The Suggestion to Rule them All

[John Sheridan]

So this First post here:

http://star-made.org/content/space-battles-should-be-more-epic

And then this post here:

http://star-made.org/comment/77074#comment-77074

READ THIS POST BELOW REALLY WELL BEFORE RESPONDING.


The above links me to consider, a key problem with Starmade, which is precision core drilling with AMC's...and poof your core gets overheated, you die, and now your rather in-tact ship is free to be pillaged.

The first link above gave a great suggestion on how to stop this problem by introducing secondary ship cores that all have to be killed for the ship to overheat (pilot to die). And the other issue, more in the utterly ridiculous range of problems... the old "decimate the enemy ship nothing but the core left" and its still flying around with gusto...which I personally find ridiculous but I doubt this will / could truly change.


HOWEVER, what WOULD make "deep core drilling" or epic levels of bombardment and "the fker wont die" problem become LESS of an issue....is...

1. Make the real ship core invisible to sensors unless its exposed to outer space somehow (via some algorithm). Nothing to do with having an atmosphere.

2. Introduce "various secondary ship cores" as Saria suggested in the first link above.

Except each secondary ship core has its own simple function. "Power Core", "Weapons Core" etc.

Now it is optional to use these secondary core blocks, but if you do, e.g. say "Weapons Core", all AMC damage is doubled. The downside is, if that core is disabled (no blowing it up - just disabling / "overheating" it), then all your weapons become disabled unless its reactivated. If it stays dead for its countdown timer (say 10 minutes) - no option for to "kill it faster" like you can with ship cores, only then does it disapear. Your weapons return to normal mode upon it disapearing. You can "fix it" by entering it in astronaut mode. In a combat situation this would require you run to it and fix, which would be very hard unless you had a second man aboard with gravity on or put BobbyAI on and hope for the best.

Which would make "teamwork" ship battles possible, but also, as most battles are 1 vs 1, it would make it hard for you to fix your weapons core without running out to it and getting raped by the enemy ship, making losing your weapons core a very bad situation, requiring you flee, ram the other guy (if ramming damage gets added), or try to fix it.

There should be a minimum distance from every core in your ship to each other, at least say 10m apart (forced by game). This is to stop people putting them all together in one very protected location, and instead force people to spread them apart. Bigger ships would be needed for more cores as per Saria's rule there regarding number of minimum blocks (or whatever rule).

Little fighters cant have secondary cores due to lack of size / block count.

Let me note, if you shoot the regular enemy "ship core" block and overheat it, the player dies, like normal - no change to that block at all.

Also as a reason to ensure these secondary cores are placed appropriately, you get a 10% bonus to all blocks near by of the "type" the secondary core represents. So a Thruster secondary core being near thrusters, would give the thruster blocks in its 10x10x10 radius, a 10% performance boost.

This is so on your enemy's nav computer, when it says "Thruster Core" they can assume it really is near thrusters, and your thrusters are positioned as a normal person would have them, and that your Thruster Core is not inside an 8x8x8 hardened hull box.

If you blow up the thruster core, the ship drops to 10% thrust efficiency for 5 minutes until it disapears or is repaired (makes acelerating almost useless) Or whatever is decided.

You see where I am going with this. A Power core (due to complex arrangements required by the game atm for efficent power cells), might be able to be placed anywhere on the ship to give a significant boost to power. But if the power core is blown, your recharge rate turns to utter shit until it disapears or you fix it. Still cant be within 10m of any other core.

Shield core, same thing, no shields until its fixed, or it eventually disapears from overheating, in which case your shields go back to "normal mode", and stops being in "beast mode". Side note, in the case of shields, spamming them in every nook and cranny of your ship really needs to stop being ok by this game! If the shield core goes down, no shields.


The closer your respective secondary core is to a block of its type (e.g. Thrust core to thruster blocks), the bigger an advantage you get in efficiency for those blocks in its "circle of influence". This is ON TOP of the already heavy boost having a secondary core produces.

Secondary cores must provide a big boost to performance of that element of your ship otherwise there is no incentive to use them and risk them being targetted and crippled by an enemy ship. Understand this point before bitching with "huuuurrrr over powered" rants.

Only one secondary core of each type allowed per ship. You cant have two Power cores etc.

These secondary cores would have to be the last items to be deletable from a ship, just before the ship core - in build mode.

Now to address the ridiculous issue of you have shot the shit out of another ship, it's now half its already size (lol), but its somehow still firing back (obviously worse now), and it's still flying. Remember above, you require X amount of blocks/mass to add more secondary cores? The game can delete them descending order of when they were added, if your ship loses too many blocks. So if you ship was 10k mass, and you had 3 cores, and now its 6k mass, your last core, lets pretend it was the Thruster core, will overheat and be unrepairable and will have to wait the full 10 minutes (or whatever) to disapear, and your ship is crippled, movement wise, meantime. This represents your ship taking REAL damage and real consequences - and not being a skeleton of its former self, merrily still flying around shooting you. So you wouldn't add ship cores if you JUST barely met the blocks/mass requirement. Also this stops people cheating the system by making gigantic garbage "temporary" ships, adding in secondary cores, then deleting the bulk of the ship to keep the secondary cores.


Now, ANOTHER Brilliant idea to make ship fighting "more epic" besides the above...

Introduce cables / electricity from the Secondary Power Core! The cables could be like Minecraft's redstone, or perhaps actual cables that take up real space, or take up a quarter of one block, so you can fit 4 separate cables into one block, to make one central pipe of cables so to speak, to spread apart to power things. Optionally, each cable could have a maximum power transfer from the SECONDARY POWER CORE block (NOT power cells all over your ship thats stupid trust me), so your 50000 block canon would require several cables to run it from the Secondary Power Core block, if they are to be 100% capable... to make things more complex design wise (I like complex).

All your separate cannons and misc blocks (thrusters/shields/etc) require a cable to them from the Power Core. If the cable is cut, the affected weapons stop working.

I thought about doing this with each individual core to their respective "child blocks", e.g. a Weapons Core with cable to AMC/Missles instead of the Power Core, but because that means the Weapons Core will likely be placed to the AMCs (for the bonus damage etc I mentioned above), its not much of a "cabling challenge". But if you that require the Power Core power everything via cables, then that will be a greater ship design challenge to achieve, more fun, and more prone to breaking if somehow the enemy gets to see them. Which is good, weak points and whatnot are good and you can factor in how to minimise them.

You cant cable from a regular power cell because right now the game rewards you have a zillion separate X0X0X power cell arrangements...so really wierd to try...if you could make power cells a big fact cube it would be ok but you cant. So Power Core would have to do.

You dont need cables if you dont have a power core and dont have a secondary core for the system it would affect. E.g. If you dont have a weapons core, your weapons dont need cables. This keeps it simple for noobs, the game stays the same for them, but for the pro's wanting a beast ship, a bigger building challenge, more strategy in fighting, then cables would be required otherwise your AMCs would not fire at all. They would require a Power Core + cabled to it, and a Weapons Core onboard somewhere. Obviously they get a big bonus to damage output for having these added "weak / targettable points".

The noobs will have to learn if they want to move into the higher levels of ship building, otherwise they can keep building their regular ships without any impact or change to them. But for those of us who want ship warfare and building to be "more" than it is, this is a great step forward, and I dont think it would be a massive job to code either considering half these things exist in star made already, like being able to target turrets (e.g. you can target Secondary cores), the game knowing if a power cell is connected to another power cell (e.g. useful for cables).

READ THIS POST EPICLY WELL BEFORE RESPONDING

ITS STILL POSSIBLE TO BUILD IN REGULAR JOE MODE IF DESIRED. Just dont place secondary cores in your ship. Read above.

 

[Ithirahad]

This would actually be great, except for the fact that I really don\'t like the sound of weapons cores for some reason... and cables, though a really nice idea in principle, sound kind of annoying and complicated in practice for people who don\'t really want to have to think about all of that stuff every time they build a ship.



Also, though this is unrelated and possibly advertising/spamming at this point, I\'d like to see pilot seats become a required feature to pilot spacecraft (As in my topic), so that the Ship Core becomes nothing but that - the central core of the ship.

 

[Syzygy]

\"Make the real ship core invisible to sensors unless its exposed to outer space somehow\"

Dislike because its hard to find the ship cores of large ships to start flying it. It wouldn\'t be as bad if you can just get into a cockpit to start flying. Then this would be fine.



The rest, to my over-tired mind, sounds like it is making ship building a lot more complex and difficult. This makes the learning curve for new players a lot larger and will discourage a lot of new casual players (though would probably make it more fun for those who are really into the game). I\'m for doing this partially, but making it take a TON of thought to build a ship is probably a bad idea. It might not be as complicated as I am imagining it right now, but the best thing to do is fix this problem in the least complicated way as possible, and this doesn\'t look like it.

 

[Izikiel]

This is an interesting suggestion, but I don\'t see how that would make it more epic. You would still only kill one block with a death laser, even if the laser IS your ship. The secondary cores is an interesting idea, but I dislike both the fact that they would vanish after blocks become destroyed. Why not become inactive? Same effect, but the block doesn\'t just self-destruct. You keep it, allowing easier repairs (if you live). Cables would add realism, but it would be too ridiculous with bigger ships of any kind. With the secondary cores, there would be another strategic target, but (if I\'m getting this right, that if the central core is destroyed then the player dies) most players would still try to destroy the center one anyway. If you are going to make weak points, why not make reactors explode if too many power storage blocks are destroyed( or if too much power generation for stores)? However, adding basic penetration would make space battles a lot more epic, and make it more realistic. It is also a lot simpler than multiple cores as enhancers or quarter-block cables.

 

[ardiel]

This is why I tend to have different guns and adjust their rate of fire according to what I want them to do.

For shields extra damage matters, but I also have gun designs which are meant to eat blocks at a rapid pace. With these guns when a single blast can kill any block, I adjust everything else to firing rate, travel speed and range.

DPS matters a lot but it\'s better to have it split up into a lot of 400 damage increments rather than say a few increments that do more damage.

 

[John Sheridan]

It\'s optional if simple is what you prefer. Read main post again.

 

[John Sheridan]

Let me clarify, it makes battles more epic (and ship building more fun) because it gives you / the enemy more options for combat, more strategy. You dont have to start tunneling into the ship core, you can instead target the weapons core if its more accessible at the time. It adds the element of \"I can fix the failing weapons captain!!\" feel to it. Rather than drill to core you are dead, and likely only after your ship is truly half the size. Whereas firing on a secondary core, would likely be more accessible. The fight can continue in other ways, but now \"system failure\" starts coming into play.

If you \"overheat\" the weapons core, it COULD become Inactive and not disapear. I dont envision too many issues doing that. Good idea.

Adding cables is an excellent idea, for big ships, good, its not meant to be simple. It should require good amounts of thought.

Remember, cables and secondary cores are optional. Simply don\'t add a secondary core, and you wont need to deal with cores going inactive nor cabling anything. Easy.

 

[AlienPet13]

I have to say I don\'t see any cabling system being needed as in any real ship most of the internal wiring, pipes, cables, etc, would be inside the walls, floors and bulkheads... so we can assume that the hull blocks contain the space for wiring up and connecting all the ships systems. It would make seense however to require that any control block be directly attached to a hull block and that continuous hull must connect that block to it\'s systems. Besides, this sounds way too much like a MC redstone system and we all know it woulld just be called a ripoff... but if it were to be done I would prefer it to be like redstone where just a 2D overlay of wiring is applied to the block surface rather than an actual 3D object that takes up space. The wiring is already in the hull blocks as far as I am concerned so there\'s that.

On the multiple core idea... I do like the idea but maybe a reworking of the control blocks would be easier. For instance, I\'d like to see a seperate weapons computer required for each group so when that computer is destroyed that particular weapon group goes offline unless you replace the computer... let\'s say you run over and plop down another WC and have to wait one second for each block in the group for it to go back online so as not to make it too easy to repair damaged systems too quickly. So if you have 8 AMC groups you have 8 seperate computers. Two get destroyed and those cannons go offline till you fix it. Similarly you could have a seperate shipboard bobbi AI to control each turret so if those computers are destroyed, that particular turret goes offline. Make them all very tough like faction modules so they take a lot of damage to destroy and also reduce system performance based on damage of the control block... a weapons computer damaged 20% and that cannon does 20% less damage, range and reload speed, etc.

I\'d also like to see a block called a Scanning Computer with associated array blocks that allow you to reveal core locations. The number and arrangement of the array blocks determines number of cores, computers etc it can detect as well as range, and larger groups are required to scan larger ships based on mass. Heavy hull can reduce scanning success by half and Jammers still prevent detection but would also require arrays of blocks making an interesting battle of who can out-scan a jammer or vice-versa. Both these systems would use power depending on the number of blocks in the systems. So if you have a small scanning array maybe you can only see one core and have to be very close to see the diamond marker... display would show the closest one(s) within it\'s range.

All this would work much better if there was some kind of captains control hud with sliders that let you divert power to different systems... even overdriving, let\'s say, shields to 125% temporarily with the risk of overheating the system causing it to go offline until it cools down for a set amount of time... or even burning it out requiring it to be replaced with a new control block. With the large, slow turning ships, it would also be nice if there was some sort of directional shield boosting, where you could divert shield strength to one quadrant of the ship or even have this managed by a Bobbi AI that would calculate the area taking the most damage and divert most of the shield strength there depending on parameters you set.

And, of course a time delayed self destruct would be awesome to have, as well as escape pods that cannot be steered but return automatically to your spawn point. Make the pods move twice max speed to give you an actual chance at a getaway.

 

[ardiel]

Yeah, and besides, the point of redstone is for making your own logic, not for just powering stuff. Unless we can design giant space calculators or switches that operate on conditions, I see no point to cables. Powering things is so mundane as to be assumed, just like you say.

 

[AlienPet13]

Switch or button blocks would be cool though... just like a WC you can select by \'V\' all the blocks you want it to control...so you could connect it to doors or lights.

 

[ardiel]

Yes, it would be nice to have those.

It would be great to turn off or on all the lights in a compartment. It probably doesn\'t even matter since core is highlighted but I don\'t like the idea of always having all the lights on in my ship. They\'re some times necessary to work on it when you can\'t see a darn thing, but if the ship gets cracked open they\'d let the enemy see everything you have inside easier. So it could be a nice touch to be able to shut them off.

 

[Curithwin]

You could use ECM blocks to jam other vessels finding the Core and the vessel, with a core, shows it\'s waypoint as the CENTRE of the vessel instead. Though the number of ECM blocks you need is relative to the mass and power output of the vessel trying to use the ECM.

Other new systems could be Advanced Sensor Blocks that increase in rating and can cut through Cloakers, Sensor Jammers and ECM blocks to find vessels and cores.

I do think allowing an Auxillery Core to be activated in an emergency is a great idea. Though all system should run at -15% do to the jury rigged system switching to this unit.

One other way to do this is to project the core onto a scematic on the UI so you can see the Core on the UI, but not not on the vessel so you have to learn how to aim at the location yourself.

The only down side to this is the AI as they aim at the core, maybe they could have a heavily seeded targeting list that player could set up as targets. e.g. If I set the AI targeting list for Turrets 1,2 & 3 to Weapons, Power and Core; then Turrets 4, 5 ,6 & 7 to Shields, Core, Power Then they would look up on this list AND the vessel they are attacking and pick the closest AND the highest up the targeting list.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

I like this massive wall of text. I was actually thinking about the secondary core idea a few weeks ago, but never expanded on it. Seems to be well thought out. Just a few questions though.

So when the ship gets up to a certain size, you can out down an extra core. Advantages to this are more points for your enemy to destroy, giving you a better chance of defeating him. You said this being an optional feature, along with the main core being invisible. Why wouldn\'t I just have one core, undetectable to scanners, avoiding the massive drawbacks of having my other cores destroyed? I think cores need to be mandatory, but you can chose what type of core to place. Did I misunderstand this part? If I did please educate me.

As for cables, I was almost upset when you said:


The cables could be like Minecraft\'s redstone


But, you proved it to be good. It adds realism and more possibilities for crews. However, instead of taking up part of a block, I suggest they are placed on a block like a painting in minecraft. This allows people to walk within the block they occupy and they would look cool bolted to the side of hull.

Here is a picture:



The red bit are the cables attacked to black hull.

 

[John Sheridan]

The benefits of having cores of each type is you get a big bonus to that system. So if you have a weapons core, your AMC output / damage skyrockets 50% more (or wahtever is suitable lets avoid the cannons are OP discussion). Thats the benefit. The weakness is its visible to enemy radar and can be targetted, and if blown, you lose your ability to fire back for 10 minutes until its fixed (or it disapears). Big weakness, but worth it with you are good. Otherwise you can go without them (and no cables), and not have the big bonuses attached

 

[Imperial_Gold]

Thanks for clearing that up.

 

[Ithirahad]

I just realized that if weapons arrays and other controlled devices that are a certain (short) distance from the weapons computer needed to be connected to the computer with Data Cables, it would really add to the epicness of a battle even more, and the need for crewmen and access hallways...

 

[John Sheridan]

Having to run to a secondary core to repair it in astronaut mode, and cable its connected systems (thruster core cabled to thrusters etc), really does bring in a new depth to ship building and combat... and strategy too.

If I had my way there\'d be cables for everything.. plex doors wouldnt open without a cable etc. So when you see a big mother ship, with docks that open, its like DAYAM thats a sweet ship, a work of pride.

 

[Draren Thiralas]

I don\'t like this idea at all, it limits creativity in ship design, and makes it too mathematical. But, there are some nice parts in this idea. Additional specialised shipcores would be great, but i don\'t like your tries to enforce their use only in a certain way. And cables would ruin the ship design completely. Also, imagine i accidentaly misplaced a weapons core on a 100k block ship...

 

[Ithirahad]

Then put it somewhere else, there\'s nothing stopping you unless I missed something. Only the main core is unmoveable.

 

[Ithirahad]

NO... no cables for everything. Weapons, perhaps, and MAYBE power and engines... but why in the world would you want cables taking up block space (and looking ugly) all over your doors, docking and whatnot?