The Quickfire Initiative: Rebalancing StarMade.

[Nauvran]

Quickfire = fast and "unbureaucratic" changes...

there is nothing to discuss here...

#waveshand

then stop showing up in here

 

[TheDerpGamerX]

Do you really believe this, or just lie to win an argument? This is the exact opposite of the truth, and a really cheap way of trying to make a point.

The game already let me build however big I wanted before the quickfire config artificially created your warped version of "reality".
The FACT is, nothing in the material universe says big things can't go fast. Drive them with sufficient force and they can.
A big heavy sports bike accelerates better and reaches a higher top speed than a tiny scooter.
A meteor flies magnitudes faster than a pebble you threw.

Some elements of the SM community got this weird idea in their heads, that big things can't fly well, and apparently they won't rest until they manage to thoroughly mess up the game with it. This is not realistic, nor does it make the game any better.

Why do they want this, though?
Because they are evil: It's harder to troll big ships because they die slower. Of course lowlifes will want to twist out an advantage however they can.
Same's true for this apparent hatred of scanners: Of course they want to make it more difficult to get max level scanning, how else would they grief unsuspecting players? They can't win a fight if they get spotted....

More to come when I have the stomach for it.
This kind of obstinate misinformedness is getting really tiresome.

In old vanilla, big ships did not die much slower. In fact, systems were so broken and unbalanced you could evaporate ANYTHING within mere seconds that didn't use the low damage chamber. The low damage chamber made ships near immortal to anything but very strong beam missile sticks. That was a horrendously balanced meta and everyone hated it. The notion that old configs were in any way or form "fair and balanced" is complete bullshit. And I don't know how you are designing your systems, but max level scanning is very easy to get in QF. And if you don't like getting "griefed" then maybe dont play on a PvP server?

You are trying to suggest that StarMade should be realistic, when it is anything but realistic. Look at space battles in Star Wars. You have these big slow battleships firing into eachother while smaller craft fly around and bomb. They are all at relatively close range from eachother space wise. Sci-Fi space battles are based off of 2D conventional naval combat rather than what space combat actually would look like. This is not realistic. Yet QF tried to reconfigure the systems to be more like Star Wars, in order to make the game fun. Whether they fully succeeded in this is another matter (personally I think it still needs a lot more work), but trying to imply that they are maliciously trying to ruin the game for others is a load of completely toxic bullshit that only serves to fan the flames.

A lot of people are complaining about QF now, but when the team was asking for people to help test and give feedback very few actually said anything or gave feedback. That would have been the best time to help the team, but now that the configs are implemented it's a lot harder to make big changes without having to redo a lot of other stuff.

Quickfire = fast and "unbureaucratic" changes...

there is nothing to discuss here...

#waveshand

Stop baiting. If you don't have anything constructive, useful, or informative to say then leave this thread.

 

[Zoolimar]

There are, in fact, a multitude of reasons (real-life and in-game) for a ship to be wide. These reasons include necessary systems such as power (nuclear reactors are not exactly small), fuel, ammo, and crew supply storage, crew habitation, weapon systems, communications, redundant systems, almost anything that makes a ship functional will necessitate a departure from the two-dimensional plane. For example, look at the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit bomber. The ideal stealth shape is an infinite flat plane, and that is how the design began. Once fuel, engines, weapon bays, and crew spaces were added, the design expanded.

Building wider also reduces the maximum torque on the ship (Torque=force times distance) by allowing for a mass distribution closer to the center of mass. The reduced axial dimensions also improve handling characteristics (crucial for a combat ship) and efficiency of logistics (refueling, docking, etc.).

Thing is most of those don't exist in Starmade. And you can build existing systems in any shape or form you desire.

 

[Scypio]

The FACT is, nothing in the material universe says big things can't go fast. Drive them with sufficient force and they can.

Realism does not mean balanced. Reality is NOT balanced. But a game HAS to be balanced to be FUN.

To sum quickly your point :
Small ships have to be faster than bigger ship. Because there's no reasons to use them otherwise. It takes away the fun of using smaller ships vs bigger ones in combat. It takes away the fun of engineering(or building if you prefer) in starmade as building bigger is just the scaled up version of a smaller ship.
That is also why we're so hard on thrusters. Because there needs to be disparity in ships classes.
Since this game is about building ships and eventually fighting with it, if both sides of the game are NOT fun because there's no disparity in ship's classes and size then what's the point ? I get it. You want your big ships to be fast and furious. But this won't happen for the sake of the game and all other players that don't build big ships for whatever reasons.

I can agree what we did is far from perfect. I would very much love to have a separate formula for acceleration and tmr so we can have a harsh acceleration on thrusts curve but a slower one on max speed. But that's not the case today and we work with what we have.

 

[Forsyth]

Thing is most of those don't exist in Starmade. And you can build existing systems in any shape or form you desire.

I understand that, but a fair bit of your post to which I responded dealt with real-life comparisons. Even in-game, you'll find that a long but thin ship is difficult to maneuver, and a planar ship reduces the cross-section in two axes but presents a huge cross-section on the third. Nothing, whether it be in real life or in a game, is perfect, and engineering is a series of compromises. I think that this nature is executed fairly well by Quickfire, and it does encourage unorthodox solutions that may have been limited by earlier versions.

 

[Agame3]

The only thing with big ships is players need to feel some progression for them. In survival, IDK how you start and progress, so I'll talk about me. Though I suspect it is the same for everyone.
Start on a new survival world, online or offline, is I have enough blocks to make a small miner and go off, find a place to call my own later, find a shop, mine my soul out till I can make a station, claim the sector. At this phase, I'm loot for Isanths and if I run into some that guard roids, then tough luck, I'm toast.
Once I get enough resources to build a bit bigger than 100 mass, then I can make a ship that can still mine, but it can also fight Isanths. Some servers use stronger pirates because they like us to live in fear and misery for longer.
Once I have a ship that can hunt isanths in safety, I'm close to middle game and I'm the scare of all the noobs and all those who download BPs but don't know how to re-engineer them to fit their play-style. I won't go attack a station guarded with missile turrets, not even a pirate station, nor a battle-cruiser no matter what. Owning a battle-cruiser means that guy is old on that server and he probably has other old friends, so if I disrespect him I will have tons of troubles. Not even first bases are actually invulnerable to anything a smart player with almost unlimited resources can engineer.
Late middle game I suppose it's when I already have a ship strong enough to wreck pirate stations in a salvo or two in perfect safety. It's time to show off, talk about and test exploits and other good ship designs, I can test my ideas, I can duel in good battleships without crying if I loose. Some newbs think I'm an old player. Some newbs I help with materials and maybe a small warship, so they live in fear less time than others.
Late game is when server restrictions are the only limit. If an idea I tested is better than what my main ego wrecker uses currently, then I build another ship limited only by server restrictions, better than the previous one, just because I can and I enjoy doing it. If anyone messes with me or my online friends, I wreck his fleet, then his "invulnerable base" in the next few hours or sooner. Millions of warheads for tens of hundreds of warhead torpedoes, ship "antennae" made with warheads, thousands of bomb drones for blockades or station wrecking, all these are just a logistics minor problem now, if need arise. The specialized ship to deploy or use them is probably just one of my old dreadnoughts, taking some sector space for nothing anyway, until this need arises.

Now, QF team claims they tried and succeeded not only to do the good deed of balancing: the wrong chamber effects, unbalanced weapons, stabilizers forcing multiple bodies ships or spaghetti, etc. No, they say they aim hard to make noob ships better than dreadnoughts. Why is erasing progression in this game a good thing? Should new players with a less than 1k mass stealth bomber (less than 10 hours played on the server after you downloaded a good BP from the net) make the law? Should old players be punished because they are old? IDK. I'm in early middle game now, so I'm not talking from experience, yet.

 

[Alphajim]

If anyone messes with me or my online friends, I wreck his fleet, then his "invulnerable base" in the next few hours or sooner. Millions of warheads for tens of hundreds of warhead torpedoes, ship "antennae" made with warheads, thousands of bomb drones for blockades or station wrecking, all these are just a logistics minor problem now, if need arise. The specialized ship to deploy or use them is probably just one of my old dreadnoughts, taking some sector space for nothing anyway, until this need arises.

Wrong.
You can't do a thing to Home Bases. Not even with your outdated warhead torpedoes or any other weapon.
What about other bases ? You'll ask. Then I'll answer that except in RP servers and for some really big factions in other servers, there's not that much vulnerable bases. Because there's no need to, there's no reward to.
So you can wreck their fleet (if you're not facing a multiplayer faction) but not their HB. If you blockade their HB there could be some other players sending help. Or they could simply escape and build up at another spot.

Whatever, actually it's harder to gain money as shops now have finite money and blocks in stock. You'll have to manufacture everything.
And you're still wrong with the objective of QF. They are not making noob ships better than titans.

 

[MrFuz]

Howdy Howdy.
Despite me having 6 years on the game, I really have no idea how to PVP since I was stuck making miners since day 1. I like miners, but something that can apply from miners to PVP ships may be a different way to structure them.

Big ships and little ships are made out of blocks. Most of them are fancy, some of them are armor. But what if, there were "zones" and "nodes."


For example,
A barrel sticking out of a ship is where fellas would say the bullets come out. That is a "node" for whatever the gun "zone" contributes to the ship.

Zones can be damaged, effectiveness is reduced. Nodes can be eliminated, zone use is eliminated.

A way to balance ships is that zones have diminishing returns compared to volume.

Nodes or ships with a high density of nodes for their size or mass can have higher effectiveness.

A disproportionate swath of zone is required for big ships to be on par with a well balanced small ship, favoring the small ship in combat.

Likewise, a well balanced big ship may fair better against a small slow ship trying to tank.


Implementation..

Replace all system blocks, shields, guns with either "zone" or "node" blocks.
In a separate build mode, zones can be partitioned. Nodes adjacent to the zones may represent the zone.

Shooting out the engines might mean something.
Blowing up the missile racks might do something.


A hud item may highlight these "weak spots" after sufficient damage to zones of a ship to reduce the effectiveness of meta ships.

This would also make retrofitting and experimentation fast. Instead of checking every nook and cranny for a system block, zones blocks may just be assigned a per selected volume in a ship. Sorta like a bird's eye view of sections of the ship for different purposes.


Large zones may provide different benefits for their size.
Hundreds of tiny missile zones, a massive warp zone, all might do different things.


I realize that this is a strange idea that might not be fit for the game, but allows for interesting node based gameplay, and greater creativity in zone partitioning.
Thanks.

 

[Agame3]

Wrong.
You can't do a thing to Home Bases. Not even with your outdated warhead torpedoes or any other weapon.
What about other bases ? You'll ask. Then I'll answer that except in RP servers and for some really big factions in other servers, there's not that much vulnerable bases. Because there's no need to, there's no reward to.
So you can wreck their fleet (if you're not facing a multiplayer faction) but not their HB. If you blockade their HB there could be some other players sending help. Or they could simply escape and build up at another spot.

Whatever, actually it's harder to gain money as shops now have finite money and blocks in stock. You'll have to manufacture everything.
And you're still wrong with the objective of QF. They are not making noob ships better than titans.

Well, Warheads used to do their thing in any base. Ignoring its invulnerability. So, procedure was easy: 1. Make an antenna by using one core, one rail docker "under it", then place 8 warheads in it's "up" direction, remove the first 7, place 8 more, remove the 7 between the first and last warhead... Continue until it's too long (tall) or you get bored. Not less than 100 meters, though. 2. Blueprint the Antenna. 3. Get a large face ship (a miner?) of yours and place rail blocks on its face, in rows and columns 1 every 9 meters, to dock the antennae to it. 4. Get that ship to the HB that you want to play with and push into it, face forward.

Actually, the old deprecated torpedoes were harder to craft and use than antennae.

When you need to settle a score, that is a satisfaction in itself. When you don't care about someone, griefing them gives no satisfaction. But when someone pisses you off, the harder they play with your nerves, the happier revenge is going to make you. So this is the reward and need.

For blockades, what you can do only if 2 conditions are met (their base is not larger in every direction than 72 meters and they do have an undeathinator there to respawn there every time they die): Have large missile turrets, come to their base, fly around their base while detaching turrets one by one while you fly. Re-turret your ship from BPs, repeat if needed. Every time the blockaded people come online, before having the time to enter a build block or ship or anything, the explosion radius from a missile sends them to undeathinator and the cycle repeats itself forever. Untill someone geared good enough to wreck your turrets pass by. But by then, they lost almost all cash they had on, so it does not matter anymore.

PvP is of 2 kinds: 1. "Let's play together, I want to test my ship". We are both ready and willing to loose the current ship, it's all fun. It stops once one looses his ship or admits defeat in chat.
2. "I want to piss people off, this is how I socialize". Well, if you piss me off, I am trying my best to make sure that you will not have blocks or money to buy blocks too soon, by destroying all I can from what you own, periodically. People tend to be less annoying after they become shipless and poor, problem solved! Of course, smart guys keep money and valuable blocks in their HB, so that is a target that can not be ignored, though it is a difficult target.

Anyway, usually if someone pisses you off and only you, you have a problem and should seek professional help. But if they piss more people, then you are right to act. In which case, not many people will come to the rescue and admins will probably look the other way.

Shops always had finite stocks and finite money AFAIK and only the new NPC factions and personal shops combo has any use as a long term source of blocks. And NPC factions are buggy as hell. Exploration to find and use tens or hundreds of shops or mining and crafting or both is more pleasant.

Whatever, this was not my point. In my previous post I tried to say that removing or softening big ships advantages actually penalizes people that spend a lot of time in the game (a 100k mass ship alwais takes about 10 times more time to make than a 10k mass ship) and gives more power to those ADHD kids who lack the patience to do anything and demand instant gratifications for any action they make. Which may ease the strain on the server's hardware, but makes SM a game that is unpleasant to play. Big = time consuming to make. So biggest ships tend to belong to the most patient, mature, reliable players. Therefore, big=better should remain true.

And in my opinion, 10 meters long ships (with 25-50% of their mass in hull, usually, for the looks) should not play any role at all in PvP.

 

[Scypio]

No, they say they aim hard to make noob ships better than dreadnoughts

Idk where you get that from. I'm tired of someone claiming i'm thinking something else.
It's just not feasible in any logical way that a 1k mass ship can skywalker a death star in starmade. Yes there has been some problems, mainly with bombs being equivalent to memes, but that's about it and has been fixed quickly on our end.
However, having an intensive to use slightly smaller ships than your opponent is a good design. Because, for stability and sanity reasons, you cannot promote titans for everyone. Hence thrusts curve. But the rest is linear, so besides having a slow as fuck titan it should behaves the same as a 1k mass ship. It gives room for egineering and working with disparity in ships design and sizes. Having everything linear would be the end of what's left of ship's egineering in starmade.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Ok. I have to ask; why the hell do you guys HATE shields so much?

Every major update, you guys seem to do something that either...
1) increases the power cost of shields
2) lowers their capacity
3) slows their regen...

Seriously; Not everyone cares to be an EVE online armor tanker. ...and even if they did, the astro-tech isn't ready for that yet.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

A lot of people are complaining about QF now, but when the team was asking for people to help test and give feedback very few actually said anything or gave feedback.

There's a reason for that.

QF and their supporters made it clear that they did not want any feedback that conflicts with their chosen path for the game; even if that feedback is constructive or raw-data-based.

Not everyone is going to stick around after that's been made known.

 

[Alphajim]

QF and their supporters made it clear that they did not want any feedback that conflicts with their chosen path for the game

I see this argument sometimes. But I never saw any example besides "muh that's not what I want". Do you have any ?

 

[Nauvran]

I see this argument sometimes. But I never saw any example besides "muh that's not what I want". Do you have any ?

he kinda already prove your point
All he's doing is complaining instead of giving some proper feedback

Ok. I have to ask; why the hell do you guys HATE shields so much?

Every major update, you guys seem to do something that either...
1) increases the power cost of shields
2) lowers their capacity
3) slows their regen...

Seriously; Not everyone cares to be an EVE online armor tanker. ...and even if they did, the astro-tech isn't ready for that yet.

iirc it was because shields where still kinda overpowered? Im guessing at least, not sure

 

[aceface]

Ok. I have to ask; why the hell do you guys HATE shields so much?

Every major update, you guys seem to do something that either...
1) increases the power cost of shields
2) lowers their capacity
3) slows their regen...

Seriously; Not everyone cares to be an EVE online armor tanker. ...and even if they did, the astro-tech isn't ready for that yet.

Im all for buffing capacity or making it easier to have a larger amount of shield ehp than we currently have. I do feel and have for a long time based on experience in multiplayer battles that in combat regen ought to be nerfed to the ground, to the point where even small fighters can chip away (extremely slowly) at bigger ships shields. Theres nothing more I hate than someone out regenning your weapons, meaning no matter how good your piloting and aim is, you will not be able to do anything to the enemy ship. In the old days (pre 2014) shield regen was a lot weaker and it was actually possible a lot more than now to outmaneuver a bigger ship in a small ship and eventually take down their shields (after a long time).

 

[Dr. Whammy]

I see this argument sometimes. But I never saw any example besides "muh that's not what I want". Do you have any ?

The argument stands on the simple fact that QF's response to anything questioning, or criticizing their idea of balance is met with the same phrase... "working as intended". You consistently see this here and on Discord.

I can point you to one particular Discord chat where I gave feedback and data on how a previous version of the thrust curve impacted ships much smaller than the typical 40k mass multiplayer ship; only to be met with indifference by QF and a rather disrespectful tester who thought it was more important to brag about being a tester than to actually discuss the issue.

Why would anyone waste their time after seeing something like that?

he kinda already prove your point
All he's doing is complaining instead of giving some proper feedback

iirc it was because shields where still kinda overpowered? Im guessing at least, not sure

Not quite.

In several ways, this game is being altered to suit a limited scope play-style to the exclusion of all others; creativity be damned. But because some of you don't want to hear this, you say it's not "proper" feedback and complain that "no one contributes".

Regarding shields specifically:

Shield regen is what is over powered; not shields themselves. Over the past few builds, changes have been made to the config that have reduced shield capacity by 20% and increased their power draw by what appears to be 50%. Regen is considerably lower as well. That means you lose capacity, regen and power grid all in one set of changes. Quite frankly, I don't think they have considered how this will affect ships of different size classes; specifically smaller builds. Had they lowered regen and left power draw alone, there would be no more infinite-shield-tanking unless the size difference between the opposing ships is very great.
EDIT: ...or they sacrificed everything (speed, armor, firpower) to build a semi-effective shield tank.

Im all for buffing capacity or making it easier to have a larger amount of shield ehp than we currently have. I do feel and have for a long time based on experience in multiplayer battles that in combat regen ought to be nerfed to the ground, to the point where even small fighters can chip away (extremely slowly) at bigger ships shields. Theres nothing more I hate than someone out regenning your weapons, meaning no matter how good your piloting and aim is, you will not be able to do anything to the enemy ship. In the old days (pre 2014) shield regen was a lot weaker and it was actually possible a lot more than now to outmaneuver a bigger ship in a small ship and eventually take down their shields (after a long time).

Agreed. I've seen, fought against and produced high regen shield-tank builds and they do get tiresome, since not everyone has a spare 8 million gigawatt ion cannon lying around.

While I don't realistically see (for example) an X-wing single-handedly taking down an ISD's shields, the recent changes were excessive, to put it mildly.

A more reasonable solution to excessive shield tanking would be to simply reduce the rate of regen as well as upkeep values for charge blocks but leave their power cost alone. That way, for most of us, shields would function as a buffer to protect your hull (armored or not) but not as a form of permanent psudo-invulnerability.

And if someone, really wanted to go all out and fill their ship with regen in order to shield tank, they'd not be prohibited from doing so, but it would be a lot harder to pull off and far from cost effective space-wise and power-wise.

 

[Zoolimar]

I can point you to one particular Discord chat where I gave feedback and data on how a previous version of the thrust curve impacted ships much smaller than the typical 40k mass multiplayer ship; only to be met with indifference by QF and a rather disrespectful tester who thought it was more important to brag about being a tester than to actually discuss the issue.

I'm pretty sure that was the goal of the thrust curve. If thrust curve starts to actually curve only at 40k than all the ships of lower mass than that can as well not exist. Bar for people who only start playing on the server. Basically the size at which you can reach top speed or close to top speed is the minimum effective ship size. That's your "fighters" so to speak. The actual "cruisers" and so on will be 5-10 times that size.

So if you propose 40k to be minimum size -standard size for heavier ships will be 200+k mass. Most servers won't be able to handle more than 5-8 ships of this size in combat. And even that is doubtful.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

I'm pretty sure that was the goal of the thrust curve. If thrust curve starts to actually curve only at 40k than all the ships of lower mass than that can as well not exist. Bar for people who only start playing on the server. Basically the size at which you can reach top speed or close to top speed is the minimum effective ship size. That's your "fighters" so to speak. The actual "cruisers" and so on will be 5-10 times that size.

So if you propose 40k to be minimum size -standard size for heavier ships will be 200+k mass. Most servers won't be able to handle more than 5-8 ships of this size in combat. And even that is doubtful.

Actually, you weren't part of that particular discussion. Just so we're clear; your aforementioned tester was actually the one who originally cited 40k mass as the "standard". On the other hand, I do find it ironic that you acknowledge the negative effect large ships have on a multi-player server, yet your team consistently makes config changes that disincentivize smaller builds and encourage much larger ones.

Regarding "minimum effective ship size"... No.

Your team chose to make system blocks unreasonably heavy. ...which necessitates more thrust. ...which adds yet more mass, negates a good chunk of the thrust you just added and drains even more power. By the time you get to something with enough power grid to be "effective", you are well above anything fighter sized and you are NOT reaching top server speed. That's more of your forced giantism in action.

I'm not interested in discussing this dated topic further. Alphajim and Nauvran questioned the reasoning for my previous statement. Now all of you have a general idea what I (and others) experienced when trying to contribute something constructive to your group.


Back to my original question; Why do you guys keep nerfing shields?

 

[Zoolimar]

Your team chose to make system blocks unreasonably heavy.

Yes. We cut the mass of the reactor blocks that were making 60-70% of the ship mass before that and spread it to other systems. It made ships with more than 100% power draw a little less attractive. Though didn't stop NotManhattan from doing it.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Yes. We cut the mass of the reactor blocks that were making 60-70% of the ship mass before that and spread it to other systems. It made ships with more than 100% power draw a little less attractive. Though didn't stop NotManhattan from doing it.

That did not answer my question.