Koriandah

Since we now have a confirmation of a wipe at launch, how about  a contest  for new UEF ships. Give us some parameters, and let us submit our creations.

Hello there,
 
First off, thanks for the feedback. 
 
So there's a couple of different things to touch on here:
 
The internal balance of shields sizes CCS/honeycomb health vs Shield Health per mass Venting
I’ll try to address in that order but they will mesh a little since they have some obvious links.
 
First of all smaller shield sizes are at an advantage in regards to HP/mass. So something to keep in mind is that as you go up in size, as it pertains only to shields, you are losing out on the HP/mass ratio (in simpler terms, each HP weighs more on larger shields). This is an inbuilt advantage smaller sizes simply have.
However, the main and primary reason we have different shield sizes at all, is to support constructs of varying sizes and mass. This is the key center-point around which everything else mostly revolves.
 
If you are intending to make a larger, heavier construct, that is going to trend towards or go past the max mass, then the large shield becomes the obvious choice. However, should you want to make something smaller, more agile, and quicker, you may start to use shields of smaller sizes. We already see people experimenting with constructs of smaller sizes using S and M shields to take advantage of the speed, this is a great direction, as long as the pendulum does not swing too far in the favor of smaller constructs.
Now, if the weight penalties do not sufficiently affect the design of the ship, and large shields are still too mass effective even on smaller designs. That's a subject we will continue to address. We do not want to see S designs using exclusively L shields because the additional mass from larger shields doesn't matter in regards to acceleration, max speed, and rotation speed.
 
To answer your question clearly, there is no direct goal for an M shield and an equivalent 95t of voxel to be worse, equal, or better than an L shield and I’ll try to explain why as we go. You should take the shield of the size that makes sense for the design of your ship. If you have the mass available, or are willing to “spend” the mass to have a larger shield, then go for it.
 
Don't want to get into the venting subject too quickly, but using an M with a bunch of honeycomb could allow you to vent once or twice during a battle, especially on a lighter design that can also evade some damage. Maybe the balancing on that isn't perfect, but it should be an option.
At the end of the day the inbuilt advantage of an M shield over an L shield is that it's significantly lighter. You say it's always worth going to an L shield because M+HC is worse in HP, maybe this is the case (more on that later) but the point is that for that 95t you could probably build out a good part of a fully equipped construct, allowing you to have a quicker, more agile construct with a superior max speed, that's the upside.
 
Talking concretely in regards to the mass, if I made a competitive light-ish design with an M shield around 250t ( I don't have one on hand, this is probably on the lighter side after the changes). I'm going about 38-39k km/h max speed, just switching from an M shield to an L shield, I drop down to about 35k km/h. Now adding an extra 95t to a 250t design is probably going to seriously hurt my acceleration as well, so now I'm probably at least looking at redoing my engine setup, which likely adds some more mass as well.
So now the question is more along the lines of, do I prefer an extra 5mill HP from the L shield, or about 5000-6000km/h extra max speed and some extra rotation speed. Well that's a question I’d love feedback on, maybe the max speed and rotation speed isn't enough, I could see that.
 
Secondly there could be an advantage to being able to “modulate” your weight while still gaining some tankiness from honeycomb. An M shield with some honeycomb unlocks some venting on that design, while retaining some/most of the mobility.
 
In regards to your reasoning about M vs L shields. Roughly you're going from “it only makes sense to use the largest shield mass wise, so I can never vent on xs-m because I'm not going to be using voxels on anything smaller than the L”.
 
Well honestly, I don't particularly agree with that, at least not in theory. The interest of voxels is that it's scalable, and you can choose how much voxel you think you need. If you're going to use an M shield because that makes sense for your design mass wise, you don't “have” to use 95t of honeycomb. You can use 30t of a good hc over your ship. That's already going to give you a chunk of armor to help you get some venting going, and probably not endanger your cross-section too much. If that honeycomb buys you enough time for 2 vents (probably optimistic), then you’ve essentially caught up on an L shield in raw shield HP and you’re operating at more than half the mass. 
Now maybe that's not viable, maybe the honeycomb itself is too weak and even reasonable quantities of honeycomb get blown apart too quickly, that's possible and that's something we can look at. Perhaps at that point the subject is more that voxels are generally weak.
 
It's also important to note that in regards to your “real HP”, some amount of the incoming hits are also going to be hitting elements, elements that can be repaired which can give you more tankiness down the road. That means that when comparing raw HP to CCS, you have to take into account that CCS is counting every hit no matter where it's going, as opposed to your raw voxel HP which will, in effect, have additional health from elements.
 

For point 2, there's a couple things to say here. Shields are not inherently in competition with honeycomb, as mentioned we don't want them to be magnitudes apart in terms of HP because it wouldn't make sense, but fundamentally they are supposed to be complimentary.
 
Now in regards to your chart and conclusions. You didn't quite explain what “mean raw HP” is but I can guess it's the actual HP value of the deployed m3 HC multiplied by the average resistance, or at least I get close enough to your numbers using that.

Internally, in our tests using real ships CCS almost always goes first as opposed to the direct destruction of the core, I’d say in general this is situational depending on the design of the ship. In my experience, when constructs actually have a good amount of voxels, it's very difficult to dig your way to the core, and between the HC and the elements and the (occasional, hopefully fewer and fewer) lost shot, I believe that most of the time, you can count on your CCS HP being your “real” HP bar.  If that's not the case, especially on ships that have a good amount of HC, I’d love to see/hear more about it, since that would be contrary to what we’ve tested. Perhaps certain voxels are outliers.
 
My gut feeling is that in the “nano-age” during which CCS was introduced and voxels were rebalanced, people haven't been using voxels a ton in pvp. The goal is for that to change and honestly, if people start using voxels in some quantity, that's already good progress. If it does come out that cheaper voxels, or certain cheap voxels are always way better than more expensive voxels, I'll be more than happy to take a look at that (and to be honest, I’ve started already since I had to look at a bunch of stuff for this).
Lastly on this, you’ve defined that plastic is the best material on the basis of it having the most “mean HP” for the mass. That may be the case, but seeing how much effort players have put into reducing cross-section at almost any cost, I don't think 6700 m3 of plastic is always going to be the best solution.
 

For the last point in regards to venting, I feel like I’ve partly answered the question already but I’ll answer more broadly. Venting isn't something that will or needs to be used. It's a tool at your disposal and it's up to you to figure out how and when you're going to use it depending on the situation and the design of your ship. In contrast it's our job to make sure that those avenues can exist in the game.
 
In view of that, lighter ships now can try to disengage using their speed and try to get away and disengage to vent and come back, some ships may have honeycomb to tank on the CCS, some ships may not be able to reliably vent. If you design your ship in such a way that it cannot vent, then that's on you. However, if it is the case that there are NO competitive designs that allow you to vent at all, I agree that's a problem we need to change.
 
It will come down to the design of your ship, and it's possible that venting will be more usable in certain situations, and certain circumstances than others. For example, I don't expect smaller and lighter ships to have enough CCS/voxels to tank more than a couple hits (let alone all the elements that will die on a compact design) so if they can't escape the firepower using their speed/agility, they are likely dead. But who knows, it might be worth it now to dedicate some amount of HC on ships, specifically to be able to tank a handful of shots to get some shield HP back, even if you don't manage a full cycle off.
 
Essentially from my perspective, if you go no honeycomb, you are accepting that venting is going to be a tougher proposal than if you had dedicated some mass to HC protection, there's a tradeoff there. Now maybe that tradeoff isn't balanced, and there's one obvious better choice than the other, in that case we will take a look (that was sort of what was happening up to 0.29, there wasn't much point to using HC, but I think between the shield mass and health changes,  and the speed changes, HC could have merit again in at least some designs, but maybe it's not enough).
 
For an example on a relatively light design, even just 100m3 of that grade 5 titanium is going to give you around 1.2milll CCS health for 4-5~ extra tonnes. Is that enough to tank serious damage for a while? No, probably not. Is it enough to absorb a couple hits as you try to pull out of range, get your transversal speed up and start venting some HP back, probably yes. The downside is your cross-section may suffer and you'll lose some speed (honestly the speed loss won't be much, even at the most severe parts of the speed curve). Is it worth it? I’d say so yeah, in some designs and some situations, especially now that heavy L ships can’t easily rotate to keep up with smaller constructs, having a slightly larger cross-section probably isn't such a big deal in certain scenarios now.
 
To be fair in regards to that point, I agree that on lighter and more compact constructs, the damage dealt to elements will sometimes be what ends up killing you rather than CCS, or even the core being killed. If you take a nasty hit that blows up half your elements, you are essentially dead. My question is are you able to use some HC, to reduce the chances of a good hit taking you out of the fight entirely.
 
I did a quick test, put up 50m3 of grade 5 titanium and blasted it with a fully talented laser L. It took 3 shots to get through and kill the core I had placed  just behind the material. To be honest though, based on my hit chance on a totally immobile target with zero cone or range issue, I would actually expect an actual S design to take almost 0 damage from L weapons. The shield and the CCS at that point is more of an insurance policy for the occasional hit, or to fight off other smaller constructs.
 
There's also something to be said about balancing cross-section vs compactness. Not having all your elements in the same spot, even on smaller designs, means a single shot has less chance to obliterate half your elements.
 

Anyway, I'm just spitballing on a lot of things, I certainly don't have all the answers, and likely there's some things I’ve missed, or some things I've overestimated the importance of or underestimated the importance of.
 
 
Now to address your “problems to be solved” directly as a conclusion of sorts.
 
   Point 1: In regards to this point, if people start using any honeycomb at all it’ll be a good direction. Once we get to the point where we’re saying “we’re using HC and these honeycombs are all clearly better than these honeycomb”, we will be in a good place to start addressing HC internal balancing. The second thing is I do currently believe that especially on larger ships, CCS is a better representation of health than raw HP, and this is likely the opposite on smaller ships.
 
   Point 2: I‘m not totally set on this. Unplayable seems like a strong word here. I think lighter, smaller constructs have more opportunities now to disengage from fights in order to vent, or potentially exploit larger ships' slow rotation to stay out of the cone of the guns. Additionally, in my mind, some honeycomb can be a valuable addition to smaller designs, to give yourself some room to vent. However, If this isn't enough, we could explore more powerful and quicker vents for smaller shields, that's certainly a possibility.
 
   Point 3: Maybe, I’ve gotten some info by looking into it again today, and it's possible some changes can come down the line on this. In the past we’ve had the opposite issues, so it's possible we went too far.
 

I know this is a big blob, I hope my numbers were right, my brain is a little hazy, and hopefully I’ve answered most of your questions and made this a little clearer for you guys.
 
 
Thanks.
 

Hey everyone,

Recent news of Athena got me thinking: Why would the average player want to use voxels on their ships?

You see, the more voxels you have - the heavier your ship. So clearly, using voxels costs more in fuel costs, lifting capacity and warp cell cost. Additionally, for PvP, more voxels means more mass which currently means slower acceleration and maneuverability. With Athena, it will also mean that voxels will lower your ships' top speed - a terrible thing for missions runners who spend hours being afk and PvPers who are trying to catch them. Lastly, more voxels also adds to the cost of ship deployment.

This leaves us with two, just two reasons to use voxels as it stands:
- Your ship will look cool
- CCS value for PvP ships

The first one is pretty self explanatory, but it doesn't change the fact that the majority of missions runners nowadays don't bother putting voxels on their 'ships' and just fly element only piles of garbage because its cheaper. Its entirely an optional bonus.

The second is a little more complex. You have PvPers who use CCS in order to out-tank their opponent, however, with the current meta and ways of PvP, more voxels means more mass which means higher warp costs - terrible thing for pirates warp chasing haulers from whose packages they can't even profit. I'd say that it is also an optional trade-off because with shields, you can fly faster glass-cannon ships that don't have any voxels on them. Note that with Athena, high CCS ships may become useful for control of the Alien cores and strategic territory holding around them. They will be able to, in theory, out-tank the smaller nimbler ships, but that remains to be seen to be believed.

I propose a crude solution to this problem: mandatory usage of voxels in order to be able to carry mass.

The addition of a "Structural Stress" mechanic, where ships need a certain number of voxels or CCS in order to carry loads. For example, you would need 10,000,000 CCS in order to fill your containers on your ship with 10kt of cargo (just as an example, numbers can change ofc). If your ship doesn't meet the CCS requirements to carry that cargo + docked ships, it will either take damage to its elements over time or not work. 

This solution is crude, however, hopefully it will force people to use voxels in their builds. Sure, you will still have cubes that are optimized for that value, however, once a player uses voxels it is a much easier mental hop for them to at least try make it look like a ship. Compare this to now, where the usage of voxels is strictly suboptimal for most cases. This should remove voxel-less ships from the game, because lets face it, they are not only ugly but also against one of the main pillars of the game - player creativity. Why put all that work into a voxel system if nobody uses it?

Thank will be all. Feel free to discuss below or yell at me for "Proposing to ruin my super optimal warp shuttle that is just elements floating in space!". Up to you. 

Hey everyone,

Recent news of Athena got me thinking: Why would the average player want to use voxels on their ships?

You see, the more voxels you have - the heavier your ship. So clearly, using voxels costs more in fuel costs, lifting capacity and warp cell cost. Additionally, for PvP, more voxels means more mass which currently means slower acceleration and maneuverability. With Athena, it will also mean that voxels will lower your ships' top speed - a terrible thing for missions runners who spend hours being afk and PvPers who are trying to catch them. Lastly, more voxels also adds to the cost of ship deployment.

This leaves us with two, just two reasons to use voxels as it stands:
- Your ship will look cool
- CCS value for PvP ships

The first one is pretty self explanatory, but it doesn't change the fact that the majority of missions runners nowadays don't bother putting voxels on their 'ships' and just fly element only piles of garbage because its cheaper. Its entirely an optional bonus.

The second is a little more complex. You have PvPers who use CCS in order to out-tank their opponent, however, with the current meta and ways of PvP, more voxels means more mass which means higher warp costs - terrible thing for pirates warp chasing haulers from whose packages they can't even profit. I'd say that it is also an optional trade-off because with shields, you can fly faster glass-cannon ships that don't have any voxels on them. Note that with Athena, high CCS ships may become useful for control of the Alien cores and strategic territory holding around them. They will be able to, in theory, out-tank the smaller nimbler ships, but that remains to be seen to be believed.

I propose a crude solution to this problem: mandatory usage of voxels in order to be able to carry mass.

The addition of a "Structural Stress" mechanic, where ships need a certain number of voxels or CCS in order to carry loads. For example, you would need 10,000,000 CCS in order to fill your containers on your ship with 10kt of cargo (just as an example, numbers can change ofc). If your ship doesn't meet the CCS requirements to carry that cargo + docked ships, it will either take damage to its elements over time or not work. 

This solution is crude, however, hopefully it will force people to use voxels in their builds. Sure, you will still have cubes that are optimized for that value, however, once a player uses voxels it is a much easier mental hop for them to at least try make it look like a ship. Compare this to now, where the usage of voxels is strictly suboptimal for most cases. This should remove voxel-less ships from the game, because lets face it, they are not only ugly but also against one of the main pillars of the game - player creativity. Why put all that work into a voxel system if nobody uses it?

Thank will be all. Feel free to discuss below or yell at me for "Proposing to ruin my super optimal warp shuttle that is just elements floating in space!". Up to you. 

Maybe you are one of the few that likes these small cross-section M cores ships to stomp everything and everyone but me, not the only one advocating for a change. The fact is we miss multicrew ships. Also, fact is the current meta makes ship look like the Dogshit you always bring up. That Weapons are ridiculous large doesn't help it.

NQ we built these big multicrew ships we had much fun with. Then came shields and ccs smaller weapons got buffed and then these ships became obsolete.
Mass to speed is just the final nail in the coffin for Ships that are anyway now just Museum pieces.
Real balance means for me that shields would bleed DMG and a portion of DPS gets past shield at all times so this would force people to build with voxels and not too small,
so your speed changes would have an impact.
As it stands now it would only impact Haulers. Once Aphelia missions for 3 hours now how long will it take?
I also support the idea of ships shields being size locked to have ship classes.

If all L cored ships where L sized, If all M core ships where M sized, if all S core ships where S sized.  I would agree.  But you can get a medium core ship that weighs 10KT, and you can get a Large core ship that weighs 1KT.  
 
Core size does not reflect ship size.  And this is something I said from day 1 when they added shields to PTS. Shield HP should be a multiple of voxel HP. 
 
Restricting L shields to L core only would be bad for the game. 

-> Something i would add to the changes
The max. size of a shield generator should be matching the actual core size.
Shield Generator L on Dynamic Core L only Shield Generator M on Dynamic Core M only etc..  
 
 
 

We only just had all the cores transferred from our sub orgs to MTI proper, the real cleanup begins now... gotta build 1 voxel towers and ask NQ to clean the terrain from the roads since they hadn't originally... RDMS was a nightmare before Panacea - so much easier now. Been working on lots of other stuff too. Hopefully the city will become something more than a bunch of roads down the line.

Now imagine that you can do this in the next update, however, to make those you need a special resource that you get only from those Alien cores... Would be nice to have some unique mechanic tied to a resource that is actually hard to get

In my opinion, a wipe would only be acceptable if:

1 - It fixes the issues that brought about its' necessity in the first place
2 - adds something new to the game
3 - ensures we will never need a new wipe

That's my two cents on the issue. Wiping for the sake of wiping is pointless.

I nominate this from the YouTube user "Bonusaben":
 
 

This community has become so much meaner...it's pointless and petty. 
 
Someone stating that they'd rather not return unless there's a wipe isn't "demanding" anything. It's stating their opinion, which they have every right to. 
 
This sort of rhetoric is really not helpful -- twisting a simple and commonly expressed opinion into a "demand" so that you can frame someone you don't know as "selfish" is not productive communication. 

-.- can we please wipe so the guy who hasnt read a devblog for 16 months blesses us with his presence for two and a half weeks
 
what was it can't turn a profit turning ore into intermediaries or some other thing nobody needs help for, or are you convinced all juicy spots are allready sucked dry...?
 
Sorry for the salt but I'd be surprised if it wasn't one of these reoccurring easily debunked memes.

I would really like to set up missions to transport things more often, sadly, I can rarely use the mission system.
 
My missions will compete with the endless supply of NPC missions, meaning if I pay less than a player can get from an NPC mission, I don’t have to bother. NPC missions are 
-repeatable, can be done multiple times in one shipment with alts.
-the longer the mission, the better it pays, and the smaller the inconvenience of having to log into multiple accounts, or ask friends to come for the ride.
-the shorter/smaller the mission, the lower the collateral.
-no limit for litres
 
Due to this, the player missions are hard to sell:
 
Long range ore transport: Every ~5 days I ship 4ML from Sicari to Alioth. I would have to set the collateral to 200M for the whole amount (50 per litre), so no newer player can do it. And more established players, if interested in transport, will already do NPC mission which pay better and can be organized better with group or alts. Also, I would have to split the transport into 512kl chunks, and as only 3 missions can be set up at a time, I would need three EXL parcel containers, on both ends, to organize, pack, set up. I would also have to pay upper market cell cost for a heavier ship than mine, +actual reward. So I just do it myself.
 
Short range heavy transport: No warp cells involved, but still same problems as above. Also, these transports would likely be from the market to my base, which means I need to create the parcels inside the market container, which does not allow to split stacks. If I have more than 512kl of a single type of ore in the market container, it can no longer be used for a mission.
 
Long range light transport, like schematics: For a small job like just hopping with a warp shuttle to Talemai and back, I could set up a mission, but now the collateral is a huge deterrent. 3M quanta job, for 100M collateral, maybe somebody would still do that. Same job but for 500M or 2B collateral?
 
Short range light. I just pick it up next time I need to fly light anyway.
 
 
 
 
I wouldn’t mind outsourcing some work, but the tedium, high price (to compete with NPC missions) and restrictions mean I either ask a buddy to fly it (and I move from container to container via VR) or, in 99% of the cases, I just fly myself.

Because personally, I can never get the same level of voxel detail lol, and yeah didn't see that yours goes 2k, I thought only 1k mb

Completely irrelevant to my point.
 
All name calling makes you sound like a child, but especially mildly homophobic slurs like "butthurt". 
 
I don't care if you enjoy PvP or not (personally I do enjoy it)...if you resort to boring, repetitive, childish insults, your opinion should be thrown in the dumpster as irrelevant garbage. It doesn't matter "who starts it" -- this isn't 2nd grade and the topic is a video game. If you must use insults, at least save it for a topic worth getting riled over. 

I don't get how a game of mostly adults...mostly 30+ year old adults...so often devolves into pointless name-calling.
 
If you feel the need to use the term "carebear" or "butthurt", you don't have anything worth saying. 
 
It's a deep irony that people who accuse others of having thin skin or being too "weak" for PvP so often have their feathers ruffled with the drop of a pin. 

"The best news of all is that we plan to release a smaller update between now and Athena release to introduce some quality of life improvements."

PLEASE BE A LARGER SELECT/COPY/PASTE AREA!!!!!!!!!!

This sounds like a big update, can't wait to hear more

This may be some proper new content. Good thing I've been preparing for WAAARRRRR!!! Let's gooooo!

Curious, introducing Alien Cores feels like a huuuuge departure from the original game... you can't just drop "Aliens" on us and not expect the obvious question.... when do we get some Alien NPC's to shoot at?
 
hyyyyype!

This sounds like a big update, can't wait to hear more

You keep skipping past all the entry level content, right to the most profitable and hardest thing.  And then you try to do it with no research, planning, or effort, and when you fail, you come here and blame NQ.
 
I can't speak for everyone, but most of us here are benefiting from each other's knowledge and experience.
 
There's nothing wrong with listening to other people and letting them help you.  I do it constantly.
 
If you chose not to, then it was your decision to make the game harder than it needs to be.
 
 

The joys of insomnia bring me to reading these posts and offering random replies.
 
It's actually very easy just to set up a simple T1 mining operation on Alioth and turn a profit within a short space of time. 
The expenditure of a higher tier operation whilst it will turn a profit eventually, it will take longer due to the abysmal prices at the moment for higher tier ore.
 
I for one much prefer the current system to spending hours, days and weeks digging in holes. Once the operation is setup I can get on with other things in the game.
 
I get by your recent postings that you're doing that thing we see from time to time where you're disgruntled with the current systems and rather than adapt or not play, you're venting your frustrations with multiple posts.

There are no other engines that can do what Unigine can do in the context fo DU. 
 
The needed scale, precision and everything being in one single instance with many thousands of players is not going to happen in UE or Lumberyard, which really are the only two alternatives besides Hadean as that is a similar engine in concept to what they have and is further along in showing to be proven technology plus it has big names behind it.
There is computing solutions available now that were not available 7+ years ago when NE started their journey which would very likely be more efficient, cheaper, and higher performance than AWS, particularly Edge/private cloud solutions. But NQ is too busy now to get to release to spend months moving the game over.
 
OP has watched too many flashy demo videos which show off UE5 but has not really paid attention to what is left of all that once the engine actually has to run in the context for a game.
 
Needless to say, there is a lot about NQ that needs to get better, but the engine they use is not that big an issue right now.