I'm grateful that we can have this discussion. The sooner things get identified and fixed, the better off StarMade will be.
Agreed.
Unfortunately, without additional testing/input from other players, we have no way knowing if these are intended changes or a bug.
Have you been able to try a fresh install of 202.87?
I have reinstalled ver. 202.87 several times. Using it without QF is no different than the build I was using in late January.
Using it
with QF resulted in the changes we discussed and quite a few changes to the weapons as well.
Here is a recap of all the changes I'm seeing for anyone else who may be following. Yellow denotes a possible bug or other inconsistency between builds.
- Shield capacity reduced from 250/block to 200/block
- Shield regen rate reduced from 5/sec/block to 2/sec/block
- You can build a large reactor and get full power without stabilizers.
- Chambers of 99 blocks or less require only one chamber block (used to be about 10% of reactor size; regardless of size)
- Swarm missiles (MC) are gone and have been replaced with fast firing, low damage lock-on missiles.
- Bomb (MM) is gone and has been replaced by the classic Damage Pulse "nuke" (slow, high damage guided missile) from before power 2.0
- MM no longer ignores shields.
- BC in a 1:0 ratio (Damage beam with a cannon secondary with no blocks) does far more DPS than if you added blocks for the cannon secondary. In fact, a 50 block BC in a 1:0 ratio does far more DPS than a BC in a 1:1 ratio several times larger.
- BM (Charge beam with Missile secondary) is gone and has been replaced by a slow fire, high damage beam.
- BB (Beam with beam secondary) does less damage per shot than a standard beam.
- Beams seem to fire only one tick; regardless of type; requiring the use of BC (high rate of fire) or BM (high damage) to do damage.
- CM (Chargeable Cannon with Missile secondary) is gone and has been replaced by the classic Damage Pulse artillery cannon (slow, high damage) from before power 2.0
- Power cost for shields has increased but resting power cost for thrusters and weapons seems to have been eliminated; leaving rail mass enhancers and shields as the only constant drains.
- The old power 1.0 range settings are back; missiles = long range, cannons = mid range and beams = short range.
Bugs aside; I find this build interesting. I will miss the bombs and swarmers but I welcome the return of "nuke" missiles and artillery cannons.