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The Point of Designing a Cool Ship?


Frigidman

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First thing I'd like to clarify is that imho many of you are missing the point that the starwars like dogfight is the less realistic reresentation of space fights, ever. You shouldnt take x-wing style ships as a reference because they will never be possible nor viable in a semi-realistic environement due to how movement (and weapons) works in space. 

 

That said, I agree that the current situation can be solved by locking weapon size to core size (L weapons only on L core) but I strongly believe that weapons need to be reworked in a way that every weapon has a specific role: missiles are fine but we need lasers to act as a countermeasure for missiles. Lasers should have low range but fast rate of fire. Cannons and railguns shouldnt have autoaim, ok you deal a lot of damage but good luck hitting a small and fast ship.

With these tweaks you can finally get rid of xs deadly cube and create a lot of possibilities with ships's roles. There's no point in having a capital ship now if 3 xs cubes have the same firepower at 1/100th the cost.

Bear in mind that cubes will always be the most efficient way to protect your core, in space.

 

On planets it should be a completely different thing, like day and night. A cube should be no threat for an f22-raptor. They need to make planet warfare in a way that speed and maneuverability matters a lot, we need proper ballistics (bullet drop for railguns and cannons), atmosphere that negates lasers, and so on.

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5 hours ago, Lethys said:

Don't care for Design or beauty. A ship has to fulfill a task and it needs to do that job well. Min/max ftw with all allowed exploits and to circumvent restrictions. If that means cubes, fine. Idc.

Would never ever buy a well designed ship if a cube does the job 5% better. 

 

And I'm not a guy running around like a little kid "uuuuuuuuhhhh That's a beautiful ship" and being impressed by such. To me if doesn't matter at all 

Slightly confused why you think that someone who like aesthetic design is a 'kid', we tend to find that it is peoples love for good looking ships that increases the quantity and value of the ships that we sell.  I also like to 'min/max' the amount of quanta in my wallet.  Having one of the best designers in the game building ships for my org certainly does that.  Having nice buildings also bring recognition to my org and our activities.  You would be surprised how many leaders I have spoken to through the quality of our asset design.

I am all for quality design, and also for the devs doing everything they can to remove any benefits from having borg cubes / 'exploits to circumvent restrictions'

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3 hours ago, Moosegun said:

Slightly confused why you think that someone who like aesthetic design is a 'kid', we tend to find that it is peoples love for good looking ships that increases the quantity and value of the ships that we sell.  I also like to 'min/max' the amount of quanta in my wallet.  Having one of the best designers in the game building ships for my org certainly does that.  Having nice buildings also bring recognition to my org and our activities.  You would be surprised how many leaders I have spoken to through the quality of our asset design.

I am all for quality design, and also for the devs doing everything they can to remove any benefits from having borg cubes / 'exploits to circumvent restrictions'

Dunno, reminds me of that xD

 

Good for you I guess.

 

Would never pay any extra for design tho, only for function.

 

If the devs push in that direction then so be it. Don't have anything against designer ships but to me it doesn't matter at all 

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Sorry for the sidetrack, but this relates to why a good looking ship should make more sense beside just the aesthetic factor.

 

The saying "If it looks fast, then it is fast" is very much true for aerodynamics. And NQ has accounted for that to some degree with frontal area deciding how much drag a construct will have in atmosphere.

So while a cube does in fact make a lot of sense in space, make the large profile affect radar detection distance, hit chance etc.

A lighter ship with faster acceleration should also have a MUCH higher chance of escaping then currently. I.e. make weapons follow the same physics rules as ships have to obey.

 

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On 10/2/2020 at 4:05 PM, Frigidman said:

A "death cube" is generally what wins out there.

  • Has maximum blob surface for armor.
  • Game allows it no problem.
  • Requires the least investment in time to get going.

 

 

This happens because of a simple and wrong mechanic that NQ implemented as the 1st iteration of pvp:

Radar locking is related to core size instead of actual build size or material or radar cross-section.

 

When NQ changes this, ppl will be able to make all types of PVP ships instead of just volume efficient XS designs.

Hopefully they will change it soon.

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There are a lot of practical benefits when it comes to ship aesthetics. Well...sort of practical. 

 

Your fleet ought to be recognizable. Everyone knows a Federation ship when they see it -- if you attack it, you'd best be ready for war with the entire faction. 

 

They design ships to look pretty and consistent -- sure, they could pump out a bunch of war ships, but the design is a reflection of their values as an organization.

 

If a Federation ship shows up to answer your distress call, you probably trust them more than a stranger. Even if you aren't familiar with their org, they don't look like warships. You wouldn't invest in pretty ships if your only concern is piracy/war. 

 

Cohesive ship design helps build the organization's reputation across the galaxy -- and this reputation helps each individual ship stay safer...or be more feared, or whatever values you want to reflect.  

 

For those of us that want to play a civilization sandbox, these sorts of things will hopefully be important. 

 

My hope is that generic cube ships (if they remain in meta) get treated as "pirates" on sight by more organized fleets -- e.g. if your ship looks like it is a generic cube built only for combat that doesn't belong to any faction...maybe you get treated like the dirty space rat you are by more civilization-focused orgs. :D 

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While the build tools are actually there.   Game mechanics seem to really not care at all about reinforcing those build tools.  IE: as an example of a building game that has mechanics that reinforce it's building mechanics you could look at something like Oxygen Not Included, where actually building a dining room gives further benefits to dining room equipment after the game classes it as such.

 

Current PvP mechanics very heavily fall into the "Combat effectiveness gets the absolute say" over everything else.   Along with that mantra being forced to essentially all playable areas of the game (Sanctuary is not really a playable area with laughably bad resource "fun-ness" mechanics, and being a laggy pile of dung where you feel server crashes/resets hour before they actually happen).

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7 hours ago, HangerHangar said:

Current PvP mechanics very heavily fall into the "Combat effectiveness gets the absolute say" over everything else.

Meanwhile the real PvP challenge by far in Newtonian physics based space should be 'catch the ship'. Realistically a lighter ship built for maximum acceleration would be almost guaranteed to escape a 'death cube' simply by accelerating out of weapons range.

 

And in addition to distance, relative speed between two ships should also have a large say in weapons hit chance. So that a ship coming towards you at high speed would be harder to hit, even if the distance is technically well within weapons range. Combined with a narrow ship profile (when burning away from other ship) to further decrease hit chance, this would make it so that you can build good looking ships that would have a very good chance of evading PvP.

 

But this still doesn't mean PvP looses out, since that ship design would also suck at for example transporting goods. And if PvP'ers decide they want to hunt smaller faster ships, they simply have to adapt and make lighter ships also (at the expense of now being more vulnerable against counter attacks). And presto, we now have emergent game play where one size does not fit all.

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6 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

Meanwhile the real PvP challenge by far in Newtonian physics based space should be 'catch the ship'. Realistically a lighter ship built for maximum acceleration would be almost guaranteed to escape a 'death cube' simply by accelerating out of weapons range.

 

And in addition to distance, relative speed between two ships should also have a large say in weapons hit chance. So that a ship coming towards you at high speed would be harder to hit, even if the distance is technically well within weapons range. Combined with a narrow ship profile (when burning away from other ship) to further decrease hit chance, this would make it so that you can build good looking ships that would have a very good chance of evading PvP.

 

But this still doesn't mean PvP looses out, since that ship design would also suck at for example transporting goods. And if PvP'ers decide they want to hunt smaller faster ships, they simply have to adapt and make lighter ships also (at the expense of now being more vulnerable against counter attacks). And presto, we now have emergent game play where one size does not fit all.

 

The design team has been constantly utterly underestimating the players though.  Solving whatever riddle that was supposed to take 2 years,  range limits based on core size, and thinking that each tier of ore was 5x harder than the previous tier (to the detriment of market balance).  

 

thinking they get other player interactions balanced on a mechanic release/change is very optimistic.

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It is also my experience in games that there is always an absolute best meta. In ED for a while it was FDLs against all comers. Then with engineers, the boat was shaken for a bit but play soon gravitated around the new meta of engineered weapons. 
 

there ended up only being a couple of viable PvP ships out of the 40 odd ships in the game.
same for weapons only one or two out of the hundreds were useful... same for the engineering buffs... same for the commodities for trading. Same for the activities for making money. 
 

one or two key meta activities. The rest relagsted to pointlessness by the sheer gap in effectiveness between the “top tier” and the rest. 

 

all PvP play in ED (against non pvpers)  comes down to: can you get the first shot in before they can warp? If you can, your win is all but garanteed.  (I’m simplifying, but the point stands)

 

And if you were not PvP you have to warp out immediately before they can one shot you. 
 

 

the fact is, the PvP meta ships are honed to perfection and are unbeatable by anything not explicitly playing the same meta. 
 

I agree with the commenter above. Players are ingenious and focused humans in general are very, very good at optimizing at the expense of any variety at all. 

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NQ can't ignore the builders player base, I think there will always be a safe zone somewhere. Where and how big? The current safe zone is fine to me, it has every ores so builders can build everything in the game (untill everything gets mined out).

 

On 10/2/2020 at 10:34 PM, Frigidman said:

This is about building, or more specifically, spending the time to build things above and beyond the most basic flying brick needed to do pvp or travel through pvp.

 

There is zero skill involved in making a deathcube.

The current game mechanics leads to the current pvp meta, the deathcube seams to be the most efficient fighter. You define skill involved for it as "zero", when omitting all the process players went through before starting the construction. Building the perfect XS fighter doesn't happen in a day, there are a lot of things to consider like the proportion of engines, weapons, voxel used, etc. All of this is affecting the ship capabilities and when the goal is to build the most efficient XS fighter, you have to test a lot of things before coming to the solution.

 

You place the skill at "building a nice ship", where some other players place it at "building the most efficient ship". There is no "right way" of building a ship, it's only subjective to you, it's about what you want to do with it. But you have to concider the game rules for what you want to do, a beautiful ship will win the first price at the Alioth Aerospace Expo, but outside the safe zone the rules are clear, prepare to die in your lamborghini killed by people flying in a dumpster.

 

Play in the world you want to be in, and accept what happen if you step outside of it.

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Totally agree with the initial post even if I DO believe that DU needs PvP, even the most sauvage version of it.

 

But the game, on this aspect, is really unbalanced. 

 

Some ideas :

- no exploitable external view while in PvP combat, for example no engine control or weapon activation => no more seat in voxel blobs, no more blind voxel blocks => add the need to design proper cockpits with usable view. 

 

- seats needs to be "inside" the ship. Totally possible as they are already able to detect it (for the sound)

 

- currently, PvP is a huge and sharp cissor and a very thin leaf and a tiny rock. Pure escaping ship (speed or signature) or tanky ship should be able to manage encounters without problem. And these feature should be exclusive with heavily weaponized ships. Using capacity, perhaps? With thrust enhancer or shield, plugged on the seat? 

 

- no build mode while in combat. You should be able to repair from inside the ship.

 

Just some ideas. 

 

 

 

 

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Yeah, I discussed this with a friend of mine. I feel the game should do a better job at detecting aerodynamics. Its appears it currently only cares about weight and components equipped. I think that there should be other factors for example:// resistance, etc. I just don't think that someone should be able to slap a square of voxels together and fly with it, at least not effectively.

 

If you aren't good at building, then you buy blueprints. Let the creative players do the R&D to create the most effective ships. There is nothing worse than admiring this beautiful game, and a telephone booth flys by....

 

Just my opinion. ?

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On 10/3/2020 at 2:33 AM, Aremes said:

Maybe so, but it's definitely a heck of a lot easier than building a real looking space ship that resembles as such with true creativity. I guarantee it takes a lot less time to create a stupid cube meta ship than a creative ship, and once you have said cube meta ship, you just blueprint and redeploy after being destroyed. That's infinitely faster than creating a second new creative ship that's different than the first. So your argument is mute and not helpful to this discussion, as you are not going to convince anyone that it will sustain the future of this game for PVPers or Builders. Period.

And me not defending the cubes I can appreciate a well-built ship in DU. I would like those weapons to get locked to core sizes and that we would get shields so that other builds get a fighting chance. People in PvP build right now to win a fight that is the fact. Last Weekend I built such a cube and flew it and got bored out of it that ugliness so I return to my non Meta ships. But to keep it short I agree with you that this situation is not sustainable in the long run even when I say a good cube to make is not an easy task.

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14 hours ago, Ater Omen said:

You define skill involved for it as "zero", when omitting all the process players went through before starting the construction. Building the perfect XS fighter doesn't happen in a day.

 

You place the skill at "building a nice ship", where some other players place it at "building the most efficient ship". 

 

Play in the world you want to be in, and accept what happen if you step outside of it.

The problem comes where there is only a single, limited  meta... There are infinitely more ways of building a "nice" or just even a "proper," real-world-physics-complient ship than there are of exploiting the game's physics engine's obvious naïveté, so in the end there are droves of similar, functionally "efficient" but physically "questionable" flying around like the identically kitted FDLs of old on the ED open server. 

And make no mistake, these cubes ARE exploits to some extent... floating elements and multiple layers of non-contiguous armour, just like using 3rd person camera as a magic view through 4m of solid gold and .. creating flying boxes that somehow work in atmosphere despite having occluded elements _is_ an exploit, and arguably, using the game in ways it was not intended is a bannable offence ?

Also, that last sentence comes across as preachy or even (imo) risible given that nobody (not even JC) knows what the shape or even size of that finial "world" will be.
Heck, JC's future decisions may even ignore these exploits and make the game entirely unsuitable for pure PVE/builders, leaving the PvP cubes wandering aimlessly around pinging other cubes in an ironic return to 80s style space video games... but more importantly, unable to find any seals to club and sate their IRL inadequacies.

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8 hours ago, GraXXoR said:

The problem comes where there is only a single, limited  meta... There are infinitely more ways of building a "nice" or just even a "proper," real-world-physics-complient ship than there are of exploiting the game's physics engine's obvious naïveté, so in the end there are droves of similar, functionally "efficient" but physically "questionable" flying around like the identically kitted FDLs of old on the ED open server. 

And make no mistake, these cubes ARE exploits to some extent... floating elements and multiple layers of non-contiguous armour, just like using 3rd person camera as a magic view through 4m of solid gold and .. creating flying boxes that somehow work in atmosphere despite having occluded elements _is_ an exploit, and arguably, using the game in ways it was not intended is a bannable offence ?

Also, that last sentence comes across as preachy or even (imo) risible given that nobody (not even JC) knows what the shape or even size of that finial "world" will be.
Heck, JC's future decisions may even ignore these exploits and make the game entirely unsuitable for pure PVE/builders, leaving the PvP cubes wandering aimlessly around pinging other cubes in an ironic return to 80s style space video games... but more importantly, unable to find any seals to club and sate their IRL inadequacies.

Something that is not realistic doesn't mean that is an exploit, or we would play a full simulation (or at least as best as it can be) and not the current game.

edit: I agree that atmo lift and obstruction physics is a joke, and an update on that is welcome.

 

How do you define an exploit? Here is my definition:

 

Edited by Ater Omen
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A sensible design is naturally cool-looking, but also;

  • Death cubes don't work as well in atmosphere, will be less useful in territory warfare within atmosphere if at all
  • Death cubes will always be slower than normal ships, given the same amount of things and engines carried

And the uses of "cool-looking" ships beyond the obvious fact that it makes the owner / users happier;

  • Propaganda / branding of your faction
  • Crew's psychological endurance (see how long it takes for someone to get bored of being a gunner in a floating steel cube)
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A lot of interesting answers in this topic, so let me put my 5 cents : D

 

1. No, there is 0 functional point in designing ship now. I have seen cubes, spheres, coca-cola trucks, chess-boards, two-floor houses and even an ass-crack flying in atmo and feel same comfortable as bad-ass looking spaceships. And as author mentioned - current pvp-meta is a flying blob.

2. Is that bad?

2.1 The fact that players do build flying death cubes are not bad. As people above mentioned - it is current meta, you can do nothing with it. If something is top-effective - people will use it. You can stay in your bubble, building Elon wet dreams spaceship designs for pure aesthetic - but when pvp will start to mean something, you either build your borg ship with guns or sit tight in your safe zone and suck.

2.2 The fact that game allows player to build a flying blob that is a meta - is a very bad thing. There is too much of building sugar added to dynamic constructs. Airfoils always applying lifting force to the center of mass wherever it is placed, containers mass placement easy manipulated with hub, center of mass will most probably always be between engines, obstruction with voxels is non-existent and so on. Same goes with weapons, though I believe something is planned to be changed there.

3. Can we expect game will be OK with current state of flying constructs physic?

It will, but we all be flying in cubes with railguns, never leaving safe zones or losing our sweet Normandies every time we do.

4. Should that be changed?

Depends on how devs envision the future of the game on release. If this should be a space sim with realistic but simplified physics - definitely. If this is going to be an arcade where you can just design your ship - it is good as it is, can be simplified even more, but I won't be playing it then. Both will attract their audience - and developers should decide which one they want. Until then realists will be crying that they are tired of flying penises and physics should be more strict, while arcadists will be crying that they can not create ship of their dream as it can not take off, and physics should be simplified. 

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PVPers don't like their cubes but no one gonna choose a cool looking ship over an effective one.

I think a solution to this is making the most of the tanking dependent on shields and not voxels. Like common, in space age we still defend ourselves by a steel wall ?

With shields as defense the shape of your ship is not as important, voxels are week anyway and are mass inefficient armoring.

The voxels should be used to "hold the ship together" like maybe if there is no connection from core to element X that element becomes non functional. It "cool looking" ships get on the same level as PVP ships then people will fly cool looking ship as to why not.

 

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