I also think the game needs some kind of screen that can tell you what the affect of particular mass with various thrust. For example I was building an SV yesterday, that was somewhat large mass wise and it did not handle very well even though it was showing 30 thrust to the sides etc, a smaller ship easily turned and moved with similar side thrust that was a lot less mass, but there is no stat block or indication to help players balance things Just having a 2nd value on the ship diagram that shows how much thrust it gets after applying mass below the current thrust vectors would be of great help. Or something stating how much thrust is required to negate the mass so you could design two ships with different mass to have the same type of maneuverability by adjusting thrust to be the same after subtracting the thrust to negate mass number. I do agree they need to make the material cost of sv/hv vs CV/BA better reflect the size difference in the blocks and the raw material/component cost better reflect the final product mass and cost. It doesn't have to be exact or real world but right now it is way out of wack I still think the missing factor in much of the mass volume stuff is using planetary gravity. For example if Gravity is applied to the mass before adjusting the thrust then you give CV's an option of being space only ships if people want to make large ships and cargo haulers. This is why that type of ship is usually built in space in most sci-fi because with Zero G moving the large mass and heavy materials around is easy.
If you're referring to having the game project the performance of the ship under various loads of cargo, then I agree completely. It doesn't have to be real world, but it does have to be exact. Otherwise there ends up being a mismatch between the performance of two ships of the same absolute size, but made from different-sized blocks. If you make this sort of change to CV thrusters, you'll end up having to make it to SVs as well, as players will simply build larger SVs (which isn't good from a server performance standpoint). A division of thruster types into high-thrust atmospheric-only and low-thrust in all environments would be closer to accomplishing this.
@Hummel-o-War We have ultimately gotten a consensus going here that: Mass/Volume can be balanced! Thrust should be part of the balancing equation CV's should carry an amount relative to their SV counterparts instead of being artificially able to carry more BA/CV parts should be relative to their SV/HV counterparts in a ratio of 64:1, 32:1, or 16:1 (64:1 may not be acceptable for gameplay!) Block mass should be based on component mass minus efficiency gains (see next) Completed parts should have less mass than their requisite components What we need from Eleon is to now answer a few questions for us so we can give proper feedback: What is the size of on SU? Or: What building block is the closest representation of one SU? What is the intended gameplay role of a Capital Vessel in relation to a Small Vessel? How many BA/CV Steel Blocks should a player be capable of carrying? (This is a major balancing question that needs developer input) And what is are the planned or considered thruster changes? Answering these questions would give us a much more informed position to start considering balancing the mass/volume mechanic.
There is definitely not a consensus on this point, and I'd argue that implementing this principle would defeat the purpose of making mass and volume self-consistent in the first place (unless the intent is to model lossy construction, which is a different question, and could be addressed afterward anyway). If it's not 64:1, SVs will always be at a disadvantage to CVs when built with the same absolute dimensions (and there's quite an overlap there). So I'd say that anything but 64:1 may not be acceptable for balanced gameplay. Before the unit relabeling, volume was in units of liters. Also SV/HV cargo blocks occupy a volume of 125 L as they are 0.5 m on a side and store 125 SU of items (8000 for CV/BA cargo blocks). So there's really no doubt that 1 SU = 1 L. Honestly, I don't see why they bothered with the relabeling, given that mass and dimensions both stayed in SI units. A better question might be what kind of inventory loadout (including weapons, ammo, food, and medical supplies) the devs intend players to be capable of having. Hauling building materials in inventory is essentially not necessary with the advent of connected inventories and the logistics system, except in the early game (where I'd argue the proper fix would be to expand the capabilities of the logistics system rather than artificially allow players to carry around a bunch of materials).
While I can see why you would say that implementing less mass for completed parts would make things worse. I think we can all agree that refined ignots of metals should have less mass than the ore that goes in as the whole refining process is to remove impurities in ore and get a final pure bar. While I agree that in real world construction the final product usally has less than the part used to build it do to cutting shapes from steel plates etc, I can see it being easier to understand if it is purely the sum total of the parts so long as the ore to ignot step looses mass and volume. If they were to do anything more it would have to be a flat percentage or it would not be something that could be calculated easily Can you please explain where the 64:1 calculation comes from for SV to CV size. I know SV blocks are a lot smaller then CV blocks but it didnt seem like that much of a difference, pretty sure i could not fit 64 sv blocks in 1 cv block. For the inventory while i can agree that having someone carry blocks requires suspension of belief and you could put them in a cargo box that is not really any different can a SV cargo box really carry BA/CV blocks to build a base, they are bigger than the entire box for 1 in size. With that in mind I would balance player inventory for being able to carry tools weapons, ammo and food To help with the beginning of the game allow the bike to have a bit of cargo capacity and wifi for mining, or have build in wifi connection to the survival constructor. The truth is even to build a basic constructor and a bike you need to be able to carry several types of ores back to the survival constructor and if this required more than one trip for each type of ore, or even not being able to gather a bit of 2 types or ore before coming back I would probably quit playing before even really getting started.
[QUOTE="MrFubar, For the inventory while i can agree that having someone carry blocks requires suspension of belief and you could put them in a cargo box that is not really any different can a SV cargo box really carry BA/CV blocks to build a base, they are bigger than the entire box for 1 in size. With that in mind I would balance player inventory for being able to carry tools weapons, ammo and food To help with the beginning of the game allow the bike to have a bit of cargo capacity and wifi for mining, or have build in wifi connection to the survival constructor. The truth is even to build a basic constructor and a bike you need to be able to carry several types of ores back to the survival constructor and if this required more than one trip for each type of ore, or even not being able to gather a bit of 2 types or ore before coming back I would probably quit playing before even really getting started.[/QUOTE] "Suspension of belief," the military is working on suits that can dramatically increase the weight someone can lift, now. Your basically saying the far in future no one has perfect this. For a SI-FI game I don't think it's suspension of belief at all.
More of a volume than weight thing. Yes with an exoskeleton to suit a human could lift crazy amounts of weight, lifting one or two CV blocks on their own, but carying 5 or 10 or 100.... how exactly would they lift and support something of that volume. think about 10 blocks that is 20 meter high stack. Even made of foam try carying a stack of blocks that size it would be falling all over the place. Of course it wouldn't physically fit into a SV cargo box either. I suppose they could have some honey i shrunk the kids miniaturization tech that lets blocks unfold as you take them out, but if they do that then would it be the same mass while shrunken?
Well, with weight system enabled I don't "carry" anything big, especially blocks. I think even one combat steel block is too much weight carry. Oh and BTW, the next point of view is going to be about, how the ships in the game shouldn't be able to carry anything bigger than 5 toothpicks.
This comes from 4^3. CV blocks are 4 SV blocks wide and 4x4x4 = 64. Gameplay wise, this just doesn't work. Even realistically this does not work. First, we know that our basic steel block can't be steel all the way through, so we assume for this exercise that the block is hollow and likely just 6 steel plate facings. Given this, we can work out that BA/CV steel blocks must have near to 64 SV blocks worth of empty space inside. Secondly, we have already come to the logical conclusion that blocks are 'digitized' for storage in some manner and that this means massive efficiencies in storage based on how much material is in each block. So we are left with a conclusion now that BA/CV blocks that are not completely solid all the way through can not take up the same storage space as a 64:1 ratio would. 16:1 is likely the optimal gameplay ratio. Current values have production gain upto and over 100% of their material mass. So before anything, that likely needs fixed, either by fixing mass of completed construction or by requiring more materials. Hopefully a mixture of both. But as a gameplay mechanic, making completed things easier to carry that materials just makes sense. It pushes the uses of small constructors on SV/HVs, encourages every player to engage in some form of production, and eases construction of things like bases (especially for new characters/players/servers). 1L == 1SU just doesn't make sense. Currently, 1 SV steel block takes 2SU of storage, making an SU = 62.5L. But, how does that work with digitizing the blocks and materials? Are we talking star trek style replicators which used tanks of goop as raw material? In that case, then the material when stored is far more compact, which is exactly what is currently being assumed. And its a good assumption, one that fits in well with the behavior of the mechanics. Furthermore, we know that materials and blocks are being compressed and digitized because we have wireless connections! Seeing as Empyrion is a survival construction game, loadout is not important because the intention is clearly to have players hauling survival items such as wood, ore, meat, and plant fibers. That has always been part of the game and looking to loadouts is looking at solely the FPS portion of the game at the detriment of any other. A far better metric is asking how many BA Wood blocks should a player be able to hold. Knowing that players will be able to expand their inventories with the wireless inventory system, this question asks how players are intended to play in their early game when they don't have an expanded inventory to rely on. It speaks to how fast and how large early wood structures should be. If a player can carry only 50 wood BA blocks, then they likely won't be able to make a safe base in one go, which isn't a bad thing!
Conservation of mass says that yes, mass is preserved. And by using some arbitrary unit for storage and not for mass, developers have indeed preserved that concept. So volume wise, they use some arbitrary unit that denotes the size of an object when digitized. The mass remains the same and is thus our true limiter to ships carrying cargo. Its why I disagree with the current storage capacity difference between CV storage blocks and SV/HV storage blocks. Volume should not be the main limiter to ship capacity, that should fall to mass. Volume works well as the main limiter to decorative storage, like containers and devices. We simply shouldn't expect to be able to fit a whole base worth of blocks into a small half BA/CV block container. The bike having inventory and a wireless connector is a great idea except, the bike is too small! Instead, the bike should really be there to carry us when we are over mass. But, extending the wireless connection idea so we can expand our wireless network is a fantastic concept. We have the concept of armor in the game already. All that we need is a lower mass/volume inventory amount when wearing no armor at all. This then takes care of those incongruities. Just put light armor in the pod and significantly lower its durability so things are balanced and then make it so that light armor is fairly easy to repair.
The problem with 16:1, though, is that then 64 SV blocks are considerably more massive than 1 CV block, putting SVs at a severe disadvantage. Plus, it could make sense for CV blocks to have thicker plating and/or additional internal bracing as compared to an SV block. Alternatively, if blocks are actually some kind of aerogel-like foam, then they have a uniform volumetric density instead of being hollow boxes, and thus an SV block should have the same volumetric density as a CV block (and thus the ratio should be 64:1). Regardless of whether you think 1 SU=1 L makes sense, it is currently a fact (as indicated by current in-game values). If the devs want to change that, then they can, but I don't see any good reason to do so (it won't change the relative amount of stuff you can store in an SV container vs a CV container). As far as compression goes, there are two ways it can be handled: different compression ratios for every item, or one consistent compression method. The former would require a lot of manual labor and iteration (good luck balancing it, basically), so I feel like the latter is the way to go. For physics reasons, compression exceeding solid density doesn't make much sense to me, so my recommendation is that everything compresses to solid density when stored. Given the fluffiness of most items, even a player inventory of just 100 L would still let the player fit over half a ton of stuff (assuming their suit was sturdy enough to support such a load). Thus, I'd argue that the expanded volume of an item is entirely irrelevant; what matters is how much matter (with what density) there is in the item. I'd also point out that even if an item in inventory is simply held as a pattern to be reconstituted, the matter that forms that item still has to be stored somewhere. So, whether some kind of folding of items happens, or they're reduced to a pile of their constituent atoms, the matter in items still has to be stored, and I'd argue the minimum reasonable volume for that is the volume that the items' materials would require when at solid density.
Hi, not been posting much here, but would like to put my 2 cents in here. As i'm a real newb at the game, these are my thoughts on some matters that might come in handy in this discussion (which i find interesting). I would like to point out one fact that you're probably missing against 64:1 ratio. The supposed block is in it's almost entirety empty inside. Shouldn't we consider the area for each block? Even considering some supporting filling, it should be negligible or influencing the ratio in a smaller degree. Consider this: 1. We have an SV/HV block of 0.5x0.5x0.5 m. From this we surely have 0.125 m^3 of volume, but 1.5 m^2 of surface. 2. We have a CV/BA block of 2x2x2 m. From this we surely have 8 m^3 of volume, but 24 m^2 of surface. By comparison, the difference in volume is 64:1, but the difference in surface is 16:1. If we take into account any structural support inside the blocks, we could argue a few additional SV/HV blocks inside the CV/BA block. I would settle for 4 smaller ones inside the bigger ones to make the ratio up to 20:1. Some suggestions from my part: 1. Introduce a small transport vehicle that the player can build similarly as the bike. It would have a storage capable of transporting more materials than the player (considering the mass and volume increases and the player early on wouldn't be able to carry as much), but way less than an HV. Lower speed (perhaps), bigger carrying capacity, this would allow the player to gather the big amounts of resources for an HV or SV before building a Base or after. 2. Allow the drone to use materials from a specific, nearby cargo container, if not player inventory. Perhaps make a special Drone Stand that the player has to interface to activate the drone (i don't really know where it is hidden in all that armor) and is created for Bases and CVs only. Without the drone, the player uses only player inventory. This could allow building SVs and HVs as is (requires ligher materials) with player Inventory, but CVs or Bases would need to be built either with light materials (first base) or with a complementary Base/CV equipped with a Drone Stand.
While I agree that the surface is 16:1 and it would make more sense to use that figure for some factions geostar is correct too that if you give a cv block only 16x the mass of an SV block when it is 64x the volume the a Sv is at a severe disadvantage in a thrust to mass ratio over a CV. If you build a small CV say 10x20 blocks vs a large sv 40x80 blocks in size the CV mass would be considerably less then and SV of the same physical size making it require much less thrust and be much more maneuverable which we dont want to happen. I would propose a compromise have CV blocks be 64x the mass as a SV block and 64x the Volume of a SV block, for purposes of storage and mass for lift etc making the ships equal, but make the cost to build only be the 16x in raw materials, that way we dont increase the cost of building CV's to the point where you have to strip mine an entire planet and still not have enough ore. It balances the game play and grinding with the realistic size/mass/ lift.
Under this scheme, though, CV blocks would have 4x the mass of their input ingredients, and so mass would not be conserved. To put it another way, you'd get 4x the effective number of blocks for the same amount of matter when building CV blocks as when building SV blocks. SVs would essentially become considerably more expensive per unit volume than CVs, and there'd be substantial differences in transporting finished blocks vs intermediate components (an important issue where looting is concerned). Also, as I've noted before, making a CV block take 64x the resources of an SV block doesn't need to lead to more grinding; all it means is that mining technology needs to scale up more. If each new mining technology tier (survival tool -> T2 drill -> HV drills -> CV drills) increases the effective resource gathering rate by a factor of 5, that's already more than enough to go from barely scraping together enough ore for a basic HV to building a large CV. Also, I'd like to argue against the notion that planets must have severely limited quantities of ore. What should gate the player's progress is their mining tech and whether a rare resource is available at all on a planet, not the absolute amount of ore (one might be able to make a case for very specific, possibly not-naturally-occurring resources, of course).
Having the effective number of blocks vs amount of material is the one downside to my compromise, but considering most people building CV's that are much larger in block size then SV I thought It was a decent trade off. You are correct that you could increase the amount mined, but that would greatly inflate numbers in the game in terms of amount of ore available, etc in order to keep CV's from being out of reach in terms of materials for many players which would make SV even easier to build. Rather then only increase the effective resource gathering rate this should also be paired with reducing the amount of ore to make an ignot and or number of ignots to final material in order to keep the numbers from inflating out of control in terms of storage needs etc. While mass to physical size must be kept the same for all ships, sv, hv and CV to balance the amount of thrust needed. We need to be careful to not make either SV or CV not viable due to farming time, storage of resources etc. To go along with that the mass/volume and space taken for thrusters needs to be looked at with regards to the thrust generated, looking even just as sv thrusters the 1x1x3 jet thruster has a huge advantage in thrust per square. There are a lot of other issues in trying to compare CV and SV such as shield blocks having base different number of square sizes and same with warp engines and other parts, like constructors, armor lockers etc., not sure how to balance that out correctly.
I guess I don't see this as a problem. CVs being substantially harder to build than SVs on account of sheer materials needed seems like a reasonable situation. It means that you need to scale up your materials harvesting. If you don't want to stand in a hole for hours, you might think about building a mining HV or you could scrape together a warp sled to get you to a planet with the rare materials needed to build autominers. Building a CV should be a significant endeavor for a player. It's the step that takes the player out of the early-game survival phase and puts them into the mid-game exploration phase. For anything larger than the smallest CVs, gathering and storing materials should be a consideration, as well as power consumption and defenses during construction. As far as SV and CV systems are concerned, the problem is that they aren't generally scaled appropriately, in either output or materials costs. Both of those things need to be rectified before comparing SV and CV performance can be expected to make any sense.
I will always remember building my first CV (as i decided, the first i'll have will be from my design just to see how it turns out). Do consider that i played in survival without spawning any blocks or using god mode to fly around. Additionally, i built it on a planet, so i had to work around "lifting" it up at some point to place blocks lower than the core and mount the landing gear. Nothing i haven't done before with an HV or SV, but the difference in size proved to be difficult. Point is, i spent hours running back and forth building it, additionally running up to a nearby titan wreck to salvage materials for the blocks (Titan End was something like 50% salvaged after i finished). Also, i wanted a cool hangar for an SV, because even though my previous SV had a warp drive, a CV could move me to a planet with resources i needed and what better way than fly around in an SV, while the CV is in orbit. Add to that time i spent moving some sections, because i didn't plan some things ahead and while building i needed to redesign it. To make this short, recently i rebuilt one of my previous SVs. I spent an hour redesigning it from the floor up, adding better engines, placing vital components (more generators, RCSs and fuel tanks) and in general making it bigger, but also more capable. So yeah, there is a colossal difference concerning complexity, time and resources needed to build either, especially as both SV and CV i mentioned had a warp drive, some storage and weapons. And yes, making that CV was a significant endeavor for me, it's a pity i made a colorful, flying patchwork with warp drive and not something cool... BUT IT WORKS! Should i need hours on designing and building such a medium sized vessel? Sure. I would bother even with a 4-16 times more needed materials, because they are mostly easy to find, unless you mean Cobalt, Neodymium, Zascosium or Sathium, but they can be found in POIs and on some of this on the moon. Increase the materials needed, but also tweak the mining improvement with better tools and all will be well. BTW, all of the materials i needed i found in POIs or harvested with my T2 hand drill/Mutitool (T2).
I did the same thing the first time i built a cv, a long time ago many versions ago when sv could not warp. I do feel it is worth it and a CV should take a lot more effort than an SV to build. Would I still do it if it took more than 64x the time to make a small cv breadbox with a warp drive and enough engines to get off the planet, that is where I am unsure. Yes you need to upscale your mining, but think about the size it takes to make just a simple CV, its at least 10x10x5 to fit everything, if each cv block is 64 times the ore needed as a sv block that would make the simplest of CV take as much resources as a super dreadnaught size class 7-10 ship does now and i am afraid a lot of people would quit before bothering. If you make mining a lot easier then making a sv takes 5 minutes and it makes things too easy for those. Not to mention in MP with 10 people or more on one starter planet it would not have enough resources in mines for 10 people to build cv at the current ore ammounts and 64x cost.
