Combat Overhaul

Agreed on the dogfighting aspect though I disagree on needing to make custom turrets, assuming subgrids are even slightly as jank or lag-inducing as in SE1. They would need to make subgrids a much cleaner experience first for me to get on board with this.

And this is one I must completely disagree with. While I appreciate people may not like shields, they can easily turn them off if they don't like them, or mod them to a state they do like them. And no they absolutely do NOT need to balance the entirety of vanilla around the existence of shields. All they need to do is figure out the default settings for shields, such as how much health they grant, power consumption, regen rate and such, then ship it off to players to mod or disable as we please like they do with all other features. Functionally the shield is just an overbar of health. If you can't get through it it's no different than not being able to break the armor. Giving folks the ability to turn it off means they're not effected by it unless they choose to play on an official server, or otherwise unless they choose to be effected by it. People should not have to rely on 3rd party scripts or have to know how to script purely to have something so basic. The existence of shields hurts no one unlike something such as a Jump Drive Jammer would.

I'm with you. I really don't want to see shields in vanilla. They belong in space fantasy like Star Wars or Stargate, not in a more grounded scifi setting like SE.

To those demanding shields: What was wrong with SE1? There were shield mods and anybody who wanted to play space fantasy could just download the mods, which worked fine from everything I've heard. There's no need to force them on other players (ie: on official servers).

You do need your balance around shields once you put them in or the whole experience for the average player will be a mess. Whatever yor vanilla is will be the balance point. Shields will touch everything and once they do combat is defined. Just like other games.

Completely agreed. Shields just doesn't feel even slightly within the mood of the game. Space Engineers is sorta sci fi but basically every block in the game is made of simple technology that anyone could genuinely see happening in the near future IRL. If they added shields, they would need a complete revamp of how the game looks and feels.

Also: the 'you can just not use the shields in game' argument is very unreasonable. In any PvP (and PvE really) environment, just choosing not to use shields while your enemies do means you just die. Not a fun experience.

Problem is my opinion ship armor and blocks are too week, single shot to the cockpit and the ship is totally disabled, cant have an exposed bridge or cockpit on pvp, the glass is way to week, thats why people enjoy the shields so much, even in pve, where you build for prettyness

@Nuno Rocha Shields may allow for nicer looking builds, but they always invalidate too many designs and strategies in favor of one single meta-build and strategy based around how they function.

-With armor-only, you design knowing there are trade-offs in durability and evasion, you add redundancy to avoid loss of function from luck/precision and try in turn to aim at weak-spots or strategic targets on your opponent, you add decorative bits both to look good and to serve as decoys/armor, and you design knowing you'll need to either effect repairs, or rebuild the ship after a fight.

-With shields, you have the shield hp/regen numbers vs the damage output numbers of their weapons, you evade if the meta allows it, you build to that meta and those numbers or you lose, and the loser either runs or replaces their ship.

Armor-only isn't perfect, it takes time to fix, it favors raw mass, involves luck, and if you take a Starfury in to a fight against an A-wing, Clonal Viper, or Gallente Cyclops, you'll probably lose your cockpit before they do, but the dramatic increase in variation over the endless cavalcade of decorated shield-meta-bricks is absolutely worth it for most people, and for those that still want them modders are sure to have shields in the game as soon as weapons are functional, if not sooner.

Spaceships are fast.

If the speed of their ships is limited by the limits of the game engine, then the correct simulation solution should be to significantly REDUCE the speed of projectiles and missiles. And that's below the speed limit for ships/grids.

Conversely, the range or "existence" time of the projectile should be significantly greater - it looks nonsensical if the projectile takes full damage just before the range limit and disappears at the range limit, causing no damage. Or it explodes and causes damage beyond the range limit.

This error is often exploited when fighting against turrets - the player fires from a distance just beyond the range limit, taking advantage of the fact that the missile explosion acts beyond the range limit.

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How would making projectiles have a lower speed limit than ships improve combat? That just seems like it would push everyone back in to the super-old days of SE1 when pvp was just ramming ships in to each-other like roman war-galleys.

In regards to projectiles exploding when they reach their max range, that is (probably unintentionally) one of the most realistic parts of space-combat involving physical projectiles. In real life if you somehow hauled a modern tank in to orbit and fired the cannon the shell would continue on effectively forever or until it hit something, which would be bad because then every time you went in to space anywhere near the area of the shell's orbit you'd have to worry about suddenly getting your rear-end blown off by your own shell. Subsequently it has been theorized that any future anti-vehicle sized physical projectile fired in space-combat will likely contain a timed explosive charge for if the shot misses, meant to reduce the projectile in to pieces small enough to be safely absorbed by the same protective devices a space-craft uses to stop micro-meteorites with.

As for the exceptionally short maximum range itself, the game would be a lot less visually interesting if combat took place at realistic ranges because you would never be able to see what you were shooting at, or what was shooting at you. Combat would just be your guns firing in the general direction of a targeting indicator, and then parts of your ship exploding because your opponent fired back.

...I don't think I've ever seen anyone use the extra 2m of range you can get out of a rocket explosion outside of clickbait, or since the inclusion of turrets other than rockets and gats and AI blocks that can direct those turrets without player-input...

If the means of radio-electronic warfare are to be realistically simulated, they should work against players as well. I can imagine that the REW unit will lie on the range of the target - the range will not appear on the target marker at all, or will change randomly, or will lie on the position of the target - the marker will move rapidly and randomly around the target. Targeting the ship's systems is quite impossible.

Or it will create several accurate holographic projections of the protected object at adjustable position and distance relative to the protected object. (Kind of like a construction projector, but with more opacity to the point of being completely opaque).

If the target detection and targeting system is to be separate from the weapons, then the same should apply to the player. No permanently working radio beacons on "armed ships" - locate and track the target yourself. Only neutral civilian ships have radio beacons. The radio beacon signal can also be encrypted - visible only to one's own faction or to allies. The automation can then track it after targeting, but is also limited - one system can track 2--4 (small system) to 32 (largest) targets, depending on its size. And target acquisition is lost when the system's range is exceeded. Reasonable - 3-5 times the weapons range, or depending on the size of the system (small system say 4-5km, largest 20-50km). A spacecraft can carry several systems whose information is informationally fused for the player. An active reconnaissance system acts like a radio beacon.

Tracking targets with the camera is possible, but only at a smaller (half?) distance. It's "silent". One camera can track one object. (But this leads to the need to use blocks of several cameras...)

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I agree, it looks reasonable. Let radars not be a decoration, but become an essential element for reconnaissance and combat.

I think this is the optimal solution. And it's useful for PvP, because there will be an element of tactics. It will make sense to shoot at vulnerable areas.

If there are two-three-four radars and optical reconnaissance stations on the starboard side... it's getting to be a real challenge for a small ship.

To me, the Main Problem is this:

Two or three wargame concepts are meeting here.

One is what we'll call the "lone knight" - building small, fast, agile ships and boldly taking on adversaries in person. Taking risks in person. He hates automated systems, he wants to fight primarily with players, not with their automatons.

The other might be called a "commander" - he builds big, heavily armed ships with lots of turrets controlled by automation. In his imagination, his ship is manned by a large group of players/androids/artificial intelligences. He demands that the abilities of the auto-controlled turrets be comparable to those of the players, who he just happens to be unhappily lacking.

The third type I'll call the "builder" - he considers the first two, and with them all pirates, to be just useless aggressive vermin. If forced to build weapon systems, he tends to follow the ways of the "commander". He demands that the abilities of the automatic weapon system exceed those of both the untrained and trained player. So that he doesn't have to deal with annoying pests when he's engaged in more important world-building tasks. ;-D

They also differ in other ways - while the first two are more suited to the creative mode, the third prefers the survival mode, and one that is as complex and as close to the real universe as possible.

@Joshua Cosica A bit of a trade there. We want new players, but if we make things too complex we wont get as many. SE1's current version of turrets seems a relatively practical middle-ground in that you can slap them on and they're good to go within a relatively short-range (600-800m), but if you want them to auto-target out to max-range (2km) then you need extras (ai blocks in SE1's case).

@Semtex You'd be surprised at what people will throw in to pvp in survival. A bit of teamwork, some careful design, and a solid industrial late-game goes a long way if the server doesn't have some really hard limits on it. As for small-vs-large, punching up against significantly larger opponents is typically difficult just by virtue of ammo and fuel storage, and differences in durability or damage output only make it more-so. Baring a significant gap in skill/design or the use of player-made weapons, larger ships tend to win 1v1 just by raw mass, and smalls only do disproportionate damage by being hard to hit. If anything the requirement to have external radars will let smalls win more by forcing larges from the field for lack of ability to target and lack of desire to see how long a small's ammo or fuel lasts.

Overall, requiring radars and a fire-control-computer for long-range stuff isn't a bad idea, but we need some new-player friendly features, even if those features are sub-optimal for anyone relying on them and lack a bit of realism.

My opinion.

After all, this is a game about engineering and engineering solutions, so any kind of simplification of the gaming experience can be perceived negatively.

If we mean PvE content that involves danger only from bots, then new players can be given a "security turret" that has a short firing range but does not use the AI ​​unit for guidance. For higher technology levels, you will still have to build a system, but at the beginning of the gameplay you can protect yourself like this.

If we mean PvP, then this is not a solution to the problem at all. The very essence of the game puts a player with skills and knowledge above others. I watched podcasts of one Russian guy who was openly engaged in piracy, attacking mining ships near asteroids. He used only vector algebra and programming skills, creating torpedoes that left no chance, since they were guided by the camera very far away. The game provides a lot of opportunities, so you can just put up with the consequences of this.