Eh, any sci-fi that has gravity-control negates any structural impact from maneuverability. It's only ever the wetware(crew) that really suffer from quickly maneuvering (for the same reason centrifugal gravity works) in sci-fi without gravity manipulation. That's where Sheer Modulus comes into play IRL engineering and why large massy things like the
SaturnV can most assuredly accelerate like a dog with a sparkler up it's hiney. S5 could even accelerate MUCH faster if it didn't have wetware onboard. A LOT of preconceptions about space maneuverability come from people using the word "ships" causing them to associate it with seafaring ships and their maneuverability in WATER. I've read more than a few sci-fi that deal with that too,
Troy Rising for example(EPIC READ!!!). From a balance standpoint I see why it's implemented even if I personally disagree with the WAY it's implemented for the most part(boxdim&mass&thrust Vs pure mass&thrust).
I can agree on the jamming part, info-war in SM is just trash ATM.(beta excuses I know)That's kinda mitigated with a sane weapons range though(EG not 100+ km for a lock-on missile)
Despite all that I think you'll agree one of the greatest buffs&fixes to lag in the game was the deterministic missiles. I'm looking forward to similar buffs once the LOD meshes and chunk priority are ironed-out.
An interesting side-note: Disabling animation on blocks seems to REALLY help low&medium spec computers deal with larger ships(and planets too, because lava), but that's a server-side block-config option that can't be effectively done client-side(WHY? IDK, the cat-god wills it).
I think having an upper limit on blocks(or dimensions) for ships COULD be(is) a good balance and performance thing. But a large portion of the ACTUAL balance issues in the game are more intrinsic to the piece-by-piece way starmade is programmed with new features and semi-haphazard removal of old ones.
Yes, if you use a method of movement that does not rely on gravity, sure, like.. jumping? (Or Star Trek warp drives, or wormholes, or streamslipping, etc.) I don't expect jumping to be slower for a larger ships in StarMade, and it isn't. (And I am using nomenclature local to StarMade here by calling them "ships" rather than "space craft"; this is intentional.) I do, however expect any sort of movement that has a ship moving through space, subject to centrifugal forces, to result in that ship requiring an exponentially greater amount of structural reinforcement based on the dimensions of the ship to pull off the same maneuvers as a smaller ship. But there is no such mechanic in StarMade. Instead we have the diminishing returns on thrusters and turn speed. Is it a fair trade off?
People get stuck into this mentality of "build as big as possible" because this is how you make the most effective ships even with the thrust and turn speed drawbacks. Are thrusters some kind of expensive block in StarMade? No. They are made out of the most plentiful resource in the galaxy. So players end up building ships that are much too large for most people's computers to effectively handle. There must be some kind of drawback to building larger that scales in size, but which also effectively renders building "too big" to be a waste. It should "seem realistic," even if it isn't, but I don't see the dev's including centrifugal force and then having ships break at key structural points any time soon if they decide to suddenly turn really fast. We build ships out of blocks here. This game isn't supposed to be a Nasa space simulation engine.
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How does that help ships that are too big and slow to evade dumbfire missiles?
If you build your ship too slow to evade dumbfire missiles, then that is your fault. haha
And secondly, if your ship is so large that it CANNOT be made to move fast enough to even escape dumbfire missiles, then that's great. Working as intended.™ There
must be a point at which ships are too large and are vulnerable if we have any hope of StarMade battles not always being determined by "who has the bigger ship".
Though to me, individual ship mass is less of an issue for lag than docked entities/turret lag in fleets (as a result of bounding box lag). But then again, we have server hosting that has good upload speed to our users, so it can handle the transfer of data for these larger ships to clients for the size limits we have specified (1m mass hardcap). As a server admin though, I can tell you right now that we had a LOT more server-killing lag merely from turrets on fleet ships. And secondary to that, fleets crashing into each other when moving from sector to sector because they all try to cram into the same exact point. What can be done about the bounding box lag from docked entities/turrets? I don't know. Maybe implementing bubble shields for ships, so they bounce off each other rather than having to calculate each individual block collision? Or maybe a new type of dock that fuses a docked entity to the main ship, where it does not detach if the dock breaks? Or turrets pre-calculate what their movement range is ahead of time and then when actually moving, it just follows that set of rules, ghosting through any external ships? Then for fleets, they really, really need to NOT use the same point in space to try and move the entire fleet to when moving to a sector. It should be a grid of trajectories that are offset by the bounding boxes of each ship.
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I have issues with hard-limiting build sizes on a server. It encourages min-maxing and lowers the chance of interesting fights with big contrast (small frigate fleet vs one big mothership).
Correct me if i'm wrong but so far i haven't seen anybody mention an alternative to hard limiting the size of ships/fleets. What about increasing block costs (credits and manufacturing) by a factor of anywhere between 100 times as expensive to 1000 times as expensive? On an intuitive level it seems like it would act as a natural limiter for how many blocks can be expected to be seen in any given fight, helping performance and also reducing some construction tedium since the average player is more likely to want to construct a 1k mass ship rather than a 100k mass ship, while not hard-limiting the entrepreneurial souls who want to pour their souls in those huge builds.
Of course there would be cons:
-How to balance astronaut mining so someone who is broke can actually afford a tiny mining ship?
-Eventually, given a long enough stalemate/peace time, big factions will still lag the game
I think the devs should really consider including an optional fuel component. Because this would definitely be part of what determines how big a player wants to build. But then we should have interesting mechanics for mining and creating said fuel, like different kinds of production facilities. Also maybe different kinds of power reactors. This is the kind of variability that I think would make the game more interesting and also more realistic. Just because someone builds a giant ship doesn't mean they have the resources to keep that ship running.
But, in any case, if you battle against a larger ship with smaller fleet ships, you will notice that the fleet ships almost always suffer casualties, but they also win vs ships many multiples their size (if you build them right). This is due to how they mitigate damage against larger turrets by minimizing the block damage to individual entities at a time and also because they are a lot more efficient block per block, pound for pound. Though you do run into issues if there are too many projectiles and the server starts dropping calculations because it can't keep up, effectively turning the spam of weapon fire to 0 damage.
