Why exactly is power broken?

[Ghent96]

I'd like the [probable minority] few players to post here that actually think power is broken, and explain exactly why.

I along with many other players reject all the premises for the proposed power overhaul as being wrong / invalid. I don't think there's anything at all broken with power as-is. If anything needs to be changed with power, it can be handled with a simple rebalance or tweaking of the stats of the reactor, capacitor, and auxillary without re-inventing the core game of StarMade.

I have made dozens, perhaps a hundred ships over the past 3 years, and fixed / tweaked even countless more of other people's designs. I have _NEVER_ had a problem with power but one time, on a station that is pretty much entirely scaffold + interior and needed massive numbers of rail mass enhancers for gigantic turrets... so... go figure. I never came whining to the forums to demand the devs change the entire game to make power easier for me. I simply solved the problem by experimenting with new building ideas and reactor layouts. Moreover, everyone I've ever gamed with in Starmade has never complained about power or had issues with it. We all wonder, "Who is it exactly that demands power be changed, and why?" because this has never been a significant issue for the past 3-4 years, until now all of a sudden.

With reasons different/unique from those in the power overhaul thread (which, again, we already quote bombed and all proved false), WHY exactly is power broken? What exactly have you personally been so absolutely unable to accomplish in-game that you think StarMade is broken unless we have a "power overhaul"?

 

[DrTarDIS]

AFAICT Devs have been playing mechwarrior online or Elete Dangerous and got stuck on the heat bar mechanic.

Seriously though; I think it's more a matter of wanting "pretty ships" to be less crippled vs "ugly bricks."
It might also be hoping that they can "fake it" better with NPC AI using heat than with the current system.

 

[Jaaskinal]

The current power meta after 2M e/s is extremely boring. Place down groups of 9890 aux, dock armor over them, have little to no consequences for the aux becoming damaged on its own, and laugh when they try to target your docking point, as destroying it will crash the server, nullifying the fight.

 

[nightrune]

Broken? Not really.

Fun? Not really.

Encourages large ships? Debatable now after power aux. I've seen topics discussing how fleets/drones are meta now.

Hard? Not really after you learn the basics?

Intuitive? Not at all.

Works? For the most part.

Enhances and connects with all gameplay mechanics? Nope. Its just a thing you need. I've also seen the discussions on whether combat gameplay is deep or not. I'd argue its not if you take away many of the exploits, but I don't claim to be an expert on it. I agree with the original proposal on few more meaningful blocks, and I even like the idea of a heat area. It definitely needs refinement though, but all first pass ideas do.

 

[JinM]

The only thing about the power that I think is lacking, that you actually don't have to care about to where put your "reactor". Because the reactor as concept doesn't exist atm in Starmade. And one point is a bad design too: You have to make snakeish mazes of power lines, that only clutter up your system placements.

Placing the power grid is a complex mechanic every player has to exercise, but gives no real value back. I mean if you play chess and think hours about where to put your pawn in 4 moves, it actually matters. But making this snake lines actually doesn't matter at all, because in the end every ship has the same premisse: The power grid is everywhere on the ship. The idea of strategically thoughtout placement of the most preccious ressource you have is very limited. Yes, you can think about wether to put the lines on the top or keel of the ship, but nothing more. Woah so you can decide about 2 possibilities when it comes to the most important thing a ship has: the power. Not very deep.

Doing an actuall reactor mechanic, where you have like 12 places to place it, is a less tedious exercise compared to build this power grids, and gives more strategical value back. More strategic value for less tedious thinking. Having to think in a game is ofcourse a good thing, but as game designer you are also concerned about what players have to think hard, and what duties should be easy. And if you have to think hard, about some stuff thats all the same in the end, it's not that fun to play.

 

[Az14el]

Current power is "broken" in the way it acts on a soft-cap-per-entity basis, this isn't "imbalanced" broken as it is "literally breaks the game" broken, because it essentially rewards a larger entity count, docked together. This is fine if every player can agree on honor to not dock too much shit and have some limitations, and some servers do severely limit docking & fleet use for these reasons, but this means your ship that works on one server now cannot work without heavy modifications on another.
I wish this simply weren't a problem and such designs wouldn't cause crippling lag, because I do love the current power system, but unfortunately they do cause that lag, for reasons not entire within schines control.

tl;dr it needs to be fixed because its a fact that your computer is bad at reading "in game efficient" gigantic file structures regardless of their actual size.

Encourages large ships? Debatable now after power aux. I've seen topics discussing how fleets/drones are meta now.

Those "meta" Fleets/Drones could be just turrets docked to the one/few large ships for further protection & control, the meta is in efficiently built entities, which can mean more ships but more practically means more turrets.

 

[JinM]

The term "broken" is just not suitable for this matter. If the power would be "broken" the game would not work atm. Like having an overpowered hero in a moba that you can't win against. The power is just not fun to play with and tedious to build.

The guys who say it's broken are just too lazy to use the right words and maybe want to exagerate as well. =) Also they might be angry and want to exagerate. Whatever.

It's the internet. The 1% of guys who want their titans to make sense in pvp, are the loudest and the guys who exagerate the most. And those you just give the attention again. There are studies, that the most disagreeing and exagerated opinion on online-forums get the most attention, and thuss seem to matter more to the people, than they actually do if you actually counted the number of people who think like this.

Read the word "broken" as part of the everyday ranting that happens on this board, because people expect this game to get finished faster and are eager to play scify fights. =)

 

[Az14el]

It's the internet. The 1% of guys who want their titans to make sense in pvp, are the loudest and the guys who exagerate the most.

Agreed "broken" might not be the right term, the games clearly been playable (but also breakable for the previously explained reasons), though I do wonder about these "1%ers" and their "pvp titans", if they wanted to selfishly maintain their power they would absolutely be arguing to keep the current system that they are 1: Familiar with and their giant ships that are difficult to rebuild are entirely based around, and 2: enables their builds to be so effective relative to the other implied 99% in the first place.

My own ships are difficult to rebuild, rely heavily on the current power system in ways that would mean guaranteed ground up rebuilds with any major change to the power system, and heavily 'abuse' power & docking interactions. But im perfectly aware thats part of the problem, another part of the problem is that competetively I'd be an idiot not to make use of the advantages that the current system gives me (and by default cause significantly more impact on the server than those who don't).

 

[Scypio]

With reasons different/unique from those in the power overhaul thread (which, again, we already quote bombed and all proved false), WHY exactly is power broken?

Two things, the first one is mostly performances issues, to what we told me, wich is something someone heard from someone else that heard from... So with a bit of salt even if it makes sense. The fact that the current power system got a lot of calculation behind, you got power for each groups and then every groups got calculation together, there is 4 formula behind multiplied for each other ships, that isn't a light system. Well, could change formulas then, that's just my opinion.

Second thing, the fact that power capacity is kind of useless and i can't argue against that. We usually take what we need, a bit more for good measures and then we're good. But then again, it's more about current mechanics/formulas than power capacity itself.

Third one is a bit more of a personnal opinion, it's about caps. They're soft cap, yes, but they're still caps and i highly prefer logarithmic curves to caps. Also it removes aux, i never liked aux anyway.

The rest, Arkudo explained well.

 

[Malacodor]

The heat system would drastically reduce the number of system blocks, which would also make all future refits much easier. We wouldn't have to cram our ships so much with systems to stay competitive. We could build complex hull shapes without it being a pain to fill with systems. For me this outlook lets the current system look pretty broken. It isn't actually broken, I can work with it, but I don't like it.

Third one is a bit more of a personnal opinion, it's about caps. They're soft cap, yes, but they're still caps and i highly prefer logarithmic curves to caps. Also it removes aux, i never liked aux anyway.

Not only you, just look at the reactions on the introduction of aux reactors. I never understood why a soft cap was preferred to a logarithmic curve.

 

[Scypio]

We could build complex hull shapes without it being a pain to fill with systems.

Not if you have to deal with big box of forced system space. Again, heat boxes. >_>
The only one way for me to agree with is a way to manage myself the size of the box, not depending the ship's size or anything else.

Not only you, just look at the reactions on the introduction of aux reactors. I never understood why a soft cap was preferred to a logarithmic curve.

I know i was part of theses people too. But still a personnal opinion regarding the current power system, the fact that i'm not the only one or not doesn't change anything concerning the power in it's globality. There is caps and we have to deal with them.
Also fun fact, the only one thing that got an exponential curve in starmade is power, until you reach the caps of course. The more you add blocks in your box dimension, the more efficient your power line will be until the 2M/e softcap is reached(except if you reach something like a 900m box dimension but... Seriously who will make this kind of box without more to backup if the line get damaged ?) and same for aux powers. Their power by block get better and better until you reach their optimised number by groups wich is around 9890.

So where everything is linear/logarithmic and should be, power is the invert of the rest and what it should be.

 

[jayman38]

Personally, I consider the existing power line system to be "broken" for new users, who just want to lay down a big giant block of reactor blocks via advanced build mode to create a big, efficient reactor. Sure, it doesn't take much to learn the correct power system, but the line system is not entirely self-evident (not necessarily a bad thing), and it is confusing to new players (not a good thing). As JinM pointed out, long lines of reactor blocks make bulk building slightly harder (not a good thing). So, in my opinion, the current line system for power is 2/3rds broken from a fun gameplay and user-friendliness point-of-view. If the game had an unskippable, interactive tutorial at the beginning that explicitly taught new players to place lines of reactors to build efficient power systems, I would only consider the mechanic 1/3rds broken (interrupts bulk builds).

 

[kingreol]

I don't think the power overhaul was just to fix the game, but for the coming features to work better. Not sure what kinda restrictions for AI exists with the power system. I can assume it's the restrictions one can do with a AI ship with having regen and capacity. AI can't phase there weapons right

 

[kulbolen]

"who just want to lay down a big giant block of reactor blocks via advanced build mode to create a big, efficient reactor."

why should this be efficient? i kinda thought part of the point of the new proposal is to make things more engaging.

"(interrupts bulk builds)."

i see no problem with occasional interruptions to laying giant chunks of systems. i kinda thought part of the point of the new proposal is to make things more engaging.

 

[Malacodor]

Assuming that damaging the "generator room" this stop working, do you really prefer to return to "coredrilling" times? Of course this problem will only be for small ships [less 50 meters], "big" ships [more 50 meters] are not going to have that problem. [More than 1 generator "room"]

That's of course a serious problem. I already stated in schema's thread, that the current armor system is far from sufficient to properly protect reactor rooms and conduits. schema also stated, that other systems would be changed/rebalanced as necessary to accommodate the new reactor system.
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Not if you have to deal with big box of forced system space. Again, heat boxes. >_>
The only one way for me to agree with is a way to manage myself the size of the box, not depending the ship's size or anything else.

Afaik the size of heat boxes is planned to depend on the reactor size.

 

[Ithirahad]

The word broken implies some balance or basic functionality issue, which is not the case. The issue is more that the current system is strange, and not much fun. Though the math is straightforward, the system is unintuitive, awkward, and just feels unrewarding to build with. Essentially you build a bunch of weird angular spaghetti in some shape or other, and end up with... um, a bunch of weird angular spaghetti in some shape or other, and have to try and fill around that. I don't know about everyone else, but I'd rather build systems that look and feel somewhat like systems on a spaceship. It's not so much a question of realism ('realism' in a Sci-Fi space game is a somewhat meaningless term, and invoking realism never ends well around here anyway), as it is a question of meeting expectations.

Never mind all the rail clipping shenanigans that couldn't be fixed without some kind of cross-entity heat system.

Aux is a little better, but Jaas mentioned some of the issues with that.

 

[Jaaskinal]

You are another player that make lines more than Braids with power blocks, correct?

Boring things differ between people, if you consider that the worst thing that the current system has is that it is boring as you do not try to explain yourself better is not something that can be measured to know whether or not you have reason in that argument.



You really thing that stuff can not be used AND WILL NOT HAPPEN, at new "power heat" system?

First off the bat, it'd be much appreciated if you used something like Reverso to check your spelling and grammar. I do so myself, despite how well I think I know the English language, it catches some of my mistakes.

Reverso English spellchecker

With that out of the way, you are correct, I do not use braids very often. They're simply not efficient. When making an efficient reactor, you want to get to 2,000,000 e/s with the minimum number of lines possible. To do this, I typically use reactors that are shaped like 3d L's. I make them go through the center of my ship as much as possible, until they get under the highest point, where I make a line jut off to the top, same for the lowest point, and the widest point. Limiting yourself to any configuration that does not meet these points is inherently less efficient since you cannot abuse the dimensions of your ship.

Regardless, I was mostly referring to the Auxiliary system, and not the base power system. Base power can be interesting, but I doubt anyone who builds large ships finds aux interesting. As I stated above, groups of 9890 reign supreme, and there's almost no alternative. If you're using some alternative, you're either not particularly efficient, or you're limited by space and only have one or two aux's. If you're using smaller blocks because you think that they don't take as much damage, many people have made different ways to defend their aux's. I dock doors over my aux. If I remember correctly, Dr. Tardis makes empty tubes of Aux. The damage aux does to itself is embarrassingly small compared to what the opponent is likely doing with it once it's been shot.

Finally, no, I don't think docked armor will go away. I think that docked armor being placed over the power system of a ship will go away. And no, I do not think that the game will stop crashing because of undocked colliding entities, there's numerous other suggestions to deal with that.

 

[jayman38]

"who just want to lay down a big giant block of reactor blocks via advanced build mode to create a big, efficient reactor."

why should this be efficient? i kinda thought part of the point of the new proposal is to make things more engaging.

New players expect a big group of reactor blocks to be more efficient, because of simple logical expectations that a bigger "reactor" (group) will be more efficient than a smaller "reactor" (group), in a general context not restricted to Starmade. New players aren't familiar with proposals and existing mechanics, which is why they go for the big bulky approach when they first build an energy system in the game.

"(interrupts bulk builds)."

i see no problem with occasional interruptions to laying giant chunks of systems. i kinda thought part of the point of the new proposal is to make things more engaging.

A long string of reactor blocks is a continuous interruption, not an occasional one. Again, not even related to the new proposal. From what I understand, the new proposal will make power systems more of an occasional interruption than a continuous one, depending on if it will require "connective" systems, which would again bring it to the level of continuous interruption.

 

[Az14el]

You are totally wrong on a way that seems to do with some extra intention [please do not think on an AD hominen keep reading].
[real sorry for my lack of english]

It's not your english. It's messy but by no means unreadable, i don't have a problem with the way you speak.

Anyway what I've said in the snippet you referenced is that ships built under the current system, tend to be built with the current system in mind.

Now without making any assumptions about my intentions, would you kindly explain how and why that is an inaccurate statement.
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You are totally wrong on a way that seems to do with some extra intention [please do not think on an AD hominen keep reading].

Assuming I have correctly understood the exposure of the heat system, that sistem is triying to be an hibrid between the current one + docked stuff, but elimination the docked stuff and uniting it as a "real" part of the ship, in other words a weapon array can have his "power reactor room" on the same way at this moment you dock a weapon self suficient on a ship.

If you can get that point [If have problems please said it and ill try to explain it better] you can understood why the "heat power" system is only stuff that make giantism easier. [In other words the same places that have now be used for big full power reactor blocks chunks or the docked stuff, can be used for "rooms"].

How do you STILL not understand that excessive docking is the problem here and is encouraged under the current power system (literally all you need to know to figure this out is that a reactor soft cap exists), for both the (dubious) "balance" complaints AND the performance complaints, and that localising the cost of these weapons will mean less need to have them all offboard with their own power & large moving parts. Moving docked entities into equivalent onboard entities is a significant reduction in lag, period.

This isn't about taking away peoples toys its about making them actually work properly, and it's only a step.

Heat system encourages gigantism no more than blocks giving you more stats encourages gigantism, of course the system gets stronger as it gets bigger, and this is on diminishing returns due to Rail Mass & Thrust concerns, it just doesn't have to get exponentially laggier like it does right now due to docking. Lag concerns, like ive already said I like that individual weapon systems can be powered, i like the intricacies of the current system, but its not sustainable. This is not for balance concerns.

tl;dr 2.0; it needs to be fixed because its a fact that your computer is bad at reading "in game efficient" gigantic file structures regardless of their actual size.

 

[Jaaskinal]

New players expect a big group of reactor blocks to be more efficient, because of simple logical expectations that a bigger "reactor" (group) will be more efficient than a smaller "reactor" (group), in a general context not restricted to Starmade. New players aren't familiar with proposals and existing mechanics, which is why they go for the big bulky approach when they first build an energy system in the game.

Remind me again why the incorrect assumptions of new players should influence game design? I mean, sure, some things should be intuitive and standard, like using wasd to move around the player, but does every mechanic have to be child proofed? Are we restricted by the lowest common denominator of the player base, can we not rise above them?