The Quickfire Initiative: Rebalancing StarMade.

[Scypio]

Hmm, would it be possible to put diminishing returns on weapons? Dogfights with tanky fighters will be long and arduous.

Doing that would simply result in splitted weapons. Which is not wanted.

 

[Neon_42]

Doing that would simply result in splitted weapons. Which is not wanted.

Im not sure what you mean by "split weapons" what does that mean?

Furthermore, having tanky fighters seems to be a big issue as well driving the player base to build swarms of small fighters vs. having diverse fleet complements. How would we solve this problem?

 

[aceface]

Hmm, would it be possible to put diminishing returns on weapons? Dogfights with tanky fighters will be long and arduous. Another option would be to have a steeper growth curve for armor so it really only benefits larger ships. I'm not sure how to do this, or what the best approach would be.

I'm sure theres some way to work around that, but issues with diminishing return weapons is someone will find a way to spam them so that they reap the benefits of the small weapons buffs. perhaps limit the buff on a ship depending on how many total outputs exist cross the whole ship etc.

 

[Scypio]

Im not sure what you mean by "split weapons" what does that mean?

What aceface said. You'll split your weapons so that you can Simply get rid of the diminushing return. That means that in order to make it work you need to add even more mechanics on top of it. Which means your mechanic is flawled from the start. A good mechanic is something that is simple and works without needing much more.

Furthermore, having tanky fighters seems to be a big issue as well driving the player base to build swarms of small fighters vs. having diverse fleet complements. How would we solve this problem?

There is no problem here because nobody will do that.
First the original claim was that fights between fighter sized ships. What size of ships are we talking about... ? 100 mass ? 20 meters long ? If i want to call my 400m long and 50k mass ship a fighter who stops me from doing it ?

I'll assume below 100 mass and 20 meters from now on.

Now it was claimed that for really small ships it would take a while thanks to armor being strong. That is completely correct. But the game is not evolving around dogfights and really small sized ships. So you got to live with that. Plus, the game being what it is : a voxel game where you have to destroy individual blocks with each a fixed amount of hp bring this entire problem. Fights for really tiny ships will take a while. Maybe more than big ships. Acid and armor formula exists so we can reduce this problem. But i'll always exists because starmade is a voxel. You have to destroy 100 hp blocks. It doesn't take the same time to do so if you use a gun dealing 10 dmg per seconds and one dealing 1000 damage per seconds.

Now on the problem of swarms vs one big ship... There is no problems here. First because swarms were always better than 1 ship in every situations. But you can't trusts bobby to use your ship correctly because he is drunk. So you don't give a ship to bobby and so he gets lonely and drinks even more.

Then a swarm is not the same as one member of the swarm against itself. First at each hit the big ships won't take a while to destroy a tiny member of the swarm. More of the contrary.

Then, the biggest counter for reducing the number of outputs for every ships stays the same. The armor formula. Explained in our documentation. To put it simply the ratio between the armor in line and the damage of the weapon gives you the reduction. If you have more armor than damage the ratio won't be good and the damage will be reduced. It can be reduced so much that it does 0 damage. I don't remember if there is a cap at 99% reduction.
While if you don't have much armor compared to the damage dealt it won't be reduced by much. Like 0.01% or even smaller numbers. So in the end the big ship can have more armor in line than the fighters and their 1 layer. So who wins ? Obviously the big ship because it has so much armor the swarm doesn't do any damage.

 

[Zoolimar]

Now on the problem of swarms vs one big ship... There is no problems here. First because swarms were always better than 1 ship in every situations. But you can't trusts bobby to use your ship correctly because he is drunk. So you don't give a ship to bobby and so he gets lonely and drinks even more.

I should add that this should not be a problem with Quickfire armour. As swarms are just outputs split over multiple ships. So a swarm would be less effective directly combating armour than a small number of ships of higher mass. CM and missiles allow to work around it somewhat. But CM needs a player and making missiles too weak will lead to spaced armour becoming incredibly effective and punishing the swarm.

On the other hand larger ship with beams should be able to swat swarm fighters left and right as their armour would be way below adequate to stop even beam weapons.

Corner case - ships with large un-armoured weak spots. But that's working as intended.

 

[Captain Fortius]

Soo, I hear this'll soon be official?
There are some rather good ideas in the OP. I like most of them.

The thruster nerf is the exception;

Thrusters:
-Nerfed thruster scaling overall. There should be more variance in ship maneuverability and top speeds now depending on ship size and design.
-Made diminishing returns on thrust harsher (ships physically cannot reach maximum speed cap after a certain reactor size)
-Increased TWR cap for max speed to 3.0

One of the few good things p2.0 did, was making thrusters decently powerful.
Yes, my ships all got considerably faster.
What needs to be kept in mind though, I put a considerable amount of effort to make them as high performance as they are; And I'm sure with even more planning and effort they could yet be MORE efficient. All of them reached the desired thrust ratio with really tight margins, and the systems were all built and rebuilt multiple times until I was happy with their effectiveness. Also keep in mind, those thrusters took space and power away from more shields or weapons, so I'm inclined to think it's actually pretty damn balanced as it is.

Do not change thrust (or block weights. I honestly think they work very well on basic settings now).

-Reaching 2.5 ratio is more possible than in the old days but not TOO easy. Requires sacrificing something else; Shields, Weapons, Interior.

-Big ships being unable to reach maximum thrust ratio regardless of how much space and power they sacrifice for their thrusters makes no sense , is bad game design, and goes against real physics, as discussed numerous times over the years of the game's existence. Balance is achieved by bigger ships having slower acceleration / deceleration, which is already present in game and needs no further change.

-3.0 thrust ratio could be too high. Flight speed, acceleration and deceleration times are already as high as they can get while still being practical.
This will adversely affect hitting your mark in combat, increase drift during manouvers, and make you overshoot your destination by considerable distances. Just use the jump drive if you want to travel fast and far.

To say something positive, Praise be for doing away with stabilizer distance / dimensions. That system is silly. And runs on witchraft.

 

[StormWing0]

Honestly what I'd like to see done with thrusters is make the facing direction of a group of them affect thrust in that direction more. So thrusters facing out the back of a ship affect forward movement more while forward facing ones affect the opposite directing more, and so on.

 

[EricBlank]

I totally disagree regarding nerfing thrusters; I think it's a necessity for balancing large and small ships. In a competition between two craft of similar density, dedicating equal power to thrust, I would for game plays sake like the smaller of the two to have the advantage in speed and manueverability.

I also like the above suggestion, but I worry it would force players to worry too much about balancing thruster directions on a build, plus, it's unnecessary as we already have a thruster config dialogue that pretty much controls that without having to worry about how the ship is actually built.



That does lead me to another weird train of thought; like i mentioned above, requiring thrusters to face a particular direction to achieve ideal acceleration in that direction would just result in players being forced to build all their craft balanced to function ideally, and we already have the thrusters config dialogue that does that for us. But we could also vary the max speed by axis, using the thruster direction configs we have now to determine not only degree of acceleration in that direction but also max speed when accelerating in that direction. Say, if your left-right axial thrust is left at 33% as by default, then the fastest you can accelerate to if strafing left-right is 1/3 your top speed. The craft won't slow down when holding the key if it's moving faster than that already, but you cannot accelerate further in that direction. To achieve max speed in any direction, the thruster configs would then need to be set to dedicate 100% of thrust to that direction.

In pvp strafing terms configs would probably be set to prefer left-right and forward-back strafing, because most people seem to prefer to turn/move that way (prevalance of vertical ships instead of flat, wide winged ships in pvp contests in current configs, where ship dimensions affects turn rates) pvpers would probably have configs like 10% up down, 45% sideways/forwards. It would also make a thrust config chamber more important in pvp, to adjust your speed limits in combat, probably. Overall probably not an improvement then, but I haven't heard anyone else even considering it, so I figured it should be thrown out there, I thought it was an interesting idea.

 

[Ithirahad]

Soo, I hear this'll soon be official?
There are some rather good ideas in the OP. I like most of them.

The thruster nerf is the exception;



One of the few good things p2.0 did, was making thrusters decently powerful.
Yes, my ships all got considerably faster.
What needs to be kept in mind though, I put a considerable amount of effort to make them as high performance as they are; And I'm sure with even more planning and effort they could yet be MORE efficient. All of them reached the desired thrust ratio with really tight margins, and the systems were all built and rebuilt multiple times until I was happy with their effectiveness. Also keep in mind, those thrusters took space and power away from more shields or weapons, so I'm inclined to think it's actually pretty damn balanced as it is.

Do not change thrust (or block weights. I honestly think they work very well on basic settings now).

-Reaching 2.5 ratio is more possible than in the old days but not TOO easy. Requires sacrificing something else; Shields, Weapons, Interior.

In all my time here I've tried not to act like the excessively blunt, dickish stereotypical PvP vet (primarily because I'm not one and don't have the first-hand experience to back myself up acting like that), but just this once, for about two sentences, I'm going to have to act like one, as I simply have a hard time putting this nicely.

Outside of whatever bubble you've been living/playing in for the past 1-2 years, that was decidedly not a good thing p2.0 did. The norm for combat ever since 2.0, at any ship size, as just been ships all going at the same speed, trying to carefully manage their range and then dump massive damage on one another. Doesn't matter if they're little "fast-attack craft" or huge star cruisers and battleships, they all go the same speed and accelerate at nearly the same rate. Part of the issue was just how weak defenses are per mass and power invested, but the other part is:

Assuming you follow certain guidelines for efficiency in hull and system building, and didn't bother with excessive armor, thrust and speed was really cheap.

To be fair, this doesn't show up easily in the building process for "normal players" like (probably) you and I, who might care more about the lore role or general concept of the ship we're building, and so build systems to fit a size and hull shape that we want. In that case, vessels may get fairly heavy, bogged down with "heavy defenses" for our "survivable" ship, along with giant chambers, simply because that is the kind of ship we wanted to build. For those who cared to win - those who would become very relevant to anyone in multiplayer as soon as Schema's empire mechanics were implemented - it was a different story. Weighing yourself down and trying to "tank" damage was pointless, because it's infinitely better to just stay out of harm's way unless you're dealing damage yourself.
Even if defenses in p2.0/weapons 3.0 were better than they are, being able to control range is important. Quite simply, if you have defenses, you take less damage for some period of time. If you can stay out of enemy range unless you're in an advantageous timing and position to destroy them, you take no damage at any period of time. Naturally, if everyone has the option to just go faster with minimal penalty, the arms race becomes who can get the fastest ship, with its logical conclusion being that everyone just barely caps out their acceleration to maintain range control, and then the rest of the power goes into weapons and maybe defenses if they don't suck.

This seems acceptable for really small ships, where high acceleration is the expectation anyway. As ships get larger, though, it seems only natural - and more interesting - for speed to become, increasingly, a trade-off, until you reach the extreme of lumbering "titans" which have no option but to design strong and potentially intricate defenses to stay 'afloat'. It promotes diversity to some extent, gives smaller ships something of a unique feature (counterbalancing the worse-than-linear scaling required to keep defenses functional in all scales in similar-mass fights), and also (though I'm sure we'll take lots of flak for this :P) sort of forces sufficiently large ships to comply with the expectations and sci-fi conventions of huge flying fortresses as opposed to strangely nimble beasts.

...Furthermore, do you really want 1m mass ships able to collide with things at max speed? That sort of thing tends to break servers. :P

-Big ships being unable to reach maximum thrust ratio regardless of how much space and power they sacrifice for their thrusters makes no sense , is bad game design, and goes against real physics, as discussed numerous times over the years of the game's existence. Balance is achieved by bigger ships having slower acceleration / deceleration, which is already present in game and needs no further change.

Having a top speed at all, and having a top speed that changes with maximum acceleration, goes against real physics to begin with, so that's already out the window. It doesn't make "no sense" in the intuitive sense, as we're used to larger things generally moving slower - a terrestrial tendency which, granted, doesn't hold up in outer space, but sure does show up a lot in sci-fi :P
As for being bad game design, you're going to have to explain that one further.

Also, by the way, those "big ships" that physically can't reach 3.0 TWR in the current state of config are IMMENSE. You'd have to ask Scypio for specifics (I've lost track of the thrust spreadsheets for the time being) but probably in the order of millions of mass. Larger than most things you will generally encounter in-game.
The main speed limit for large ships isn't physical, but simply practical - you CAN create a pretty massive 'ship' with 3.0 TWR, yes, but it will essentially just be a rocket. Almost no power left for weapons, shields, or chamber abilities, and very little margin for armor. And the bigger you want to go, the less power margin you get. Practically speaking, large fast ships aren't exterminated by the Quickfire config, though they may have to settle for somewhat below the total max speed if they want to be functional for any combat role. They just become more and more of a specialized ship type as total mass increases until they're entirely impractical.

-3.0 thrust ratio could be too high. Flight speed, acceleration and deceleration times are already as high as they can get while still being practical.
This will adversely affect hitting your mark in combat, increase drift during manouvers, and make you overshoot your destination by considerable distances. Just use the jump drive if you want to travel fast and far.

Hmm? 3.0 thrust ratio doesn't just mean you go fast. It means you accelerate (and hence decelerate) fast. So, flight speed goes up, but your accel/decel time scales proportionally. Overshooting isn't a concern. That's actually one of the more elegant parts of having top speed coupled to acceleration.

Aside from potential physics issues with high speeds, this is a non-problem.

To say something positive, Praise be for doing away with stabilizer distance / dimensions. That system is silly. And runs on witchraft.

Yep. I hope we can keep that :P

Also hopefully the community will be allowed a more meaningful role in helping Schine avoid this kind of nonsense to begin with.

 

[MrGrey1]

I'm coming here after seeing that this is going to be adopted. In particular I'm concerned about,

"Switched reactor level calculation to linear formula."

I wanted to clarify my thoughts further on this and say why I think making this linear is detrimental to the game.
(Unless somebody's got an alternative plan for tiers in StarMade?)

For fair competition there has to be tiers.
You can't have different levels of competitors in the same competition.
You don't put F1's against dirt bikes?
You also don't put Little League players on the field with guys from the Majors? (sorry if those terms are incorrect I don't do the sport but you get my drift?...
Likewise you don't put fighter ships against destroyers against battleships against titans... in war? Yes. In fair and balanced competition? No.

For these reasons StarMade has to have a way to be able to compare and classify ships so that they can be fairly judged against each other and a winner and loser decided.
You can't have a competition without it. This presents a problem, we all know the standing pun around here about everyone's classification systems being different.
The only way I can see it working is if the game makes this decision on classifications and ship sizes for the players, preferably through a fundamental mechanic and not some arbitrary numbers pulled from someone's proverbial...
the tiered reactor system does just this.

Some argue that ship comparisons should be based on mass. I argue this is not viable because you can build a small high mass high power ship that will trounce a much nicer but larger and better balanced ship of the same mass.
Mass is not a fair factor to base a ships performance on.
The only other alternative is to base the judgement on power. Every system on your ship is fundamentally effected by how much power you have, that includes mass. All the performance factors, size, mass, maneuverability, defense and offense are based on power.
Therefore the only fair way to compare equivalent ships is on their reactor size and power output.

Now, here we are about to take the reactors from a staggered, tiered system to a linear system.
This simply does not make sense to me...

If we stay tiered.

In Survival with PVP
People will naturally learn of the optimization zones, it' not rocket science. Ships will gravitate to these sizes and we will see a perfectly natural tiering system evolve on the Docks. Currently you have extra small ships at 19, small ships at 199, medium ships at 1999, large ships at 19,999, and extra large ships at 199, 999. Call them what ever you like but XS/S/M/L/XL works for me... There will still be ships in between these levels as they will offer their creators tactical options despite being comparatively inefficient to ships totally out of their classification class. You don't compare the efficiency of an aircraft carrier against a fighter, it's just stupid. Ok the 40k reactor is not as efficient as the 20K reactor but so what? You can't compare a 40K ship against a 20k ship so why does it matter? You can opt to build reactor optimized ships... with the caveat that if someone comes at you with a non optimized ship he's going to trounce your small ships and get away from your big ships. He's going to be in between your ships performance wise and that will likely give you problems irrelevant of whether or not he's running an optimized reactor. Basically all the tiering does in survival is add tactical options. It also increase your chances of a having a fight against forces with ships similar, comparative to your own... isn't that a plus? I think keeping it tiered adds depth to the strategy and increase your chances of having a competitive fight in survival. It's a plus, not a minus.

In Competitive PVP.
You play in ships that are equivalent in power. Otherwise it's not a competition. A fighter against a destroyer might be interesting, but it's not a competition. Therefore all ships competing against each other will have the same extra mass handicap IF they are not reactor optimized. Ergo NO problem there with tiered reactors. There is literally no effect on competitive PVP from having tiered reactors unless of course you want to classify your ships on mass instead of power so as to gain an unbalanced power advantage over your opponent... yah, won't tell you what I think about that.


If we go linear.
In Survival. Good luck finding a fight where your ships are roughly equivalent to someone else's ships. Your fighters are his destroyers? Fun fight? pfft. People will pick and choose whatever reactor size they like, bigger will be better. There will be no consistency on the docks. There will be no set sizes or agreements on what constitutes S/M/L ships. Basically a mish mash cluster fark like we have now.

In Competitive PVP.
It'll be exactly the same unless you are fighting ships that are not equivalent power... which means it's not competitive play..?

One of my favourite things about the new power system is the natural tiering that has become apparent. So. Can someone please explain to me why we're trashing this natural tiering system? What is proposed to replace it? Anything?
What is the advantage of having a linear reactor efficiency? I don't see it and I'm genuinely curious as to the arguments that have been put forth for it.

Cheers.
MrGrey1

 

[Scypio]

I see i am needed.

Concerning thrusters. Every size of ships should be able to get the max tmr : 3.0.
However, this cannot be done without investing a large portion of your mass into it. For some numbers coming from my sheet : a 500k mass ship should invest 80% of its mass toward this goal. Aka only power reactor, stabs and thrusters just to reach this cap.
There is a point where it is no more possible (because of the logarithmic curve) but this size of ship is so large it won't even be allowed on servers.

 

[aceface]

im confused, my ship that was fine pre quickfire now at idle uses 200% power, without using any module at all...

*edit* it seems like you guys doubled the power consumption of weapons. my missile system used 1 mil e/s pre quickfire now uses 2 mil e/s. I really hope you guys do not do this if you intend to nerf weapons. just half their dps, this way nobody has to refit. shields also seem to be massively more power hungry.

 

[Captain Fortius]

Outside of whatever bubble you've been living/playing in for the past 1-2 years,

And you have your head up your rear!
-And now that we've both had a harmless joke at each other's expense, we're equally difficult to take seriously on anything that follows :D

The norm for combat ever since 2.0, at any ship size, as just been ships all going at the same speed, trying to carefully manage their range and then dump massive damage on one another.

I don't think I played in the absolute first..... half year(?) of the game's life, but ever since then it was the same. An idiotic strafing contest.
That's not because of thrust ratios. Slow down all the ships, give them low acceleration and heavy inertia, players will keep doing the same.
Why?
Because the stupid thrusters let you accelerate in any direction, and if you fly sideways you can keep your guns on the enemy 100% of the time, as opposed to WW2 style space-dogfighting where you only face each other part of the time. This'll only be fixed if flight mechanics change to only having meaningful thrust forwards, and all other directions are just low powered manouvering thrusters. Like in EVERY sci-fi material we both seem to care about.

To be fair, this doesn't show up easily in the building process for "normal players" like (probably) you and I, who might care more about the lore role or general concept of the ship we're building, and so build systems to fit a size and hull shape that we want. In that case, vessels may get fairly heavy, bogged down with "heavy defenses" for our "survivable" ship, along with giant chambers, simply because that is the kind of ship we wanted to build. For those who cared to win - those who would become very relevant to anyone in multiplayer as soon as Schema's empire mechanics were implemented - it was a different story.

That's the thing. My stuff, your stuff, and any artistically minded players stuff will drop in thrust ratio. We won't change the hull of a ship we like, let alone that of a revered replica. The powergamer brick pilots will find a way in the first day to maintain max thrust.
Now at least max thrust is something anyone can have, or get reasonably close to without messing their ship up.

Also, by the way, those "big ships" that physically can't reach 3.0 TWR in the current state of config are IMMENSE. You'd have to ask Scypio for specifics (I've lost track of the thrust spreadsheets for the time being) but probably in the order of millions of mass. Larger than most things you will generally encounter in-game.

If it's so huge it's not allowed on most servers, then what does it matter? I wouldn't mind if my perpetually in-construction Retribution Battleship wouldn't reach 3.0.... Never planned it to get there. Thing is, I'm worried it wouldn't reach 0.75.
Then there's my pal NagyGeri01. You know how happy he was when the BC-304 finally started to fly as nimbly as on TV? How fast could that one reasonably be expected to fly under this config?
Would diminishing returns really only start to be noticable at such a high mass? Past experience would lead me to believe even my Normandy replica is in danger. And that one has sooooo much thrusters.

The main speed limit for large ships isn't physical, but simply practical - you CAN create a pretty massive 'ship' with 3.0 TWR, yes, but it will essentially just be a rocket.

Op specifically stated "ships physically cannot reach maximum speed cap after a certain reactor size". That seems quite definitive.

Hmm? 3.0 thrust ratio doesn't just mean you go fast. It means you accelerate (and hence decelerate) fast. So, flight speed goes up, but your accel/decel time scales proportionally. Overshooting isn't a concern. That's actually one of the more elegant parts of having top speed coupled to acceleration.

Depends on how you do it. Lower top speeds but better acceleration, braking, dampeners, = yes please.
Problem is, I'd still need oh-so-damn much more thruster blocks to get there. 2.5 is hard enough to reach as it is. Especially after the nerfs in this config. Who's gonna find room for that? Space Brick builders.

Aside from potential physics issues with high speeds, this is a non-problem.

Yeah, things fly too fast as is. I wouldn't have problem with cutting top speeds all across the board. I know it's popular to set them higher and higher, but the game's crap like that. Weapons will hardly score a hit, either by AI or Player, collisions be bad, loading stuff be hard.

helping Schine avoid this kind of nonsense to begin with.

I'd like that, but at this point we're kinda like abused housewives.
"He promised to change, for real this time! Anyway, he only gets violent when he drinks. It's just that.... he always drinks...."

Well. Not gonna have time to test these things until Sunday, but I'd better see it all with my own eyes.

Just keep an open mind. I approve of literally every other change. Me. I do that. Sure it was the product of hard work but one out of so many aspects touched could be wrong.
That holds true for me as well; When so many other things are right, there's a fair bit of chance that Thrust changes are also good, and I am indeed mistaken, but on first hearing they strike me as quite wrong.
So. Testing. Eventually.
[doublepost=1565689537,1565689351][/doublepost]

*edit* it seems like you guys doubled the power consumption of weapons. my missile system used 1 mil e/s pre quickfire now uses 2 mil e/s. I really hope you guys do not do this if you intend to nerf weapons. just half their dps, this way nobody has to refit. shields also seem to be massively more power hungry.

Ace, check the damage numbers. They wanted to make weapons more compact; More DMG and P.Cons for the same amount of blocks.
This should have a paragraph in the OP.

 

[aceface]

Ace, check the damage numbers. They wanted to make weapons more compact; More DMG and P.Cons for the same amount of blocks.
This should have a paragraph in the OP.

even more refits :,( i dont get the point of it, they seem to anyway do less damage than before though.
what did they do to shields?

 

[alterintel]

Hey Guys, (full disclosure, I sponsor Quickfire)

I'd like to point out that this is a community driven initiative. I see allot of good arguments for and against certain ideas like thrust and reactor size. Please feel free to jump on our Quickfire Discord Server to have a real time discussion and try anything you want on our public test server www.quickfiresm.com:4242 . We don't have to guess and argue theory. We can actually test it and see if it works.

We've already done allot of testing, including some of the ideas that are being discussed here. We've already tried making thrust faster cheaper and smaller. We've tried messing around with reactor scaling. We've tried messing with shield settings. We've tried allot of stuff, and this is the stuff that we think makes the game more fun for the most people.

I think that most people can agree that the direction these changes are going are in the right direction with only a few of the changes being unpopular. Please come join us on Quickfire and be part of the initiative. Come try out your ideas and see if they will work.

 

[Ithirahad]

I'm coming here after seeing that this is going to be adopted. In particular I'm concerned about,

"Switched reactor level calculation to linear formula."

I wanted to clarify my thoughts further on this and say why I think making this linear is detrimental to the game.
(Unless somebody's got an alternative plan for tiers in StarMade?)

For fair competition there has to be tiers.
You can't have different levels of competitors in the same competition.
You don't put F1's against dirt bikes?
You also don't put Little League players on the field with guys from the Majors? (sorry if those terms are incorrect I don't do the sport but you get my drift?...
Likewise you don't put fighter ships against destroyers against battleships against titans... in war? Yes. In fair and balanced competition? No.

For these reasons StarMade has to have a way to be able to compare and classify ships so that they can be fairly judged against each other and a winner and loser decided.
You can't have a competition without it. This presents a problem, we all know the standing pun around here about everyone's classification systems being different.
The only way I can see it working is if the game makes this decision on classifications and ship sizes for the players, preferably through a fundamental mechanic and not some arbitrary numbers pulled from someone's proverbial...
the tiered reactor system does just this.

Some argue that ship comparisons should be based on mass. I argue this is not viable because you can build a small high mass high power ship that will trounce a much nicer but larger and better balanced ship of the same mass.
Mass is not a fair factor to base a ships performance on.
The only other alternative is to base the judgement on power. Every system on your ship is fundamentally effected by how much power you have, that includes mass. All the performance factors, size, mass, maneuverability, defense and offense are based on power.
Therefore the only fair way to compare equivalent ships is on their reactor size and power output.

Now, here we are about to take the reactors from a staggered, tiered system to a linear system.
This simply does not make sense to me...

If we stay tiered.

In Survival with PVP
People will naturally learn of the optimization zones, it' not rocket science. Ships will gravitate to these sizes and we will see a perfectly natural tiering system evolve on the Docks. Currently you have extra small ships at 19, small ships at 199, medium ships at 1999, large ships at 19,999, and extra large ships at 199, 999. Call them what ever you like but XS/S/M/L/XL works for me... There will still be ships in between these levels as they will offer their creators tactical options despite being comparatively inefficient to ships totally out of their classification class. You don't compare the efficiency of an aircraft carrier against a fighter, it's just stupid. Ok the 40k reactor is not as efficient as the 20K reactor but so what? You can't compare a 40K ship against a 20k ship so why does it matter? You can opt to build reactor optimized ships... with the caveat that if someone comes at you with a non optimized ship he's going to trounce your small ships and get away from your big ships. He's going to be in between your ships performance wise and that will likely give you problems irrelevant of whether or not he's running an optimized reactor. Basically all the tiering does in survival is add tactical options. It also increase your chances of a having a fight against forces with ships similar, comparative to your own... isn't that a plus? I think keeping it tiered adds depth to the strategy and increase your chances of having a competitive fight in survival. It's a plus, not a minus.

In Competitive PVP.
You play in ships that are equivalent in power. Otherwise it's not a competition. A fighter against a destroyer might be interesting, but it's not a competition. Therefore all ships competing against each other will have the same extra mass handicap IF they are not reactor optimized. Ergo NO problem there with tiered reactors. There is literally no effect on competitive PVP from having tiered reactors unless of course you want to classify your ships on mass instead of power so as to gain an unbalanced power advantage over your opponent... yah, won't tell you what I think about that.


If we go linear.
In Survival. Good luck finding a fight where your ships are roughly equivalent to someone else's ships. Your fighters are his destroyers? Fun fight? pfft. People will pick and choose whatever reactor size they like, bigger will be better. There will be no consistency on the docks. There will be no set sizes or agreements on what constitutes S/M/L ships. Basically a mish mash cluster fark like we have now.

In Competitive PVP.
It'll be exactly the same unless you are fighting ships that are not equivalent power... which means it's not competitive play..?

One of my favourite things about the new power system is the natural tiering that has become apparent. So. Can someone please explain to me why we're trashing this natural tiering system? What is proposed to replace it? Anything?
What is the advantage of having a linear reactor efficiency? I don't see it and I'm genuinely curious as to the arguments that have been put forth for it.

Cheers.
MrGrey1

The current convention in PvP is to compare with mass. If you want to compare using power, or reactor level, you can still do that with linear levels and if anything it will be more accurate. The optimization zones are just too restrictive to preserve that mechanic, and the in-betweens don't offer "tactical options" - just pitfalls for players.
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even more refits :,( i dont get the point of it, they seem to anyway do less damage than before though.
what did they do to shields?

There are going to be refits no matter what. Some things like thrust either have to cost more power per block (resulting in a need for less thrusters to maintain power) or less effective per block, in which case you would need a ridiculously large blob of thrusters to make a fast ship and it would not play pleasantly. We've tried to scale ship systems so that you never run into a situation where adding more blocks feels inconsequential or some system feels extremely disproportionate. For weapons, it is designed such that there are enough blocks to avoid weapons being unhittable, but not enough blocks that turrets have to be massive, ugly monstrosities to be functional.

As for shields, we actually didn't do much other than mess with the relative scale, if I remember correctly. Weapons are less effective per power relatively, so shields are better than they were (without the broken chamber) by default.
[doublepost=1565702476][/doublepost]

And you have your head up your rear!
-And now that we've both had a harmless joke at each other's expense, we're equally difficult to take seriously on anything that follows :D



I don't think I played in the absolute first..... half year(?) of the game's life, but ever since then it was the same. An idiotic strafing contest.
That's not because of thrust ratios. Slow down all the ships, give them low acceleration and heavy inertia, players will keep doing the same.
Why?
Because the stupid thrusters let you accelerate in any direction, and if you fly sideways you can keep your guns on the enemy 100% of the time, as opposed to WW2 style space-dogfighting where you only face each other part of the time. This'll only be fixed if flight mechanics change to only having meaningful thrust forwards, and all other directions are just low powered manouvering thrusters. Like in EVERY sci-fi material we both seem to care about.

I think you're missing the point. Strafe fighting is sort of a given with Newtonian mechanics in free space with no gravity/orbits, and that's not what I'm talking about. (tbh that's more a problem with 1v1 battles than anything else)
The issue is when there's no meaningful trade-off for better speed, and so nobody has the advantage in range management because there's never a reason to engineer a slower ship. Neither player can close in if the other doesn't want to, and bombers* and fast attack craft** are stuck at the same speed as battleships. Rather boring.

That's the thing. My stuff, your stuff, and any artistically minded players stuff will drop in thrust ratio. We won't change the hull of a ship we like, let alone that of a revered replica. The powergamer brick pilots will find a way in the first day to maintain max thrust.
Now at least max thrust is something anyone can have, or get reasonably close to without messing their ship up.

So-called "Brick" pilots (who, mind you, don't really fly bricks any more) will only maintain max thrust universally if there's no alternative, otherwise people even at that skill level will try different things.

If memory serves, FCM really tried to maintain their heavily armored, slower ship doctrine after the update, only to find that it is physically impossible to do because the balance was such a mess.

If it's so huge it's not allowed on most servers, then what does it matter?

It's just the extreme case. Below that it's just difficult to reach, as Scypio explained.

I wouldn't mind if my perpetually in-construction Retribution Battleship wouldn't reach 3.0.... Never planned it to get there. Thing is, I'm worried it wouldn't reach 0.75.
Then there's my pal NagyGeri01. You know how happy he was when the BC-304 finally started to fly as nimbly as on TV? How fast could that one reasonably be expected to fly under this config?
Would diminishing returns really only start to be noticable at such a high mass? Past experience would lead me to believe even my Normandy replica is in danger. And that one has sooooo much thrusters.

I'll just start out by saying that sci-fi conventions only matter if they provide interesting facets to gameplay or can help the experience feel intuitive without harming anything. If they don't work out for gameplay/balance (and they often won't, because scripted battles in CGI are very different from a player-driven world with consistent physical rules) they aren't really relevant.

Also, if you want to build replicas and aren't worried about optimization, there's still an option left open to you: just use a smaller reactor. Hull and armor are not insanely heavy any more, so there isn't that much of an incentive to pack the entire ship with systems. The reactor carries much of a ship's mass now, so if you don't want to get hit with the diminishing returns you can always simply build a reactor that weighs less. For Nagy's BC-304 replica, that might be the best option depending on how big it is.

Diminishing returns start to show up pretty fast, but won't totally cripple your ability to maneuver unless your ship is some kilometer-long titan or uses minimal thrusters. TBH though, even ~1.2 TWR actually doesn't look that clumsy from a cinematic third-person PoV.

Op specifically stated "ships physically cannot reach maximum speed cap after a certain reactor size". That seems quite definitive.

It's also a bit outdated. While still technically true, that limit is much higher than it was before we changed thruster scaling to be a bit more sane.

Depends on how you do it. Lower top speeds but better acceleration, braking, dampeners, = yes please.
Problem is, I'd still need oh-so-damn much more thruster blocks to get there. 2.5 is hard enough to reach as it is. Especially after the nerfs in this config. Who's gonna find room for that? Space Brick builders.

You don't even need 2.5 TWR to feel maneuverable, let alone 3.0.

For reference, here's a gif of me taking off from a standstill in my 100k star cruiser at 1.2 TWR, with another static cruiser floating in front of me for reference (which also means the other cruiser would be able to accelerate at the same speed visible out the window, because Newtonian relativity):

And it's not a matter of "room" - you can generally just scale the reactor down, within reason, and the star cruiser actually has a rather huge reactor for its size - it's a question of power consumption. This doesn't really help space brick builders much.

Well. Not gonna have time to test these things until Sunday, but I'd better see it all with my own eyes.

This is what I'd recommend. Try it out, see how it works in real life, and then we can discuss this stuff in practical terms. If you want to hop on the server, I should be there on Sunday working on some things as well.

Just keep an open mind. I approve of literally every other change. Me. I do that. Sure it was the product of hard work but one out of so many aspects touched could be wrong.
That holds true for me as well; When so many other things are right, there's a fair bit of chance that Thrust changes are also good, and I am indeed mistaken, but on first hearing they strike me as quite wrong.
So. Testing. Eventually.
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Yep, pretty much. I never said (or meant to imply) that I or we can't be wrong, but so far given testing, expert insights, and personal experience, this is the best we've done. I'm open to further changes if more testing reveals that it's necessary.


*This is an especially huge issue assuming you want bombers to be a thing ingame, because bombers rely on being faster than their targets, otherwise their bombs physically can't hit.

**Notice that I specifically avoid using the F-word - that being fighter. There are no fighters in (pseudo) Newtonian space. A terrestrial fighter and battleship are so different because a fighter literally moves through a different fluid medium with very different rules, and has a whole extra dimension to work with. In space, even with differing speed limits, you naturally aren't going to have such a huge distinction, and that's OK. Rather than WW2 "fighters", what you really end up with in space are more like a sliding scale of fast attack craft. High-acceleration, high-top-speed, maneuverable little boats with either powerful but limited armaments or comparatively weak, but still potentially useful, guns.

 

[aceface]

There are going to be refits no matter what. Some things like thrust either have to cost more power per block (resulting in a need for less thrusters to maintain power) or less effective per block, in which case you would need a ridiculously large blob of thrusters to make a fast ship and it would not play pleasantly. We've tried to scale ship systems so that you never run into a situation where adding more blocks feels inconsequential or some system feels extremely disproportionate. For weapons, it is designed such that there are enough blocks to avoid weapons being unhittable, but not enough blocks that turrets have to be massive, ugly monstrosities to be functional.

All I'm saying is that if you can make a change and you have a choice between two options and one route requires one to not refit, then one ought to go for that one. So basically your guys reasoning is so that weapons dont have to take up as much space as before?

As for shields, we actually didn't do much other than mess with the relative scale, if I remember correctly. Weapons are less effective per power relatively, so shields are better than they were (without the broken chamber) by default.

I still have the same amount of shield cap and recharge and they use much more power now.

 

[Ithirahad]

I still have the same amount of shield cap and recharge and they use much more power now.

Out of curiosity, are you at 100% reactor stabilization, or the previously-needed 25%? If so you're now at 1/4 of your old power regen :P

Also yes, we have increased the power cost of shield regen per block. I'd forgotten about that. With weapons being weaker, we didn't want to run into a situation where regen tanks end up too strong and become invulnerable ships.

By the way, here is a more comprehensive document of changes and explanantions for them. I'll add it to the OP.

 

[Tsnonak]

Well just to getr in on this thrusters discussion...
I'll let the PICs speak for what the configs changes actually do...

1. BossHossRaider from here: https://starmadedock.net/content/boss-hoss-raider.7753/
Mass & top speed on current vanilla settings.


2. New BossHossRaider stats on Quickfire :
It even has a few blocks more.


First thoughts:
I thought the thruster changes would slow "bigger ships" down, but BossHossRaider is now cruising like a demon... I am not exactly sure how to feel about the proposed changes...
Given BossHossRaider is not very large @150 meters, but it's no fighter class.
It would seem reducing mass equaling bigger ships (up to what mass?) go faster maybe counter productive.
Considering the proposed 16km default sector size and all this stuff I am starting to wonder, is this all geared towards MP servers or SP?
100k ships zipping around in 16km sectors on MP servers sounds equiptment heavy. :poop:

 

[aceface]

Out of curiosity, are you at 100% reactor stabilization, or the previously-needed 25%? If so you're now at 1/4 of your old power regen :P

Also yes, we have increased the power cost of shield regen per block. I'd forgotten about that. With weapons being weaker, we didn't want to run into a situation where regen tanks end up too strong and become invulnerable ships.

By the way, here is a more comprehensive document of changes and explanantions for them. I'll add it to the OP.

No I have 100%, the recharge is fine but modules are using more power.

I think this is a really bad idea to increase power requirement of rechargers. Just reduce how much recharge a block gives and you'll make regen tanks less effective. The same outcome will happen but shields aren't needed to be refitted. These are the kind of things I'm talking about in my previous post.