Thermite is Fun!

[Malacodor]

a tangent on that thought, should respawning cost resources?
food for thoughts

Realistically that would be 1-2 blocks of dirt.
But seriously, StarMade isn't an MMORPG where you respawn with all your equipment, ready to pwn again (or die again trying). Dying typically means losing a ship, which cost enough resources.

 

[Master_Artificer]

Realistically that would be 1-2 blocks of dirt.
But seriously, StarMade isn't an MMORPG where you respawn with all your equipment, ready to pwn again (or die again trying). Dying typically means losing a ship, which cost enough resources.

hm! good point!
I was just thinking like "if I have this thingamajig filled with a few respawn sticks, I will respawn here instead of at my normal undeathinator"

 

[Crimson-Artist]

hm! good point!
I was just thinking like "if I have this thingamajig filled with a few respawn sticks, I will respawn here instead of at my normal undeathinator"

maybe we could have both, a moving respawn point and a stationary one. The ship based repsawn could cost something more while the stationary one just costs the normal credits.

 

[Captain Tankman]

The ship based repsawn could cost something more while the stationary one just costs the normal credits.

Maybe the ship based respawn 'rebuilds' us with just like 1/3 of our health and is a one-time use only (it would need to be re-adjusted at a shop or so after every spawn)

 

[Tamren Shade]

You say "everyone using them" like it's a bad thing.

Not a bad thing per se, just not as interesting from a game mechanic point. Obviously, if you're building a large ship there really isn't a choice, you're going to use them and armor the hell out of your reactors, but if the risk is so minimal, there's no reason to not use them in a fighter, the design choice is kind of boring.

However, if they have a nice balance between dangerous and efficient, the choice to use them or not in say a 20k to 30k mass ship becomes more engaging. You may or may not have the internal volume and thrust to really armor up your reactor, but if you could push this ship to 3 or 4 million energy a second you could do this really cool thing or that really cool thing at the cost of having a quarter of your ship go up in an atomic bonfire after an unlucky (or lucky, depending on perspective :p) hit.

The more interesting choices a game has, video, tabletop, rpg or whatever, the better said game is

 

[Jojomo]

Using them together with docked reactors would be pointless since they have a per-group cap rather than a per-entity cap, and power/shield supply are getting nerfs while docked as well.

Also, I'd prefer if we moved AWAY from encouraging modular ships outside of RP. They cause a lot of combat lag, and will ALWAYS be laggier than non-modular ships on the simple premise of "two ships cause more lag than one ship."

It's likely far too late to change now, but it would have been great if the devs had anticipated this effect, and made docked ships combine into just a single entity from the point of view of the game engine (no difference to now from a player's point of view)
Excluding ships that have an AI module attached, probably.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

I imagine there could be some difficulty in getting the game engine to do that (similar to how moving the core would be more complicated then people imagine, and it would almost definitely exclude things like elevators and other moving parts of a ship. Essentially anything that moves will need collision detection.

In the specific case of docked reactors the fact that they were separate from the ship was there main balancing factor, making them classed as part of the same entity would make it just a free no strings attached extra 2 million odd power.

 

[Jojomo]

The problem with modular building isn't just that "more ships = more lag". It's that having a fairly large entity nestled inside of a bigger entity means you have lots of fairly intensive collision calculations happening pretty much all the time. Especially in combat, where it has to share processing with the various turrets etc (larger turrets are a server load hog). Even especially-er if the docking modules are destroyed, and the server has to process the modular part repeatedly colliding into the mother ship. And the only real benefit to it from a game design standpoint is some kinda neat gimmick builds, so it doesn't strike me as worth it, beyond as was previously said, the RP element.

There are some benefits to modular design though.
Ships can be more easily altered for different mission roles/fleet functions, more easily altered to fix design flaws, repairs can be done by hot-swapping modules, resources from one ship can be salvaged for use in another without breaking every block down, and a shipyard can run production at 100% of the time even if you don't know what ship you'll be building next.
There are probably other benefits I haven't thought of also.

 

[Malacodor]

In the specific case of docked reactors the fact that they were separate from the ship was there main balancing factor, making them classed as part of the same entity would make it just a free no strings attached extra 2 million odd power.

If docked reactors were part of the ship, they'd suffer from the same soft cap and would not produce 2 million power.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

Which would make them completely pointless.

 

[Endal]

Which would make them completely pointless.

Which is why batteries are being worked on, to replace them.

 

[AtraUnam]

In line reactors forever!

 

[Lecic]

but if the risk is so minimal, there's no reason to not use them in a fighter, the design choice is kind of boring.

Sure there is. Since you can have them "build up" power, you could design a fighter bomber that uses them to quickly refill the main power tanks after launching the missiles, since the regular power generation isn't enough to quickly recharge from such a huge missile.

However, if they have a nice balance between dangerous and efficient, the choice to use them or not in say a 20k to 30k mass ship becomes more engaging. You may or may not have the internal volume and thrust to really armor up your reactor, but if you could push this ship to 3 or 4 million energy a second you could do this really cool thing or that really cool thing at the cost of having a quarter of your ship go up in an atomic bonfire after an unlucky (or lucky, depending on perspective :p) hit.

I've had ships with 6k mass that have needed docked reactors... what kind of 20-30k mass ships are you building that don't have reactors?

 

[Master_Artificer]

what kind of 20-30k mass ships are you building that don't have reactors?

THE ARMOR KIND

 

[Tamren Shade]

I'm not saying you should or should not have this system on a fighter, I've just been saying I want it to be balanced to where the risk/reward decision is requires some careful thought. That's all :p . I think the idea of a high-risk high damage bomber is pretty cool, both if you manage to blow a hole in a capital ship or if the thing takes a hit and self immolates. Both outcomes are interesting, and make for good story elements.

The main weapons on my ships tend to be high damage, low ROF, so I tend to use lots of power capacitors. I haven't pushed any designs below 40K mass into the realm where I needed more than 2 million regen a second.

I aim for fast, balanced ships that seem plausible for something out of a hard sci fi or military sci fi book. I usually run by total block count 20-30% thrusters, 20% shields, 10-20% weapons, and the rest to the power systems needed to run the above, support systems, a combination of standard and advanced armor depending on aesthetics and what kind of T/M ration I'm aiming for, and a decent amount of volume devoted to an interior.

I'm interested in making my ships cool, like something you'd see in a good sci-fi movie. I'm not a pure RP builder, I want my designs to do what I want them to do, but I haven't gotten around to really pushing min-max efficiency in anything. On the sliding scale between perfect efficiency and RP ships, I'm probably somewhere in the middle.

 

[Scypio]

I'm not saying you should or should not have this system on a fighter, I've just been saying I want it to be balanced to where the risk/reward decision is requires some careful thought. That's all :p . I think the idea of a high-risk high damage bomber is pretty cool, both if you manage to blow a hole in a capital ship or if the thing takes a hit and self immolates. Both outcomes are interesting, and make for good story elements.

Actually if they're well placed that mean that if they're hit, the ship is basically overheating.

 

[Malacodor]

I think the idea of a high-risk high damage bomber is pretty cool

High risk, high reward means basically gambling, which I don't want to see in StarMade. If I want to gamble I play poker.