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Construct Specialization through role specific command chairs


Izon2887

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Introduce dynamic construct classifications by using role specific command chairs that affect what can and can't be placed on the build as well as provide boosts to performance. This would offer advantages and disadvantages depending on the role the construct will be performing. Each chair would have its own skill branch requiring minimum level 1 to use the chair, all other levels increase the chair's effects. Adding higher tiers (uncommon, advanced, rare, exotic) will boost the effects further. 

 

Once one is placed on a dynamic construct all other control units (hoverseat, remote controller, etc) will be disabled and taken off the construct, ECUs unaffected. Dynamic construct icon will change as well from the blue ship to new icons.

 

 

  • Military command chair
    • Boost to weapon output (XS to M weapons only) - Allows M core PVP ships to compete with L cores 
    • Increases all onboard ammo crate capacity
    • Boost Product voxel HP (to broaden building materials away from purely gold voxels)
    • Reduce container element capacity by 75%
    • Boost gunner seat capacity
  • Exploration command chair
    • Allows atmo and space radars to connect at once
    • Increases brake/retro rocket capacity
    • Voxel mass reduced
    • Reduced fuel consumption for Safe engines, decrease capacity of all other engine types
  • Hauler command chair
    • Boost to container capacity and mass reduction
    • Cannot equip territory scanner or weapons
    • Increased lift capacity of wings, hovers and vertical boosters
    • Increased fuel consumption except when using freight engines
    • Reduced element HP

 

The goal of this is to drive specialization in dynamic constructs gearing them towards the pillars of the game. 

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The whole "M-cores must compete with L-cores" thing I keep seeing confuses me a bit. I don't understand why people think one or two ships should be capable of reasonably competing in combat against something that has 8 times their mass. 2 M each fielding the same crew/weapons compliment and skills as a single L will match it for damage, but that L will still have significantly more tank and repair capacity to it than both the M combined. Additionally, boosting M weapons enough to even it out will just result in L-cores with M weapons instead of L. Limiting the bonus to core sizes instead would prevent this, but it would also just shift the meta to M cores, annoying people that had L and accelerating their efforts in min-maxing due to the increase in gathered info resulting from reduced costs (we'd be looking at cubes again, in M scale instead of XS).

 

Increased ammo cap sounds nice.

 

Trying to push materials away from gold is nice decoratively, but voxel HP is the way it is for a reason. It needs some tweaks to be sure, but buffing any small sub-set by a significant margin is just going to push everything in to being that instead. Resists (when they exist) are a function of tier, hp is a function of weight, and while I can agree that there should probably be a tier 5 that works better than gold, I cant advise putting anything else even close to it as it would risk significantly reducing the cost of armoring those ships belonging to players/factions that can already afford huge amounts of gold.

 

Reducing container capacity would be circumvented immediately by using sub-cores and loopholes (that exist intentionally to significantly reduce game-loading and frustration) in the linking system.

 

Care must be taken with the suggestion of boosting seat-capacity, as NQ isn't keen on having very small groups wield huge amounts of guns (it would reduce the need for cooperative play in what is supposed to be an MMO)

 

Radars/brakes would be nice.

 

Why are we trying to buff voxels and (exclusively) safe engines? Pirates chasing your exploration ship will use this stuff just for the radar, and applying these buffs isn't going to stop a purpose-built attack ship with the same buffs from taking the purpose built explorer down.

 

Cargo sounds nice, but will get sub-cored on to ships of all types as mentioned above.

 

Preventing direct territory scanner attachment will get circumvented immediately with sub-cores.

 

Extra lift sounds nice for haulers.

 

Almost everything already uses more fuel than fright engines, except for the maneuver engines which have less tank than your freights from the get-go.

 

 

A good concept, and I'd like to see it developed (although perhaps tied to cores instead of chairs), but in suggestions like this a significant amount of consideration must always be given to both "how will people abuse this" because this is the internet and it will happen, and "why is this the way it is right now" because sometimes things that may seem to just be casually there are actually specific choices serving a good purpose. If you'd like I'd gladly discuss this with you at length to see if we can refine and improve on the idea.

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15 hours ago, Taelessael said:

applying these buffs isn't going to stop a purpose-built attack ship with the same buffs from taking the purpose built explorer down.

That’s what I liked about exploration ships in ED. If you managed to jump, you could usually out jump a combat ship as they were specked for a different task. Exploration ships were made to be light as possible, suck in a fight, often had no weapons, but man could they make some distance. The combat ships were a lot heavier, weapons, heavy armour, shields, but they just did t have jump range. 

 

Two have meaningful PvP it can’t just be if you aren’t a combat ship and you get caught you’re dead. Different builds somehow need to have different options. 

 

Maybe power management will bring this in? Cargo ships have huge generators for shields and engines, but combat ships have to also provide power for weapons, longer range radar, weapon heat sinks etc.

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17 hours ago, Taelessael said:

The whole "M-cores must compete with L-cores" thing I keep seeing confuses me a bit. I don't understand why people think one or two ships should be capable of reasonably competing in combat against something that has 8 times their mass. 2 M each fielding the same crew/weapons compliment and skills as a single L will match it for damage, but that L will still have significantly more tank and repair capacity to it than both the M combined. Additionally, boosting M weapons enough to even it out will just result in L-cores with M weapons instead of L. Limiting the bonus to core sizes instead would prevent this, but it would also just shift the meta to M cores, annoying people that had L and accelerating their efforts in min-maxing due to the increase in gathered info resulting from reduced costs (we'd be looking at cubes again, in M scale instead of XS).

I'll admit that I am ignorant of what is involved with PVP beyond a gunner seat and gold voxels. A comment about people only seeing L cores as viable because of the L weapons is why I made mention of that. Though I agree, it should take several M cores to take out an L core. 

 

As for getting around the container capacity penalty for combat ships, I think if that was changed to Cargo Mass doubled would cover any docked ships in the equation. 

I really hate that gold is considered the best material considering how malleable actual gold is. Voxel HP definitely needs tweaks, though without shields of some kind boosting other materials is the only method I could think of. 

 

18 hours ago, Taelessael said:

Preventing direct territory scanner attachment will get circumvented immediately with sub-cores.

I think that would still be fine, as you're still designing an specialized ship with module cores attached. Its to provide more ways to differentiate ship builds other than just looks. More planning and thought would need to be put into things. 

 

Quote

Why are we trying to buff voxels and (exclusively) safe engines?

Mostly because I've never seen people use these, they only use maneuver or military engines. Boosting safe engines for lighter/faster ships would give more incentive for industrialist to build these. Also I couldn't think of other benefits for exploration ships, perhaps when they release asteroids they could be better suited for hunting those down better than other ship classes. 

 

18 hours ago, Taelessael said:

(although perhaps tied to cores instead of chairs)

This is a good idea, and probably easier to implement than a chair. 

 

I know my idea needs more tweaks and probably would be completely changed when power systems are implemented. My goal with the idea is to provide ship builders more ways to make their creations unique. I'd love to hear more suggestions, definitely think changing it from command chair to specialized dynamic cores would be the way to go. 

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The main current difference between and exploration ship and a combat ship will probably be functional range. Dedicated combat ships I have encountered (or seen/built) tend to operate out of bases or off of carriers, they can dish it out and take it, but even with spare fuel they tend to run dry a lot sooner than a dedicated exploration ship.

 

As for combat vs everything else: this being an MMO the general idea would be to either out-smart the combat ship (have someone fly scout/bait ahead to draw off attackers), out-plan the combat ship (figure where they are probably waiting, and fly around that area rather than through it), or out-prepare the combat ship (hire/bring a combat ship with you as an escort).

 

In regards to L weapons, they quite logically have the highest damage, and people tend to take half a look and go "biggest number wins". In practice things can be a bit more complicated, but that is quite heavily scenario dependent. Tracking isn't as huge an issue as you'd think it could be, currently (in my experience) it tends to be more about element damage/repair/replacement and ammo/fuel supply in larger ships, gold or not. Voxel supply can become an issue eventually if the ships manage to drag on for long enough, but I don't see that often before something else becomes a problem (recently anyways).

 

Speaking of gold, it isn't even remotely realistic, and only results from the fact that hp is tied directly to weight for voxel. Because of this two ships of equal mass/weight of voxel, one gold and one maraging-steel, will have identical voxel hp totals. Gold's only real advantages over any other tier 4/5 material is that you can make it thinner for the same hp, and that pure honeycomb is less work-intensive than product. It will still weigh just as much for any given set hp value.

 

The cargo-mass idea is good, that should help get your desired results.

 

If I had to guess, safe engines were built to be the "oh snap, I'm attacked from surprise, must get going to counter" engines... They were intended to try and survive long enough to let the ship they are attached to "scramble" in to combat and would be best served in a defensive role (similar to the WW2 German Komet), something currently less than ideal given the prevalence of safe-zones inside of which one can build their bases/stations. Their value will probably increase when we get other solar-systems that don't have safe-zones, though I can't guarantee they will match the other engines in value or use even then.

 

Also, now that I think about it (being more awake helps), voxel is already its own issue. In short: too much hp (for too little weight). It doesn't stand out so badly if designs use thin-ish hulls and some degree of even vaguely artistic layout, but sooner or later someone brings a death-brick and you realize that even if you strip it clean of external elements, you cant actually kill it without bringing a similarly sized cargo-block full of extra ammo. Buffing voxel would probably only make the issue worse. I wont say such designs should be against the rules if someone wants to spend the resources, but I cant advise doing anything that significantly incentivizes their use.

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I would prefer that they deepen ship building by adding additional concerns (power seems the most obvious), I think it is fine people can make a jack of all trades ship just so long as it can't stand up to something that was built to be a specialist.

I also think that whilst you can make a ship that 'does it all' it will always have to compromise in efficiency and on top of that crew capacity would need to be sensible if you wanted it to actually be PVP ready (it could have all the armaments out there but it won't put up much of a fight if there aren't any gunners).

 

Soo yeah you can have an L core running around in pvp space hauling whatever but if it is attacked it is going to have a harder time moving about and accelerating/slowing down compared to a ship that is specced just to destroy stuff, it will also require a ton of warp cells to get out of trouble compared to a pvp ship which sees it is out matched and notes out of it.

tldr I am a fan of giving players the capability to make the jack of all trades but they will never be as efficient as the master so players and orgs will need to decide between adaptable ships and specialised ships with obvious pros and cons to both.

And as I said they need to add more concerns to ship building.

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I hope power systems is implemented in a way that there are different paths to generating the power  (fuel burning, solar panels + batteries, fusion). Fuel burning would be tiered with Nitron T1, space fuel T2, and rocket fuel T3. Each require heat sinks to dissipate heat, which would have to be exterior to the construct (not like air brakes stacked inside, make them similar to adjustors). Solar power would require batteries the size of S/M/L containers and be better suited for quick power discharge (scanning, railgun) over slower fuel burning.  

 

Specialized cores would make better sense with power systems in place. Combat core would enhance weapons and radar, exploration would apply to scanners, hauler core would enhance lift and storage capacity power consumption. 

 

Wishful thinking would also have static core power systems be entirely different from what is placed on dynamic cores. Make them massive, require multiple elements that can change how the power plant operates based on what the player chooses to put down. Though that gets into a completely different topic of power systems. 

 

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Odds are static cores will have access to every kind of power-system, plus possibly some static-only things (geo-thermal/wind), but will have relatively low usage so that they can generate power to supply dynamic craft with the surplus charge. Specific/intended core function adding benefits and drawbacks to this system could be applied to statics and space along with the previously mentioned dynamics to get people to construct specialized buildings much the same way we were discussing specialized ship designs earlier in the thread.

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not a new idea ;)

 

Construct Management - The seat dance - Idea Box - Dual Universe (dualthegame.com)

 

 

I suggested this back in February and obviously would agree this would be a good idea. It's one of the examples of IMO good ideas that get ignored by NQ and I can see that happen again. There will not be any engagement with is and the thread will move down the list and out of sight..

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