What happened to box dimension bonuses for power regen?

[DrTarDIS]

In short: There are a LOT of space-sims, there are a LOT of builder games, I would prefer this one doesn't become a cookie-cut boredom "facebook game" by dumbing down complex mechanics to a point where "everyone gets cloth/chain/plate armor" and "Levels scale in battle arenas".

I THINK warsong is talking about building a single-line box-reactor up to 1.1 million (as each additional reactor after first one is roughly 1/2 the block efficiency of the previous one) so if you DID just add 2-4 more blocks of x y or z to 900k/sec reactor you would see more improvement that an ENTIRE COPY of that same one. (I have a couple of "advanced stealth" ships that showcase this point) What's not listed in that thought process is the min/maxing of turning&rotation, etc the dimension vs block-count math brings up (also redundancy from having you single pole cut at the 1/3 mark and losing 40% instead of 33.3%)

WarSong, bro; if the system is no longer going to BE box-dim as vanilla "keeping it from those who would abuse it" does NOT matter anymore. It's silly and illogical to use as an excuse and you're better as a person than that. If you're just repeating the words of someone better at math than you and you're copping-out because you don't know the details but trust their viewpoint, please direct them here to address (in a lucid manner) the concerns raised.

Keeping mechanics "secret" to "prevent abuse" is just silly. Unless exploits are found and disseminate so useful ones become treated as FEATURES (eg, Tribes and 'skiing') a new game will NEVER break out of it's box and become something unique and captivating. This is the ENDGAME that keeps your players IN the game after 2 weeks and allows a REAL economy to form; Goods, and SERVICES. Experience and knowledge transfer are very important services, unless it's a facebook-game.

 

[sagethe13th]

Man, I love playing around with reactors. But, I have to say that I like power the way it is now. Power is just far to basic and important for it to rely on such an odd mechanic. It's a good thing that it is so much easier to build decent power systems.


Back on an old server I used to play on, I had to teach nearly a dozen different people how to use the box dimension power mechanic. Most of these guys were in my faction and one or two of them took quite a long time to wrap their head's around it. Now, I don't except everyone in a faction to be an expert ship builder. But, power is literally the first thing to have to do right and was one of the easiest things to get wrong. The gulf in power between ships that had proper power setups and ships that didn't was just to much considering it was one of hardest things in the game to learn. It always bothered me.


Also, there's still some skill left to power design. I haven't stopped playing around with power and the other day I created a formation that beat the simple power lines setup in the 13x13x13 box I was limiting myself to.

 

[CyberTao]

You want that extra goosing of efficiency then you're prolly better off on a PvP server.

Just wanted to point out, that almost EVERY server is Pvp, so many that Pvp is basically the default server.

I would be interested how it was being exploited as well, cause all I can think of is Long ships with a fewLong lines (Which I dont really think of as an exploit).

 

[DrTarDIS]

Man, I love playing around with reactors....I had to teach nearly a dozen different people how to use the box dimension power mechanic.

The question I have is if you and they had FUN discovering the "right way" to make power. I'm in a related conversation with a fellow player over skype (who HATES forums) and this is what he has to say:

[10:33:57 AM]: sad if they take that mechanic away
[10:34:04 AM]: R&D is one of the FUN aspects of the game
[10:34:13 AM]: like, in my opinion one of the most fun
[10:34:51 AM] : R&D, and then building something pretty that still uses practical design principals
[10:35:08 AM]: without the R&D its cookie cuttering
[10:36:06 AM] : besides, seeing soemone that hasnt got the mechanics down and then offering to help them is something that MAKES a good community good

Thought this would go well here.

 

[sagethe13th]

The question I have is if you and they had FUN discovering the "right way" to make power.

Sure I had fun. I loved playing around with power. I won't mind if there was some other complicated system from me to play around with. My problem was that power was first system anyone should get right. Everything else basically stemmed from the ship's power system. And it was to complex to be the first thing you had to learn to do in the game. It was just a little too frustrating for people new to the game, which was not fun. If shields or something used a fairly complex system I'd be okay with it. But, in my experience power needs to be simple.

 

[DrTarDIS]

I see your point sage, but must respectfully disagree. Having the most basic system, as you put it, being a deep and rich area of exploration is what kept my interest in this game long enough for me to actually WANT to learn about other things. When thrusters switched to box-dim (another and arguably just as important basic system) for a while I was in a heaven of depth. with MANY viable and interesting designs.

Let's be clear about a pont here: even a noob can slap together a 9*9*9 solid block of power then slap a solid block of thrusters and get their 'quick and dirty" ship out and about; it will EVEN WORK in noobland. But without the joys of discovering new and BETTER ways of doing things ("leveling up" in an non quantitative manner if you will) the game becomes a very simple cookie-cutter "grindz for moar blockz" instead of a "find a better way to uze mah blokz."

Like most "treadmill games" that lack of accomplishment, and yes PISSING CONTESTS, will IMHO kill any word-of-mouth advertisement and growth the game is starting to build inertia on.
++Play for two weeks, know everything, go back to bigger treadmill game with a bigger community. There's a REASON most people need to go to "spin class" instead of just jumping on the cycle solo, and I think that reason applies here.

 

[sagethe13th]

I see your point sage, but must respectfully disagree. Having the most basic system, as you put it, being a deep and rich area of exploration is what kept my interest in this game long enough for me to actually WANT to learn about other things. When thrusters switched to box-dim (another and arguably just as important basic system) for a while I was in a heaven of depth. with MANY viable and interesting designs.

Let's be clear about a pont here: even a noob can slap together a 9*9*9 solid block of power then slap a solid block of thrusters and get their 'quick and dirty" ship out and about; it will EVEN WORK in noobland. But without the joys of discovering new and BETTER ways of doing things ("leveling up" in an non quantitative manner if you will) the game becomes a very simple cookie-cutter "grindz for moar blockz" instead of a "find a better way to uze mah blokz."

Like most "treadmill games" that lack of accomplishment, and yes PISSING CONTESTS, will IMHO kill any word-of-mouth advertisement and growth the game is starting to build inertia on.
++Play for two weeks, know everything, go back to bigger treadmill game with a bigger community. There's a REASON most people need to go to "spin class" instead of just jumping on the cycle solo, and I think that reason applies here.

Having deep and rich systems in the game is a very good thing. But, you're only seeing things from the perspective of an experienced player. Having what is essentially step 1 in ship design also be the most complicated step in ship design creates an odd learning curve for the game. Where the first thing you must do in building a ship is the hardest thing to do and literally everything after that is easier. A pretty common reaction I got from people I was teaching was that they felt dumb because they had screwed up making a ship at step 1. I always had to explain to them that power is in fact very complicated and that yes this is a strange way to have things setup this way.


The complexity isn't even so much the issues as how it's complicated. There's no real indication you're doing things wrong until you start comparing your ship to others. And even then there's little outward sign of what you had done wrong. The system itself wasn't very intuitive either. If you understood what was going on and you knew the logic of how it worked it was fine. However, no one new to the game would even assume the mechanics worked like that. I know I thought it was a strange system when I was first starting and looked how power worked. One of the people I had taught thought I was some kind of wizard because I could remove power blocks form a structure and get more regen out of it.

Really power and thrusters need to be simple. Any other systems can give more learned players something to play around with. I wouldn't mind if almost every aspect of combat was made more complicated. That would keep people from slapping together a few thousand blocks and having an invincible PvP monster with little thought put into it. But, the game's starting point shouldn't also be the highest part of the learning curve. That's just bad design.

 

[DrTarDIS]

I think I understand where you're coming from on the learning curves, and I can even get behind it to a degree (the difference in efficiency should not be so high, perhaps 20-50% difference instead of the whopping 400% a "good build" will give you). But I must completely disagree that I'm "only seeing things from the perspective of an experienced player." Again, when I was a TOTAL NOOB the reactor efficiency equations were the only thing that kept me playing; I HATE accumulation tredmills (with the exception of "katamari damacy" but that is for an ENTIRELY different reason). I really don't think "bad systems design" could be that much of an issue for new players to overcome, but then again it DOES make me cry when I see a ship with a bunch of willy-nilly block designs. Granted, I'm a special kind of insane IRL where I like to take things apart, figure out how they work, and make improvements.

Then again, if having an "advanced tier" of systems engineers is a "bad thing" to the devs, and they view pushing the envelope of performance specs as "game breaking" and/or "exploiting" they should just make every damned block give a flat bonus with no interaction based on linkage and go cookie-cutter NOW so the players who ARE looking for depth and intrgue stop wasting their time and money and the players who ARE looking for KISS can take over the community.

 

[sagethe13th]

I think I understand where you're coming from on the learning curves, and I can even get behind it to a degree (the difference in efficiency should not be so high, perhaps 20-50% difference instead of the whopping 400% a "good build" will give you). But I must completely disagree that I'm "only seeing things from the perspective of an experienced player." Again, when I was a TOTAL NOOB the reactor efficiency equations were the only thing that kept me playing; I HATE accumulation tredmills (with the exception of "katamari damacy" but that is for an ENTIRELY different reason). I really don't think "bad systems design" could be that much of an issue for new players to overcome, but then again it DOES make me cry when I see a ship with a bunch of willy-nilly block designs. Granted, I'm a special kind of insane IRL where I like to take things apart, figure out how they work, and make improvements.

Then again, if having an "advanced tier" of systems engineers is a "bad thing" to the devs, and they view pushing the envelope of performance specs as "game breaking" and/or "exploiting" they should just make every damned block give a flat bonus with no interaction based on linkage and go cookie-cutter NOW so the players who ARE looking for depth and intrgue stop wasting their time and money and the players who ARE looking for KISS can take over the community.

I agree completely. I am also technically minded IRL. And I love, love, loved playing around with power in Starmade. But, I noticed it was causing problems with new players and feel like the changes have addressed many of them. And yes I would like to see the rest of Starmade's gameplay be as in depth and interesting as possible.

PS. Sorry for putting words in your mouth. I am enjoying this debate.

 

[NeonSturm]

1kk soft-limit => all ships are built either around 1kk or up to 2kk to have some reserve for damaged ones.
Even a soft-limit is too limiting on design choices.

Currntly, all ship are like this:
1.10x * 1.10y * 1.10z = 1.33 volume/power/damage, 1.1 hull thickness.
(until soft-cap, but after about that they start like this again once 1kk power regen is negligible compared to the total output)

The same happens to reactor-cubes (if you count only 25 per reactor block). 10% growth = 33% more output.


Planr What do you think about my idea below to replace soft-cap with linear power growth (instead of cubic)
AndyP WarSong What do you think about the calculations?

1. let it depend on: sum = reactor.size{x+y+z} for a linear (not cubic) growth.
   • let x,y,z being greatest distance of reactors in x,y,z axis only in an array.
2. let power for well placed ones always be 145 and power for others725.
   • let power output be: sum * 145 + (reactor.blocks - sum) * 75,
     • numbers may change
       
     • 100 should be accessible for an average designer to make it easer for effect balancing.
3. to compensate for linear (not cubic) power growth, give thrusters more strength as ship mass increases in a cubic style dependent on ship size (not array size):
   • let thrust per block be: ship.size{x*y*z +1} / ship.size{x+y+z +1}

 

[Ithirahad]

Planr.
Look in your blockconfig files. Block Behavior Configs.
You can edit those with Notepad (Notepad++ works better though) And re-enable block dimensions for power gen.
Don't complain unless you actually look for a fix.
seriously you couldn't have just looked in the configs and toyed around with the settings? Really? You HAD to make a entire thread? And shaming NEW players because they're "just as good" at you at building ships? Ship are not all about stats, you know. Looks do matter.
Peace.

Oh... My... Gods... This... Fucking... Argument... AGAIN! The next time I see this I'll probably throw my tablet at the ground >.>

Seriously, does nobody get that the majority of players build ships for use on (multiple) servers, so local config changes all just mess up the ability to build things that work in those servers?


(Amusingly, I actually don't care much one way or another. The way I see it, the only truly interesting power system would involve lots of complicated simulations and mechanics that aren't even worth mentioning here, so if I can generate power and build nice ships, I'm okay until computers become several times more powerful. However, if I must give an opinion for the sake of not being completely off topic, I'd say that boxdims should be around for those who want to mess with them, but line reactors should be reasonably powerful too, so that the skill/power curve isn't too annoyingly steep for newer players and those whose ship designs don't accommodate massive blocks of power generation. If a system that fulfills these and is also more challenging/interesting than this one can be added, so much the better, but meh.)

 

[MossyStone48]

In short: There are a LOT of space-sims, there are a LOT of builder games, I would prefer this one doesn't become a cookie-cut boredom "facebook game" by dumbing down complex mechanics to a point where "everyone gets cloth/chain/plate armor" and "Levels scale in battle arenas".

There hasn't been a unilaterally successful space sim game since Freespace2 which was inspired by the Wing-Commander series most of which were essentially reskinned WW2 dogfight sims. And besides Star-Made is less 'space sim' and more 'scifi inspired physics sandbox'. Allow me to segue for a moment; One of the first ships I built was a faithful reproduction of the Herc2 from FS2. I filled in the correct width length and height while building around a full set of ship systems. By the time I was done it had just enough kick to kill an Isanth VI. I was happy with it. The game showed me how flexible is could be. By better optimization of the internal space I could drastically change the ship's behaviour if I had been so inclined. I think that rather evaporates your cookie-cutter admonition.

WarSong, bro; if the system is no longer going to BE box-dim as vanilla "keeping it from those who would abuse it" does NOT matter anymore. It's silly and illogical to use as an excuse and you're better as a person than that. If you're just repeating the words of someone better at math than you and you're copping-out because you don't know the details but trust their viewpoint, please direct them here to address (in a lucid manner) the concerns raised.

If a server were to op-in for boxdim people who know 'this one weird trick server admins hate him for' would go right to that server and essentially run the place unless an admin intervened. No. It would be monumentally irresponsible for me to expose an exploit for the sake of "pics or it didn't happen". To bring in someone to explain it "for me" because I "evidently" lack the math skill for basic multiplication would also be rather inconsiderate. As I mentioned it is still a viable exploit and just as AndyP did not go into detail neither shall I.

I also hope you are not questioning my lucidity. I may seem rather alacritous but I'll clarify for you that I am quite compunct. No mater the volume of my joviality I would be most distressed if information I divulged found its way into the hands of someone who would use it contemptuously.

However. If you really are so keen to understand then there are several reactor designs for download. Along side which are several youtube videos on the subject of reactor design and flaws. In essence; Google is your friend.

 

[NeonSturm]

what is now the best reactor design?
does the line have to be a straight line or can I make a S-shape?

I get a bit confused with old /new, but if you can do an S-shape and it is not just connect upper box-dim boundary to lower, how many calculations are then done for a 100^3 reactor cube with no empty space?

 

[BDLS]

Many moons ago someone mentioned about possibly making the disintegrator block something that boosts power generation when adjacent to generators. I thought it was a really cool idea. It would allow people to engineer systems and to balance whether they want a safe stable power system that can take some heat, or a highly volatile but more powerful unit.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tiny tidbit of power generation info I'll throw in here for efficiency people (relevant to drone sized ships)

If you have 8 or less power generators, make sure they aren't touching eachother, or it will be less efficient.

NeonSturm By s-shape you mean connected lines extending on all axis right? The same amount of blocks touching will scale the same, no matter which direction you build off.

Spoiler

 

[NeonSturm]

If you have a car and driving it around other randomly placed cars in a long road, will it arrive at the same time as if there are no cars?
=>No

If you have a car and driving it around other randomly placed cars in a long road, will it have the same average speed?
=> with a very low speed limit (about 20km/h, 10mp/h, ...) and high distance between cars maybe very close
=> else no

Ty for pics, but you didn't answer my question. R=reactor:

r0 = 0x 0y 0z
r1 = 1 0 0
r2 = 1 1 0
r3 = 2 1 0
r4 = 3 1 0
r5 = 3 0 0 !!!
Each only touching 2 others (not including diagonally).​

Because that is what I have most trouble with.

 

[Planr]

Power is just far to basic and important for it to rely on such an odd mechanic. It's a good thing that it is so much easier to build decent power systems.

Have you even been reading my posts in this thread? I think I've already established that power should not be a "simple, any idiot can ace it" kind of feature. Sandbox building games are naturally more fun the more challenge they have to offer for engineering systems and mechanics for objects. Frankly I find building to be boring as hell right now. There is barely anything special whatsoever in slapping down long lines everywhere, that that's LITERALLY all there is now to power systems.
The last thing we need is more simplicity and redundancy.

 

[TheBlueThunder]

I have a question I'm going to feel like a noob asking this "So what is the best way to place power now?"
Because I've been doing the old style of placing them.

 

[NeonSturm]

The old way has no downside in the new system.
If you take that effort, at least you didn't waste efficiency - just design choices.


Now I am thinking about

Instead we should have air-flow blocks which increase life-support dependent on their output / ship mass :p
More blocks to build lines of some new systems

Not to actually require life support (would be another thread), but maybe it could track RP points or RP % which is an option for some servers to prevent simple doom-cubes.
(at least above certain ship size...)

OR

Use code for easy power lines for small ships and require something more difficult in big ships.​

Any ideas how it would be approved in our community?


I personally like more mathematical stuff but it would be bad to suggest too difficult since it it nerfed to a more simple form.

I think we should have a list of mechanics and a vote

 

[Planr]

I have a question I'm going to feel like a noob asking this "So what is the best way to place power now?"
Because I've been doing the old style of placing them.

Now, it's to just place them in long lines everywhere. Expanding box dimensions still is helpful but it doesnt give as much benefits nowadays as it used to.
FYI any blocks that dont contribute to the box dimension still only return 25 regen.

 

[Planr]

Now I am thinking about

Instead we should have air-flow blocks which increase life-support dependent on their output / ship mass :p
More blocks to build lines of some new systems

Not to actually require life support (would be another thread), but maybe it could track RP points or RP % which is an option for some servers to prevent simple doom-cubes.
(at least above certain ship size...)

OR

Use code for easy power lines for small ships and require something more difficult in big ships.​

Any ideas how it would be approved in our community?

It's a great idea, and I would like it too, but considering the amount of ignorant posts I have seen so far in this thread- apparently people don't read- I wouldn't be surprised if it got shot down by a multitude of delusional fears from people who don't read.

Not to sound rude about that, but it's true. I've noticed, some people are replying with old arguments that I have repeatedly debunked in my posts throughout many threads.