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WEAPON MODIFIER BLOCKS
Outlined here is my thoughts on a possible direction the weapons in Starmade could go in. This revolves around not creating new weapons, but modifying existing ones to act like new ones, with special Modifier Blocks. Turn your boring old AMCs into a deadly Wave Motion Cannon, or a beam that can keep up with the dodging of that ace pilot in his super fast fighter!
These Modifiers work by being placed on the end of an AMC array, connected to the weapons computer, and set to be the Output. The AMCs fire out through these blocks, not only looking cool, but also giving an indication of what kind of weapon another ship has just by looking at the texture on the end of the array. A Gatling Modifier, for instance, would likely have a texture showing a revolving multi-barrel output. An added benefit is that players don't need to search for 2K+ Gatling Cannon Blocks, and 1K+ Plasma Cannon Blocks to arm their ship; all the weapons use AMCs, and so you'll always be able to experiment and fiddle to see what works best without worrying about finding X of some specific weapon.
Gatling Modifier
The Gatling Modifier is for all those AMC arrays that need to shoot more than they need anything else. Perfect for dogfighting fighters, or point defence turrets shooting down enemy fighters (or missiles, if that becomes a thing.) The Gatling Modifer drastically increases Reload rate, at the cost of quite a bit of damage and range. The projectiles also look like a few thin bullet-like AMC shots at once, giving the impression of a torrent of withering fire without causing the server to want to kill itself.
Beam Modifier
The Beam Modifier changes AMCs to fire a constant damaging beam at your enemies. Great for welding away hard to hit fighters, or just boiling your way through some capital ship's hull. This modifier increases energy consumption a fair amount, while also reducing damage by a moderate amount, to make up for the constant and instantaneous advantage a beam weapon brings to the fight! The beam would look like a thin white beam, which scales in size according to the damage of the array.
Blast Modifier
The Blast Modifier makes AMCs into the perfect heavy weapon for bombers and capital ships alike! Firing a large fairly slow moving ball of plasma, on impact this weapon does high damage in a small AOE around itself, perfect for chewing through those hull blocks. The weapon is also effective against shields, but lacks the bonus damage from the AOE. An excellent weapon for destroying those giant slow moving capital ships, without the downside of a missile's inability to damage shields effectively. A power-efficient weapon overall, but the projectile's slow speed may render it useless against fast targets unless a lot of points are put into Speed. The projectile would look fairly similar to the current star sprite, only flickering and of course, far smaller.
Wave Modifier
The Wave Modifier changes AMCs to fire a large cone from their output. The projectile itself still travels at the same speed as a normal AMC shot of that array size, but spreads out wider the further it travels. The further it travels, also decreases the damage, until it simply fizzles out. This weapon has the advantage of being able to hit multiple targets in a wide area. Turrets armed with this weapon can decimate smaller fighters that get too close, but will also lightly damage them at long range due to the massive cone spread at that range. The main disadvantage of the weapon is the incredibly slow Reload speed, preventing ships from creating a constant killzone around their ships (Although a supertitan probably could, but it would be a bit silly to concentrate on doing so.) The projectile itself would likely look like a white energy ring the radius of the cone.
Energy Modifier
This Modifier is different from the others, in that it only needs to be connected to a weapons computer; it can be placed anywhere. Activating the computer gives you the ability to set RGB values for the projectiles from your weapons, allowing you to make cool coloured weapons that can help give factions identity, or simply help you make your weapons as cool and amazing looking as you feel they should be. You know you want to stick some orange beams on your Starfleet ship! You cannot change the projectiles alpha, because people would make their weaponry invisible and do mean things with them. You know who you are.
COMBINATIONS
Here's where the idea gets interesting!
You can combine the various Modifiers to get even more weapon types! Place a Beam Modifier onto a Gatling Modifier to create a Pulse Beam weapon! Place a Blast Modifier onto a Wave Modifer to get a Shockwave Cannon(space flak)! You can have any combination of Modifiers, with the only restriction being that you can only have one of each type, and no more than two. Simply attach a Modifier onto the end of another, and you're done! You don't need to worry about which order the Modifiers are in, as there is only one combination for each set of blocks.
The Tier III combinations are listed simply as an example of interesting weapons that could be made, but a combination of more than two Modifiers might be a bit too much, both code and gameplay-wise.
Tier II Modified Weaponry
Advanced weaponry for specific roles, allowing for more interesting ship and fleet roles and diversification.
Gatling + Beam creates a Pulse Beam weapon, which deals higher damage, but has a Reload rate, as it fires on and off in short pulses. The customization for this weapon should not only have Reload, but Delay as stats, so you could make a long firing beam, with only a tiny delay before it fires, or maybe a rapid fire beam that has equal durations for firing and recharging. Beeeeeam and off, Beeeeeam and off. Pulse beams are awesome. This would likely make the most accurate Phaser weapon, for the Trek fans out there.
Gatling + Blast creates the ideal fighter-bomber weapon, a micro plasma cannon that can fire at a moderate rate and speed. This weapon unfortunately, is quite inefficient compared to the normal Blast plasma cannon, and requires a great deal of power to fire. If you can fire it without crippling yourself however, this weapon is quite effective against unshielded targets, because of the tiny little AOE it has, damaging or destroying the blocks around the impact area. This combination is quite similar to a standard AMC, except for the higher power drain, slower projectile speed, AOE damage and of course, the fact that it's an awesome glowing ball of plasma.
Gatling + Wave creates the Firestorm Cannon, the ultimate in "shooting the crap out of everything" technology. This weapon basically spurts out a horrifying amount of gatling AMC firepower in a cone, causing light damage to everything in the cone. While the gun may be firing waaaay more than a simple gatling weapon, the visible projectiles are just cosmetic in nature, as well as the damage being even lower than before. This weapon is basically a rapid-fire, really weak wave cannon that looks like minigun heaven, and of course, it would be the greatest anti-missile weapon in the game. Try firing missiles through that withering barrage!
Beam + Blast creates the deadly Ion Cannon. This weapon is a giant beam of death that uses a huuuuge amount of power, but does a great amount of damage, and also has an AOE at the point of impact. A frigate class vessel dedicated to using a single one of these is a genuine threat to ships many times it's size. Apart from the power requirements, the main downside? The cannon cannot be aimed, firing directly ahead at all times, making it extremely difficult to almost impossible to hit any small fast targets.
Beam + Wave create the Wave Motion Cannon. This weapon is affected by damage dropoff over long range more than any other weapon in the game. A giant beam weapon that widens the further it travels, it causes immense damage, as well as a great deal of knockback to whatever it hits, sending them flying away burning and/or dead. This weapon requires colossal amounts of energy to fire for more than a second or so, but makes up for it with raw power; if you can jam the barrel of this weapon into your enemy's hull, you can be assured that they will certainly feel the blast, regardless of how massive and shielded their ship is. At long range however, the damage drops down to miserable levels, so this weapon is really designed for captains that want to fly giant shotguns through space.
Blast + Wave creates the Shockwave Cannon, a delicious space flak gun that will torment enemy fighters for sure. Firing a fast moving bolt of energy towards a target, if the bolt gets within a certain distance of an enemy vessel, it explodes in a large radius, low damage explosion. Where the Shockwave Cannon truly shines however, is when the shields go down; damage to the hull scales inversely with the mass of the enemy ship! The smaller the ship, the higher damage it's exposed hull will take from the explosion. The damage decreases to a minimum of 25% of the basic explosion damage against larger ships, so it is inadvisable to use such a weapon against them. If the ship is covered in Hardened Hull, the damage reduction may reduce the damage to almost nothing!
Tier III Exotic Weaponry
Listed here for the sake of brainstorming, but I feel that a combination of more than two Modifiers would be bad. Such strange weapons would be better served as entirely seperate systems.
Gatling + Beam + Blast creates the Ravager Disruptor, the pirate king's best friend. While this weapon has no effect on shielded targets, if you hit an unshielded target with it, it damages that vessel's power generators proportional to the amount of power they are producing. A vessel producing a huge amount of power would find a great deal of their regen disappearing quite quickly, preventing them from operating properly, and opening them up to boarding actions from the people that crippled it. The downsides of such a weapon? You'd need an entire capital ship built around this weapon in order to power it, and it of course has diminishing returns; a low power target will take very little damage to the generators at all. A vessel armed with such a weapon can be dispatched because it can't work through shields, but if it has friends? Run.
Gatling + Beam + Wave creates the Scrambler Wave. This strange weapon messes with the IFF tags of the ship you hit with it, causing it to appear hostile to everything in the game. Players obviously would not suddenly attack their friend, but all NPCs and AI-controlled turrets and ships would turn on them. Turrets attached to the affected ship would not target their vessel. In order to activate the weapon's effect, the wave must constantly strike the targeted vessel for several seconds. An excellent weapon to use against multiple enemies armed with many turrets.
Gatling + Blast + Wave creates the Quantum Driver. This weapon fires a bolt of energy that folds space around itself, drawing in low mass objects towards itself as it travels. On impact, the projectile will deal constant damage to whatever it hits until it runs out of power and disperses. Against a powerful shield, it will do a great deal of damage before fizzling out, but against an unshielded target, it will simply drill straight through the target, until it either expends itself on the target somewhere or passes through the other side to continue its deadly journey.
Beam + Blast + Wave creates the Graviton Beam. This advanced weapon slows down a ship in proportion to it's thrust capacity, and the Beam's power. With enough power behind it, the Graviton Beam can even render enemy capital ships incapable of anything but turning, allowing allies armed with weapons such as the Plasma Cannon or Ion Cannon to start utterly disassembling them. Such a powerful Graviton Beam however, would likely need a large ship like a battlecruiser to completely stop an enemy capital ship in it's tracks. A dedicated support weapon indeed.
The premise of the Modifiers could also be adapted to missile weapons, with things like Torpedo, EMP, Plasma and Cluster Modifiers, for instance. Firing lock-on, slow moving torpedoes that disrupt shields and power regen? Sounds awesome. I could cover stuff for them, but I think the AMC Modifiers show how it could work pretty well.
I would love to see a missile customization Modifier though, pick from a selection of sprites for the main missile, choose RGB and alpha for the missile trail. That would be fantastic. Get some awesome photon torpedoes flying around or something.
Other Ideas
Lastly, unrelated to the Modifiers above, I'd like to put forward ideas for two new blocks. I feel, at least the second one of these is truly needed for the game. First one would be awesome though.
Shield Control Block
Basically, seperates your shields into different facings. Place a Shield Control Block (or SCB) facing forwards, and it splits your shield strength 50/50 between frontal damage, and then damage from everywhere else. Add extra SCBs in different orientations to change those facings into seperate shields. The shields are of course a fraction of your full capacity, divided however you like amongst them, in the same fashion as the AMC customization currently works. You could set your ship to have 50% of it's power to the forward shields, with the remaining 50% divided between whatever other shield facings you may or may not have.
Armor Energizer Block
The twin brother to shields, this block is placed exactly the same as shield blocks, anywhere on the ship works fine. It's effect is to increase the health and damage resistance of every Hull and Hardened Hull block on the ship by a small amount per Armor Energizer Blocks (AEB). The damage resistance caps out at 65% for normal Hull and 80% for Hardened Hull blocks, making sure ships, while resistant, do not become invincible. The HP of these blocks, however, has no limit, and will continue increasing based on the number of AEBs on the ship, similar to the capacity of a shield. The AEB not only allows regular ships some capacity to prevent AMCs from drilling their way through the hull in seconds once the shields fall, but also allows for ships to be built that aren't based around shields, low-tech ships and such. The AEB also drains power exactly the same as the shield blocks, polarising the hull against damage, making it a true counterpart to the shield block.
Your hull may not regenerate like a shield, but shields don't have damage reduction, do they?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on these mechanics.
Outlined here is my thoughts on a possible direction the weapons in Starmade could go in. This revolves around not creating new weapons, but modifying existing ones to act like new ones, with special Modifier Blocks. Turn your boring old AMCs into a deadly Wave Motion Cannon, or a beam that can keep up with the dodging of that ace pilot in his super fast fighter!
These Modifiers work by being placed on the end of an AMC array, connected to the weapons computer, and set to be the Output. The AMCs fire out through these blocks, not only looking cool, but also giving an indication of what kind of weapon another ship has just by looking at the texture on the end of the array. A Gatling Modifier, for instance, would likely have a texture showing a revolving multi-barrel output. An added benefit is that players don't need to search for 2K+ Gatling Cannon Blocks, and 1K+ Plasma Cannon Blocks to arm their ship; all the weapons use AMCs, and so you'll always be able to experiment and fiddle to see what works best without worrying about finding X of some specific weapon.
Gatling Modifier
The Gatling Modifier is for all those AMC arrays that need to shoot more than they need anything else. Perfect for dogfighting fighters, or point defence turrets shooting down enemy fighters (or missiles, if that becomes a thing.) The Gatling Modifer drastically increases Reload rate, at the cost of quite a bit of damage and range. The projectiles also look like a few thin bullet-like AMC shots at once, giving the impression of a torrent of withering fire without causing the server to want to kill itself.
Beam Modifier
The Beam Modifier changes AMCs to fire a constant damaging beam at your enemies. Great for welding away hard to hit fighters, or just boiling your way through some capital ship's hull. This modifier increases energy consumption a fair amount, while also reducing damage by a moderate amount, to make up for the constant and instantaneous advantage a beam weapon brings to the fight! The beam would look like a thin white beam, which scales in size according to the damage of the array.
Blast Modifier
The Blast Modifier makes AMCs into the perfect heavy weapon for bombers and capital ships alike! Firing a large fairly slow moving ball of plasma, on impact this weapon does high damage in a small AOE around itself, perfect for chewing through those hull blocks. The weapon is also effective against shields, but lacks the bonus damage from the AOE. An excellent weapon for destroying those giant slow moving capital ships, without the downside of a missile's inability to damage shields effectively. A power-efficient weapon overall, but the projectile's slow speed may render it useless against fast targets unless a lot of points are put into Speed. The projectile would look fairly similar to the current star sprite, only flickering and of course, far smaller.
Wave Modifier
The Wave Modifier changes AMCs to fire a large cone from their output. The projectile itself still travels at the same speed as a normal AMC shot of that array size, but spreads out wider the further it travels. The further it travels, also decreases the damage, until it simply fizzles out. This weapon has the advantage of being able to hit multiple targets in a wide area. Turrets armed with this weapon can decimate smaller fighters that get too close, but will also lightly damage them at long range due to the massive cone spread at that range. The main disadvantage of the weapon is the incredibly slow Reload speed, preventing ships from creating a constant killzone around their ships (Although a supertitan probably could, but it would be a bit silly to concentrate on doing so.) The projectile itself would likely look like a white energy ring the radius of the cone.
Energy Modifier
This Modifier is different from the others, in that it only needs to be connected to a weapons computer; it can be placed anywhere. Activating the computer gives you the ability to set RGB values for the projectiles from your weapons, allowing you to make cool coloured weapons that can help give factions identity, or simply help you make your weapons as cool and amazing looking as you feel they should be. You know you want to stick some orange beams on your Starfleet ship! You cannot change the projectiles alpha, because people would make their weaponry invisible and do mean things with them. You know who you are.
COMBINATIONS
Here's where the idea gets interesting!
You can combine the various Modifiers to get even more weapon types! Place a Beam Modifier onto a Gatling Modifier to create a Pulse Beam weapon! Place a Blast Modifier onto a Wave Modifer to get a Shockwave Cannon(space flak)! You can have any combination of Modifiers, with the only restriction being that you can only have one of each type, and no more than two. Simply attach a Modifier onto the end of another, and you're done! You don't need to worry about which order the Modifiers are in, as there is only one combination for each set of blocks.
The Tier III combinations are listed simply as an example of interesting weapons that could be made, but a combination of more than two Modifiers might be a bit too much, both code and gameplay-wise.
Tier II Modified Weaponry
Advanced weaponry for specific roles, allowing for more interesting ship and fleet roles and diversification.
Gatling + Beam creates a Pulse Beam weapon, which deals higher damage, but has a Reload rate, as it fires on and off in short pulses. The customization for this weapon should not only have Reload, but Delay as stats, so you could make a long firing beam, with only a tiny delay before it fires, or maybe a rapid fire beam that has equal durations for firing and recharging. Beeeeeam and off, Beeeeeam and off. Pulse beams are awesome. This would likely make the most accurate Phaser weapon, for the Trek fans out there.
Gatling + Blast creates the ideal fighter-bomber weapon, a micro plasma cannon that can fire at a moderate rate and speed. This weapon unfortunately, is quite inefficient compared to the normal Blast plasma cannon, and requires a great deal of power to fire. If you can fire it without crippling yourself however, this weapon is quite effective against unshielded targets, because of the tiny little AOE it has, damaging or destroying the blocks around the impact area. This combination is quite similar to a standard AMC, except for the higher power drain, slower projectile speed, AOE damage and of course, the fact that it's an awesome glowing ball of plasma.
Gatling + Wave creates the Firestorm Cannon, the ultimate in "shooting the crap out of everything" technology. This weapon basically spurts out a horrifying amount of gatling AMC firepower in a cone, causing light damage to everything in the cone. While the gun may be firing waaaay more than a simple gatling weapon, the visible projectiles are just cosmetic in nature, as well as the damage being even lower than before. This weapon is basically a rapid-fire, really weak wave cannon that looks like minigun heaven, and of course, it would be the greatest anti-missile weapon in the game. Try firing missiles through that withering barrage!
Beam + Blast creates the deadly Ion Cannon. This weapon is a giant beam of death that uses a huuuuge amount of power, but does a great amount of damage, and also has an AOE at the point of impact. A frigate class vessel dedicated to using a single one of these is a genuine threat to ships many times it's size. Apart from the power requirements, the main downside? The cannon cannot be aimed, firing directly ahead at all times, making it extremely difficult to almost impossible to hit any small fast targets.
Beam + Wave create the Wave Motion Cannon. This weapon is affected by damage dropoff over long range more than any other weapon in the game. A giant beam weapon that widens the further it travels, it causes immense damage, as well as a great deal of knockback to whatever it hits, sending them flying away burning and/or dead. This weapon requires colossal amounts of energy to fire for more than a second or so, but makes up for it with raw power; if you can jam the barrel of this weapon into your enemy's hull, you can be assured that they will certainly feel the blast, regardless of how massive and shielded their ship is. At long range however, the damage drops down to miserable levels, so this weapon is really designed for captains that want to fly giant shotguns through space.
Blast + Wave creates the Shockwave Cannon, a delicious space flak gun that will torment enemy fighters for sure. Firing a fast moving bolt of energy towards a target, if the bolt gets within a certain distance of an enemy vessel, it explodes in a large radius, low damage explosion. Where the Shockwave Cannon truly shines however, is when the shields go down; damage to the hull scales inversely with the mass of the enemy ship! The smaller the ship, the higher damage it's exposed hull will take from the explosion. The damage decreases to a minimum of 25% of the basic explosion damage against larger ships, so it is inadvisable to use such a weapon against them. If the ship is covered in Hardened Hull, the damage reduction may reduce the damage to almost nothing!
Tier III Exotic Weaponry
Listed here for the sake of brainstorming, but I feel that a combination of more than two Modifiers would be bad. Such strange weapons would be better served as entirely seperate systems.
Gatling + Beam + Blast creates the Ravager Disruptor, the pirate king's best friend. While this weapon has no effect on shielded targets, if you hit an unshielded target with it, it damages that vessel's power generators proportional to the amount of power they are producing. A vessel producing a huge amount of power would find a great deal of their regen disappearing quite quickly, preventing them from operating properly, and opening them up to boarding actions from the people that crippled it. The downsides of such a weapon? You'd need an entire capital ship built around this weapon in order to power it, and it of course has diminishing returns; a low power target will take very little damage to the generators at all. A vessel armed with such a weapon can be dispatched because it can't work through shields, but if it has friends? Run.
Gatling + Beam + Wave creates the Scrambler Wave. This strange weapon messes with the IFF tags of the ship you hit with it, causing it to appear hostile to everything in the game. Players obviously would not suddenly attack their friend, but all NPCs and AI-controlled turrets and ships would turn on them. Turrets attached to the affected ship would not target their vessel. In order to activate the weapon's effect, the wave must constantly strike the targeted vessel for several seconds. An excellent weapon to use against multiple enemies armed with many turrets.
Gatling + Blast + Wave creates the Quantum Driver. This weapon fires a bolt of energy that folds space around itself, drawing in low mass objects towards itself as it travels. On impact, the projectile will deal constant damage to whatever it hits until it runs out of power and disperses. Against a powerful shield, it will do a great deal of damage before fizzling out, but against an unshielded target, it will simply drill straight through the target, until it either expends itself on the target somewhere or passes through the other side to continue its deadly journey.
Beam + Blast + Wave creates the Graviton Beam. This advanced weapon slows down a ship in proportion to it's thrust capacity, and the Beam's power. With enough power behind it, the Graviton Beam can even render enemy capital ships incapable of anything but turning, allowing allies armed with weapons such as the Plasma Cannon or Ion Cannon to start utterly disassembling them. Such a powerful Graviton Beam however, would likely need a large ship like a battlecruiser to completely stop an enemy capital ship in it's tracks. A dedicated support weapon indeed.
The premise of the Modifiers could also be adapted to missile weapons, with things like Torpedo, EMP, Plasma and Cluster Modifiers, for instance. Firing lock-on, slow moving torpedoes that disrupt shields and power regen? Sounds awesome. I could cover stuff for them, but I think the AMC Modifiers show how it could work pretty well.
I would love to see a missile customization Modifier though, pick from a selection of sprites for the main missile, choose RGB and alpha for the missile trail. That would be fantastic. Get some awesome photon torpedoes flying around or something.
Other Ideas
Lastly, unrelated to the Modifiers above, I'd like to put forward ideas for two new blocks. I feel, at least the second one of these is truly needed for the game. First one would be awesome though.
Shield Control Block
Basically, seperates your shields into different facings. Place a Shield Control Block (or SCB) facing forwards, and it splits your shield strength 50/50 between frontal damage, and then damage from everywhere else. Add extra SCBs in different orientations to change those facings into seperate shields. The shields are of course a fraction of your full capacity, divided however you like amongst them, in the same fashion as the AMC customization currently works. You could set your ship to have 50% of it's power to the forward shields, with the remaining 50% divided between whatever other shield facings you may or may not have.
Armor Energizer Block
The twin brother to shields, this block is placed exactly the same as shield blocks, anywhere on the ship works fine. It's effect is to increase the health and damage resistance of every Hull and Hardened Hull block on the ship by a small amount per Armor Energizer Blocks (AEB). The damage resistance caps out at 65% for normal Hull and 80% for Hardened Hull blocks, making sure ships, while resistant, do not become invincible. The HP of these blocks, however, has no limit, and will continue increasing based on the number of AEBs on the ship, similar to the capacity of a shield. The AEB not only allows regular ships some capacity to prevent AMCs from drilling their way through the hull in seconds once the shields fall, but also allows for ships to be built that aren't based around shields, low-tech ships and such. The AEB also drains power exactly the same as the shield blocks, polarising the hull against damage, making it a true counterpart to the shield block.
Your hull may not regenerate like a shield, but shields don't have damage reduction, do they?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on these mechanics.
This would allow for a huge expansion to the variety of shooty weapons whilst keeping the system relatively simple and not necessarily requiring that entirely new weapon systems be added. It, furthermore, fits very well with the whole StarMade idea of custom-building all of your ship\'s components, block-by-block. I love it. :3 The defense ideas as well are a nice touch. Very good ideas overall, in my opinion.
