WHY Balance?

[Mered4]

From what I can gather, WHY which you seek is pretty small thing, on which WHAT is based on. How does it differ from a tl;dr version of what?

More to the point, I agree that currently mechanics have little cohesion or synergy, but isn't it the goal, or WHAT that needs to be clarified for us to focus on how to get there?

My personal tl;dr of the goal:

Having a balance system that encourages finished ship designs, enables multiple ship shapes to achieve most efficient performance and provides several almost equally effective methods to approach a problem.

You got it - sorta. It's not really a tl;dr of the WHAT - especially if you apply it to other parts of the game, like crafting or trading. That said, what you've stated works just fine for the combat balance, so go for it!

 

[shadowulf]

My personal WHY is to create a game with epic space battles, an amazing single-player experience, an expansive universe unique in that it changes, and a game to enable the creative to be their very best.

To me, other Indie games, such as MineCraft or Terraria, are great games, but have their faults for either PvP or creativeness. A good example is how I discovered StarMade. A hardcore player of Mine craft until recently, I heard about "MineCraft, but in Space" while on YouTube. I then stumbled onto Saber's ship review videos, and my inner creator woke up.

The point is, to me, starmade is a game where a creator, or explorer, or a player vs player guy can go nuts, but what is glaringly in the way is that there are balance issues. All ideas above have their merits, but what I see missing is single-player aspects.

As I have seen many times, not just on this thread, is the idea of ROCK,PAPER,SCISSORS. My problem with this is a large enough ship ( not very big) can hold all three, which I agree with, though I believe certain issues could be removed by eliminating multiple weapon classes on a ship. Bigger is better, currently, but I'd like to see a smaller/specially designed ship break another in two.

As for adventuring/exploring in StarMade, I personally like to land my ship on the surface, or fly around it in-atmosphere, which makes a small ship practical. But a small ship in space isn't practical, or at least, not very easy to survive against other player or even upgraded pirates.

I agree balance issues are a problem, but let's look at both sides of the coin, both single and multiplayer. That's why I believe certain franchises are not good anymore.

 

[NeonSturm]

Maybe merge WHAT and WHY.

WHY = to get WHAT.
But what is WHAT? It's the WHY.

What was there first, the chicken or the egg?


StarMade does not focus on Role-Play as much as Seed of Andromeda or Mine-Craft with their 1/2 meter blocks do.

StarMade dedicates 8 out of 24 bits to block-damage, and 10 or 11 bits to the ID => which means armour, ...

SM certainly does not use the most efficient design, neither for

1. RAM usage of Big ships (where a block's hp is just 1% of weapon damage)
2. RP value of small ships.
3. RAM->GPU transfer (damage display would only need 3, not 8 bit with our current 8 stages)

What is StarMade? You need to ask that question to reverse-engineer the WHY.


I think the WHY can be anything, including:

1. Schema getting his personal project out
   • (not that personal anymore with kupu's support on graphics, all the testers, and community feedback/suggestions, ... contributing)
2. Get something that didn't exist 3 years ago but now has many concurrents
   • (Seed of Andromeda with performance, Untold Universe, Sky Nations, just to name a few ...)
3. Getting rails+logic? Was that the plan?
4. Something we don't see jet.