Does building matter beyond elements?

[Anomaly]

So Dual Universe looks cool - cool enough that I just bought in at silver. One thing is bothering me though... 

 

I've seen prefabricated elements come into use in the preview vids. The builders put down some custom voxels, attach the elements and away they go.   The simplicity of it makes me wonder if the custom voxels matter at all.  Is a sleek and beautiful battle cruiser with hours of work put into it any more capable than a big cube with the right elements attached?

 

I remember this kind of building from Spore and I hated it.  A thing shaped like a hippo could outrun a thing shaped like a cheetah because it had higher tier feet. 

 

What is custom building with elements going to look like in the final game?  Will we be able to affect how the elements perform?  

 

Will we be able to customize the elements themselves?  If so, to what extent?

 

I have high hopes for DU but the game could go very wrong here. 

[Anomaly]

I hope you don't mind the bump. This was almost off the front page by the time it was approved. 

[Thokan]

They have outlined in dev diaries they aim to make the elements as realistic as possible i.e even the most careless shipbuilder would have to follow some principles of logic.

 

Seeing as ships will take some time to build atleast smaller aircraft and vehicles will probably mostly be of sleek design because of thriftiness. It would take considerable more resources to turn a one-man aircraft from a sleek design into a penis, for example. Very inefficient.

 

Who knows what organizations of childish people and crafty teenagers will come up with though.

[Lethys]

I think in the beginning a cube will be as effective as a sleek ship, but who knows, maybe (depending on server load) they add more realistic aerodynamics..

 

Afaik jc said something like that in some interview. More sophisticated designs will definitely be prevalent, I will stick to pragmatic designs though

[Thokan]

I have a hard time seeing people building cubes in a tactical sense since the only tactical value more voxels bring is more, inefficiently placed, ship health/armor. It would be far more tactically sound to just build another ship and have twice the fire power than having to conform to building in a certain object shape.

[Kurosawa]

Cube are a very efficient structure, and can be made nice to look at.

[Dygz_Briarthorn]

Some of us are what I call "fashion-over-function".

If the role I choose to play is to emulate the Borg, having a cube for a ship may be more important than the efficiency of ship health or armor - especially if I maintain my ship in a safe zone and use it primarily for the aesthetics of the story I hope to tell.

 

As long as warp speed is reasonably fast -in WoW, I can spend hours just swimming around continents in order to uncover the fog of war, so "reasonably fast" is subjective- the tactical aspects may not be a presiding factor.

[Pang_Dread]

Yeah I don't think we know enough yet to say what the relationship is between size, shape, amount of voxels used and how it all effects performance, efficiency etc. of our ships.

 

Because technically if the control modules are the most important parts and we need to protect them from attackers then making just big cube or sphere with the mods in the middle and maximum amount of voxels surrounding them that would indeed take out much if not all the customization factors of ship building and we'll all just be building the same looking ships that offer max protection to the important parts.

 

So yeah there has to be some kind of pro/con system where building a ship a certain way has consequences to performance and such.