) hull blocks will add to hitpoints. As the size of ships increase with 3 dimension values, the hitpoints would also increase exponentially. There would also be a problem with cube shaped ships as those would have the most armor this way. I think it is ok to let hitpoints scale that way and cube ships might have disadventages too. Damaged hull should be repairable, and it should not regenerate automatically. Maybe make repair drones possible to fix that... or shop function to repair, or station repair pods.

- Also: Damage on non-hull parts should be increased, and damage on normal (non-hardened) hull should be slightly increased. This could also be applied for shields, making them having more "efford" absorbing damage from weakspots.

- Inner Parts: As soon as shields and armor are down, inner blocks of the ships are vulnerable. Each stack of something should have its own hitpoints together based on their amount. The overall block number of the ship except hulls could also modify the stability of those parts, making heavy ships still sturdy, while small ships will not suffer for long. As it is now, every block is kind of one-shot... that is so wrong! If a block with stacks gets destroyed, all of the other stack parts should also be destroyed together. These could also cause explosions which could cause chain reactions (which mostly just damage other blocks a bit).

- Shields scale quite well. However, together with the potential changes to energy and its limitations, they might need some adjustments in the formula. Keep the exponential part however, it is quite clever. Also the energy usage should be more like a permanent drain in form of reducing the maximum power capacity, or, which might be better, absorbing damage drains shield points and energy aswell, making too many shield generators obsolete. Anyways, there needs to be a restriction to prevent players to spam their remaining interiors with shield generators!

- Power storage is a good way to enhance the power potential in particular. It should also be one of the decisions to make, so I would suggest to do the following: They increase energy capacity lineary, giving absolute storage per piece. However, they reduce energy regeneration by an absolute slight amount each. Maybe combine it with stacking it together for more effect and less regeneration drain, but with no special position requirements.

- Engines need some rework. As for now, it seems like the ship core is the center of movement upon turning the ship. This should be changed (I don't know exactly how). Also, which can be easily fixed: Engines should have the need to have empty space on their output. In the line they are outputting, there must not be any block! Stacking them in a line is fine, but the output needs to be free of hull or the whole line would be "blocked" by a hull part. Other items could get allowed, which are not hull blocks or utility blocks like generators, shield generators, weaponry, etc (so one can place lava blocks there for design purposes, but no "combat relevant" items). This will make engines a vulnerable soft-spot for ships and guarantees their position at the back of the ship... and not in the interns somewhere. (Another option is to count the amount of together stacked engines and count the amount of "outputting" engines. Each outputting engine could handle some "intern" engines, which makes them work. This would have to increase with engine size to allow multiple layers of engines on big ones.)

- Armor stabilizers: This is actually a block which could be quite a good fit to the armor idea. It increases armor by a linear amount, but reduces energy capacity, but slightly less than shields. Also they give way more durability overall than shields. Maybe they could also regenerate armor slowly. Also they could increase the defense they grant versus penetration slightly.

=> This would allow very sturdy tank ships to withstand great siege and havoc for a long time or just prepare for bad cases.

- Speed: The speed should vary between ships, depending on their mass and engines. This could also use a exponential formula and an absolute amount to limit extreme speeds.

- Escape: There needs to be some sort of escape possibility, which is independant from regular speed. Maybe some sort of charged teleportation or lighting speed to home coordinates. It could also cost some sort of reagents. I have no clue (yet), however, pirates following me forever until it is 30 of them is not really fun. Escaping mechanisms may not be used offensively however! Also they need to be surpressed somehow, but not totally prevented. Complicated theme.

- Death: While shields and armor are down, there should be a third lifebar, "structure points". Dealing damage to ship parts will decrease it, dealing damage directly to the core will deal extra damage to it. The structure points should be in relation to the amount of total ship blocks. Death should occour as soon as the bar hits zero, which could be achieved if like ~30-50% of the ship has been destroyed (if not fired on the ship core itself).

- Money system: The money system needs a clear rework. Having bigger and bigger ships should be an achievement. One should progressively be able to do harder things with more credits, and farming rocks, meteorites, planets, looting stations, killing pirates should be in a more appropriate relation. If you kill a pirate now, and he drops loot, you become very rich in no time. Also there need to be more pirates (but it is a very good idea to use blueprints for that, however, only allow selected blueprints to spawn them by standard) (but I assume this is clear anyways). Their loot should be much less, at least only a few variety of items, or else the inventory is full in one second. Their wreck should be salvagable, but it should not give too much money.

- Turrets: Some more things regarding turrets... it could also be interesting if you could connect the main ship weapon system with the weapons of a turret. This could allow less mobile ships to have rotating cannons. Also, stop own shots from own ship blocks, guns need to be at the outside of a ship and cannot fire from the inside out. This should cause Line of Sight or Line of Fire for guns.

- Movement: Movement of ships depends on engines. If engines are on the back, the movement is the best if moving forward. Moving backwards or sideways should progress very slow. Introducing stabilizators could be ideal for that, allowing better maneuverability and untypical movement (strafe down/up/left/right).




So... that's it. I sat quite long here to type all ideas here. I am aware some of these things might have been already posted, but I just wanted to post all as a whole coherent bundle. However, I am sure, the game depth and fun factor would increase enourmously. I would really want it to get to a level, where it can achieve success similar to Minecraft.

Greetings,

Battle

 

[Ultraviolet Dugong]

A good way to stop the core drilling issue would be to incentivize destroying the rest of the ship. Maybe add some kind of \"core shield\" block that acted as a second, stronger shield for just the core? By the time the attacker is at the point where they can hit the core, they should have already breached the main shields, so the core shield blocks would be wide open for attack. Ideally, this would make it far quicker to simply destroy the core shield blocks than pierce the secondary shield itself.



Edit: And you absolutely have a point about optional becoming mandatory. A good game, in my opinion, should provide many, equally viable choices that cater to different playing styles. To some extent, letting players slap on tons of everything without any sort of negative penalty for doing so (other than turning speed, which, let\'s face it, is an annoyance of a balance mechanism), makes gargantuan ships a necessity. Now, a properly balanced economy might fix this problem on its own by forcing players to choose ship parts wisely.

 

[Battle]

Core drilling is really something that should be avoided. The core has so many uses already, beginning with being the axis for turning, being the block which only needs to be destroyed to kill, being the block to enter the ship and giving base stats. I would rather like to see people choosing to take pieces of the ship apart to destroy a ship and having explosions everywhere. The mechanic with shields / armor hitpoints / structure hitpoints would take care of that. However, there should be squishy targets, meaning non-hull parts, which should increase the damage taken if hit there, for all types of hitpoints.

Also some additions regarding \"penetration\":

- Stacking weapons increase penetration, stacking shield generators increase protection for shields, the \"inner room\" as stated above define the amount of protection for armor and hull, stacking armor stabilizers increase protection for hull and structure some more. With every shot there is a penetration versus protection check to calculate the damage dealt. Making many small fighters ineffective to harm much bigger ships, as big ships will also have problems hitting small ships - however, having more arsenal to defeat those (but they cost a lot more, and it\'s quite fair to win and survive that), which would be turrets, and own interceptors of similar sizes.

- The way with regulating everything with correct costs is also possible, but that would also mean, design elements will always be inefficient and expensive. I mean you can for example put those triangles on the hull to decorate. These should give some advantage. Another way is to let all inner hull parts count as weightless if they are not necessary for calculating the \"inner room\" (if they are surrounded by 4 blocks, they count as adding to armor and structure hitpoints). Also, regulating with costs means bigger is better. Yes, that\'s true, but small ships should still be of use. For example to fight other small ships or medium sized ships with big cannons. Medium ships could also be fitted with many small cannons and more maneuverability to fight small ships.

Btw: The costs need to be reworked and rebalanced anyways.

- One more thing, aiming and shooting needs to be enhanced. It should be similar to Freelancers, an older, but really good game. If you target an enemy, there is an indicator where to shoot to hit them on their given speed and movement direction. More important - the weapons need to focus their fire on the plane/level facing you orthogonally if you try to shoot on the targeted enemy. Now, they only do that if you click on a block of the target ship, and if you predictally shoot, they shoot without focussing as you did not target the block. Anyways, the focusing area needs to be a circle around the target ship and the indicator, connecting those 2 circles\' \"edges\".

 

[Battle]

I will do a summary of the ideas I posted above, as it really seems to be quite too long...




- Anti Matter Cannons: The more stacked (placed adjacent to increase their size), the more range, less bullet speed, less cadency, more penetration, more explosion radius. Damage increases via damage/second lineary, meaning 10 pieces stacked will do 5 times as much damage as 2 pieces stacked. The difference is, smaller pieces will do less damage on bigger ships with heavier armor.

- Altering of weapon stats via the weapons-menu will not be necessary. If that should be kept, make usage easier and saving a ship also save these settings. For example 0-5 points each stat instead of 100% to distribute. After that, the ratios inbetween will be calculated instead of distributing the rest on every stat.

- AI: Improve AI intelligence. Save AI settings on turrets and docked ships. Make undocked ships having reserved docking place. Grant settings like: docked (ship stays docked), undock (ship gets undocked), aggressive (undocks to fight, returns afterwards). Leftclick would undock, rightclick could alter the other 2 settings.

- Energy generators: These should act as a limitation for other modules. The space they are occupying (cuboid) within their 3 dimensions, should not allow energy production for more energy generators built there. Other modules will either reduce max energy capacity or cost more energy to function, this way they limit the amount of other modules, allowing more free space within space ships to walk around without being guilty for ineffeciency. Also you can barely alter anything if the ship is fully spammed once, and spamming it full with everything is not fun. Power storage should be also part of the decisionmaking: They reduce energy regeneration for more energy capacity. They scale lineary and can be stacked to improve their effect while reducing the negative effect very slightly. Also: Singular or less stacked generators should not grant more energy than stacked together generators. Best way to maximize shields and energy is by putting them in a \"X O X O X\" pattern. That makes no sense that way.

- The Hull: Hull should be at the outside of a ship. Everything they occupy, meaning a block is surrounded by 4 other blocks of any kind, counts as adding to ship armor and structure. This will also allow decorations like rectangles on the outside to still have some function.

- Hitpoints: There are 3 types of hitpoints. First one is shield. Once it has no hitpoints left, armor will be damaged. Armor protects blocks from being damaged also, but it is much thoughter and does not regenerate by itself. After it has 0 hitpoints left, structure and blocks itself will be damaged. Blocks will explode (deals some damage to adjacent blocks) and get destroyed as a whole if stacked together. They will not vanish, they will be transparent(ish) and look like wrecks, without collision any more. If structure hitpoints hit 0, the ship is destroyed and leaves a wreck of its remainings. Structure hitpoints are as much as it is needed to destroy 30-50% of the ship itself. Hitting squishy (non-hull) blocks will increase damage on shields and armor. If armor hitpoints hit zero, the whole hull will get destroyed. If the armor is breached, this means the ship is actually near to death. Also, armor stabilizers increase armor, while also granting a very slight armor regeneration, they reduce max energy cap as shield generators. Also, regarding penetration and defense, see my post above!

- Engine placement: They may not have hull or utility blocks on their output to provide speed. Allow lava and similary non-relevant blocks to be in front of them for decoration. However they still may be stacked together in some way, but need enough \"output\" to make use of the \"intern\" engines. The engines shall be at the outside and the backside of a ship, and not somewhere in the intern. Grant them more stability equal to normal hull, to not make them too big of a weakspot (which they still should be). Damaging ships from behind will deal increased damage this way.

- Speed should vary between ships. However it needs a fixed limit to avoid extreme speeds.

- Escape mechanism: There should be a way to escape from disadvantageus battles. It should be something like a worp jump or teleport to home. Maybe also phasing out of existence to escape, while shields go down and armor and shield regeneration is off and weapons do not work. It should take some time, so you cannot just simply instantly vanish easily. Pirates or even players able to follow forever and kill you is not fun. However there needs to be some counterplay to that, but no total \"you will never escape\" mechanic.

- Movement: Engine stabilitzators to allow better control and moving sideways. Without that, you should only be able to move forward or backwards and only a minimum of sideways. Turning should depend on engine distribution and get enhanced by engine stabilizers.




Greetings,

Battle

 

[Battle]

Feedback is still appreciated!

 

[Cloverfield]

Nice ideas but they are a bit complex, for me.

 

[Legolas170]

Interesting, perhaps I could introduce you to a new hull system. Every flat face of a ship shares hp based on the amount of blocks it contains, so a 7x5x2 flat plate will share hit points, and that is hull integrity. When hull integrity is compromised, the armor only gives a small damage reduction, say... 5%. So this way, hull can be important, and interacate designs for armor can also be made. This also would prevent pilots from building a ship with a cube of hull at one end, because the system only works with flat faces. So, as an example, let\'s say you are in combat with your ship, and you are fighting. Your enemy in a doom cube is scares, because as soon as you target one face of his cube and compromise hull integrity, you can scoop out his vitals. It would also provide a more cinematic feel, as there could be reports like \" Captain, Shields are down!\" \" We\'ve been hit! Port hull integrity is holding at 30%!\"



Thoughts?

 

[Battle]

Well this is a good idea, however this still leaves 2 points open:

1. Filling the inner space of the ship to the last edge with shield generators or hull pieces to achieve maximum efficiency (or better, reduce unnecessary free space),

2. Restricting outer ship design to have flat surfaces.

3. Having flat surfaces of hulls every 2nd block like this: [Core]_I_I_I_I_I_I --- [Enemy]

However, it is true that the actual shield system needs good rework, as it scales too bad in comparison with the increasing damage by more and bigger AMCs and is the only line of defense you actually have (lower AMC damage output instead of increasing shield!). After it fails, your ship parts inbetween your enemy and your core vanish within few seconds. Also there is much more potential than just having shield hitpoints and alternating regenerations.

If you want to build in a mechanic with having different defenses on each side, it needs to be done with shields, especially because they do not need to be placed in specific formations. However, to adjust that part of the idea... it might be possible to do that with having shield generator stacks. Each stack of shield generator would splitt the shields into more pieces. With 1 stack, you have 1 singular shield on the whole ship (like now). With 2, you would have a one shield at the front and one on the other side. With 4 you would have 4 parts, like front-, left, right and backside. Now the important thing: You can adjust where to place which ones, as you can have them stacked differently and might want to have stronger shields at specific places. You basically set the point where they \"radiate\" the shields from in an orb, which then will be \"layed\" on the hull (or just pick blocks which radiate them). With some clever calculations this should be possible to accomplish. However, this can also be simplified. The effect would be to have shields which can separately regenerate while not being under fire and having more shields overall by having more separate stacks, which each having \"diminishing returns\" by the exponential formula. Also allow a function to simply scramble all shields generators to generate into one singular shield (like now).



Anyways, these ideas would improve gameplay in terms of efficiency and designing, even though these are more complex in nature.

 

[Legolas170]

Well, I left some parts out of the additional post

1. The stacking only works with armor.

2. There is a maximum area, say 10x10x10, if there is more armor that that, it starts a new group

3. I was Hoping that the system could also work with wedges

4. Pretty much anything is better than the hull system that we have now, except the idea of armor being based on total ship armor, because it\'d be possible to create a giant solid cube at the end of your ship, and being invincible.

I have successfully out thought you!



a.k.a. Spending far too much time thinking about it in the basement :/

 

[Battle]

Well the armor hitpoints would not be based on the total amount of hull pieces. If any block (also empty space, where you could walk around in the ship) is surrounded by at least 4 hull blocks (so 4 of 6 possible directions), no matter how far they are, they add to the armor hitpoints. Also if the block is a hull block and at the outside of the ship (if there is 1 direction, in which there is no block anymore), it also adds to the armor hitpoints. (all this only for the cause, that you do not need to fill the ship with more hull parts)

Of course you could just build randomly a huge hollow hull block, but this would make your ship 1. an easier target, 2. not giving him more fire power or anything of utility, 3. making him slower and less maneauverable. It only gains more armor (and structure hitpoints). 1. and 3. are issues bigger getting ships have anyways, 2. one would be avoided by filling those blocks with utility blocks. And in that case you automatically just built a bigger ship in a shape of a cube, and doing exactly that is an intended feature.

 

[Legolas170]

Are you agreeing with me, or are you saying that there are more problems? It seems like you were critisising the hull groups, which prevents doom cubes. It also rewards thick hulls. What do you have a problem with?

 

[Battle]

My effords are going in a way to reduce the mindless filling of the inner space of a ship with shield generators or just hull. To accomplish this, you have to make this procedure either impossible or ineffective. The reason is, it is not fun to have your ship at the end of your work filled with that stuff, only because it\'s the most reasonable stuff to do (leaving space free means you leave protected parts (or rather: invisible) out just to be able to walk around for no reason yet).

If you would avoid that, you could walk around and you would have enough space left to modify your ship. This supports inner architecuring, later modification and therefore also better decision making how to balance utility blocks.

Hull is something, that has to be at the outside. Having it in the inside would mean the same problem would still exist. Being able to stack multiple layers of hull means it causes the same issues.

With the modification by my ideas, doom cubes would be no issues any more, as there wouldn\'t be the reason to have that shape to maximize utility (maximizing inner space and minimizing outer hull). There would be other ways, which favor cleverer designs.

So summirized, I am against your idea regarding hull layering, as this would work against the direction I would like to guide this game.

 

[Battle]

These changes would improve the gameplay by far, in all regards. Especially balancing the values would be much of an easier of an easier work this way.

It is not ment to improve only singular aspects of the game or adding specific things, it is a coherent bundle of ideas to improve everything. It would be quite some work of course, but it is worth it.

 

[Izikiel]

I do like those ideas, but the cannons and armour systems are a little iffy. This idea is still the one I prefer (you will have to search for the armour idea, but it is in there. They also talk about missile changes.

http://star-made.org/content/my-take-new-amc-system

 

[Ithirahad]

To semi-fix doomcubes, couldn\'t shields, weapons, and other utilities become FAR more powerful, but require ridiculous (and exponential) amounts of energy as they scale up to their current ridiculous \"endgame\" amounts? This way, a current doom cube wouldn\'t even be able to fire because of its extremely long AMCs and massive shield array, but a current frigate that is composed mostly of hallway space with a bit of space set aside for power and shields would work quite fine, as would a massive battlecarrier that has a nice big Main Engineering room full of power blocks and power tanks to power its two 100-block-long main AMC turrets, formidable selection of missiles, powerful shield array, and huge engine wall. However, if you tried to fill the entire thing, including hallways, ornamental rooms, etc. with power it would be too heavy, and if you tried to fill it with shields and engines or something it would no longer have any power.

 

[Battle]

@Ithirahad

Yes, this is exactly what I try to achieve! Having the possibility to build good looking spaceships on the outside and inside, while you maintain 100% combat efficiency. Also having reasonable possibilities and decision making with the utility blocks.



>> I do like those ideas, but the cannons and armour systems are a little iffy

Well, with bigger cannons you can penetrate bigger defense systems. Hitting will be increasingly more difficult, but the larger the target, the slower it gets, so overall it rather gets easier to hit. Smaller ships will be more and more difficult to hit. The energy consumption may also increase exponentially, making multiple weapons more energy-cost-effective, if you already have reached the \"penetration-cap\".

Just an imaginary list:

- Ship with 4 medium cannons: Good vs same sized ships. Moderately efficient vs smaller and bigger ships. -> This is a concept of an allrounder fighter, good to use for everything.

- Ship with 2 large cannons: Moderately efficient vs same sized ships, inefficient vs smaller ships, but very efficient vs larger ships. -> This is a concept of a bomber, ideal to dodge the heavy weaponry of large ships while dealing good damage to them. Does have less defense.

- Ship with 8 small cannons: Moderately efficient vs same sized ships. Very effective vs small ships, inefficient vs bigger ships. -> This is a concept of a cannonboat, destined to fight nasty little ships. Can also afford more defense.

- Ship with 2 medium cannons, but very much defense: A flying bulwark, able to withstand large amounts of fire and tank the damage of same sized ships. Smaller ships will have even less possibilities to destroy it. It needs to sacrifice damage though. A good method for Freighters, Carriers or just flying fortresses.

- Ship with 8 medium cannons, but very few defenses: Rains havoc amongst his enemies, but needs support to survive. It might also need to sacrifice some speed and agility to maintain his weaponry. Maybe a good stealth ship or a heavy gunship. Also a possible good interceptor, dealing high damage if being ignored by the enemy.



The armor system I thought of is to allow more dynamic and longer fights, by not only having shields, which can easily regenerate to full hitpoints in few moments, and also not to have ship parts which will be destroyed within seconds. Yes, the armor might be too simple at the first sight, but it would be the first step to implement such a thing into the game at all. After that point, you can do more fancy stuff.

The AMC system is also very improvable, no doubt. There are many possibilities, but I would still prefer the one I suggested. At least as the first step into the right direction. Many more things need rework anyway, but it takes much time and certainly much work. Just think about the concept of protecting other ships or recharging their shields. This could also be possible.

Regarding AMC some more words... maybe think about implementing more kind of AMC-like weapons:

- Medium movement speed, medium range burst fires with heavy damage and good explosion ranges.

- Instant beams with medium range, low damage, small area of effect. Constant firing.

- Cannons, medium speed, long range, medium damage, medium area of effect.

- Missiles, slow speed, long range, high damage, medium area of effect.

Additional mechanics: Ammonition, which reloads over time and depletes by constant firing (blocks to enhance recharge and storage). Ammonition which uses energy as source. Ammonition which uses energy as source, but drains more power the longer it is fired, but also deals more damage. Heat, which is generated upon firing, overheating forces cooldown (fire stop). Bullets which have chemical reactions on their way to the target, increasing their damage the longer they fly (long range damage), or vice versa, being efficient mostly on melee range. Heating up: Firing consumes constant ammo or energy, but the fire rate increases over time, making long bursts of fire more efficient.

The possibilites are endless. But the correct way is not to balance everything on one singular weapon, and rather add more weapon types later on.

 

[Battle]

/push

Also please disable this auto-popup chat in the forums. This is one of the most annoying things I have ever encountered.