Yeah... if I didn't intend to reboot my faction on Shattered Skies I'd just join this server... As it happens I'll have to just go ahead and play on both. If something like this server could be set up except with player factions rather than established ones I'd happily jump on there.
Shattered Skies does not have size limits, so it's just a matter of time for it turning into a EE MK II. So I'll be rather waiting on this one.
SS DOES, however, have rules against doomcubes, if memory serves. And evidently, that server seems to tend towards more interesting ships than giant flying fridges anyway.
Very promissing so far, cant agree with everything you did, and it seems you didint know about the Beam Hitregistration bugs beyond 2-3km, but other than that its good work and promissing.Okay you asked for it. I apologize to everyone else for this since its about to get interesting like a math class. I will try to Spoiler tag it and lets see if that works.
So in the current build I have only the weapons changed on the base level. We haven't tested it much besides watching a couple dozen AIs kill each other and our two PVP experts smashing things with them. They seem quite effective now and much more balanced. The missiles aren't wrecking the world and the beams and cannons actually seem 'heavier' feeling. Sadly we haven't had a chance to blow up as much as we have been building. 4 stations of the size in the pictures over 2.5 weeks.
My personal notes I wrote for myself starting this bit of work.
"The point of this balance was to increase the effectiveness of the 3 other weapons without invalidating the missiles. This avoids ruining a Blueprint by nerfing the missiles. While one could argue buffs to everything else are nerfs, in this case the numbers show the power of the missile. Missiles are dead even to the other weapons when range and AOE is not accounted for, then another 60% range is given to the weapon set plus the AOE effective against unshielded targets. Combined with its lethal seeking accuracy this can cause an imbalance. Solving for the DPS and PPS is easy. Once those are solved for then the data needs to be normalized. Since the next variable factor is the range that is compared against the total as a raw multiplier. The power needs to be reduced to a ratio since not all devices use the same power amount per shot. The constant was 50 for this since it was the missile baseline. Then the balancing was performed. Some tweaks to the weapons and groups need to be made."
First thing I did was break up the weapon into metric categories as follows (I ran this through excel).
View attachment 11861
I then categorized them by proportionality and supplementary. That then becomes Indirectly and Directly.
So Directly Proportional are Multipliers, Inversely Proportional are Divisors, Directly Supplementary are Additions and Inversely Supplementary are Subtractions. I then slapped all that into a formula which was then fed all the data for the weapons.
Formula(AOE): =(POWER(Radius, 2)/20*DPS*Range)*(50/PPS)
DPS is Damage Per Second = Damage * Pulses / Reload
PPS is Power Per Second = Power / Reload
Formula (Direct) =(DPS*Range)*(50/PPS)
This is where the formula needs weighting. The DPS is essentially as valuable as the range, which is kind of true, but not to the current extent. But even with the weighting you can see the issue. AOE damage is huge against unshielded targets. (Yes the formula for Volume of a circle is (V=4/3 π r^3) but I traded it to a nerf area of a circle because Using half or 1/8 sphere was off the scale, I think half sphere was something like a weight of 8k, AKA unmanageable to balance).
I will tweak later as we go along with testing but the end result is it gives me a Balancing formula that can be used to gauge the 'on paper' lethal nature of a weapon. The first numbers coming back were scary, much having to do with the issue of missiles and the lack of range on the Damage Pulse. Damage pulse was in this formula essentially useless, which is somewhat true from experience. On the other hand missiles are the prime PVP weapon, with cannons providing that backup between salvos. And beams are essentially MEH. So the formula holds true for what we are seeing.
Next I started balancing the weapons. Keep in mind their are playstyles and overall block destruction that required some things to be tweaked away from my baseline of 8 points I was aiming for. Beams are very good at killing a half dozen blocks with the pulse effect. While the cannons were great against shields but the block damage was terrible even with piercing and punch through (Can we say nerf gone too far?). So play style kicked in and the the cannons got a slight bump up (to compensate for the lack of single block damage). I tried my best to not nerf the missiles and think I did a solid job. They feel explosive and yet aren't the king of the server.
Once I feel those are solid and leveled I will work on the Slave weapons. I already have another formula for that and have the basic numbers up. Just it takes a lot of testing for me to be satisfied with balance.
Here are my notes of what the pro/con/tradeoffs were.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
- Alternate weapons are opened up.
- pulses are now semi capable of combat, but slower.
- Cannons and Pulses are now not as effective against missiles.
- Less projectiles will be launched in a fight with slower cannons, but increasing hit rate. (Lag skipping of bullets)
- Beams have much greater range and a heavier feel
Neutral points:
- Missiles will need projectile speed increase to offset loss of superiority, loss of pulse counter and AA cannons helps though.
- Cannons and Pulses are now not as effective against missiles.
- Beams will be VERY power hungry for their new strength
**Alpha strike does not mean First Strike, it means everything is fired at once. Which IMO should mean 'Power Failure' flashing on your screen afterwards.
- Power usage will be much spikier in combat, alpha** strike less likely.
- Beams need group penalty added (DEVs please?), will reduce lag as well through with less beams
- Combat will have harder hits, but slower firing rates.
- Combat ranges have been increased significantly with these changes
- Might encourage diversity of weapon builds
XML code for those that like it, and for those that will wander off with this and not say thank you.
<Cannon>
<Damage>16</Damage>
<Distance>1</Distance>
<Speed>10</Speed>
<ReloadMs>2000</ReloadMs>
<PowerConsumption>50</PowerConsumption><AdditionalPowerConsumptionPerUnitMult>0.1</AdditionalPowerConsumptionPerUnitMult>
<DumbMissile>
<Damage>75</Damage>
<Distance>1.8</Distance>
<Radius>8</Radius>
<Speed>1.50</Speed>
<ReloadMs>15000</ReloadMs>
<PowerConsumption>1200</PowerConsumption>
<AdditionalPowerConsumptionPerUnitMult>0.1</AdditionalPowerConsumptionPerUnitMult>
<DamageBeam>
<DamagePerHit>10</DamagePerHit>
<PowerConsumptionPerSec>875</PowerConsumptionPerSec>
<Distance>1.4</Distance>
<TickRate>0.2</TickRate>
<CoolDown>10.0</CoolDown>
<BurstTime>2</BurstTime>
<InitialTicks>0</InitialTicks>
<DamagePulse>
<Damage>25</Damage>
<ReloadMs>30000</ReloadMs>
<Radius>100</Radius>
<PowerConsumption>2500</PowerConsumption>
More will come in the future for rebalancing. its a slow process which is likely why the Devs haven't done it much yet. They do rapid tweaks to keep us going but nothing major can be done on their part without the time investment.
I will have to test for this. I sadly don't know of all the wonderful bugs in the game only being a member for 5 months. Also there is always hope they stealth fixed it sometime. TBH, the beams in the current build are quite deadly. It needs more testing before I move on to the slaves then the effects.
I might be able to pull that off but cannons currently have a side effect of rounds skipping. This I have tested on a few servers. At 10 RPS the bullets just start disappearing. So actually you lose bullets. Mostly happened in large ship fights. I tested it on hulls to see how many were disappearing and it seemed like 2-3 out of 10, which wasn't good. I wanted to avoid that on this server. Just because it looks like its firing fast if its losing rounds that is not good. ONce again, more testing needed. Sadly cant build, test, code, and have a life all at once.
You can't separate the base weapons. So dumb fire missiles have to be slower if they are unslaved. I can boost the speed on the Slave side, but to effectively slow down the heatseekers you are stuck nerfing the base then buffing them individually on the slaves. Since I haven't got to the slaves that makes this a "wait and see" argument. I still think dumbfires are best against space barns, because then you can't miss.
Mining rates will be tweaked to encourage more expendable usage of blocks. Being that its a PVP server I really want players to beat on each other. A) That takes blocks, lots of them. B) If blocks are too rare then players will hide instead of fighting.
Okay havnt had that so far, last tests i did on rapid fire cannons was on shielded targets (without regen ofc), and they did pull their full DPS as calculated, so all projectiles must have hit. This was in SP though.
Wait, you are making the base missiles slower because you want to slow down the already slow swarmers too?
I cant promisse that i have time to help testing, but should i have time available, ill gladly help.
Well its kinda a bad solution if the missiles then cant even catch a 50% overdrive ship anymore, and honestly, AMS is useles against swarmers anyways due to the sheer numbers used most of the time, in 1vs1's i even use tiny 2 block swarmer groups just to piss of AMS turrets. Id rather advice to play around with the rate of fire and projectile speeds, and maybe wait with this until the Turret AI for tail turrets is fixed.
Glad that i could help.
Well i said "even with 0% support the 1.98x serverspeed (swarmer) is painful", but yes i use them, one of my ships has 128 0% support swarmer groups.
Nah, just seems like you misses some of the things i wrote, but being tired can have that effect XD
Nope, even if the projectiles does not get rendered by the game, they still do damage. Same for multiple-missile launching.
SMD Y U NO GIVE ME NOTIFICATION?
It propably is, as it is quiet random sometimes, either its a bug in the algorythm, or some bug in translating the sector size and range multiplication into the actual hitscan range of the client. Most of the time it is 2km, default sector range, once on a server we were chilling near a guys station with rainbow beam turrets, those beams would have had 5km range on that server, was a lightshow... suddenly out of no where, those beams did damage on 4km, and just like that, it stoped again, and there was nothing else on nav shooting us.
Good to hear. Well it doesnt scale with the sector size at all, its only scales based on the speed limit config like every weapon does.
Thats propably the smartest thing ive yet heard a Starmade Admin say, simply because i think thats what most people forgett when they try to change, sorry, "butcher" in most cases (im looking at you EE) the configs.
You likely recieved a notification, but the alerts popup cannot display more than 20-24 alerts, meaning if you have more, you need to look onto the alerts page instead.
"=(6.5*(10*Damage+ 4*Range + 2*BlastRadius^3,4*ProjectileSpeed,4*SpecialRating)/(6*(PowerCost + ReloadTime) ) ) + ( 2* Damage / ReloadTime *((10*Burst Length) / (10* PulseSpeed + 0.0001)))One of the biggest issues is the sheer amount of stuff in the game. So balancing isn't as simple as does this long list. I actually have to take time on each part. I actually have a plan with this in mind and always had this plan in mind from the beginning since I knew the results would cascade. Don't assume what I have shown you is even close to being done. It is just slow moving since I am bouncing between 5 things right now.
TEST.VoidFlareGaming.com:4242
