What are the most valuable 3 things you miss in StarMade?

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    3 - Ship design mattering for how it performs instead of gameplay communism where all ships are shoved in a mold and "ballanced" into being completely identical. No gatling guns anymore, no efficiency, empty space everywhere completely ruins tactical designs for turret coverage, etc etc etc
    The "one-meta" that you see all the middle-tier builders chasing is different than what you see the real top-tier players making. The reason is that the stuff people talk about in public is already obsolete or only fragments of what you need to know to REALLY make a nasty ship. Spaghetti excluded (since it is so ridiculously OP and easy to exploit) Top tier ships still have faction specific metas that destroy what you may think is top-tier. I can pretty much guarantee that MagicTech, MercDragon, and Trinova each use at-least 3 closely guarded, unique game mechanics that you've never heard of before, and we are not all using the same ones. Furthermore, some of those techs actually require going against the things people assume are best practices.
     
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    I can pretty much guarantee that MagicTech, MercDragon, and Trinova each use at-least 3 closely guarded, unique game mechanics that you've never heard of before
    I will second/confirm this. Any time you get two people together working on & playtesting ships with real commitment, they begin discovering crazy shit.

    I love the real-tech aspect of this - there are some very good unique techs I've encountered - but the downside is that many top players seem to lose sight of the blurry line between an obscure, non-intuitive mechanic and a bug. The result is that a lot of our most active and knowledgeable playtesters are not reporting certain kinds of bugs; bugs that can be exploited in the tech-race.
     

    Raisinbat

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    The "one-meta" that you see all the middle-tier builders chasing is different than what you see the real top-tier players making. The reason is that the stuff people talk about in public is already obsolete or only fragments of what you need to know to REALLY make a nasty ship. Spaghetti excluded (since it is so ridiculously OP and easy to exploit) Top tier ships still have faction specific metas that destroy what you may think is top-tier. I can pretty much guarantee that MagicTech, MercDragon, and Trinova each use at-least 3 closely guarded, unique game mechanics that you've never heard of before, and we are not all using the same ones. Furthermore, some of those techs actually require going against the things people assume are best practices.
    Im talking about ship paradigms

    • Shock damage vs DPS
    • Speed vs Defense
    • Turret coverage vs structural weaknesses (How prone a ship is to critical damage/having components shot off)
    • Efficiency vs cost
    • Utility (mining, jumpdrive, scanner) vs Efficiency
    DPS is god, speed is god, turret coverage is god, cost is irrelevant and everything got free scanners and jumpdrives.

    Do any of these hypothetical ships deviate from that, or are they just stronger versions of the standard ones?
     

    Matt_Bradock

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    DPS is god, speed is god, turret coverage is god, cost is irrelevant and everything got free scanners and jumpdrives.
    Now that's the thing that might actually change with the new power/chamber system, because that doesn't allow you to have a permajammer ship with capped Ion, Punch and Pierce def systems, a dozen self-powered turrets, a docked hull with its own defense effects, a scanner that can decloak/de-jam anything up to twice your ship's mass, and a chaindrive that'll get you to the next galaxy in a minute, all on the same ship. You actually have to pick what you want. You can have the defensive effects but that's gonna cost your jump range or scanner strength. You can have permacloak/permajam but that forces you to leave anything else on the most basic tier. You can choose to go for a good strength and range scanner, and decent jump range, but then no defensive effects or stealth drive for you. You can't have everything any more. And you can't bypass the power needs with self-sustained turrets either.
    If only the stabilisers weren't made so ridiculous, I'd actually look forward to the new power system. Systems won't be free any more, or if they are they are as basic as it gets and need upgrades to actually be reliable.

    That said, DPS might still be god, although a well-made alpha ship with the proper setup might be able to cripple the enemy's reactor in one well-placed cycle of shots. Especially if they can somehow get a good scan off undetected.
     
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    Maybe if you can make an alpha gun that clears out the enemy's structural integrity in 1 shot, the whole thing will go up in smoke.
     

    Raisinbat

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    Now that's the thing that might actually change with the new power/chamber system
    The new power system standardizes EVERYTHING; the benefit of shielding drops off dramatically so you can't really specialize in anything, you can't power a lot of thrust anymore because your power supply is standardized (or its supposed to, hello needles) so you'll always have the same speed, and you can no longer make sacrifices to your ships attributes, like cutting shields in half, to add on another effect. The new system could never allow for a ship that was defined through its chamber effects, because thats just a small piece of it, all ships, without chambers, are basically equal and what its done is strip away your ability to create a ship with weaknesses or specialties; an EWAR ship will be able to fit just as many guns and have just as much basic shielding as a pure combat ship, and that's fucking stupid.

    No matter what chamber effect you want its completely static, you can never go beyond the standard. You could never create a ship thats specialized entirely for scanning/radar purposes because its only able to dedicate a tiny fraction of its mass to those systems.

    The problem was never that you could fit all those effects, it was that there was no penalty in doing so, because it was tied to a % of mass, so splitting up your ship gave you the same benefit with a fraction of the cost. If effects simply gave a linear benefit, like -1 to all damage taken by armor per effect module it wouldn't be possible to exploit it. Obviously this doesn't work for everything, but thats entirely a problem to do with the poor models for stealth, detection and penetration. The only difference between chamber effects and the old passives is what shape they're forced into, and how many you are allowed to have.

    I think you're mixing the removal of exploits in with 2.0; you could've eliminated power generation and passives on docked entities in 1.0 as well, i don't see why anyone thinks there is potential in 2.0; its a worse, more restrictive, FAR MORE EXPLOITABLE version of 1.0 and the only possitive thing i've heard about it has to do with interior decorating. Not that 1.0 is perfect or even that good, but 2.0 is worse in every way when it comes to shipbuilding.

    That said, DPS might still be god, although a well-made alpha ship with the proper setup might be able to cripple the enemy's reactor in one well-placed cycle of shots. Especially if they can somehow get a good scan off undetected.
    I really couldn't care less for 2.0 so i haven't tried this, but isn't power consumption reduced to 10% once a weapon is fully charged? You should be able to build an alpha ship with 10x more weapon systems as long as your ship doesn't move around while charging them. Maybe im missing something since noone has complained about it yet, it just seems super obviously retarded and im sure once people start crying about it schema will unzip his divine pants and piss all over it like usual.
     

    NeonSturm

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    But you can make a tiny scanner ship.

    Or you can make a big one with less scan chambers and more guns.
     

    Matt_Bradock

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    No matter what chamber effect you want its completely static, you can never go beyond the standard. You could never create a ship thats specialized entirely for scanning/radar purposes because its only able to dedicate a tiny fraction of its mass to those systems.
    Except that's false, because mass is no longer your only very limited resource, that's why you have to specialise. Because your chamber capacity won't be enough for everything, you have to choose. And while chambers truly do not take nearly as much space as a conventional good ratio jump drive, maxed defensive effect or a good scanner did, they certainly take more space and require more trade-offs than a jammer (1 block), cloaker (1 block) or chain drive (50 blocks max) did mass-wise. Not to mention that active chambers (like jump drive augments, scanner augments, stealth drive) do tax your power gen too, which is also limited.
     
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    Im talking about ship paradigms

    • Shock damage vs DPS
    • Speed vs Defense
    • Turret coverage vs structural weaknesses (How prone a ship is to critical damage/having components shot off)
    • Efficiency vs cost
    • Utility (mining, jumpdrive, scanner) vs Efficiency
    DPS is god, speed is god, turret coverage is god, cost is irrelevant and everything got free scanners and jumpdrives.

    Do any of these hypothetical ships deviate from that, or are they just stronger versions of the standard ones?
    Cost is irrelevant is true, but that does not dictate design,

    "free scanners and jumpdrives" is not true. In Power 1.o, scanners take lots of of blocks and chain drives are way more vulnerable to Inhibs than big drives so some factions still use 1 big drive as a backup to their chain drive. In Power 2.o you need chambers to make those systems not shit.

    The other 3 things (DPS, Speed, and only using turrets) have hard counters that make all 3 next to useless.
     
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    The new power system standardizes EVERYTHING; the benefit of shielding drops off dramatically so you can't really specialize in anything, you can't power a lot of thrust anymore because your power supply is standardized (or its supposed to, hello needles) so you'll always have the same speed, and you can no longer make sacrifices to your ships attributes, like cutting shields in half, to add on another effect. The new system could never allow for a ship that was defined through its chamber effects, because thats just a small piece of it, all ships, without chambers, are basically equal and what its done is strip away your ability to create a ship with weaknesses or specialties; an EWAR ship will be able to fit just as many guns and have just as much basic shielding as a pure combat ship, and that's fucking stupid.

    No matter what chamber effect you want its completely static, you can never go beyond the standard. You could never create a ship thats specialized entirely for scanning/radar purposes because its only able to dedicate a tiny fraction of its mass to those systems.

    The problem was never that you could fit all those effects, it was that there was no penalty in doing so, because it was tied to a % of mass, so splitting up your ship gave you the same benefit with a fraction of the cost. If effects simply gave a linear benefit, like -1 to all damage taken by armor per effect module it wouldn't be possible to exploit it. Obviously this doesn't work for everything, but thats entirely a problem to do with the poor models for stealth, detection and penetration. The only difference between chamber effects and the old passives is what shape they're forced into, and how many you are allowed to have.

    I think you're mixing the removal of exploits in with 2.0; you could've eliminated power generation and passives on docked entities in 1.0 as well, i don't see why anyone thinks there is potential in 2.0; its a worse, more restrictive, FAR MORE EXPLOITABLE version of 1.0 and the only possitive thing i've heard about it has to do with interior decorating. Not that 1.0 is perfect or even that good, but 2.0 is worse in every way when it comes to shipbuilding.



    I really couldn't care less for 2.0 so i haven't tried this, but isn't power consumption reduced to 10% once a weapon is fully charged? You should be able to build an alpha ship with 10x more weapon systems as long as your ship doesn't move around while charging them. Maybe im missing something since noone has complained about it yet, it just seems super obviously spaget and im sure once people start crying about it schema will unzip his divine pants and piss all over it like usual.
    I can imagine going into a fight players will have "Strap on Weapon pods" or "One-shot Salvos" which are ejected after use.
    Thus for lugging around a bit extra mass they can bring significantly more firepower to bear in the intial stages of the fight for no penatly after they have been ejected.
     

    Raisinbat

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    I can imagine going into a fight players will have "Strap on Weapon pods" or "One-shot Salvos" which are ejected after use.
    Thus for lugging around a bit extra mass they can bring significantly more firepower to bear in the intial stages of the fight for no penatly after they have been ejected.
    But where would they fit all these one-shot weapons since competitive ships are 100% full of syste- oh wait.
     

    Sachys

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    Now that's the thing that might actually change with the new power/chamber system...
    I dont think the new power system was needed for that though. pretty sure adjustments could have been made without all the months of nothing before... well before where we're at!
     
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    Like what?
    They would not be "closely guarded" if I just blurted them out on the dock, but I can say that I regularly kill the exact types of ships you are talking about (at same mass) without taking a single point of damage and without needing the element of surprise. (and no, I do not use spaghetti).