vanilla state fighters, and a way to have locked up sectors

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    What do you guys think about this: The game provides in its vanilla state fighters, and a way to have locked up sectors where you fight against each other in this fighters. The developers would have to decide what type of fighters are most fun to fight in against each other.

    Server owners could then add on their own designs and orient themself on the developers examples of "fun pvp".

    The fighters would not be minmaxed but actually build for having cool fights where your positioning matters, and when you fire what weapons, and where you are for example able to hit each other with cannons because the fighers are flying at only 50m/s and NOT 225m/s + mobility chambers.
     
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    DrTarDIS

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    So, activate "battle arena" mode that's been in the game for at least 4 years?
     
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    Dr. Whammy

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    What do you guys think about this: The game provides in its vanilla state fighters, and a way to have locked up sectors where you fight against each other in this fighters. The developers would have to decide what type of fighters are most fun to fight in against each other.

    Server owners could then add on their own designs and orient themself on the developers examples of "fun pvp".

    The fighters would not be minmaxed but actually build for having cool fights where your positioning matters, and when you fire what weapons, and where you are for example able to hit each other with cannons because the fighers are flying at only 50m/s and NOT 225m/s + mobility chambers.
    I like the idea but depending on the size of these ships, you're likely going to see differences in aesthetics only; as most players are going make a B-line for stealth/recon chambers and beam weapons.
     
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    I like the idea but depending on the size of these ships, you're likely going to see differences in aesthetics only; as most players are going make a B-line for stealth/recon chambers and beam weapons.
    The challenge for the developers and server owners would be to build fighters where a battle actually is fun.

    Ofcourse hard fights and challenging fights can be defined as fun too.

    This is what I would define as the most unfun type of fighters: For example I once built a fighter with 10-10 cannon-cannon modules, that was around 15m long. I spawned in the same fighter as pirate and we fought each other in the same ship. The fight lasted around 20 minutes of absolute brainless chasing and circling, without any deeper tactics besides "who is able to spray the best".
     

    Dr. Whammy

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    The challenge for the developers and server owners would be to build fighters where a battle actually is fun.

    Ofcourse hard fights and challenging fights can be defined as fun too.

    This is what I would define as the most unfun type of fighters: For example I once built a fighter with 10-10 cannon-cannon modules, that was around 15m long. I spawned in the same fighter as pirate and we fought each other in the same ship. The fight lasted around 20 minutes of absolute brainless chasing and circling, without any deeper tactics besides "who is able to spray the best".
    My standard power 2.0 fighters are of a similar size to yours. 15x15x9m.

    When equipped with a 16-16 C/C The damage numbers listed for my cannon were 64 DMG per round with a 5 rounds per sec. firing rate. So that's 320 effective DPS (provided that all rounds impact) spread out over multiple blocks via acid damage with some of it supposedly being negated by armor. The result of this on a stationary target was as follows; 4 shots to destroy one hull block, 13 shots to destroy one standard block and 32 shots to destroy an advanced block.

    At the rate that those smaller ships can accelerate and change direction, I wouldn't necessarily call this kind of fight "challenging"; more like unnecessarily tedious.

    I equipped the same fighter with a 16-16 B/C weapon and got much higher damage stats; for both burst and DPS. The numbers shown for this combo were 160 DMG per tick with 10 ticks per sec. to create a 1600 point damage burst. Factor in a cooldown of 1.5 seconds for a true firing rate of 2.5 seconds and you get an effective DPS of 640 for this weapon. When used against the same kind of target as before, it cut a hole 5 blocks deep in basic hull with a single 1 second burst. The same beam weapon will destroy one block of standard armor and severely damage the one behind it. 2 shots will break an advanced block.

    This is why I say the only difference (in design) you will see between most fighters who engage in this kind of fighting will be aesthetic in nature. Nearly everyone will slap on a jammer, (some may try to cram in some cloaking) a scanner and as much thrust and beam damage as their reactor will support; possibly waffled and/or under-stabilized if they think they can outmaneuver their opponent.

    [doublepost=1538786337,1538785647][/doublepost]Also, DrTarDIS has a point about battle mode. You can also emulate this feature by building a 1km+ box arena and locking the combatants inside.
     
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    This is why I say the only difference (in design) you will see between most fighters who engage in this kind of fighting will be aesthetic in nature. Nearly everyone will slap on a jammer, (some may try to cram in some cloaking) a scanner and as much thrust and beam damage as their reactor will support;
    I think we have a missunderstanding here. The minmaxing is all what this suggestion is not about.

    The vanilla fighters provided by the devs and server owners are supposed to exactly counter the minmaxing by only allowing each fighter manually.

    That's what my suggestion is about:
    - The devs shall just once try to build ships themself and show to other players what they consider as fun battles.
    - The example ships should give a guideline for other builders for adding their own designs into this lineup of balanced fighters.

    The key of this suggestion is, that the balancing happens via building equally bad ships.

    Another good example would be 10 different fighter builds the two opponents can choose from, but all the allowed fighter builds for the "battle area" are only maxspeed 50m/s and didn't use advanced armor, all 10 different fighters are not minmaxed and try to be equally "bad".
     
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    Dr. Whammy

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    I think we have a missunderstanding here. The minmaxing is all what this suggestion is not about.

    The vanilla fighters provided by the devs and server owners are supposed to exactly counter the minmaxing by only allowing each fighter manually.

    That's what my suggestion is about:
    - The devs shall just once try to build ships themself and show to other players what they consider as fun battles.
    - The example ships should give a guideline for other builders for adding their own designs into this lineup of balanced fighters.

    The key of this suggestion is, that the balancing happens via building equally bad ships.

    Another good example would be 10 different fighter builds the two opponents can choose from, but all the allowed fighter builds for the "battle area" are only maxspeed 50m/s and didn't use advanced armor, all 10 different fighters are not minmaxed and try to be equally "bad".
    Nowhere in my response did I mention anything about min/maxing.

    I understand exactly what you're saying. You want to use balanced "presets" for fighters; kinda like an Elite Dangerous Redux Edition.

    Unfortunately most close range fighter battles tend to lean toward that aforementioned 20+ minutes of "mindless circling" you mentioned; with the key difference in Starmade being that you and your opponent can move in any direction at full speed so you're almost constantly facing each other.


    What is your idea to counter the fact that we only have one decent fighter weapon?
     

    DrTarDIS

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    EH, you CAN alter the acceleration of each axis and rotation in the thrust config of the fighters...

    I think the main issue boils down to the config is silly. The Gud pvp players should make a thread where they post their own updated and balanced config files, explain why it's better, and then use this kinda battle arena with those files in rotation to find out who's right.
     
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    Dr. Whammy

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    EH, you CAN alter the acceleration of each axis and rotation in the thrust config of the fighters...
    I'm aware of the per-ship thrust config; as it's the first thing I change when building fighters. With regard to the OP's objective, a good question to ask is; does a server config exist that can be set to allow / disallow ingame player modifications to thrust?

    I think the main issue boils down to the config is silly. The Gud pvp players should make a thread where they post their own updated and balanced config files, explain why it's better, and then use this kinda battle arena with those files in rotation to find out who's right.
    There are a lot of jacked up things in the vanilla config. What specifically are you referring to?
     

    Dr. Whammy

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    Exactly my point. You should fix them and post your updates.
    Maybe you're onto something. Fuck it. I'll give it a try and see what sticks.


     
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    I think the main issue boils down to the config is silly. The Gud pvp players should make a thread where they post their own updated and balanced config files, explain why it's better, and then use this kinda battle arena with those files in rotation to find out who's right.
    This is the best idea ive ever heard. Since the devs obviously cant or wont think critically about balance, and we have constant arguments over what the balance should look like, how about everyone with a big idea actually put it into a config so the rest of us can test it and decide which one works best and vote on it. We can have a community competition.
     
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    Do missiles and AMS work now? Cause without it trying to make any changes to weapons is more or less worthless.
     
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    No, missiles still wiggle all over the place and cant hit shit less than 40m to a side, and the ai on default settings cant fire cannons accurately at all to intercept missiles. Technically you can intercept them manually and that works great, though. So its still a draw and a waste of time there.

    Can still balance dps correctly, but youre right that without functioning missiles were kinda down to beams vs cannons, and the games AI is all around incompetent garbage.
     
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    Dr. Whammy

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    Also, AI can't lead targets properly. It over-leads with beams (shouldn't need to lead with a laser beam). It under-leads with slow to medium speed cannon shells or if the target is really far.

    Missiles... While they're fast enough to intercept a target and have a good turn radius, they too under-lead targets just like cannons. They speed toward the target then stop tracking it directly and instead aim where the target was rather than where it going to be. So they miss nearly every time then hang a tight U-turn to get back on target and orbit the target until they either hit (<25% of the time) or expire.
     

    OfficialCoding

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    As I said on the Discord, I did extensive testing and Missiles now work, hitting AI piloted drones a good percentage of the time. I should also point out that AI now can actually AMS as long as you are a good distance away from the missile launchers. IDK why people are complaining that missiles don't work. Sure they don't deal a great deal of damage, but Schine can easily tweak that.
     

    kiddan

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    A Thunderdome with dev-defined building restrictions, then? If you had a referee to counter endless circling, I think that could become pretty entertaining. This can all be done with a huge player-made station, so long as guests followed the guidelines; Unless I'm missing something, yea?
     
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    A Thunderdome with dev-defined building restrictions, then?
    No, the devs build the fighters.

    And they are not minmaxed, but build for example with only one thruster so they have 50m/s thrust. Then you can hit each other with cannons. And all fighter build that you can select from to fight in the dome, are equally "bad".

    Just an exagerated example I am certain there are many many more designs possible with a lot of strategical depth, if you don't try to maximize the systems for each fighter, and instead build for maximizing strategical possibilities between the fighters.


    Keep in mind I say fighter, I guess its obvious that I mean any ship type.
     
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    OfficialCoding

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    The thing is with those games like Star Conflict these not min-maxed ships only work because ships have HP and after a certain number of hits, no matter where they are hit, they will explode. You can't do that in Starmade any more because Reactor HP. If they reintroduced Structure HP you could, but currently you can't.