I really hate small ships with a lot of weapons

[DerPfandadler]

So a random idea i had was this type of ship could maybe be combated with ridiculous power requirements if you want to have a lot of weapons. So the amount of power needed for weapons could maybe increase exponentially by the amount you have on a ship. This could be realized trough a device that charges the internal buffers of weapon bodies, a power converter if you will. Maybe a modular device that has a base. This "base/core" would be limited to only existing once per ship. Similar to the transponder. This would be necessary to prevent people from circumventing the exponential increase by having multiple converters. The base alone could be useless and you would attach additional devices to increase it's capacity and amount of outputs. Each output would be capable of charging one body. by adding more optional modules you would decrease the efficiency at which this converter charges bodies. So the amount of power needed for each body would go up rapidly the more bodies you want to be able to charge. More powerful weapons like rail cannons could even require you to have two modules per body because of their required 1.5k eps to uphold their charge. This converter would be the only way to charge the bodies. You could maybe pre-charge them so tiny fighters without their own converters could still exist but would be very limited in how many shots they can fire.
The charge of the weapon bodies could decay similarly to how the rail cannon functions but much faster so each body has to be supplied with a constant supply of converted power to not run out of charge. This would limit crafts without their own converters quite heavily.
Having a block of modular devices isn't a problem on a larger ship and supplying it with power shouldn't be a problem either. Especially with the larger generator, but could be a choke for small ships.

Just imagine if small ships could only sustain 2-4 weapons. It looks much better, would finally somewhat restrict how effective small fighters can be and would add another interesting ship system.
small ships with 8 rail-cannons just look stupid af

[pasted from #alpha-feedback on the discord. The following discussion can be found here.]

 

[CalenLoki]

I agree that over-gunned ships are bad.
But I see some problems with that approach:

1. It's based on artificial limits of a single block per ship. Transponder limiter is QoL limit (so people don't spam them to annoy everyone around), not a balance approach.
Hard limits like that tend to bottleneck "legit" creativity and encourage "cursed" exploits. I.e. carrying weapon pods in internal CLBs (once they're stable).
I would also mean that no ship can be build really redundant, as there is always one part of the ship that needs to be protected at all cost.

2. It aims to punish ships with many weapons, so mostly large ships that aren't even meta now. Not to mention even bigger ships that may be possible in the future - those would be nerfed to the ground before even appearing.
It should instead aim at ship-mass to weapon count ratio.
Also while large ships have more internal space, they still need to push that mass (so more thrusters, gens, tanks) So exponential price per weapon would hit them really hard.

3. It's basically a second gen that creates different kind of energy, just with diminishing returns. IMO kind of makes no sense from "lore" point of view. But that's secondary.


Instead I'd suggest ship temperature system:
The bigger ship, the more heat it can store (temperature=stored heat/mass) and radiate it faster (radiation rate=temperature*mass).
The higher ship temperature, the slower weapon cooldown (cooling speed=weapon temperature-ship temperature)

So every non-weapon thing you install on your ship (i.e. armour, decorations or cargo crates) indirectly buffs your weapons.

Also make weapons blead their stored energy (so you need to pump energy into them even when they're idle, if you want them to be ready to use). To discourage alpha-strike kind of ships.

 

[Tagarik]

My suggestion would be to hard limit weapon bases per how much voxel space is being used, so you can make large ships with little to none weapons, but unable to make small ships with obscure amount of weaponary

 

[CalenLoki]

And how you gonna enforce it?

Can't buy over-gunned ship from SSC -> add some balast to cut off after leaving SSC (then recycle it)

Ship can't move if it has too many guns per mass -> during battle your ship can become stationary after loosing one plate, if you were close to the edge. Or a wing, if further.

 

[Verbatos]

Weapons already consume a lot of power for small ships, and can get pretty heavy too, so you can't exactly just make a shoebox covered in guns, you'd have to optimise it to have larger generators and bigger thruster arrays for manoeuvrability, increasing the size and complexity of a ship. Basically turning it into a flying bomb with how many explosive components you need.

 

[Messir Astaroth]

There are no problems with 'too much' weapons. Since you cant throw all of them into a tiny fighter - there will be simply no power source for them, and if there is one - then it is not a tiny fighter anymore.

There are problems with 'too small amount of weapons', however because the 30 weapons per ship - is ridiculously small amount for the current sizes/device/machinery/voxel limit. It is possible to build a huge power station required for all those guns to work, it is however NOT possible to have the guns themselves on such a ship.

 

[Quevin]

I honestly would love to use 1-4 guns setup max, however they are in general to weak to accomplish anything.

Current balance to guns have little to no impact, as most combat uses burst fire and resource restrictions only limit time between shots.

 

[Shibas]

I am always for creativity even if its stupidity. (Like the Mechlab change from Mechwarrior 3 -> 4 if someone knows what i mean XD)

8 Rails => 8 * 20k Power => 20 Batteries for 1 Volley.
If you want to reload this you cant have an small ship anymore. Or you will be a sitting duck.^^
And if you loose this ship you will think twice before you waste your hard earned cash on this.

From an tactical standpoint i would put this in a Bomber category wich seem legit to me even if i would prefer an missile or torpedo approach for this.

From an esthetic point its maybe understandable for this some options could be:

An tier system that favors higher tiers in damage/power/heat ratio

Tier 1:
50 dmg, 10 Heat, 10 Energy
Tier 2:
120 dmg, 15 Heat, 15 Energy
Tier 3:
200 dmg, 25 Heat, 25 Energy

If its not an price focused build you will always choose the higher tiers for the inch of extra damage.
Or you like the sound of your 12 laser cannons in the morning and keep the less optimized option^^

Another option are Enhancer to empower the weapons for benefits
- Doubles the fire rate for double energy consumption
- Doubles the damage for double ammunition consumption and Heat

Dont nail me down to numbers but the point is to give one benefit while increasing some requirement to prevent from stacking the mount of weapons.

My personal favorite would be other mount sockets for weapons or other weapon designs.
Like a Gatling Laser that shots 4 shots for the cost of 4 normal Lasers.
Or a socket where you can mount lasers horizontal so that they fit better on a fighter.

If it comes to an shipmeta where everyone has 8 RG on a Fighter and 200 Laser on a Battleship i am pretty sure the devs will tweak the energy and heat costs but this is something the time will tell.

 

[Aha]

I had a similar idea, that would be the CPU. You'd need CPU to manage anything and everything, that is extra space and power demand. Could be related to the flight computer.
And/or:
https://forum.starbasegame.com/thre...ore-mechanics-too-in-depth-presentation.2032/

 

[MoonSet416]

The "more weapon leads to disproportionally more power/heat requirement" approach actually reminds me of ghost heat in Mech Warrior Online, look how well that was received.

Just imagine if small ships could only sustain 2-4 weapons. It looks much better, would finally somewhat restrict how effective small fighters can be and would add another interesting ship system.
small ships with 8 rail-cannons just look stupid af

Functionally, I would say that for a given set of components with given stats (e.g. current status of the game), small fighters will ALWAYS be "overgunned" compared to other ships using the same sets of parts. That's kinda the point of small fighters to begin with. Putting a lot of weapons on a small nimble platform has been a design approach in military engineering for ages so honestly I don't know why you would have a problem with that now. Maybe tell every army on this planet to stop using things like attach helicopters?

Since you hate small ships for combat so much and want to make big ships just as good, how about making small mining ships just as good as the big ones (and for that matter, salvage, transport and other purposes)? It physically doesn't work that way, and that's how it is. You need size and weight for industrial purposes, and you need agility (or small size or both), some armor, and lots of fire power for combat.

Then everything else based on "looks" just sounds stupid af.

 

[DerPfandadler]

Since you hate small ships for combat so much and want to make big ships just as good, how about making small mining ships just as good as the big ones (and for that matter, salvage, transport and other purposes)? It physically doesn't work that way, and that's how it is. You need size and weight for industrial purposes, and you need agility (or small size or both), some armor, and lots of fire power for combat.

it's not about big ships being just not as good as small fighters. it's about large ships being utter trash and the only viable designs being a small fighters with as many weapons as you can fit. There is no place for large ships. When you are building a large ship you are just building a bad ship. Tripods can now work against that a little. But they are still not really a perfect solution for the issues with small ships being straight up superior. It's like as if a speedboat was superior in all aspects over a big ass cruiser.....

 

[Ckeeze]

Just simply make weapons phisically more costly to operate or heavier, that would make it a natural barrier for overgunned ships, you still could technicly build them they would just be too slow or have a low firing speed or poor energy ballance.
Puttting in arbitary restrictions are bad, but i do agree that there NEEDS to be drawbacks and limitations when you take any aspect of a ship to the extreme, and the limitation shouldn't be arbitary but something logical for example:
-Too much armor on a ship -> slow as ****
-Too much guns on a ship -> runs out of ammo, hard to controll (recoil maybe?), power inballance
-Too much reactors on a ship -> fragile, easy to critically hit
-Too much thrusters on a ship -> runs out quickly of fuel/fragile

I don't think "You can't put another gun on this ship cause you can only have 2" is a good aproach but as with every single module there should be clear limitations and weapons wich should requer heavy amounts of ammo or should use a lot of energy (lasers) currently do not do that... leading to tiny ships having dozens of railguns, not fun to build, not fun to fight with and not fun to fight against.

 

[Lionard Freezer]

Right now we only have fighter vs fighter combat. Why is that? becourse fighters are better at destroying other ships than other classes. Do you expect a bomber to be good against a fighter?
I agree that big ships should be possible to build and be a viable option, but that doesnt mean that fighters should be gone. Fighters are just the best ships to destroy other ships.
My idea is still a programmable AA gun. You can tell the bullet when to explode with yolol. As such small weaknesses on especially nimble fighters can be used against them. Thrusters could be slowly damaged to slow the enemy down, small openings in the armor might destroy a fuel line or cable.
Makes bigger ships that have more redundancy be better against these guns and as such would be a good way to balance it.
Fighters that use AA guns against other fighters couldnt fight well against big ships, but fighters that arent that good against other fighters could still destroy big ships with railguns. Would make it so its more diverse and create a little bit of a rock, paper, scissors scenario that you guys seem to love.

 

[MoonSet416]

There is no place for large ships.

Not true, large ships are necessary for salvage, fighter resupply, repairing, troop transport/respawn. Large ships will be filling critical roles in a combat fleet once you leave CA and have to actually spend precious materials on ships, and when station combat becomes meaningful. Trash at one task within the combat loop (which itself is one of the many loops of the game, most of which heavily favor large ships) doesn't make large ships somehow worse. If anything, overall you will see less usage of smaller ships than larger ones in the entire game. If your aim is to make every size of ships good for every game loop then I guess good luck.

 

[Lionard Freezer]

Not true, large ships are necessary for salvage, fighter resupply, repairing, troop transport/respawn. Large ships will be filling critical roles in a combat fleet once you leave CA and have to actually spend precious materials on ships, and when station combat becomes meaningful. Trash at one task within the combat loop (which itself is one of the many loops of the game, most of which heavily favor large ships) doesn't make large ships somehow worse. If anything, overall you will see less usage of smaller ships than larger ones in the entire game. If your aim is to make every size of ships good for every game loop then I guess good luck.

I totally agree, but im pretty sure @DerPfandadler meant for combat.
I might also know why big ships are worse in SB when in other combat space games where you can design your own ships they are better.
SB doesnt have a lot of stuff to put into ships that makes them stronger. There are basicly only 2 ways to make your ship stronger.
More weapons or more speed.
As weapons like the railgun can shoot through 3 layers of the strongest armor in the game in 1 shot, there isnt much armor you can create for your ship. Its simply better not to get hit, which is why speed is important. And we all know that if you can kill the enemy faster than it can kill you, you win, which is why more weapons are important.
Now... both weapons and thrusters have to be on the outside of ships right? Nothing needs to go on the inside that would boost either.
But if you make a ships bigger the volume of that ship multiplies by several times the surface area increases.
So a ship becomes a much bigger target for not that much better dmg. And as it gets heavier its speed decreases.

In most other similar games, there are such things as shields and enhancers or in the case of FTD the weapons themselves are just huge. In those games you actually need that big increase of volume, but in SB you dont (as long as you dont do humongus things with yolol).

But who really thinks that big ships should be the main fighting force of a fleet? Havent we all seen starwars? A billion of small fighters with 4 capital ships, that dont do much other than fight the shields of the enemies capital ships. Wont it be the same in SB, just with no guns for capital ships?

 

[MoonSet416]

I totally agree, but im pretty sure @DerPfandadler meant for combat.

Yeah but even in combat there are roles for larger ships. Plus combat alone doesn't mean much, Starbase is a game with many other game loops and judging at least by the current material consumptions, most ppl will spend most of their time in other game loops dominated by large ships just to mine the materials needed for combat ships (and this is not accounting for building stations and even caps at some point).

Larger fighters still benefit from just being larger, up to a point at least. Larger means more internal volume per surface area, which means under the same conditions a larger ship should have thicker armor. Larger ships also tend to have larger plates, which plays an important role in magically reducing voxel damage. TBF I haven't seen large ships covered in only 432*432 plates so I'd say at least defensively the current large ships aren't even using the full potential.

Haven't been playing FtD in a long while (2-3 years) but when I was playing, I found small-ish fast hover crafts extremely good. They just circle around and dodge everything other than lasers (which can be stopped by laser shields). I guess another notable thing from FtD is that the turrets in that game are properly covered in armor, which you can't really do in SB.

 

[PhearedPhantom]

Or just cause stress when weapons are fired, that way it is more realistic and the weapons will break off