Alpha393

Yeah exodus could use some work. Perhaps in the form of an option to help repair the larger wreckages, turning what's left of the arkships into a formidable armada who would turn up near the middle later on, and in the core after you open the breach? Or if you repair their ships they gift you one of the smaller ark-ships, with some additional armor and guns thrown on and fully crewed with professionals? Just a thought.

+3 +1 realism +1 design options for days +1 color changes

Before we make engines everywhere a necessity can we make the darn things turn off when they aren't burning? I wouldn't mind being able to control a ship entirely through thrusters tbh.

Well that's sort of what the powered radiators are intended to be, just in a static variant. Wouldn't mind an extendable variant, but not particularly necessary . Now then, as for fleet types: Xsotan dread fleet: Consists of: 1-3 mobile fortresses/dreadnoughts (potentially exceptionally weak for their size depending on distance from core), 0-10 cruisers and/or frigates, and 0-40 corvettes, all rather weak compared to the area's normal xsotan. Tactics: build up their numbers in an empty sector around the flagship(s), temporarily making it an hidden mass sector (or a unique sector type of possible), before attacking a nearby faction capital. Occasionally you can observe these fleets getting ambushed by faction defender fleets. Faction defender fleets: Consists of: 0-1 dreadnoughts, 2-5 cruisers, 5-10 corvettes and/or frigates. Very strong for their area most of the time. Tactics: will patrol sectors in a group, periodically moving between sectors of high interest (factories, shipyards, home, etc.) will intercept xsotan dread fleets immediately when they enter faction territory. Faction vanguard fleets: Consists of: 4-10 battleships, 4-10 cruisers, 0-10 misc corvettes and/or frigates, and 2-6 various support craft such as arks, carriers, at least one salvager, at least one mobile shipyard (a new craft type that exists to carry a shite ton of repair beams and build and crew new vessels made from salvaged minerals) Tactics: expand faction territory by expanding into other factions and empty space, claiming territory for their faction and clearing them of pirates, xsotan, and locals, before leaving an occupation force and moving on until they're wiped out or run low on supplies.

Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Radiator: +50% heat dissipation to normal components. Works off of surface area Must be exposed to function -25% to heat damage taken How's that look?

Great that just makes me want thermodynamics more. Ehh, we can do without, can't we? Also I'd just like to throw out there that lasers would be stupidly ineffective/inefficient when dealing with a craft that is for all intents and purposes a spaceborne continent bristling with guns and redundant systems, and a literal mountain of armor plating and energy shield projectors. Who cares if it's in a vacuum and has longer range and blah blah. At the end of the day, it's still going to take more energy than throwing potshots at them with a conventional weapon, or doing something similar to an Archimedes death ray (made viable by modern mirrors and not really having as much of a weight or airflow handicap in space) And of course mirrors to deflect lasers and death rays. Because why not, it can't be too dirty to reflect a laser if there's no dirt. /joke I like giant impractical laser arrays as much as the next guy, but at the end of the day there will almost always be a better alternative. Exceptions for the outright better alternative rule include: glassing beams, energy transfer, anti-missile point defense.

I actually agree with it being a bit too complex, but at the same time the proposed solution feels a bit too simple. Perhaps if several pieces of < say 10 km^3 volume each in contact with eachother get grouped into one 'piece' for heat flow, with all their stats added up? Plus, so long as your ship isn't a cube or a Tetris block of doom your surface area would ideally be enough to handle excess heat anyways.

Thermodynamics: most functional parts produce heat, the biggest sources being warp drives, engines, weapons, shield generators, etc. too much heat in one area, and your ship will start taking damage. When placing any piece, something similar to the hangar bay clearance and the thruster ports appears on every side and the length of these areas scale with part volume, with a hard minimum length of 3 voxels. These fields allow a component to dissipate heat if a side is fully exposed, additional exposure increases the dissipation rate accordingly. Heat dissipation scales with surface area. Heat will attempt to reach equilibrium across the craft, and will constantly dissipate into space through all exposed surfaces. Plasma applies a large amount of heat to anything it hits. Thermal vent: dissipates heat at twice the normal rate, but consumes extra energy to do so and is very fragile. will not be protected by energy shields. Heat sink: draws in heat, and has a higher thermal damage threshold, but cannot be protected by energy shields and will vent its heat back into the craft if destroyed. Heat will leak back out if it's buried in the hull.

Can we also get a means of repairing an individual block to full health? +1

What about making only larger fighters and eventually small corvettes take pilots, while the rest are 'unmanned' and still require a pilot to work, but said pilot is safe at a computer terminal staring in disbelief at the game over screen rather than you know, screaming and burning and freezing and disintegrating all at once.

I'd rather a 'remote control' function be added, with a slight delay to movements, orders, etc. because raiding a base while the fleet is out takes some level of basic strategy. Would suck if the second you touch their station their currently docile captainless dreadnought roars to life and guts your hull in one shot.

Captain, not commander, allows you to give orders. We have hangars for fighters, bombers, and interceptors, and I have an idea for a means of carrying fighters en masse, corvettes, or even frigates if you have the horsepower and surface area, which will be posted sooner or later.

Yes but at the same time you have to factor in how undeniably, utterly, stupid some people can be sometimes, myself included. Odds are people will ignore the stickied thread and go on whining about not being heard by the devs on steam.

A lot less tech goes into a giant inert wall outlet and a door than goes into energy shields, field hardeners, etc. so I'd say make docking ports univer- oh wait we already have those. Enabled for ships please?

Unfortunately true for a substantial portion of both communities. :-\ perhaps the solution could be to add torsional forces which get exponentially stronger with size and mass, eventually leading to you flinging yourself apart if you try to do a 180 in half a second - despite weighing more than a small moon - in a blatant attempt to ignore physics.

I think we're all missing the obvious answer in the form of depth charges. A little ship could duck and weave between them for the most part. A big ship will get shredded by glorious shield-ignoring armor-tearing murder balloons if they're dumb/slow enough to barrel into a minefield.

I don't know whether to applaud you for your audacity or artistic genius. 9/10 a bit too pink.

Ah, fair enough. Although at least we have inertial dampeners and gyros which can be buried in the hull to maintain appearance so it could happen, it wouldn't really change much except ships that have no business strafing in the first place can no longer strafe. But yes you do make a fair point.

Alternatively, make them not work when covered, and give them a solid 400% strength buff.

Hmm. How to break stupidly thick armored cubes? Perhaps make railguns pass through one layer of blocks after armor before stopping? Make plasma and chaingunw apply a stacking weakening effect to increase incoming damage to the block they hit for a few seconds? (The logic being that the plasma would melt it a bit and the chain would puncture and/or dent it, either way structural integrity is diminished.) Thrusters and engines dealing damage to anything in their way. RIP everyone's designs for a bit, before they all melt. Alternatively: Disable thrusters and engines in any covered directions. RIP everyone's designs. A bit on the crazy side, but: make shields scale off of exposed surface area (like how hangar bays work but covered shields don't add capacity at all) or add a shield variant that works this way and is stronger across the board by mass, health, and cost. In general, make things require exposure to work. Solar panels, thrusters, engines, heat sinks if that becomes a thing, possibly shield generators? I'm just spitballing here.

I can answer that. It's not using bullets and that's not its real physical damage. It's a water balloon filled with the blood of your slain enemies, to demoralize your opponents in mere moments upon its use, causing them to tear their own ship apart from within out of shock and terror at what you've done. Will throw a picture of a pretty neat early-game drop I found in here later.

How in the heck did I miss that? At least this thread is focused somewhat on entirely new stuff and not entirely on improvements like yours. Crisis narrowly averted!

If they aren't immediately hostile to you, go to their sector and wait for xsotan and pirates, then side with the pirates.

Feel free to add to this list with your own ideas, give feedback on others, and/or build off the backs of others to create the ultimate comprehensive sector/event idea list! Or just, you know, just a really cool comprehensive sector/event idea list. :D Blackout sector: I already brought this idea up, but it will be included for the sake of convenience. Rich in resources, the occasional super-asteroid or small planetoids, very dark, rarely civilized due to distance from habitable worlds, aside from the odd research center. Whirlwind sectors: accretion disk clouds dense and fast enough to form hurricane force winds. Will cut into your shields, push you and everything around, and obscure vision but otherwise leaves you unharmed. Fairly rare, always shows up as a hidden mass sector directly adjacent to a maelstrom sector, although maelstrom sectors can occur without whirlwind sectors. Maelstrom sector: shows up as an anomaly sector, fairly rare, more common towards the outer rim unknown regions extragalactic void. Yeah let's go with that. How do I begin to describe the chaos that these sectors are? A black hole is off to one side, surrounded by its accretion disk. And the sector itself is constantly ravaged by anywhere from one to a dozen streams of superheated matter falling into the black hole, consisting of a giant laser type effect and any actual objects that spawn at the far end of the beam or touch it. Imagine a force gun the size of a planet, that can pierce targets to drag more stuff down at once. Yeah that sounds about right. Devoid of any debris or civilization, but if you stick around long enough the gravity well will pull something good to you from out of the sector. Quarantine sectors, and a neat little event: for when boarding is implemented. Consists of a 'civilized' sector but devoid of any ships, and containing lots of wreckage, some of which is still intact but abandoned. You go to interact with it, and you just hear a warning being broadcasted over and over to get away. You, being an opportunistic scavenger, happily disregard the information. You go closer. Suddenly a dreadnought belonging to the sector's old faction warps in and warns you to retreat or be obliterated along with the abandoned ship, as it contains a deadly pathogen which must not be allowed to spread. If you back off, you get a free fireworks display. If you don't, the dreadnought will either turn hostile or flee depending on your ship's relative strength. As soon as you dock with the ship, 'boarders' flood in one by one until you get out of range or are overtaken. Outside of the event, quarantine sectors would be rich in resources and littered with filled cargo pods and abandoned wrecks, although you'd need to clear them with boarders/security. Nebula sectors: technically they sort of exist in the game but these ones are different. Always have dense clouds of a reddish brown color, and more common toward the center of the map, these sectors tend to hold vast deposits of resources. Very rarely may contain a wrecked or abandoned dreadnought class ship. I don't mean a larger than normal wreck, I mean a giant monstrosity cut in half filling a solid 2% of the sector end to end kind of thing. Utopia or glitterworld sectors: pretty self explanatory. Often the capitals of factions, these places tend to have absolutely massive stations that will likely dwarf anything a player could reasonably build, are patrolled by a large fleet, and probably filled with broken xsotan. I will likely add to this list in the future. Thoughts?

Give beta branch a try if more time doesn't help.