The Rant of Big Ship VS Little Ship

[Tomino_sama]

on our server we discussed have a scalable top speed, relative to mass and the top speed of the server.

so that larger ships could reach proportionally higher speeds on server with raised limits, while smaller vessels could reach top speed fastest due to reduced mass.



This means nobody has to refit and only the ships which are largest in terms of mass feel the penalty worst. Your ability to accelerate is unchanged, however a hard cap could be placed on those ships with Mass over a certain amount.



I think that amount would be up for debate, however the largest ships I have built so far are between 250k and 350k Mass. Those ships should move at a crawl of at least 50% the Server Top Speed.

 

[Tomino_sama]

well put sir

 

[NeonSturm]

*joking* Or you hit the desintegrators meant for self-destruction :P

But then you have to have them excluded from shielding (see threads: but armor above shields, they would have negative armour)

 

[NeonSturm]

Should only be possible for 1/5 of your size (or more) upwards and if the designer was really dumb.



What do you think about hit&run vs turrest before you take an attempt on the ship itself?

 

[-Moose-]

That is an RPG format, RPG formats reward your time with objectively better items to give the perception of progression. If you gave that lvl 10 the stats and items of a lvl 50 he would be just as good regardless of his skill or time he spent playing the game. Under this system, if someone just starts the game and downloads a titan ship, he will be just as good as the person whose played for a year painstakingly putting time and effort into building the titan from scratch. This system neither rewards the players building nor piloting skills because there is an objective \'best\' that must be attained or you might as well self destruct your ship. Overall, an uncompetative, and unrewarding environment as what is \'best\' has already been decided.



In a skill based game your rewards for playing the game is experience with the game. Everyone starts out on the same playing field. The longer you play, the better you become, not because of an arbitrary \'armor of awesome\' from the RNG but because you figured out how to balance power, weapons, and thrust ratios to an optimal amount that the player desires. This system rewards experience and efficiency. This system also rewards variety and creativity in ship designs, because there is no \'objectively better block\' that you can put onto ships. Finally this rewards the both the player\'s building and piloting skills. Overall a more competetive, and rewarding environment.



No it shouldn\'t be easy to take out a 2000 mass ship in a 500 mass ship, but to say that it should be impossible is a blatent ignorance of game design in a skill based game.



And by the way Fortius, ad hominem falacies are used when a person can\'t find any other reason to support their claim than \'because I said so\'. Perhaps you would be willing to answer a direct question :



Why should a terribly designed ship with a terrible pilot win against a skilled player in a skillfully designed ship a quarter in size?

 

[MrFURB]

Well, I think I should pop in and make sure this discussion doesn\'t turn into another childish rage-fest...

In my own humble opinion, a ship\'s combat strength can be divided into two parts.

The first part is it\'s design. How many blocks have been put into it? How are those blocks organized? This is the show of the shipwright\'s force. This is the shipwright\'s skill. (And yes, total number of blocks counts just as much as how those blocks are placed.)

The second part is it\'s crew. How much common sense, lag compensation, and experience do the pilots/gunners have? Are they going to let the enemy get the first shot in, then panic and attempt to shoot while stationary, forgetting all their tools besides AMCs?

Some folks, mostly the ones that bring up the RPG/levels/Starwars examples, vouch for a more design-focused balance. Others favors the opposite, where the game takes advantage of a pilot\'s knowledge and practice enough to overcome a superior ship on the enemy\'s side.

I believe that favoring either one of those two disciplines too much is going to alienate a part of our current player base, which is something we want to do as seldom as we possibly can. I\'m surely hoping we work towards a balance between the two, where a profitable pilot will be able to feel the effect of his skill and be proud of it, and at the same time a devious designer can chuckle at the gifts he\'s going to be giving his enemies while adding 10x10x10 cubes of shields with triple-symmetry all over the ship. Combine the two, and you get a skilled pilot in a well designed ship that has the possibility of taking out something much larger if said enemy shipwright/pilot makes the mistakes required.

I feel like when we reach a point where every time you\'re defeated you know exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it is when we\'ll reach this ever elusive balance.

 

[ObiShawnKenobi]

Doesn\'t EMP mean Electro Magnetic Pulse? Wouldn\'t it just disable all power for a period of time?

 

[NeonSturm]

Some folks, mostly the ones that bring up the RPG/levels/Starwars examples, vouch for a more design-focused balance. Others favors the opposite, where the game takes advantage of a pilot\'s knowledge and practice enough to overcome a superior ship on the enemy\'s side.

I believe that favoring either one of those two disciplines too much is going to alienate a part of our current player base, ...


Well written, but these two points are not opposing each other.

• RolePlay and ported StarWars ships are design ships. You can have a combat-core and build the RolePlay ship around it (with cheap and few block parts).

You can make powercube/shieldcube/amc-cube mountains and dig your holes (for RP rooms) in it. You can use wedges, and at the same time, use real hull. Size (weight, power) comes mostly from vital parts.

• But it also helps a lot, if deko parts are cheaper and have less weight (either through coded weight or number of blocks).

Personally, I would like to see more \"Rock, Paper, Scissors\" with bombers / fighter-squads / big ships and more PvP with expendable ships, but that will not help if some peoples play 24/7 for eco and put everything on some ship which would also win through pure lag-the-low-budget-pc mechanics

• If stations get some serious buffs (like station-only extra strong, heavy-weight and spam-able hulls) it might be a really good backup for your ships while offline. But right now - do they have any real advantage over 1 thruster vs 50 other block station-killer-ships?