You are all doing a wonderful job I play nightly and gotta say balancing things in a game can be a game of tug of war and you are all winning! Keep it up, winning winning winning!
When a few other posters talked about how this energy regen system reminded them of other games it got me thinking about other types. One of my favorites is the way capacitors recharge in EVE Online. The recharge rate increases the more drained it becomes, but drops off sharply under a certain threshold (graph attached). This makes the bar resist being drained, giving you more power the harder you draw on it, but only to a point. In EVE the capacitor runs nearly all active modules for offense, defense, and utility and is by far the primary way of driving ship activities (exceptions include passive modules or things that consume actual ammo/physical charges instead of drawing capacitor energy). This is not to say Starbound needs regen behavior like this, but to show how flexible a single regenerating resource can be. ie. it is possible to carefully tune one resource to drive several ouputs like guns and tech. https://wiki.eveonline.com/wikiEN/images/c/c1/EVE_Cap_Recharge_Rate.png Y Axis - Capacitor Recharge Rate X Axis - Percentage of Capacitor remaining
I get that there's probably an interest in preventing overpowered gun+tech strategies like people tend to use in stable, but I still think guns and techs really need to use separate resources. It's mighty confusing employing complicated gun+tech tactics when you have to watch out for energy use or risk getting "burnout" and being unable to use either. Even a few seconds can mean a world of a difference when you're surrounded, especially if you're unable to use techs as well during that time. The alternative suggestion I've liked the most so far is that of weapons being divided into energy and ammunition weapons. The former still use energy, which is ideal for people who don't rely too heavily on tech manoeuvring during combat, and the latter use ammunition from your inventory. To prevent infinite firing, you could either implement a reload system, so that weapons would have limited shots until reloaded, or, better yet IMO, you could implement a "firing bar" for each gun. A firing bar is, essentially, a separate energy bar that is unique for every kind of gun, and which you cannot upgrade in any way. Just like with regular energy in the nightlies, as you shoot your weapon, that bar is drained, and if you let it drain completely, your weapon gets temporarily jammed until the bar refills fully. This mimics the weapon energy behaviour of plenty of games out there, like shooters or space sims. In addition, because each gun can have its own bar, you can have different refill speeds (both normal and while "locked"), energy amounts, and energy consumption per shot for each weapon. Also, implementing ammunition means weapon status effects could be switched mostly or completely into ammunition types, which would make crafting that much cooler, and which would allow one to use the same gun with different kinds of ammo depending on the situation (and the available resources of course). Ideally, weapon damage for ammo-using guns would also be mostly or completely dependent on the ammo type. Less damaging ammo would be cheaper to make than more damaging ammo, of course.
Amunition taking up space in your inventory would quickly become a problem especially when the Matter manipulator radius is at its maximum and you start gathering trash from digging at a ridiculous rate >_>
I feel the need to point out again, that the "new" Energybar is interesting... for combat..... fight, combat, shooting.... Not so helpfull if, as i said in the previous post, one uses the Techs to move through the air. It would be appreciated if the whole talk would not only be reduced to the guns! If Guns are so important for so many, then implement something like ammo so some modders can make a supermegamod with 1000 different ammotypes and weapons. Less to do for you CF's and more to do for Modders. For those who don't like to manage their inventory, i'd think 1 or 2 slots with stacked ammo can't hurt that much^^
1 or 2 slots for how many weapon types there are and if each uses a special type of ammo. Yeah that's not gonna be enough. Best compromise would be a reload bar like the Shield break mechanic. But with the speed with which one can accumulate blocks and resources once their Matter manipulator is upgraded, having ammo in general is just too much of a chore. And the last chore that as eliminated was the Hunger. So I doubt they'd add another chore.
If there were limited ammo, I likely wouldn't use guns. Like hunger was, ammo would be a boring little chore to just check: do I have a couple stacks of ammo- no- better buy a stack of ammo. It's not significantly limiting at all, and while I must admit the ultra-mobile butterfly bubble-gun blasting playstyle sounds fun and cool, I wonder what could keep melee weapons relevant alongside it. The idea of a "magazine bar" with reloads like some have suggested could have some merit, but ammo as a finite item will do nothing to balance things and will be a nuisance and a chore.
Please make the outpost portal thing easyer to find. Every time I try to find it its not there I have gotten a lot of tips from people ( And thank you ) but NONE of them work. PLEASE FIX.
I think one way to balance is to look at it through a bells curve. Where 50% of the enemies will fall into +0 ( the level of the planet ) 20% are +1 { 1 level above the planet level ) 20% are +2 and -1 (10% each ) 10% are +3 and -2 (5% each ) With additional modifications by each body part. That way all planets of the same level will feel different in difficulty. Especially if the body parts give huge bonus to some enemies giving them even a brutal advantage. The chance of that happening is probably 1 in a million. But it does leave the possibility it can happen. === I am also a huge fan of the new energy system balance, that was a great idea.
looks actually quite nice. Seems like guns could now be used, while also using techs. thanks for that there is a tech for that^^
And this new change just completely kills off a lot of the techs. To me, this whole 'no regeneration unless you've not used energy for a few seconds' thing is horrible. I happen to be quite fond of guns and gravity bubble tech and with this change it kills my playstyle because now I would be guaranteed to run out of energy. What the hell people? You change the armors up to make there be three distinct 'classes' (Melee, ranged, and scistaff) then you screw over the ranged and sci-staff users. At this rate I really am worried that when the next stable update does come out, it's going to be when I uninstall starbound and say the hell with it.
Probably, if you carried a lot of different guns and ammo types. Could be attenuated if we had "universal ammo", where the only difference was damage/status effects but all ammo fit all guns. Also easier to micromanage, if less realistic (and perhaps less interesting from a crafting perspective). Or you can just stick to one, two guns maximum at any given time. That was precisely my point. With the new method, guns and techs sharing energy is too limiting unless you have a big energy pool -- and the "burnout" feature, even with refill times being the same no matter how big your energy pool is, still prevents certain tech movement strategies that rely on short, but constant and evenly-timed tech uses. An alternative is to make the bar refill any time no guns or techs are being used, rather than having to wait a few seconds for the refill to kick in. That way the refill rate would potentially be faster than the energy usage in those strategies depletes energy. I still think the hunger system needed a rework more than it needed a complete removal; but the ammo system could potentially be more useful than a chore. Currently, unless I'm mistaken, you rely completely on the luck factor as to what effects you get on weapons. With effects being ammo-based, you would have full control over the effects your guns produce (and maybe even damage, like I suggested). You could still find guns with their own effects, but you would no longer be fully dependent on luck... so long as you had the resources, of course. I fully expect such a feature to be expensive resource-wise, as a compromise. It's a strategy like any other, and it requires skill. I personally don't do well with that fighting style. I do like guns, but I find that melee is much easier to work with, and if I try to pull the gun+move/fly tech combo, more often than not I just miss all the shots because of my poor reflexes. But other people prefer fast-paced hit-and-run tech+gun strategies. That's totally fine. But hey, we could always have melee+gun via gunblades; that would close the gap between the strategies. : )) (I'm totally serious here, by the way) Yea, that's pretty much the bare minimum of an alternative at this point. Something needs to be done, that much is pretty certain, if tech is to be a reliable strategy.
Did no one else find it odd that techs went like tier 1: double jump, tier 2: floaty hover flight, tier 3: super fast virtually limitless inertia-free flight? I don't actually know if techs fall into "tiers," but I guess what I mean is that bubble-butterfly stuff really blows everything else out of the water and seems to come really early in the game, to me.
