I guess I don't see the problem with this system? If they completely removed the speed limit you would have the same effect of ships with greater acceleration being able to catch slower ships, but if you need to have a speed limit for technical reasons this achieves the same effect. Anyways, back to CPU discussion...
It is somewhat related to CPU, don't you think ? Anything related to number of devices having an effect on performance is tied to CPU. More thrusters to get higher acceleration = higher CPU cost, meaning a "trade-off" is needed somewhere (at least that was the original intent). But forcing different max speed caps to allow some ships to catch up with others... why ? Please elaborate on this, as it seems to be central to your proposal, and I don't see the "need" behind this. Edit : just for clarity, I agree for different "speed caps" on planets because logically the ship's drag comes into effect. But in space, no such thing.
Just because there's a technical max speed doesn't mean we need to also impose an acceleration-based max speed. The fundamental problem is that unspecialized ships have too much acceleration. There's not much of a difference between 50 m/s^2 and 100 m/s^2 when the technical max speed is 200 m/s. But there's a big difference between 5 m/s^2 and 10 m/s^2. Lower average accelerations by a factor of 10 and ships will take considerably longer to reach the max speed, allowing them to be caught by faster-accelerating interceptors. I'll point out that the distance traveled before max speed is reached is actually quite important to this issue. At 50 m/s^2, a ship travels 400 m in 4 seconds before reaching 200 m/s (from a dead stop); at 100 m/s^2, it travels 600 m in 4 seconds. At 5 m/s^2, a ship travels 4 km in 40 seconds; at 10 m/s^2, it travels 6 km. So, clearly, it's much easier to catch ships in the second case (the 10 m/s^2 ship will catch the 5 m/s^2 as long as it starts within 2 km of it). Also, as more or bigger thrusters would be needed in the case that thruster output was decreased, it would still have a similar impact on CPU (large thruster arrays = large CPU consumption, probably at the expense of something else).
I see allowing ships to catch up to others as another form of specialization, allowing for specialized pursuit ships with a lot of engine mass to have a nice role in pursuing escaping targets. Otherwise once a ship is up to speed, regardless of what it is it becomes uncatchable, even if it's a giant laden freighter. It also allows for small, fast exploration ships that can more quickly traverse a solar system. Logically there should be no speed cap in space, and in that situation it's all about acceleration and a ship with superior acceleration (and sufficient fuel) will be able to catch up to a slower ship if both are thrusting continuously. Given the technical limitations of the game, this is simply not possible to implement and we need a speed cap. By making it somewhat flexible and dependent on acceleration you can simulate this effect of faster ships eventually being able to catch up to slower ones. Thematically it's also appropriate, as there's quite a few instances in scifi of faster ships pursuing and catching up to slower ones. As a side note, making a ship fast does NOT automatically make it maneuverable. You'll need to devote mass to RCS/maneuvering thrusters for maneuverability.
I'm not particularly talking about the current game balance (it's pretty bad across all the game systems), but rather the logic that I see in having different speed caps dependent on vehicle acceleration. To make any of this work well all these values would need to be heavily playtested and tweaked.
And I'm saying that having different speed caps isn't necessary to achieve the type of gameplay (high-acceleration ships catching slow-acceleration ships) that you're talking about. Yes, the precise values (whether thrust output should be reduced a factor of 5, 10, 20, etc) will naturally require playtesting to determine. The issue here is whether an additional mechanic to constrain max speed is needed to mitigate the effects of the technical max speed, and my argument is no (as shown by the little example in my previous post).
@gamer1000k : see my question in this light instead. If "catching up with ships" is so important (and I imagine "escaping" is equally important) what will an additional set of arbitrary rules solve ? For example, why would players build anything that can't reach max speeds knowing some other ships will "catch up" with them if they do so ? If we leave the "dumb player makes dumb decisions" aside, why would anyone want to design an unefficient ship ?
So it can't be used against you again later? Because it's carrying some sweet loot you want? Same logic as in any armed confrontation. As a side note, having warp disruptors (like the SW interdictor cruisers) could also be handy to prevent ships from warping out during combat.
I'm trying to think of how to make these rules feel as NOT arbitrary as possible within the technical confines of the game engine. If a speed cap is a necessity, making it vary a bit depending on how much you specialized in engines feels less arbitrary (i.e. players have some agency in it) than having a "slow" freighter become totally uncatchable once it hits the speed cap. In terms of efficient ship design (for PVP I assume), then it becomes a tradeoff of how much weapon/armor mass will your opponents need to sacrifice to be able to catch you? If this is a soft cap (what I'm suggesting), then there's a lot more wiggle room to find the sweet spot between fast enough with enough firepower to blow away anybody who happens to be faster and had to sacrifice guns/armor to gain that extra speed.
Well, no. The "arbitrary" here would be not allowing a vessel to evade, despites being heavier, but given enough time, because it has an artificial speed cap which would be lower than a pursuing ship's top speed. This brings in the "dumb player makes a dumb decision" : why would anyone build a slow-mo freighter and fly it into hostile space ? If we're talking about AI ships, then why impose a limit on every player while the AI can simply be forced to be "dumb" if needed ? What do you think of the acceleration caps given by @geostar1024 up here in order to get to similar results to the ones you seek, without implying that "dumb players make dumb decisions" ? As for PvP, the "balance" needs will naturally force everyone towards the "optimal builds", so it's back to square one, unless there is a way to force players to use badly designed ships.
thing to keep in mind here is that there is a minimum acceptable rate of acceleration: escape velocity. 13 m/s^2 is about the slowest a ship can change its velocity while still being playable.
Only for ships intended for planetary operations. With the recent improvements to the docking system, there's no reason that every ship needs to be capable of landing on a planet.
every new player's first ship needs to reach escape velocity. The harder it is to achieve that (whether through resource, mechanics, or arbitrary limits set by CPU), the more likely the game will alienate new customers. You can talk about PVP all day, but if you're going to recommend something that hurts new players for the sake of balancing a hypothetical scenario that most of them will never encounter in the entire time they play the game, then you're just making bad decisions, both for business & game design.
No but seriously : there is an "escape velocity" in game? You mean that lower values will prevent players from leaving a planet's atmosphere ? I think I never built anything below 50 ms/2 so I never noticed...
Not flying a slow freighter into hostile space in my mind is something that would be a smart decision. Freighters should be vessels that operate in safe areas, or with escorts. If you're in a hostile space, than your ship need to either be fast or have enough firepower. I don't see this as a limit. I see this as a speed bonus for ships that dedicated more mass to engines. Those acceleration caps could potentially work if the speed cap were significantly higher than it is now such that very few ships would actually hit the limit in normal gameplay unless a player was actively trying to go as fast as possible. However, given the current low speed cap the acceleration values would have to be nerfed so much that it would be more immersion breaking than the variable speed cap IMHO.
In order to leave a 1g planet, you need to make a ship capable of accelerating faster than 10 m/s^2 in some vector. It's not something most players would think about, since pretty much every ship performs better than that limit. With the current game mechanics, you're more likely to experience this issue on the 4g lava planet. Any ship that can't lift off faster than 40 m/s^2 will begin sinking. Even ships in the 40-50 m/s^2 range will have difficulty maintaining altitude while maneuvering to any extent. As the game is currently set up, this isn't really an issue, but when people start talking about making acceleration rates like 5 m/s^2 the new "standard", then you're going to start running into problems.
I think lower acceleration values would do the trick, given the relatively small size of ships and low range of weapons. If CVs could measure up to many km in length it could be different, with turrets being far apart. But trying to solve a "problem" by adjusting only 1 of its 5 or 10 parameters has a low chance to get satisfying results. @casta_03 : I don't think @geostar1024 was proposing the lower acceleration example as any kind of "standard", and surely not for small & agile ships, but as a way to prevent a cargo freighter (given in previous posts as example) from accelerating too fast and reach top speed quickly, making a pursuer unable to catch up with it. And of course we're still talking about "speed in space", but I just wanted to know about "escape velocity"...
A player's first ship will be extremely basic. It will likely be unarmed and unarmored, and have little cargo space. A few directional thrusters will be able to do the job.
I'm just gonna call it out: this entire branch of this discussion is absurd. You're all talking about changing core mechanics of the game that will throw off the learning curve for every new player & piss off a large chunk of the current player base (because lowering ship performance across the board like that will piss them off, whether or not the nerf was justified) all for the sake of rebalancing a single PVP scenario that the majority of players will never even encounter. Even then, the whole point of this theoretical balancing comes down to making it easier to chase down cargo transports, or, to put it in blunt terms, to make it easier to grief people. I can't believe I'm even taking part in this facet of the discussion because it doesn't pass the smell test. If the devs would even consider what players are proposing here, it means I've put way too much faith in them.
