Will one efficient design suppress all creativity?

Commissar Awesome

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#1
I love the creativity of designing cool spaceships and the idea of taking them into combat against other people's creations. However, i have seen it happen before in these type of games where one particular way of building ships is clearly superior to all other designs and eventually all vehicles look the same. Will there be any mechanics in starbase ship building to encourage creativity or will the ships all look the same once people figure out the best design?
 
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#2
I do not think so. Different users will have different preferences and playstyles. One person may prefer storms of bullets that are likely to hit, but cause little damage while another would like powerful, more difficult to hit shots. Assuming the developers take care in balancing the weapons, I doubt any will prevail above the others.
 

Talla

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#3
Concept-wise, I expect ships to look more or less the same, if they intend to fill the exact same functions.
Once the ship can efficiently complete the work it's been designed for, the rest is just a matter of taste (customization aesthetics).

There's a proverb on this subject : "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery".
If someone has a good idea, you can expect others to copy it.

Apparently, there is no aerodynamics in space, so that's a bonus for ship diversity.

I wonder, can you edit ship blueprints you buy from other players?
 

Kimsemus

Well-known endo
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#4
IMO unless the devs implement an in-game system otherwise, you can expect SB to end up like SE, Empyrion, and other games: where the most efficient PVP ships are cubes. Pretty/aesthetic ships really won't have a place in PVP unless FrozenByte gives them a reason to be made that way. I know there is no third person camera (yet imo) but that won't fundamentally alter PVP designs that much.

Believe me, PVP ships in games like this are super boring and super optimized flying bricks/cylinders/spheres. I hope the devs design systems to discourage that but no other similar game has been able to.
 

Commissar Awesome

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#5
Maybe drag could effect the speed of cubes and spheres with more severity than it would sleeker ships? Best i can come up with.
 

Kimsemus

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#7
I don't think the large flat surfaces of Cubes will be all that great at avoiding incoming fire...
They're not designed for avoidance though, they're designed to soak as much damage as possible from every angle, without presenting a weakspot and equally protecting all the vital systems. They're flying bunkers, basically. :D
 

Vexus

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#8
Every ship design should be dependent upon the function, so I don't think there will be a single efficient design that suppresses creativity. In 3D space, everything is relative to the expected situation. Generally your goal is to not get hit, and if you do, you protect where you think you will get hit from. A cube is an all-around generalist design that will basically be good at getting hit all over, but that means less armor in any one spot. A ship design that can always keep it's front pointed towards a target would do better to have extra armor in the front - however, a flanking ship would be able to target any weak points.

If you are a merchant ship, keeping cargo and armor to the back of your ship protects your cargo and if you lose the cargo to a pursuing attacker, you gain speed and can get away. However, if caught out from the front, you're weaker and more prone to taking critical damage. A clamshell style ship can maintain heavy armor on two sides, fitting guns and less armor in the middle, meaning they would be a smaller frontal target, balancing their weakness to head-on fights where an enemy could target the middle of the clamshell; the strength of the design being able to deal with flanking damage with ease.

A sphere fighter would be able to conceal some of its movement properties and present a more static profile, but one which you're not able to easily anticipate movement from. It would be like shooting a wobbly ball. This suffers somewhat like the cube ship, in that you're fairly protected from all angles but not the best at any angle. In addition, the poor use of space in a sphere ship would be hard to fit everything you might want into it, increasing the overall size due to inefficient space utilization.

If you have a large fleet, lots of hammerhead style ships with front armor, acting like a shield protecting rail-gun ships in the back of the fleet, means those mass-heavy ships have a purpose, and will be good for that purpose, but again if a squad gets behind you, those ships become a slightly softer target.

It boils down to some interesting balance, because if you think you will be hit at from any angle at any time, a sphere or cube shape ship is very generalized and should perform well - in doing so you are less-fast than one specialized ship, and can't take as much damage as another specialized ship. However, if you learn to control one facet of the fight, such as being able to keep a target to your front at all times, you can build to maximize your potential knowing those conditions.

There is no one best ship, though out of convenience, cost and other factors, we might see fairly generalized 'good enough' ships. The key will be to balance cost to produce with effectiveness and so on. If you're throwing endless cheap ships at a target, then a lot of 'guns with engines' becomes more viable than worrying about protecting anything or how it looks. So the economy will play a big part in making sure people design for what is worth it. A high cost of production will mean bigger, more armored and slower ships, while a balanced cost would see every variation.

Last I'll point out something we'll all probably enjoy a little - mining. Is it better to use a very fast, lightweight ship that can get to the asteroid fast, and get back to station fast, or a large ship that can scoop up multiple asteroids at once but is slow? If you think about it - if both of these methods produce the same amount of resources returned to a station over the same amount of time - there's no "best" ship for this. The fast small ship might be able to sell their haul at a higher profit each time, because they can deliver lots of small packets of resources to the station, not affecting the price of any one material too much, and capitalizing on their valuable mined materials more because they get to sell their product first. The larger ship however can haul back lots of material, necessarily dropping the price heavily when they sell in bulk, but having a much higher bulk payoff per trip. The smaller ship would spend a lot of fuel, going back and forth, countering his higher profit, where the larger ship would spend less fuel, countering his lower payoff (and maybe do less overall manual work). The faster ship might be able to deliver highly sought after materials quicker, while the slower ship might be able to deliver bulk materials to someone who needs a lot of stuff all at once. So it's fairly balanced if the game systems can achieve that balance, and each method for doing this will be different based on who designs the ships and so on.

It comes down to preference. You might like a ship that flies "down" or "horizontal" while you're sitting in the cockpit, where your perspective is facing "up". This would allow you lots of vision for mining, or aiming weapons and so on. That preference will be viable for the style of flying you do and the kinds of things you do. If your ship easily moves "up" and "down" relative to your view, you can pop out from behind asteroids or other ships to take shots, and then quickly move to cover as needed. This means your style of play and your creativity will give you an edge depending on the situation.

In the end, most people will not be inspired to create their own ship, so the diversity will only come if we have enough people making their own ships, in their own factions, and if production cost is high enough where you can't just buy one of each car on the car lot. Most people will just want whatever works (or whatever they can afford), and this will help the economy and allow ship builders to make and sell their ships. So even if it looks a little bland at some point, as lots of people really like one style of ship, keep in mind that it's just a fad; that the moment some conflict arises, or the moment someone realizes something new about the game, the designs could shift dramatically. If for example, someone spots a mega-asteroid far in the distance, the focus of ships will turn to fuel storage and distance and so on, to go check out what that thing out there is. Luckily, as shown in the Boltcracker video about sabotage, we can just slap some fuel containers on our ships and begin our journey... only to be taken out completely by some guy in his default Kingdom fighter...

Edit: I forgot one thing: one way to make sure ships are NOT unique is by implementing sci-fi 'shields' that protect ships. Then the look and shape and purpose of the ship goes out the window at that point. Further, if the devs ever add planets with atmosphere into the game later on, this would dynamically change the meta ship for those areas - maybe specialized ships which operate in-and-out of atmosphere with ease would perform better around those planets, but less effective in open space. Anything that changes the environment would shift ship design, so gravity wells would make certain ships better in those environments, nebulas would see different ships and so on. I think a key thing to keep an eye for is you don't want one ship completely invalidated by an environmental factor - just have it more efficient if you chose something purpose built for that environment.
 
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#9
They're not designed for avoidance though, they're designed to soak as much damage as possible from every angle, without presenting a weakspot and equally protecting all the vital systems. They're flying bunkers, basically. :D
Problem there is:
Generally your goal is to not get hit, and if you do, you protect where you think you will get hit from. A cube is an all-around generalist design that will basically be good at getting hit all over, but that means less armor in any one spot.
You either have mediocre armor all around and can still fly semi-nimbly, or a heavily armored crate that basically is a barely flyable bunker.
A ship design that can always keep it's front pointed towards a target would do better to have extra armor in the front - however, a flanking ship would be able to target any weak points.
My Cross Fury Artillery Ship probably won't even HAVE front armor, it's a siege engine designed to do as much damage from as far away as possible before the defenders can get fighters past the screens to pop it.
The key will be to balance cost to produce with effectiveness and so on. If you're throwing endless cheap ships at a target, then a lot of 'guns with engines' becomes more viable than worrying about protecting anything or how it looks.
Basically what my Star Cross Interceptor is going to be, to the point that it doesn't even have its own Generator to save on mass and cost.
Naturally, this makes it a rather short-ranged Military Craft.
 
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#10
They're not designed for avoidance though, they're designed to soak as much damage as possible from every angle, without presenting a weakspot and equally protecting all the vital systems. They're flying bunkers, basically. :D
That doesn't work in this game unless you're ok flying blind. There's no third-person camera here, which means your gunners and cockpit must be exposed.
 

Vexus

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#11
That doesn't work in this game unless you're ok flying blind. There's no third-person camera here, which means your gunners and cockpit must be exposed.
Oh this is a good one; normally you'd say yes, you need to be able to see. But do you, really? If you're making a routine trip from point A to point B, couldn't you use sensors for everything, Matrix-style interpreting the sensor information from within your secure shell of a ship? Sure, why not. That's the potential here. Even the most logical and common sense features can sometimes be thrown out the window, depending on what you're trying to do. There are a very large number of ways to get from point A to point B without any need to see where you are going. And, when en route, you can always hop off the helm, open a door, and walk outside your ship just to be sure you're going in the right direction.

Of course, a fighter design where you want to be able to tell what the enemy is doing, you would want lots of vision, exposing your ship to a weak spot - you, the pilot - in exchange.
 
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#12
Oh this is a good one; normally you'd say yes, you need to be able to see. But do you, really? If you're making a routine trip from point A to point B, couldn't you use sensors for everything, Matrix-style interpreting the sensor information from within your secure shell of a ship? Sure, why not. That's the potential here. Even the most logical and common sense features can sometimes be thrown out the window, depending on what you're trying to do. There are a very large number of ways to get from point A to point B without any need to see where you are going. And, when en route, you can always hop off the helm, open a door, and walk outside your ship just to be sure you're going in the right direction.
There have only been two sensors announced. The first is rangefinders, which cannot tell what they're pointing at, and cannot detect anything except what they happen to be pointed directly at. The second is ID transponders, which it is a crime to not use. We don't know if it's possible to identify a ship's location from its transponder. Regardless, a pirate can simply turn off their transponder to hide themselves from you.

So in other words, you could fly blind by putting forward-facing rangefinders on your ship to tell if you're going to run into something, but your ship would have no combat capability.
 

Vexus

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#13
Right. However, you could have placed beacons along your route (stationary ships or even parts of ships like panels which act as 'reflectors') to range-find to and program a route off that.

And it's not that you'd have no combat capability; just not a very reactionary combat capability. If you're sitting there firing large weapons at a station, you might choose to not reveal the pilot weakspot with a 'glass' encased cockpit. Likewise, an armored personnel carrier would not want to expose their pilot, meaning the pilot needs little vision, and the transported players can fire weapons from holes in the side of the ship. The possibilities are immense!
 

K-T0N

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#16
Another weakness which should not be forgotten is the ship’s thrusters. Wether it’s the main or the auxiliary maneuverability ones, even if we got the third person view or advanced sensors, we would still have to leave them exposed on the outside.
So any cubic design with slow movements and bad maneuverability would be easily outmaneuvered by fighters, before having its propulsion destroyed and end up as a big immobile target.
While they will most likely be ship design better than others which will end up being used by most player, I do however believe that, due to the way ship fighting has been shown in videos up to now, there won’t be just one unique ultimate all purpose design, but rather several optimized designs each with its own specialization.
 

Azelous

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#17
Will one design stifle creativity? When building meta ships, creativity is dependent on the number of different configurations components can be placed on a ship frame while maintaining that it is still “efficient enough”. At the end of the day, Starbase designers will be aiming for the densest ships, just as Minecraft redstone users aim for the tightest circuits.

I would wager that for meta ships, creativity is proportional to the size of the ship. The smaller the ship, the tighter the build and more defined the meta is. The larger the size, the less effected it is by increased mass or lower density that would be associated with more aesthetic designs.

Of course, as to whether or not creativity is stifled, it is up to how important it is for ship users to use meta ships. This in turn depends on what type of crowd Starbase pulls: casual or competitive? I’m personally betting on competitive, but I’m also betting the majority players are willing to sacrifice efficiency for a bit of aesthetics.

Also, specifically for PvP, the likelihood of zero-sum matches is very low. In a 1v1 duel, efficiency could be everything, but in an mmo such as this, the victory is significantly reliant on many more factors than the efficiency of the build.
 

Quinc

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#18
It think that this is a distinct possibility that will continue to haunt the devs for a long time. The biggest feature of the game is the ability to create any sort of spaceship or station you want. However that feature is greatly diminished if you realize that there are only a handful of options that are the best. Worse is the fact that the huge variety increases the chances that somewhere there will be something that is vastly better than the other possible designs, and that it is only a matter of time before someone figures it out. It is not enough for the ship creator to have essential infinite options, they have to have a huge number of options that are almost as good as the best options, but still noticeably different from the best option. This is still true if you are only talking about a specific role. There have to be multiple solutions to each problem, and ideally multiple best solutions to every problem.

So the developers will have to spend a lot of time analyzing trends in what the community builds, and react when a single design, feature, or strategy is becoming vastly more common than the alternatives. Unfortunately nerfing and buffing specific ship designs will cannot be done directly. It will be partly the duty of the players to try to highlight why a particular design or strategy is becoming over powered, and what can be done about it. Fortunately these forum goers seem to ready and willing to discuss the virtues of a particular design, even though the game itself isn't available!
 

Guedez

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#19
I wouldn't be surprised if the box meta only happens because of the hard speed limit cap
 

Wicca

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#20
I'm hoping we can find some sort of weight distribution or armor/speed/firepower distribution to allow for some other shape than box to be best.
 
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