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PLANNED HONEYCOMB CHANGES - Discussion thread


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So it looks like Lithium, which is currently the lightest material  (5.3kg/m3) and ship builders use it for speed centered crafts is increasing the weight by almost 5x (25kg/m3) which puts it on even grounds with Carbon. Historically Lithium has been almost 1/5 the weight of Carbon, so it does not make sense to now make them equal. Even the new lightest materials will be increasing by almost twice this current value (10kg/m3). Plastic is also increasing by 42%, which is very commonly used in PvE ships for voxel.  This of course combined with the recent adjustor and max speed calculations means that ships that have no foot in PvP at all are going to be negatively effected by this change. This will be most noticeable on XS and S ships.

 

My suggestion would be to keep Lithium where it is as the lightest material, and also move plastic to "building material" category and make their resistances and HP to match. This will preserve its use in PvE ship design without causing it to be overpowered comparatively in PvP use. Otherwise ships looking to save weight will be reduced to being made out of wood, which I'm sure we can all agree isn't how a spacecraft should look.

 

 

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3 minutes ago, Shiromar said:

So it looks like Lithium, which is currently the lightest material  (5.3kg/m3) and ship builders use it for speed centered crafts is increasing the weight by almost 5x (25kg/m3) which puts it on even grounds with Carbon. Historically Lithium has been almost 1/5 the weight of Carbon, so it does not make sense to now make them equal. Even the new lightest materials will be increasing by almost twice this current value (10kg/m3). Plastic is also increasing by 42%, which is very commonly used in PvE ships for voxel.  This of course combined with the recent adjustor and max speed calculations means that ships that have no foot in PvP at all are going to be negatively effected by this change. This will be most noticeable on XS and S ships.

 

My suggestion would be to keep Lithium where it is as the lightest material, and also move plastic to "building material" category and make their resistances and HP to match. This will preserve its use in PvE ship design without causing it to be overpowered comparatively in PvP use. Otherwise ships looking to save weight will be reduced to being made out of wood, which I'm sure we can all agree isn't how a spacecraft should look.

 

 

 

+1 to make plastic as well as wood / concrete / fiber etc.
 

Edited by Kanamechan
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7 minutes ago, Kanamechan said:

To be sure people will not use concrete / wood / fiber in ship pvp or pve, make them with old mass, 0 hp and 0 resist

 

I would prefer that those make sense too. So we can already prep a bit for future Territory warfare. They can also just limit the use of these mats on statics to rule it out completely :)

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this seems really awesome! just as an idea though: what if the lumi glass had a higher weight, so that people could still use it for accenting as much as they'd like, but would be deterred from overusing it (ie, huge cube ship of glass), incentivizing people to find alternate, more proper ways of lighting large surface areas? i think that'd be pretty cool, because with that in mind glass would still be used quite freely as accenting, but wouldn't ruin the darker sci fi feel of the game as much. would probably work best if it were in conjunction with adding mass tiers for building materials as well, which i see some suggesting.

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Just now, Pcfreak9 said:

 

I would prefer that those make sense too. So we can already prep a bit for future Territory warfare. They can also just limit the use of these mats on statics to rule it out completely :)

maybe in the futur they can make a special resist for news weapons for territory warfare. But i understand your argument

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Eventhough I don't really do any pvp this seems like a really good and interesting change.

A small thing that springs to mind here is material choice for estetics. If I want to make a ship for a specific goal I need to make a choice on the material I want to use. But that material may not have good looking textures or textures that go well together. I may need to use a different material for that but that would change the ships properties. Has this been adressed or are there any plans to detach the textures from the materials?

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Please pay attention to real physics.
Concrete is not light.

Plaster should be a thing to replace the cosmetic need for light concrete but, plaster isn't concrete.

Iron is heavy

Steel is lighter then Iron but actually stronger, so having HP tied directly to mass is a bad idea.  Rare ore based materials, expensive matierials etc should be able to be ligher and stronger. If I build a ship out of carbon nanotubes and titanium it should be a better ship then out of iron and wood and concrete

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2 hours ago, Cobqlt said:

....The voxels must have minimal impact on the cross section to allow their use and see real designed PVP ships. Currently voxels/CCS ship = borg cube, or close to...

 I guess that's why you can have those "Very Heavy" Materials. If I understand correctly they will have a Huge concentration of HP in a very small volume

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Is it me or is this moving to slower ships and more element only ships again?  Nothing affecting cross-section builds.  mmm.

 

I do miss the old hulking ships with actual designs and not this speed fest because we have to when outnumbered :).

 

Remember any changes in weight etc will also make slowboating slower!  Slowboating is the most boring thing in DU

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1 hour ago, W1zard said:

With linear honeycomb HP based on mass what's the reason to use lighter materials?

Yes, we absolutely need a range of hp:mass for different material types or light materials will be inferior based on having poor hp:volume values. Not to mention the fact that these mass changes are breaking existing lightweight designs. I really don't want to have to make my light low-ccs pvp ships out of wood and concrete...

Example values:
very light = 90 hp:kg (best hp:mass but worst hp:volume)

light = 60 hp:kg
heavy = 45 hp:kg

very heavy = 30 hp:kg (worst hp:mass but best hp:volume)

Edited by TobiwanKenobi
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Quick feedback

 

1). Very good direction of the changes from the PvPer point of view

2). Not so good direction from the realism perspective (Ultra lighr concrete is a good example here)

3). As to the balance in the table: I think that effective Hp of the honeycomb (after calculating resistances) could be about 30 - 50% bigger than in the table to be worth using

4). If I understand correctly then the big 240% difference in evective HP between the cheapest and the most expensive materials is to reduce the adventage of giant ships with kilotones of honeycomb (if so, than I think that it may actually work).

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Zychov
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First off, I can appreciate the reasoning behind these changes, in terms of what it brings to PvP. However...

 

While PvP is a major pillar of the game, it is not the only pillar. Some people just want to build things that look nice, and their motivations are based purely on the textures of the honeycomb, not the HP value. 

 

I have suggested several times in the past and I still believe that a good addition to the game would be armor specific material. This is more realistic and more practical to meet the needs of all players. Armor is not made to look attractive, it is made to be functional.

 

The various polished, galvanized, etc forms of HC have these looks so we have a variety of colors and textures to build with. Many non-PvP ships are going to be heavier as a result of this change. We can learn to live with that, like we have with so many other changes. I question why we should need to live with that when there is an alternative that treats two entirely different things in different ways?

 

 

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Change Lithium to 4KG, 180 HP.  It keeps its same place on the board regarding defensiveness. But allows a non tanky light weight design allot of people have used. 

 

Change Plastic to 10kg 725HP, 5% resistances. It keeps its same position on the board regarding defensiveness. But allows creative designs. 

 

Swap stats for Aluminium and Carbon. Makes more sense that aluminium is the lighter of the two as more people use aluminium ships. This is more of QOL change and will have little effect on other aspects of the game.

 

Change concrete, Brick, and marble to 4500HP and 150KG. This makes these materials better suited for building on static cores. And with that weight, pretty much not for dynamic cores. 

 

Change sodium to 20kg, 900HP. same reasons as Lithium. 

 

 

Edited by RugesV
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So now BPs of ships that currently fly will be useless.

 

also, Physics!

since when has concrete been a light material?

Have you ever tried to pick up concrete?

 

*shrug

NQ will mess with this game until we all leave.

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27 minutes ago, RugesV said:

If your going to change them I would go more along the lines of something like this:

image.thumb.png.011c82ae2cefbe1e4144c04a0757c0f8.png

 

FYI, the numbers in your sheets have been completely wrong. I would suggest fixing your old sheets before suggesting improvements.

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the new maths on honeycomb seem to go in the good direction

but there is actually (same with new honeycomb value) no interest to build pvp ship with honeycomb on it
i'ts more mass and no enough tankyness
damage of weapon is clearly to high
cross section destroy all possibility for design
only small ship with the less C.Section could win fight as it enhance shield hp trought hit chance

if your enemy has 25% hit chance or less and you have L shield then you have equivalent to 80 000 000 hp
to get 80 000 000 hp-ccs with voxel (actually) you need about 65k iron honeycomb


sorry wrong numbers here shield have 10M base so it would have 40M effective hp with 25% hit chance

with same amout of gunner and actual cross section
compact miniborgcube without (or just a litlle bit of) alwais win vs heavy armored ship

this imply the same logic with designed ship

 

Edited by ch3w8a
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Honeycomb_Values.csvHere is a csv of the table provided in NQ's main post if anyone is interested in taking a closer look at the numbers.

I have included my findings below along with some personal feedback. Hopefully you find it helpful.

 

Resistance Feedback

image.png.c0ea0f6e1a6e9e3a42e4193da86064c1.png

 

The proposed progression curve is quite interesting. Looks like products on average are 15% more resistive than their pure counterparts with a little bit of diminishing returns at the exotic level. I think this might be a bit too much as the difficulty of obtaining higher tier materials is substantially higher than merging two different types of the same tier. Consider reducing the offset on products to make them equal or less effective than the next tier of pure. Also the variance across resistance types is constant  throughout the tiers (~9%) with products having only slightly less spread than pures (~8%) . Consider further reducing this and establishing that manufactured materials have more uniform resistances. The idea behind this change is to give manufactured materials slightly more consistency in light of the fact there are fewer options to choose from in a given tier. As to the overall extent, I think the extreme ends (10% and 75% average resistance) are right where they should be. If however, you are considering implementing other features that will influence these values (ie: talents, elements, etc) then you might want to reduce said range to reserve some working space and avoid needing to revisit these changes later on. 

 

Hitpoints/Mass Feedback

 

Obviously these factors are not associated with progression so the objective is just to find a a good setpoint for the hitpoint/mass ratio, the average material mass and an acceptable amount of variance between material types within a given class. The currently proposed figures are as follows:

  • 45 hitpoints/kg/L
  • Pure material average of 2790 hitpoints (62 kg/L) with variance of 1440 hitpoints (32.5 kg/L)
  • Product material average of 2129 hitpoints (47.3 kg/L) with variance of  608 hitpoints (13.5 kg/L)
  • Building materials are all identical with 450 hitpoints (10 kg/L)

I fully agree that building materials should have minimal hitpoints (and mass) along with little to no variance. Ideally this will encourage players to use said materials in non-pvp/non-critical applications without needing to worry too much about optimization. Products and pures have approximately equal average but products are a bit more consistent. I think this is perfectly fine and the current setpoint of around 2500 hitpoints (55 kg/L) seems reasonable. The only potential problem is the hitpoints/mass ratio. This is actually a very important number because mass affects speed which can also contribute to effective hitpoints when you take into consideration tracking limitations on weapon elements. Unfortunately I have no idea what a good setpoint would be as it really depends on what kind of dynamic you are aiming for with regards to small/fast vs large/slow.

Edited by Msoul
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I really like the low-mass options for building material products, brick, concrete, wood, carbon fiber, marble, and luminescent glass.  They give me a wider variety of colors and textures for lightweight PvE ships.

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3 hours ago, Nayropux said:

 

There is no reason to remove cross section. In encourages engineering tradeoffs. Keep in mind that hit chance scales with the square root of the cross section, but CCS/HP scales with the volume of the ship. That means as you scale up, you gain more EHP in ccs/hp than you lose from increased hit chance.

 

Changing the lock ranges would not be good for the game as it removes options like upsized radars, and makes smaller ships essentially unkillable.


Cross section is really hard to scale with shield/voxels and co, if you put the lockrange/coresize and you delete or reduce really hard the strengh of cross section then you will see a lot of different ship, with smaller ship who can do a // battle in the same fight without being focused and OS by staying in range of L core, you can equip your L core with smaller weapons for a better DPS on them (if they turn around you for example) with some missile or else. You can let a small cross section but not 1% hitchance with L weapons.

The early beta meta was XS borg cube and some bigger ship but smaller ship are really OP because they can equip larger weapons, without this, it's really fine imo.

NQ will just need to put the energy for dodge any L core borg cube and try to push the game in the direction of what they promote all time: a nice building game, even in PVP.

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4 hours ago, Frank2 said:

I really like the low-mass options for building material products, brick, concrete, wood, carbon fiber, marble, and luminescent glass.  They give me a wider variety of colors and textures for lightweight PvE ships.

We'll all be flying wooden ducks yeah.  :D

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