ZimmTech: Pirate Fleet Competition [Awards Announced]

[Lone_Puppy]

I used an overclocked logic clock with a really high tick rate. We've been talking about super fast clocks with small numbers of blocks here: http://starmadedock.net/threads/trying-to-make-this-basic-clock-faster-for-a-push-effect.8662/

Sweeeet....!

I've only recently discovered the logic section of this site. Most helpful and some really cool stuff!

 

[StormWing0]

lol I wonder how my ships are going to get rated since most of them are likely to take off and vanish before anything short of jump inhibitors + Beam Missiles can do anything.

 

[Parameter]

Because I'm a loser, I forgot to upload my ships to the community content section, instead of just linking to them in the thread. I've fixed that now!

You can find the Shepherd pirate ships here now: http://starmadedock.net/content/zimmtech-theshepherds-parameter.3545/

 

[Lone_Puppy]

I've started polishing off the Erox. I'm just chipping away at stuff now.

• The Emergency Cargo Release switch and Display by the door are now embedded in the floor so you can view from the core out the door using Right+SHIFT keys.
• Started changing the Cruise control a little. Arranging it in a logical construction so you can see how it works at a glance better.
• Fixed the cannon block count.
• Looking to add automation for the jump drive or maybe double up on jump drives. Haven't decided yet. Maybe I'll add this feature to my Trading Guild Freighter instead.
• Have a couple new pods. Once with a stolen ship and some parts. You have to install the parts to get the ship working. It's made to look like the ship is being reverse engineered by the pirates. So, they've pulled it apart and have the bits & pieces stacked up here and there. Naturally, in a fire fight some of these things would most likely be destroyed. So you will have a puzzle to solve if you want to rebuild the ship.

 

[jzimmerman4]

_______Pirate Fleet Competition_________​

Sponsored by ZimmTech
​

_____Awards_____

• Grand Prize: Parameter
• Cosmetic: SirRadAlotMore
• System: Panpiper
• Creativity: StormWing0

 

[StormWing0]

lol want to inactive versions later so they don't run away? XD

 

[jzimmerman4]

lol want to inactive versions later so they don't run away? XD

Those were certainly be helpful! Hahah

 

[StormWing0]

Here they are.

Would have uploaded them earlier if I knew you needed them not moving. XD

 

[Panpiper]

Thank you jzimmerman4 for holding this competition. It is very unlikely I would have otherwise ever created this many small ships, as I usually focus my thinking on cruiser and up. The server I play on has gained a much greater diversity of pirates as a result.

I would like to know if you intend to post more elaboration on how you judged the entries. For instance, I won the 'systems' category, but not a word was spoken in your video about systems. A more detailed analysis of each category, or a more detailed analysis of each contestant, from the point of view of each category, would be instructive. It is also interesting how Parameter won the overall competition, yet did not score top in any of the individual categories (I do not contest the judging, his ships are very nice, just curious how he stacked in the categories).

 

[Lone_Puppy]

_______Pirate Fleet Competition_________​

Sponsored by ZimmTech
​

_____Awards_____

• Grand Prize: Parameter
• Cosmetic: SirRadAlotMore
• System: Panpiper
• Creativity: StormWing0

Hey thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate it! Was a great exercise for me and I learned so much. Let me know if you run another competition. I'd be happy to participate. I'm keen to play with all the other guys entries. Especially Stormwings pinata.

 

[jzimmerman4]

Thank you jzimmerman4 for holding this competition. It is very unlikely I would have otherwise ever created this many small ships, as I usually focus my thinking on cruiser and up. The server I play on has gained a much greater diversity of pirates as a result.

I would like to know if you intend to post more elaboration on how you judged the entries. For instance, I won the 'systems' category, but not a word was spoken in your video about systems. A more detailed analysis of each category, or a more detailed analysis of each contestant, from the point of view of each category, would be instructive. It is also interesting how Parameter won the overall competition, yet did not score top in any of the individual categories (I do not contest the judging, his ships are very nice, just curious how he stacked in the categories).

For systems I mainly focused on DPS, shields, and armor hp. I measured how much damage unloading all the ships weapons onto a 100,000 shielded target did. Reasons your ships won the system category was that they dealt the most damage and your ships on average had the 2nd most shields as compared to the other contestants. This gave you the best rating (1) in the system effectiveness. Parameter placed (2) in systems and (2) in cosmetics so his total rating was the best over all despite getting second in the sub categories.

Hey thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate it! Was a great exercise for me and I learned so much. Let me know if you run another competition. I'd be happy to participate. I'm keen to play with all the other guys entries. Especially Stormwings pinata.

Glad this was helpful for you as a builder! And yes I will be holding more competitions! I believe a trading guild fleet will be held around fall or winter break

 

[SirRadAlotMore]

Hey Ho,
great review and feedback, had lot´s of fun participating in this contest.
Also, as i am very new to this Game, seeing the other entries was inspiring and
instructive as well.
Enjoyed it, looking forward to the next competition

 

[jzimmerman4]

Hey Ho,
great review and feedback, had lot´s of fun participating in this contest.
Also, as i am very new to this Game, seeing the other entries was inspiring and
instructive as well.
Enjoyed it, looking forward to the next competition

Awesome man! My one suggestion to you would be to try and improve your stats, that's what held you back from first place but otherwise beautiful submissions! Great job.

 

[Parameter]

:D YAY :D

Sadly, I, uh, don't have a speech prepared or anything. I know you all are disappointed. :p

First and foremost, though, I'm glad that jzimmerman4 took the time to host this competition and provide an opportunity for the entire community to get involved. I also really enjoyed getting to see all the entries come together, and was really impressed with the variety of builds and talents that the competition was able to show off. Congratulations to everyone who entered, you guys are all awesome builders. I'll definitely be downloading the entries and poking around all the cool ships.

I really liked the video review of all the ships, seeing them like that showed some really cool details I missed in the various still shots. I also really liked being able to see the scale of the various ships in relation to each other. Video of some combat testing would've been fun, too. I'll have to set up some pirate battles soon, methinks.

Space is definitely a more dangerous place with all these extra pirates hunting around. Makes you wonder if any faction's up for some intergalactic bounty hunting...

 

[Lone_Puppy]

:D YAY :D

Sadly, I, uh, don't have a speech prepared or anything. I know you all are disappointed. :p

First and foremost, though, I'm glad that jzimmerman4 took the time to host this competition and provide an opportunity for the entire community to get involved. I also really enjoyed getting to see all the entries come together, and was really impressed with the variety of builds and talents that the competition was able to show off. Congratulations to everyone who entered, you guys are all awesome builders. I'll definitely be downloading the entries and poking around all the cool ships.

I really liked the video review of all the ships, seeing them like that showed some really cool details I missed in the various still shots. I also really liked being able to see the scale of the various ships in relation to each other. Video of some combat testing would've been fun, too. I'll have to set up some pirate battles soon, methinks.

Space is definitely a more dangerous place with all these extra pirates hunting around. Makes you wonder if any faction's up for some intergalactic bounty hunting...

I'm planning to do some battle tests!

I'm dying to see how my ships fare against Panpiper's lethal machines. Most likely, my ships will not fare well, but it will be fun to watch. I also can't wait to play with everyone elses ships to see how they also fare against my own and each other. Being new to ship building, this competition has really taught me a lot. I hope more competitions like this come up in the near future. I will video my battle tests if anyone is interested.

 

[Panpiper]

I'm dying to see how my ships fare against Panpiper's lethal machines. Most likely, my ships will not fare well, but it will be fun to watch. I also can't wait to play with everyone elses ships to see how they also fare against my own and each other. Being new to ship building, this competition has really taught me a lot. I hope more competitions like this come up in the near future. I will video my battle tests if anyone is interested.

Videos are always fun, but I fear it won't be terribly instructive for you other than as an object lesson. My ships were designed to to give a fight to ships ten times their size, and I've had several reports on my server of people fleeing from fights when they had that weight advantage. Your ships frankly would die so fast, you probably wouldn't even have time to figure out what was shooting at them.

That said, the aesthetics and imagination you put into your ships is SO extreme, I am frankly rather surprised you didn't win for cosmetics. I wish I had a fraction of your artistic sense. If you approached your ship building the way I do and then added your aesthetics to the ship after, you would clean up in competitions like this.

My approach is to build the power system first, and to build it for maximum power generation for the size I am aiming at. With that maximum power, I then plan a weapon system that will make use of that maximum power. That done I build the ship 'around' the power system, adding the weapon system as first priority, and then add whatever is necessary to turn that power/weapon system into an actual ship. If you did something similar, but added your level of imagination to that last step, your ships would be indomitable.

I should also note that a system spec almost entirely unrelated to power and weapons in which your ships are seriously lacking is thrust. A good thrust to weight ratio to aim for is two to one. Your ships appear to mostly have a quarter of that level of thrust. Note also that thrust blocks can make very decent side paneling aesthetically, a good way to get extra thrust. Also figure out how to bury a good few extra shield capacitors into your ships. You don't need a lot of regenerators, some, but not more than is needed to bring the shields to max in the space of a minute or so. (The amount of shield regeneration the game says you get is basically a lie, as that amount is reduced to a tenth the instant you are first hit. Shield regeneration is virtually worthless 'in' a fight.)

So again, my advise is to learn everything there is to know about effective power system design, master that. Build weapons that use the resulting power. (Don't mix weapon ranges on ships flown by the AI.) I have probably spent ten hours staring at the weapon systems page on the Wiki, calculator at hand. I have easily spent much more than that obsessing over power systems. I would recommend disassembling my ships to look at their power structure.

 

[Parameter]

One thing I noted when doing some combat testing with my ships is that beams are ridiculously badly broken right now. Close range, they perform as expected, but at even medium ranges you'll often see long range beams completely pierce a ship and yet register no damage.

Also, even on the 'mean' difficulty setting the AI has problems leading with cannons at range. It doesn't matter as much at cannon/cannon ranges, but once your target gets a few klicks out your cannon hit percentage goes down drastically with AI aiming. These long range snipe fights can go on for a while between AIs, as neither will close the distance to gain any accuracy. Siccing an AI ship on a small cross-section target makes this effect particularly noticeable.

An unintended side effect of these issues is that shield regen plays a much larger role in AI vs. AI fights if they aren't using missiles or cannon/cannon exclusively. The low hit percentage means combatants get plenty of time to regen up lost shields. The other, more unfortunate side effect of these problems is that it kills the meta game. If you want to target small ships with AI, you pretty much need to go homing missiles of some kind or cannon/cannon to be effective. That sucks, but I expect it to change as Schine gets around to fixing the AI behavior and weapon bugs.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

Wow guys! I really appreciate your advice and comments. I was a bit lost when it came to building the weapons and power, so I will be paying closer attention to these in future.

I most certainly will dissect your ships Panpiper. I think the way you have built your ships would be more in keeping with actual Pirate built ships. They would build for effectiveness more than aesthetics.

Even though my ships will be slaughtered, I'm keen to see how. Perhaps they may surprise me like my Erox and Trixnos surprised me when battling 4 of the original Isanths on their own. I thought they would be pretty useless, but turned out to be the stars of the battle. The Razer was ok, but not as good as I had hoped. The other ships sort of hung back out of range. I was pretty disappointed with the performance of my Raider and Striker. Not sure what happened there. And one of the Isanths just went of on its own. I eventually tracked it to an adjacent sector. I have yet to deal with this deserter.

Hey Panpiper, perhaps I could integrate our designs into something new. Could be interesting. Maybe I could build a different hull design.
Not sure if it would be worth while, but maybe you could alter my ships to be more effective.

 

[Panpiper]

Hey Panpiper, perhaps I could integrate our designs into something new. Could be interesting. Maybe I could build a different hull design.
Not sure if it would be worth while, but maybe you could alter my ships to be more effective.

Retrofitting a power/weapon system into an existing ship is vastly more difficult than building a new ship from scratch. What would be much easier would be for you to perhaps strip the hull, shields, etc., off of my ships, leaving only the power structure and weapons, though remembering in some instances how many blocks you removed of the various systems (IE: especially power capacitors in the missile ships), and then rebuilding them according to your own aesthetic. As long as you put in the same power capacitors and a similar ratio of thrusters and shield capacitors, your resulting ships should both perform every bit as well but look that much better. (Note: power capacitors all need to be touching, they can be all sorts of the weirdest shape, as long as every one that is in your ship is somehow in contact with all the others, just one giant weirdly shaped battery.)

In the long term however, you might be better off just learning the nuances of how to get great power and the best mix of modules for weapons. It is not really all that hard. Power is a matter of getting the longest X,Y,Z dimensions into the most non-touching sets of power module lines you can inside the dimensions of your ship. Weapons are just about figuring out what the optimum weapon configurations are.

Optimum weapons are (IMO); cannon/cannon in equal measure, plus the same number in either overdrive (for small ships), punch, and in some cases ion. Missile/beam/explosive in equal measure for extreme long range, but make sure you have sufficient numbers to swamp point defense and sufficient power capacitors for their power draw upon firing. The same missile/beam/explosive works well with the secondary 'slave' missile ratio being much smaller than the primary. This will result in lower range but much higher rates of fire. You could also use cannon/beam/punch to create small, slow firing weapons that can still break armor, but the actual DPS of such weapons is underwhelming IMO given their final surface area realestate. This last could for instance be used to give the tiniest shuttlecraft (or a small turret) a weapon that can still break advanced armor with as few as fifty modules and relatively low power.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

Retrofitting a power/weapon system into an existing ship is vastly more difficult than building a new ship from scratch. What would be much easier would be for you to perhaps strip the hull, shields, etc., off of my ships, leaving only the power structure and weapons, though remembering in some instances how many blocks you removed of the various systems (IE: especially power capacitors in the missile ships), and then rebuilding them according to your own aesthetic. As long as you put in the same power capacitors and a similar ratio of thrusters and shield capacitors, your resulting ships should both perform every bit as well but look that much better. (Note: power capacitors all need to be touching, they can be all sorts of the weirdest shape, as long as every one that is in your ship is somehow in contact with all the others, just one giant weirdly shaped battery.)

In the long term however, you might be better off just learning the nuances of how to get great power and the best mix of modules for weapons. It is not really all that hard. Power is a matter of getting the longest X,Y,Z dimensions into the most non-touching sets of power module lines you can inside the dimensions of your ship. Weapons are just about figuring out what the optimum weapon configurations are.

Optimum weapons are (IMO); cannon/cannon in equal measure, plus the same number in either overdrive (for small ships), punch, and in some cases ion. Missile/beam/explosive in equal measure for extreme long range, but make sure you have sufficient numbers to swamp point defense and sufficient power capacitors for their power draw upon firing. The same missile/beam/explosive works well with the secondary 'slave' missile ratio being much smaller than the primary. This will result in lower range but much higher rates of fire. You could also use cannon/beam/punch to create small, slow firing weapons that can still break armor, but the actual DPS of such weapons is underwhelming IMO given their final surface area realestate. This last could for instance be used to give the tiniest shuttlecraft (or a small turret) a weapon that can still break advanced armor with as few as fifty modules and relatively low power.

Wow, great advice! I'll have a play around tonight.