I'd really like to test my existing suite of ships against the new settings in an effort to give informed feedback, but one glaring issue stands out to me as it seems to have done so for others, though it might seem to be for an unusual reason: Thrust nerfing.
Larger ships should accelerate more slowly. Not simply be slower, with drastically rising power costs for any attempt to compensate. This is very, very important. Not just for the sake of realism, but because of the necessities of cooperative survival gameplay.
I get why you're doing it from a pure building and combat point of view, but in my reading of the summary of the recent interview/stream with Schine, cooperative gameplay for things like raiding the Void for resources, or defending against incursions is intended to become much more beneficial and even necessary. Which honestly, I had hoped for all along.
Specifically, I'm talking about being able to make ships like my Uktena Industrial Support Carrier. It is designed to function as a rapid-response logistical support platform for deep-range industrial/combat recovery activities (which will be perfect for supporting operations in the Void) and most importantly to the discussion here, do things like function as a tow-truck for the recovery of even large-ish crippled combat vessels, which conserves resources and allows for a quick turnaround on that vessel's return to service. It can also dock with a crippled station and provide power for manufacturing, shielding for the structure along with vessels for players to use in repair and defense.
It carries 100k of cargo, 4 mining vessels, 2 respectable fighters as well as 2 rescue/repair vehicles, all of which can be crewed and have their own respective cargo holds. With black hole slingshot travel, it can carry all of this while moving and steering at speeds in excess of 700 m/s on vanilla settings, thusly the 'rapid-response' qualifier I added earlier.
As you might imagine, this pretty much requires an overpowered, undifferentiated thrust package to make viable.
I strongly feel that with things like real cooperative survival gameplay on servers being an intended end result of the changes made for the universe update, the ability to design ships for the role I've described will be increasingly important. In fact the whole reason I started designing this kind of ship is because when I was playing on the public test server in survival some years back, it was simply necessary to have for helping out the occasional player in distress, or new players who would like help getting themselves established, or for building a station, gate, etc., in deep space, far from where rapid travel may otherwise be available.
Particularly when viewed through the paradigm of cooperative survival gameplay, with random attacks occurring at random places, against random players, being able to field rapid-response vessels that have both power and speed will be necessary. Helping someone out who has just suffered a catastrophic attack against their stations, etc. pretty much requires the mobilization of a flying mountain that can essentially function as a temporary replacement station/large work platform for use by players engaged in repairs.
And it has to get there yesterday. If it takes 2 hours to get where the help is needed, with the help that is needed, then it is no help at all, is it?
Like I said, I don't mind if you want to make large ships difficult to accelerate for combat balancing purposes, but they should still be allowed to achieve solid top speeds after acceleration without gobbling up their entire power supply. This will also be necessary for large cargo and combat vessels, which often need to be able to haul ass under load in normal space to get where they need to go, not just hopping in FTL. So excuses about FTL chambering are simply inadequate. If you intend FTL to be the primary method of locomotion in the game, why have thrusters at all?
I apologize for the length of this post, but I'm seeing a definite bias in the discussions among the people who are deciding these things toward PvP, min-maxing and fantasy builds, rather than deciding these things on what the actual game will be like for the average player (which this game very, very much needs to attract) or what that will likely necessitate in ship design and capability. I get that you want to make it harder for large ships to dodge your weapons fire or whatever, but just nerfing the s**t out of thrusters seems like a ham-fisted, lazy, myopic answer to a very specific problem, experienced by a very specific kind of player that will nevertheless by decree, apply across the board to include all players and play-styles.
But hey, it's not like this kind of insular thinking has been a problem for the development of the game or anything, right?
P.S. As a direct example of the thinking I'm talking about, I'd like to point out that you are releasing these files for people to try in what I would hope is the effort to solicit feedback from as many different kinds of player possible, but have included no specific instructions as to which files on the list are needed, or where specifically we should be putting them. You just assume people know.
Then, judging by much of what I've seen, you'll likely assume that anyone who doesn't already know isn't worth listening to anyway.
Just sayin'.
the only option is to push for the feedback so we know if we have to adjust values or if something is completely broken. We don't want to push any hidden agendas or anything we just want to make combat and building enjoyable again. So if you have any reliable data to contribute that something is fundamentaly wrong with the config just show us and we will change it. The initial idea of quickfire is to make fast and unbureaucratic config changes to find values that work and are fun. If your feedback has a solid reasoning we can simply throw them onto the server and try them.
