Xira

Then you haven't solved the cube meta, you've just turned it into a stick meta, or a cross meta, or a sphere meta. They all look ugly and will drive artistic players away. All the 'watch this awesome ship battle between 50 players!' youtube videos will be of sticks trying to get hits on each other and missing a lot. That's not something people are going to be enthusiastic about and then want to buy your game. The best way to make pretty ships viable is to make shape not matter. Then people can fly whatever they want, and they'll tend to fly pretty things, even if they only downloaded it from the workshop. Mind you, sticks will still have a small advantage. Missed shots don't count toward IF-hull damage. But since everyone is likely to use hit-scan weapons *anyway* it won't matter that much.

This is a very good idea. Reverting the change will allow 'cool' looking ships to operate on equal footing to boring borg box ships. I think the general gameplay forum has a better discussion on it. The gist is that ships with odd curves, warp nacelles, or whatever else you think looks 'cool' are going to have greater surface area that needs to be armored while some of the armor provides less effective protection than that on a borg cube because it's less likely, but not unlikely, to be hit. Building weaker armor in those spots would leave the ship with 'weak spots' and those are easily exploited by real players. It would also require more IFGs to cover the greater area. People will build and use 'awesome looking' ships if you make shape not matter. So revert the IFG and make shape not matter.

Is there a reason to make non-cubic designs a good design (if not one of the better choices) that isn't an argumentum ad populum (an argument based upon using popular opinion as the basis)? A heating mechanic would certainly be interesting But at any rate, that'd be better served as a Suggestion thread. Again, is there anything wrong with people building cubes? If, as a thought experiment, you were to make it so that people got the best performance out of building ships that looked like what you envision as an ideal space ship, would you have the same problem with that as you appear to have with people making cubes? Because it's the exact same problem (there is a simple ideal design) with the exact same results (people make their ships to fit this ideal design). 1) The game is designed to sell copies of the game, to provide the author with a profit and an adoring fanbase. Thus argumentum ad popularum is perfectly valid because a more popular game sells more copies. 2) You're overthinking this. Humans like to build gardens, absent other constraints. When we build something other than a garden it's (usually) because other factors are more important, such as the wheels needing to touch the road and cost of materials. You are brainstorming methods by which non-block shapes could be mandated or incentivized, which is wholly unlessCary unless your objective is to punish people who aren't creative/are utilitarian. You don't have to overthink this. If you make shape not matter then people will build and use awasome looking ships. There will be some optimal 'ratio' or set of optimal solution 'ratio's but any ship that uses those ratios will be just as effective in any size. So if you want to make a block do it, if you want to make a spirally thing with a happy face you can do that too. So make shape not matter. Revert the integrity field change.

>But trying to make it so that there is a clear way that a small ship can be just as powerful as a large ship is one heck of a task. It's already halfway done. There's a non-linear ramp to the additional blocks you have to add to get an additional turret slot using ship upgrades. I'd suggest the mechanism be tuned to promote smaller ships having more firepower/block but the same hps/block. The aspect of this game that prevents that from being the balancing factor is the railgun. You *NEED* giant blocks of thick armor to prevent a railgun from destroying your ship quickly. I honestly think it's just a bug that railguns penetrate the way they do - full damage to X layers if no layer can absorb all the damage, always full damage to the ship HP if there are X layers under the penetration point. Also the dev has indicated he wants to make turrets physically larger if they are more powerful, which may require more surface area to place. That would also work against small ships having more DPS, unless it was a non-linear ramp.

ECM is a horrible idea. The primary rule of multiplayer, especially in MMORPGs, is that you *NEVER* take control away from a player. I played a game called Perpetuum that failed/fails because it's got effective ECM and as a result whoever has the most/first ECM mechs wins the fight. If guns are going to be inaccurate they need to be inaccurate all the time, otherwise, it's someone interfering with your control of your ship. Even warp jammers are only border-line acceptable, but only because they solve an enormous problem.

Because players will gravitate to the most powerful solution even in single-player PvE, and that solution should be 'gamey' and fun.Fighters should be better than doomcubes because that's more fun.

If the devs here are really going for "Minecraft + X3" a robust out-of-sector simulation is an absolute necessity, and soon.

Poppycock. Smaller ships need to be more powerful than one bigger ship (of the same total mass) to promote diversity in ship building. Otherwise you get doom cubes. Which isn't fun. Realistic for a space game, sure, everything will be doom cubes if we ever have a REAL war in space. But this is a game and a game is supposed to be fun.

This. So much this. I left Starmade because of the 'cube meta'. Big boring borg blocks blowing each other to bits. I spend 20 hours building a ship, it was even pretty compact, and so pretty. Blown out of space by a boring borg block half it's size. I agree with the OP's assessment of the integrity field generator. The most straight-forward way to allow pretty ships is to provide some way to turn them into bars of HP so their exposed surface area and under-exposed interiors that still need armor do not make them less effective. You can fiddle around with a lot of other things to alter the optimal ship shape but in the end it's still going to be ugly unless you make shape not matter. So, make shape not mater and revert the IF change.