Let's look at CVs for the example. The current thresholds are 200,000, 500,000, 1,500,000, and 10,000,0000. That means under the current regime (which will tighten in the future), the absolute maximum CPU and be able to move at all (or have turret fire and whatever else CPU limits) is 599,999, 1,499,999, 4,499,999 and 29,999,999. So if you have a small tier-4 ship at 2,000,000 CPU and lose a tier-4 extender and are relying on your tier-3 backup, you only suffer 25% penalty on acceleration, turning, and turret speed though I you are trying to rely on a tier-2 extender you can't move at all. If you have a large tier-4 clocking in a 5,000,000 CPU or more, it can't move or turret fire at all under tier-3. For what it is worth, the proposed tightening would reduce the maximal CPU values to 449,999, 1,134,999, 3,749,999, and 22,499,999 making the situation more dire for when you lose an extender. Lower tier extenders as backups will often just be wasted space/energy drains.
This scenario implies that attackers made a surgical hole in the ship and that all devices are still present when the T4 extender is destroyed. Does this sound like a realistic scenario ? Edit : same answer for @sillyrobot : unless a ship exposes its precious extenders (and why not the core while at it) how realistic is the scenario that a ship sustains battle long enough to still have all its CPU costly thrusters, shield and weapons up to the point the CPU/ core components are exposed ?
The idea of CPU backups was back with the first CPU limits, which were much lower when the distance between tiers was far smaller (iirc, it was 150k, 300k, 600k and 1.5m for CVs). But those values didn't fly with people... or at all.
They're answering your question. Destroying an extender isn't like destroying multiple devices at once; it's more like taking out the core but leaving a little for leftovers. As opposed to being pieces that make your ship function properly, the math means that extenders determine whether your ship functions at all. In essence, it means your core is 2x-9x as big as before & has that much extra surface area to guard & losing any part of it is the same as losing the entire thing (i.e. backup extenders do nothing) The reason this is important to the topic is because the way it was described in the initial FAQ posting, lower CPU tiers could act as "fallbacks". In practice, there's basically no way this hold true. The line about lower tiers acting as backup could only come from someone who had no idea what the final numbers would look like for CPU tiers & the penalties for going over the soft cap.
The problem isn't the thresholds so much as the slope of the line. Originally it was 0.1 or so and small extenders were valuable out to a huge overflow. Now it is 1 and the overflow is significantly reduced. The proposal shifts the slope up to 1.25 and makes lowers extenders have an even smaller region of value.
And they still have to test every setup they come up with with as many realistic scenarios as they can, I guess. There will always be "limit" situations where players underestimate the danger and get wrecked in a huge battleship, and then blame the game. But up to now @dpburke2 's explanation for hull CPU holds reasonable, no ?
Does it matter? We're talking a single extender being destroyed is like your core going only instead of a single block in your ship it is 9 blocks scattered in whatever pattern the designer picked that if any single one is destroyed you are dead in the water. Having backups is unlikely to help because they'd have to blow off half your ship for you to be allowed to move.
What you and Casta are implying is a purely theoric situation that is simply not probable, and if it happens then the design is to be blamed, not the CPU system. Of course if the "core" of a ship or its most valuable extender is shot, the ship is stranded. Are you saying this should never happen ? I don't think they will make "extenders" auto-targets for turrets, and if they do I doubt they will be targetable "by tier". Once again, knowing how large thrusters are with poor armor per surface unit, the mass impact they have and their CPU cost, vs the weapons mass and CPU cost and space they occupy on the shell of the ship, it's not reasonable to believe that a CPU T4 core would be exposed before some of the most costly devices are gone, lowering mass and CPU tax. You and Casta are just putting the whole, intact ship in the situation where the most precious device is destroyed before everything else. ANd in this perspective, it shows the dramatic difference between the CPU cost of the intact ship with against the loss of a core, to draw a simple picture. A 10 million CPU ship has to be built by an idiot to remain intact and loose its core or extenders when attacked, but no other devices.
OK let me try a different scenario. You are building a 6,000,000 CPU CV and trying to decide if adding tier-3 backup extenders is a good idea. Under what set of circumstance will they be useful? To be useful, all of the following conditions must be true: One or more Tier-4 extenders has been destroyed The CV is still capable of flight (has a cockpit, core, a generator, fuel and a thruster or you have spares you can add and don't have a spare tier-4 extender in your pack) The CV has to have lost at least 1,500,000 CPU from destruction (25% of the whole ship!) All the tier-3 extenders are still intact How often will that particular circumstance show up? Note that the energy drain will be constant for the life of the ship. For a tier-2 extender backup to be useful, the ship has to lose at least 4,500,000 CPU (75% of the ship) and still be operational.
mostly. Insofar as I'm willing to believe that explanation is correct at the conceptual level, yes. On paper, it doesn't hold up as well. I was going to list off a bunch of examples, but it really comes down to this: CPU costs for hull blocks really only limit three types of constructions: - tier 1 vessels - the upper limits of compensatingly large T4 vessels - bases (unless you're the type of person who ruins d&d night) For anything in between, hull costs are minimal compared to anything else - maybe 1-2% of the total CPU budget. It's just enough to be annoying to calculate, but no so much that it'll have any meaningful impact on vessel performance. I think the pvp explanation is probably correct, but my point is that the horse may have been meant to balance pvp, but the camel definitely does not.
That is the faulty reasoning that makes your other points moot. Having a simple proportion abstracted from device CPU costs can mean anything. If I make a ship with 75% of CPU into blocks or non-vital devices, it may even perform better losing 25% of them. If a ship is made mostly of thrusters, then losing them is dramatically lowering the CPU total of the ship, and also its mass, so the "penalty" will not necessarily make the ship unable to move. And if I go by your example, you are still avoiding to answer my point about having the extenders (top one, not backup) or even the core to be destroyed, while still having all or most of the other costly devices. You're also not answering to the question : should a ship never be crippled (under realistic scenarios) if its most sensible devices are hit? And this is just dragging further from what @dpburke2 mentioned. What do you think of his post ? Did you find a better explanation for hull CPU cost, for example ? @dpburke2 did not pretend the system was balanced or "ready to sell" either (and I surely don't). And obviously, the developers never intended to "sell it" under the "PvP exclusive" sticker either. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe they tried to hit too many birds with the same rock though.
Whether or not it is sensible to have a ship crippled is immaterial to me. That depends entirely on the genre the game is attempting to emulate. Nor does it matter in terms of determining whether or not adding lower tier backup extenders is a sensible choice. I would assume if an extender is taking damage, the ship as a whole has taken more. However the game suffers (suffered?) from damage leaking through external blocks and some splash damage types can (could?) affect devices immediately behind the hit. Backup extenders though require a specific set of circumstances to occur before they can be useful. Part of that scenario is large scale destruction of the ship that somehow leaves it operational. Losing at least 1,500,000 out of 6,000,000 of the CPU total is not just some armour and a thruster or two. Losing at least 4,500,000 out of 6,000,000 is of course insanely worse. What are the odds (a) the player isn't killed, the ship still has a core, cockpit, thrust, generator, fuel, and the T2 extender AFTER losing 75% of the ship? The scale of devastation required before the backup extender can even function is what makes me question the devs understanding. By claiming players can add the lower tier backups implies the devs think those backups should be useful. What a player should do is have extra extenders in personal storage in case one or more is destroyed so they can be replaced since they can't be placed ahead of time for <mumble mumble> reasons. My actual guess is the devs saw the system in a different game and copied it whole cloth expecting it to magically accomplish what they wanted it to do. In other words I blame laziness rather than nefarious motive.
Most likely explanation: the 225% hard cap was intended from the start. It made much more sense when each tier was exactly double the previous tier. In that case, a ship that lost an extender on its main tier could still limp along with backup extenders. With the changes to tiers, anything less than 275% or so might as well not exist, while a cap around 330% would be needed to accomplish what the original hard cap was initially intended to do. This assumes the ship comes to a complete stop at some point, since the destruction of a tier also negates auto-braking I think this is correct. The fact that the official explanation for CPU has undergone more changes than the system itself implies either a lack of understanding (meaning the system was reverse-engineered rather than built from the ground up) or that the explanation is less description & more an official talking point (which is what politicians do when trying to pass unpopular legislation- usually by making the corporate giveaway a discussion about "freedom")
Maybe. Even then the original article pointed out one could have all the extenders on a ship and T2 extenders are useless on an original T4 ship without massive destruction and most ships won't fly on just the core which was also called out. My actual guess is the original design called for a soft cap and the devs implemented a linear cap 'because it is easier to understand' or other such rationale without checking for consequence. But won't the new "space drag" system immediately stop the ship? The acceleration hits zero so the max velocity hits zero.
which in turn lends more credence to your copy-paste hypothesis. good point. "Space drag" isn't something I think about organically unless it's a discussion about Ruby Rhod.
Well that's a big part of our discussion here. You reacted when I wrote this: Well without extenders, CPU would be tied to the core as the only device managing CPU, so when the core is disabled the fight is over (and it's not targettable). With extenders players can still fight or try to escape, and for attackers disabling some CPU extenders is equal to destroying many devices at a time, so it may not be as bad thinking as it appears. Am I wrong ? Your reaction (and Vermillion's) was that a ship would be crippled if losing a T4 extender because of the CPU dramatic capability drop, to which I answered this scenario was improbable. It makes absolutely no sense to me that the game envisions "balanced combat for PvP" when players only encounter alien enemies in the game's "story". We drop on a planet in an escape pod and struggle to survive alone, but in this "other" segment of the game that is multiplayer ships have to be made to combat other humans with similar tech and limits. Connecting these two is hard in my mind. These are the actual values for CV thrusters: ThrusterMSRoundArmored = 13340 ThrusterMSDirectional = 5336 ThrusterMSRoundNormal2x2 = 133400 ThrusterMSRoundNormal3x3 = 800000 ThrusterMSRound3x3Blocks = 533600 That's what I found in the config file, don't ask me why there are 2 "ThrusterMSRound" measuring "3x3" with that big CPU difference... Losing 1,500,000 CPU can be just 2 of these thrusters, precisely, plus their mass. Players could also mitigate losses in many different manners during combat with the game's most powerful weapon (the Multitool!) and remove another or two thrusters to get to a desired limit to be able to continue combat of try to evade, especially now with the new flight mechanic that support 1-thruster builds. But we can discuss these scenarios infinitely, there are just too many variables and it's not leading somewhere conclusive. It's possible. All I was saying was that the reasons for CPU to be aimed mostly at PvP were sound in @dpburke2 's post, and a better reason to tax hull than what was generally proposed, the main argument being "it makes no sense, they just want to limit bug builds".
Hopefully you're not trying to evade but just limp home because losing 1,500,000 of your 6,000,000 and using T3 backup mean you're accelerating/turning at 1% of your normal rate. That's why I keep stressing at least. That's the point where the T3 becomes marginally functional. You need to lose another 1,500,000 to hit 50% effectiveness and that's 50% of your crippled state.
That's still a possible scenario, but there are thousands of other, more probable scenarios. There is also the very probable scenario that CPU values will change again and force retro-fitting of "limit" builds, there's also possible scenarios where players will not use back-ups and simply keep spares because they know the consequences of not having them, etc. Losing a core means a player can't add or remove blocks easily, and can get his ship seized at any point. Losing extenders gives them that extra chance that can make all the difference. One very probable scenario is that players may put T4 extenders in the middle of many CPU-expensive devices that NEED to be gone to expose the extenders. I trust player's intelligence to venture into PvP hell with more than an eggshell with a glowing core behind a glass.
I'm trying to parse this statement & failing. The presence of CPU extenders do nothing to protect the core from destruction. The core is equally vulnerable to destruction whether or not CPU is enabled. So extenders don't give an extra chance to salvage a fight- they give an extra way to lose it in the first place. CPU acts as a liability, not a buffer.
