Multiplayer Custom Ships

why not have room for both?  custom ships that can use stock with modded values and a rules mode that allows for ONLY un-modded, stock ships and values for said ships.  modded values must be on both clients and match value for value or defaults will be used instead.  custom ships must match data on both sides or workshop defaults are used for ships on the workshop for lack of a more solid location to check data.  Imbalances between custom ships is to be expected (hey what would you put up vs an Enterprise or a Star Destroyer?)

You missed the point of the post.

I was refuting Brad's idea that you can have a balanced and diverse shipbuilding multiplayer experience. It's not possible within the limitations of Star Control.

Agree with IBNobody. With the minimal diversity in damage variations it will boil down very quickly to a paper-scissors-rock game. With the secondary weapon/ability component, it is going to be very easy to see combinations which will significantly dominate. And as new weapons and abilities are created there is going to need to be a significant amount of testing to try to encourage balanced play.

Secondary to point cost, perhaps there could be upgrade levels for armaments. That could allow adjustment of a few variables in the weapon. Base level weaponry could be fairly poor in range, homing, DPS, or DPF (damage per fuel). Upgraded items would have elevated costs and could bring down one or some of the key factors for effectiveness. Depending on the weapon, the cost to bring down any one of the factors could be different.

I think what I've described above is essentially the precursor modules that could be found in SC1.

Other option is to also disallow OP combinations (would be difficult to justify, hard to get them all).

IMHO, use of custom ships should be separate mode of the game, and the main focus should be on making sure standard super melee is as fun as possible. This mode needs to *shine* in quality.

What I like of original SC1 was that you had two almost completely balanced teams. This is something that was lost in SC2 sequel, but then focus of SC2 was not so much on improving super melee combat, but making good SP campaign.

Sure, there is no reason why use of custom ships can't be optional usage. Completely agree on the ship balance from SC1 and that standard super melee needs to be awesome. But to get longevity of the online multiplayer mode there is going to need to be some way to seed diversity. Without that, online play will likely reduce to hardcore players.

Speaking of SC1 - I'd love to see that as a game mode for online play.

I agree that there should be an option to play only with the original ships, with some type of flag to allow custom ones.  I have actually pretty much already done this somewhere else, so I know that Brad's idea can be made to work... but there really is a lot too it.  Most likely, this isn't going to work out too well and is going to have a lot of problems.  For example, certain combinations of balanced things are, when combined, stupidly powerful.  "Photon Torpedoes" are balanced, a "Displacement Device" is balanced... the two together are stupidly powerful.  And this is just one example.  Already knowing how this works, and what and how long it took how many people to arrive at a system that would work tells me that no computer game developer possibly has enough time to figure it out.  I'm sure Brad can do a good enough job in the time he has for an optional system to work, but it is going to have too many issues to just make this the way the game always works.

I like it as an option, when I go into it knowing "I've got my totally unfair ship... and they've got theirs.  I bet mine is better."  But most of the time I'd be in the "Standard Zone" with IBN.

EDIT: I thought of a good example here that this audience will all easily understand.  Imagine replacing the fighters of the Ur Quan dreadnought with the "Beacon Warp" ability of The Measured (Yes, I like The Measured a lot...).  The fighters are nice, but the weakness of the Ur Quan is its slow turn rate.  It is dominant at first, but the situation quickly degrades for it when it gets in close.  The fighters are balanced, the Beacon Warp is balanced.  But the Beacon Warp on the Ur Quan nullifies its only real drawback.  When the situation begins to degrade at "knife fighting" range and you begin to stay out of my firing arc while you hit me, the Beacon Warp means that I am not in any trouble at all.  I warp back to the beacon and begin a fresh new pass.  I get to keep repeating the stage of the fight where I have all the advantages, and then I get to reset the fight as soon as the situation begins to favor you.  You have little chance of winning this fight unless your ship is specifically designed to counter it and not many ship designs will counter this, this generally works against everything.  I just get to repeatedly keep doing the one thing my ship is dominant at, the initial "battle pass".  There is a lot more too it than simply not allowing big guns on fast and agile ships.

Kavik TL;DR: Some weapon combos are going to be imbalanced. You don't need a degree in game design to see that this is going to cause problems.

Your example might make more sense to the rest of us if there were more than 4 people with keys who have actually seen The Measured and know what its ship can do (beyond working it out from the context)

Hey folks,

I've been giving some thought to this subject and i think we need to take a step back and look at how MP would even work and only then see where Custom ships can fit it.

some thought points:

1. Super Melee was never about ship balance, but overall fleet balance. SC1 gave you 2 fixed feelts to fight with. SC2 gave us the points per ship system and allowed us to build custom fleets. So overall when thinking about balance in MP, the emphasis should be on the overall fleet balance.

2. Fleet balance is derived from the per ship points calculation, so overall balancing will greatly depend on how well each ship's "weight" is assessed

3. Since the balance is between fleets MP matching would also be between fleets. There are many ways to do the matching, other than the obvious point matching:
- players could post a game with 2 designed fleets, while the player who joins the game would chooses which fleet to play with
- allow players to veto certain ships from each other's fleets
- allow a random fleet mode 

Now bringing custom ships into the mix, before even thinking about their balance (which i agree with IBNobody will be extremely difficult to achieve) it can easily just be a different game mode, and obviously all players will need to have each other's ships in order to match. so if a player doesn't have custom ships, you won't even match with custom ship players even if you try.

Quoting bleybourne, reply 8

Your example might make more sense to the rest of us if there were more than 4 people with keys who have actually seen The Measured and know what its ship can do (beyond working it out from the context)

Don't worry. Kavik is out of the loop too. He is basing his info on the vault docs and doesn't even know that the Measured suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck now. 

Remember the original example of Photon Torpedoes and a Displacement Device...  Ur Quan weapon = Photon Torpedo, Beacon Warp = Displacement Device.  There is nothing in any space combat game anywhere that we didn't do first.  I don't have to play the current supermelee, I already knew how this worked 30 years ago.

The point was, actually, not about weapon combinations or ship designs.  From the example you should have realized that the point was that weapon combinations and ship design are only about 25% of the equation.  Most of it is the "science" of "Space Combat Maneuvering", which is similar in concept but very different than the real world science of Air Combat Maneuvering.  Without an understanding of how the fight actually works, you don't have the knowledge to know what works together and what doesn't.  In the example I gave, just that one simple change to an existing "stock ship" makes it nearly unbeatable because, tactically, it allows that ship to just keep repeating the stage of the battle that it is dominant at.  The approach and initial battle pass, from that point is where the smaller and more agile ship takes over and gets its licks in as the "hack & slash" ship attempts to separate to set up another pass.  So that one little, well chosen, modification results in a ship that almost can't lose.  It can reliably, 100% of the time, just keep repeating the phase of the battle where it is dominant.  

Brad specifically mentioned a small ship like Defiant flying rings around a larger one, which is what inspire me to use this specific example.  Let's take it further and explain how the Ur Quan works as it is with fighters.  If you remember the fighters wouldn't shoot at you until the achieved a specific position right alongside you.  There was a reason for that.  The fighters put a time limit on the smaller and faster ship being able to stay near the Ur Quan so that it isn't helpless against a smaller and faster ship.  You get a short pass of staying out of his arc and hitting him until the fighters attain their position on you and force you away.  This wasn't arrived at by trial-and-error, either Fred or Paul (or both) had a real understanding of "SCM" and the design of several of the ships of SCII make that obvious.  By replacing the fighters, you basically never get your turn.  The Beacon Warp Ur Quan just keeps resetting the fight as soon as you get "under its guns".  That's why the Ur Quan works as it is, and it wasn't arrived at through blind trial and error or playtesting, they knew to do that from the beginning.  You don't arrive at that by accident.

If you honestly don't want to hear this knowledge, if it annoys and offends you that we know these things as it seems to annoy and offend so many, I can go away permanently.  I assumed this knowledge would be wanted here, if it isn't I don't have to spend time trying to help.  It's nothing new too me that many people are greatly offended by the knoweldge of the SFB Staff, in fact it has become a cliche.

The displacement device actually will be OP on almost any ship, the only reason the Arilou Skiff wasn't OP is because it had 6 hit points and a random teleport...

You need to come back to the chat. Most of the information on the game is being given out there.

Plus, I appreciated your company, and I found your life story and life work fascinating. It was the highlight of my time as a founder.

Edit: If you do decide to move on, know that I will always have this post to remind me of your NPD.

A Final Word About Rube

 Thank you IBN.  Not sure what NPD means, probably due to being social network challenged:-)

I'll probably come back to the chat when us regular people get access to the game.  I'm really not very compatible with it.  I'd like to explain how things function when issues come up, so those making the decisions have an understanding of the true nature of the issue from which to make their decisions.  I can't really do that in chat... in fact in chat anything more than a few sentences at a time is practically a breach of etiquette.  I don't really know how to function that way in doing this type of thing.

As for Rube, I am still working on getting that past just me insisting it is a real thing and everyone else thinking I am crazy.  I haven't heard back from them yet, but I wound up taking it back too it's source and the people who are probably the only people in the world with a frame of reference from which to understand it.  I have also revealed to them a very key piece of the puzzle I have been leaving out with everyone else.  I haven't heard back from them yet about it, in a long time at this point, but there is no doubt in my mind that they understand what I am talking about.  So as far as Rube goes I am just patiently waiting to see what SVC thinks we should do with it, since it is half his as far as I am concerned anyway.  I have kind of handed it off too him for now, since as far as I am concerned we were actually equal co-designers of it.  And he actually knows how to deal with a thing like this where I may as well be a vegetable when it comes to anything related to business or "moving the world to live my fantasies";-)

I think I can help the most by just offering my opinion, of what is most often other people's knowledge, on the issues that get brought up here.  Where I have the space to explain our understanding of whatever the issue is.

... and along those lines:-)

It had been bothering me that I had left this part of that last discussion out.  In the end, SFB's version of ship customization was ultimately removed due to an overwhelming player sentiment that there were so many restrictions required to achieve a balanced system that there was no reason for the system to exist.

Within that game system, about 80% or so of what you might do needed to be restricted in the name of balance.  SC ships are far more simple, so it probably wouldn't be quite as bad in the end.  But, still, by the standards of modern gamers who will be expecting an almost free and open system to do anything... How much will they like 50% of what they "should" be able to do disallowed by rule, simply because the designer says so (in their minds).

It's not an issue if it is seperate, as IBN had been suggesting.  You can even take it a step further than that, like the "Proving Grounds Zone" in my Pirate Dawn.  A seperate zone where players can make ANYTHING THEY WANT.  And possibly then, maybe through a "Council" of players you establish through the forums... some designs from that zone might be allowed into the "real" game by suggestion of that council, and final approval of Stardock.  The company, of course, always retains the final say;-)

Quoting IBNobody, reply 10

Quoting bleybourne,

reply 8

Your example might make more sense to the rest of us if there were more than 4 people with keys who have actually seen The Measured and know what its ship can do (beyond working it out from the context)

Don't worry. Kavik is out of the loop too. He is basing his info on the vault docs and doesn't even know that the Measured suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck now. 

 

 

Yep.  Measured are not in a good place.  Think Androsynth with all the fun removed.  And the Blazer is my least favourite ship from SC2.  Hate in in fact.

If the Arilou and the Androsynth had a lovechild, and then someone dropped the baby on its head, you'd end up with the Measured 2.0.

some more thoughts:

StarDock wants a way for the game to expand organically. That's basically their main vision of this project. So it's a given that Custom ships will exist right?

The issue as was originally pointed out is when trying to create a flexible ship customization system that produces 100% balanced ships. Pretty much an impossibility, and too much balance will make it simply boring.

Therefor if this system is going to exist there must be some form of curation involved to filter out all the trash.

The ships should NOT be balanced. That's not the point of SC SM. The more powerful/grunty a ship is, the higher its point cost value. The balance is at a fleet level, not at the ship level.

Let people make whatever ships they want, and design the system so that it then takes the ship and runs it through a bunch of simulated fights against all of the existing ships and it should then be able to calculate the point cost/value the ship should be at.

The thing is, the balanced point cost of custom ship is difficult to specify. Ships are not sum of the parts. There are a lot of synergies involved.

There are aspects of a "Proving Grounds" that I didn't mention.  This is one way that ADB has created the extreme loyalty of their fans over the years.  If you had something like this, ships accepted by Stardock and added to the game would also begin to appear in the full/story game as a part of that "living universe" that Brad mentioned.  Only a few of what I call the "Stellar Nations" of Star Control are actually in the story.  There are, obviously, many others out there that are not mentioned.  Ships that get added after the fact are assumed to be from a "Stellar Nation" that was not a part of the story, and yet is still out there.  So these ships would also begin appearing as a part of that "living universe" once they had been added to the game.

Stardock might have the council pick 6 candidates a month, or if they want a slower pace 12 every 3 months... or whatever seemed good for them.  They might accept none, they might like all of them.  In the patch notes that adds new ships from the proving grounds you would list the new ships being added, and two VERY important pieces of information.  The name of the person who "submitted" that ship through the Proving Grounds  and always, ALWAYS, the specific mention that "Brad Wardell" has selected these ships to add to his game.  That is very important, and a big part of the point of all of this.  Any player who gets a ship added to the game is a lifelong Stardock fan from that point forward who feels a connection to the game, Stardock, and Brad.  And, on top of all this... Stardock is putting their fans to work for them.  Both in creating new ships, and the council weeding out all the obvious "garbage" for them and just presenting them with the good candidates every once in a while.  This creates a situation of regularly adding content, and creating a long term loyal fan of both the company and the designer with each accepted submission.

In the Proving Grounds, players are mostly "self-governing" in the ships they design.  Most players designing ships are hoping to see Brad personally select their ship to add to his game, so they design what they feel are balanced ships and intentionally avoid making unbalanced ones.  Of course, there are players who don't care about that and just built the most powerful thing that they can imagine to stomp on all the "fair" ships.  But that is a good thing for those trying to built balanced ships that might actually get added to the game, the extreme capabilites of the "super ships" only highlight issues with their own balanced designs and help them to understand their own design better.

This is very much SVC's way of doing things, and part of what it does is make, in this case Brad, a literal game design hero to every person he honor's by choosing one of their ship designs to add to his game.  This might not have as much impact over in the computer game business where the audience is counted in millions instead of thousands... but then again in the information age of social media, and the reviews these people will write every time Brad makes a new game, maybe it is still a relevant thing to do.

I don't think you've considered the scope (or the budgetary cost) of what you are proposing. This might work in games like GalCiv, but the Pilot AI in any Star Control is not good enough to mimic human piloting and ingenuity.

Do you need some examples or for me to go into more detail on why this is a bad idea?

Brad should be a hero by making good games (which he has so far, I've said before I wouldn't have backed this game if it wasn't Stardock and Brad's posts on TPONAF) not by making people feel like special snowflakes for picking their ships.  Not to mention all the sand coming from people who don't get picked.  imo of course

So? A shitty AI against another equally shitty AI will probably see similar overall result trends as a hotshot human against another equally hotshot human. It would certainly be enough to ballpark the general level of the required point cost, and then the ship could go into a probationary period during which as humans use the ship the system tracks trends and if the ship is winning too often the point cost bumps up and if it loses too often the point cost bumps down. Once it seems stable, the probationary period is finished.

Don't make it harder than it has to be...

That might be true, but it could miss OP maneuvers that the AI might not think about. 

agreed 100%.

still i just think it'll happen whether we like it or not, so better find ways to make it work somehow.