Chaos' List to make Starbase 'work'

[ChaosRifle]

I know people will whine about the headlines without reading the reasons and results of them, but please try to read it all before freaking out over one part, these changes I have been asking to get for a while specifically work together, and need eachother to be viable. I ask that you keep an open mind until the end. These changes come from experience in many other games, as well as feeling like it could fit the game, with the already planned mechanics in development and on the roadmap.


- Add automated guns hosted by the target they are shooting, that have high velocity. ONLY able to be put on stations or military capitals to enforce rules like no attacking. increase the hosting range for them to desired safezone range, only the gun needs hosting. Presumably could be player operated(hosted by gunner), or left to auto aim(hosted by target).

I must stress this, NOT FOR NORMAL SHIPS. These guns will protect you, by killing your enemy. These turrets on military capitals and stations would function in sieges. During a siege these would provide PvE targets and threats added into the mix, while outside sieges they provide soft safety like EVE, enforcing the same area as a safe zone, but because its a gun, its effectiveness is a gradient. Hug the gun? dead. Quick dive inside to shoot them? Maybe you lived depending on your piloting. Their effect should be a gradient, becoming more lethal the closer you get (this will naturally happen due to tracking of targets and lead times). Turrets become the safezones, they enforce the rules of the zone (such as no shooting other players property etc).


- Delete safezones other than origin. Stations/caps KEEP their indestructible nature when de-safezoned like right now on PTU if FB deletes the SZ for you. Station/capital can ONLY be damaged in siege.

The removal of SZ's allow more freedom to PvP, and more PvE threat when landing. Docking is serious business. This supports two other changes here


- Add heat tracking. star citizen style for IR/EM.

doesn't have to be as in depth as nebulous or DCS does it, even as simple as SC's IR/EM = meters seen from, and radar spotting it depending on tier is multiplier. Probably using radiator radiated heat per second. IE T1 radar detecting 100,000EM is 100,000*0.75=75,000meters. numbers examples only, obviously. combined with no safe zones, running away is not a good solution, unless its to a fleet, or you get to try to park under stress, possibly under gunfire, at your hangar hall to de-spawn the ship. much more room to screw it up, much more engaging to be chased. This lets you hunt other people, this lets you evade other people, this starts the interactions of players.




The above start the interactions and beginnings of a combat loop, that could, aside from automated guns for stations/military caps, already exist today.
If we leave it there, that works on its own for some time before people get bored of the combat in Starbase. Below are my quick changes that should open up the complexity of dogfighting, that starbase sorely lacks. What we have now, is a point and click adventure game. Below are some changes that I PERSONALLY THINK COULD WORK. You may not agree. Some of you already have. Vocally. Very vocally. The above section is what matters most, how FB make combat actually compelling is up to FB. Here are some ideas, and what they will cause. Use at your own risk FB.


- Make FCU's operate in degrees per second, instead of percentile of maximum performance.

This is both QoL, but also helps make the next change easier for end users to work with. For example, an input to the FCURotationalPitch of 50, would TRY to rotate the ship at 50 degrees per second. If you have extra thrust, it only goes to 50 degrees per second, if you have not enough thrust, it tries to get as close to 50 as possible. This has a few advantages - easy consistency. shooter snobs love their sensitivity tuning (fight me), and making sure ships that are similar in performance, actually identical by allowing a user to tweak it a touch to be just how they like it, every time, in every ship, is a great value-add to the block. This will make players accuracy rise by getting more consistent ship controls to use. easy redundancy. There are a few extra bits and bobs to add for interactions with different devices, but it serves as a good groundwork, IMHO.


- Controls rework. Please. Seriously. WHEN!

You know it, I know it, FB know it, the mouse/hotas/hosas/gamepad/insert analogue device here update is LONG overdue. How this went to CA without it is... frankly startling. Sorry FB, but I have to call you out here. "When!" no longer has a question mark because its no longer a question, it's a battle cry. This was a ****-up to not have done before releasing it to players for testing, much less customers. Ships feel clunky enough, you need to fix that, this is one of the best ways to do that.


- Speed should be a function of acceleration. And variable.

Acceleration based combat gives you a resource to spend, so to speak, and you need to spend it wisely, because your enemy gets a say in a fight. This change would see ships have significantly lower accelerations to match top speeds in starbase, which emphasizes the need to spend that acceleration in the direction that puts you better off, rather than any direction. Paves the way for more skill driven gameplay, closer to dogfights of real life. Top speed should be variable, to allow for interceptors to exist, to get meaningful advantages they should need to make sacrifices on size, and weapons, to achieve the speeds to run people down. Due to how game engine hitreg works, FB probably needs to make all other ships slower to retain hitreg working correctly. Sorry, I know, you all hate me.
Please remember, ship top-speed doesn't matter for long range travel in a state of the game where capital ships fast travel at a minimum speed of 1000m/s will just take you there instead. Just remember that top speed is only necessary in transit to a station usually (Maybe someone spots T10's and T11's at 150? sorry to you, Machine.)


- lower pitch, yaw and roll maximum rates significantly to make positional advantage a real thing, make it variable on ship design, and tied to ship current speed.

This is to allow for ships to have radius and rate fights starting to happen.

Spoiler: current state

As it stands, a voxel volume max ship can get instantaneous angular velocities that exceed 150.1m/s at only 50m away(or less if you keep pushing it) This means that right now, a correctly engineered ship(of ANY size), is capable of simply turning to point at you, no matter what you do, or how fast you are. The scary part is that it is actually pretty easy to achieve. It should not be, and

this change should mean larger(pronounced, stupid scale 30 gun voxel volume max) ships get out-radius-ed by smaller ones. This should be fairly tame at the low end, making 'heavy' fighters disadvantaged to light fighters, but having more firepower to make up for that, obviously. Sliding scale, bigger + more guns = less maneuvering. We're talking a couple degrees per second here between light and 'heavy' fighters currently in play commonly. big enough to matter, small enough a better pilot in the 'heavy' can outplay the 'light' fighter meant to soft-counter him, 1v1, within reason. At the extreme end of 30 gun ships, they need to be treated more as bombers than fighters. Don't fly alone territory. (more fleet ops!)

Spoiler: big ships

You can mathematically prove that 30 gun ships are the most efficient fighter for corporate sieges, when designed correctly, which almost chicken nobody has yet. They will though, its just a slog to do it. They should not be able to keep up with microfighters, and should be punished for the firepower they bring. They can one-salvo most normal fighters, and move like them too. If you don't agree, you CLEARLY have not seen one. Most floating around are of very poor design still. Be thankful.

This change allows for positional advantage to be gained via skill - aided by build (within reason people, calm down), exploited, by getting into your bandits control zone, and allowing you to actually stay there to some extent, depending on maneuvers performed. This should also be tied to ship speed, the speed at which you get optimal pitch/yaw/roll performance should vary on ships, finding sweet-spots to hold your maximum performance. doing better at managing your rating speeds than the other guy rewards you with being able to turn faster than him. (lesser craft winning is not uncommon, that is how important it really is to loose 1-7 degrees per second in a rate fight by performing poorly. Skill plays a serious role here to keep monitoring all these systems.) Know your hardware. Become proficient. This also starts allowing for some real world maneuvers from dog-fighting to be employed in game, bringing more depth and skill to the combat. This also plays into squad combat too, and becomes very interesting there specifically. Maneuvers exist to allow a vastly weaker combatant win IRL, but I have not given offset-two-circles much thought in starbase yet. Just know this is a skill driven change, NOT because fights are too fast and I want them slower. (They already are too slow, IMHO, this could probably see some damage tuning along side it post release, to speed things up a bit, because this will slow it down a bit) The main goal here is to allow for the gaining and loosing of positional advantage based on several variables the player must manage real-time, such as position of his bandit, position of possible other bandits, his rate speed, your rate speed, and the matchup between your ships native properties, like a dogfight.

Below would be nice to have:
- salvage, we need more money makers. mining blows.
- add insurance, fractional loss of vehicle cost would help soften the blow a lot for most players
- fix auto-cannon accuracy? (I need to re-calc stats of the new gun costs, but they were still bad after heat changes.. easy fix)

On the horizon:
- PvE content to make money and have fun, AI ships for example. This will take a lot of time though. This should be next priority. Seriously. Players can not provide all the content for you, ESPECIALLY if we are restricted by safe zones from holding our own events. LOTS of people want PvE combat. PvP players too if only for bringing more people to the game to hunt, or to blow off steam. Good PvE content should be a priority, but I know this is a VERY tall order.
- identifiable, meaningful, ore hotspots.



I probably typo'd this, that, everything in between, and missed some parts of my explanation. If something doesn't make sense, I will try to explain.. I have talked about this a lot in the circles of starbase players I know, so its entirely possible I left stuff out that I should not have.

This whole thing should give a relatively attainable gameplay loop, given they can get soft-safety working quickly. Big ask, I know. go classic 1990's aimbot, perfect target leading, high velocity rounds for V1. make them brutally good. I don't care. Apart from the planned features like heat etc, the only additions I made here are mostly config changes, and whilst I do not know the workflow at FB, I know in projects I have programmed that these changes should not be so hard to make.. That said, FB use a quadratic equation for determining top speed already, so its probably totally unfeasable (sarcasm). The game design here seems sound to me in order to give people something to do with the already done, or mostly done, mechanics, and tries to implement as few new ideas as possible to achieve something enjoyable in a reasonable time-frame. I know a lot of things here are different, and change is scary, I hope that before you take the time out of your day to comment, you read all of this. I hid a word in there totally out of place, go ahead and find it. The most fun I ever had in starbase was roaming around just outside origin safezone in the first few days cutting people down for their loot, in an attempt to finally kill my labourer so I could go design something better. I fear with safezones everywhere as FB is claiming with station clusters etc, it will kill a lot of the impromtu adrenaline rush that can be had. I don't know anyone that has told me they are excited for sieges. Every PvP player is however excited for tracking. Use that. Tarkov is great for a reason, and its the rush of being hunted down 5v1, and coming out on top that rare time, by luck, cunning, and skill, in the perfect storm. Starbase can be that rush for PvP, and has serious creative PvE sides too. There is a lot there to unpack here. Looking forward things like multiple ship 'classes' (light small ships, huge ones, mid size ones, all working rock paper scissors style) complementing eachother in fleet ops for sieges would be cool. We all love Starbase, and want it to be a hit, I still think it can poach players from SC, EVE, and SE with ease, given development time and the right team. We get upset with you because we know you could be so much more. <3

TLDR;
provide combat oriented gameplay loop that is engaging, in hopefully minimal extra external steps, that falls in line with everything already in the game and in development, then push for PvE content ASAP because PvP is the closet thing to done. And we love starbase.

 

[Recatek]

- Add automated guns hosted by the target they are shooting, that have high velocity. ONLY able to be put on stations or military capitals to enforce rules like no attacking. increase the hosting range for them to desired safezone range, only the gun needs hosting. Presumably could be player operated(hosted by gunner), or left to auto aim(hosted by target).

I must stress this, NOT FOR NORMAL SHIPS. These guns will protect you, by killing your enemy. These turrets on military capitals and stations would function in sieges. During a siege these would provide PvE targets and threats added into the mix, while outside sieges they provide soft safety like EVE, enforcing the same area as a safe zone, but because its a gun, its effectiveness is a gradient. Hug the gun? dead. Quick dive inside to shoot them? Maybe you lived depending on your piloting. Their effect should be a gradient, becoming more lethal the closer you get (this will naturally happen due to tracking of targets and lead times). Turrets become the safezones, they enforce the rules of the zone (such as no shooting other players property etc).


- Delete safezones other than origin. Stations/caps KEEP their indestructible nature when de-safezoned like right now on PTU if FB deletes the SZ for you. Station/capital can ONLY be damaged in siege.

The removal of SZ's allow more freedom to PvP, and more PvE threat when landing. Docking is serious business. This supports two other changes here

This is sacrificing player construction for destruction in an effort to add player activities, and is the wrong way to go about it. There are tons of ways to add day-to-day PvP and PvE activities that don't come at the cost of player construction in more stable social-hub areas (and those are still vulnerable during sieges). Stations must be safe for their players and contents when they aren't being sieged, and not just on an easy-to-exploit gradient. Stations need value as more than just offline raid targets for Starbase to function in the long run. If you want more PvP and PvE activities (and I do), add them as contestable objectives separate from stations. I've already posted at length a number of ways to create new PvEvP objectives instead of compromising station stability and their value as social hubs.

 

[ChaosRifle]

This is sacrificing player construction for destruction in an effort to add player activities, and is the wrong way to go about it.

not sure I follow what you are saying here.

just offline raid targets

hangar halls despawn and at one point were said to close, allowing storage of a ship, presumably in a cargo hall. not sure where the 'offline raiding' came from, but you cant raid what is not actively being used if they put it away??

The idea isn't "go merc stations", its "now they are not actively hindering combat, they are a problem to be worried about, but not just going to get abused for godmode/escapes from combat." with station clusters safezones are only getting vastly larger, and more common, according to lauri.

 

[Recatek]

hangar halls despawn and at one point were said to close, allowing storage of a ship, presumably in a cargo hall. not sure where the 'offline raiding' came from, but you cant raid what is not actively being used if they put it away??

So you're just taking potshots at people walking around stations? What's the point in that other than being obnoxious? Stations should be staging areas for more interesting, long-term PvP, not pointless raiding. The point of stations is for them to eventually become social hubs and focal points for gameplay, and a big part of what makes that happen is allowing them to provide stability in an area. Taking that away just removes the social hub factor without really adding much meaningful gameplay. It would be much better to instead add secondary non-stations that are worth fighting over and that can actually provide a more complete PvP experience, without losing the benefit of adding social hubs to the game.

 

[ChaosRifle]

You are missing the protections. If you are close enough to shoot endos, you would be dead by automated gunfire if they fitted one. this isn't some nerf to safezones in disguise, its to make them more fluid. Make no mistake, they are meant to be safe, by force, if you breach the laws of the airspace. (presumably, shooting) SafeER the deeper towards the station you get.

 

[Tomasz]

They just announced they pretty much cancell the game .

 

[Recatek]

You are missing the protections. If you are close enough to shoot endos, you would be dead by automated gunfire if they fitted one.

Static auto turrets basically exist for players to cheese/exploit their blind spots. It's tedious and unrewarding for the creators, and doesn't actually stop determined attackers. Station safe zones aren't even that big, they mostly cover just the structure and some parked ships outside. If you're chasing someone and you're angry that they managed to evade you long enough to get back to their station, then siege it.

 

[CaveSalamander]

- Delete safezones other than origin.

Probably the most controversial request of the thread.

Preamble: I think that FB's intention of adding continuous safezones with clusters is problematic. Clusters creating large enough safezones to attract unaffiliated users just to mine in them (I think this was a stated goal at some point, correct me if I'm wrong) means PvP players are at risk of getting choked out of organic content as resource gathering becomes focused around safe clusters, and since sieges are telegraphed beforehand any unaffiliated parties can simply flee the affected area to secure their assets, potentially just huddling up inside their own invulnerable civ-cap parked nearby until the safezone is back up. This would make sieges the only reliable source of action with single ship hunting (and salvaging) becoming a mere footnote in the book of SB meta.
/preamble

Alas, I don't agree with your idea either. My issue with this one is, deleting safezones and placing the responsibility of defeding it upon the player would be both an increase in initial resource cost (unless defensive turrets are free, in which case there would need to be other limiters to prevent gun spam which would inevitably result in a station-building meta, further limiting player creativity) and add extreme amounts of uncertainty into a PvE players' game loop. And let me tell ya, the one thing most passive players hate is uncertainty, no matter how necessary from a game theory perspective.
While no SZs would be a massive boon for PvP players looking for action, the higher barrier to entry on establishing a station and the stress of dealing with the potential loss of all you've worked for when building undefended portions, or worrying about missing some flaw in your defensive turret positioning would rapidly burn out and drive off PvE players who establish themselves outside Origin SZ.
This is not even accounting for the possibility of bugs or player exploits potentially rendering turrets ineffective or otherwise leaving stations undefended.

- Add heat tracking.

YES! I hope it's high on FB's TODO list. Space is big, knowing if there's people around you is crucial for both hunting and evading hunters.

- Make FCU's operate in degrees per second, instead of percentile of maximum performance.

When I initially heard this my first thought was "It just makes sense." I would love to see this implemented!
It would make adjusting control preferences sooo easy, no need to test all kinds of lever settings on a per-ship basis if I know the rough maximum degrees/second of pitch/yaw/roll I can operate at.

- Speed should be a function of acceleration. And variable.
- lower pitch, yaw and roll maximum rates significantly to make positional advantage a real thing, make it variable on ship design, and tied to ship current speed.

Probably the second most controversial pair of requests, and I think agree. Big ships need SOMETHING to hold them down besides resource cost when compared to small fighters, or, alternatively, small fighters need some kind of combat advantage that large hauling/mining rigs cannot counter with ease. Making larger ship sizes less maneuverable is the simplest solution and hard to argue against, as it's already a thing in most combat-focused titles.
People are going to gripe about losing their gigantic 150m/s miners that they paid millions just to buy the BP for and while I call it griping I can't really blame them, nobody likes their expensive toys getting a nerf. However, capships are literally around the corner. If big ship movement got "taken behind the sauna", smaller miners/haulers trading cargo capacity for max speed would become a viable alternative as civ-caps and hangar halls reduce the need for long distance hauling with non-capships.

 

[Recatek]

PvP players are at risk of getting choked out of organic content as resource gathering becomes focused around safe clusters

This would make sieges the only reliable source of action with single ship hunting

This doesn't have to be the case if the game offers non-station secondary sub-objectives for PvP players and corps to fight over on a daily basis.

 

[CaveSalamander]

That is true, but I'm not sure wether the devs are even thinking about that.

Having a designated area where placed station SZs are tiny would be an interesting premise though. Disabled would be even more exiting but that would require developing some kind of defensive/anti-griefing mechanics for said stations.

 

[Recatek]

That is true, but I'm not sure wether the devs are even thinking about that.

I've presented at least one fairly practical (IMO) way to go about it, and there's no shortage of other ways to do it. Stations are high-investment and sieges are important, but the game needs more lower-stakes PvP where both sides are willing combatants.

 

[ChaosRifle]

Pretty sure FB don't intend helpless solo players to build out of safezone stations they can't defend, as the whole point of civ-caps was to be impossible to harass/destroy. I don't get where the mentality that a solo player should be perfectly protected against guns, at the inconvenience of everyone around by preventing transit and defeating the point of heat mechanics, while still being able to just get knocked down by a corp rolling in to loot the stations inventory in siege, comes from. Especially with civ caps to do that EXACT thing. If your worry is getting messed up at your stations, outside start-zone, use a civilian capital like FB intends you to??

The currently claimed mechanics from lauri are:
Giant safe zones so big they attract random players to mine in your safe zone and tax them.
station clusters that siege will only shrink the safezone, and must be done to every single station in the cluster
protected civilian capital ships.
24-48 hour advanced notice before a siege so you can leave a station under siege, via a civilian capital ship, or wait it out in the capital ship (aka insurance transfer to your second cap ship, play there for a bit, come back when its over)

As a PvE player, this doesn't just provide 100% absolute safety from anything going wrong ever, it forces it. The most boring task is the one that never changes, and if I know, factually, that I am FORCED to be safe to be optimal in my money gathering via mining, then frankly, that gameplay loop is awful with nothing exciting able to happen. FB has talked about using insurance even to lessen losses to PvP. I get that not everyone likes PvP, but even when I wear my PvE hat, which is often, I do like being surprised. The current systems sterilize the gameplay to the point its punch-in, punch-out, repeat.

 

[Recatek]

I don't get where the mentality that a solo player should be perfectly protected against guns.

They aren't in like 99% of the game world. The point is that stations should be social hubs and staging grounds for more interesting and valuable PvP than just miner ambush. Of all the different kinds of PvP out there, miner ambush is the most overvalued by far. There are so many more interesting PvP scenarios to be had.

preventing transit and defeating the point of heat mechanics

Again, I'm not sure how station safe zones do these things. The vast majority of the world will still be unsafe, and creating interesting POIs to fight over that are not covered by safe zones is the far more preferable way to drive meaningful PvP. If you're arguing that stations prevent transit because they're in an area of space that you want, then that's what sieges are for.

while still being able to just get knocked down by a corp rolling in to loot the stations inventory in siege, comes from.

Solo players aren't going to be claiming large areas of territory. This is for corp vs. corp territory control and wars, where siege gameplay is actually meaningful. Sure, if you try to occupy a valuable area with a station as a solo player you should expect that to end very poorly when you're inevitably sieged.

As a PvE player, this doesn't just provide 100% absolute safety from anything going wrong ever, it forces it. The most boring task is the one that never changes, and if I know, factually, that I am FORCED to be safe to be optimal in my money gathering via mining, then frankly, that gameplay loop is awful with nothing exciting able to happen.

Well, you aren't forced. Siege the station and take that territory for yourself. That's certainly a dangerous, and potentially rewarding, activity that nobody is stopping you from doing. I agree that certain valuable and lucrative hotspots shouldn't be able to be covered with safe-zones so you always take a PvP risk when going to them. That's why, for example, my Progenitor Mine proposal specifies that no station and no capital ship can be placed or warp within 20km of it. As I've been saying, there are so many good ways to promote interesting and compelling PvP that don't require making stations worse.

 

[ZombieMouse]

- Add automated guns [...] ONLY able to be put on stations or military capitals to enforce rules like no attacking.

[...] - Delete safezones other than origin. Stations/caps KEEP their indestructible nature when de-safezoned like right now on PTU if FB deletes the SZ for you. Station/capital can ONLY be damaged in siege.

The removal of SZ's allow more freedom to PvP, and more PvE threat when landing. Docking is serious business.

This is almost exactly how Starmade home stations worked, so this can work.

The only difference for Starmade was that non-home stations were fully destructable all of the time and home stations were always indestructible.

 

[shado20]

most of the problem with fighting and pvp would be salved with more players in game. but they are shutting down as they are putting in game the main reason player count is down, being able to live out of player stations.
they have shot themselves in the foot! releasing the patch many have been waiting on to come back to the game, at the same time announcing the death to the game!

 

[pavvvel]

- Add automated guns [...] ONLY able to be put on stations or military capitals to enforce rules like no attacking
...No. No and no.
Do you want automatic turrets? Do it yourself, using yolol

 

[Lupus the Canine]

Probably the second most controversial pair of requests, and I think agree. Big ships need SOMETHING to hold them down besides resource cost when compared to small fighters, or, alternatively, small fighters need some kind of combat advantage that large hauling/mining rigs cannot counter with ease. Making larger ship sizes less maneuverable is the simplest solution and hard to argue against, as it's already a thing in most combat-focused titles.
People are going to gripe about losing their gigantic 150m/s miners that they paid millions just to buy the BP for and while I call it griping I can't really blame them, nobody likes their expensive toys getting a nerf. However, capships are literally around the corner. If big ship movement got "taken behind the sauna", smaller miners/haulers trading cargo capacity for max speed would become a viable alternative as civ-caps and hangar halls reduce the need for long distance hauling with non-capships.

The problem with that is while large ships need to be maneuverability limited compared to small ships they can't be significantly slower because it will be really annoying for people hauling stuff. Also if you want pvp you need ships to travel outside of a safezone for a prolonged time not take shortest route to the civcap and logout while it teleports near origin or another station. If we didn't have to deal with f** spacedrag the problem would have solved itself as fighters and attack craft would be able to consistently outaccelerate freighters (at least until they ran out of fuel). IMO there should be minimal drag below 100 m/s and it should increase exponentially above that in such a way that typical freighter at a full load can go 110-115 m/s fast freighter can sacrifice load to get somewhat faster, somewhere around 125 m/s and dedicated fighters can keep 140+ m/s.

- Add automated guns [...] ONLY able to be put on stations or military capitals to enforce rules like no attacking
...No. No and no.
Do you want automatic turrets? Do it yourself, using yolol

YOLOL is designed to prevent excessive automation, automated turrets explicitly included to prevent programmers from having too large of an edge. You can't have no station safezones and automated defences unless you want to bar a large portion of the playerbase from experiencing parts of the game.

 

[Udrakan]

I only agree with 1 point in your post and that's the necessity for PVE. Vast majority of players in online games never speak in chat, watch or read guides about the game or even use discord. Now for Starbase, this is a bit different, because even though we don't have the data about this game in particular, I'm sure most players are on the Starbase's discord.

The point I'm making is that this massive chunk of players need to have at least basic satisfaction with the game, so that companies that successfully integrate them can grow in size and integrate them to the game, so they come back playing.

I'm not entirely sure about how the devs would develop proper PVE because of everything being so physical in the game. I can't imagine them implementing dogfights. Maybe there could be some NPC enemy endos running around inside indestructible cap ship wrecks with basic pathfinding in it. Maybe a ship with valuable cargo could fly from A to B and it would be in player's best interest to immobilise and loot it without damaging it too much or blowing up the tanks.

 

[pavvvel]

The problem with that is while large ships need to be maneuverability limited compared to small ships they can't be significantly slower because it will be really annoying for people hauling stuff. Also if you want pvp you need ships to travel outside of a safezone for a prolonged time not take shortest route to the civcap and logout while it teleports near origin or another station. If we didn't have to deal with f** spacedrag the problem would have solved itself as fighters and attack craft would be able to consistently outaccelerate freighters (at least until they ran out of fuel). IMO there should be minimal drag below 100 m/s and it should increase exponentially above that in such a way that typical freighter at a full load can go 110-115 m/s fast freighter can sacrifice load to get somewhat faster, somewhere around 125 m/s and dedicated fighters can keep 140+ m/s.



YOLOL is designed to prevent excessive automation, automated turrets explicitly included to prevent programmers from having too large of an edge. You can't have no station safezones and automated defences unless you want to bar a large portion of the playerbase from experiencing parts of the game.

Limitation of maneuverability of large ships? What? This is nonsense. The maneuverability of a ship weighing 1,000 tons and 20 engines should be equal to the maneuverability of a ship weighing 10,000 tons and 200 engines.
If you make an artificial restriction of maneuverability, then players will not have an incentive to make large ships. Big ship = big target. This is an argument.

It doesn't matter if the player is casual: To attack someone or defend yourself against someone, you have to learn how to do it.
Automatic weapon guidance is not necessary for this game. There are no energy shields here - I don't want to take damage just because someone has a gun with automatic aiming.
Automatic weapon guidance will reduce the superiority of those who learn to fly and shoot over those who drink 16 liters of beer in an evening - and this is wrong

 

[Colonkin]

Limitation of maneuverability of large ships? What? This is nonsense. The maneuverability of a ship weighing 1,000 tons and 20 engines should be equal to the maneuverability of a ship weighing 10,000 tons and 200 engines.
If you make an artificial restriction of maneuverability, then players will not have an incentive to make large ships. Big ship = big target. This is an argument.

+1
There is a concept of inertia. Inertia is overcome by thrust.
Big ship = big inertia = many engines of comparable turn rate or acceleration.
The same applies to acceleration in a straight line and maximum speed. If you want to ride with 1500 exorium containers at a speed of 150 m/s and high acceleration, install a lot of engines. The ship will be very expensive. And very big. And very inertial.