Thoughts of a returning player

[NaStral]

Constantly crossing sector lines like that leads to a lot of issues. Your going to run into tons of desynch issues and even server corruption. The ideal sector size is between 10-12km, beyond that problems arise. Speed beyond just a bit above vanilla leads to more physical sector crossings which will put you right back at square one.

 

[Agame3]

Could anyone make a v0.19228 server just for fun?

I know I would love it no matter if the BPs are to be filled with blocks or with money, no matter what sector and planet sizes are (because I only settle in sistems with no planets anyway), no matter what one starts with or if shops are infinite or if they are not and almost never refilled, (since my main income I expect to be random loot from random pirates, not shops. Mining/crafting only if I am really desperate, and even then not for long), no matter if I can bring my own BPs or not. I only use what I created myself anyway, out of some stupid engineer's pride.

All that really matters is that it would be the v0.19228, the version that I like the most.

Spoiler

I deeply regret I can not create and host it myself, though I could offer some advice about configs if anyone think they need my help (I doubt it). Right now and for the next months, I have to limit myself to a GSM crappy connection and I can't pay for professional hosting. Sorry I am that stupid, but the way I handle money in real, it's either I cut all the expenses to the minimum possible up to the point on saving on food money, either I declare personal bankruptcy. I would be really grateful if someone could host it for me and if I ever solve my money problems, then I could also express my gratitude

If nobody wants to do it, I will probably do it myself sometime later this year, I hope.

Am I the only nostalgic?

 

[MacThule]

Am I the only nostalgic?

Not hardly. I am and have been of the opinion that before diving into 2.0, they should have spent 3 months closing the most major bugs in the old version and locked it as a 'complete' version unto itself. 2.0 should be... 2.0 - an entirely new version of the game as the designation implies.

It would have prevented much outrage, and would allow them to hedge bets against the real potential for lack of engagement with the new version even once completed. Sometimes what makes a game fun to play is very difficult to pin down, and I still think that Frogger is a better game than many out there all told - regardless of the simplicity, the age, the absurdity of it all. It's possible that even if 2.0 ends up technically far superior, far better in performance, excellently balanced, and appreciably more realistic that it could lack the je ne sais quoi that makes a game enjoyable. It happens to good designers all the time.

 

[JumpSuit]

Could anyone make a v0.19228 server just for fun?

I know I would love it no matter if the BPs are to be filled with blocks or with money, no matter what sector and planet sizes are (because I only settle in sistems with no planets anyway), no matter what one starts with or if shops are infinite or if they are not and almost never refilled, (since my main income I expect to be random loot from random pirates, not shops. Mining/crafting only if I am really desperate, and even then not for long), no matter if I can bring my own BPs or not. I only use what I created myself anyway, out of some stupid engineer's pride.

All that really matters is that it would be the v0.19228, the version that I like the most.

Spoiler

I deeply regret I can not create and host it myself, though I could offer some advice about configs if anyone think they need my help (I doubt it). Right now and for the next months, I have to limit myself to a GSM crappy connection and I can't pay for professional hosting. Sorry I am that stupid, but the way I handle money in real, it's either I cut all the expenses to the minimum possible up to the point on saving on food money, either I declare personal bankruptcy. I would be really grateful if someone could host it for me and if I ever solve my money problems, then I could also express my gratitude

If nobody wants to do it, I will probably do it myself sometime later this year, I hope.

Am I the only nostalgic?

The version you speak of has no features from the newer ones prior to Power 2.0 I wish it had...

 

[Agame3]

The version you speak of has no features from the newer ones prior to Power 2.0 I wish it had...

I try to avoid turning my looting pirate-hunter ships into armed garbage trucks. (We are talking about 3-4k mass warships.) So I avoid versions that need cargo bays for that loot.

 

[JumpSuit]

@

I try to avoid turning my looting pirate-hunter ships into armed garbage trucks. (We are talking about 3-4k mass warships.) So I avoid versions that need cargo bays for that loot.

Hmmm I see. well I suppose that is viable. But at the cost of possible missing features from the newer versions prior to Power 2.0. well, your call.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Integrity is crazy, it punishes super hard for not having perfect bricks. Complete mistake in my opinion, it really messed up me and my friend when we wanted little thruster packs sticking out on a Star Trek ship.

Relatedly, I think the thruster config was a completely stupid design decision. I get not going realistic, but it's a pointless thing to adjust that adds another player decision without good info, making ships harder to design.

I think the direction overall is good, but too much is added in, making things more complex, before it's cut down to its essentials, leading to a complexity overload.

 

[Agame3]

Well, I do build bricks. What concerns me is integrity in double chessboards.

Whenever I want an output to be as even as possible over some surface, like in salvage rays or in anti-missile cannon-cannon turrets, I place the salvage/cannon groups in a chessboard pattern to keep each group separated from its neighbors and I make the chessboard as deep / the groups as long as I think it is necessary. Behind the first chessboard I add a second chessboard, just as deep as first, but with groups behind empty spaces in first chessboard and empty spaces behind first chessboard's groups. Then fill up the empty spaces with anything I feel like. For 1-deep cannon chessboards I add the cannon support, for example.

Now, please try to imagine how much I love the implementation of integrity. And I repeat, I am a compact bricks builder, not a ship artist like the best of us, the true devoted SM players.

 

[MacThule]

it punishes super hard for not having perfect bricks

No. It doesn't.

Not even close.

Ships are super robust. Not having max integrity doesn't mean your system is made of glass.

It may seem that way, but combat testing so far is showing ships even without perfect integrity being waaay too hard to kill. It is fine for your system integrities to be mediocre.

 

[Agame3]

I never kill for fun, neither in games nor in real. But also, if someone is really tring to be a pest, I try to always be prepared for violence, both in games and in real. (I never felt the need to be different in games than in real and I think even those who think they are different in games than in real, actually are not. Game trolls are almost certainly real life trolls too and nice guys in games are very probably nice guys in real too. Whatever.)

In StarMade, being prepared for violence also means that if I kill a ship, I must be prepared to fully salvage it leaving nothing but a core, and I need to do it fast, or the pest will just come back, repair it and keep on being a pest. If possible, I'd like to salvage it without dangerous space-walks in a field of battle.

Therefore, even my smallest fighters still have to have at least a tiny frontal salvage double chessboard. This is one of my smallest warships and you can see it is really compact, a true brick. If I'd built something like this in pow2 versions, do you think its integrity will be positive at all? How about a miner ship, then?

Spoiler

The fill of this salvage double chessboard are missile tubes (just 3 deep each, since this is a small ship) and one single group cannon-cannon under the frontal camera. Secondary/support weapon systems are all inside the ship, not shown.

Really, integrity is not even good for the bricks. It simply punishes everything but the spaghetti ships it was meant to punish. A spaghetti 3 x3 width x height has no integrity problems and a 5x5 has better integrity than most real ships.

 

[MacThule]

If I'd built something like this in pow2 versions, do you think its integrity will be positive at all? How about a miner ship, then?

I'm not sure we can expect a major revision of how systems work and expect to use the same build or even mining techniques.

Mining works just fine P2, you just have to build differently. The ship shown would work fine in P1, but we can't replicate the exact same beam array patterns you used in P1 without some ridiculously roundabout engineering. That in itself is not bad. I think the game has changed - based on years of feedback regarding issues with the game, you may remember that massive beam numbers creating load on servers during mining was something that repeatedly came up as a problem. Ideas about how systems worked based on the P1 engine need to be revised. Without pre-conceptions about what mining is, how it works, how fast it happens, what the value of mining results is, etc. There doesn't seem to be any use comparing P2 systems to P1 except on a very abstract level; the details are vastly different.

 

[Agame3]

you may remember that massive beam numbers creating load on servers during mining was something that repeatedly came up as a problem. Ideas about how systems worked based on the P1 engine need to be revised. Without pre-conceptions about what mining is, how it works, how fast it happens, what the value of mining results is, etc. There doesn't seem to be any use comparing P2 systems to P1 except on a very abstract level; the details are vastly different.

Note/Edit: I usually played SM "Always outnumbered (maximum 3 players faction) never outgunned."

OK, I do not mind the change as long as it does not take more effort to harvest the same amount of blocks in the same amount of time, just like what killed past servers. It's called optimization and it is always welcome. Farther, Higher, Faster, as Latins used to say. If now it is harder or impossible to do things (in a different, incomparable way, agreed) that were easy to do before, then the sandbox aspect of this game shrunk, see my signature.

Now just like then, it is important to deny the enemy any chance to recover resources from the tools he used to aggress you. In case you win, to make the entire adventure as high cost for him as possible while getting some proffit from it for yourself. While a torpedo salvo against the destroyed hull is faster in raising the enemy costs from "a few hits" to "no cube to recover from what I used in this fight" it still does nothing for your profits. So, then or now, salvage as much as you can as fast as you can from the dead ships is way more important than the possibility to mine asteroids or planets. If it takes too long, you are dead when his friends join in. And remember that what you salvage from an expired 100k warship are modules, advanced armor, things way more valuable than even the minerals they were made from. Things that shorten your way to the next improved dreadnought and lengthen the time until your enemy fills another BP and come annoying you again with his favourite dreadnought, because people never ever change and very rarely learn from their mistakes.

Automated planetary miners can do their boring job just as well if it takes them 1 hour or 1 week for an entire planet. Their efficiency is insignificant, no reason to talk about them here. But fast combat salvaging is a matter of (virtual) life or death, the way I see/play this game. So, are there any improvement in the time it takes to an efficient pow 2 salvaging array to harvest say, 40k mass to let you get the hell out of there before any more enemy dreadnoughts get to you, kill you and harvest you? For the same mass/volume of the old pow1 harvester chessboards, do the new harvesting systems have faster speeds on the same servers? Or is the pow2 a step backwards in this aspect of the game, too?

 

[MacThule]

So, are there any improvement in the time it takes to an efficient pow 2 salvaging array to harvest say, 40k mass to let you get the hell out of there before any more enemy dreadnoughts get to you, kill you and harvest you? For the same mass/volume of the old pow1 harvester chessboards, do the new harvesting systems have faster speeds on the same servers? Or is the pow2 a step backwards in this aspect of the game, too?

Personally, I just can't even imagine the numbers for harvest amount being an issue of backward/forward. It's like saying that reactors are priced at $1M per unit and that seems like way too much, but reducing the price to $100K/unit is a step "backwards." It occurs to me that P1 mining may have been OP, and was possibly a major factor in the Titanmade issue. Now I don't know at all if that's the reasoning behind the change, but scaling mining productivity up or down isn't progress forward or falling backwards and my point is that there a lot of factors to consider when balancing how much a beam can mine. Economics have balance too, and how many blocks a salvage block can harvest per minute is going to directly affect the baseline of the entire player economy. NPC economy as well I believe, since their mining results are based on actual ship models.

If they scaled it so we can just mine an entire belt in a minute, would that really be a step "forward?" Or if they make it so we can mine the whole system with a single click that would be way better than the current setup? They already do have a creative mode with unlimited resources for building...

 

[Nosajimiki]

Well, I do build bricks. What concerns me is integrity in double chessboards.

Whenever I want an output to be as even as possible over some surface, like in salvage rays or in anti-missile cannon-cannon turrets, I place the salvage/cannon groups in a chessboard pattern to keep each group separated from its neighbors and I make the chessboard as deep / the groups as long as I think it is necessary. Behind the first chessboard I add a second chessboard, just as deep as first, but with groups behind empty spaces in first chessboard and empty spaces behind first chessboard's groups. Then fill up the empty spaces with anything I feel like. For 1-deep cannon chessboards I add the cannon support, for example.

Now, please try to imagine how much I love the implementation of integrity. And I repeat, I am a compact bricks builder, not a ship artist like the best of us, the true devoted SM players.

New salvagers a 5x as strong, so you can get very powerful salvagers only 20 blocks long. At that size, they are not affected by integrity; so, you can waffle salvagers all you want, just be mindful not to go to big, because they also use 5x as much power.

No. It doesn't.

Not even close.

Ships are super robust. Not having max integrity doesn't mean your system is made of glass.

It may seem that way, but combat testing so far is showing ships even without perfect integrity being waaay too hard to kill. It is fine for your system integrities to be mediocre.

All ships are hard to kill, but as I mentioned on your other similar post, their hardness to kill makes the importance of integrity scale more not less, because small cheezed reactors are harder to hit that they are in their fully in tact state. Your unstable ship might take 10 minutes to die, but if its stable counterpart takes 20-30 minutes to die, you will still loose.

Note/Edit: I usually played SM "Always outnumbered (maximum 3 players faction) never outgunned."

OK, I do not mind the change as long as it does not take more effort to harvest the same amount of blocks in the same amount of time, just like what killed past servers. It's called optimization and it is always welcome. Farther, Higher, Faster, as Latins used to say. If now it is harder or impossible to do things (in a different, incomparable way, agreed) that were easy to do before, then the sandbox aspect of this game shrunk, see my signature.

Now just like then, it is important to deny the enemy any chance to recover resources from the tools he used to aggress you. In case you win, to make the entire adventure as high cost for him as possible while getting some proffit from it for yourself. While a torpedo salvo against the destroyed hull is faster in raising the enemy costs from "a few hits" to "no cube to recover from what I used in this fight" it still does nothing for your profits. So, then or now, salvage as much as you can as fast as you can from the dead ships is way more important than the possibility to mine asteroids or planets. If it takes too long, you are dead when his friends join in. And remember that what you salvage from an expired 100k warship are modules, advanced armor, things way more valuable than even the minerals they were made from. Things that shorten your way to the next improved dreadnought and lengthen the time until your enemy fills another BP and come annoying you again with his favourite dreadnought, because people never ever change and very rarely learn from their mistakes.

Automated planetary miners can do their boring job just as well if it takes them 1 hour or 1 week for an entire planet. Their efficiency is insignificant, no reason to talk about them here. But fast combat salvaging is a matter of (virtual) life or death, the way I see/play this game. So, are there any improvement in the time it takes to an efficient pow 2 salvaging array to harvest say, 40k mass to let you get the hell out of there before any more enemy dreadnoughts get to you, kill you and harvest you? For the same mass/volume of the old pow1 harvester chessboards, do the new harvesting systems have faster speeds on the same servers? Or is the pow2 a step backwards in this aspect of the game, too?

Not only are new salvage beams more compact (making them fit better on your warship), but they also are able to harvest more resources per second before server lag hard-caps you.

 

[MacThule]

Your unstable ship might take 10 minutes to die, but if its stable counterpart takes 20-30 minutes to die, you will still loose.

In a deathmatch.

EDIT: in a 1v1 deathmatch where DPS v HP is the sole factor specifically. Pretty much only arranged duels, right?

 

[MacThule]

Not only are new salvage beams more compact (making them fit better on your warship), but they also are able to harvest more resources per second before server lag hard-caps you.

Also - I played with putting some new salvagers up in long lines they way we used to do... they keep a decent integrity up to 50x1, and if you shoot the module in half, each remaining piece actually has better integrity so I'm not even really sure what the issue is. It seems as if I could set up a huge brick of 50x1 salvage beams in waffle and vaporize roids faster than ever, with no integrity issues whatsoever.

But I have only been tinkering with the new dev a few hours a week and no time on MP - am I missing something?

 

[Qweesdy]

Also - I played with putting some new salvagers up in long lines they way we used to do... they keep a decent integrity up to 50x1, and if you shoot the module in half, each remaining piece actually has better integrity so I'm not even really sure what the issue is. It seems as if I could set up a huge brick of 50x1 salvage beams in waffle and vaporize roids faster than ever, with no integrity issues whatsoever.

But I have only been tinkering with the new dev a few hours a week and no time on MP - am I missing something?

I'd assume that complaints about "salvager integrity" are actually about cannon modules used as a gap filler between the lines of salvager modules. If the lines of cannon modules touch anywhere then you end up with a single group of blocks with extremely bad integrity. Of course the solution should be obvious - either don't let the lines of cannon modules touch (so that it's many small groups where each group has positive integrity), or use something else for filling the gaps between lines of salvager modules (I tend to use pink hull for all "gap filling") and put the cannon modules in a single blob somewhere else.

 

[Agame3]

Thank you a lot for clarification. And no, I use missile groups as fillers in the chessboard, to have a chance to push at least some missiles through any PD, even if that means each missile alone is crap. I like my punch-through cannon-cannons to be able to first take out 1 AA per hit (10 per second) before splitting them into multiple groups.
So, once I get over my displease regarding cargo bays in small (Isanth/whatever the pirates are today) hunting-looting fighters, I could advance my game version up to the newest versions, probably...

I know nowadays Isanths are obsolete, but I suppose any server has some small and loot-able pirates or at least hostile NPC factions have that kind of ships to allow me to live out of loot and almost never mine and craft the modules I need.

Thing is I first build an anti-pirate fighter/looter, smallest that can do the job, then with what it loots a larger fighter to use comfortably with no risks against same weak AI weak ships, then an NPC station killer, then... Usually I only get this far in multiplayer, because either a war or a server reset stops me from evolving further. For such events it is mandatory for all my ships, even the smallest ones, to also be capable of PvP, (according to their size) because I never know when I am forced to leave pirates be and defend myself against some players.

And because I never made ships bigger than 233x144x89 I never got to the point where cutting a slice of a side of my brick and turning it into a docked power + side armor plate would be able to pump into my ship more e/s than if I slice nothing, have the same volume, but in one piece, and add power generators in bulk. To make docked power profitable, a docked power should have 20k blocks or less in volume while pumping into the mothersip at least 500k e/s. That is kind of impossible when both its length and its width are too small.

Of course, turrets and turret intermediary docks (that part of the turret that is docked to the ship and has the real turret docked to it) both have their 1Me/s generation, thus limiting my turrets to 2 Me/s which means almost 200k per second damage, which I think it is kind of enough for each turret. That just so the turrets do not get to draw power from their mothership/station. That is the only kind of docked power that I found profitable in old versions.

 

[Nosajimiki]

In a deathmatch.

EDIT: in a 1v1 deathmatch where DPS v HP is the sole factor specifically. Pretty much only arranged duels, right?

Both. If all ships have a high guaranteed survivability factor, then true tanking becomes an important tactical component. If you want to keep an enemy fleet distracted while you kill them, just throw someone everyone hates/fears into a super tanky, super stable ship and let the enemy fleet spend half an hour trying to get that final kill shot while your noob swarm takes them apart.

Also - I played with putting some new salvagers up in long lines they way we used to do... they keep a decent integrity up to 50x1, and if you shoot the module in half, each remaining piece actually has better integrity so I'm not even really sure what the issue is. It seems as if I could set up a huge brick of 50x1 salvage beams in waffle and vaporize roids faster than ever, with no integrity issues whatsoever.

But I have only been tinkering with the new dev a few hours a week and no time on MP - am I missing something?

50x1x1 is integrity stable., but most people suggest 20x1x1 because of power efficiency. Harvesting power with salvagers have a logarithmic fall off but linear power consumption; so, to a point, you can collect more blocks for your power investment using the larger cluster of the smaller beams. 20x1x1 seems to be at or close to the sweet-spot where the power inefficiency of multiple outputs is balanced with the fall-off of a each output leading to optimal efficiency.

For reference, the Merc Dragon Basilisk class miner is 5k with moderate RP features, great ttm, and enough shields to soak some pirate harassment yet it can still hit the mining lag threshold on most servers. Plus, with logistics chambers, it gatherers resources at least twice as quickly as our old 10k miner from p.1.

I'd assume that complaints about "salvager integrity" are actually about cannon modules used as a gap filler between the lines of salvager modules. If the lines of cannon modules touch anywhere then you end up with a single group of blocks with extremely bad integrity. Of course the solution should be obvious - either don't let the lines of cannon modules touch (so that it's many small groups where each group has positive integrity), or use something else for filling the gaps between lines of salvager modules (I tend to use pink hull for all "gap filling") and put the cannon modules in a single blob somewhere else.

Cannons and beams are an issue, but mostly on a larger scale. Since Schine plans to make acid spread based on canon width, high penetration weapons will be naturally less stable than wide area weapons.